Little Emperors (27 page)

I am still shaking my head in the dark taxi ride home, watching as cars and other red taxis pass my window in a ground-level haze. I feel as if I've been slapped in the face. A slap in the face that has woken me up, reminding me that, while China may be open for business, it is still ruled by an oppressive regime. A regime that doesn't allow freedom of information or freedom of speech. A regime that fears a four-page article in
Newsweek
.

Monday at lunch I tell Connie about the censored
Newsweek
. She seems slightly amused by my outrage, nodding matter-of-factly as she listens.

“This is nothing new,” she says at last. “Many Chinese believe the only true thing in the newspaper is the date.”

The Grade Six students unanimously vote Gerry for the role of Big Bird. They all raise their hands in favour of him, then pound their sneakers on the floor and chant,
“Gerreey! Gerreey! Gerreey!”
Now, along with his status as Student Leader of Number 1 School, Gerry can add “Role of Big Bird in English Presentation” to his résumé.

The presentation will be held at a concert hall at the end of March. There will be two shows — a dozen schools performing in the morning, a dozen different schools in the afternoon. Each show contains four hundred kids. We are in the morning show. We have four weekends to pull it together. I feel a nightmare approaching. A disaster looming. A headache beginning to form.

On Saturday, we have our first big group rehearsal. Connie and I hop on a bus after our morning classes and head to the school near Beijing Lu where the rehearsal is taking place.

No one told me that there is a day in March here in southern China when, overnight, the weather goes from cold and clammy to hot and humid. You go to bed shivering and wake up in a sweat. Today is that day. Connie and I sit and perspire all the way to the rehearsal school.

Four hundred kids and a dozen teachers are sitting or standing in the school's sun-baked courtyard. It looks as if this hot day has taken others by surprise, too. The kids are completely unprepared — no sun hats, no water. Some are even wearing sweaters.

We sit on the hot paving stones and watch other schools rehearse their scenes. Halfway through the three-hour rehearsal, I discover that my students have now learned enough English to whine and complain in it. They bombard me with cries of, “Miss Dionne, I'm hot!”

“Miss Dionne, I'm thirsty!”

“Miss Dionne, I'm tired!”

“Miss Dionne, my stomach hurts!”

One way of keeping cool in the heat and humidity of Guangzhou
.

“Miss Dionne, where is the bathroom?”

I am proud of them for using their English so well, but also frazzled by it. I play the role of mother bird, hopping from student to student to pour what bottled water I have into their up-stretched, open mouths. Connie and I do our best to amuse them through the hot boredom.

Finally, it is our turn. The rehearsal goes surprisingly well for a first time through. Afterward, the other teachers compliment Gerry and tell me, “You've got a great Big Bird there!”

I smile and reply, “Yes. He's brilliant.”

The Grade Six class finally masters the first verse of the
Sesame Street
theme song “Sunny Days” for the presentation, so we move on to the second verse.

“Okay, everybody, it starts like this: ‘Come and play . . .' ”

“Come on, baby!” the class bursts out.

I look over at Connie while Gerry continues yelling, “Come on,
baaybee
!” as if he were the new front man for Led Zeppelin. “Where do they get that?” I ask.

“Hong Kong TV.”

We cancel Saturday's classes at both Number 1 School and Number 2 School in order to hold a big group rehearsal in Number 1's courtyard. Connie arms herself with the school's bright red bullhorn and gleefully marches around crackling out orders to keep the kids in line. Near the end of rehearsal, Connie and I are working with the Grade Threes on their scene when Gerry, Cailey, and Krista come storming out of the school and across the courtyard toward us. A moment ago, they were watching the show from the second-floor balcony. Now I have no idea what's happening.

The trio hurries past us. At the other end of the schoolyard, students from Number 2 are dredging Number 1's fishpond with plastic bags and Styrofoam cups. They are trolling for the tadpoles that hatched last week. Gerry and the girls shout abuse at the kids from Number 2, push them out of the way, and pour the murky water back into the concrete pond. As the Number 1 kids rescue their tadpoles, I order the Number 2 kids together and lecture them on being polite guests and respecting the property of others. Then I send them away with Connie back to their school.

Once they are out of sight, I help Cailey, Krista, and others pick up the garbage the Number 2 kids have left behind — mostly hamburger wrappers from McDonald's, where they stopped for snacks on their way over. I am livid, but feel partly to blame for the mess. What was I thinking putting the two schools together for this thing? They are natural rivals!

I am sure everyone will be happy when the presentation is finally over. Especially the tadpoles.

As I walk to work today, the sky is grey. My mind is grey. The dark clouds clear their throats and begin spitting on me. Oblivious to the chess players and the hairdressers, I bow my head and concentrate on the muddy alleyway as it passes beneath my unpolished shoes. I step over a squashed rat. I am thinking about the presentation, what a nightmare it is going to be, how dreadfully the rehearsals are going.

Moodily, as if the rain cloud is hovering right over my head, I enter the gates of Number 1 School. I am trudging up to the fifth floor when Krista, Tina, and Amy run down to meet me, joyfully squealing “Miss Dionne!” and nearly tackling me on the stairs. Six thin arms fling around my waist and three small heads of shiny black hair rest against my stomach and back. I practically drag the girls up the remaining steps to the class. I laugh and smile as I open the door's padlock, and remind
myself that moments like these make this — dead rats and mud and spit and all — worth it.

