Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (48 page)

A few weeks later, Norman and Driver Liu were on the way to the repair shop to handle some paperwork when they suddenly spotted our old tan Toyota parked at a traffic circle. It looked exactly the same … except for the red police lights strapped across the roof and its special police plates. “I think that’s our car,” Norman said. “Can I see the serial numbers?” The uniformed policeman sitting inside ignored him.

The next morning, I hurried down to the special police station for foreigners. I had very little time because the following day I was scheduled to board a plane for Hong Kong to have Ben. On the way to the station, Driver Liu coached me on strategy.

“Now don’t lose your temper,” he warned. “Don’t accuse them of stealing your car. Don’t even say the word
steal
. Just say, ‘Sorry. Excuse me, but I believe you might have our car.’ You’ll never get the car back if you lose your temper.”

The problem would be keeping a straight face. It was a delicious
moment, catching the Reds red-handed. That morning, I faithfully stuck to Driver Liu’s script. I also produced the import documents my predecessors had meticulously filed away a decade earlier. Eventually, two tough-looking men in leather jackets walked in, introducing themselves as special detectives. I repeated my story for the umpteenth time and apologized for bothering them that day. I had little choice, I added, glancing down at my bulging belly. A look of panic flickered across their faces.

“Do you have a car?” said one, not realizing the irony of his question.

We piled into the
Globe’s
newly repaired Jeep and headed for their headquarters. “No matter what we do,” one of the detectives muttered, “it’s going to look bad. There’s no good explanation for this one.”

At headquarters, they conferred some more. The thieves turned out to be the police at the Eastern Peace precinct. Their alibi: they didn’t know who owned it. I refrained from pointing out it was the same police station where I had initially reported the theft. The police not only didn’t apologize, they announced they would keep our Toyota another month. They needed it, they explained, as an extra squad car during the tense run-up to the first anniversary of Tiananmen Square. On June 5, 1990, we got our Toyota back, a year less a day after the police had stolen it. The gas tank was empty, the odometer was broken, the cigarette lighter was gone and cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks littered the interior. As Norman cleaned out the debris, he came across a receipt for our 1989 road tax. It said: “Paid by the
Globe and Mail
of Canada.”

A couple of years later, when thieves stole the Jeep Cherokee of Deng’s eldest daughter, police recovered her car in record time.

In 1993, I decided to take the whole family to Hong Kong for the birth of our second son, Sam. “Take me with you, too,” urged Nanny Ma. “I can look after Ben while you’re in the hospital and help you with everything.” I treasured Nanny Ma. She was the smartest person in the bureau, myself included. Were it not for the Cultural Revolution, which truncated her education, I’m sure she would have been running a bank.

She was in her forties and had small crinkly eyes, a stubborn jaw and delicate hands and feet. Like all my staff, her childhood had been marked by poverty. Born in a village in coastal Shandong province, she had to feign illness as a child to get a precious egg. Now, in one generation, she had made the leap from famine to fat. In attempts to shed a few extra pounds, she sipped special “thinning” teas and went on weird diets, sometimes refusing to eat even a single grain of rice.

“She has the airs of a duchess and the fate of a scullery maid,” snorted Cook Mu in disgust, after she declined to sample a dish of his delectable fatty pork.

Nanny Ma made Ben tiny, rose-bedecked cakes out of Play-Doh. On warm summer days, she taught him how to catch dragonflies. In winter, she knitted him little wool mitts, with the thumbs missing so he could suck his thumb. And she brought him the baby quilt she had made years earlier for her own son. Ben loved Nanny Ma with all his heart. She was convinced it was destiny when at four months he developed a tiny mole in the middle of his nose that exactly matched the beauty spot on hers.

More than one friend hinted they would love to inherit her when we left. I told them not to hold their breath. Nanny Ma was coming with me to Canada. It was her idea, not mine. She assured me she could temporarily leave behind her husband and teenaged son. When I realized she was serious, I applied to bring her into Canada under a special foreign-domestics program that would eventually enable the rest of her family to emigrate to Canada.

I knew it would be expensive to take her to Hong Kong, but she would help ease Sam’s arrival into our family. And I knew it was also a rare chance for her to see the outside world. She brushed off my worries about a visa. “Lots of nannies have gone there. Its easy,” she said.

It turned out she didn’t know a single nanny who had ever been to Hong Kong. I found myself ensnarled in months of red tape. As our departure date drew near, she asked for a week off “to rest and pack.” By then, I was very pregnant, very busy and very irritable. When I refused, she asked if she could fly down alone a week later. I nixed that idea, too. The reason I was bringing her, I testily explained, was so that I could work.

But we both knew who was boss. She took the last day off despite my objections. I was so busy shutting down the office, paying last-minute bills, taking care of Ben and packing that I canceled a much-postponed haircut. I showed up at the airport the next day with my regular dog-bitten-off hairdo. Nanny Ma was relaxed and smiling. She looked great. I asked how her day off had been.

“Great,” she said. “I got my hair done.”

For a person who had never left China, Nanny Ma suffered remarkably little culture shock. On weekends, she eagerly struck out on her own in Hong Kong, taking the subway, wandering through department stores, chatting to strangers on the street and taking in the occasional movie.

Thanks to her membership in Workers of the World United, she figured we were all on a camping trip together and everybody ought to pitch in. I soon found myself doing the laundry, the grocery shopping and most of the cooking, while continuing to work.

