Little Emperors (8 page)

“Miranda! Don't leave me!” I plead in mock desperation, but mean it quite seriously.

“I enjoy teach with you. Really! But I have to do this.”

“Take me with you!” I joke. There are so many things I want to say, but don't.
Take me with you
. I want to leave this dirty city and this tiring job.
Take me with you
. I want to see Tibet. I want to fill my lungs with thin mountain air.
Take me with you
. I want to feel free and exhilarated again, not crushed by the heat and noise of this place. Don't leave me in this concrete prison. I need to hear more of your stories.
Take me with you
.

“I haven't told the teaching centre yet, so don't tell anyone right now.”

I nod.

“You will get another TA. Better than me. So no problem! Don't worry.”

I step out of the Park 'n Shop grocery store across from the McDonald's clutching a can of tuna, a small jar of mayonnaise, and a very white loaf
of bread in an oversized plastic bag. I decide not to go straight “home.” What is waiting for me there, anyway? Two whiny roommates. Tedious lesson planning. What's the rush? Bus number 222 is parked at the terminus in front of the store, filling up with people. I get on to see where it will go.

It goes west and straight into a traffic jam. I lean my head against the glass and stare into the fading light of day. Bikes. There are so many people on bikes. They just keep coming and coming and passing and passing. For a brief moment, while the bus window frames them, they are a part of my life. A woman in a yellow dress. A shirtless man, a long scar where his right nipple should be. Thin young men in dirty T-shirts. A sad-faced schoolgirl in a polyester uniform. A young dad, his elementary school–aged son's arms wrapped around his waist. Where are they all coming from? Where are they going? What have their days been like? So many stories passing my window, lost forever to me as they disappear behind the bus.

I am walking on Shui Yin Lu to catch a taxi to work when I see her. A young woman with a dirt-smeared face sits on the sidewalk down a side street. She isn't wearing pants, or underpants. She is dressed in only a shirt, and it barely covers her waist. I do a double take. She is hugging her knees and looks angry, but not panicked or embarrassed.
What is she doing there?
I wonder as I continue on my way to the main part of the street.
What happened to her pants?

I catch a taxi on Shui Yin Lu. The taxi goes over a blind hump on an elevated section of Guangzhou Da Dao, then descends into a massive traffic jam. The driver eases us into the gridlock. A petrol truck sits snugly to our right. The only Chinese character I can read on it says “fire.” To our left, next to my open window, sits a flatbed truck crammed high with pigs in cages. I go to close the window, to shut out the pigs' desperate squeals and sickening smell, but the handle is gone. I shift to the right side of the taxi, closer to the inflammable truck. I glance over at the pigs and try not to inhale through my nose. One pig, its face squeezed between the rear ends of two other pigs, its snout poking out the bars, looks sadly at me with its one good eye. The other eye is blind blue. Saliva hangs in thick, white threads from its mouth. I look away.

Up ahead, I begin to see what is causing this traffic nightmare. A
motorbike has slammed into the back of a garbage truck near the guardrail. As we inch closer, I realize there is a body on the pavement between the crushed bike and the truck. Oh, God! A man lies smashed into the concrete. He is crumpled, flattened. Dead. Two policemen stand over the body just looking at it. No white sheet covers it. I glance away but realize there is nowhere to rest my eyes. I'm trapped between a dead man and a pig truck.

I shake all day, unable to lose the image of the dead man. After work, I climb on bus number 222 once again, not wanting to go back to the apartment. I get out on screeching, neon-flashing, air con–dripping Beijing Lu, one of Guangzhou's main shopping streets. I look at dresses in an alley market and find one that isn't too hideous. There are no change rooms in the market, so I can't try the dress on. I buy it, anyway. I pay the first price the woman shows me on her calculator. I'm too tired, too inept at this incomprehensible language, this culture, to bother bargaining. I head to Pizza Hut across the street. I need comfort food.

I stare at the grease globules on my plate. The same song plays over and over again on the restaurant sound system. It's an American tune from the late 1970s or early 1980s. The lyrics are sappy and stupid and make me want to cry. By the fifth time the song starts up, I want to throw my knife, or something — anything! — sharp and heavy at the ceiling speakers. I want to stick my fork in them and gouge out their wires! Isn't this music making anyone else in here crazy?

