Little Emperors (22 page)

Dallas, as it turns out, is the younger brother of Alice, one of the eleven-year-old girls in the all-girl class at the school. Two siblings couldn't be more different. Alice is bright, bubbly, conscientious, and nearly fluent in the English she has learned so far. Dallas, on the other hand, spends his class time rolling across the floor.

We have a parent-teacher meeting for the new class after school. Connie talks to Dallas's mother for a few minutes, then explains to me that, because of China's one-child policy, Dallas's parents had to pay a fine when he was born.

“Really? How much?” I ask.

“About 10,000 RMB.”

“That's a lot,” I reply. I think of Dallas purposely falling off his chair, over and over again in class, and hope that someday, somehow, he will finally give his parents a return on their investment.

Three men crouch over Adidas duffle bags near the entrance to Qingping Market. Stiff brown ropes string out of one of the bags. One of the men clasps them in his hand like a horse's rein. Just as I pass him and wonder what the ropes might be, he catches my eye and pulls them out of the bag. I stop in my tracks. They aren't ropes. They are tendons, and a large, clawed, orange-and-white paw is dangling from them.

It is a tiger's paw.

I gasp. I have heard about this — the selling of endangered and exotic animal parts — but always assumed it happened covertly in an underground market. Yet here it is in a sports bag right in front of me in broad daylight at the entrance to a tourist market. I feel like an accomplice to extinction by simply looking at it.

The next man over, seeing my disbelief, reaches into his bag and pulls out yet another furry paw, this one still connected to its leg bone. I gasp again and escape into the market.

The market isn't much of an escape. I see the usual coils of dried snakes and stacks of flattened lizards and, for the first time, about a dozen dried, flattened rats hanging on a wall.

I turn around. I will go Christmas shopping at the mall instead.

Walking to the mall this evening, I see a guideline for cycling safety on a public notice board in front of the book centre.

On the top half of the notice, drawings and diagrams demonstrate correct cycling procedures; on the bottom half, to further motivate cyclists to be careful, are photographs of real-life bicycle accidents. Most show only the bicycles — munched and mangled and pretzelled under the heavy wheels of garbage trucks. One photograph, however, clearly shows a young man flattened on the pavement, his twisted bicycle spilling its load of
baak choi
across the road like scattered seeds. Curdled flesh is torn from his thigh, blood splatters from his skull like ketchup from a
packet. Seeing that, I am very glad my bicycle has been stolen.

A man sells coils of dried snakes in the old Qingping Market in Guangzhou
.

I cross the street and walk through Teem Plaza's sliding glass doors. The mall looks as if a Christmas bomb hit it. Gigantic plastic Santas hang from the atrium by parachutes, their inflated black boots just touching the tip of a huge artificial tree in the middle of the mall. The air is filled with blinking lights and Christmas Muzak. In the basement, the Jusco department store has a large Christmas section, tables and tables piled high with trinkets and decorations, ribbons and wrap.

I pick out a few cards and some wrapping paper and stand in line to pay. The song “Do They Know It's Christmas?” comes on over the store's sound system. I hum along to the line about no snow in Africa at Christmas time.
Nor in Guangzhou, for that matter
, I think, and realize that, when a Canadian can stand in a Japanese department store in China and hum a Christmas song about Africa written by an Irishman, the world has become a bizarre place indeed.

Early Sunday afternoon, my roommate Rhonda and I take the 136 down to Haizhu Square. It has a reputation for being the worst city bus in Guangzhou, but we take a chance and squeeze our way on at Huanshi Lu, wriggling under a canopy of underarms to find a spot to stand and breathe. The bus creaks for almost an hour across town, strangers' groins
pressing into our backsides as the bus leans around endless street corners. While we weave back and forth, a few people poke their heads out the windows and retch down the sides of the hot and dusty bus. Just as the 136 is finally pulling up at Haizhu Square, a seated woman begins to convulse, her cheeks filling as she desperately presses her fingers against her lips, then spews an orange-and-white stream onto the floor. It splashes our shoes as Rhonda and I push for the exit.

We tissue the vomit off each other's loafers at the bus stop, then go our separate ways. I head off to meet Connie to go Christmas shopping for our students.

The mini-warehouses and open-fronted shops along the streets near the square are crammed with every piece of Christmas kitsch imaginable. Ceilings are filled with fold-out paper bells, walls are layered in Santa suits, boxes are overflowing with plastic ornaments — all shipped directly from the manufacturers at Chinese prisons and sweatshops. Funny, I think, how the largest (and officially atheist) country in Asia supplies the vast majority of Christmas junk to the West. Connie and I step into a shop festooned with blinking lights and each buy a Santa hat. Hers has a little light-up snowman dangling from its peak.

A block away from the square, another street is filled with shops selling wholesale toys, stickers, stationery, and mountains and mountains of bulk candy. We buy two hundred gold-and-silver pencils, one hundred ultra-bouncy rubber balls, and four big bags of hard candies wrapped in colourful pieces of tinfoil for our students. Then we cross the street and buy bulk wrapping paper and ribbon.

On Monday, Connie and I spend our entire lunch break sitting on the cold tiled floor of our classroom at Number 1 School, wrapping the gifts in time to give them to our students at the Christmas parties on Wednesday. Above us are the Christmas cards the kids have given us over the past few weeks, all hung on lengths of pink twine in zigzags across the room. It started out with a few kids giving a few cards, but once everyone saw how proudly we displayed them on our desk and bookshelf, it turned into a Christmas card–giving frenzy.

