Little Emperors (17 page)

National Day is celebrated in Shanghai
.

Half an hour later, I leave completely relaxed. But this doesn't last for long. From the moment I am down at the zigzag bridge, it is push and shove or get pushed and shoved until I finally dig myself out of the crowd and the entire teeming bazaar.

As I forge back toward the hotel along the crowded Bund, I hear a group of voices yell out,
“Fuk you! Fuk you! Fuk you!”
I stop to look around and spy a group of teenagers, Chinese headbangers, leaning against a ledge. I glare at them over my sunglasses. They laugh and flip me the finger.

I return to the hotel and watch CNN for the rest of the afternoon. What was I thinking coming to China's most populous city during its most important day off of the year? Let China celebrate China Day without me.

Hunger gets the better of me by 7:30 in the evening, so I brave the crowds yet again and head to Gino's Pasta and Cappuccino Bar way up on Nanjing Lu. As yesterday, all traffic is blocked off and all thirteen million Shanghai inhabitants are out walking on the street, bashing one another with large inflatable plastic hammers, sledgehammers, and baseball bats.

I'm in no hurry this evening, so I walk slowly, gliding with the crowd under the glittering neon lights, actually enjoying the night's carnival atmosphere. I even stop at a street vendor and buy an inflatable plastic blue crayon — a classroom prop, of course — but do manage to swing it a few times and hit a few people as I walk up the street.

The crowd is so dense that I don't arrive at the restaurant until almost 9:00. I decide to sit at a window table in order to watch the world, or at least all of Shanghai, go by. Instead, the whole world watches me. People break from the crowd and come right up to the window to look at what I'm eating or watch what I'm writing on postcards. One fellow even bangs his head on the glass in his eagerness to see what I am doing.

My audience gradually thins, and by the time I finish dinner at 10:00 the crowd in the street has largely dispersed. As I walk back to the hotel, I pass plastic toy vendors packing up their stalls and men in green uniforms cycling home. Women with straw brooms sweep up flattened Coca-Cola cups and popcorn bags decorated with stars and stripes. I
pass under a huge sign for Shanghai REEB beer and laugh out loud at its name —
beer
spelled backward.

My last day in Shanghai is purposefully unambitious. I spend the morning watching CNN, then check out at 11:59, my bag full of Peace Hotel stationery, soap, combs, pens, and a mini sewing kit.

I buy some oranges and chocolate croissants and head up to Renmin Park to eat my breakfast alfresco on the ledge near the fountain. It is a lovely, warm day and a flotilla of kites bobs in the blue sky. I peel one of the oranges and bite into a croissant.
Ack
. The croissant is filled with sweet red bean paste, not chocolate as I expected. There is no keener disappointment.

Later, I decide to go to the Jade Buddha Temple. I find the stop for the bus that will take me there. As it pulls up and its doors clunk open, an old gentleman stands aside, smiles, and says, “After you,” in English.

I stare at him, dumbfounded, momentarily forgetting where I am. “Oh, thank you,” I finally answer. I step up into the bus without having to jab my elbows into anyone's ribcage.

At the temple, I stand in line with Japanese tourists to glimpse the Jade Buddha statue, poke through the souvenir shop, and then finish off a roll of film by running around snapping arty photos of red lanterns and their shadows. I am sitting on a step, looking up at the mustard walls of the temple's courtyard and breathing in its incense, when a man sitting near me asks,
“Ni shi na guo ren ma?”

“Jianada ren,”
I answer, half guessing his question.

“Oh, Canada!” he says in near-perfect English. “How long have you been in China?”

“About six months. I live in Guangzhou.”

“Oh. Your Chinese is good.”

“Ha!”

“No, really. You can hear the Chinese well.”

“Only sometimes.”

I soon learn that he is from Taiwan, but has been working in Shanghai for six years for a computer company, making computer screens. “Computers are big in China,” he tells me. “Really big. Last year sold 1.2 million, this year 2.4 million. Double in one year!”

