Ask Not For Whom The Panther Prowls by Astor James Monroe

Prolog.
     
    They met in
a dark staircase, in the evening just past dusk, in one of the apartment towers
near Donghua university in Shanghai. The stale smell of dinners
past filled the air, just barely overwhelming the sulfurous smell
from the coal smog.
    The young man said in his most desperate voice,
“I need to do well on the TOEFL to enter Harvard. My parents could
not live with the shame if I fail.”
    The
foreigner coughed from the smog then quietly replied, in his
strongly accented and not quite mastered Cantonese, “The money, you
it have?” By his build, he was unmistakably a foreigner, despite
his smog mask, dark glasses and hat pulled down over his eyes. Even
though he wore clothes from the local department store.
    “ Five
thousand dollars?”
    “ Six. Cash.
Now.”
    “ Here.”
    The
foreigner counted it. “You're short. Not enough. More.”
    “ It's all we
have, we'll pay you. I promise.”
    “ No. Not
enough for Harvard.”
    “ UGA
then?”
    “ OK.” The
foreigner pocked the money. He then gave the young man a written
sheet with his gloved hand. “This instructions is.
Understand?”
    “ Yes, thank
you.”
    “ Now forget
you saw me.” He left down the stairs and out into the deepening
fug. He had long a series of appointments to keep that evening
before catching his plane home.
     
    Shen
Yi carefully read the
sheet of paper he bought. It contained detailed instructions on how
to log into a site using a virtual tunnel through the 'Great
Firewall of China'. He could hardly wait, and once home fired up
his laptop and got started.
    The most
beautiful girl he ever saw was on the screen when he logged in. She
looked very much Chinese, for an American. He wasn't expecting
that. He sat there, agog at her, his jaw dropped with amazement.
She began to speak, “Do you want to start with the English
practice?”
    He stammered, in Cantonese, “Do you speak
Chinese?”
    “ A little,”
she then continued in English, “I'm adopted and my parents insisted
I learn my culture's language. You're here to learn English aren't
you?”
    “ You're very
beautiful,” Yi, continued this time in English. She blushed. “Thank
you.” She looked down at a paper on her desk and asked him, “The
first question is 'what is the difference between to and
too?'”
    “ One means
also. Can you give me your email address so we can talk
later?”
    The girl
paused, “I'm not allowed to tell you that.” She wrote something on
a sheet of paper and held it up in front of the camera. Yi hastily
wrote down her address. She continued, “The second question is give
me an example of using too.”
    “ I like know
if you are a college scholar too.”
    “ Very good,
but it would be better to say, 'I would like to know if you are a
college student too'.”
    “ I would
like to know if you are a college student too.”
    “ That's
excellent. And I would reply, 'I am, I am a student at Georgia
State University'.”
    “ You
are?”
    “ Yes. Where
are you?”
    “ Donghua. I
want to graduate study in Georgia.”
    “ Good, but
'Donghua, I want to do graduate study in Georgia', is
correct”
    “ Donghua, I
want to do graduate study at Georgia State University.”
    The girl blushed again, Yi was a fast worker. He
seemed nice enough, but coming halfway around the world after a
couple of minutes of an online chat was a bit excessive. “Don't be
silly.”
    “ What's
silly about it? What is your name?”
    “ Jane.”
    “ Jane I
think I you love.”
    “ Now you are
really being silly. The right way to say it is 'Jane I think I love
you', which you can't yet. We've just met.”
    “ Jane I know
I love you.”

1. Put Your Hand Up before You
Die.
    Spring
semester found me back practicing academic physics. While it was
not quite as spiritually rewarding as chasing down a network of
serial killers, my sudden death was a lot less likely when I was
standing in the front of a classroom blathering away. Even with the
new concealed carry law, the