"I saw a lot of guns," he says. "It's not uncommon to have a tour guide who carries a gun."

Many Harvard students went home for the summer, but few had as memorable a homecoming as did Jamian Lai '96.

Lai travelled to his ancestral village in Quon Dong, China to see the home his family fled at the onset of the Japanese invasion during World War I.

"My grandfather worked for the Chinese government," Lai explains. "Had [the Japanese] found out they would have killed the whole family."

Lai says his family had no choice but to escape on foot to Hong Kong.

When he returned to his village Lai says he was surprised to find clans in which the entire population share the same last name.

"There is an old Chinese custom that the wives have to go and live with the husbands--everyone has the same last name," Lai says.

Lai spoke with members of the Wong clan who told him they remembered his grandfather from the days before the war.

The clan members told him of the cruel treatment Chinese villagers received during the Japanese invasion.

"It was pretty brutal," Lai says. "They took people out and chopped off their heads.

When most people think of a llama, they picture a large furry animal--sort of a cross between a horse and a camel.

But to Clare A. Sammells '95 llamas now mean much more.

Sammells spent her summer in La Paz, Bolivia, where she researched middle-class attitudes towards eating llama meat.

The llama, which is native to South America, Sammells says, is a far more ecologically sound form of meat than beef or mutton.

Still, Sammells says, most Bolivians are loathe to eat llama although she knows from experience that it can be tasty.

"I've had it and it tastes just like beef," Sammells says.