Now every last student has given us each a card. As the numbers of cards increased, so did their complexity. We have received cards encrusted with sparkles, others with pop-up 3-D images, some with moving parts, and a handful that play battery-operated Christmas tunes. Jim and Ben
each gave us homemade cards, complete with drawings of UFOs, the entire cast of Dragon Ball Z, and Christmas trees topped with red stars. Russ gave me a sparkly pop-up card that has nothing to do with Christmas. It features two cartoon alligators smooching on a deserted tropical isle, no suntanned Santa in sight.

Sitting under the sagging strings of cards, mindlessly wrapping two pencils, a handful of candy, and one ultra-bouncy ball for each of our nearly hundred kids, I begin to feel guilty for having subjected Connie to my harebrained Christmas present idea. “Connie, do you like this job?” I ask. “Teaching, I mean, not wrapping this stuff!”

“Yes,
sometimes
 . . .” she says, looking over at me with a twisted grin. “Really, though, I like this job. It is much better than my old job in the shipping company.”

“Really? Is this easier?”

“In some ways, maybe. In the shipping company, I sat at a desk and put numbers into a computer. It was so boring! Also, I had to wear skirts and high shoes. Too girly and so uncomfortable!”

We cut more squares of wrapping paper and lengths of ribbon.

“I don't want to be an office worker anymore,” she continues. “The classroom is better. More fun. And here —” she smiles and pats her knee “— I can wear my jeans!”

“I have a book called
China Wakes
written by an American couple,” I tell her. “In the book, they say it's quite common for bosses in China to hire young women for much more than putting numbers into computers . . . you know, for sex . . .”

“Yes, this is true,” Connie says. “It happens, but it is not a trap. You can quit the job. This happened to my friend's sister. The boss tried to touch her, so she quit the job.”

“Maybe it's not so easy to quit if the girl has no money and no other job to go to.”

“Yes, that is true, too. But some girls do it to get a higher position.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. My friend Linda told me her father worked in a company where the boss and the secretary were lovers. The secretary was like another boss. Always telling people what to do. The workers were very scared of her! Even the boss's wife knew about it, but she could do nothing.”

“That's terrible.”

“Yes, all the workers thought so, so they all quit the job.”

“And the company went out of business?”

“No. The man hired all new people and continued as usual.”

“Oh.”

We sit silently for a long moment as we fold paper and curl ribbon with the edges of our scissors. “There are many bad things in China,” Connie says at last.

“Yes and no,” I reply. “
China Wakes
seems to focus on a lot of bad things, but it's an interesting book.” Then I get brave and venture, “The chapter on Tiananmen Square is really amazing. You know . . . about the student protests in 1989 . . .”

Connie hesitates for a moment. “Oh, yes . . .” She lowers her voice. “Is it true that a tank ran over some of the students? A friend told me she heard that.”

“Yes, I think so. There's one picture I'll never forget, though, of a young man standing alone in the street facing a line of tanks. The whole world saw it on CNN. Did you hear about him?”

“We never saw any pictures on TV. We just heard the trouble was caused by students and foreign influences. And that the government was right.”

“I don't think we saw the whole thing, either. If I remember right, the Chinese government cut the satellite links of foreign reporters so they couldn't send out any more live pictures. The government only allowed them to transmit videotape that had been edited and government-approved.”

Connie frowns. “Really? They could stop the foreign news, too?”

“I think so. Yes. At the time, I didn't realize how many people were killed there. I thought maybe just a few. But then horrible stories came out. Western reporters think hundreds or maybe thousands were killed.”

“Government says no one. Says only soldiers died there.”

I tell her about a scene from
China Wakes
, from the early hours of June 4, 1989, where author Nicholas Kristoff paints a horrifying picture of the People's Liberation Army opening fire on two busloads of students approaching the square. The soldiers killed all the occupants of the buses, except one, and caused the second bus to explode. As I recount Kristoff's story, Connie's face shadows with a mixture of sadness and anger, as if storm clouds are gathering somewhere behind her eyes. I quickly bring the story to a close.

“I was in middle school when that happened,” she explains quietly, “so I didn't give it much notice then.”

“Yes. I was very young then, too.”

We continue wrapping gold-and-silver pencils in squares of emerald paper, tying each present closed with a snip of red ribbon. I start counting off presents from our ever-growing pile and putting them into plastic bags for each class. “I hope the kids like these.”

“I think so,” Connie says as she puts another gift on the pile. “You know, since 1989, the government doesn't allow the Christmas parties in the universities.”

“Really? Because it's a Western holiday?”

“Partly. But, I think, mostly because government doesn't want many students together at the same time. So the government doesn't allow because they are scared of many students together.”

Just as Connie says this, I hear little feet shuffling outside the door and know that little eyes are trying to peek through the cracks in the wood. “Speaking of Christmas parties,” I whisper, “we'd better clean up. I don't want them to see their presents!”

We quickly hide the bags of gifts behind the desk, stash the wrapping paper in the bottom drawer, and let the kids in for their first lesson about Christmas. I explain what happens on Christmas Eve in Canada, telling them with picture cards and diagrams how Santa comes down chimneys and leaves presents and candy under the tree and in our stockings. (Gerry chortles and calls the stocking “Hong Kong foot-ah! Ha! Ha! Ha!” throughout the lesson.) I tell everyone how exciting Christmas morning is because we get to open our presents, to which, in the Grade Two class, Russ yells out in Cantonese, “And if the girls find a husband inside the present, they are very happy!”

On my last shopping trip to Hong Kong, I bought Jan Wong's
Red China Blues
. I shoved it to the bottom of my weekend bag, face down under my underwear, so the Shenzhen border guards wouldn't easily detect it on their X-ray machines. Usually, the guards don't so much as bat an eyelid at their monitors, but I was wary about carrying this book. It is banned in China.