“That's amazing,” I reply, but I'm not surprised. “I saw on CNN the other day that the Chinese government is halting the sale of Microsoft systems in
China for a while because someone has been writing anti-communist slogans and messages like
INDEPENDENT TAIWAN
! into the programs.”

“Really?” He laughs. “Did they come from America?”

“No. They think programmers in Taiwan did it.”

He laughs even harder at this. “You know,” he continues quietly, “the Chinese government is scared of computers. It's scared about the ideas in the programs. It's really scared of the Internet. It's scared of all the changes happening so quickly.”

“And things here change very quickly.”

He nods. “I think this place will go like Russia in a few years. As soon as Deng Xiaoping dies, this place will go like Russia. No more communism here.”

“There really isn't too much left here as it is. It just hasn't been made official.”

“Yeah. That's true!” He laughs. “So what you think of Shanghai?”

“It's really quite beautiful, but a little crowded. It's a lot cleaner and quieter than Guangzhou, though. Guangzhou's a crazy place,” I answer, smiling fondly at the thought of my city in the south.

“Yeah. In Guangzhou, it's all about money,” he says. With that he gets up to take a picture of his wife in front of the temple, wishes me well, and leaves.

The sun, now a large pink disc, sinks into the city outskirts as a cab takes me back to the airport. Once checked in, I can't help but wonder if the Shanghai airport is built on swampland. Mosquitoes swarm through the terminal, in the shuttle bus across the tarmac to the airplane, above the crowd wrestling to get on the airplane, and then
in
the airplane. Luckily, at altitude, the air pressure sucks them all flat to the cabin ceiling.

I look out the dark window. I smile when I finally see the hazy orange lights of Guangzhou dotting the earth.

Home. At last.

We choose a live snake from the many in round wire cages stacked at the restaurant's entrance. Almost as soon as we sit down, the waiters bring a bowl of glistening snakeskin and bean sprout salad to our table. A glass of snake's blood quickly follows. Then another glass of clear, strong alcohol, the snake's gallbladder suspended in it. We pass the glasses around the table and sniff at them.

“Chinese believe drinking snake's blood gives you energy,” Li Ling explains. “Gives you the snake's energy.”

It being Sunday, we, the foreign teachers, decide to revel in our lethargy and place the glass of blood back on the table. The blood slowly coagulates.

The waiters bring a bubbling pot of snake stew to the table. The snake we chose has been chopped into bite-sized chunks, and is unrecognizable as snake until we have nibbled the meat away, revealing a section of reptilian ribcage still connected to a spine. The snake's meat, a golden honey brown, is delicious, and its skeleton fascinating. Its backbone is still pliant and bends in death as it does in life. As I eat, I line the pieces of skeleton up in front of my plate to reconstruct the snake. I stop when I notice puzzled looks from my fellow diners.

When we leave the restaurant, two hours later and full of snake, we stop to inspect the other cages stacked out front. There are the usual cages of clucking brown chickens; a cage with what look like two nervous, oversized gophers; and a cage containing two reclining cats, one black, one white. Gazing at them, I think of what Deng Xiaoping once said about using capitalism to modernize a communist country — “Black cat, white cat: what does it matter as long as it catches mice?” In Guangzhou, this could be rephrased to “Black cat, white cat: what does it matter as long as it tastes good?”

These two cats appear calm, cool, collected — entirely feline — and
oblivious to their probable fate, their nine lives ending on a plate by the end of the day.

“Miss Dionne, Saturday, please eat lunch my house?” Yvonne asks, standing in front of my desk as the rest of her class files out the door.

“Okay. Yes. Thank you.” I nod, smiling.

“Miss Dionne, what do you like eat for lunch?”

“Oh, anything,” I answer, feeling brave after having eaten snake on the weekend. “Anything is okay.”

