Little Emperors (36 page)

“Miiiiiiiiiisssss Diiiiioooooooonnnne!”
I hear someone yell. I look up to see chubby little Sandra pounding across the schoolyard. She has her usual big grin, and a pink gift bag is bopping against her leg as she runs. As she gets closer, I spy an old Troll doll with sticky-up purple hair and a dirty pink dress peeking out from the gift bag. I know it is for me. Let the avalanche of weird goodbye gifts begin, I think, smiling.

“Hello, Miss Dionne!” Sandra says, gleefully tackling me.

“Hi, Sandra! How are you?”

“I'm fine, thank you, and you?” She holds the gift bag up to me. “This is for you!”

“Oh! Sandra! Thank you! I like it so much. Thank you!”

“You are welcome!” Then, holding on to my little finger, she accompanies me under the mango trees and up to the classroom.

After a morning of singing and crying, the children have all gone. A weight has lifted from my shoulders. My heart is broken.

Connie and I begin cleaning our tiny toilet classroom. We slowly, quietly, peel faded Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster drawings from the tiled walls. I place them carefully in a pile next to a stack of new drawings. For this week's homework, I asked the kids to draw pictures of the future — what Guangzhou will look like and what they will be doing in twenty years' time when they are as old as old Miss Dionne.

Judging from these crayon masterpieces, the future of China is dazzling. Guangzhou will have pink and orange and yellow and blue buildings, and green, green trees. Jessica has filled her future Guangzhou with large, exotic hotels. Heather has pictured herself swimming in a clear blue lake surrounded by colourful fish. A robot will serve Gerry his dinner. Alice, Victoria, Beverly, and April will be English teachers. Paige will be a vet. Calvin will be an artist. Sophia will be a doctor. Gabby will receive her doctorate. Yvonne, Emily, and Marie will have lavish white wedding dresses that look like lace-covered bells. Vern will save the Earth by blasting away gigantic cockroach alien invaders. Ben will drive a Benz. Dale will be a pilot. Gary and Michael and Terry and Theresa will be astronauts in the many joint ventures between China and Canada to Mars and Pluto. The future is bright.

I slide the pictures into my shoulder bag, and we continue cleaning. We move the little stools and sweep soot out of the corners into dust drifts in the centre of the room. Connie organizes her files. I start cleaning the bottom drawer of the desk. I pull out Santa hats from Christmas and a bag of leftover candy from Tokyo Disneyland. Oh! The history that lies, still life, in a junk drawer! I pull a dead cockroach out from a handful of dead whiteboard markers. Connie stops shuffling her papers.

“Someone is calling you,” she says.

“What?” I look up from where I am crouched and wipe sweat from my nose.

“Someone is calling you. Can you hear it?”

I pause. Faintly, I hear, “Miss Dionne! Miss Dionne!”

Connie and I run out onto the balcony to see where it is coming from. We look out over the courtyard. Deserted. Then something catches my eye on the third-floor landing — a pair of small beige legs in purple shorts and white sneakers. “Russ!” I cry. The shorts are followed by a red
baby doll dress and sandals. “Gabby! Russ and Gabby are coming back!”

We rush back to the room and sweep up the last of the dirt just as Russ and Gabby reach the fifth floor, their moms in tow with cameras. Russ races into the classroom. He pulls McDonald's brochures out of the garbage, yanks the Troll doll from its gift bag, and grabs the Ernie puppet off my desk. His mom tells him not to touch anything. He responds with a playful but hard punch on her arm.

“Russ! Don't hit your mother!”

He settles down, and the photo shoot begins. Russ and Miss Dionne. Gabby and Miss Dionne. Russ, Gabby, and Miss Dionne. Miss Connie, Russ, Gabby, and Miss Dionne. After twenty minutes and every imaginable picture combination, Gabby and her mom say goodbye and head downstairs. They turn on the fourth floor, and Gabby waves until her hand disappears below the concrete banister. Then Russ's mother tugs on his T-shirt and tells him it is time to go.

“Goodbye, Russ,” I say, waving and watching as he begins down the stairs after his mom.

“Goodbye, Miss Dionne!” he answers, looking back and waving. On the landing, he turns, glances up at me again, and giggles. “See you tomorrow!”

Whenever she looked at Prince Chulalongkorn and others of her pupils, who were the new generation, the tomorrow of the country, she felt encouraged to hope.

— Margaret Landon,
Anna and the King of Siam

So much has changed in China since I wrote the first words in the first journals that became this book. The kids are all grown up now. The youngest are just finishing high school, the oldest are in college or about to enter the workforce. Connie is married to an entrepreneur, and they have their very own Little Empress to love and spoil to bits. The muddy pits of Guangzhou construction sites are now gleaming high-rises and efficient subway lines. Where motorcycles, buses, and beeping taxis used to clog traffic, brand-new, privately owned cars now jam the streets.

I could go through this book and footnote a transformation on nearly every page. In the hotel where I spent my first days in China, plastic electric kettles have replaced the metal Thermoses and musty corks. The market described in the opening chapter has been razed and replaced with hygienic shops complete with glass doors. (The wild animals have mostly disappeared, too, although the occasional plastic tub full of scorpions can still be found down a side street.) The market below the apartment where I lived, where I bought my tea and vegetables, is now a four-lane elevated freeway. The rust-stained concrete walls of the schools where I taught are now covered in pink and white bathroom tiles. The nearby McDonald's was long ago renovated from one storey to two.

