Little Emperors (7 page)

“No. Use special chemical paint to make that look.”

“Oh.”

“In China's terrible years,” Miranda explains, “many — thousands and thousands — temples smashed. Government said temples were old ways of thinking, so had to destroy them. Now they build them back up. For tourists.”

We walk through the first temple building. Its walls and pillars are yellow and red, its lintels green and blue. Flowers adorn the altar of a corpulent gold Buddha. Wild-faced gods lining a wall seem prefabricated, pulled from plastic moulds and painted the garish colours of carnival rides. The flagstone courtyard just beyond is serene and tranquil and surrounded by trees. Incense smoke curls fragrant from huge brass burners.

Miranda and I explore more of the temple buildings, take some pictures, then turn to go. Just as we cross back through the first building, the yellow-capped tour group streams in, talking loudly and snapping photos. A young woman, not with the group, follows them. She kneels on
a vinyl cushion in front of the fat, smiling Buddha. She clasps her hands in front of her chest, is still for a moment, then bows her head three times.

Outside, I snap one last picture. Then we leave, gravel crunching under our feet.

“Helllllloooooo Miiiiiiiiiss Diiiiiiiiiiooonne! How are youuuuuuuuu?”

Little Russ comes running across the concrete playground as I walk through the gates, his school bag thumping against his back. His seven-year-old buddies follow hot on his heels. He leaps in front of me. “Hello, Miss Dionne! How are you?”

“I'm fine, thank you, Russ. How are you?”

“I'm fine, too, thank you. And you?” he replies. His tiny friends hang back and watch, mouths open, amazed at Russ's ability to communicate with the alien creature crossing their schoolyard.

“Goodbye, Russ,” I say, turning to go up the stairs.

“Goodbye, Miss Dionne!” he sings, showing off to his friends who are not in my English class. From the corner of my eye I can see Russ huddle with the other boys, whispering to them, perhaps explaining his trick: “See . . . it's easy . . . you say certain magic words to her and she'll talk to you!”

This simple greeting from a small boy is a major breakthrough. Up until now, I have felt like a leper entering the schoolyard every day. I'd walk through the gates and under the arch of mango trees, and no one would come near. Games of jump rope would slow as girls watched me from the corners of their eyes. Ping-Pong matches would pause as the players gawked in silence, then quickly resumed their games. Kids would back against the opposite wall if they encountered me on the stairs, as if I were surrounded by a cloud of contagious germs and they wanted to stay far, far away. When I first arrived in Guangzhou and went to observe other teachers at other schools, their students would come running through the schoolyards, screaming and yelling, to mob them and escort them to their classrooms. This hadn't happened at my schools yet, and I was beginning to wonder what was wrong. I realize now it just takes time.

Later, Russ strides into class, hands in his pockets, his backpack for ballast. As he pauses in front of my desk, he waves casually and says, “Hi, Miss Dionne. How are you?” He sits on a wooden stool in front of the glass cabinet full of dead animals and shrugs his heavy Power Rangers backpack to the floor with a thud. He pulls out a sparkling pink pencil and twirls it in his fingers. Two little moles sit next to his right eye, like two stars that always follow the moon.

Everyone in this class, the youngest of my classes, is adorable. And, thus, gets away with murder. There is Joey, very much in his own world, kung fu fighting invisible demons as he walks into class, and sometimes during class should his imaginary foes suddenly appear to him in the middle of a lesson. There is Brian, the Chinese twin of Alfred E. Neuman of
MAD
comics fame, who stares up at me with his front-toothless grin as if saying, “What, me worry?” There is Jeff, whose big round eyes lend him a look of bewildered innocence, his halo blinding me to the devilish heart that ticks within. There is gentle William, the ladies' man, who leads little Becky into the classroom by the hand and insists she sit next to him. Should Becky be late or absent for a class, it's William who tells Miranda the reasons why. There is Alice, Becky's best friend, all knobby knees, buckteeth, and Coke-bottle glasses. When she comes into the room, her school bag drooping from her bony shoulders, her magnified eyes popping out at me, I can't help but smile. And there is Alexander, who floats into the room like a balloon on a string, his head too large for his thin body. A perfect gentleman, he sits on his wooden stool, folds his hands on his knees, and glances up at me as if waiting for the intellectual conversation to begin. They are all so cute, so small — with attention spans to match. They haven't learned much yet, but are perfect parrots.

