;Away from home, I was in a small hostel, Ningbo. The moment I stepped into my room, I saw a cockroach creeping on the bed. “Oh, dirty!” I couldn’t help shouting these words out. The owner of that hostel, a thirty-something woman, was standing beside me, but she seemed totally indifferent to what she saw, and tried to kill the cockroach with the pillow I was gonna use. She failed—the cockroach disappeared quickly, finding a nice place to hide below the bed. The owner shrugged her shoulders as if to say that there was nothing else she could do about it.
Grant Barrett