On Saturday, Yvonne arrives at Number 1 School promptly at 1:30 to pick me up after my last class and escort me to her house. Her apartment is in one of the concrete walk-ups in a quiet square in the streets behind the school. Using her new vocabulary from Unit Seven, Yvonne points out where other students live around the square: “That's Jacob's house. That's Theresa's house. That's Jessica's house.” As she points up to Jessica's apartment, I hear, “Hello Miss Dionne!” and see the round faces of Jessica and Theresa peeking down at me. They scramble away from the window and run down six storeys to join us at Yvonne's house.

Yvonne's mother, in a dark floral-print dress and bright makeup, and father, in a blue suit, white shirt, and blue tie, greet me at the door and sit me down on the sofa in their spacious living room. In front of me, the coffee table is piled high with fruit. Yvonne's father turns off the large colour TV while her mother kneels at the table to make me tiny cups of
wulongcha
. The three girls get out their Chinese-English dictionaries and sit next to me on the sofa. I pull my Chinese phrase book out of my bag. We munch on the fruit. I teach the girls some of the fruit names (grapes, melon, apples). They teach me the Cantonese names for the fruit we don't have in Canada (
yeung to
, a yellow star-shaped fruit; and
yau
, a pomelo, which looks like a gigantic grapefruit). I chat with Yvonne's mom through the girls and their dictionaries. Yvonne's dad has taken out a camera and is snapping photos as if my visit were a fashion shoot.

The girls take me out onto the concrete balcony and show me birds in two bamboo cages. “This is my Big . . . no . . . 
Little
Bird,” Yvonne says, lifting one of the cages off the balcony floor. She points to the other cage hanging from the balcony's iron bars. “That is my grandfather's bird.”

The girls then grab my hand and take me on a whirlwind tour of the entire house. It is huge, and is made from two renovated apartments fused at their living rooms. Yvonne's parents follow closely with their
camera as the girls show me four bedrooms, two bathrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, and another balcony with a washing machine and flags of hanging laundry.

The tour ends at Yvonne's bedroom, a room frilly enough for a young Marie Antoinette. Yvonne pulls open a door on her towering four-door wardrobe. “Miss Dionne . . . Bert!” she cries, fishing out a one-metre replica of the cone-headed Muppet to show me. I peek around the wardrobe door and see similarly large stuffed animals — kittens, bunnies, the Lion King — and dolls, all crammed onto the shelves. Yvonne pulls more dolls from between the many lacy pillows on her bed, while Jessica and Theresa lift knick-knacks off her desk for my inspection. Then Yvonne yanks a red velvet coverlet off a hulk in the corner, revealing a piano. She slides onto the shiny bench and plays a few songs while her mother, Jessica, Theresa, Bert, and I look on. Her father snaps more photos.

So much for rejecting bourgeois materialism.

Yvonne's grandmother calls us to the dining-room table to make
jiaozi
, or dumplings. She puts a bowl of minced pork mixed with cabbage, garlic, and ginger on the table as the girls and I sit down. Next to the bowl, she puts a plate of flat, round noodles. Yvonne takes one of the noodles and shows me how to put a small spoonful of meat into the centre, then fold the
jiaozi
by tucking in the ends and pleating the top. I complete one, and the girls chime, “Good, Miss Dionne. Good!”

Soon, however, I revert to simply folding the noodle over the meat and squishing the ends closed in any haphazard way. I explain my unskilled efforts by telling the girls, “My dumplings are crazy dumplings!”

“Crazy dumplings!” they shriek with laughter. I taught
crazy
to the students just last week, and it is now everyone's favourite word. Everything is crazy these days — Miss Dionne is crazy, China is crazy, English is crazy, the chair is crazy, my book is crazy, you are crazy, I am crazy, he, she, it is crazy. It's crazy! The girls start making their own “crazy dumplings,” and we end up with a tray of the most warped
jiaozi
China has ever seen. Yvonne's dad snaps photos.