SHENYANG, China—The statue of Chairman Mao in Shenyang rises three or four stories to survey Zhongshan Square, without a doubt cutting a more imposing figure than any Mercedes-chauffeured communist official or donkey-cart-driving farmer in this provincial capital of 7 million. Clad in an overcoat, which probably still leaves him chilly during the northeastern China winters, Mao stretches forth one arm over the sledgehammer-swinging, automatic rifle-slinging soldiers, workers and peasants surging forth from his feet in sculpted struggle against the forces of the West, capitalism, imperialism and whatever else. He offers, in short, the perfect place on a Friday evening in July for a self-proclaimed “American English training center” to hold an English karaoke competition, with its Chinese employees adopting the voices of Richard Marx and Celine Dion.

“Is the irony lost on these people?” I wailed to no one in particular that night four weeks ago.

That’s something I’ll have to ask them in the following week, before I finish my term of drilling students five hours a day on patterns like “How often do you eat hamburgers?” and return to the United States. Really, though, it’s only one of many related mysteries I mull after seven weeks in China as an English teacher.

Unlike the foreigners of 100 years ago, I didn’t come to this country to carve it up like a banquet fish, sucking profits out from between every bone. I don’t live in an idyllic riverside concession graced by elegant European architecture. And I didn’t expect the special treatment that treaty after treaty once guaranteed for nationals of the various early 20th-century imperial powers.

Anyway, who needs treaties these days in China? The oddity of my white-skinned, wide-eyed appearance alone elevates me to stop-and-stare status. In the ever-mopped, ever-muddied hallways of the private English schools where I work, a foreign teacher enters and the mass of students and parents parts, the kids gazing in what looks a lot like amazement and the adults nodding in satisfaction. On a field trip, thirty or so Chinese children mobbed me for autographs. I signed school-logo baseball caps, t-shirt sleeves, t-shirt backs—and all three for some—with my authentic foreign name. Then the mothers posed their little ones for pictures with my foreign face. Later, while on vacation in Beijing, I repeated the whole “shuo qiezi!” (“say eggplant!”) routine with Chinese tourists from outlying provinces who just had to have photos of themselves with an American against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City.

If the Chinese simply desired mementos of their encounters with a Westerner, I’d brush it off as curiosity about the unknown and delight in having met it. As it is, the practice only adds to the unsettling feeling that I represent everything against which China has spent much of its modern history waging both military and ideological wars. And this country is welcoming me, perhaps at the expense of its own people.

Compare, for example, my living conditions and salary against those of Alice, a Chinese teacher and working single woman. Free of charge, the school provides me and all foreign teachers with accommodations. I have my own room, offering me air conditioning, a TV featuring four copies each of five different channels, rather reliable hot water, and furniture that typically serves its purposes, along with a plodding washing machine down the hall. Sure, the room also came outfitted with permanently-there hairballs on the randomly-chosen rugs, belching pipes, a well-entrenched lard-like slime colony on the bathroom floor, and a central bathroom drain that sends the smells of several other toilets wafting up near mine. As long as I have flip-flops lashed to my feet, though, it’s quite tolerable. For 20 hours of classroom time per week, I earn 4,000 yuan per month—about $500. The school slips in 300 yuan per month for transportation and 100 yuan per hour of overtime. In a city where a four-yuan bowl of noodles will keep me full for half a day, I’m doing just fine.

Alice, on the other hand, shares a sixth-floor apartment (sans elevator) with five other young women in one of the bruising concrete blocks that industrial Chinese cities ought to trademark. They enter into a room with a table, to which they pull over plastic stools when they want to eat. Their “kitchen,” if it could be called that, has a sink and a burner or two. The six of them sleep on bunks spread between two rooms. They don’t have much in the way of closets or drawers for storage, but that’s okay, since they don’t have much in the way of stuff to store. Their sun porch is a hanging forest of drying clothes, basically whatever they’re not wearing at the time, which they wash in plastic tubs in their bathroom. Nowhere in sight are a TV or phone, and hot water probably isn’t an issue, as they also lack a working bathtub. When it’s shower time, they pack their towels and deodorant into tote bags and head out to the public bathhouse for three yuan a visit. Alice’s reward for standing in front of a classroom about nine hours each week and sitting probably twice as long in an office is less than 1500 yuan per month.