After Sam was born, it dawned on me that I didn’t have to spend my maternity leave in smoggy sweltering Beijing. “We’ve decided to go back to Montreal for the summer,” I told Nanny Ma. “I’ve checked. There’s a perfect flight for you back to Beijing. It leaves two hours after our flight for Montreal.”

Nanny Ma flushed. “You should see
me
off first,” she said.

I was taken aback. I remembered how she had wanted to fly down on her own. I reassured her she would have no problem waiting at the Hong Kong airport, a bilingual model of efficiency. I pointed out that she had been roaming around on her own for nearly a month. When I realized she was truly insecure, I promised to book her a business-class seat, give her extra cash for an emergency and leave the phone numbers of Hong Kong friends in case disaster struck in those two hours.

“I help you, but you don’t help me,” she said, storming into her room and slamming the door. I took a deep breath and followed her in. She was lying on her bed, dabbing at her eyes with a fluffy white bath towel.

“Sam will be just one month old when we leave. I have to breastfeed him every two or three hours. Ben has just turned three. He’s still in diapers. We have to get on an eighteen-hour flight through
thirteen time zones,” I explained through gritted teeth. “We just can’t go to the airport two hours early to see you off first.”

“You saw your sister off to the airport, but you won’t take me,” said Nanny Ma. “What if I get lost? What if I can’t find the plane? What if the luggage never makes it to Beijing?” She started sobbing. Decades of cradle-to-grave socialism had rendered her incapable of handling anything on her own, or at least it had convinced her she couldn’t.

That same cradle-to-grave socialism had turned me into a raging member of the bourgeoisie. I wanted to scream: “You work for me, remember?” Just then, Norman, who loses his temper about once every ten years, stomped into the room. I left. Through the door I could hear them shouting. Norman told her she was being ridiculous. Neither of us had ever talked to her like that before. It was too traumatic for words.

“This just isn’t done,” Nanny Ma said angrily. “According to custom, if you ask someone to do a job, you must escort them all the way home again. You just can’t abandon them.” Norman retorted that if we treated her the way foreign companies treated Chinese workers, we would make her take the train to save money. It was a mistake.

“Take the
train?”
she yelled. “I’d be glad to. I’d
walk
back if I could. What if you took me to Canada and did this to me? Do you expect me to swim back?” She burst into tears anew. Norman walked out, throwing his arms in the air. After a moment, Nanny Ma emerged from her room, ignored us completely, and with great dignity told Ben she was taking him for a walk.

I looked at Norman. He looked at me. We had forgotten our place. He meekly changed her flight to one that would leave before ours. By the time Nanny Ma returned with Ben, Norman was hiding in our bedroom.

“It’s all fixed,” I said politely. “You’ll go before us. Don’t worry about Fat Paycheck Shulman. He sometimes speaks bluntly.”

“No, no. I will go
after
you,” she said icily. For ten minutes, we had that ritually polite Chinese conversation that caused traffic jams at entrances. Nanny Ma was bitterly determined we should go first, even though she remained unconvinced she would make it back to Beijing alive. I finally hit upon the perfect solution.

“Well, I am a half-wit anyway,” she said, when I told her my plan.

Dragonair provided escort services for unaccompanied children, very old people and anyone who was ill. But how to get them to take care of a middle-aged, healthy woman? I called them up and explained: My friend has to fly back on her own. The problem is, I said, she is mildly retarded.

“She can talk and all that, but, well, you know …”

The person on the other end of the line said smoothly, “Don’t worry, ma’am. We’ll take good care of her.” And that was how Nanny Ma got back to Beijing.

Nanny Ma eventually forgave us for mistreating her in Hong Kong. After three months, she even began speaking again to Norman. I assumed she was still interested in the chance at a better life, or at least the chance to give her only son that opportunity. I was wrong. She never again mentioned the plan to go with us to Canada.

At first, I thought we had fatally offended her by not seeing her off first. But it turned out that her twenty-two-year-old son had no desire to leave the motherland. He enjoyed hanging out with his friends at home. After failing the entrance exam to senior high school, he worked briefly as a hotel cook, then quit and refused to show up for other jobs his parents wangled for him. Whenever Nanny Ma lost her temper with her son, she would call him a lout and threaten to go to Canada. He would then fall to his knees and beg her to stay. The erstwhile Golden Mountain, as the earliest Chinese immigrants called North America, had gone from being the promised land to the bogeyman.

Life, it seemed, was getting very good in China. Nanny Ma’s husband was deputy chief of the Beijing Municipal Taxation Bureau, an ideal get-rich-quick job under Deng’s reforms. I watched as their standard of living soared. The tax bureau assigned him a car and a driver. It installed a phone in their home. Nanny Ma bought a freezer. And she hired a cleaning woman. If I needed any more evidence of China’s economic boom, I had it. Even my maid had a maid.

The felicitously named Dr. Long
.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail

Li Xiaohua, an ex-labor camp convict and the first Chinese to own a Ferrari
.
Photo courtesy Li Xiaohua

I
t was impossible to ignore the fact that for many, many people like Nanny Ma, life was improving dramatically. Seemingly overnight, cheap yellow minibuses flooded the streets of Beijing, making taxis affordable for the masses for the very first time. Despite a steep hook-up charge – about half a year’s pay for a state worker – many friends began installing home phones.