Forbidden City (23 page)

I couldn’t say it.

“When I was a little kid, in elementary school, we were taught
PLA
were the heroes.” Xin-hua spoke almost in a whisper, almost as if I wasn’t there and she was talking to herself. “Sometimes the
PLA
soldier would come to the school and talk to us, tell us how
PLA
liberated China before we were born. Since then they fought imperialists in the Korea, fought Russians in the north because of the border argument, fought Vietnam, who were Russia’s friends at that time.”

I remembered that Lao Xu had told us the Twenty-seventh Field Army were Vietnam veterans.

“We called those
PLA
guys Shu-shu, means “Uncle”. My elder brother, when we were very small, had a
PLA
uniform he wore all the time, even to school.”

Xin-hua wasn’t exactly answering my question, but I let her talk without interrupting her. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that something she had believed all her life had blown up in her face and that she was having a tough time coping with that.

As if she had heard my thought she said, “I don’t know what happened, Shan Da. But I think the Party and the government, especially those old leaders,
lost face when Gorbachev was here and we students were demonstrating in the square. We made them look like they couldn’t control the country. We made a big mistake. We wanted them to lose face, so they would pay attention to us.”

She began to cry. “We never thought,” she sobbed, “we never thought they would do that to us!”

Cao chuan jie jian
, I thought. “Straw boat borrow arrows”. The government had used the People’s Army against the people.

Xin-hua covered her face with her hands and cried harder. I crawled across the dirt floor and sat beside her. I didn’t know what to do, so I put my arm around her.

Her crying, the dreary rain, homesickness — everything started to work on me, and I felt my throat thicken. I choked back a sob and tried to keep control.

Xin-hua raised her face from her hands and looked at me. Drops of water stood out on her straight lashes. “So many of my friends, my classmates, were shot down,” she whispered, “even one of my teachers. My friends,” she sobbed again, “I lost my friends.”

I began to cry. “Me too,” I said.

We sat like that for a long time.

The drumming of the rain on the roof decreased slowly to a light patter. My arm was beginning to feel numb and when I removed it from Xin-hua’s
shoulder I was glad to see she had dropped off to sleep. Her arms were crossed on her knees and her forehead rested on her arms. Who knows how much sleep she had managed over the last week?

I crawled back across the floor and retrieved my cane. I pulled myself to my feet and hobbled to the Peony box. I pulled off the lid and lifted out the camcorder. It was dry. I put it back into the wire cradle, squeezed the lid onto the box, and hobbled to the door. Outside, rain drizzled out of a heavy grey sky. It was 5:00 P.M. I went outside and walked through the long sodden grass to the walkway. I took a look out the gate, scanning the dirt road in both directions. To my right, in the distance, light traffic moved along Bai Shi Qiao Road. A solitary man fished at the culvert, his long bamboo pole arched over the water. Outside the gate the water meandered slowly around rocks, through the wide riverbed.

I went back inside the temple grounds, walking up the pathway to the tall platform. There were lines of Buddhas carved into the light orange marble wall. Dozens of them. The five pagodas were clearly visible, now that the rainfall had lessened, one at each corner of the platform, the fifth, taller, in the middle. Bells hung from the ends of some of the eaves. Lao Xu had once told me the bells were to keep evil spirits away.

I walked around the platform. All over, in the long grass, were fallen pillars, rubble, pieces of green tile — not the kind of destruction that the passing
of time would cause. Then I remembered that, during the Cultural Revolution that ended about ten years ago, gangs of Red Guards would swarm into temples, museums, and other historical monuments, smashing things up and defacing everything they could reach. Something to do with stopping the worship of old customs.

When I got back to the little house the rain had come on strong again. Xin-hua was still asleep. I lowered myself to the floor again, opposite the door, staring out at the rain beating the grass, listening to the hammering on the roof.

I looked at Xin-hua, hunched over, her head on her slender arms. If I ever got to the embassy, ever got out of this place, I would hate to leave her behind. I don’t mean I was falling in love with her, or any of that soap-opera stuff. I was
worried
about her. What would happen when I left? It was easy for me. I could leave this country — at least, I
hoped
I could. But what would happen to her?

I imagined her in Canada, goggle-eyed at all the strange things she’d see. Especially how rich people are. The freedom we have. And then I began to compare her to the kids I knew, the ones my age, the older ones who had gone to university. That gave me a funny feeling. Things at home would seem different now. I knew, I just knew that from now on there would be some kind of gap between me and the other kids. We were all pretty well off, at least the people I hung around with. All the guys could drive.
They all lived in nice houses, some with pools in the yard, most with basketball hoops over the garage door. Colour TVs, VCRs, a late-model car in the driveway. And that’s what most of the guys wanted when they got through school. A good job, meaning one that paid lots of money. A cottage in Muskoka.

If I told them that in China one of those little washing machines was a status symbol, they’d laugh. If I told them about Nai-nai’s house and how peaceful her courtyard was, they’d tell me to get real. But whose world was more real? Ours, or the world Xinhua lived in?

