He thought Dorsey looked like a prison. The campus is surrounded by a tall fence, and just getting in and out was a challenge.
Zhao immediately stood out. He seemed to be the only Asian on a campus divided between black and Latino students jawing loudly about their summer vacations.
During his first week, he decided to poll the class.
"What do you know about China?" he asked.
One student said she'd heard of Shanghai. The room fell silent except for the groan of the air conditioner.
Zhao tried again.
"Do you know what the Great Wall of China is?"
More silence.
Then a student looked around and asked, "What's the Great Wall?"
One morning a few weeks later, Zhao woke up in a cold sweat. The situation with his students had only gotten worse. He had dreamed that all his hair fell out. It wasn't far from the truth. The last few days, he'd noticed clumps of hair in the shower drain. This morning, like every other, Zhao left his tiny Chinatown apartment at 6:30 and caught the first of two buses that would get him to Dorsey by 7:45. He would give his first quiz. He wasn't expecting many of his students to get more than half the questions right.
Zhao had heard a rumor: Another teacher in the program -- somewhere in the Midwest -- had quit and returned home. Zhao was secretly jealous, but he knew he'd lose tremendous face if he left, especially so soon.
Still, he felt the weight of the cultural differences. He was grappling with the way some of his students treated him. In China, teachers traditionally command unquestioned authority. At Dorsey, the few good students were being overshadowed by those who walked around the classroom to talk to friends, sent text messages and defied Zhao's orders to pay attention. He could not understand why his efforts -- traveling all the way from China to share a resourceful language -- stood for nothing to so many.
It didn't help that the students could not understand Zhao's stilted English at times, and that he rarely offered encouragement. In China, a simple "hao," meaning "good," is often the extent of teachers' praise.
"You can't put these characters together, it's wrong," Zhao sternly told a girl during a writing exercise. As Zhao walked away, the student carried on, unsure how to complete the exercise correctly.
