Searching his memory, he wonders when he first encountered a Chinese person. He thinks it was the year Johnson and Patterson competed for the world heavyweight title and resolves to check the date later. That morning, he rides his bike to the local library that has a hen house at its entrance. Before he goes in, he smokes next to the five chickens and contemplates why he is so interested in the first time he met a Chinese person. 

He decides not to go into the library and bikes away. He knows his memory is unreliable and can recall only two memories from elementary school, the Chinese story and a baseball game in which he smashed his head on a basketball hoop pole. When he’d come to, he was lying underneath a bench and said, “That’s okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it,” to a friend who was caring for him. He remembers these odd words now and contemplates his existence and the inevitability of death, which for some reason reminds him of the Chinese. 

Up the hill from the harbor, there was a Chinese elementary school where he had to go take a standard aptitude test. On the testing day, he sharpened his pencils and took a thirty minute bus ride to the school and when he arrived he found the place large and surprisingly quiet. In the testing room, the proctor walked in with a cane and a stack of tests and gave directions. The proctor tells the Japanese test-takers that he is Chinese and that his Chinese students work just as hard as them. He expresses his desire for cross-country friendships and instructs them not to vandalize the desks or make any marks on the classroom they would not want students to do at their own school. Twenty years later, he can’t remember the test results, but he remembers the Chinese teacher. 

His high school was in a port town and there were several Chinese students in his class. The next Chinese person he met was a shy 19-year-old girl he met in a part-time job during his sophomore spring. She worked diligently and ignored his attempts to strike up a conversation. Two weeks into the job, she made a small mistake and freaked out. He calmed her down and she opened up to him and shared that she was Chinese. 

They worked together in a publisher’s house in Bunkyo Ward in Tokyo next to a dirty open sewer. On lunch breaks, he learned that her father ran an import business in Yokohama and that she was Japanese-born. She was attending a private woman’s university and hoped to become an interpreter. On their last evening of work, he asked her out to a discotheque in Shinjuku. He already had a girlfriend, but he felt like they were going their separate ways and didn’t see this as an issue. 

They danced for two hours and then she told him she needed to be home by the curfew her brother set. He got her phone number and put her on a train. It’s only when he’s back home that he realized he put her on the wrong train. He went back to the station and found her when she got off and apologized and promised to call her the next day. After she left, he smoked and accidentally threw away the matchbook with her phone number and never saw her again. 

Six years after he got married, a stranger stopped him at a coffee shop and asked if he remembered him. The man doesn’t give him his name and they talk about work and family.  The stranger tells him he sells encyclopedia sets to Chinese people and he finally realizes the man is the Chinese boy he knew from high school. The boy had been smart and good-looking and he was surprised to find he was selling encyclopedias for a living now. He gives the man his address and asks him to send a pamphlet about his business. He would never see him again. 

Now, as a thirty-year-old, he imagines that if he were to be hit in the head during a baseball game again the words that would come to him would be, “This is no place for me.” He feels gloomy in Japan and he wonders about China. He’s read a lot about China and daydreams about being there daily. He sits on the stone steps of the harbor and waits for the slow boat to China.