In this chapter, the narrator recounts the story of how he failed in his attempt to be admitted to a high school in China. He went to live with his parents, who arranged for him to attend a community college. When he went to visit his old friend, he found that he was cold and inhospitable. He had no idea what to do with his friend, who had become a stranger to him. One day, while he was walking home, he saw a middle-aged woman who looked familiar. She asked him why he did not go to school that day, and he told her that he had become "like a stranger" to her. She told him that she had come home from work one day and found that her friend had not gone to school. When she went to check on him, she found him in bed, sleeping for a full day and not waking up until dark. She did not think much of it, and let him sleep for a whole night. She came home late from work, and when she woke up, she saw that his friend had never been sick. She went to the bathroom, but found that a man was in his living room. She wondered where he was going, but he said that he would be back in his old home. She could not understand the boy she had known for ten years, and she felt hopeless. She saw him talking happily with a tombstone, and laughed with it. She felt hopeless, and in the days that followed, he would just sit down and talk to it all night. Instead, he began to resist her, and insisted that his state was fine. When the narrator asked her what had happened, she told him she had seen him weeping while she was weeping. She said that his condition was still the