Little Emperors (33 page)

Pound. Pound. Pound
.

I lift a heavy eyelid. Is that the door or my head? A line of light shoots across the ceiling as Serra groggily opens the door. “Yeah . . .?”

“Are you guys still sleeping?” It is Amanda and Tina.

“Yeah . . .?” answers Serra, not yet fully awake.

I moan. “What time is it?”

“Five.” Amanda answers, switching on the light.

Shelley covers her eyes. “Five?” she groans. “Five what?”

“In the afternoon.”

“Oh . . . what day?”

“Tuesday, July 1.”

“Oh, God! We've only been sleeping four hours!” I bury my face under my pillow. The 1997 Hong Kong Handover is over. The 1997 Hong Kong Hangover begins.

Someone clicks on the TV, and the five of us lie across the twin beds we have pushed together. Every channel plays repeats of the handover ceremony at the Convention Centre. I peek out from under my pillow at the screen. Prince Charles sits before me, looking either worried or bored. Outgoing Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten looks un-ironed and uncomfortable.

Three British soldiers high-step onto the stage in their most formal uniforms. They lift their knees so high I almost catch a glimpse up the Scottish soldier's kilt. Goose pimples dot my arms as strains of “God Save the Queen” begin. Then, with a tug, the Union Jack slides down the flagpole.

The British officers have barely unhooked their flag when Chinese officers march out from the other side of the platform. The military sounds of the Chinese anthem start up. The red flag zips up the pole and unfurls in the artificial breeze, as if blown by a gigantic hairdryer.

The crowd claps. Chinese President Jiang Zemin, so different from his performance at Deng Xiaoping's funeral, beams behind his huge, black-framed glasses. Tung Chee-hwa, now the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, grins his Cheshire cat grin. In fact, I think, if you painted stripes on him he could be the Cheshire —

Snap
. Off goes the TV.

“Let's go get something to eat!” Amanda says, brandishing the remote.

Shelley has fallen back to sleep. Serra groans.

“You go.”

They go. We sleep.

On Thursday morning, I sit in McDonald's drinking coffee, trying to figure out what to teach that afternoon. I look up from my notebook to see Connie bounding up to the glass doors. She bursts into the restaurant and rips the Walkman earphones out of her ears.

“Hey! Long time no see!” I say.

She laughs at this English expression that sounds so Chinese. “This is for you,” she says, and reaches into her knapsack to pull out a bulging brown envelope. “I'm going to get a Coke!” She bounds off toward the counter.

I peer into the package and pull out two newspapers plus photos from our camping trip to Zhuhai. The
China Daily
's headline reads, in red, “Home at Last!” I glance through this English paper, then unfold the
Guangzhou Daily
to a headline of bold, black Chinese characters, only four of which I can read:
Hong, Kong, return
, and
country
.

Connie saunters back to the table, chewing on her straw and grinning. “I just spilled the Coke all over!” she says, laughing. “Look!” I turn around to see one of the cashiers wiping down the counter.

After Connie sits, I reach into my shoulder bag to pull out the Hong Kong newspapers I bought for her during the handover. “Oh, thanks!” she says between sips of Coke. “So how was Hong Kong?”

I tell her my tales of warm champagne and drag queens, strange boys and large-screen TVs, then ask her what she did that night in Guangzhou.
I imagined she made the pilgrimage to Tianhe Stadium with her compatriots to see schoolchildren dance, watch fireworks, and cheer the end to foreign imperialism in China.

“I watched the Hong Kong fireworks on TV, then went to bed.”

“What? You
slept
? You mean you never went to see the fireworks in Tianhe?”

“No. I was tired so I went to bed.”

“You,
Connie
, slept through the most important night for China in this decade? Really?”

“Yup.”

“So what did you do on July 1?”

“I got up early to buy the newspapers. Good thing. People queued up for them later. Then I . . . uh . . .” She leans back in the plastic chair as she tries to recall. “Oh, yeah! I went bowling.”

“You went
bowling
?”

“Yup.”

In the afternoon, the Grade Fives mope into class uncharacteristically quiet and subdued. When I ask them how they are, everyone is either sad or angry. I ask them why.

“Because big test,” Jessica replies. “The big test is very bad.” She points across the room at Jacob. “Jacob was crying.”

“Really, Jacob? What was your score?”

“Ninety-two,” he says glumly, holding his cheeks in his hands.

“Jacob, ninety-two is really very good.”

“No. It is really very bad.”

Everyone else is equally depressed over similarly disastrous final exam marks. They change the subject by asking me about Hong Kong. “Miss Dionne, did you see the Britain's flag fall down?”

With Connie's help, I tell the class about my weekend in Hong Kong, skipping the parts of drunken debauchery.

“Miss Dionne, did you see Jiang Zemin?”

“Yes, I did,” I answer. They all gasp in wide-eyed wonder. “I saw him on TV.”

The class lets out a slow, rumbling
“Buuuuuuuuuuuu”
of disappointment. Connie tells me the kids thought I went to Hong Kong to attend the official handover ceremony in person.

Jessica asks Connie a quick question in Cantonese.

“Soldiers,” Connie replies.

“Oh! Miss Dionne!” Jessica begins. “The Britain's soldiers were wearing
skirts
!” Her eyes roll at the thought of kilts, and she laughs. “That is so crazy!”

Later, Connie and I are in the back of a little red taxi, speeding along the Pearl River. Out the window, I see a series of new banners posted on lampposts along the river's promenade. I read the few characters I know out loud in Chinese as the taxi zooms past them. The driver snickers quietly to himself. Connie giggles.

The next banner reads
XIANG GANG MING TIAN GENG MEI HAO
.

