Little Emperors (2 page)

While common speech is the official language of the PRC, free speech is, sadly, still not encouraged there. Because of this, I have changed some people's names, have used only their English names, or have left their names out altogether. Perhaps one day, in a future edition of this book, I will be able to write these names out in full in big, bold letters. But not now.

The China and world we fight for will have peace and justice; it will be free of hunger and tyranny, of hatred and privilege and of arrogant use of power. It will finally be free of all uniformed bullies beating, beheading or shooting unarmed civilians.

— Dr. Norman Bethune

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

— Lao Tzu

“While aircraft is ditching, pull first cord for inflating . . .”

Ditching?
Ditching?

Images of the plane careening through a thunderstorm and “ditching” in the ocean or the side of a mountain flash through my mind like streaks of lightning. I have never been scared of flying until right now. The English subtitles on this safety procedures video are some of the most frightening things I've ever seen.

I'm trying hard not to think about all the scary facts I've read about Chinese airlines in the past week, or the joke a friend told me, that the initials for the Civil Aviation Administration of China — CAAC — also stand for “Chinese Airlines Always Crash.” I hope tonight, on this China Southern Airways flight, the acronym doesn't apply.

Everything will be okay. Everything will be okay. This is my mantra for this evening: Everything Will Be Okay.

The high-pitched screaming coming from an engine on the other side of the plane isn't helping calm my fears. Nor the fact that we were ten minutes late boarding at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong, and a further twenty minutes late getting off the ground. I'm just going to eat these peanuts and try not to think about it. Everything Will Be Okay. Everything Will Be Okay.

What's that? I do hope that
clunk
from below is the landing gear coming out. Yes. It must be. The plane is beginning to angle downward. Wait — we've only been in the air twenty minutes. This is supposed to be a forty-minute flight! We're going down fast. The earth looks dark, deserted. I can see a few lights now. But they're not bright at all, more a muted orange. There aren't enough of them. This is wrong. Guangzhou is supposed to be a city of over six million people. Where are they?

We're hurtling toward the earth now, hurtling toward oblivion for all I can see. The pilot has just announced that we are indeed landing shortly.
I still can't see very many lights down there. I do hope he's telling us the truth. I do hope we're really landing. I do hope we're not “ditching.”

I tug once more on my seat belt. Everything Will Be Okay.

Entering China is so easy it is almost disappointing. I do get a thrill when, walking down the corridor from the plane, I see two men wearing olive-green military uniforms and caps with red stars. But the thrill vanishes when I realize they're simply shuffling along and not marching in step. As I wait at passport control, the airport begins closing for the night, its rows of dim fluorescent lights shutting off like dominoes falling across the ceiling. The officer at passport control barely gives me a second glance as he stamps my visa. What? No bare-bulbed interrogation room? No one asking exactly
why
a Western, capitalist running dog such as myself wants to come to China? The customs officer makes no search for spiritually polluting items in my luggage. Instead, he helps me carry it to the door.

The taxi ride to the hotel is riveting. That is to say, I am riveted to my seat with terror, a substitute for the missing seat belt. Through the tiny porthole of a back window, Guangzhou looks like a post-nuclear Hong Kong. Neon advertisements and giant Chinese characters wink down at me through a ground-level haze, the buildings supporting these signs unlit and abandoned-looking in their pink and orange glow. The little red Lada bumps along, beeping and honking as it rockets blindly through crowds of tooting motorbikes, screeching buses, and roaring trucks, all lurching through the dust and chaos of Guangzhou at night.

The hotel room smells of must and moulding carpet, as does the hot water in the large steel Thermos on the desk, as does the cork that tops the Thermos keeping the hot inside. I make a cup of jasmine tea from a packet next to the Thermos. It, too, tastes musty. Jasmine and mould — a China smell. On the back of the room door is a notice that says: “Please phone to the fire control centre at once to point out the position and you can scatter from the safe passageway on the map but don't go down from the lift. If you can't go down from the stair, please scatter to flat root at once. Don't go back the room to take your any thing.”

In emergency: scatter to flat root. I'll have to remember that.