Again, a breakthrough. Of sorts.

A further breakthrough: the Grade Six class, the class that laughed at the
Yellow Book
, rarely snickers at any innuendo inherent in translation anymore. They come storming into the science room on our break today, a day they don't even have our class, and run around the classroom pointing to every obscure object and asking, “Miss Dionne, what's this?”

“A ceiling fan.”

“What's this?”

“A floor tile.”

“What's this?”

“A Bunsen burner.”

“What's this?”

“An overhead projector.”

“How spell?”

I write each new word on the board. The yellow chalk, made mushy by the humidity, dissolves into the black-painted glass. As I rummage in the chalk box for a fresh piece, the kids copy their new words directly onto their hands and arms with their pens. When they are satisfied that they know more strange English words than anyone else in the school, they leave, flashing their ballpoint tattoos as they wave goodbye.

“Miss Dionne!”

I am leaving Number 1 School for the day when Betty and Liliana run from the school garden toward me. Betty's hands are cupped as if holding an invisible egg.

“Miss Dionne!” Liliana says again and points to Betty's hands. Betty moves her top hand up and away, like removing the silver dome from the main dish of a fancy meal, and
voila!
— there, in the centre of her wheat-coloured palm, sits a ladybug.

The three of us stand and watch as the dainty little bug scuttles around and around her palm, then explores the dangerous precipice of her thumb. “Red,” I say, pointing to its wings.

“Red,” the girls repeat, reviewing one of the colours they've just learned in class.

“Black,” I say, pointing to its dots.

“Black,” they repeat, then confer in Cantonese as to the meaning of “red” and “black.”

I point again at the insect. “Ladybug.”

“Nadybug,” they repeat.

“L . . . l . . . l . . . ladybug.”

“L . . . l . . . l . . . ladybug. Ladybug.”

“Good!” We watch the bug scurry around and around and up and over her hand. Betty twists her wrist to keep the polka-dot shell constantly in view. The bug bumps across Betty's knuckles and returns to her palm for a rest. It flutters its crimson wings, revealing layers of black gossamer underneath, a black crinoline peeking out from under a red dress. I want to stay all evening, just the two girls, the ladybug, and I. But, being an adult, I am always going somewhere in a hurry. I point to my watch and say, “Miss Dionne must go. Goodbye!”

“Goodbye!” they chorus, their eyes still transfixed on the bug now scaling a finger.

I go out the school gates. When does it leave, I wonder, that skill of being fascinated by the perfect red shell and quick black stockings of a ladybug? Where does it go?

Sunday morning, Kerry and I go to the Garden Hotel for a swim in the outdoor pool. We float on our backs and stare up at swaying palm leaves and the fluttering red flag of China. Ah, decadence!

Two foreign businessmen, a Chinese-American and a Lebanese-American, lower themselves into the water a pool's width away. They start chatting with us, and we soon learn they live in the hotel apartments. “How long have you girls been in Guangzhou?” asks the Lebanese.

“About two months,” we reply.

“And what do you think about it?” asks the Chinese.

“Well . . .” Kerry and I look at each other. Who would tell the truth? “It's very interesting, but . . . um . . . kind of crowded and polluted.”

“You know,” the Lebanese begins, submerging himself then re-emerging and wiping the water away from his eyes, “Shanghai is worse. More people, much more pollution, and you see these —” he points up toward the construction cranes surrounding the hotel “— you see many more of these in Shanghai.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” replies the Chinese, kicking on his back toward the far end of the pool. “The construction crane. It's the new national bird of China.”

I'm not teaching English. I'm creating monsters. Little English-speaking Chinese monsters. I would like to have a word with whoever had the bright idea of putting size vocabulary in the same unit of the
Yellow Book
as body part vocabulary. The kids have begun to take what I teach them and use it against me.

