It’s 8:30 and I’m at the office again on a Saturday night, though apart from Wang Xuefu, who’s leading a group therapy session in the other room, we all abandoned hours ago the idea of actually working.

In the afternoon when the two volunteer hotline counselors arrived it started to slip away. Our tea breaks grew longer and we found ourselves dropping into chairs not connected to a computer. Someone had brought sunflower seeds. Zhang was recommending another book that I can’t read. Xiao Meng started detailing a friend’s younger sister’s dilemma (stay with the current boyfriend, or leave him for the one her parents have suggested).

By the time the last of the counselors-in-training were saying their goodbyes and heading out the door at 5:30, all suggestions of work were completely gone. Xiao Meng was out holding the elevator and yelling for the rest of us to hurry and then we were down the street to the “Yangzhou Porridge Shop” where last week we traded an (authentic!) English translation of the name for a bowl of black rice porridge.

Now we’re scattered on the folding chairs and the stools and the two sofas in the main office, staying because there are others, and good conversation, and laughter. It’s the “renao” (literally “warm noise”, that a good Chinese gathering can’t be without). It’s Zhang, trying (bravely) to explain some of the terms related to the Chinese theories of health and divination to his diligent student (me). It’s the draft copies of the almost-ready-for-print book of short stories that are being passed around, flipped through, or read from cover-to-cover.

It's the writing that brings people to Zhi Mian ... not these stories and poems (though everyone agrees that they’re delightful), but the articles about parenting and fear and psychological escape. Countless clients have ended up here because, they say, “I read some of your articles on the website and felt like you really understood me”.

They stay because Zhi Mian is professional (of the few dozen counseling centers in Nanjing, it’s been around one of the longest) and because Zhi Mian is a place where people find love, warmth, real care for people.

Tonight the parents of the three teenagers in the group counseling session are scattered among the Zhi Mian staff and counselors in the main office as we study and socialize. A long haired reporter-father plays on his laptop beside me, on the couch a well-dressed mother reads from the to-be-printed book, and another father sits straight-faced and silent, with his elbows on his knees. At one point someone’s laughing about how setting a ten-minute time limit for TV watching isn’t exactly realistic, and then it turns into a serious discussion of parenting.

Parenting: an issue on which some parents come to Zhi Mian directly seeking help. A lot more bring kids they are convinced have psychological problems, and then after the session, Sun Wen and Wang Xuefu are crying out in frustration, “It’s the PARENTS with the problem!” Being a parent in China is hard. Kids face incredible academic pressures at an incredibly young age, and a quickly changing society means rules are changing as well. Parents often end up at an extreme - either too-much-discipline or too-much-love. A lot of Wang Xuefu's articles are about parenting.

Sun Wen and the parents continue for awhile about limits and children’s desires to push them, and how they need to find identity in their teenage years. I wonder if she's smiling inside, as I am, at the thought of how these two group counseling sessions – an official one in which the teenagers are participating, and a spontaneous one for their parents – are being carried out in adjacent rooms. The topic changes, the evening wears on, I'm not really sure what all is happening. Whatever it is, it feels nice, and I'm happy to be a part of it.