One In a Billion

Having had a few drinks before the usual academic cocktail party, I greeted the Dean with the only Chinese words I knew. At a similar celebration a few weeks later, I'm told, I agreed to leave in six months for a year-long teaching assignment in the heart of the People's Republic of China. What might have sounded like an adventure to some, made me heartsick when I sobered, I had started the worst part of my drinking several years before when I had spent the year teaching in Poland; and I knew that I would die drunk and disgraced in China. But I had given my word and would go.