When Natsumi divulged that a student in her class had copied an article from the internet for a group project, and was very likely to lose all the points and get a warning from the department director, she couldn't fight the impulse to ask, "Was he Chinese?" "Yes..." admitted Natsumi. That was so unsurprising. She knew that every semester the Japanese teaching group had to device strategies to discourage the Chinese students from cheating. It was humiliating, and she wanted to write to someone "in charge" of the Chinese population on campus about this and make every Chinese aware of this dishonorable situation.

For the last two years the Chinese language program had been losing students. True that there was an overall drop in enrollment in all the humanities programs, but she felt that Chinese itself was losing ground. In contrast, enrollment in Japanese increased. This year their program recruited a dozen new graduate students, including seven or eight TAs. That was like adding at least ten sections to their language courses, even after deducting the old TAs who had graduated. About eighty percent of the undergrads who registered for their language classes were Chinese. What could one do with it? The Chinese population at this college was growing exponentially, and most of those with language credit requirement preferred to learn Japanese, a language close to their own and attracting them through animations, food, and what not. In Natsumi's words, they, the Japanese TAs, depended on the Chinese students for their salaries.