Little Emperors (5 page)

Debby, Cindy, Coco, and Karl Marx hang out at Number 2 School
.

“Oh . . . but no man in China can write his — what you call? Life story.”

“Biography?”

“Yes. ‘Biography.' No man can write his biography of that time because of government.” She scrapes the last of her rice into a corner on her plate. “Only man who now lives in United States can do so.”

We leave the restaurant and go to Number 2 School, where there's been a room change. The teachers living upstairs lock the top floors
of the school on weekends, so we have to use the staff room on the ground floor for our lessons. The staff room doubles as a storage room. On one end sit shelves stacked with red drums, red flags, and dinted trumpets. On the other end there is a jumble of wicker sofas and chairs. We arrange the sofas, and the children clamber on, the littlest kids' feet dangling high above the floor. Portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin watch us from above the sofas — keeping an eye on the bourgeois foreign teacher as she dances around the classroom and, quite possibly, spinning in their graves.

On Thursday, the electricity goes out at Number 2 School for the second time this week. It's the second time this week with no ceiling fans. The second time this week I pour sweat on the kids for fifty minutes. At lunch, Miranda and I sprint to a restaurant close to the school because it's starting to rain, and Miranda seems genuinely frightened of rain.

The rain here is nothing like the rain at home in Vancouver. Vancouver's rain is not much more than a light but constant background noise. It gets you wet, but you can usually shake it off if you even notice it at all. Here, the rain announces its arrival on a booming bass drum of thunder, then hits like a faucet slammed to full blast. It's torrential. It's horizontal. It comes down in sheets, walls, columns, and buckets. It leaves white blouses transparent in seconds.

“It's raining like dog and cat now!” Miranda says as we rush into the restaurant and sit down, just escaping the deluge. The waitress puts two laminated menu placemats in front of us. “What do you want?” Miranda asks.

I look down at my menu, then up at her.

“Oh!” She laughs when she catches my eye. “I forgot you can't read this!” She orders us rice and meat.

Our food comes. While we're eating, I watch Miranda spit bones and gristle onto the table. It's an odd sight — someone so well dressed and immaculately made up spitting onto the table. I've seen her do this before, and have seen other people in other restaurants snorting, spitting, picking their teeth, and picking their noses at the table. I decide it's my turn to ask a question out of the blue.

“Miranda, in China, what sorts of things are considered rude to do while you're eating?”

She glances up, chewing a piece of meat. She spits the fat onto the
table and thinks for a moment. “Maybe . . . maybe putting your feet onto the chair when eating. Like this.” She demonstrates by pulling a knee under her chin.

“I'm sure I've seen people do that.”

“Then, I think, anything's okay in China.”

“It's just that —” I point at the pile of cartilage next to her bowl “— in Canada we never spit bones onto the table.”

“What?” She laughs. “What you do?
Swallow
bones?”

I explain that we usually cut around the bones with a knife and fork, and that if we do get one in our mouth, we discreetly spit it into a napkin and hide it behind our plate.

She laughs at this, is amazed by this. “In China, if restaurant puts down placemat, it means we can spit onto it. We don't
hide
!”

In the spirit of “When in Rome . . .” I try the same. I chew a piece of meat, gathering the bones in one side of my mouth, then spit them onto the table. I do this a few times, study the hill of gnawed meat and bone growing beside my bowl, and cover it with a tissue.

We run through the rain from Number 1 School to the noodle shop. My new umbrella is already broken and looks like a spider with a dislocated limb. My feet and left arm get soaked. Miranda, as usual, is unscathed and fashion perfect. We take seats near the window and watch passing taxis splash walls of water over cyclists in plastic ponchos. We order congee.

“Next week I will begin shopping for my wedding dress,” Miranda says.

“Good! Have you told your parents yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“Miranda!”

“I know, but I'm waiting for right time. I want to talk with them a long time. I must make them understand me. They must have a good relation with my husband.”

