The room is pretty, but there is a pair of small red shoes by the doors that lead to the balcony. A stack of papers sits on one end of a shelf that displays pottery (perhaps my teapot was a good choice.) It is not as beautiful as my apartment, but it is more comfortable. And the beer works on me and I begin to relax a little. It is hard to completely relax, I am always watching my behavior, trying to be Chinese. There is a huaqiao saying that when you step foot in China you become Chinese. Maybe it is true if you are first generation, maybe it would be true for San Xiang's child, Foreman Qian's grandchild, but it is not true for me. Maybe I am more my mother's son than I ever knew.

But I like Woo Eubong a great deal and her husband is easy to talk to. Dinner is delightful, thousand year old eggs, sweet and sour pork and spiced cabbage with anise, a chicken roasted with it's head tucked under it's wing, fresh sliced tomatoes with a dusting of white sugar, candied yams. The girls have to be told to pick up their rice bowls when they eat, they want to leave the bowls on the table, stick chopsticks in them and carefully try to get the rice in their mouth with spilling anything. Woo Eubong is a little embarrassed, but I am relieved to be treated to real life. Everything at Wuxi has seemed to consist of glossy surfaces, effortless perfection, with me as the only flawed example of the other life I knew. It is nice to see that children are still children.

After dinner we talk some more, and I find myself admitting that I am frustrated.

"You try too hard," Woo Eubong says. "You have this feeling that what you are trying to do is very difficult, but it isn't. Once you find a way in, it will not be difficult at all."

A way in. A way in where?

Monday at Wuxi Engineering Technologies. I spend the morning reviewing jobs. I am starting to pick up speed, this, my third week. I eat lunch with Woo Eubong in the cadres' dining room (five pink prawns on the side of my plate like five shingles, slices of green kiwi fruit from Australia, cooked cucumber and tomato.)

"Today," she says, "you're not going to scribble. Today you are going to design doors."

"Why is that?" I ask.

"I am trying something different."

Ah. Okay. So that afternoon I sit and design doors. Imagine a door, the system draws it. A wooden door. A metal door. A garage door. A great Chinese double gate, each side set with eighty-one brass studs. A moon gate, the opening a round zero. Then back to wooden doors. Without windows, with insets, with carving, with a window, with square panes, with panes like a fan. I take a stack to Woo Eubong. She nods.

"Keep working," she says.

"Doors?" I say.

"Doors," she says.

So I do doors with transoms. Doors with security systems. Doors that fold, that retract, that slide. Doors within doors. When I run out I do doors of varying widths. Doors of varying finishes. A stone door. I start to indicate a little bit of entryway but Woo Eubong, leaning over my shoulder says, "No, just the doors."

Glass doors. Stained glass doors. Revolving doors. Doors for openings with arches, with triangles. Doors in doorways with lintels. I rack my brains for variations of doors. I do doors that open up. Doors that swing, slated doors, bamboo doors, half doors. My desk is covered in doors. People passing stop and look, shake their heads. By four-thirty I think I have done every kind of door known to man. But Woo Eubong keeps me making doors until 5:00.

I walk back to my apartment, noticing the doors I pass.

There are a lot that I hadn't thought of. Hell, when I get back to the apartment I find that I hadn't even done my closet door. So that night, I do a few more doors, and when I pull out my schematic of Wuxi Complex, I run through all the doors in the place.

Li Jian-fen was incredible with doors.

I begin to realize the importance of doors. They set the tone for the building, they are the second interaction between building and person, the first being the sight of the building. I think about the black doors of the main entrance to Wuxi Complex. They are opaque, lusterless matte. It is not just the efficiency of energy absorption, it is also the effect they have when one enters. They are like walls, they protect.

China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a wall. And so doors are very important because they represent vulnerability but also opportunity, which is a great metaphor for every endeavor.

Excited, the next morning I am ready to tell Woo Eubong all about my understanding of doors. I see why she has had me study doors. But she is planning and I don't get a chance to talk with her. She has a luncheon so I eat lunch with a couple of people in the department and when I get back from lunch there is a message from her in the system.

Do floors.

And so I do floors. And the next day steps (a long, difficult afternoon.) Thursday I do windows, which is a pleasure after steps. And Friday I do lighting. Saturday, usually my half-day, there is a message in the system for me. More lighting. Monday, more lighting. Tuesday, oh bliss, I do sinks.

I learn to dread the afternoons again. There's no more failure, no more 27 second scribbles, but it's so tedious. Still, I find myself looking at lighting, at sinks, at stairs. The Wuxi Complex isn't enough, I use the schematics from the organic architects and observe what they did with doors, with windows, with stairs. I never really thought much about landings or mezzanines. Li Jian-fen used a lot of mezzanine areas at Wuxi complex, but her use of stairs isn't particularly inventive.

Still, by three-thirty, there I sit at my desk, haunted, trying to invent another sink and hoping that Woo Eubong won't come by and see me sitting there not doing anything. She never says anything, but she notices.

I do walls and ceilings. I have learned a lot by the time I do walls and ceilings, I have more ideas. But I do them faster and then there I sit. It is work a child could do. It is meaningless, a catalogue. Has she decided I cannot do the real engineering? Except for the one assignment in lighting, after three more weeks I haven't done anything even remotely resembling engineering. I wonder, does Woo Eubong keep count of the number I do? Does the system report the amount of time I sit motionless?

One Saturday night I sit down again and try to scribble. Four walls, light through ice, and then I think, what kind of windows? I remember doing all those windows and try to remember if there were any that I liked and-

16 seconds. Worse than when I first started.

After that I don't try again.

When I have been there nine weeks, Woo Eubong comes to me one day and tells me that I am needed on a project. They are building a complex (in the conventional way, no daoist engineering this time) and are involved in a competitive bid. So for four days I work with other engineers doing real engineering work. We discuss ideas, have the system construct analogs, modify and change them. By the time I join the team, they have already been working for over a week, and on Saturday night, at nine, we submit our rough plan for the competitive bid and then go into Wuxi and have a drink.

I feel as if I am one of these people, I have been working with them ten to twelve hours a day for four days and they accept me as a colleague. I realize, sipping my beer, that I am a colleague. I am an engineer. When I go back to New York, no matter what else, I will be an engineer, I will have my degree in Construction Engineering from Nanjing University, and I will be something of an expert in the use of systems. Not to mention particularly inventive with doors.

It is a comfort. Almost enough to make me forget the last 16 second scribble.