My small hotel is located on Shamian Island which, I soon learn, is a buffer zone between the newly arrived Westerner and
real
China. The
next morning, I stroll along the island's south side, the brown waves of the Pearl River lapping at its concrete banks, and watch people playing badminton on the sidewalk. I turn a corner and walk through a humid haze, down quiet, banyan tree–lined streets. I stop to marvel at these trees, at the intricate braid of branches covering their grey trunks like fingers clasped or bodies entwined, their roots bending up from the ground like human knees. Their dark tendrils hang over the road like wet, tangled hair. I pass colourful colonial buildings — the former churches, embassies, and mansions of European missionaries, emissaries, and opium barons — now home to Chinese grandmothers feeding rice to babies on wide balconies.

Just as I begin to think
How pleasant China is
, I round another corner and come stench to nostril with an oily, sludgy canal oozing its way along the north side of the island. Beyond the canal, over a few small bridges, is the scene I remember from the back of the taxi, now accelerated by the light of day: dusty, tumbledown buildings; dusty, creaking buses; and people, people, people. The
real
China.

Intimidated and jet-lagged, I dash back to my hotel room and gnaw on a chocolate Easter bunny stowed away in my suitcase, then fall asleep.

I cross one of the little bridges on my second morning in China. I zigzag through the beeping and honking traffic and soon find myself at the entrance to a dark alley. It is the entrance to a Chinese market. I look up and see a sign, in Chinese and English, that simply says:
MEAT
.

Just before leaving Canada, friends of friends who have visited China told me stories about these markets, stories of caged puppies, horse penises, and monkeys' brains, all proudly displayed and fresh for the frying. I've also read about the Cantonese delight in eating “anything with four legs that isn't a table.” I imagine I'll see kittens being throttled, snakes being skinned, blades flashing, and blood flying everywhere. I take a deep breath and, morbid curiosity leading the way, go into the market.

Dim light bulbs covered by red plastic shades hang low over the tables, bathing the market in a menacing pink glow. At first I see only tables with rows of gutted fish sliced open lengthwise, their gills still silently puffing. The gumbooted fish sellers brush blood from their latest catch onto all the open fish, making each look equally bright and fresh. Below these tables are shallow steel tanks of thrashing live fish, some flopping out and around on the ground.

Soon I pass the hearts, intestines, and penises of some unfortunate
livestock drooping from huge, sharp hooks. Buckets slither with shiny black eels. Low, round cages hiss with snakes. A bamboo basket boils with a thousand red scorpions. Rabbits, crammed into wire cages, twitch their noses nervously as their cousins, skinned and stretched, lie lifeless on a table next to them. Baby deer, their soft antlers sawn off and front legs broken, kneel in cages half their size. Dead fawns lie on still more tables. The dead ones seem luckier.

There are turtles of all descriptions — hard-shell, soft-shell, big, little, alive, deceased. I spy one hard-shell making a break for it, trying to escape his plastic orange bucket and impending doom. His front legs claw and slip against the edge of the container as his neck strains toward freedom. The man sitting next to the bucket sticks his foot out and, without so much as a glance up from his newspaper, knocks the turtle back into place, dashing the turtle's dreams.

The stench of concentrated chicken shit suffocates me as I pass cages, stacked five high, stuffed with the squawking, pecking birds, their brown feathers flying. I've had enough for one day and begin heading toward the light at the end of the market. As I near the exit, a large pig, split open snout to tail and impaled inside up on two spikes, zooms past me and into the market, draped and jiggling over the back of a motorbike.

We, two other teachers and I, move into our apartment on Sunday. The taxi ride across the city from the hotel is a blur of twisting flyovers and crazed traffic. We pass rows of sooty, low-rise apartment blocks, each with balconies enclosed by rusty iron bars and drying underwear. These buildings look sad and old compared to the many new high-rise apartments among them. The taxi pulls up to our building. It is one of the new ones, all twenty-eight, white-bathroom-tiled storeys of it.

