Little Emperors (34 page)

I step down into a cramped, dusky room, onto an uneven concrete
floor. Long scrolls of calligraphy cling to the walls above the room's old sofa and new TV. The sofa is wedged between a refrigerator and a table. A microwave sits on top of the table, and an automatic rice cooker rests on top of the microwave. Against the far wall is an old washstand piled high with papers.

“Sit down, please.” He motions to the couch. I sit and sink into its crease. He takes the lid off a metal pot on the coffee table, revealing glistening peanuts. “Please, help yourself. They are fresh. Just boiled this morning. Do you like?”

“Yes. Thank you.” I crack one of the wet peanuts, and water from inside the shell trickles down my fingers. The old man sits on the doily-covered armchair opposite me, next to the TV.

He jumps up again. “Do you want a Sprite? A Coca-Cola? Do you like tea?”

“Oh, tea, please.”

He lifts a big steel Thermos off the refrigerator, takes a tea bag from a box, and pours water into a brown ceramic cup encapsulated in a smaller steel Thermos. “To keep warm,” he explains, and hands me the cup, the string from the tea bag draped over its side.

“Thank you.” I notice through the screen door another man, younger but not young, puttering in the small courtyard outside. “Do you live alone?” I ask.

“No. Do you know? I have three sons and one daughter. My first son lives here with his wife and son. That is him outside now. He is making dinner.” The man outside begins hacking vegetables on a cutting board beside an outdoor sink. The old man sits back and contemplates me while I crack another peanut. “Do you know?” he says. “I have many foreign friends.”

“How do you meet them?”

“Like I met you. Outside my house. Or maybe while I am walking in the park. I like to talk to people and use my English. Do you know? I also speak Russian.” He says something to me in what I guess is Russian, then tells me, “That means ‘I speak Russian.' Do you know? I am a linguist. I also speak Japanese:
Koonichiwa! O genki desu ka?
”

“Genki desu, arigato. Anata wa?”
I reply.

“Ah! You speak, too!”

I explain that I used to live in Japan with a Japanese family and learned to speak a little Japanese, but forget a lot. I ask how he learned, and he laughs as if the answer should be obvious.

“During the Japanese occupation, of course. All subjects at school
were in Japanese. We had to learn it. Had to!” He says
had
and
to
as if spitting each word onto the floor. “But I don't mind.” He grins. “I am a linguist. But English is my favourite. Do you know? I was an English teacher at Tianjin University. Started in 1947.”

I nod and sip my tea.

“But in 1949, after China's so-called liberation,” he explains, “I was transferred back to Beijing.”

“To a university here?”

“No. I was an English interpreter with the government intelligence bureau,” he answers, nonchalantly telling me he was, in other words, a spy. I imagine him wearing large black headphones and listening in on the American or British embassies. “Do you know? I wasn't allowed to come home. My family wasn't permitted to know where I was, even though my office was just up the street. I only saw my family once that year, at Chinese New Year.”

I nod again, not sure how to respond to his story. It doesn't matter. He keeps talking. “In 1950, I was transferred to Korea. Do you know ‘POW'? Yes. I worked in a POW camp as a translator and interpreter. I got to talk to Americans.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh,” he says, waving his hand casually, “I asked them questions about their military installations.”

“Oh!” I say, not at all sure how to respond to the news that I am sipping tea with an interrogator from the Korean War — an interrogator from the other side to boot.

He seems to read my mind. “I didn't agree with the war, you know. No. But I was
compelled
to go. Many English teachers were
compelled
to work in Korea.” He pauses. “Do you know?” he whispers, leaning farther forward in his chair. “I am not a Communist. I didn't join. I refuse to join any party or religion. That way —” he sits up straight and splays his fingers across his chest “— I am free. No one owns my mind. Do you know?” He poises a finger in the air and raises his voice. “ ‘Give me liberty or give me death!' ”

He asks about my religion, my work, my family. I want to hear more of his life story. “Come to my office,” he says. “I will show you my books.”

