At first, Zhang, too, figured Ouyang was looking for work. Yet his fascination grew as he rode a shuttle bus to his job as a swimming teacher. Finally, one hot day last summer, he left the bus to meet the woman who had filled his imagination.
"I was very nervous, but she is very easy to talk to," he recalled. "I asked her, `Why are you studying here? There is a lot of gas exhaust from the cars.' She said lots of drivers told her that."
They became friends, and he taught her how to swim. Zhang, 35, still questions the wisdom of how she studies -- "I hope you can suggest that she stop studying here," he told a reporter -- but not her motivation. "I hope that one day God will be touched by her and she will get a good job," he said.
Ouyang hopes to earn a correspondence degree in English by next year. She is paying for it herself because she does not think her father would approve. Her parents do not know she studies beside the highway. "For a girl, he does not think it is important to have too much knowledge," she said.
She added: "My father said, 'You are so old. You are always studying. Why don't you find a boyfriend?"'
A friend once introduced her, by e-mail, to a foreign man, an American, and a correspondence began. After a year, the man proposed marriage. Ouyang accepted and awaited his arrival. But the man whose picture she had admired by e-mail was different from the man who stepped off the airplane.
"When he came to see me, I thought, `Oh my God! He's so old,"' she recalled. She sent him back to America, unwed.
A doctor once stopped and strongly advised that she move, advice she has politely declined. Her only complaints are the sun -- many Chinese women abhor tans -- and the lack of a nearby bathroom.
"Some people will say, `This girl must have some purpose to study here because so many foreigners come down this road,"' she said. "But I don't care what they think. I know what I'm doing."
She recently quit another hotel job and seems no closer to her ultimate goal of a position with an international company. But she did find a temporary job for which she is qualified. A Chinese architect asked her to help him improve a skill he hopes will improve his professional chances.
She is teaching him English.
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