If I were to visit Beijing today, I could put “have a double Mocha Frappucino at Starbucks” on my list of “Things to Do.” There are fifty-seven Starbucks in Beijing now. Until recently I could have enjoyed my Frappucino at a Starbucks right inside the Forbidden City. However,
early in 2007 an anchorman for China Central Television, writing on his personal web log, criticized the Forbidden City Starbucks as “an insult to Chinese civilization.” In July 2007, after more than half a million people signed the anchorman's online petition, Forbidden City officials banished Starbucks from the palace. There is now a traditional Chinese teahouse in its place. (But it serves coffee, too.)

And Miranda, wherever she may be, must have been happy when the Chinese government reduced the expensive dog registration fees by up to 80 percent in 2003. Middle-class dog owners could finally afford to legalize their pets, and five million clandestine canines in cities across China came out of hiding. Small dogs like Lily have become fashion items in the bigger cities, where nouveau riche owners can buy toys and treats — even a perfume called Oh, My Dog! — at special pet boutiques.

People in China are freer to travel and have the means to do so more than ever before. In 1997, the government lifted many restrictions on overseas leisure travel and made it easier for people to get visas to countries with approved destination status. Most Mainland tourists still prefer visiting nearby Macau (Asia's Las Vegas) or Hong Kong (the Great Mall of China) to going overseas. But, as China's list of approved countries grows — all of the European Union is on it now and Canada was added in 2005 — Chinese tourists are venturing farther abroad. While it is still difficult for independent travellers to obtain exit visas (most Chinese going abroad do so on group tours), the World Tourism Organization predicts that by 2020, a hundred million Chinese tourists will be journeying around the globe each year.

The way Chinese authorities censor information and keep tabs on citizens has changed, too. In addition to the guys with rulers ripping offending articles out of imported copies of
Newsweek
, there are now over thirty thousand cyber cops monitoring the flow of information into, around, and out of the country. Thirty thousand is small compared to the estimated 162 million Internet users in China, but the Net police have had some help. Western information technology companies like Cisco Systems provide the hardware to build and maintain the Great Firewall of China, and companies like Google enable authorities to block over half a million banned websites.

Chinese cyber police also get help from their Internet avatars, the wide-eyed
manga
-esque cartoons Jingjing and Chacha. Jingjing is a boy police officer, Chacha a girl. Their names come from the Mandarin word
jingcha
, or
police
in English. Jingjing and Chacha's job is to pop up
on computer screens every once in a while and remind users that they are under surveillance. Beneath the big, watchful eyes of Jingjing and Chacha, Chinese Internet users must be careful not to type “remember Tiananmen Square,” “free Tibet,” or “Falun Gong forever” in their emails, or criticize anything bigger than Starbucks on their blogs. If they do, the real
jingcha
just might come knocking at their door. Jingjing and Chacha encourage people using the Internet in China to censor themselves, saving those thirty thousand cyber cops a whole lot of work.

Even clicking the forward button can get you into trouble. In early 2004, the government sent an email to journalists across China telling them how they should — or rather should
not
— cover the fifteenth anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Shi Tao, a journalist, writer, and poet in Hunan Province, forwarded the message to a pro-democracy website in the United States using his Yahoo! account. The cyber police saw this but didn't know where the message came from. They asked Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. to give them the Internet provider address of the email account. Yahoo! did. With this information, the cyber cops were able to trace the message back to Shi Tao's computer. Later that year, the real-life police arrested Shi Tao outside his home. He is now serving a ten-year jail sentence for revealing “state secrets.”

Shi Tao isn't the only one. According to Reporters Without Borders, of the sixty-four cyber dissidents in jail around the world today, fifty of them are in China.

Hmm, maybe China hasn't changed that much, after all.

There is still no freedom of information, expression, or the press in China. Thirty-three journalists are currently in jail there, more than in any other country. (Cuba gets the silver with twenty-four, and Eritrea the bronze with fifteen.) And you don't have to be a Mainland journalist to get into trouble. In April 2005, the chief China correspondent for Singapore's
Straits Times
, Ching Cheong — a Hong Kong citizen and holder of a British National Overseas passport — went to Guangzhou to meet a source. The source claimed to have transcripts from secret interviews with ex-Communist Party official Zhao Ziyang, who had supported the students at Tiananmen Square. Police intercepted Ching on his visit to Guangzhou and arrested him. Later, he was transferred to Beijing. At the end of August 2006, a closed trial found him guilty of “spying for Taiwan” and sentenced him to five years in prison.

The Chinese government still refuses to acknowledge or apologize for the Tiananmen Square massacre. There continues to be no clear
idea of the number of people killed in the bloodbath. Hundreds maybe, perhaps thousands. Amnesty International says more than fifty people are still in jail for their part in the demonstrations. Other sources say the number is much higher. At least thirty protestors disappeared that night, never to be heard from again. In 2004, bodies of some of them were found in unmarked graves in central Beijing. According to an article by Jasper Becker in the
Independent
in June 2004, Ding Zilin, a former university professor and founder of the Tiananmen Mothers — whose own seventeen-year-old son, Jiang Jielian, died from a bullet in the back that night — worries that all the new construction in the capital will make it “extremely difficult to find any more remains.”

While public protest was largely silenced in the years immediately following Tiananmen Square, the number of protests and riots in China has skyrocketed in the past decade. According to a 2004 Chinese Ministry of Security report, there were around fifteen thousand “mass incidents” in China in 1997. In 2004, there were over seventy thousand. Most often, the demonstrators are people in rural areas protesting the confiscation of their land for power plants or freeways, or labourers objecting to hazardous conditions in mines or factories. In March 2007, a 100 percent increase in the cost of bus tickets in a Hunan Province town sparked a riot. The brutal enforcement of China's one-child policy in villages in Guangxi Province triggered days of violent protests there in May 2007. To quell the crowds, authorities sometimes admit they are wrong and apologize. Other times they use tear gas, water cannons, beatings, and arrests.