We walk out into the courtyard, where he introduces me to his middle-aged son. The man smiles shyly and nods a greeting as he chops chicken. The old man and I enter another small, dark room off the courtyard. A wooden bed with a thin mattress and wool blankets is
pushed against the wall. At its foot near the door, a heavy wooden desk sits under the window, its surface buried in stacks of paper and files. The shelves along the wall opposite the bed sag with books — most of them are in English, including
Business English 500
.

“Wow! You do have a lot of books!”

He unfolds a chair next to his desk for me, then sits in his own, an old wooden office chair, and swivels it to face the bookshelves. “What you see here is only about one-tenth of my books.”

“Really? Where are the others?”

“They were damaged in our so-called Cultural Revolution,” he answers matter-of-factly.

“How do you mean ‘damaged'?”

“The Red Guards came to my house and took them. Mostly my English books: the complete works of William Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Wordsworth. They made a bonfire outside my house. They burnt anything with English on it, anything they couldn't understand. I was back working in Tianjin when it happened. My mother-in-law was here and could do nothing when they came to the house.

“Look at this,” he says, plucking a book from the shelf to change the subject. It is a children's English reader. “I am teaching my grandson English. He can read most of this book by himself! I also tutor some of his friends, but I am afraid I am not a good tutor. My English is poor.”

“No, it's not!”

He shakes his head. “Do you know? I didn't have any opportunities to speak English with foreigners for over thirty years. Even though I had the ability, I dared not. If I spoke to foreigners, people would follow me. Then I would have to go to the police and they would ask me, ‘What did you say?' Even fifteen years ago, I couldn't invite you to my home. I dared not. It is only in the last ten years I have been free to talk with people like you. It is so wonderful.”

Deep dusk settles outside now, and I can hear the family dinner sizzling in the wok in the courtyard. “I'm sorry,” says the old man. “I didn't catch your name.”

“JoAnn.”

He introduces himself, then takes a fountain pen and writes my name in perfect undulations of black on his notepad. “JoAnn teacher,” he says, looking up from the paper, “would you stay for dinner?”

“Oh, thank you, but I've already promised some people at my hotel I'd meet them for dinner.”

“Can you visit tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Is four o'clock fine? Then you can stay for dinner.”

The old man gets up from his armchair and shuffles past the TV to the old washstand. He pulls some envelopes from the stack of papers on the stand, turns, and sits down again. “These are from my foreign friends. The people I meet walking on the street.” He hands me a few of the letters from America and urges me to read them as if to prove his foreign friends are real and not imagined. I feel voyeuristic reading someone else's mail, but they are nothing more than “thank you” and “it was nice to meet you” letters, some with photographs. He hands me more — from England and Holland.

“Do you talk to every foreigner who passes your house?” I ask, joking.

“No.” He shakes his head. “No. I am very particular. I choose carefully to whom I say hello.”

“Why did you say hello to me?”

“I liked your face. Do you know? You have a good face.”

There is a small commotion out in the courtyard: the ticking of bicycle spokes, then the squeak of hand brakes. “That is my grandson home from school,” the old man says, calling out to the boy to come and meet the foreign teacher sitting on the sofa in his living room. The boy stops abruptly in the doorway when he sees me, then shyly slides next to his grandfather's armchair. “Say hello to JoAnn teacher,” the old man commands. The boy stares at his grandfather's shoulder, quietly squeaking “Hello” to the old man's brown sweater. The man tells him to go fetch his English textbook, and the boy scampers out.

“I apologize. He is very shy. He is not so used to foreigners as I am. Do you know? He is only in first grade.”

The boy returns with his book. His grandfather tells him to sit on the ottoman and read a passage to me. The boy hunches over his book, as if hoping the pages will swallow him, and obediently begins reading. He is the same age as many of my students back in Guangzhou, and suddenly I miss them terribly. As I listen, I can't help silently comparing him to my students — his shyness to their boldness, his rocky English to their smooth, casual fluency. When the boy finishes reading, I applaud and congratulate him on what seemed a painful ordeal. A big grin finally breaks out on his face.

