第173页 Strange Stones

The year after we drove across northern China, Goettig finally returned to the United States. He was thirty years old and nearly broke. He went back to southwestern Minnesota, but he couldn’t imagine living there again; after a month, he caught a Greyhound bus heading south. Some other former volunteers were living in Starkville, Mississippi; they let Goettig crash in their home and found him a job teaching English to foreign students at Mississippi State. It paid twenty-four thousand dollars for the school year. When Goettig looked into teacher-certification programs, he realized that they took almost as long as law school. He bought some books about the L.S.A.T., studied on his own, and scored off the charts. The next time I saw him, he was living on Riverside Drive, studying at Columbia Law School. In his spare time, he did Chinese-language research for Human Rights Watch. Eventually, he became the editor-in-chief of Columbia’s Journal of Asian Law. He wore a certain expression I recognized from China—slightly stunned, a little overwhelmed, completely out of his element. He had no idea where this was going, but he was happy to hang on for the ride.