Black snow brought inside on shoes marbles itself into wet swirls on every vacant patch of floor. Drop anything and stain it; coal and snow and phlegm and dirt whorled black. Try to wash your hands when they've been soiled, the faucet in the Zhongshan School bathroom never stops its unsterilised dribble of tap water, the soap itself greased and sticky in a grimy plastic cup. Look left at the wrong moment and you'll see the kid's mothers squatting in the non-cubicled girl's room; the curtain thankfully replaced now with a barely adequate saloon door. The men's room still has a curtain, though. I stand at the urinal and the man next to me begins the crescendo of the clearing of the throat, Shenyang's daily gooey anthem wrung out from men and girls alike; he makes his deposit next to the urinal, as opposed to in the bowl where it would be flushed away. It will be stood on by the next patron and traipsed throughout the building or out into the snow.

At Tie Xi school, where I teach an adult class, it is sometimes worse, when pipes periodically burst above the sole two squatting lavatories in the building. Used paper and feminine pads, both too thick for the drainage system, are stuffed together down a side gutter, sometimes it is impossible to flush anyway or the cistern is continuously emptying itself through cracks onto your coat. In my classroom, a rusted radiator ejects dark puddles of oily water alongside the main wall. I seem to be breathing in the chalk dust, which cakes onto my hands leaving grimy dry marks and thick moistureless skin cracking at the tips of my fingers.

Where there is ugliness without, there is often ugliness within. I was beginning to feel that Shenyang people suffer from a very difficult to understand spiritual affliction, as if the greatest culture on Earth had been forced into cold, apartment blocks stinking vilely of smoke and old food and sewerage, and had become itself darkened. Everyone has some subtle evil about them; the nicest of my co-workers all have some connection with a forger or gang member or criminal, and can offer discounted rates on stolen or copyright-breached items. One remarked sadly, in the words of her own father, 'Chinese people have lost their decency'.

I wanted to visit a night-club. Friends of Xiao's offered to take me after one of my evening classes, they came to meet me in my room at Lan Ting before I left and wanted to watch TV until I returned. I had been lying on my bed all afternoon with a lazy discomfort, the girls on TV had been rubbing face cream into their skin again, with a smile and a zenmeyang? which normally means, 'how about it' but in this sense means 'buy this cream and be my mirror', except the girls outside have overdone it with stern masks of makeup over blotchy pockmarked skin, their slippery unshowered eyebrows rising like snakes over black irises. I watched them from the taxi window, the driver had decided to try his luck with a foreign passenger and attempt a longer route to Zhongshan Road to earn an extra buck or two, so I had plenty of time to watch the pedestrians as we circumvented the main road that directly connects my hotel with the school, no corners. A plump woman attempted a spitball which the wind blew back over her fatty breasts, which she wiped at halfheartedly. At a roundabout I saw an older woman who had pushed her thick trousers down to her knees and was holding her shirt up as she crossed the road, moaning and waddling in snow cold wind.

It was getting dark. My classes on that particular evening were my most difficult - the students who had no choice but to take the extra classes in English, because of the insistence of their parents. Love in these families descends from baba and mama in the form of scholastic pressure, the children were not rude, but were unresponsive and unmotivated. And there are too many of them; Guan Ya has more than 2000 students, of which a significant percentage are as such, and these are the lucky ones whose families can afford payment. The curriculum dictated that I should teach them the names of dinosaurs in this lesson; why a 12 year old Chinese girl would need to learn the word Compsognathus I have no idea.

It was almost 9.00pm before I got in. They were still watching TV, another drama about people shooting people because of some girl. And the hero is sitting there in some bar, in a really old cotton shirt, with a bit of fluffy stubble, talking about shooting. The gangster arrives and they start open mouth kissing and he slips the bra strap off her shoulder, and that's all you see except when three suits bust down the door and shoot them while they're writhing under the silky sheets. These dramas are often more extreme, death counts can number in the thousands after half an hour, at which time the entertainment switches to a kung fu piece, heads get kicked away from the neck, fists crack into guts, reminding me of the constant fighting that can be seen on the street in reality. It's always because someone shoves some other guy, punches are thrown, a serious amount of blood is spilled on the dirty pathway... it could be on the street, in a food court or anywhere.

