Four weeks ago in my first column about my trip to China I wrote how I hoped to encounter China's "cultural core," its Confucian "root," and experience it.

During my two weeks in China I did encounter what I might call China's ancient core a few times-in a ceremonial smudging outside a Buddhist temple and the timeless view across West Lake in Hangzhou, in the colorful ancestors' tombs on the hillsides on the way to Yiwu, and upon arriving in that city listening to an old singer chant an ancient song in an ancestors' temple.

A friend wrote today in an email and said "Save the Earth" at the end of her note. I'll admit I've thought about the problems of "saving the earth" a great deal since we touched down in Shanghai. The pressures on the planet here are seriously extreme already, and it's obvious they will mount in the next few decades. The scholars who have lectured us have said that the Chinese know they will not be able to establish a middle class like the West because there will simply not be enough resources.

This sets my personal record for distance learning. I'm half-way around the world in China's largest city, Shanghai. It's Day Three of the Wofford Milliken Faculty Development seminar.

I think it's yesterday where you are, or maybe it's yesterday here, and today there. Time is just the first of my concepts under renovation. This morning the only thing I know for sure is I'm not in Kansas (or Cowpens) anymore.

I'm headed to China for two weeks on a Wofford College faculty study trip. At first I wasn't very excited about going. I'm not a city boy, and our whole 14-day excursion would mostly take place in vast Shanghai, a coastal city of over 20 million people, China's New York, a pulsing vortex of trade, commerce and consumerism.