New maintenance assignments become available right after dinner on Friday. The maintenance track kids, and anyone else who thinks they'll have better luck trading than taking their default, crowd around the little postboxes each with a name on them. Everything's in Latin characters, the Chinese names in pinyin, which Huang allows makes sense since the Romans did have the cunning innovation of putting all of their characters in a specific order. She finds all the Tianjin assignments she is supposed to do, and her own, and reads through them.
"I have one cafeteria cleaning," she calls out when there's a lull in the buzz of everyone else doing the same, "and will trade other things for more of the same, or that one for another bathroom cleaning on the freshman or sophomore levels."
