NEUROLINGUISTIC programming teacher Debrah Roundy never knew Chinese line dance, commonly referred to as guangchangwu, which literally translates as square dance, until she came to Shanghai five years ago with her college teaching husband.

“I kept seeing this beautiful dance by a group of Chinese people and thought I would do anything to know about it,” says the American.

Roundy first saw the dance in the Xuhui campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and it wasn’t long before she joined a dance group.

Even when she moved to work at Tongji University, Roundy still managed to dance with her group three times a week, despite a one-hour subway trip from Yangpu District to Xuhui District and then another one-hour journey back home.

Although she loves Shanghai, it is the time for her to say goodbye to the city. Roundy, who is 60 years old this year, is retiring. “But I will be back,” she insists.

She’s off with her husband on a new adventure in Vanuatu, an island in the Pacific, where she plans to carry on dancing.

The couple set off on January 1. They will teach English in Vanuatu for the next 18 months as volunteers.

Q: You’ve been here for five years, so you must have some impressive stories.

A: Something happened to me when I first arrived. As a neurolinguist, I was taught to look for the good in things, not the bad. We say your energy flows where your attention goes.

We met these young girls who were foreigners. I told them I was trying to find a market. They said, “We’ll show you.” As we walked they said, “Oh, the Chinese people do this that I don’t like” and “We’re going to change China.”

I thought about it, and a lot of things Chinese people do, that foreigners don’t do, works for China. The thing that they were complaining about is what has made China successful.

We foreigners need to appreciate China and look at those cultural differences and say, “what are they doing right that’s made them so successful?” Chinese women have learned to work together to make it smooth to get along and to support each other. Westerners need to copy that. Other things, like Chinese people taking off their shoes when they walk in the house — we foreigners walk the dirt right in!

Q: That’s a different angle for us to think about. And as a “new Shanghainese,” how do you spend your weekends or leisure time here?

A: Dancing, dancing, and sometimes after dancing we’ll go out for breakfast.

One day this year, I had too much work to do, so many papers to grade and one of my dance friends, who really touches my heart, said, “Why don’t you just come to my house and I’ll make you breakfast, and you can get your work done.” So I went. She made me breakfast and tea. Then she went upstairs and I worked downstairs — we’re just like sisters.

On Saturday mornings I tutor her granddaughter and some of their friends, and I don’t charge her. I do it for free because she has done so much for me. Then sometimes I get together with my friends, both American and other expat friends and Chinese friends. One time we volunteered to help single people who aren’t married.

Q: Can you still remember the first time you met the dancing group?

A: One day I stopped and they invited me over, and now we use WeChat to chat because they don’t speak English and I only speak a little Chinese, so we have long conversations through WeChat translate.

They said I was the first person to join just from watching them dancing. They’re aged between 55 and 80 years old.

Q: Which place in Shanghai do you like best? Why?

A: My favorite is Qibao. I go there about three or four times a year. I like the old-fashioned atmosphere. It’s so traditional, and the smells — I even like the smell of stinky tofu even though I don’t like to eat it! I loved riding on the gondola boats but they quit having them, I don’t know why.

Then the Qibao temple, it’s my favorite temple in Shanghai. It’s very quiet and beautiful. I don’t belong to any religion but I like the peaceful feeling there.

The food is good there, too! They used to have the best yoghurt I’ve ever tasted. I like all the different meats and noodles, potatoes and the curly fries.

We went to the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium for the first time about a month ago. That was amazing! I guess it has the longest tube in the whole world. I’ve been to many aquariums, but nothing was that good.

Q: Which element of Shanghai do you like best?

A: The whole big city atmosphere. You’ve got the old and new things, and the energy of the new. I think that they’re trying to modernize it too much, sometimes. They’ve taken out a lot of the little food stalls. I miss that, especially over at Tongji University. It would be nice if they could find a way to regulate it, keep it safe. It made Shanghai so unique.

Q: And what do you dislike here? And do you have any suggestions to make it better?

A: I don’t think there’s anything I don’t like about Shanghai. The people are amazing, and I haven’t met a person I haven’t liked. I feel very safe in this city — much safer here in Shanghai than we do in a big American city. The policemen here are on top of things, but they aren’t aggressive. The tai chi in the community is helping!

Today is a good example of the goodness of the people. The other day I bought a frozen chicken but then I forgot my package, so today I went back to the same seller. He looked at me and ran and got the little card, which I had given to him. He ran back and saved the package and gave it to me. I was really taken care of.

Q: Compared with your country, are there any shortages in Shanghai? Let’s borrow some solutions.

A: I was talking with other teachers about how impressed I am with the way Shanghai has been dealing with pollution and rubbish on the street.

In the five years I’ve been here they have made such a big improvement. It’s not as clean as you’d find in an American city, but it’s changing. I also see things on the subways telling people how to line up and respect others. People here are willing to do that.

That’s the people in Shanghai working together. The people know how to work together and how to solve them.

Q: Any memory from your life that really impressed you?

A: As a little girl of about 4 or 5 years old, I took my shovel and going out to dig. I remember shouting, “Mom, if I keep digging, where will I end up?” She said, “Oh, you’ll get to China!” I never made it, I probably got one or two feet.

When I got older and had children, my oldest daughter decided, for her senior school project, to make school bags for children in Africa. We took them to this place called the Humanitarian Center in Salt Lake City.

They took us on a tour, and when everyone was all tired and wanted to sit down, she said to me, “Come here, I want to show you something.” One room was full of books. She asked me, “Do you know what these are?” I said, “Yeah, they’re books.” “These are medical textbooks. We have the latest ones donated to us and we want to get them out to the world, but it takes five years for us to translate them. We’ve got a new idea.”

This was in 1996 or 1997. She said, “We’re going to start sending teachers out to the world to teach English and then we can give them the textbooks and they can have the very latest.”

I got a sparkle in my eye and my daughter knew that I might do one of those one day.

When I came to Shanghai I had a dentist in one of my PhD classes and he would talk about how much he loved dental work and so on. One of my teeth chipped and I had to go to the dentist, and when I got there I noticed they had all the modern texts. I realized, he had been at Tongji University for 20 years and it was very likely he had been one of the first teachers to learn English and have access to the latest medical textbooks.

Quite an amazing story, right? To dig a hole to China and come back and find myself having been fixed with the most modern equipment, and it was probably because of that link.