Jishou is not famous for its selection of shoes, and it took a couple of hours to circulate Central Jishou's main shoeholds. We finally struck a shoe oasis near the xiaojie karaoke venues, a street of glassfront stores on Hongkong Road. I settled on a startlingly cheap black pair with enormous soles, fantasising that they would make me appear taller. Many Chinese girls were wearing embarrassingly thick soles after a recent fashion come into the mainland from Hong Kong and Japan, and given that women in South China are exceedingly short it was an understandable trend here. Men were less inclined to the style, and so I was a little self-conscious to put on mine even at the moderate width of three or four centimetres. My worn-and-torn pair of 'Old Man Shoes', only ever worn by aging farmers and thus making me seem even more ridiculous to the students when I'd worn them (at the English Corner, several students had pointed them out: "Michael, I have discovered that your shoes are very interesting, giggle giggle.") were handed in to the storekeeper for trashing: he tossed them irreverently into a puddle outside his shop. In the time it took me to walk down the street and back, they had been picked up by a Miao peasant who saw more value in them than I had.

I took Faith to the Wanlilong cafe and sat with her for a while listening to her stories. A country girl from across the province, she considered herself relatively fortunate to come to Jishou University; as an English major, she anticipated a bright future in one of South China's developed cities like Shenzhen or Guangzhou. Hers was not an atypical situation in the varsity, in fact, most of the students at Jishou University were not Jishou natives. Jishou is a small town unlikely to produce students of the calibre to attain admission into its own university. She was very dark, and her long, black eyes gave her a handsome face under a shaggy crop of casually cut hair. Although visibly nervous, she had an affectionately warm nature; as we walked outside, it was inevitable that we were going to hold hands. Stopping off at the local supermarket (which really just stocked greater quantities of the same goods sold in smaller outlets) she leaned back against my chest as we pushed a trolley around the aisles. It was quite possibly the most successful date I'd ever had.

Until, of course, the question she asked as we sat together on the minibus back to the university - "Would you be angry if I told you that I already had a boyfriend?" I replied that no, I wouldn't be angry, but a little surprised as she'd already claimed to be single. That, she explained, was a habit she practiced to keep her relationship with the boy in question, who no longer lived in Jishou, a secret. A few minutes later, and quite disheartened at what had suddenly become a day's wasted emotion, I was back in the flat explaining the embarrassing situation to Hamish and Bonnie and sulking over a café au lait - we'd figured out how to make them by boiling milk and adding quantities of Hamish's thick black coffee brewed from the unusual cheap 'backpacker's espresso machine' he'd purchased for caffeine emergencies before leaving New Zealand.

I had assumed that it would be the last time I'd see Faith, but she turned up early the next morning, skipping her classes to visit me. She told me that she wanted to take me on a long walk, and I suggested that she take me out to the temple I'd heard was only just down the road past the university at the edges of the rice paddies.

A couple of minivan stops down the road leading away from the city centre, Faith and I alighted at a bridge over the rail lines and made our way towards a settlement of closely-knit homes across the way. Thin rims of mud and stepping stones packed between sodden rice fields made difficult and grubby paths, their gradual mazing back towards the base of the mounts making a direct walk to the temple impossible without sucking my new shoes deep into the clay: we elected instead to climb the slopes of the hill to obtain a vista of the city first, before edging our way back to the temple. The mount was aflame in tobacco plants, and we passed a huge tobacco factory as we started our ascent. Most of Jishou's hills are tobacco farms, cigarettes being one of China's most popular commodities. The infamous Canadian reporter on China, Jan Wong, reveals that the Chinese Government is the world's largest producer of cigarettes, and that their cigarette empire is the world's single most profitable organisation.

Atop the hill, in a small clearing, we lay for a while under the sun, Faith laying scraps of newspaper she'd brought with her to prevent our clothes from picking up coal dust and soil. The city seemed like a lake swelling through the valley from the summit; the sunlight dripped lazily from the clouds, Faith lay shyly on my chest and delivered inexpert, tongueless kisses. A fat gray cow with huge antlers for horns waddled past, followed by a disinterested farmer who regarded us without surprise. I was happy, and felt at home in this city, if but briefly.

We slipped down to the temple, a wide yard with a few red chambers of gods and incense. Faith taught me the elaborate art of Chinese kowtowing, three low prayerful bows, followed by three on the knees, letting your forehead rest on upturned hands, followed by another three standing bows. The plainclothed elderly lady keeping the temple clucked approvingly as I practiced self-conscious kowtows to several faded deities.

Perhaps edified by the temple visit, Faith told me that she was too traditional for a relationship with a foreigner. I had supposed that the relatively innocent affair was rather impossible, but awoke the next day emptied of the comforts I'd experienced the day before. I didn't speak to either Hamish or Bonnie that morning, instead escaping to wander the campus alone.

