Beijing, China

I was tired as hell. Spending 14 hours in a suffocating aircraft, choking down slimy eggplant will do that.

The hotel bed urged me to sink into its clean white sheets, so I gladly did after a moment’s triumph. “I’ve finally arrived,” I thought, and remarkably so after that verbal struggle with the taxi driver, who didn’t seem to know his way around the city. Head on the pillow, nodding off with the Chinese news screaming H1N1 in the background, I glanced to my left and saw it.

The entire shower was clearly visible through the glass pane next to my bed. My first thought was that I would have to lather up in full view of my roommate, someone whom I met only hours before. But on the outside of the glass, not far out of reach from my position on the bed, was a thick privacy curtain.

Amused and slightly disturbed, I fell into a deep sleep.

I spent three months teaching English in Beijing, where I had experiences even stranger than what my classmates invariably called the “Sexy Shower.” But these snags in what Midwesterners deem “normal life” were small details — the daily rituals implanted in my subconscious were hardly disturbed. I ate three meals a day. I had a job, used the Internet, made my bed, bought soda and cookies at the grocery store and took unlimited naps in an air conditioned apartment with a large, flat screen television.

Two blocks away, people slept in the 100-degree heat. They used an outhouse, consistently breathing in dust from the bricklayers working to remodel their deteriorating courtyard homes. Their skin was leathered and tan from sitting on their shop stoops all day, waiting for customers to give them a few kuai for an expired bottle of orange Fanta.

I meandered daily through these Hutongs, shanty neighborhoods overshadowed by my nine-story apartment building. I often wondered if the U.S. table tennis players felt the same bewilderment I did when they penetrated China for the first time in 1971, after the trade embargo between the two countries was lifted.

But the China they experienced in 1971 wasn’t facing the same rapid development the country is now, the kind that causes traffic jams on narrow streets, where shiny foreign cars block the rusty rickshaws. Those team members probably didn’t have to cover their noses with sweaty palms to keep from tasting the soot or shield their eyes from skyscrapers reflecting the eastern sunlight.

Whether China’s economic growth will eventually smother its more than 2000 years of tradition is a question with an obvious answer: No. Chinese people, both poor and successful, are as stubborn and set as the fortresses that surround their temples, and Western influence won’t easily change that.

The reason is a complicated mixture of religion, political power and the global market. The younger generation — with better access to and understanding of technology — is catching on quickly, but they’re still shielded by a Communist regime and surroundings that don’t quite match up to a modern Western style.

People walk backward on the streets for daily doses of exercise. They buy corn on the cob from the snack stand. They slurp their noodles and spit on the sidewalks. Babies poop where they please. Umbrellas paint the landscape in both rain and shine. Workers dance outside their shops in the mornings, lucky jade Buddhas dangling from their necks and wrists. Tiny leashless dogs cross the streets while their owners follow lazily behind them. Men loiter outside on hot days, flashing their sweaty, swollen bellies, their T-shirts rolled up to their armpits.

When I brought souvenirs and tastes of the strange Chinese palette home, my family took only a short break from sipping cold drinks and eating barbecued pork steak on the back porch to admire them. I missed this lifestyle, but I didn’t envy them. They would never understand what it was like to hang underwear in front of the living room Buddha with the smell of incense still lingering in the air, or to eat chicken hearts with the housekeeper while she loudly practiced mustering one-syllable English words.

People say coming to China is about conquering the Great Wall. But no number of breathless treks up the steep, crumbling slope overlooking miles of treetops and ancient handiwork could compare to what my eyes captured through the viewfinder that was my everyday perspective.

And that was a damn good view.