While many of the foreign professors dressed like students and probably wanted to be students, if not sleep with them, I occasionally wore silk vests and tie clips. Every night I polished the incessant Beijing dust off my shoes. Perhaps I was overcompensating for my thin frame and boyish face. That afternoon, lowering my haunches to the blue couch, I felt like a freshman in big trouble.
“We are terminating your contract,” he said. “Your resident status will be revoked. You have one week to leave the country.”
I said nothing.
Why did I have such a hard egg in my throat? I had nothing to lose. This was not my country. I sometimes hated the place, I missed my sister and my mother, my best friend Mac, and yet I didn’t want to leave China.
— K: A Novel, p.38
Kanlaon 