Yeah, right, whatever
, I think. Then I freeze. That sign was crystal clear.

I read it.

Its characters are no longer encoded hieroglyphics mute before my eyes, but perfectly comprehensible. After fifteen months of being surrounded by them, I have finally read and understood a whole sentence in Chinese — in Chinese characters.

“Connie!” I holler. “I can read! I
can read
!”

Connie whoops, and we slap a high-five.

“Oh, look, there it is again!” I point out the window as we pass another sign. “That says
‘Xiang Gang ming tian geng mei hao'
— ‘Hong Kong bright heaven more beautiful good!' I flip it into English. “That means ‘Hong Kong will have a more beautiful future!' ”

“Yay!” Connie cheers.

“Very good!” adds the driver.

I lean forward. “You speak English?” I ask him.

“Yes,” the driver answers quietly, pinching his forefinger to his thumb. “A little.”

“So do you believe that sign?” I ask skeptically. “Do you believe Hong Kong will have a more beautiful future?”

“Yes,” he answers. “I believe.”

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

— Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Now I know I've been in China too long. My list of “Things to Do” on this first trip to Beijing reads “Eat lunch at Subway,” “Have coffee at Dunkin' Donuts,” and “Go to Dairy Queen” well before “See the Great Wall,” “Visit the Forbidden City,” and “Eat Peking duck.”

It's pathetic, but true.

The wooden-floored bus creaks to a halt near the city centre. I jump off and, after my morning doughnut and coffee, start across the vast concrete plain of Tiananmen Square. It's a sunny day, and families are flying kites and snapping pictures in the square. Couples stroll hand in hand. Foreign tourists videotape the soldiers standing at attention under the huge Chinese flag on the north end of the square. It's hard to believe this is the same place where soldiers, now tourist attractions, shot and killed students in June 1989 — not, in the grand scheme of things, all that long ago. I scan the concrete paving stones for bloodstains but, of course, see none.

I walk under the giant portrait of Mao on Tiananmen Gate and head toward the Forbidden City. I pay for my entrance ticket and go to the reception hall to pick up a tape player for the recorded tour. “What language tape do you want?” asks a young man in a burgundy blazer.

“English, please.”

“Okay.” He reaches for the tape on the shelves behind him. “Are you from America?”

“No. Canada,” I reply automatically, now resilient to this question.

“Oh! Like Céline Dion!”

The author poses in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing
.

“Yes,” I say, surprised to hear the sound of my last name in a city where I know no one. “Exactly.”

I strap on the clunky Walkman and fiddle with the buttons, then walk across a marble bridge to the first gigantic gate. Stepping high over the threshold of one of its huge doors, a threshold taller than my knees, I gasp. The scene before me steals air from my lungs. I am stepping into a Bernardo Bertolucci film, into a dream.

Five hours later, I leave the Forbidden City, having lost myself in its labyrinth of vermilion corridors and alleys. My mind is awash in rich orange, imperial yellow, jade green. Phoenixes and dragons twist through my imagination. I can almost hear the giggles of concubines and the cackle of a dowager empress, the padding of eunuchs' footsteps and the swish of silk robes. I deposit the tape player at the souvenir shop, then leave through the Forbidden City's northern gate.

“Hi-low? Tiananmen Square? Hi-low?”

Present-day China slaps me back to reality the moment I step foot on the sidewalk. A pack of pedicab drivers is pouncing on tourists as they exit the Forbidden City. Now I know why the emperor never left the place. I run the gauntlet of “Hi-low?”, “Tiananmen Square?”, and “How muchee?” and turn the corner. A few pedicab drivers chase after me, following me down the street shouting ever more competitive prices. I nearly sprint the next half block, finally losing the last of them.

I turn down another street. From the corner of my eye, I spy a man following me on a bike towing a small cart. “Hello?” he ventures.
Not again
, I think. I turn to tell him to go away, that I don't need a ride to Tiananmen Square, when he repeats himself: “Hello?” It's a polite hello, not a harassing one. He's not a pedicab driver at all, I realize, but simply an old man riding his bicycle. He glides slightly past me, saying again “Hello” and “Where are you from?”

“Canada.”

“Oh!” He brakes his bike and turns. “Like Norman Bethune!”

“Yes, exactly,” I reply.

He hops off his bike and pushes it alongside as he walks with me. “Are you from Montreal?” he asks in near-perfect English.

“Yes,” I fib.

“Ah!
Bonjour, madame
 . . . or is it
mademoiselle
?”

“Mademoiselle,”
I answer, giggling.

He stops pushing his bike. “Would you like to drop into my house? It's right here.” He points down a narrow alley. A Chinese character, splashed in white paint over the grey brick walls on either side, indicates this area is scheduled for demolition.

“Sure,” I answer, ignoring my mother's voice yelling
Don't talk to strangers!
in the back of my head as the old man pushes his bike up onto the sidewalk. I follow him down the twisting, dirt-floored alley, past a warren of low brick shanties and piles of garbage.

“Please excuse my neighbourhood,” he says. “It is a slum.”

“It's not so bad . . .”

“May I ask how old you are?”

“I'm twenty-eight.”

“Oh! So young. I am seventy-four years old. Do you know? I was born in 1923. Is this your first time in China?”

“It's my first time in Beijing, but I live in Guangzhou. I teach English there.”

“You are an English teacher? So am I. I graduated from Beijing Normal School in 1947. Major in English!” he says proudly.

“That explains your excellent English.”

“Hmm . . . Not so good, really. I don't have much chance to practise speaking, so it is a little rusty.” He leads me to a tiny courtyard, where he parks his bike, then opens a screen door into a small house. “This is my living room. Come in please! You are welcome!”