Little Emperors (24 page)

“So what exactly do you do at the brewery?” I ask, imagining he might be a taste-tester.

“I protect the beer!” He holds his arms in front of him as if hugging a dozen bottles of his product, then chuckles again and sits back. “I'm a lawyer for Blue Ribbon.”

He is by far the youngest, jolliest lawyer I have ever met. He looks like a black-haired Pillsbury Doughboy in a grey suit and tie.

“What exactly does a lawyer for a beer company do?” I ask.

“I protect our copyright. I look for fake beer and then try to prosecute those who are dealing in it.”

“Fake beer?” I say, surprised. “I know there are fake CDs and fake designer clothes, but I didn't realize there was fake beer.”

“Oh, yes! In China, we can fake anything!” he says, beaming. Then his face falls serious. “But it's bad news for us. There's no way we can compete with them. Their production costs are much lower. For example, they recycle the bottles — wash them out and use them again. We can't do that. Our operating costs are much higher.”

“So they can charge a lower price than you can,” I conclude, using my brilliant grasp of economics.

“Exactly. We worry that more people will buy the fake beer. It can cost us thousands and thousands. It's my job to stop it. I travel around Guangdong looking for fake Blue Ribbon. In fact, last month in Shenzhen, we had a case where over twenty-five thousand bottles of counterfeit beer were confiscated from a warehouse.”

“How can you tell it's fake?” I ask, thinking I might go souvenir hunting for a bottle on my return to Guangzhou.

“The writing on the label isn't quite right. Perhaps messy printing and bad English. The cap is faded. Our caps stay bright and clear forever, but fake caps fade after about a year. And, of course, the beer inside is a much lower quality than ours.”

“Do you know who's doing this? Where it's coming from?”

“We have an idea, but not a clear one. It's all underground. We think perhaps it comes from village factories in northern Guangdong.”

“Can't the government shut these factories down?”

“Not really. Like I said, they're all underground. They're beyond the law. It's illegal, but no one can really do anything to stop them.”

“So you couldn't take the police and some government officials up to one of these villages and arrest the counterfeiters?”

“No!” he says, and chuckles.

“Why not?”

“I would fear for my safety.”

The waitress brings a fresh pot of tea and a small plate of sweet, deep-fried sesame seed dough balls. Wanpin pours tea into each of our cups. Daniel taps two fingers on the white tablecloth to thank her silently, then
turns to me again and asks the inevitable, “Are you an American?”

“No. Canadian.”

“Ah! The biggest shareholder in our company is Canadian. From Toronto. They make big, big money from us every year.”

“So I should protect Canadian investment and break empty Blue Ribbon bottles?”

“Exactly!” he says, laughing and sending tiny ripples through his tea.

The morning of the wedding, Connie (wearing a smart pantsuit in her steadfast boycott of dresses and other girly accessories), Nancy, and I leave our concrete hotel at eight o'clock. We slurp back a bowl of noodles with the rest of the wedding party in a tiny street-side restaurant, then go to the bride's parents' apartment just before nine. We sit in a chilly side room and watch Kitty's brothers and uncles play cards while a dozen young women rush in and out of the room where Kitty is getting ready. Everyone is waiting for the groom and his entourage to arrive.

They were supposed to arrive around nine o'clock. Ten o'clock comes and goes, ten-thirty, eleven, eleven-thirty . . . My new shoes pinch my cold toes, and my brain fogs up with boredom. I glance painfully at my watch and have yet another cup of tea.

“Connie, what's going to happen when the guys finally arrive?” I ask.
If they arrive
, I think to myself.

“The groom and his men are supposed to arrive at the apartment door, but the women on the bride's side are supposed to refuse to let them in,” Connie explains.

“Then they have a big argument,” Nancy says. “They argue about money, about how much money the men must pay the women before the women let them in.”

“It should be a sum like 9,999 RMB,” Angela, sitting across from us, pipes in. “Lots of nines, because the word
nine
in Chinese sounds similar to the word for
long time
. So the idea is that they will be in love a long time, or that they will be married a long time.”

