Ling comes back from the bar with another Four Roses for me. “That bartender is busier than a one-armed paper hanger,” he says, then looks for my reaction, which is part of the lesson for him. “What does it mean?”

It’s Tuesday night so I’m in the West Gate answering Ling’s questions about English he’s heard watching TV shows and movies. I’ve learned that some lessons are more enjoyably taught under the influence, so we’ve worked it out that Ling pays me in drinks.

Ling’s in his 30s but looks like a teenager: hairless face, moussed hair, and excitement about what the world has to offer. He isn’t a paying student at the English center where I work, but they let him hang around because he contributes to the English environment, which means he talks to other students in English and never uses Chinese.

I look over at the bartender and owner, whose English name is Sam. He doesn’t look busy. My first time at the West Gate he gave me a free drink and a flash drive and made me promise to return it filled with music.

I returned a few weeks later. After listening a bit to Michael Stipe babble through “Radio Free Europe,” his Zhou Enlai eyebrows raised his mouth to a smile, and we offered a toast “to music.”

“It looks like Sam is checking his computer to see what song this is. He digs my playlist. Especially the Talking Heads, what with his eyebrows and all,” I say. “I wouldn’t call that busy, Ling.”

I turn to look at the wall to make sure I don’t knock a picture off it when I point to the wallpaper, which is patterned with huge repeating black and white images of Beijing’s CBD, giving the bar an Escher kaleidoscope feel. The framed photographs of old Beijing, like the 11 X 14 or so of the now all but non-existent city wall I would have hit, add to the dizziness. “Paper,” I tell him as I tap the wall to the beat of “Moon Rocks.”

“Hang means stick?” Ling asks.

“Bingo,” I say to Ling. I smile my feeling-good smile. I’m three whiskeys in and still a natural at facilitating organic lessons.

Ling brings up Boston, which was a topic of our previous lesson after I told him about Sam Malone and “Cheers.” We talk about universities and basketball, and Ling brings out his notebook and asks me what “teachable moment” means. I explain, then say to Ling, “time to hit the head.”

The walls of the West Gate’s bathroom are covered in international graffiti. I can identify the alphabets, but I can’t read anything except the names and places written with Roman letters. The dates and porn are for everyone.

I hear “Cities” and take a red whiteboard marker out of my pocket and write “Good place to get some Peking duck” over a faded tag that reads “Sino Evil,” the “I” a hypodermic, and the “O” with a nipple.

“Cheers!” Ling has bought us two more Four Roses and two Yanjings.

“Gan Bei Jing,” I toast with the new whiskey, then kill the old. I look at the crest on my beer bottle, which evokes a communist Islamic republic. “‘yan’ means ‘word?’”

“Yan means word with the second tone. Here yan is the fourth tone. It’s a type of bird. Hold on,” Ling says and takes out his phone to look it up. “It means swallow.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” I say and drink. “Chinese! I’ll never get these tones, but I know Yanjing is ancient Beijing. History here is quite a layer cake.”

“Mmm, Beijing,” Ling does Homer Simpson.

“Well done, Homer. You knocked it out of the park.”

Ling is interested in a new student whose English name is Echo. Like Ling, she’s a Beijing local who works in logistics. Most of the students are professionals in their 20s and 30s who need English for work. Students also like the center because they can socialize under the cover of learning oral English. “Two birds with one stone,” Ling told me.

“English as social lubricant.”

“Echo is excited. She is taking the Banned Band lesson tomorrow,” Ling says.

“That’s a very popular lesson,” I say, biting my tongue about a lesson I hate teaching, an unfocussed lesson cobbled from a list of homophones. I stop myself from making a joke with “liquor licker” in it.

“Echo thought you were the director, but I introduced her to English Environment,” Ling says, using a nickname some of the teachers have for our boss, who’s too English for the slacker Americans and even most of the other pleasant Brits he manages. We were well into one of our lessons, and it slipped.

“I get stereotyped here because of my astrological signs and blood type. I’m not boss material. Just a worker.” I drink my beer and wonder who English Environment’s too-American equivalent is. I wonder if the English and Chinese have nicknames for me.

Ling says, “You should use WeChat more. You could make a lot of money tutoring.”

“But there’s something cool about getting paid in whiskey,” I stop him.

I tell Ling I have another recommendation for an English name when he decides to choose one. “It’s because of that little notebook you use. There’s a character in a Jim Jarmusch movie, an Italian in America who uses a notebook to learn English. I forget the character’s name, but the actor’s name is Roberto.”

“Italian?”

“We’d call you Robert or Bob in America. Maybe Rob.”

“Take things?” he smiles archly.

I laugh, and before he asks about the name of the movie to write in his notebook, I recommend Patterson. “You know,” I say, “I just thought of a poet from Patterson. Allen Ginsberg. He wrote, ‘I want to be able to buy what I need with my good looks.’”

– Seth Rosenman