It was a day when Jishou was too overbearing. Students filed past with too-limited experience of the world, short young women with sexually mature bodies and no understanding of boys, young men whose gusto hid an equal ignorance of girls. Clouds reached right down to the tobacco plants on the mountains, rain falling without rain, mist without mist, just pregnant air smelling of dust and smoke and plants. Merchants inside the university itself had trays of eggs, sweaty wedges of meat, jars of quarter-pineapples thrust onto ice-cream sticks; they stood batting the flies off vegetables with little whips made out of shoelace string. I wanted a coke, and headed for the favourite Mingfei superette out the other side of the campus, in part hoping to see a pretty salesgirl with whom I'd been exchanging smiles in recent weeks.

On this day in particular she wasn't at the food counter, but in a little room to herself filled with stuffed bears and cute presents that a boyfriend might buy for a girlfriend. A small girl with an angelic face and immaculately subtle makeup, I took up conversation with her for the first time, exercising my Chinese muscle as she was devoid of any English. Feifei, named after an ancient Chinese beauty, was an arts major at the university, in her first year, which put her at around 20 years old. Encouraged and partly to throw off my mood, I asked for her phone number and gave her mine; we beamed brightly at each other and I made my way back into the campus.

I sat on a bench at the university main crossroads, still cloudy and sullen. I was greeted and joined for a while by a few students with whom I'd made friends, one of whom was the girl who had been constantly phoning me since I'd taken a dance with her in my first week at Jishou. Sammi was one of the type who cannot conceal a crush, and her excitement at sitting next to me brought on a sense of guilt which made me decide not to call Feifei . Foreigners with a sense of conscience are best not to become involved with inexperienced Chinese women in the same way that an adult shouldn't mess with schoolgirls - not that there's anything technically immoral about, say, a 30 year-old's affair with a 17 year-old woman, but in that the expectations of a naïve lover shatter with more drama than those of a mature one, such partnerings are for most purposes doomed to be regretted. Sammi sat next to me and unselfconsciously massaged my arm, I was still looking out towards the lake and wondering how long I'd stay in Jishou.

Unexpectedly, Feifei called me the next morning. Equally unexpectedly, she had decided to take the day off her classes and take me for a long walk. To make the reflection of the other day even more complete, she had decided to take me to another, more ornate temple than the one I'd visited with Faith, a little further along the same road. Within an hour, I was on the same minivan and headed in the same direction. We got off at the same stop.

This time, instead of crossing the road, we ducked into a thick nest of trees on the bank siding the rail lines. A thin forest path lead deep into lime-green woods from which a surprisingly decorate apricot-pink temple emerged. Its walls were flourished with waves and curls, unlike most temples I'd seen in North China. The walls were lined in white and adorned with black tiles. From the path leading up to it, we could see far out over the farmlands outside of Jishou city. I was glad to have found a fantastic spot the guidebooks hadn't picked up on; if I'd learned anything from travelling with the guidebooks, it was that they only cover well-worn routes, that most small towns have extraordinary treasures a little out of the way of common tourist trails. Not being a Class A attraction, this was the real thing: a genuine temple peopled by devotees who had little thought for showiness before the camera nor for the profits brought in by curious tourists.

I kowtowed professionally before the enshrined statues at the gate: Feifei laughed at the performance. "In China, we do it like this," she said, and, stepping up to the idol, lifted her hands to her chin in prayer and nodded once courteously.

Outside the temple, sitting on a broad rock, she leaned comfortably on my shoulder. I stared down at her tiny shoes and the Hello Kitty badges sewn onto the cuffs of her jeans. I made the decision to be irresponsible to relieve the romantic pressure, and we were overseen only by the trees.

We walked slowly back to the university along the rail tracks, holding hands and stopping occasionally to embrace tenderly. The gray cows were out feeding, farmer's children ran up to fences and giggled as we passed. The sun had begun to set, and the wind was carrying the scent of the tobacco down over the railway lines.

Back at Hamish's apartment, my hosts' reactions to my second date in a row weren't terribly approving. Even more devastating was the news brought by a visiting student who had heard of her - Feifei held a little notoriety amongst the students for being employed at the superette by virtue of being its owner's girlfriend. Zhang Ming had been a student at the University before opening a couple of venues outside the gate all named Mingfei after a combination of his and his girlfriend's names.

And so I spent the rest of the evening out on the bridge again, watching the gate throbbing open and shut, listening to the constant beats of the music from the tame dancehall across the road. A year or two on, I'd still be a topic of conversation at the English Corner, students telling the new foreign teachers about the previous visitors to the university, one of whom wasn't a teacher but one of the teacher's friends, tut-tutting disapprovingly about his seduction of a number of the students, girls little prepared for the advances of a foreigner. Two years from then I'd be regretting the experience as well, looking back at Jishou as a time of lonely, deep impressions, where I might just have been at home in the deep valley of tobacco weed and dust, out on the bridge over the university lake, just for a moment.