“JoAnn teacher,” says the old man, “may I ask you a favour? Will you
give my grandson an English name?” He folds the boy's book open to its last page and hands it to me. It is an appendix of simple English names, boys' names listed on the left, girls' on the right.

I take the book and decide to let the boy choose his own name. I tell him I will read the list out loud, and he must tell me “Yes” if he likes the sound of the name or “No” if he doesn't. “Alan?” He shakes his head vigorously. “Bob?” No. “Chris?” No. He rejects each name in alphabetical order until I say, “Mike.” He nods his head enthusiastically at “Mike,” then continues to reject “Nick” through “Zack.” “Mike” wins. “Congratulations, Mike!” I say, shaking his hand. He gives me a big smile, his shyness at last evaporated.

The boy's father comes in from the courtyard where he has been cooking dinner. He is carrying a big bowl of steaming vegetables. We nod a greeting as the smell of fried garlic fills the room. “Do you know? This is my first son,” says the old man. “You met him yesterday. And she is my daughter-in-law.” A solid woman in a flower-print dress follows the old man's son into the living room. She is carrying rice bowls and chopsticks, and her round face smiles at me as she places the blue-and-white bowls around the table, then whisks away the pot of boiled peanuts so her husband can put the vegetables down. “They can't speak English,” the old man tells me. “And you can't speak Chinese, so I will translate.” I smile and nod dumbly at the couple as our conversation is funnelled through the old man. He seems to delight in showing his English off to his family, as if the tide of history is finally back in his favour.

Halfway through our dinner of chicken and vegetables, the old man finishes his rice, reaches into the refrigerator for a large bottle of beer, snaps the cap off with his chopsticks, and fills his rice bowl to nearly overflowing. As I finish my rice, the old man raises the bottle and asks, “Do you want?”

“Oh . . . just a little, but I'll get a glass . . .”

“It isn't necessary,” he says, and tips the mouth of the bottle into my rice bowl. “I drink a little beer every day.” He finishes pouring beer into my bowl, raises his own bowl, and says, “Drink much.” I lift my bowl and sip at beer foam as if it were café au lait.

When dinner is over, his family insists on clearing the coffee table without my help, then moves into another living room off the courtyard from where I can hear Mike practising piano, leaving the old man and I alone with our rice bowls of beer. The bottle is nearly empty. He pours its last drops into my bowl and snaps the cap off another bottle. “I usually
only drink half a bottle a day,” he says, topping up my bowl, “but today is a special occasion.” He lifts his bowl to mine. “Drink much.”

I know my cheeks are flushed. A combination of too much sun at the Summer Palace and the beer is making my head woozy. The old man asks where else I have been in China and where else I plan to go. I reel off a list of cities and tourist sites. He nods, his eyes blurry from the beer. “You are lucky to travel so much,” he says. “I am too poor. Too poor to even travel in my own country. Even after teaching for thirty years at Tianjin University, I am too poor.” He sweeps his hands toward the cramped room, and I wonder what his ideals have cost him. Would he be in a bigger house in a better situation now had he forfeited his principles and become a good Party member? “I went to Shanghai once,” he continues. “I was sent there during our so-called Cultural Revolution.”

“Why?”

“Do you know Worker-Peasant-Soldier-Student Movement?” he asks. “The government stopped holding university entrance exams. They said
anyone
can go to university. Suddenly, I had people with Grade Three education in my classes! There were forty-year-olds who couldn't read Chinese next to twenty-year-olds with only junior high school! How could I teach English to so many different people at the same time? How could I teach English to someone who couldn't even read his own language?”

“That's impossible.”

“Yes! Impossible. That was what I told the officials. I suggested making different classes of different ages or education levels. It would be easier to teach and better for the students.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Do you know what they told me? They accused me of revisionism! Can you believe it? I had to spend days in the classroom while the students shouted at me. It was disorder. Total disorder . . .” He shakes his head at the memory. “They sent me to Shanghai and a few other places to show me how to teach English to the Worker-Peasant-Soldier-Students after I told them it wasn't possible. They wanted to show me it was.”