Chapter 3 Running

I can't read this book without quoting these words and making comments. I still believe in this website / app that can provide users a wonderful platform to record information and characters. So, if there are any real checking-editors of the back-stage management could read this worthless paragraph, if my literal work disappears again with no prompt messages this time, without blaming, I'll go and find another place.
Cheers.
Certainly, those laws had been changed more than a century ago, but China was still ambivalent about opening to the outside world and language was still at the heart of this issue. 
 Waiguoren were risky, especially with regard to politics, and in any case we didn’t need close friends in the college. We could teach during the day and return to our comfortable cages at night, and, if we needed friendship, we always had each other. They even gave us telephones so we could call Peace Corps volunteers who lived in other parts of Sichuan.
Funny word "Waiguoren" . Actually his life there was isolating, not close to the locals at the beginning. C people are very good at being gentle and polite, but may be in half of the situations,they are just putting the sugar-coated bullets. LOL
Often I’d gaze across the Wu River at the maze of streets and stairways, listening to the distant hum of daily life, and I’d think about the mysteries that were hidden in the river town. I wanted to investigate all of it—I wanted to go down to the docks and watch the boats; I wanted to talk with the stick-stick soldiers; I wanted to explore the network of tangled staircases that ran through the old part of town. I longed to figure out how the city worked and what the people thought, especially since no foreigner had done this before. 
At a Fuling restaurant, if you want the dish known as hundun in Mandarin—translated in English as “wonton”—you have to ask for chaoshou, but if you go another thirty miles to Fengdu you’ll have to call it baomian. Or, more accurately, baomin, because the folks in Fengdu slur the ian sounds.
 
That's ture. A very common linguistic phenomenon in dialect. But I anticipate the author can use Chinese very well later in view of his determination and time staying in China.
And Fuling was a frightening place because the people had seen so few outsiders. If I ate at a restaurant or bought something from a store, a crowd would quickly gather, often as many as thirty people spilling out into the street. Most of the attention was innocent curiosity, but it made the embarrassment of my bad Chinese all the worse—I’d try to communicate with the owner, andpeople would laugh and talk among themselves, and in my nervousness I would speak even worse Mandarin. When I walked down the street, people constantly turned and shouted at me. Often theyscreamed waiguoren or laowai, both of which simply meant “foreigner.” Again, these phrases often weren’t intentionally insulting, but intentions mattered less and less with every day that these words were screamed at me. Another favorite was “hello,” a meaningless, mocking version of the word that was strung out into a long “hah-loooo!” This word was so closely associated with foreigners that sometimes the people used it instead of waiguoren—they’d say, “Look, here come two hellos!” And often in Fuling they shouted other less innocent terms—yangguizi, or “foreign devil” da bizi, “big nose”—although it wasn’t until later that I understood what these phrases meant.
This clip makes me doubting my words above... Though I can take it a s a kind of awkward case of inter-cultral communication...