“Miss Dionne has big eyes.”

“Good! Good!”

“Miss Dionne has a big
nose
!”

“Okay . . .”

“Miss Dionne has a big
stomach
!”

“That's enough, now . . .”

While singing the hokey-pokey yesterday, Russ turned his back into the circle and pointed at his rear end. “What's this?”

“Bum!” I replied, not thinking of the consequences.

Soon everyone was laughing and poking at their friends' buttocks and shrieking, “Bum!
Bum
!
BUM
!” Then the inevitable happened: “Miss Dionne has a
big bum
!”

More shrieks of laughter.

Monsters. Little monsters.

I can't believe it's only Tuesday. The week has just started and it already feels years long. I am so sluggish at work this morning. I have a horrible sore throat that burns right up into my ears. Miranda has to do all the yelling in class.

At lunch, I stay at school to do report cards. Miranda goes to her house and brings back some medicine. She hands me a small rectangular box; the only English on it says “Watermelon Mist.” Inside is a plastic vial, not unlike an eye-drop bottle, filled with a fine black talc. Miranda instructs me to spritz the powder onto the back of my throat. I do. She also tells me not to drink any water with it. I don't. It feels as if I am filling my throat with Vicks VapoRub–flavoured baby powder.

The afternoon is worse. My throat still hurts. I feel clammy. Everything sounds as though it's underwater. By the last class at Number 2 School, I am dizzy and drained and have little idea what I am doing. The kids, for their part, have little interest in what I am doing.

Halfway through the uninspired lesson, a dragonfly the size of a spoon hums through the open windows of the music room. The girls squeal. The ceiling fans blow the dragonfly off course, pushing it down and closer to the students. The girls shriek. Everyone freezes and watches the dragonfly as it zigzags around the classroom. Twelve pairs of eyeballs follow it —
zip
, to the left, then
zip
, to the right. The girls duck and screech whenever it gets too close. Finally, it alights out of view on a ceiling beam, everyone calms down, and I continue with the much less interesting lesson.

Suddenly —
bazaap
!

And bits of dragonfly rain down upon us.

The dragonfly has flown into the smallest ceiling fan and gotten chopped to smithereens. The class screams as parts of wings fall here, slices of tail fall there. Half a torso with twitching legs lands next to my chair. The boys grab what pieces of the corpse they can and
terrorize the girls with them. General chaos reigns.

“We could say,” wheezes Miranda, laughing at the carnage before us, “we could say, ‘He killed himself,' right?”

“Yes,” I say, chuckling and forgetting how awful I feel. “Suicide by ceiling fan!”

Little May hollers a blood-curdling,
“Miss Dionne! MISS DIONNE!”
I look over and see her sitting with her legs tucked up onto her small plastic chair. Her eyes are wild with panic. She points to a tiny black ball under her chair.
“Eyes! Head! Eyes!”
she screams in English.

I go to take a closer look. Sure enough, the dragonfly's head has come clean off and landed under her chair. “Good, May! You're right,” I say, complimenting her excellent use of the new vocabulary. I point with the toe of my shoe. “That's a head and those are eyes.”

May gives me a pained smile. She seems to be holding her breath. I sweep the small head away with the edge of my shoe. May exhales with relief and releases her feet onto the floor.

A few of the braver ones in the class collect the remains of the late dragonfly and throw them out the window, returning it whence it came.

“I will only work for the teaching centre for another two weeks,” Miranda says as we walk out of the school gate.

Breakthroughs, I've noticed, are often followed by bombshells.

Blood drains invisibly from my fingers and toes.
No!
I silently protest.
Don't leave me! Your marriage isn't until the end of August! It's barely the middle of June!
“But why?” is all I can muster.

“Because I've decided I want to travel in China before my marriage. I want to visit Tibet. I'm going alone. I must go for two months because it's a big place.”

“Will you come back to Guangzhou?”

“I go for two months' travel, then my marriage, then I will go to other part of China to work until October. By October, I hope to go Seattle.”