“Then, after men bargain at the first door, they have to bargain and fight with girls at two more doors inside the house,” Connie says. “Sometimes they argue for an hour or more! After they get through the third door, the men have to find the bride, who is hiding somewhere in the house . . .”

“When they find her, the groom sits with her and they exchange rings.
Then they go to the boy's parents' house, then to banquet,” Nancy explains, shelling a peanut and smiling at the thought of the meal to come. “Banquet is the most important part!”

Every time the doorbell buzzes, all the women in the apartment scream, jump up, and run to the door in anticipation of the groom's arrival. It is usually just another guest arriving, or someone making a delivery. To kill time, and warm my cold feet, I wander through the house. I stop in the living room and chat a little in
putonghua
to Kitty's aunts and get them all twittering. I go out onto the balcony and crouch to say hello to some chickens and a goose in bamboo cages near the bathroom. Back in the house, I peek through a crack in Kitty's bedroom door and watch as two of her friends help her put on makeup. A stylist fixes flowers into Kitty's well-sprayed hair.

At twelve, the doorbell rings again. Once more, everyone jumps up, but again it isn't the groom's entourage. It is, however, a tiny old man and a tiny old woman bearing bamboo poles hung with heavy baskets of gifts. They place the baskets in the middle of the living room's linoleum floor. Squares of red paper pasted to the sides of each basket have black “double happiness” characters painted on them. The gifts include clear bottles of Chinese rice wine, tins of Chinese cakes, sugar cane, and coconuts. The gifts are for the bride's parents, and a sign that the groom and his friends are on their way.

Kitty's father stands off to the side at the small wooden table in the dining room, licking his thumb and rapidly counting out crisp two-yuan bills, wrapping wads of them in red paper, his fingertips stained crimson from the paper's red dye.

I smell incense burning. Angela takes me by the elbow and leads me through the dining room to the kitchen. She pushes the kitchen door open, allowing billows of scented smoke to escape. We peer in. The lights are out. On a ledge above the hot plate, a kitchen god sits looking stately behind a plate of oranges, surrounded on all sides by flaming red candles. Kitty's mother and aunts light bunches of joss sticks and place them in pots near the kitchen deity. The women's shadows flicker across the fire-red walls, stretching and bouncing like blackened marionettes.

Suddenly, men are in the living room, yelling. The groom's attendants have burst through the front door without anyone noticing! Connie and Nancy join the young women as they rush to block the second door, arming themselves with cans of Silly String and handfuls of peanuts. The women shout and shove, the men push and yell. Aerosol cans hiss, and
pink and blue and yellow strings of foam stream through the air; gumming onto people's suits and into their hair. A hail of peanuts sails across the room.

Screaming and laughing, I press my back into the living-room wall, trying to keep out of the line of fire. Silly String spritzes directly into my mouth —
Puhtuey! Puhtuey!
I look up and get some in my eye —
Ow! Ow!
The young men surge forward, almost pushing the sliding glass doors the girls are protecting out of their frame. The women group together and hold the men back. Photographers stand on the coffee tables, aiming their long lenses for aerial shots of the Technicolor warfare. Explosions of bright light fill the room.

Once the spray cans fall silent and the peanuts are all crushed underfoot, the bargaining begins. The young men make an offer. The young women scream back that it isn't enough. The young men confer, and their leader, the Chinese wedding equivalent of a best man, bellows another offer. The women shriek a counter-offer. This exchange continues until the girls shout in unison,
“Gau-chi, gau-baak, gau-sap gau!”
— Nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine!

The groom's attendants confer again. The leader nods in mock resignation and hands tiny red envelopes of money to the women guarding the door. The girls clear a path, and the green-suited groom, who has been standing in the background the whole time clutching two bouquets of flowers, is allowed to pass through.

It doesn't take long for the groom to find his bride. She is sitting in her white gown in her bedroom on her bed. They exchange rings, and people crowd in to take pictures and congratulate the couple. The men get ready to take Kitty away to the groom's parents' house, but one obstacle remains — the bride is wearing no shoes!

