During the afternoon I draw paper houses. I sit, attuned, and imagine very simple buildings.

"Don't plan the building, let the system do that," Woo Eubong says. "You just let go, let your mind drift and do what it wants."

At first I don't even produce buildings, for two days I produce scribbles. Then one day I produce a very shaky looking pyramid sort of thing. I believe it is an accident, but Woo nods. "A pyramid is a very efficient shape, using the minimum number of surfaces. The only thing with fewer sides is a circle."

"Engineer Woo," I say, "I can detail a building a hundred times better than this."

"Certainly. But could you detail the complex?"

"I'm not an architectural and engineering team," I say.

"Wuxi Engineering Complex wasn't detailed by a team, it was detailed by one woman, using, of course, feedback from the departments that would be using the building."

I gape.

"Exactly," she says, smiling. "A team would not have constructed the building as a unit, but as a series of connected-but compromised and adjusted ideas."

"It can't be done. It had to have taken years."

"It did take over two years, but it can be done. I can't do it, there aren't many people who have the ability to do work on that grand a scale."

"But all those little details," I say.

She stops for a moment. As I said, she is a tall woman with a square face. She stands out among the company people, not for her height, but because she is different. Many of the engineers have this air about them. They are more casual-today she is in black coveralls-and they tend to work different hours. Sometimes they come in late, sometimes do a lot of work at home. When I came I thought there were two classes; cadres and workers. But the cadres sometime refer to organic engineers as talent.

"An example," she says. "Stand up."

I stand up, a little nervous.

"Walk to Hai-hong's desk."

I walk over to Hai-hong's desk, Hai-hong glances up at me expectantly, her look saying, 'what do you need?'

"Woo Eubong is making an example," I say.

Hai-hong nods and looks back down at her work. I walk back to Woo Eubong. "Yes?" I ask.

"When you passed your desk, you changed direction. How many degrees? How many steps did you take? How many meters to Hai-hong's desk?"

I shrug. "I don't know."

"You didn't calculate?" she asks. "You didn't analyze the situation and determine the best possible method to get to Hai-hong's desk?"

"No," I say, smiling a little, "I just walked over."

"But you had to figure the best way to walk. In fact, standing in front of me, your muscles are constantly adjusting to keep you upright, correct? Muscles in your legs and feet adjusting constantly to make sure you don't balance too far one way or another?"

"Well, yes," I say, "if you want to think of it that way."

"But you don't think to stand, or walk, or dance. Gymnasts don't calculate trajectories." She is smiling, too.

"I understand," I say.

"Good, I want you to make buildings the same way that you walk to Hai-hong's desk, thinking about the product, not the process."

"You are going to try to make me a mental gymnast," I say.

She shakes her head. "No, Li Jian-fen, who built this complex, she was a gymnast. You, I am teaching to walk."

I work using a tutorial. It's a feedback system, when I start to think analytically the system cuts out. I sit down and try to imagine a space. I try to determine the qualities I want in the space. I try to imagine a sense of this space. I imagine white walls, realize that I have no idea of the roof and consciously start to sort through possible roofs to go with the concept I have-

System cuts out. Flimsie prints and I have a tangle of schematics. If I look I can sort of identify four walls. The timer indicates that I was in the correct mode for 22 seconds. About average.

Woo Eubong glances over my shoulder. "You are a stubborn man," she says.

I shrug, not knowing what she refers to.

"You aren't using the system, you're staying in your own head. You have the manipulative skills but not the storage capacity."

I still don't know exactly what she's talking about.

She sighs, "Words don't really explain what you should be doing, you just have to do it, then you'll know. Dao kedao, feichang dao." The first line of the Dao De Ching, roughly translated means that 'The way that can be spoken is not the way.'

She doesn't look like the kind of person who would spout philosophical Daoism. She has a short ruff of hair and looks like an athlete. A swimmer maybe, long straight lines.

"Maybe I can't learn to be an organic engineer," I say.

"Maybe," she says, surprising me, I expected (hoped) that she would say, 'no, no, no, you'll learn, don't worry.'

"Do you have a lot of failures?"

"I've only trained two others, one of them learned it, one didn't."

"Both of them were young?"

She nods, "And correspondingly more flexible than us elders. I really wonder if we shouldn't teach this to ten year olds." She smiles and I realize she is joking. "Truly, you cannot teach it to ten year olds, because in order to do it, you have to have experience with buildings, have to have buildings in your memory."

"When you do this, aren't you really an architect?"

"Yes," she says.

"I imagine architects do not really care for the idea."

She shakes her head. "No, there are also organic architects. They come at the problems from a different direction, but basically they do the same thing. But I tend to sacrifice aesthetics for engineering, architects tend to sacrifice engineering for aesthetics."

"Can I see some of the work of architects?" I ask.

"Of course," she says. She looks into the middle distance, her eyes drifting left as people's eyes tend to do when they are querying the system. "I had them print-out in your apartment," she says.

"So I don't get any time off."

"Ah," she laughs, "you are clever."

Clever in Mandarin means almost the same thing as sly. I grin and try to look wicked. Then I make more scribbles.

I do not confess to her how frustrating this whole process is. I am here by a fluke. The University charts our actual performance against our expected performance. Once I had a tutor, and that helped my grades. Then my tutor died and oddly enough, that helped my grades. I worked very hard. Everything else seemed sour but in the second semester I had a systems course and found something fascinating. I learned to tie systems into all my other courses. My projects were systems related. And I was tapped for a co-op job at Wuxi Engineering Technologies, where I would be working with systems, because Engineer Xi, who reviews applicants for co-op positions, read one of my projects.

It wasn't until the list was posted and people started to congratulate me that I even understood I had been awarded something, but for maybe the first time in my life, I have been succeeded at something. And now, I am failing. And wasting an opportunity for someone who could have learned this.

It is worst at night, sitting in that beautiful apartment, making scribbles, going over flimsies. I get cold, although when I access the system it tells me that the temperature in my room is in fact higher than normal. I wear a ridiculous sweater, one with leather ties, from New York. All I want to do is sleep, but I go back over the Wuxi Complex. How did Li Jian-fen learn to do what she does? On my black desk sits a smooth stone carved into a walrus. It was a Christmas gift from Maggie Smallwood the year I spent on Baffin Island. I thought that what I learned in Baffin Island tempered me. Haibao thought we were damaged. I thought we were simply different. Maybe he was right. Then again maybe I am just too old.