We roll our suitcases into the building under a canopy of gunfire. Or what I first think is gunfire. As we get out of the taxi, our boss explains that the blasts are actually firecrackers from a nearby graveyard. It is a festival day for dead ancestors,
Qing Ming Jie
, and people are setting off firecrackers to scare evil spirits away from family tombs. Perhaps, I think, away from the tombs and into our building.

The building is at the end of a narrow, shady lane called Shui Yin Lu. Most of the other Canadian teachers live in this building, as well as a handful of expats and overseas Chinese. I was expecting cramped, damp
quarters and a toilet in the floor. Instead, we have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge living room, and a long kitchen. The toilets and bathtubs are Western, the floors hardwood. There are luxuries here unknown to my apartments in Canada — two air conditioners, a washing machine, and even a microwave with an automatic setting for shark's fin soup. If I press my forehead against my bedroom window, I can see the kidney-shaped swimming pool sixteen floors below.

Our living-room window looks out over the small graveyard where people are still setting off firecrackers. The graveyard is behind a wall across the street. The cement tombstones are horseshoe-shaped and look like the bows of concrete ships sinking into the earth. Beyond the graveyard is a muddy field pockmarked by rows of deep holes being dug deeper by tiny men with tiny wheelbarrows. Beyond that is the eastern part of the city, the newest part. It is a grey sea of concrete silhouettes, the skeletons of countless high-rises under construction.

Wednesday morning we go to a dark, crowded clinic to have medical tests for our work visas. We fill out foreigner medical forms, then are quickly herded into line to be weighed and measured. Just as I am about to step on the scale, an older Chinese woman pushes her way onto it. I step back and wait again for my turn. Then we stand in line for the blood test. The same woman pushes her way in front of me again. I stay where I am, firm in my belief in the sanctity of the queue. Our Chinese assistant suddenly snaps the medical form from my hand and thrusts it onto the top of the pile next to the nurse, forcing the older woman to move, reluctantly, behind me.

As we stand in line for the chest and abdomen exams, a group of large Americans enters the already cramped clinic. They are couples bringing their newly adopted Chinese baby girls for medical tests, the last step in a long process before whisking them away to an entirely different life in the United States. One couple joins us in line. The man is holding his new daughter in a front pouch. The baby is sleeping, one tiny hand resting on her new dad's chest, oblivious to the noise and commotion around her. They've given her an English name, they tell me, but are keeping her Chinese name in the middle.

I watch her small, wiggling nostrils and try to imagine her life in America. She'll be able to go to the mall, watch sitcoms, eat at Taco Bell, surf the Net, and go to college. Will she ever feel lost? I wonder. Cut at
her roots like a flower suspended in a jar? Will she have a lifelong dream of visiting China? Or will she never give China a second thought, spinning it into a multicoloured blur as she turns a globe in geography class? So many questions, so many possibilities swirling around one tiny, sleeping person.

Thursday morning we go to see our elementary schools and meet our principals. I have two schools. They are in an area of Guangzhou called Wu Yang New City. They are called, logically, Wu Yang Number 1 School and Wu Yang Number 2 School. Because I work for a private company that sends foreign English teachers out to local schools, I won't be a regular member of the staff at the Wu Yang schools. The classes I teach will be extracurricular, and students who want to take them must pay extra to do so.

The good thing about being an extracurricular teacher is that, most days, I won't have to be at school until 11:30 a.m. I will teach two hour-long classes during the school lunch break, then get my own two-hour lunch break mid-afternoon. Classes resume after school at 4:00 p.m. and will run until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., depending on the day.

The bad thing about being an extracurricular teacher is that I will have to teach on Saturdays, starting at 9:00 a.m.

The name Wu Yang means “Five Rams,” which are, judging by the number of fibreglass statues of cartoon goats around the city, something like the mascots of Guangzhou. Wu Yang refers to a local legend where five magic kings rode down from the heavens on five rams, bearing rice stalks to save the region from famine and ensure it a bountiful future. In the modern age, Wu Yang seems to be a popular brand name. I've seen Five Rams Ice Cream, Five Rams bicycles, a Wu Yang Honda motorbike dealer, and even Five Golden Sheep toilet paper at the corner store.