Little Emperors

LITTLE
EMPERORS

a year with the future of china

a year with the future of china

JOANN DIONNE

Copyright © JoAnn Dionne, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Michael Carroll
Copy-editor: Andrea Waters
Designer: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Webcom

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dionne, JoAnn

Little emperors : a year with the future of China / JoAnn Dionne.

ISBN 978-1-55002-756-3

1. Dionne, JoAnn. 2. Children — China — Guangzhou — Social conditions — 21st century. 3. China — Social conditions — 21st century. 4. China — Social life and customs — 21st century. 5. Teachers — China — Biography. 6. Teachers — Canada — Biography. I. Title.

1  2  3  4  5          12  11  10  09  08

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program
and
The Association for the Export of Canadian Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program
and the
Ontario Media Development Corporation
.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use lyrics from the following songs:

“Zombie” by Dolores O'Riordan. Copyright © 1994 Universal — Island Music Ltd. Administered by Universal — Songs of Polygram International, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“Stayin' Alive” by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb. Copyright © 1977 Crompton Songs LLC (NS) and Gibb Brothers Music (BMI). All rights on behalf of Crompton Songs LLC administered by Warner/Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014.

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For Connie and the kids

Acknowledgements

Note on Language and Names

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

Epilogue

The road to publication was a lengthy and difficult one for
Little Emperors
. However, many people along the way made the journey easier. I would like to thank them here.

My thanks to “the China girls,” my Canadian and American colleagues in Guangzhou, namely, Kerry Allin, Amanda Haskins, Serra Hughes, Theresa Hughes, Celine Keshishian, Rhonda MacDonald, Jan-Marie Oldenburg, and Shelley Yip. Thank you for being there in Guangzhou and appearing here in this book.

My gratitude to the late Manuela Dias, whose interest in the idea for this book in the spring of 1997 gave me the courage to write it.

Thank you to my parents, Eugene and Sandra Dionne, for allowing me to boomerang home at the age of twenty-eight to work on the first draft of the manuscript. Thank you to Angela, Rebecca, and Cody for the good tea and company during those winter evenings in Salmon Arm. Thank you to Dorothy Rolin and everyone at the Shuswap Writers' Group for being the first audience for these stories.

Thank you to Noriko Sakamoto for the emergency loan of a printer one summer long ago in Vancouver.

My thanks to author Sandra Hutchison for her generous helpings of lasagna and advice during my early days in Hong Kong.

Thank you to my bosses at the Hong Kong office of Oxford University Press. Thank you for hiring me on and teaching me to think like an editor and for keeping me employed long after I left the building.

Thank you to Sue Dockstader and all my colleagues at the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society for your camaraderie at the FCC.

A big
doh je saai
to my many wonderful friends in and from Hong Kong, particularly Laura Bennett, James Chow, Suzy Deline, Stephanie Fowler, Lana Friesen, Tina Ganguly, Anna Hestler, Sarah Jury, Janice Reis Lodge, Martin Lodge, Maureen Nienaber, Niall Phelan, Lisa Pretty,
Mani Rao, Daffyd Roderick, Sania Sadhvani, Steven Schwankert, Delanie Sunderwald, and Jamaika Wong. Your companionship sustained me more than you know.

Extra-special thanks to the inimitable Ms. Donna Doi, the best neighbour a writer in the throes of rewriting a manuscript could ever wish for.

Thank you to Heidi Harms, Andris Taskans, and Janine Tschuncky at
Prairie Fire
magazine in Winnipeg. “The Old Man of China,”
Chapter 28
in this book, placed second in
Prairie Fire
's 2001 non-fiction contest and was published in that journal in early 2002.

My gratitude to The Dundurn Group's editorial director, Michael Carroll, for believing in this book and for rescuing the manuscript not once but twice: first from the top of a dusty Hong Kong shelf, then again, years later, from a burning ship. Thanks also to copy-editor Andrea Waters.

Thanks to Melanie Knetsch and James Watson for the backdrop, the photo, and the couch in Crouch End.

Thank you to the welcoming and supportive community of writers I met upon moving to Victoria, especially Andrea McKenzie and Elizabeth Walker, the first of the gang to befriend me.

For their friendship and encouragement across oceans of time and space, I am deeply grateful to Grace Aquino, Jennifer Cameron, Glen Kovar, Stephanie Revel, and Craig Shaw.

I am also deeply grateful to my Chinese teaching partners in Guangzhou. Without them this book could never have been written. I am particularly thankful to Connie, the best co-teacher, translator, tour guide, and dearest friend I could have ever hoped to meet in the People's Republic of China.

And lastly, I must thank my students. Thank you for being so grand. Thank you for teaching me so much. May all your life dreams come true.

The official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is
putonghua
, or “common speech.” However, this common speech is Mandarin Chinese as spoken in the Beijing dialect. While most people in the PRC do speak Mandarin, it is often as a second language to their own regional dialect (and often heavily accented by their regional tongue). This is the case in Guangzhou — historically known in English as Canton — where most people speak Cantonese as their first language.

In this book, I have usually noted when a person is speaking one or the other of the languages. I have represented Mandarin using the standard Romanized spelling system of
pinyin
. Generally, the letters are pronounced as they are in English, with the notable exceptions of
q
(pronounced
ch
),
x
(somewhere between
s
and
sh
), and
zh
(pronounced
j
). All place and street names are in Mandarin. For the Cantonese parts, I have used the
Lonely Planet Cantonese Phrasebook
to help me spell the words in English letters and, where that failed, I have made as close a phonetic rendering as I could. Words common in English I have kept as they are spelled in English, for example,
won ton
and
Hong Kong
.