Forbidden City (5 page)

“I think I’m beginning to see,” Dad said.

“Yep. If you tell your boss — your leader, they call him or her — to stick his job in his ear, and you quit and go to another job, he refuses to transfer your
hu kou
.”

“He can do that?” I asked angrily.

“Your leader has tremendous power over your life, Alex. In lots of things, not just your job.
Hu kou
is also the way the government controls population movement. For instance, if you live in the country on a farm and you want to move into the city, you can’t. The Public Security Bureau won’t accept your
hu kou
. So you have to stay where you are. Otherwise, millions of people would move into the cities, which are already overcrowded.”

I let all this soak in for a minute. I could see the part about the population. There were well over a billion people in China. But the stuff about the jobs sounded stupid to me.

“Anyway,” I said, “it’s too bad. Lao Xu is a terrific guy. I really like him.”

“Yeah,” Dad said, “me too.”

Eddie smiled a cold smile. “Yep, Lao Xu is the nicest spy you’d ever want to meet.”

“Spy?” I almost shouted. “What do you mean?”

Eddie took a big swallow of beer and shifted in his chair. “Well, part of Lao Xu’s job is to keep his superiors up to date on our activities. As a matter of fact,” he laughed, “if one of us sneezes, the Party boss says Bless you. Or would, if she weren’t officially an atheist.”

“Come on, Eddie,” I complained. “Stop talking in riddles.”

“Alex, you know that Lao Xu’s job is to assist me and your dad as an interpreter, right?” And you know he helps us if we want to arrange an interview with someone, or dig up some background for a story. For instance, tomorrow morning we’re going
to the Citi building — you’ve seen it, it’s down past the Friendship Store — to do a little piece on a new joint venture between China and another wine industry in France. Well, Lao Xu made the connections and got approval from the government to set it up.”

“Approval? Why do you need approval?”

“Because it’s a government project. Remember, this is a centralized communist state. The government doesn’t have to talk to the
CBC
about its plans to do business with French grape-growers. This isn’t Canada, where the government officials are responsible to the citizens because the citizens elected them. Political power here belongs to a very few, very old men. The Chinese government can do whatever it pleases, including send us all home tomorrow if it wants. Lao Xu is also arranging for us to cover Gorbachev’s visit. We’ll do our interviews, write our copy, then take the tapes down to
CBS
or
CNN
and ask them nicely if we can use their satellite feed to send the video to Toronto. But that satellite feed is set up by the Chinese government especially for the state visit, and they can pull the plug anytime.

“Lao Xu wears a couple of hats, Alex. He’s assigned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help us. And he’s good. He has lots of contacts and he gets us stuff that helps us keep ahead of a lot of the other news agencies. But part of his job is reporting back to his superiors on all our activities.”

“But what’s to report? I mean, you’re not doing anything wrong or illegal. What do they care?”

Eddie took another swallow of beer, then puffed furiously to get his stove going again. “They care because we’re foreigners. Foreigners are not trusted here — or in any country where there is no freedom. Number two, your dad and I are journalists from a country that has freedom of the press. We’re used to writing and broadcasting and” — he nodded to my dad — “photographing what we want. Here, the news is managed totally. The Chinese have a cynical but true saying. In the
People’s Daily
— that’s the official Party newspaper, like
Pravda
in Russia — in the
People’s Daily
only the date is the truth. And it’s like that with all the local newspapers, like
Beijing Ri Bao
or
Guan Min Ri Bao
. They’re all run by the state. Get the picture?”

I nodded slowly.

“If the Central Committee wanted, it could shut down all foreign correspondents in a day or two. Lao Xu is the government’s link to us and to what we’re doing.”

I had a sinking feeling in my gut. I felt hurt and angry and stupid. I felt betrayed. The guy who I thought really liked me, who was becoming my friend, was an informer. Was he taking me around to tourist spots and talking to me just to get information on me and my dad and Eddie for a file? And yet at the same time I was a little bugged at Eddie for telling me. He seemed to enjoy it.

My mind quickly replayed my trip to the wall and the tombs. I tried to remember things Lao Xu
had asked me. There wasn’t much — just stuff about school. I had done most of the asking. Then I tried to recall things I had told him. Something kept returning to my mind. It was the way he laughed. That ironic laugh. It was quiet and short, but you couldn’t mistake it. The laugh said, “This isn’t the way things ought to be, but that’s life.” It wasn’t a spy’s laugh.

But what did I know about spies?

Eddie heaved himself out of his chair. His slippers slapped as he padded across the rug and got another beer from the fridge. He poured some into Dad’s glass before topping up his own.

“Try not to be too hard on Lao Xu, Alex,” Dad said. “He likes you. I know he does. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t take you around like he did today. That’s not part of his job.”

