Forbidden City (6 page)

“Come on, Dad, I’ll be all right. I’m not a baby, you know.”

“But what if you get lost?”

“How can I get lost? I’ve got a map.”

“I can help, Ted.”

Until then, Lao Xu had kept out of the discussion — that’s what Dad calls an argument.

“I can write something on a card for Shan Da. If he gets lost, he can show it to a taxi driver or a bus driver, or anyone. Everyone knows where Beijing Hotel is.”

“Great,” I chimed in. “And I’ll tell you what, Dad. I’ll buy a compass, too.”

Eddie looked up from his rapid-fire typing and blew out a cloud of foul-smelling smoke. “He can even take one of the two-way radios. Most of the time they just lie around here, unused.”

I didn’t really want Eddie’s help, but there was no way I was going to turn it down. “Well, how about it, Dad?”

“All right, Alex. If you promise one thing.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Be careful.”

“No, I know you’ll be careful. I want you to put everything you see on video.”

I should have known.

After lunch Lao Xu and I set out to buy a used bike.

Nin hao? Nin shen ti zen me yang?

Hah! I can talk Chinese! Or at least a week’s lessons worth of Chinese, which doesn’t sound like much, but the way Teacher Huang puts it to us, we are learning a lot. I can already do a little shopping and ask direction and buy tickets and talk about how delighted I am to be in China and witness the Four Modernizations and great progress of the
Motherland, blah, blah, blah.

About a week ago I found out there’s a school for foreign diplomats’ kids near Ri Tan Park, which is a block or so north of the Friendship Store — You Yi Shang Dian, in Chinese — and I asked Dad if I could go and learn a little Chinese. I was getting sick and tired of feeling like I was deaf, dumb, and blind all the time, never knowing what was going on around me. And I knew the only way out of that feeling was to learn some of the language.

Dad agreed and said we’d have to find a school. We were in the office at the time, and Lao Xu said he thought he could help, and a couple of days later, most of which he seemed to spend shouting into the phone —
“Wei? Wei?”
— he had found me a place. Eddie was amazed.

“I know
diplomats
who can’t get into that school!” he said.

Lao Xu just smiled and said a former classmate of his was director of the school.

“Ah,” Eddie said,
“Guan xi
. That means “connections”, Alex.” Then he said to my dad, “It’s a hard language to learn. I hope you’re not wasting your money, Ted.”

I gave Eddie a dirty look but he didn’t notice.

“Don’t worry about Alex. Once he decides to do something, get out of his way.”

Eddie took his pipe out of his mouth and laughed. “I wonder where he got that from.”

I get up at seven every morning, shower and dress
and eat, hop on my Phoenix and bike along Chang An. There’s usually a good stiff breeze, and because the city is so flat, I can
sail
. I unbutton my jacket and hold the bottom straight out from my body with one hand, making a sail, then just sit there and get pushed along by the wind. I got the idea from people I saw doing it.

By the way, speaking of my jacket, I don’t get stared at as much when I ride along now. I got sick and tired of that, too, so one day I marched along Wang Fu Jing Street near the hotel to the big department store. I bought one of those light coats that Westerners call Mao coats, a blue hat with the red star above the peak, and a pair of those corny mirror sunglasses that a lot of young guys here think are cool. I’m glad no one back home can see me. But I’m disguised enough, with my blond hair and blue eyes covered, that I get by without the stares.

Chinese is really different from English or French. The hardest part is the tones. You can say a sound four different ways, using the tones. I can’t explain it in writing, but take the sound
ma
. First tone means Mom, second means hemp or flax, third means horse, and fourth means curse or swear! As if that’s not enough, if you put
ma
without a tone on the end of the sentence, it changes the sentence from a statement to a question! There’s more. Chinese verbs have no tense. Adding
le
to the end of a sentence changes it all into the past tense. I don’t know what you do about the future. In Chinese there’s no “he” or “she”. Both are
ta
.

As if that isn’t enough, we learn Chinese by writing the words in Pin-yin. Except some letters are pronounced differently from English. X is
Hss
, so Lao Xu sounds like
Hssoo
. Q is a hard ch sound, Zh is like our J, and Z is a sound English doesn’t really have!

