We soon discovered that Ben was a very good cook and he also loved entertaining, so we were surrounded by people all the time we were there. That meant a lot of nodding and smiling on our part. Zhang and I were not bad cooks either and we were a big hit in the kitchen. We were so used to handwashing everything, though, that we hardly used the dishwasher or washing machine. After breakfast one morning Ben had to rush to a board meeting and he told us to put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and turn it on. When I opened the cupboard to get the dishwashing detergent there were quite a few boxes of powder for me to choose from. Naturally I chose the biggest box, filled the dishwasher with laundry powder and turned it on. A few minutes later the whole kitchen was foaming. Masses of foam covered the kitchen floor and I was sent into a total panic.

During that second week in Houston, Ben's good friend Barbara Bush invited us to her house for lunch. I remembered she even had an indoor pool. She apologised for Mr Bush's absence: he had to attend a presidential rally in California that day.

I felt very privileged to meet Barbara, but her husband was such a high-profile politician that I was deeply suspicious of her hidden political agendas. Would she try to corrupt our political beliefs? I mentally prepared myself. But all we received was generosity and friendliness. Barbara didn't seem like a politician's wife at all. She reminded me of my niang. She was elegant and generous, and talked about China very fondly.

That day we'd been asked to bring our swimming suits. We didn't have any, so Ben had to buy them for us, like so many other things. Barbara and Ben chatted happily while Zhang and I swam in her indoor pool where the water temperature was perfect, a pool owned by one of the most powerful ladies in America. I could never have dreamt of this.

Barbara also had a little dog called Fred. She adored Fred. She'd even taken him to China with her while Mr Bush served as the first envoy. She talked about her dog as though he was a child. She told us that Fred was a very intelligent dog. I thought that if her dog had been a dog in my home town, someone would have eaten him for dinner.

We went to board member Louisa Sarofim's house a few times too. I couldn't believe her wealth. When I saw her garden, her pool and the surroundings I thought I had just walked into a well- maintained park. She took us inside and I saw some of the most beautiful paintings I had ever seen. Ben told me later that most of the paintings were worth millions of dollars. A million dollars? The number was too enormous for a Chinese peasant boy to comprehend. She must have more money than a god, but she was so nice and unpretentious and she loved ballet and took immense pride in the Houston Ballet's developments. The amount of wealth surrounding ballet in America seemed amazing to me. There was money everywhere. Once I even saw a ballet board member leave a hundred-dollar note on the table after a meal. Of course I quickly tapped him on the shoulder. Didn't he realise he'd left a hundred dollars behind? But he simply nodded his head and walked out. It blew me away. Over a year's worth of my dia's hard, hard work and it was simply left on the table. Sometimes I heard people talking of hundreds of millions of dollars, but again, such numbers didn't exist in my vocabulary. The financial and cultural gaps were simply too great to comprehend.

During the first week of the summer school, Ben arranged for us to attend an English language course and I began to learn ten to fifteen new words a day. I carried a piece of paper everywhere I went, with my new English words written on it. The most effective place for me to learn them was in the toilet. My English improved quickly and I ended up translating for Zhang. Clearly he should have spent more time in the toilet.

I was constantly surprised by how much freedom the American people had. One day in the dressing-room one of the students from New Orleans noticed my Mao button on my dance bag.

"Do you like your Chairman Mao?" he asked.

"Yes, I love Chairman Mao!" I replied with my fist over my heart.

"Well, I don't like our president Jimmy Carter. I don't think he's a good president at all," he said.

"No good? Jimmy Carter?" I asked, amazed.

"No good." He pointed his thumb down.

"Shh…!" I looked around nervously. "You not scared people listen to you talk about your big leader this way?" I asked in my broken English.

"No, why? I can say anything I like about our president. This is America."

"If I say bad thing about Chairman Mao," I whispered, "I will go jail and may be killed," I sliced my finger dramatically across my neck.

"You're kidding!"

"Yes, it is true!" I replied.

"You know," the student continued, "Ronald Reagan, he's the governor of California and wants to be the next president. He was only a Hollywood actor before."

"Actor?" I didn't understand what "actor" was so I took out my dictionary. An actor who wants to become the president of America? Surely I had translated incorrectly. Ben choreographed a dance for Zhang and me over the next few weeks using George Gershwin's music. We had such difficulties understanding what Ben wanted us to do in the rehearsals though. Everything was so relaxed and our minimal understanding of English made it intensely frustrating for Ben. Zhang and I could easily complete the difficult and challenging turns and jumps but taking an effortless walk across the studio without turning out our feet or pointing our toes was a real challenge. At one point during a rehearsal Ben grabbed my arms and shook my entire body. "Relax, relax!" he shouted. Then he rushed over to Zhang and did the same. Zhang's shoulders will pop out of their sockets any minute, I thought. When I finally got the hang of what Ben wanted, it felt like I was cheating. It was too easy and casual. It didn't feel like dancing at all. But I could feel the gradual progression and developments in Gershwin's music and I could feel Ben's choreography naturally meshing into it.

By the end of our six-week stay I had started to relax. I began to make friends among the students, the dancers in the company, the balletomanes and even some board members. Each weekend we had to report to the Chinese consulate officials. One of the senior consuls was Zhang Zongshu, and his wife was a translator in the consulate. They were assigned to look after us.

It turned out that Ben had decided to ask Consul Zhang if I could come back to work with the company again.

Once more Ben's influence worked. Consul Zhang and the Chinese consulate sent a favourable report to the Ministry of Culture. I was granted permission to return for a whole year to work with the Houston Ballet, only two months after my scheduled return to China. There were also discussions about the possibility of Zhang Weiqiang's return too.

The thought of being able to come back to America made me happy, but really it sounded completely unbelievable. I was so grateful to the Chinese government. I felt that they really cared for me. For me, a peasant boy. Communism truly was great.

For our last few days in America, Ben took Zhang and me to Washington DC and New York. We didn't do much in Washington except pose for photos in front of the White House and the Kennedy Center. In some ways I was disappointed. I had expected to see a massive number of security guards with machine guns around the gate and the fence, just like I'd seen in Beijing on my first day there. But there were only a few guards standing by a small gate, looking rather relaxed. They even let us stand next to the fence to have our pictures taken.

We stayed with two close friends of Ben's while we were in New York. They were involved with television and they had two skinny, funny-looking dogs that sang while one of them played the piano. Those dogs would be eaten back in Qingdao too.