What the hell am I doing here? In this restaurant, this city, this country? Guangzhou isn't going to hell — it's already arrived. It
is
hell. Guangzhou is hell on earth. Hell is humid and polluted and smells like fermenting garbage. This place is the beginning of the end of the world. Apocalypse
now
. Why did I ever leave Vancouver, where it is spring cool and unpolluted, where dresses have price tags and the dead white sheets?
Why?
I scrunch my napkin in my fist.

At home I try on the dress. It is too small. Even after ripping out the dart seams, it still doesn't fit. I ball it up and toss it behind my wardrobe. I want to scream. I pick up the phone instead.

“Kerry? It's Jo calling. I've had a bad China day. Let's go for a drink.”

Passing strobe-lit pictures of Bob Marley, we cross the vacant dance floor of the One Love reggae bar. We go upstairs to the rooftop bar and order a pitcher of beer. As we walk to one of the many empty tables, a large rat scurries across our path and into a dark corner. Kerry
and I flinch and shudder at the sight of the rodent, then sit and compare bad China days.

Two young men come over and sit at our table. One is wearing an olive-green shirt, a uniform, the top three buttons undone, red star pins sagging from the lapels.
Security guard?
I wonder.
Army?
A patch sewn to his sleeve says
GONG AN — POLICE
. They are both bleary-eyed, weaving, possibly drunk. They start talking to us in Chinese. They are definitely drunk. Failing in attempts to communicate, the policeman fumbles at his breast pocket and pulls out a package of Marlboros. He flips open the red top and offers us cigarettes. Neither Kerry nor I smoke, but we each take one and light up. Gong An Man also lights up. His friend doesn't take a cigarette; instead, he picks his teeth with a long pinky fingernail. Another man appears at the top of the stairs and shouts something to the men at our table. They get up to leave, the uniformed man tossing his pack of Marlboros onto the table. It tumbles toward us. We sit and smoke. A large rat scruffles in the dark.

It's true. I've had a bad China day. But not nearly as bad as that poor man, face down on Guangzhou Da Dao.

I don't see much of Miranda in her last few weeks of work. She usually has wedding errands to run at lunchtime, leaving me behind in the science room, where I push some of the kids' wooden stools together and lie down for a nap. The stools are surprisingly comfortable, and I am often lulled to sleep by the whir of the ceiling fan and the chants of rote learning a few floors below.

When Miranda announces to the classes that she is leaving, the students are shocked. Little Heather starts to cry. Joshua cries, too, but mostly because his team loses at tic-tac-toe. When the students ask, “Miss Dionne . . . ?” Miranda assures them that I'll be around for a while. They look relieved.

In the all-girl class at Number 2 School, Miranda announces her departure at the end of the lesson. The girls leap off the choir benches and crowd around Miranda and me, pushing books and papers and pens at us from every angle. They want our autographs! While I'm signing one book, someone thrusts another right on top of the one I'm trying to sign and screams, “Miss Dionne! Miss Dionne!”

I look over at Miranda, wrestling with her own pack of autograph hounds. She rolls her eyes. “Oh! These crazy kids!” She laughs. “They
watch too much Hong Kong TV. Always see music star and girls screaming, ‘Sign! Sign!' It's crazy!”

Friday is Miranda's last day of work as well as the end of the kids' regular school year. Monday marks the beginning of the students' summer holidays. This doesn't mean the end of Miss Dionne's English lessons, however, only the beginning of our hot weather schedule. Classes begin at 8:00 a.m. and end at 1:30 p.m. — just in time to prevent our brains from roasting in our skulls in the midday heat.

