New Alter
I
was invited back to China for another semester, we had
no other options,
and Kristin said she wants to keep teaching Sunday school at the Three Self
Church, so we returned to China for the third semester.
The pressure to marry persisted and continued to be resisted. Soon, a new alter who said she is 17 years old surfaced, and said that since I refuse to marry her, she is going to get a full time job teaching at a kindergarten that provides an apartment, where she will live on her own. I was for her having a place of her own, but to teach at a school that provides an apartment, she would need to sign a one-year contract. I told her that her fragile health cannot tolerate China's toxic air pollution for that long, so she needs to just stay put in our apartment, go outside only when needed, and then leave China with me again as soon as my semester ends.
The new alter didn't listen, signed a one-year contract with the first kindergarten at which she interviewed, and then moved out and across the city to the apartment that her employer provided. Moreover, as she had left USA for China without finishing her bachelor's degree, which more employers in China began asking for, she also began taking classes at a nearby Chinese university, saying that she wants to transfer her American undergraduate credits and receive her bachelor's degree from the private but cheap Chinese university. As I rode in the taxi with her to at least help her move, the new alter even became verbally aggressive and treated me like good riddance.
She was housed in a typical Chinese apartment building, which has little to no sound proofing. There was no freeway overpass nearby with pedestrian walkway, so I began to visit her and we began to cast out demons in her apartment. It was good to be inside instead of standing on a freeway and the neighbors didn't speak English, but they heard the guttural noise that she made during spiritual warfare, and fell silent at first; I suspect they were trying to figure out what the noise was and also scared. But irritation replaced fear as the days wore on and they began to get upset, and expressed it by slamming their doors shut while leaving their apartments whenever we engaged in spiritual warfare. The new alter said that her neighbors gave her nasty looks in the elevator and in the hallway that made her feel insecure, so I spent many nights sleeping on her couch as she slept in her bedroom so that the neighbors would think that she was living not by herself but with a man and wouldn't know who was making that guttural noise.
The air pollution that semester was the worst we had experienced to date and the Chinese hospitals filled with people suffering from respiratory difficulties. Her apartment was high up, apparently in a wind corridor, and had cheap windows. As the wind howled, I could watch fine metallic dust gather on her interior window sill.
The new alter had conflicts with her new employer, including when they wanted her to teach about Halloween, and her complete lack of Chinese created obvious issues in the classes that she was taking at the Chinese university.