The waitress brings our bowls of congee. Miranda takes a hesitant spoonful to test its temperature, being careful not to smudge her lipstick. She puts her spoon down and stares into the mush. “What is your life dream?” she asks.

I think for a moment. “Once it was to be a writer,” I answer. “But that's not very realistic.”

“I think it's possible.”

“How about you, Miranda? What is your life dream?”

She is still staring into her congee. “To live in a house,” she answers quietly. “To live in a house in Vancouver with a garden, a man, and a dog. No —
two
dogs.” She gazes up at me. “That is my life dream.”

On Sunday I meet Miranda and she takes me down to the old section of town, not far from Shamian Island and very near Qingping Market, the market of scorpions and broken deer. Miranda stops to admire white puppies in wire cages, then leads me down cramped side streets toward her friend's apartment.

“This friend is very good friend. He love me very much,” she explains as we turn down a narrow alley. “He ask me to marry, but I said no. He doesn't know of my marriage plan with American man.” I take this as my cue not to breathe a word about the topic for the afternoon. We enter a tiny courtyard and start up five flights of concrete stairs. “I'm afraid of break his heart, so I don't tell him.”

We sit and have tea and oranges with Miranda's friend Jason and his mother in their living room. As the three chat in Cantonese, I glance around and admire the shiny linoleum floor, the jungle of plants on the windowsill, the pot-bellied fish going
blub-blub-blub
in their huge tank against the wall. Soon Jason's mom disappears into a back room, and he and Miranda switch to English.

I learn that he works for a French bank here in Guangzhou. He certainly doesn't look old enough to be a banker. He's twenty-six, the same age I am, but doesn't look a day out of college. He suggests we go to nearby Walking Street to get some ice cream.

Walking Street is so called because it is closed to traffic on Sundays. This allows hordes of shoppers to zigzag across the street unhindered in their pursuit of consumer goods, safe, for at least one day, from lurching buses and life-threatening taxis. We push past bustling shoe, clothing, and CD stores until Miranda realizes we've gone past the ice-cream shop. We opt for a Chinese fast-food place instead. We order sweet red beans with ice milk. It's not exactly the gelato I hoped for, but it's interesting.

We go upstairs with our trays and sit at a table near the window. A yellow fibreglass chicken in a fibreglass chef's hat stares bug-eyed at us from across the room. I spoon a dead fly out of my glass, its corpse floating just below the milk's surface masquerading as a red bean, and try to flick it onto the floor. “A French bank, eh?” I say, making conversation to divert attention from the fly now sticking to my fingers. “Have you been to France on a business trip?”

“No. But I'd really like to,” he answers.

“China young people can't leave China,” Miranda cuts in to explain. “It's not easy to travel like you. Like foreign people. We are not free to go. Government worries if we leave China, we won't come back. China government won't give permission unless you are over thirty-five or married.”

What she says shocks me. I know people in China aren't allowed to leave. Everyone
knows
that. That's how Communist countries work. But this is different. These are two people — friends — telling me from across a small table:
We are not free to go
. Suddenly, I don't simply know this fact — I
feel
it. I feel it for them.
They are not free to go
. If I woke up one morning and the Canadian government told me, “You are not free to go,” I would die. Travel is my life, mobility my soul. Without it I would shrivel up inside.

Looking across at them, I feel strangely guilty for being so privileged, for the sheer luck of having been born in Canada. I beat the odds in a world where one in every five people is born in China. Born
not free to go
. I feel guilty for taking my freedom for granted, for thinking of it as normal, as normal as air, as natural as breathing. I feel almost ashamed of all the stamps in my passport.

“What about your sister?” I ask Miranda. “She went to Vancouver when she was young and single.”

“Yes, you can leave China on a student visa,” she explains. “My sister did that. But then she stay in Vancouver after 1989. For seven years she can't come back because China government will make her stay in China. Now she has Canada passport. Now she is free.”

“What about business trips?” I ask, still trying to find a hole in their story. “Could you go on a business trip and get out of China that way?”