Monday is also the beginning of my resolution to take the bus to work, rather than taxis. The bus schedule is erratic at best, so I have to leave the apartment at 7:00 in order to catch a bus that will get me to school sometime before 8:00. The bus stop isn't far. I hurry through the alleys below the apartment, passing a courtyard with rows of elderly people swimming silently through their Tai Chi. Then I cut through a market. The smell of the market, with freshly opened pigs rolling in on the backs of motorbikes, is quite a shock to my sleepy olfactory nerves at such an early hour. I leave the market and cross over Huanshi Lu on the pedestrian walkway, then backtrack half a block to the bus stop. Then I wait. And wait. And wait. I strain my eyes looking down the road for the 522, the bus that never comes. Cars pass, motorcycles pass, trucks, bus, bus, bus, but no 522. Sweat trickles down my spine and pools in the small of my back. It's a sauna and it's only 7:20. Suddenly, there it is, the pink-and-white 522, lumbering toward me in the early-morning sun. I hop on, stuffing two yuan of tiny jiao bills into the fare box, and search for a seat. Some mornings there is almost no one on the bus and I can sit in any seat I want. Other mornings the bus is packed, so I have to stand in the aisle and swing from the ceiling straps around sharp corners. Other times, there is still one free seat, but it's covered in vomit, so I have to stand, anyway. Ten minutes later, I jump out as the bus slows near the Wu Yang turnoff on Guangzhou Da Dao, and I'm ready to start my day.

The schools are quiet now. Ours is the only class in the entire five-storey concrete cavern of Number 1 School. The playground is a ghost town, the ping-pong tables, still lifes. Number 2 School has moved us from the music room on the fifth floor to the Marx, Engels, and Lenin
room on the ground floor so we won't disturb the teachers on summer holiday upstairs.

As the children at Number 1 School file into class Monday morning, they seem transformed. I thought they would be hyper with summertime energy, but instead they are as quiet as their deserted schoolyard and pay perfect attention to the lessons. Perhaps they are as stunned as I am this early in the morning. Perhaps they can finally sit still for my class knowing no other classes will cage them in during the day.

The kids also look different. Instead of their green-and-white school track suits, they now come to school in their own clothes, in a rainbow of colours and an array of personalities. It takes me a moment to recognize them again. Some girls, who seemed so tomboyish in their school uniforms, come in bright sundresses, others in frilly, poofy skirts. Most boys arrive casually in shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. Ben, in his oversized Chicago Bulls shirt, long baggy shorts, and backward baseball cap, looks every bit the all-American Chinese kid.

Monday is also the first day of work for my new teaching assistant, Echo. When the teaching centre first told me her name, I imagined, with such an odd choice of English name, she might be a Chinese hippie. But no — she's far from it. She is, instead, rather conservative and bland in her white polyester blouses and beige skirts. There was no particular reason for the name Echo, she explains to me, just that she liked the sound of it. Every time I say her name, I imagine someone shouting into the Grand Canyon — ECHO, Echo, Echo, Echo,
Echo
,
Echo
 . . .

Monday is also the first of July — Canada Day. I would have completely forgotten about it if the Canadian consulate hadn't sent us gold-embossed invitations for its party at the White Swan Hotel. The party is very Canadian. There are polite speeches about Canada's friendship with China, overly friendly people wielding business cards and networking, a long buffet table at which people line up and say “Excuse me” and “I'm sorry” if you accidentally bump them. How strange to be in a crowded room and have no one elbow me in the gut! How strange to line up and have no one bodycheck me out of the way! And just as I was getting used to China's post offices.

Monday also marks the beginning of the countdown. A year from now, the British will hand Hong Kong back to China. Three hundred and sixty-five shopping days left, Hong Kong.

Now that Miranda is gone, so is my lunchtime translator. Echo seems uninterested in becoming my friend and bolts out the science room door as soon as the noon hour class is finished, leaving me to forage on my own at lunch. So unless I'm going to eat peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of my time in China, I've got to get a handle on Chinese. Can it be as hard as it looks?

I walk to the book centre in Tianhe, a district just east of our apartments, and find a Mandarin-English phrase book for only eight yuan. It looks good. It has sections on the basics, plus food, shopping, and getting around. Thankfully, it devotes only a page to pronunciation and has a dictionary in the back where I can point to the Chinese characters in the event no one understands my garbled tones and I accidentally call someone's mother a horse. Flipping through the book, I spy the phrase for
When does the bar open?
(
Jiu ba shenme shihou kaimen?
) and, a few pages later, the ever-useful
Do you think China's present urban reform is making progress?
If I'm only at the phrase book stage of this language, I doubt I'll be asking anyone
that
. I will, however, memorize the one about the bar.