As Eddie lowered himself into his chair he said, “Maybe so. But part of his job is reporting on us. You can be sure that everything he knows about you and especially your dad is on file with the Public Security Bureau. Each one of us has a dossier.”

He laughed cynically. “If it makes you feel any better, someone is also reporting on
him.”

It didn’t. Maybe Lao Xu and I could still be friends, but now I knew there would always be a wall between us.

Today I felt really down. I don’t know, maybe it was just jet lag or something but I got homesick. I wished I could sleep in my own water bed in my own room, listen to my tunes on the stereo in our living room, maybe have a fire going, call up my friends on the phone — and eat real food.

I only brought six novels with me and I’m into the second already. Where will I get stuff to read?
And there’s nothing on TV here. The only program in English that I can find is a really lame show that comes from England called
Follow Me
. It’s supposed to teach English. They say things like “Do you really have your own lorry? Smashing!” or “
Who
is in the
loo?”
and fascinating stuff like that.

The most frustrating thing is that I can’t really
do
anything because I can’t speak Chinese. As soon as I step outside this boring hotel I’m isolated — totally. I can’t shop or anything unless Lao Xu comes with me to translate. He’s really good about that and he helps a lot, but it’s kind of a pain to stand in the middle of a store getting stared at by a couple of dozen Chinese while Lao Xu and a salesperson rap on about me like I’m a total retard or I’m invisible.

In our hotel suite everybody but me has work to do. Eddie keeps giving me these I’m Busy And You’re In My Way looks.

And Dad. He’s in his element, buzzing around, humming to himself like he was totally demented, having a great time. This morning, when he thought I had left the suite, he said to Eddie that if it was up to him he’d live here for a year, no problem. Now I’m afraid he’ll want to stay for longer. I hope he’s not planning to go back on our deal. I can hang in for as long as we planned, but after that I’m out of here. Even if I have to go back alone.

I got up at around nine this morning, which is practically the middle of the day in China. I heard Dad, Eddie, and Lao Xu in the office, so I slipped into the bathroom, showered and returned to the bedroom without disturbing them. I didn’t really want to talk to Lao Xu this morning. I could hear the word processor keys clicking in the background while Lao Xu yelled into the telephone, shouting “
Wei!
” every few seconds.

I went to the hotel dining room and had some toast, then I cruised the hotel shops for postcards. I got some with pictures of the wall or Forbidden City on them, plus a map of Beijing, and a copy of
Beijing, Old and New
. I was forming a plan of what I wanted to do for the next week or so to kill time.

I went and sat in the lobby coffee shop and wrote a card to Mom — Dad said I should write to her once in a while — and watched the tourists strolling by or browsing at the long glass display cases across the lobby where they sold everything from lacquer ware to stuffed pandas.

I opened the map, pleased to find that the streets were named in Pin-yin, the alphabetic system the Chinese use to teach kids how to pronounce the characters in the national language, Mandarin. Because the names of the streets and sites were written in this way, I could read them and follow the street signs, which were written in Pin-yin as well as normal Chinese characters.

I love maps. I think I got hooked on them from my interest in military history and restaging battles. I like to just sit and read them sometimes, sort of getting a picture of a city’s layout in my head and imagining what strategies I’d use if I were invading or defending it. Toronto, for example, is easy. All the streets are laid out on a north-south/east-west grid, except for spots like the Don Valley or the Humber River where the course of the rivers sometimes leads to streets whose direction varies from the pattern.
Beijing was the same, I saw right away. The map showed the Forbidden City pretty well in the centre with Bei Hai, a long lake, to the west of it. The map showed where the old city walls once stood. The walls and most of the gates have been torn down.

The plan I mentioned that was forming in my mind was this: I’d see if Dad would let me buy a bike so I could get around on my own. Then, with my map and copy of
Beijing, Old and New
I could tool around the city and see what I wanted. Dad and Eddie seemed to be getting busier every day, and even if they weren’t I doubted Dad would want to go exploring with me. There’s no way I was going to sit around in the hotel all the time.

I sat back and looked at the tourists some more. Then my eye caught something moving high in the corner where the wall met the ceiling. A video camera. I could tell from the angle that it wasn’t pointed at the display cases. It was watching people in the lobby.

It made me uncomfortable to think that in some little room in the hotel someone was eye-balling us all. It really bugged me. Alex, you’re getting paranoid, I said to myself. After all, I had seen them in stores in Toronto. Still, I felt exposed, examined. I guessed the feeling was just fallout from what Eddie had told me about Lao Xu. Then I remembered something Eddie had said that night that sort of went by me at the time. He said that someone is probably reporting to someone about Lao Xu.
Maybe Lao Xu feels just as bad about the situation as I do.

“Well, I don’t know,” Dad was saying in that tone of voice parents use when they
do
know and the answer is going to be no.