She was different from the girls I knew, too. Really different. Their idea of a tragedy was running out of mousse or breaking a fingernail. They were a lot like the woman I had seen this morning on the movie billboard. They were almost all heavily into feminism and talked about being taken seriously as
persons
while they put on purple lipstick. I don’t know. Maybe I was being too hard on them. But nobody I knew was like Xin-hua. To me, she was a hero. A strong woman with more character than most of the kids I knew, male or female, put together.

Including me.

It was five o’clock and still pouring rain so I lay down on the dirt and tried to get comfortable. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

It was a long night. The rain came and went. The wind blustered, hissing in the long grass, moaning around the pagodas. At least a thousand times I imagined I heard a platoon of
PLA
come charging through the gate, equipment rattling, to drag us out of the brick hut and throw us against the ancient wall of the temple and shoot us. After the first dozen times I stopped getting up and checking the gate.

Towards dawn the wind came up stronger and I guess it blew away the rain, because when I finally decided there was no use trying to sleep anymore the rain had stopped. I went outside to go to the bathroom — only there wasn’t one, of course. It was still grey outside, but the cloud was higher up and moving at quite a clip. Xin-hua woke up when she heard the lunch tins rattling as I pried off the lids. I was starving and I was pretty sure she was worse off than me.

She smiled at me and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

“Hungry?” I asked.

She nodded and looked a little embarrassed. “I back in a minute.”

She went outside. While she was gone I took the top off the washing machine box and set it on the dirt floor as a makeshift table. I put a lunch tin on each side, along with two of the plastic bottles of green stuff. Luckily Nai-nai had put a set of chopsticks in with each lunch.

We attacked the rice and pickled vegetables. The green stuff Xin-hua had bought the day before tasted like sugar with sugar added, but at least it was wet.

My leg seemed better. I could put more weight on it. I hoped it wouldn’t flare up too much with the travelling it would get. I had two pain pills left, and I wanted to save them until I needed them.

Xin-hua and I figured that with luck and without any mishaps, we should be able to get to the embassy sometime during the afternoon. The thing was, she
emphasized, not to try to move too quickly or else we would attract attention. I knew what she meant. We had to blend in, which was hard enough with my tall lanky build and my sunglasses on a cloudy day. We had to be two workers, delivering a washing machine for a lucky owner, taking it easy along the way.

We set out into the teeth of a stiff wind, bouncing our way back to Bai Shi Qiao Road, the tires of the
che
squishing and slipping in the mud. We turned north. Bikes hissed past, bells jingling, as people went to work. Soon we passed the wide front gate of the Friendship Hotel. When I had been there with Eddie and Dad the place was bustling, with taxis and tour buses and bikes going in and out of the open gates. Now it looked like the place was closed. There was a soldier by the gate house and the wide gates were shut. Xin-hua pedalled more slowly as we passed.

“Seems the foreigners have all left,” she commented.

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking. Past the hotel, near the intersection with the Third Ring Road, I called out to Xin-hua.

“Hold up a sec.”

“What?” she said, still pedalling.

“Stop, please.”

Xin-hua steered the
che
off the pavement.

“I have an idea, Xin-hua. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Why don’t we go into the Friendship Hotel! I could use the phone to call
the embassy.” It all seemed so easy, I felt like a fool for not thinking of it long before.

Xin-hua shook her head. “Shan Da, I can’t go in there. Chinese not allowed in the hotel without special permission.”

I had forgotten about that. Chinese couldn’t get into a hotel where foreigners stayed unless they had business there and the papers to prove it. They couldn’t get into the Friendship Store either, unless they had connections.

“Okay, you’re right. But how about if you wait outside and I go in?”

She shook her head again. “Shan Da, you look Chinese now, remember?”

I put my hand up to my hair, still stiff with black polish, and a little dirty from lying on the floor of the hut. “But I can still speak English to the guard. He’ll believe me, don’t you think?”

Again the irritating head shake. “No passport, Shan Da. No
ID
. You could be anybody.
PLA
are looking for students who are running away.”

She started to pedal again, sure that my idea was dumb. Which it was, I realized now. Until I got to the embassy, I was nobody. I was a worker delivering a washing machine, whether I liked it or not.

We turned onto the Third Ring Road, a wide avenue that headed east past high rises and stores and lots of construction sites. The crane towers rose silent and unmoving into the dull sky like bits of giant building sets left unfinished by a child.

I was just saying to Xin-hua that on this road at least the pavement was fairly smooth when we spotted them in the distance. A convoy of trucks, packed full with troops, bristling with rifles held upright by the soldiers. Heading towards us. As the convoy advanced the people on the sidewalks scattered, disappearing down side streets and into stores. Cyclists pressed on, looking down at the road as they pumped, or found reasons to swing onto side streets.

Which is exactly what Xin-hua did. She hunched her shoulders, as if remembering the shots that flew over her head yesterday, and made a sharp turn to the right onto a tree-lined street, and increasing her speed.

So we headed back south, the direction from which we had come that morning.

Eventually we turned east, then north, I think, then we zigged and zagged along a narrow alley through a quiet neighbourhood and came out near the Huang Si, the Yellow Temple. My leg had started to stiffen up again, and I kept shifting my weight and changing my position.