Little Emperors (3 page)

Wu Yang New City is not the quaint, steeped-in-tradition Chinese neighbourhood I imagined it would be. The area is filled with high-rises and traffic jams and is bordered to the east by a roaring freeway. A big, busy street bisects the neighbourhood. And, precisely halfway between my schools, a Kentucky Fried Chicken sits across from a McDonald's — a McDonald's so new that bamboo scaffolding still clings to its big
M
.

In the afternoon, I go walking west along Huanshi Lu, a main street not far from our apartment, in search of the Friendship Department Store and a bedside reading lamp. On the way there, I pass the Holiday
Inn, its movie theatre advertising an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick. In front of the Friendship Store, I take a detour into a shiny shopping complex and find Esprit, Benetton, and Lancôme stores inside. Continuing past the Friendship Store on Huanshi Lu, I see a Mickey and Friends clothing shop and, a little farther along, another huge McDonald's. I decide to eat an early dinner there. As I sink my teeth into a cheeseburger, I stare out the window at the Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs in the parking lot. Where, I wonder, is the “Communist” in “Communist China”?

The brand-new McDonald's in Wu Yang is still clad in bamboo scaffolding
.

It's almost dark out now. I'm sitting on my new bed looking out my sixteenth-floor window. The sky is grey. The buildings are grey. Even the people seem grey. It's as if the whole city and all its citizens are covered in five layers of fine grey dust.

I've just finished making 150 name tags. We have to give our students English names, which seems strange to me, almost neo-colonial. I've made tags with all my friends', family's, and favourite celebrities' names on them. I've got a John, Paul, and George, but couldn't bring myself to name a child Ringo. I've got a Mick and a Keith and a Richard. A James and a Joyce. A Robin and a William. A Michael and a Jordan. After the
Dionne quintuplets, I have an Yvonne, Annette, Emily, and Marie, but no Cecile. It's on the list of Names Not to Give Chinese Kids we were handed at orientation. It apparently sounds too much like
toilet
in Chinese. There is a Calvin, as in Klein; and a Coco, as in Chanel. And so many more. Two bulging grocery bags full — one for girls and one for boys. I meet them tomorrow.

Outside the school gates, grandfathers in undershirts and mothers with bicycles wait for the children to be released for lunch. Everyone in this small crowd is staring at me as I wait and pretend not to notice they're staring at me. A short, stylish woman walks through the crowd. Her makeup is impeccable; mine has long since melted away in this wet heat.

“Hi, I'm Miranda,” she says when she stops in front of me and offers a perfectly manicured hand. “I'm your teaching assistant.”

As we enter the school gates, dozens of kids in green-and-white track suits file out, some doing quick double takes when they notice I'm not Chinese. Miranda and I walk alongside the building, then turn and go up a set of dark stairs. On the third floor, Miranda knocks on a door, and a man, the science teacher, welcomes us into his classroom. He stubs his cigarette out in a Petri dish, gathers his papers from his desk, and waves goodbye as he leaves.

At Number 1 School, we share a classroom with the science teacher, lots of dust, and a small flock of taxidermy birds and animals. The stuffed creatures sit on display in a glass cabinet under the windows. Among them, a squirrel, frozen in mid-stride, stares up at us with one glass eye. Its other eye lies on the cabinet floor like a tiny missing button. A picture of Einstein sits atop a huge cabinet at the back of the room, reigning over the beakers, Bunsen burners, and rolled-up charts locked inside. Old desks and a pile of science teacher junk securely barricade another door at the back of the class.

The smell of the science teacher's cigarette hangs in the air. Miranda and I push a dozen worktables to the side of the room, then put twenty wooden stools into a U-shape in the middle. I run a sweaty arm across the tip of my nose and fix some papers on my desk. Miranda switches on the ceiling fan; its blades whir into a sooty blur.
Giggles rise from outside the door at the front of the class. Miranda looks over at me.

The science room awaits the children at Number 1 School
.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She opens the door. There is a pause. Then a wave of shiny black hair floods the room. Perfect little faces glance up at Miranda, then at me. Almond eyes widen, and a collective gasp seems to say,
There she is. The foreign teacher. The Foreigner. The real, live foreigner!

Excitement zaps through the kids as they sit down. Tiny shoulders struggle out of gigantic Mickey Mouse and Sailor Moon school bags. Tiny, expectant eyes stare up at me. I stare back at them. There is a moment of silence.

This is the moment of contact: alien and aliens.

I launch into an explanation of where I am from and how I came to China. Miranda translates an abridged version of the story. My imitation of an airplane buzzing low over the students' heads causes shrieks and screams and more giggles, and seems to break the ice. Then, after teaching a few classroom procedures (stand up, sit down, be quiet), we begin handing out the name tags. Miranda takes the girl grocery bag and I take the boy grocery bag. The children close their eyes and stick their hands in the bags to pull out the English names fate will give them.

But there is a problem. Everyone is wearing the same green-and-white school track suit and red Young Pioneers scarf. Everyone has a delicate nose and long eyelashes. Many also have short hair, or androgynous bowl cuts. So, I wonder, who is a boy and who is a girl?

Some girls have long hair and braids, which makes things easier. Sometimes shoes give things away. At one student, however, I am completely stumped. I call Miranda over to my side of the class. “Miranda, could you ask her . . . him . . . if she or he is a boy or a girl?” I ask.

Miranda asks and the student answers matter-of-factly that she is a girl. We then ask all the girls to raise their hands to choose a name, then the boys, and our problem is solved.