Her red high heels are hidden somewhere in the house, and it is the groom's attendants' job to find them. They rip the sheets and blankets off Kitty's bed, tear sweaters out of her wardrobe, and yank open every drawer of her desk. Connie and I stand on the back balcony, watching the frenzied shoe search through the bars of Kitty's bedroom window.

“The last wedding I was at,” Connie whispers, “they found one of the shoes in the refrigerator!”

Suddenly, victorious, one of the men pulls a red shoe from between the bed's mattresses, and soon another finds one tucked behind the wardrobe. The bride puts her shoes on, and she and her groom go out into the living room. The guests follow the couple, encircling the sofa
where Kitty's parents are sitting. Kitty kneels in the colourful debris on the floor and serves her parents tea. Her father hands Kitty and her new husband the red envelopes he was wrapping earlier. Cameras snap and flash. Then the bride's father circulates the living room, handing smaller red envelopes embossed with “double happiness” to the guests.

Soon we are all out the door, down the stairs, and back in the minivan to follow the wedding car — a white BMW decorated in coloured bows, red paper covering both licence plates just in case any of its numbers are unlucky — to the groom's village.

Once at the village, the cars and vans park on an embankment next to a wide river. The bride and groom have their picture taken while the rest of stand around. Our high heels sink into the mud as dirty-faced village children gather to watch us, the fancy city folk. People from our van start to complain that they are hungry and bored. We pile back into the van, leaving the rest of the wedding party by the river, and go to the village hotel where the banquet will be held this evening.

In the hotel dining room, people from our van sit at a round table and eat a quick, mini-banquet lunch. Afterward, Connie, Nancy, Wanpin, and I go upstairs to a smaller banquet room, where we snooze on leather sofas under sun-faded velvet curtains, drifting off to the blare of Japanese cartoons dubbed in Cantonese on the TV in the corner.

An hour later, the bride and groom and the remainder of the wedding party arrive at the hotel. Kitty has traded her poofy white Western dress for a traditional red silk dress and mandarin jacket, all embroidered and outlined in yellow and gold. She seemed tense and worried all morning, as if the stiff lace of her white dress had cut into her, forcing her to sit rigid and still. Now she seems far more comfortable, far more radiant in her red silks.

But not for long. Another change is coming up. The bride and groom visit each small banquet room to welcome their guests, then come back to our room, where the women shoo all the men away. Two of the bride's attendants help Kitty change into a flouncy, peach-coloured dress. They somehow orchestrate the change so that the bride exposes no bare skin at any time. Then, once the gumdrop gown is on, the attendants help Kitty reapply her foundation, rubbing it first on her arms (each attendant responsible for one arm), then on her face (each attendant responsible for one cheek). Finally, they help her put on long white gloves and then new shoes, each attendant responsible for one glove and one shoe.

Next, we troop out of the hotel and down the street to a small park
for photographs. The bride and groom have their picture taken with every possible people combination, a white statue of Chairman Mao blurring far in the background.

Then it's back to the hotel for the grand finale — the wedding banquet. The core of the wedding party sits in the main banquet hall, while the rest of the guests are scattered to the smaller banquet rooms throughout the hotel. Connie, Nancy, Angela, Wanpin, and I sit in the same room we napped in, along with two other tables of people, our small table squished right up against the TV still blaring Japanese cartoons in Cantonese.

It takes a while for dinner to start, so we snack on the cookies and candies piled in the middle of the table and stare at the cartoons. When dinner finally begins to arrive, it doesn't stop. First roast chicken, then roast duck, broiled fish, tiny roast pigeons, then spicy beef followed by tripe and other assorted innards.

I look at Connie. “There's so much
meat
!”

“Yes,” she answers, lifting a slice of chicken with her chopsticks. “It's a happy occasion, so they will serve mostly meat for dinner.”

As each dish arrives, the waitresses expertly stack the new plates of food on the preceding plates until a pyramid of dishes forms in the centre of the table, and I think the meal has come to an end. But, no! Chicken-filled steamed buns soon arrive, followed closely by sweet gelatin cubes in clear nectar, and finally a plate of the plump purple grapes that came with us in the van from Guangzhou. I can't move, and we haven't eaten half of the food on our table.