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On study abroad trip to Shanghai, China, I learned what it means to be alone. The last two weeks had been spent traveling from landmark to landmark, listening to poorly translated Chinese to English, on educational topics that bore no impact on our public school practices back in the US. I longed for genuine connection. Our cohort gelled in small groups or couplings: siblings, friends, and colleagues. I couldn't find my place and it made the trip a vibrant, albeit lonely, spectacle. After a series of lingering presentations, we were offered a few hours of respite in the lowest form of tourism: souvenir shopping. As we traveled to Suzhou, a warm and hospitable city located in the southeastern Jiangsu Province of China, over sixty miles northwest of Shanghai, the landscape of Beijing--a busy and ever bustling city, calmed. What replaced it were trees humming with cicada, canals with floating driftwood, and people not moving but standing simply, talking with one another. The shift was a welcomed one. I had been harboring resent at what I considered a patronizing attempt to replace a substance-less sequence of days with extraneous shopping experiences as a means to contribute something substantive to this trip. I was thousands of miles from home and rather than feeling homesick, I was hungry, or starved rather, for the meat and bones of immersion. As the group moved in unison toward the kiosks and small stores, I hung back. I paused at every shop until there was enough distance between us and eventually, until I could no longer see the last person I knew. I felt relief. It is more lonely to be surrounded by people you know but to whom you seemingly cannot relate than it is to be alone and meeting people for the first time. As the cohort disappeared, so did I. Every xiǎo diàn offered a doorway to the labyrinth of narrow alleyways connecting hundreds of yards of stone and concrete homes. Mobiles hung over the threshold of open doors. Women and men sat on their stoops, and in the intersections of homes under the shade, playing cards and drinking. Sometimes a woman would laugh and smile at me. Sometimes everyone turned to stare and said nothing: a white American lost in the back alleys of their homes. As the alley widened, vendors stood outside with their children, selling fruits and nuts. A man squats on the ground, a liuqin between his legs, releasing mellifluous tones into the air. He stops and smiles, baring no teeth in his mouth. He pushes the liuqin into my hands and demonstrates the sound each string makes. People gather in their doorways to watch. I play a wretched note, and yet another, that draws laughter from the crowd. I bow and hand the instrument back to the musician. They wave as I walk away. When I reach the end of another path, a wall forced a left turn and I was back on the main shopping drag. A group of my peers is waiting in front of a restaurant, showcasing their purchases. No one asks where I've been. No one has noticed I left.