I have a headache but we go anyway, and soon we are in a dark thumping room, and the chalk dust is sparkling ultraviolet like a starfield on my jersey, and we are seated at the balcony with a view of the floor in which a writhing girl in a bikini is threatening to take off her underwear. The thought that she's as unlikely to have showered within the last few days as has anyone else in the city makes this prospect rather unappealing. The proceedings at these venues always follow the same bizarre format; patrons come and order the amount of beer they expect to drink in the evening, which for reasons of 'face' (aka false pride) means that more often than not a ridiculous number of bottles get piled up in boxes on the table. Then, instead of dancing, they are entertained by the most incongruous series of acts; vocalists might be expected, but when florid orchestral music oiled out from the speakers and a troupe of ballerinas emerged I was amazed. They are followed by a circus act; a couple and their daughter balanced everything possible on their noses. 'Yellow' (meaning pornographic) acts are next, but with the stern policemen (literally, moral police) positioned around the place, a fashion show with a flash of leg in a long skirt is as yellow as it gets. That is, of course, until the bikini girl comes out. She reaches for a microphone and delivers a stream of flawlessly beautiful Mandarin with the pronunciation of a newsreader. She thrusts her hips at the boozed gents in the front row, 'zenmeyang?' I try to think of an appropriate Chinese phrase expressing disinterest.

Some of those faces at the front are local celebrities, they take the opportunity to wander on stage at will to force bills at the dancers. One singer openly addresses a song to them, 'please flirt with me'. And then it's all cleared away and the DJs come out, and the customers move into the centre to spend the remainder of the evening sweating over each other, until the enforced closing time at two pm. Dancing is led from beginning to end, the DJ mumbles phrases of hype-cool English into the microphone all night in between zenmeyangs, a woman in tight jeans and a crop top similarly provides a commentary on the rhythm as she twists in a cage. I dance near an edge, neighbours spot me and try to shake my hand in what appears to be a good-natured attempt to greet me and ask where I'm from. In context, it seemed an uncomfortable attention where none was necessary, what with them spinning in alcohol with too wide eyes and grins. I was under protection anyway, one of my 'hosts' had elected to come downstairs with me. Earlier in the evening he'd offered to fix me up with girls if I got lonely in Shenyang, now he took his job pretty seriously, grasping my hand at every disturbance on the dance floor. There was a fight at one point when some shoving occurred, you should have seen him pull me away to the other side of the room.... big hands that guy has.

Once I'd edged to a less monitored gap in the crowd behind some tables, I was noticed by some slip of a twentysomething girl who drunkenly began to thrust her chest into my back; but I'm looking in the other direction as I'm about to be approached by two sodden British boys... they step over, I don't stop dancing, they shake my hand. I see one of them at a later point crawl up on stage and hump one of the dancing girls, the police pull him down DAMN fast. I peek at the girl behind me, a superb job on the makeup which is now pointing at another dance partner, whom she quickly shoves away in favour of yet another.... ah, she the free agent I think.

And, she probably won't go home with some guy tonight, like she would in Auckland. Because these guys all live with their parents too.

The smoke and the beer are a little too much this evening, as they are the next night when we are taken out for Xiao's farewell dinner - she was scheduled to leave Shenyang the next day. It was put on by the family friend whom I'd quizzed about politics a few months earlier, he had threatened to check up on my Mandarin, which I was aware was less than up to scratch as it could have been with more effort on my part. I found I could understand a significant percentage of what he said, but without real clarity. He toasted me, but declined to swig the whole glass of beer as is the custom: he told me that if I'd understood 100%, he'd have sculled the lot in salute. Perhaps it was fair. Interminable karaoke followed, I gave a Faye ballad in an inappropriate key, found I was unable to control my throat, which was beginning to ache. I wanted to go home, but was bound by politeness for at least ten more vibrating numbers... finally Xiao managed to find an acceptable excuse for going home, and I mumbled farewells before wandering home on the freezing streets, the streetlights seeming to bend over me, streetsellers calling for me to buy their fruits and fish heads, attempting to maintain balance on infrequent polished mounds of ice.