Little Emperors Read online

  LITTLE

  EMPERORS

  a year with the future of china

  LITTLE

  EMPERORS

  a year with the future of china

  JOANN DIONNE

  Copyright © JoAnn Dionne, 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Michael Carroll

  Copy-editor: Andrea Waters

  Designer: Jennifer Scott

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dionne, JoAnn

  Little emperors : a year with the future of China / JoAnn Dionne.

  ISBN 978-1-55002-756-3

  1. Dionne, JoAnn. 2. Children — China — Guangzhou — Social conditions — 21st century. 3. China — Social conditions — 21st century. 4. China — Social life and customs — 21st century. 5. Teachers — China — Biography. 6. Teachers — Canada — Biography. I. Title.

  HQ792.C5D56 2007

  305.234’0951275090511

  C2007-904682-7

  1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use lyrics from the following songs:

  “Zombie” by Dolores O’Riordan. Copyright © 1994 Universal — Island Music Ltd. Administered by Universal — Songs of Polygram International, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “Stayin’ Alive” by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb. Copyright © 1977 Crompton Songs LLC (NS) and Gibb Brothers Music (BMI). All rights on behalf of Crompton Songs LLC administered by Warner/Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014.

  Printed and bound in Canada

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  For Connie and the kids

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Note on Language and Names

  PART I

  1

  Scatter to Flat Root

  2

  Lunch

  3

  Not Free to Go

  4

  A Walk on White Cloud Mountain

  5

  Ladybugs, Dragonflies, and Building Cranes

  6

  Bad China Days

  PART II

  7

  Things Appear, Things Disappear

  8

  A Revolution . . . of Sorts

  9

  Near Death on the Li Jiang, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

  10

  The Tide® of Change

  11

  A Little of the Everyday

  12

  Tea and Moon Cakes

  13

  Shanghai Is a Verb

  PART III

  14

  A Bowl Full of Stars

  15

  Cantonese Lessons

  16

  The Golden Arches

  17

  Fashion Faux Pas

  18

  How the Gweilo Ruined Christmas

  19

  Double Happiness

  20

  Ghosts from the East Sea

  PART IV

  21

  Deng Xiaoping vs. the NBA

  22

  Sunny Days

  23

  A Year

  24

  The Red Tent

  25

  The Accident

  26

  Chinada!

  27

  The Hong Kong Communist Party

  PART V

  28

  The Old Man of China

  29

  The Strength of Bamboo

  30

  The Future

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The road to publication was a lengthy and difficult one for Little Emperors. However, many people along the way made the journey easier. I would like to thank them here.

  My thanks to “the China girls,” my Canadian and American colleagues in Guangzhou, namely, Kerry Allin, Amanda Haskins, Serra Hughes, Theresa Hughes, Celine Keshishian, Rhonda MacDonald, Jan-Marie Oldenburg, and Shelley Yip. Thank you for being there in Guangzhou and appearing here in this book.

  My gratitude to the late Manuela Dias, whose interest in the idea for this book in the spring of 1997 gave me the courage to write it.

  Thank you to my parents, Eugene and Sandra Dionne, for allowing me to boomerang home at the age of twenty-eight to work on the first draft of the manuscript. Thank you to Angela, Rebecca, and Cody for the good tea and company during those winter evenings in Salmon Arm. Thank you to Dorothy Rolin and everyone at the Shuswap Writers’ Group for being the first audience for these stories.

  Thank you to Noriko Sakamoto for the emergency loan of a printer one summer long ago in Vancouver.

  My thanks to author Sandra Hutchison for her generous helpings of lasagna and advice during my early days in Hong Kong.

  Thank you to my bosses at the Hong Kong office of Oxford University Press. Thank you for hiring me on and teaching me to think like an editor and for keeping me employed long after I left the building.

  Thank you to Sue Dockstader and all my colleagues at the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society for your camaraderie at the FCC.

  A big doh je saai to my many wonderful friends in and from Hong Kong, particularly Laura Bennett, James Chow, Suzy Deline, Stephanie Fowler, Lana Friesen, Tina Ganguly, Anna Hestler, Sarah Jury, Janice Reis Lodge, Martin Lodge, Maureen Nienaber, Niall Phelan, Lisa Pretty, Mani Rao, Daffyd Roderick, Sania Sadhvani, Steven Schwankert, Delanie Sunderwald, and Jamaika Wong. Your companionship sustained me more than you know.

  Extra-special thanks to the inimitable Ms. Donna Doi, the best neighbour a writer in the throes of rewriting a manuscript could ever wish for.

  Thank you to Heidi Harms, Andris Taskans, and Janine Tschuncky at Prairie Fire magazine in Winnipeg. “The Old Man of China,” Chapter 28 in this book, placed second in Prairie Fire’s 2001 non-fiction contest and was published in that journal in early 2002.

  My gratitude to The Dundurn Group’s editorial director, Michael Carroll, for believing in this book and for rescuing the manuscript not once but twice: first from the top of a dusty Hong Kong shelf, then again, years later, from a burning ship. Thanks also to copy-editor Andrea Waters.

  Thanks to Melanie Knetsch and James Watson for the backdrop, the photo, and the couch in Crouch End.

  Thank you to the wel
coming and supportive community of writers I met upon moving to Victoria, especially Andrea McKenzie and Elizabeth Walker, the first of the gang to befriend me.

  For their friendship and encouragement across oceans of time and space, I am deeply grateful to Grace Aquino, Jennifer Cameron, Glen Kovar, Stephanie Revel, and Craig Shaw.

  I am also deeply grateful to my Chinese teaching partners in Guangzhou. Without them this book could never have been written. I am particularly thankful to Connie, the best co-teacher, translator, tour guide, and dearest friend I could have ever hoped to meet in the People’s Republic of China.

  And lastly, I must thank my students. Thank you for being so grand. Thank you for teaching me so much. May all your life dreams come true.

  NOTE ON

  LANGUAGE AND NAMES

  The official language of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is putonghua, or “common speech.” However, this common speech is Mandarin Chinese as spoken in the Beijing dialect. While most people in the PRC do speak Mandarin, it is often as a second language to their own regional dialect (and often heavily accented by their regional tongue). This is the case in Guangzhou — historically known in English as Canton — where most people speak Cantonese as their first language.

  In this book, I have usually noted when a person is speaking one or the other of the languages. I have represented Mandarin using the standard Romanized spelling system of pinyin. Generally, the letters are pronounced as they are in English, with the notable exceptions of q (pronounced ch), x (somewhere between s and sh), and zh (pronounced j). All place and street names are in Mandarin. For the Cantonese parts, I have used the Lonely Planet Cantonese Phrasebook to help me spell the words in English letters and, where that failed, I have made as close a phonetic rendering as I could. Words common in English I have kept as they are spelled in English, for example, won ton and Hong Kong.

  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

  PART I

  1

  Scatter to Flat Root

  “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 aslee
p.

  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.