Ningning looked at me apologetically: "We'll be real quick."

The National Defense University is a top training institute for officers in China's military, the People's Liberation Army. My girlfriend, Ningning, rents a room there.

Ningning is a painter. Last semester she quit her graduate program at the Central Academy of the Arts. A friend introduced Ningning to a small room at Guofang. It was only on the night we moved her stuff in that we found out I wasn't allowed.

"They don't usually allow foreigners in here," the driver of the van we had hired remarked as we pulled up to the gate. I didn't understand what he meant and the guards didn't see me in the dark van.

But when the landlord met us at the door her eyes went wide. A short woman with thinning, crackly hair and glossy skin that looks like Saran Wrap pulled tight, she hissed: "You know, he's not allowed to be here."

Ningning assured me her landlady was just looking out for us.

"If he stays over he has to wait till tomorrow night to leave," she said sternly. "Once it's morning there will be old people walking about outside. If they see him they'll cause trouble."

Ningning rents one room of the landlord's large flat. The landlord has two flats in the building, given to her because her father-in-law is high up in the university's administration.

It is illegal to rent out the flats, but this kind of illegal renting is very common in Beijing.

My own apartment complex is actually a dormitory for employees of a state-owned garment manufacturer. The apartments were distributed to workers as a benefit. Most recipients were middle management, many retired, and so already had a place to live, but they were barred from selling the apartments they had been given. So they rented them illegally.

--

The next time I saw the gate of the National Defense University was about a month later, when I accompanied Ningning and her mother back from the train station.

The guard, a short, thin young man in a green flannel army suit stopped us on sight.

"I live here," Ningning said and showed the plastic card that opened the door to her building. "I just came back from traveling with my mother."

Ningning had been in Shanghai for almost two weeks. They had changed guards during that time. This new guard didn't know her and so Ningning went into the guardhouse to call her friend in the university. The guard stared at me while Ningning's mother and I waited outside with the bags.

A minute later Ningning was out with another guard who said it was okay for Ningning and her mother to enter. I had to wait outside.

They offered me a seat in the guardhouse where it was warmer, but the sun was bright, one of those fuzzy, azure days that Beijing seems to be getting more of, so I sat on the curb letting the sun warm me and the time pass.

--

Everywhere I go people stare.

Sometimes, when I pass by an event and stop in to see what someone is giving a speech about, the speaker will look down at me and say something about how we should be extra nice to "our foreign friends" now that the Olympics are coming. I want to curse at them: "Who's your 'friend'?" I want to ask. "I don't know you."

Ningning thinks I'm being overly sensitive.

"If you were in America giving a speech and a Chinese person walked in, what would you say to them?" she asks.

"How would I know they are not American?" I respond.

I think this bothers me more the longer I've been here. The way I react to the stares, to the comments, I can't ignore that perhaps this being different all the time, this visually obvious difference has worn me down.

--

My last time to the university was the night after Ningning and I had had a fight. She still had things she wanted to say, so I agreed to sneak into the university.

Ningning had concocted a plan to get me past the guards. There are many unlicensed cabs ("black cars" they are called) that ferry residents in and out of the gates every day. The guards ignore them. Ningning talked to the cabbies and found them willing to transport me. They didn't even increase their normal price. We went in at night when the guards couldn't see passengers clearly and there wasn't be anybody wandering around outside.

We sat in Ningning's room, washed with yellow light from a corner lamp, with long, dark shadows from the easel in the center, talking about nothing.

The sound of high-heeled boots clomping down the hallway startled us. "The landlord!"

Sharp knocks at the door. Ningning opened it the width of her face and the landlord's voice entered in a grating hush: "Is he in there? How did you get him in?"

Ningning explained and promised that nobody had seen me.

"Well he absolutely can't go out tomorrow. He has to stay in your room the whole day."

Ningning looked back at me frowning. She knew I had work the next morning. "Okay," she said. "We'll talk about it."

The landlord howled back: "He absolutely can't leave during the day. There will too many old people around. They come out at six in the morning. They'll report on you. They'll report on me. They'll report on your friend in the university. Your friend's political career will be finished!"

"Okay," Ningning said and closed the door.

She came back and sat next to me on the bed.

"I have to go to work tomorrow," I said.

She nodded.

"What will happen if the landlord gets reported on?" I asked.

"She'll be investigated," Ningning replied. "She'll become a target of suspicion." She said that like it was a title that people acquired, something like "felon" or "city councilman."

We went to bed later and I didn't think about it anymore. Even when we were cooking breakfast I still wasn't thinking about it.

Then there was a sharp knock. The landlord's hands seem to have their own voice, a terse, upset reverberation, different from other knocks. "He's not going out today, right?"

"He has to go to work," Ningning said quietly. "I'll go fetch a cab and have it wait by the door. We'll get him out before anyone notices."

"Impossible. There are old people everywhere now."

I sipped my cabbage soup and decided I was going no matter what. It wasn't my fault if some old people had problems with me. As I said, perhaps parts of China are wearing on me.

"Okay, we'll think of something," I heard the landlord say.

The landlord and Ningning hashed out a plan. Ningning would go to the gate and bring a cab back. The landlord would accompany me downstairs. I was to cover my face with a scarf and, if anyone asked, I would tell them I was here to fix the elevator.

Why there would be foreign elevator repairmen and why they would wrap up their faces was beyond me.

Ningning left. I wrapped my scarf around my face and pulled my wool cap down.

The landlord's heels rang on the hallway floor. "C'mon," she urged me.

We made it about three floors before the elevator stopped. A typical old Chinese lady, a short, round bundle of grey and brown cotton and wool, did her stiff waddle into the elevator. I stood in front of the landlord and stared straight ahead.

"Elevator's being fixed," the landlord remarked to the old woman.

"Uh-huh," the woman grunted.

The doors opened. I strode forward and grabbed the exit door handle turning the lock above it this way and that, banging the still-locked door. A real elevator repairman would know how to work the door, I scolded myself. The door opened.

Outside the world was bright, covered in pale sunlight and concrete dust. Just like the landlord had said, hunched old people crisscrossed the road in front of me.

A slender wrist waved above the open door of a black car parked across the path. I jumped in.

Ningning told the driver to take us to the bus station. The driver looked back: "You took a foreigner in here?" The driver laughed. "You've got guts."

___________________________________________________________________________

Sweeble.com correspondent Michael Armstrong is an American living and working in Beijing, China.