“Yes,” Jason replies, digging at his red beans. “It's possible. But your company must make guarantee to the government that you will come back.” He holds his spoon in mid-air, bean goop dripping from it. “To do this, you have to pay your company a big deposit, maybe all your savings money. Family can't go with you. So, that way, you
have to
come back to China.”

Miranda starts giggling. “There's a funny story. Maybe a joke. Before this law, a tour group went to Australia.” Jason also giggles and nods, familiar with the story. “But the only person to get back on plane,” Miranda continues, “was tour guide!”

They both burst out laughing. The fibreglass chicken watches us, unblinking.

The late-afternoon sun blinds me from the rearview mirror. I'm in a taxi on my way home, stuck in a Guangzhou Sunday afternoon traffic jam. It's unbelievable. All these cars and motorbikes, all these buses sagging with passengers. All these people
not free to go
. How can a country prevent so many from leaving? It seems impossible. All these people trapped inside lines on a map. What could you do? How could you escape? Swim away?

Marry an American man.

I go to Kerry's apartment to play drinking games with some of the other Canadian teachers. Once the living room begins to swirl, we pile into a cab and head for the Hit Disco. The Hit Disco is a huge turquoise-and-coral-pink building along Huanshi Lu, about halfway between our building and the train station. It looks like a large stucco spaceship stolen from
The Jetsons
and plunked into the middle of a Chinese city; so incongruous, yet so logical when seen through a haze of Tsingtao beer.

We pass a row of neon-coloured Greek statues and enter the disco. Inside, with its thumping music, flashing lights, and crowd of gyrating bodies, it could be any club in North America — minus the uniformed guards watching over the packed dance floor, batons in hand and arms crossed.

We snake our way to the centre of the dance floor. A young Chinese man begins dancing near us, then grabs my face and yells something in my ear. The more I motion that I can't understand him, the louder he yells. I try to get rid of him. I make eyes at the handsome Chinese man dancing just to my right, then realize he is dancing with another man of equal beauty. The stage show starts, and I manage to lose the yelling man in the crowd.

Four dancers, also gorgeous young men, bounce onto the stage in tight white muscle shirts and white aerobics shorts. They dance in unison under the lights, smiling teeth as white as their outfits. Then they bound away and a bullet-shaped elevator descends to the stage; its mirrored doors slide open and out sashay two drag queens. Their costumes are a lot shabbier than drag queen ensembles I've seen in Canada, but not bad for a country where drag queens don't officially exist. They strut onstage for a few songs, their curly blond wigs bouncing, then dissolve behind a foggy curtain of dry ice.

A girl in the crowd jumps onto the stage, pulling Kerry and I into the spotlight with her. Tipsy, we do our best Madonna imitations for everyone. The crowd cheers and presses against the stage, copying our dance moves. Suddenly, a bottle fight breaks out in the back of the club, and the crowd's attention turns to that. We hop off the stage and return to the middle of the dance floor.

The yelling man appears again, this time armed with English. He grabs my face and yells, “You! Me! Again! I love you!” He pulls at my waist, points toward the door, and makes walking motions with his fingers. “You! Me! Go!”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! I'm with them!” I protest, pointing toward the other teachers.

He holds my arm in a claw grip. “I love you!” he yells. He rubs his long-nailed thumb and forefinger together. “I pay you money!”

I tug myself free and escape behind the stage.

The other teachers and I stagger home at three in the morning. Just as I fade into sleep, I remember that I promised to meet Miranda at 9:00 the next morning to climb a mountain.

I drag myself out of bed at 8:45 and go to the bus stop nearest my apartment on Huanshi Lu. I bring a large tin cup of tea with me because I am hung over and have had no time for a proper breakfast or caffeine dosage before leaving the house. I am already waiting at the stop when Miranda steps off bus number 522, looking well tailored even in a jogging suit.

We jump into a taxi and head for the hill. White Cloud Mountain, or Bai Yun Shan, is a small mountain in the north of the city, not far from my apartment and usually obscured by a blanket of smog. As we bump our way toward it, Miranda tells me what happened at her house this morning.