IIIMy lightning translator Meggy knocks on my door. This morning I have to meet my dean. “Hello Will,” she smiled. It's better to imbibe Meggy than just look at her. Every time I look at her, she's wearing a new outfit. Today it looks like she's off to Ascot; an ostentatious yellow bouffant dress, a Napoleon-like orange hat, pink lipstick, loads of blush – although, thankfully, this time she stopped short of the cheek glitter. Her wardrobe must be the size of an airplane hangar, I mused as I locked my door. Mine wouldn't even fill a pilot's locker. We walk towards the English department building in a light rain. Meggy offers me a spare umbrella and an assessment of her life that sounds like something Stalin would have imagined back in the day. “I want to finish my studies and then move to a better city. His soft upper lip juts out like the Pug from Bash Street Kids. “I want to approach the metropolis on two fronts, buy a house, make a lot of friends, money and create connections. Have double happiness. Later, I will get married: maybe at 26 years, three months and…..''I see,' I say: but I don't. I think about my own life and how I came home last year without a plan like Bush's in Iraq and did little of anything worthy of a verb for weeks, languishing in my living room of names. Three whole months had passed; nothing to say, so little to report: this reminds me strangely of the way school teachers summed it up for me many years ago. They had it all hidden in clever phrases like, “Good with a hammer, mediocre with a nail, never let it get close to a trick.” (woodwork). "Will serves as a good goal post (after they are robbed by local Christians for another cross symbolizing the endless lived death of Jesus). He is tall and unwavering when the ball comes......at middle of paper ......y to be raised in a spotless apartment Last week he sent me a photo, she said, pulling out a crumpled Polaroid, but it looks stolen from a filthy ID photo booth. under concrete stairs. The curtain is really dirty. “I look at a woman who looks like a hostage; neither beautiful nor simple, scared nor relaxed. she. Chinese women are raised in the harshest conditions, I reflect, but are socialized to act as fragile as possible by and for their men. The "best" behave like the heroines of a Victorian novel: pale flowers. and delicate, weakened by years of indulgence and care, who faint and die of consumption if they stub a toe, shake a beggar's hand, or if one of them stubs a toe. of the footmen accidentally flies into another wing of the mansion. That said, I can't really place Meggy.