Here's a definition of “logistical nightmare” — eight hundred Chinese elementary school children, two dozen teachers (half of whom speak little or no Chinese), two dress rehearsals, four hours, one stage. We have to be in and out of the theatre by 1:30 p.m. to make way for an Amway convention at 2:00.

On the way to the theatre at 8:00 a.m., my taxi zooms past little Tracy riding on the back of her father's motorcycle. She clings tightly to him as the bike splooshes through puddles and giant raindrops pelt her cheeks. A chill shoots down my spine. I imagine the bike skidding out of control and smashing into a concrete guardrail.
Oh, Lord
, I think, getting paranoid,
if someone dies because of this presentation
 . . .

Everyone arrives safely, if soaked, and begins lining up under their school's sign in the theatre lobby. Connie and I walk up and down the rows, trying to keep the peace between Number 1 and Number 2 Schools.

At nine o'clock, we move the kids into the theatre to begin the dress rehearsal. Everyone waits in the wings as each school takes the stage to practise their scenes. Just before our turn, I hand paper Bert, Ernie, and Oscar masks out to the kids while Connie takes Gerry backstage to help him with his Big Bird costume.

He comes bounding back wearing a yellow velvet mini-dress, orange-and-pink-ringed tights stretched taut over his chubby calves, and a fluffy yellow bonnet with a beak off the front that keeps drooping over his eyes. I quickly cup my hand over my mouth so I won't laugh. It's not a particularly dignified costume for the student leader of Number 1 School. Gerry pushes the beak up off his forehead and looks at me triumphantly.

I smile. “Gerry, you look great.”

He nods with pride and strides onto the stage.

It's over! It's finally over!

And, despite missed cues and locked stage doors and kids tripping over curtain wires, the presentation could be called, if not a resounding success, at least not a total failure. In the end, it was kind of fun.

As the lights go down and our kids file off the stage, I collect their masks and Connie goes to get the Big Bird costume from Gerry. She
soon returns. “Gerry refuses to take off his costume!”

Gerry strikes a pose in his Big Bird costume
.

We find him strutting importantly up and down the backstage hall, flapping his bright yellow wings and checking his appearance in the corridor's long mirror. He is completely in character. He
is
Big Bird.

“Gerry,” I call to him, “it's time to take off your costume.”

He shakes his head. Sweat trickles in long lines down his cheeks. The humidity of the day and the hot stage lights have created a greenhouse effect under his costume, but he is oblivious to it. He turns
sharply on a pink-and-orange bird leg and struts away.

“Gerry!” I shout. “The afternoon show will need the Big Bird costume soon!”

Connie tries to convince him in Cantonese to hand it over.

He ignores us and goose-steps the length of the hall a few more times. We watch him and tap our feet impatiently until, finally, he ducks into the washroom to change.

I know without looking at a calendar that I have been here a year. I remember this overcast sky, this hot, soggy weather. The seasonal fruit in the markets — the hand-sized yellow mangoes and the stinky, spiky durians — no longer seem foreign but reassuringly familiar.

Qing Ming Jie
, the Chinese grave-sweeping festival that startled me so much when I first moved in last year, began again this weekend. Chinese families invaded the small graveyard below. They draped the semicircle tombs in red paper, set off strings of firecrackers, and burnt paper money, paper clothes, and even paper Mercedes — anything and everything a deceased relative might need to get along comfortably on the other side. All day Saturday and Sunday, large chunks of ash floated around our building. Rounds of firecrackers made Rhonda and me jump and run to the windows to watch.

Looking over at my little desk, the numbers on the calendar tell me it is indeed a year since I arrived. Outside, the rain is roaring down in white sheets. It is mildly melancholy, but it is also cleansing and invigorating — as if nature is reminding us she still exists in this city of concrete and smog.

Connie and I jump into a little red cab and follow her sister, Kelly, Kelly's boyfriend, Jimmy, and Jimmy's friend Billy in the cab ahead of us. As the taxi beeps west on Huanshi Lu, I unzip my small backpack to reveal camp snacks. “Look, Connie, I brought Oreos!”

“Me, too!” Connie replies. She pulls a box of Chips Ahoy cookies out of her knapsack. “Great minds think alike!”

It is Friday afternoon. We arrive at the bus station just before 3:00 p.m. to catch the direct bus to Zhuhai, only to discover it has been cancelled for the day. We cross the street and go to another bus station to push our way onto another bus. As we climb aboard, Connie turns to me. “This bus doesn't have any air con,” she warns.

This isn't such a big problem because few of the windows have any glass. The bus's blue vinyl seats are torn and grimy, men smoke at will, and the entire vehicle lurches with each scraping, spine-shivering gear change. The bus releases clouds of carbon monoxide into its carriage as it slowly jogs onto Huanshi Lu. It halts at a corner a block from the bus stop and picks up two young women wearing skimpy black dresses sequined with tiny mirrors. “Sell the body?” Jimmy squeaks in English as the two women push their way past our seats to the back of the bus. The bus heaves itself back into traffic. It makes its way slowly down Huanshi Lu, crawls onto Guangzhou Da Dao, and finally heads south out of the city.

“Connie, how long will it take to get to Zhuhai?” I ask.