“Our fan is broken!” I announced with exasperation to my host parents. After a month of jerry-rigging the contraption, I was fed up. In an effort to reduce its erratic noisemaking, I had taken the machine apart four times, woken up in the middle of countless nights to shove various objects (shirts, shoes, books, markers) under the wobbly leg, made a nightly ritual of tying a pair of dirty pants around the loose middle part, and used a needle and thread to reattach one part to another. True to my genes (my father is an engineer), I knew this fan inside and out. I knew that its problems were due to worn-out threads in the top rear section. I knew it was a hopeless case unless the axle could be replaced. On the evening of the
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