Rendezvous in Huainan

“Pygmalion” is a play written by George Bernard Shaw that tells the story of a professor of “phonetics”, Henry Higgins, who trains a street vendor girl how to speak an impeccable English. The international audience knows the play as the musical “My Fair Lady”. It remains to be Shaw's most successful play, and it continues to be an inspiration for many linguists and language teachers who often pick up a challenge of training their own students to speak a more standard form of a given language. “Rendezvous in Huainan” is my version of that story in which I share my experience of teaching English at the second tier university in China.