Enough of that. I go to school in the mornings, then head down to the Friendship Store to get a pop and a snack. In the afternoons I pack up my gear in my backpack and go out for a reconnaissance trip. I take some food, a couple of Cokes, a million battery packs, the 8mm camcorder, videotapes, my audio recorder — which I haven’t used yet, but you never know — my Walkman and some rock ‘n’ roll tapes, and my vhf two-way radio. It’s a little thing, about the size of a pack of cigarettes or pager, with a range of five or six miles in the city and five times that in the country. It has a power-saving feature when it’s on receive mode so I can leave it on while I’m out and be sure the battery won’t wear down. Dad can call me anytime he wants. We use channel one.

What I did, I bought one of those bamboo baby seats a lot of people have on their bikes. It fits on the rat-trap carrier behind the seat over the rear fender. I tie the camcorder to the carrier so it points out behind me, put it on autofocus, and lock it on. I have a little box with a hole in it that covers the camcorder but allows the lens to protrude a little. When I get to a part of the city I think is interesting, or that I think Dad might find interesting, I just get off the bike, lock the camera on, remount and ride slowly along.

I tool around the streets, exploring. I’ve been through the Forbidden City — which looks mostly like a ghost town, with expansive empty courtyards — and saw the Nine Dragon Wall, out to the Summer Palace, which is an hour’s ride to the outside of the city past Beijing University, and to the Temple of Heaven Park. Those places were weird, in a way. One minute you’re in a noisy, polluted city. Then you walk through a gate and blink your eyes and suddenly four or six hundred years disappear. You see graceful, elegant buildings with glazed roofs, wooden latticework on the windows, and quite cool interiors. Gnarled ancient pines stand in peaceful courtyards. Except on Sundays, when the places are packed with people.

The most fun I’ve had is hopping on my bike and exploring the parts of the city the tourists don’t get to or even know about. A lot of Beijing is old residential neighbourhoods where there are
hu tongs
— alleys — instead of streets, with walls along the alleys and gates that lead into courtyards. I read that these walled neighbourhoods were designed to be easily defended in times of war. So naturally I had to check them out.

One day I took a walking tour of Tian An Men Square. Lao Xu told me I could pick up a lot of fairly recent Chinese history by visiting all the spots there, and Eddie added that if I got bored there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken place at the south end of the square.

The square is mega-huge. It’s almost forty
hectares, with trees lining it on the north/south sides. I wandered through the Museum of the Revolution and the Museum of Natural History. Then I walked across the sun-baked square, past the tourists and kite flyers and families and popsicle saleswomen and professional photographers, past the tall square pillar of the Monument to the People’s Heroes with the gold writing on it, to the west side where the Great Hall of the People is. The
PLA
soldiers stationed at the doors, with their wrinkled green uniforms and green running shoes and old bolt-action rifles, didn’t look too intimidating to me. I strolled past the Mao Ze-dong Memorial Hall and the two tall blockhouses that were once part of the city wall. They’re called “gates” in Chinese. Then I crossed Qian Men Lu — Front Gate Street which is even busier than Chang An Avenue, to the chicken place. It was too crowded.

Lately when I get back to the hotel the first thing Eddie and Dad ask is, “Get any good footage?” After dinner I hook the camcorder up to the TV and show them what I have. Once, they liked some footage of traffic flowing past the Drum Tower in the pouring rain so much that Dad transferred it to superVHS tape to use as a lead-in to one of Eddie’s reports. He sent it back to Toronto. We don’t know yet whether it got on the news but Dad paid me anyway.

“A newsman ought to be paid for his work,” he said. I felt pretty good about that.

Everybody — Dad, Eddie, Lao Xu — has been busy tonight. I can hear them working in the office.

There were rumours that a Party bigwig named Hu Yao-bang is really sick and may die any time. Also that when he does there will be a big student demonstration in Tian An Men Square. Apparently Hu had lost his position in the government a couple of years ago because he had been too lenient with
student demonstrators at that time. The big boss, Deng Xiao-ping dumped him. Eddie was pretty excited, puffing away like an old steam engine, and Lao Xu looked a little bit nervous.

Dad asked me to go out after dinner and do a recon of the square and draw a map that he can use to get around with his camera to photograph the demonstration. I told him I had already checked out the square and could do a map from memory. Here it is:

Dad is getting his equipment ready. He’s humming away like an old lady almost in her right mind. He’s driving me nuts. The whole apartment is alive with wires snaking along the floor, leading to our
battery pack rechargers — for Dad’s Betacam, the two-way radios, my camcorder, my tape recorder, and Walkman. I think we’re drawing more power than the nearest factory.

Whatever happens, Terrible Teddy will be ready.

This morning I got out of bed and wobbled towards the bathroom in my usual morning fog. Something wasn’t right, though. Then I realized what was different. There were no noises coming from the office.