At times, living alone in this city of 15 million people can feel pretty alienating. When I first arrived (with a fever instead of a hotel reservation), students at Fudan had just begun taking their final exams. With students cramming for as many as 13 tests, I quickly discovered that I was going to have a much more difficult time carrying out my fieldwork than I anticipated. To conduct thorough interviews with students, I was going to have to make friends first. And, like Davidson, the exam period at Fudan is not the easiest time to make friends. I realized that I was going to have to be creative.

So, during the rainy weeks of June, I offered to proofread students' English papers. I agreed to take photos of seniors as they ran around campus in their graduation robes. I hung around tea and coffee shops, trying to entertain the waitresses with stories about my sisters and brother. I chatted up students as they waited for food. Recently, I've even been teaching a friend how to swim at the university pool. Tomorrow, my friend Ma Wei, who works as a chef at a local noodle restaurant, has agreed to teach me how to stretch Chinese noodles by hand.

It's been an agonizingly slow process at times, but I've finally settled in. After seven weeks, I feel as though I fit in among the many characters that populate this end of the city. For example, there's the man who copes with the daily heat by riding his moped in boxer shorts, his unbuttoned shirt flapping like a cape behind him. Or the women who staff my tiny hotel, who scold me when I come home too late and consider it their duty to wake me up any day that I sleep past 8 a.m. Thankfully, they've stopped nagging me about my ceiling, which is now adorned with shoe prints and mosquito corpses--they no doubt figure that I'll sooner or later wipe out the entire species.

These casual interactions and developing friendships have resulted in fascinating conversations that touch on everything from Sino-US relations to the role of the press in China, from the Olympics to the upcoming American presidential election, and from the riots in Tibet to the recent earthquake in Sichuan. In one conversation, I found myself drawing from John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville in an argument about the dangers of democratic government. While that conversation certainly tested my Chinese ability, I later found myself at a total loss when someone who had just watched the movies Underworld and Batman Begins asked me to clarify the relationships among Batman, Dracula, vampires, and ordinary bats. I gave up and drew a Venn diagram.

Some of the most interesting discussions have been about China's development policies and domestic security issues. Such conversations invariably turn to Tibet and Xinjiang, China's westernmost province. Xinjiang (the name means "New Frontier" in Mandarin) is home to the Uighur (pronounced WEE-ger) minority group, a people who bear no physical resemblance to the Han Chinese majority, speak a language that is closer to Turkish than Mandarin, and are overwhelmingly Muslim. Xinjiang is huge--bigger than Alaska--and because it contains 30% of China's oil reserves and borders eight other nations, it has tremendous strategic value to China.

Last week, I traveled through Xinjiang with a Chinese friend who lives in the province's capital and several other Chinese-speaking American students. We traveled from a nature preserve near China's northern border with Russia to Turpan, the hottest city in China, where the delicious grapes helped ease the agonizing 115-degree heat. Later, we traveled to Kashgar, where I spoke with Uighur university students outside of the Id Kah Mosque. We rode camels and hiked on foot in the Taklimakan Desert, and then traveled west toward the border with Kazakhstan. The weeklong trip was an invaluable opportunity to observe firsthand the development policies that we so passionately discussed in Shanghai.

What's next? With a bit of luck, at this time next week, I'll be in Lhasa, Tibet, as one of the first foreigners to visit the region since the March riots. The process for applying for a permit has been frustrating, as the new requirements are confusing and difficult to navigate, but I should hear an answer one way or another in the next few hours. Keep your fingers crossed!