At our break, Miranda invites me to her home just around the corner from the school. She lives in a walk-up apartment building with her parents. We enter a creaking iron gate, then climb five dim flights of narrow, dizzying stairs. Miranda unlocks another gate and clangs it across to reveal a picture of a menacing fellow on red paper pasted to the door. “Door god,” she explains, tapping the picture as she fits her keys into the lock. “He protects the house.”

As we step into her flat, I am surprised by the space, the light, and the gleaming yellow-and-white linoleum floor, all a marked contrast to the building's grey exterior. A barking, claw-clattering furball named Lily greets us and smothers Miranda's cheeks with an excited tongue. Miranda's parents are both at work. We sit on a dark wood frame sofa, have tea and snacks, and watch a Cantonese soap opera from Hong Kong.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Miranda asks suddenly.

“No . . . not at the moment. Do you?”

“Yes. He is American. Forty years old. Are you shocked?” she asks with a wry smile.

“No,” I say, lying. “How did you meet him?”

“Here in Guangzhou. At church.”

“Does he live in Guangzhou?”

“No. He lives in Hong Kong. He works at bank. He comes here on a weekend to visit sometime. We plan to marry in August. My mother and father don't know my plan. My sister knows, but she doesn't like.”

“Why not?”

“Because she say that foreign man are cheater and liars and have more than one girlfriend at a time!” She laughs.

“Sometimes it's true.”

“My mother doesn't approve me dating him. She said to me, ‘If you marry, you will no longer be my daughter!' What do you think?”

“I think you should do whatever makes you happy.” I don't know which is wider, though, the cultural gap or their seventeen-year age gap.

Miranda pulls a bulging photo album off a crammed shelf and begins showing me pictures of her family. There is a photo of her sister in a park in Vancouver; her sister and a BMW in a parking lot in Vancouver; her sister on the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver. “She went to study in 1988 and never came back China,” Miranda explains. “She married Hong Kong Chinese Canadian.” There are pictures of the wedding in Vancouver, then pictures of her sister, older, chubbier, with a brand-new baby boy. “She was in Canada seven years. Seven years she can't come back China. Now she has Canada's passport so she came last year to show us her baby. Chinese government can't keep her anymore.

“All my family has been out of China. All but me,” she sighs as she tugs another album from the shelf. These photos are much older, black and white, tattered sepia. She stops at a page-sized portrait of an extremely handsome young man. “My grandfather,” she says. “He is like actor face. His family was very rich, but when China changed, it was all taken away.”

Fascinated, I want to see more, hear more. “It's boring for you,” she says, and the album is wedged back into place before I can mutter a protest.

Our talk turns to Lily, the small dog who has just peed on the floor. Miranda gets up to get a mop from the balcony. “I bought Lily from zoo,” she explains, mopping up the pee. “I paid 1,200 RMB [
renminbi
]. I don't mind it so expensive. I love dogs.” She puts the mop back out on the balcony, Lily stepping on her every step, then sits down again. Lily jumps up on her lap and licks her throat and ears. “You know, in China people must pay to government about 6,000 RMB to buy the licence to keep dog as pet.” She tousles Lily's ears, leaving the dog looking happily stunned. “I didn't buy the licence, so I must keep Lily inside. She has to be quiet so neighbours don't tell government.”

I quickly make the currency conversion in my head. “That's a thousand Canadian dollars! A thousand dollars to keep a dog?”

“Does Canada government mind if you keep dogs in the house?”

“No,” I reply. “The Canadian government doesn't mind.”

It's time to go back to school. I remember to use the washroom at Miranda's, with its sit-down toilet, before we leave. I inspected the school's toilets between classes and discovered that public toilets in China are exactly that — public. It wasn't the stench or the open trough running under all the stalls or the water barrel and scoop for flushing or even the used maxi-pads piled in the corners of the cubicles that had turned me off. It was the complete lack of doors. There was no door on the entry to the washroom and no door on any of the stalls. People walking down the hall can see into the first two stalls, and anyone strolling into the washroom can see into the third. The thought of one of my students coming in and exclaiming, “Hello, Miss Dionne!” while I am squatting over the toilet, possibly startling me off balance and into the sludge, doesn't really appeal to me. I've decided that the school bathroom will be a place to go only in emergencies. Only when it is not recess and the students are safely in their classes. That way, only the people in the office building next door will be able to peer down through the open windows and see.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have ten minutes to go from my last class at Number 1 School to my first class at Number 2 School. The schools are too close to merit a taxi ride, but not quite close enough to walk in that time, so the teaching centre has bought me a bicycle. The thought of navigating a bike through Guangzhou traffic makes my stomach ache, but I have little choice.

At 12:55, I sprint from my class at Number 1 School. I dash down the stairs, across the schoolyard, out the gates, and around the corner to the bike stand. As I hustle toward the stand, the old man who watches over the bikes gets up from his chair, grinning. He has been waiting for me. Miranda, who went ahead ten minutes early, must have warned him a flustered foreigner was on her way. Six minutes have eaten into my ten, and the clock is ticking. The bike man helps me untangle my bike from the others, shows me how to unlock it, and lifts it onto the street for me, smiling and gently laughing. Then he releases the kickstand for me when it is obvious I haven't a clue how to release a Chinese kickstand. I shout, “
Xie-xie
!” — Thanks! — as I jump on the bike and push my weight into the pedals.