Little Emperors (10 page)

I walk a few more steps in search of the restaurant's remains. I am just about to give up, thinking it must have all been destroyed, when I see parts of two yellow-tiled walls poking up from the rubble. They are the back walls of the restaurant. Their edges are jagged, as if someone has bitten off the front half of the building. I clamber up a pile of bricks and dust to take a closer look. From the top of the brick pile, I see men and women scrambling over the wreckage of the block, salvaging reusable bricks and wood and putting them into wheelbarrows. It is the scene of earthquake aftermath.

I stare at the destroyed restaurant. A severed pipe sprays into the space where the sink once was.
What about the cooks and the waitresses and the baskets of snakes?
I wonder.
Where are they now?
Gone. Gone for the sake of a wider street or a taller, newer building.

An old Guangzhou neighbourhood is torn down to make way for a new freeway and an underpass
.

A line from my Mandarin phrase book comes back to me:
Do you think China's present urban reform is making progress?
I clutch the blue-and-white flowerpot to my chest, turn down a narrow alley, and wind my way back home.

“Miss Dionne, do you like?”

Little Russ holds a plastic bag filled with ice and two cans of Coke up to me. His mom stands at the door, dropping him off for class. I smile and wave thank you to her. As Russ hands me the bag, the ice breaks through the bottom and freezing water cascades down my leg and onto my suede sandals.

“Thank you, Russ!” I say. It is by far the hottest day of the year, so giving his teacher ice-cold soda pop is a very thoughtful gesture, even if it ruins her shoes.

Do you like?
With these three words a wall seems to have come tumbling down in my classes. Such a simple, basic question, but with it I can now access the minds of my students, find out what they are thinking and hear their opinions.
Do you like?
has turned out to be a magical key.

We start with colours. I soon discover the majority of Chinese children don't like blue. One student after another answers, “No, I don't” when it comes to blue. I turn to Echo and ask her to ask them why.

“Blue is a sissy colour,” says one class.

“Blue is an angry colour,” answers another.

I explain that blue is very popular in Canada because it is the colour of the sky, the lakes, and the rivers. Echo's translation is met with puzzled looks. Then I understand — the sky in Guangzhou is often a smoggy grey, its rivers a constant flow of brown or black. These kids have not known the joy of lying on a front lawn in the middle of summer and staring up at a sky so deep and so blue you wish you could dive into it. How can you cultivate an appreciation for blue when you never see it?

Not surprisingly, red is the overall favourite. It's the colour synonymous with China on so many levels. Traditionally, it is the colour of luck, of fortune, of Chinese lanterns. In the modern era, it is the colour of
communism — Red China, the Red Army, Mao's Little Red Book, the East is Red.

A few students, however, reply, “No, I don't” when I ask if they like red. I point to the flag above the blackboard and say, teasingly, “But the Chinese flag is red!”

“Yeah!” a handful of students shout. They jump up and point accusing fingers at the dissidents. “The Chinese flag is red!” they say in Cantonese. “You
must
like red!”

“Oh,” answer the accused, realizing they have forgotten this fact. They sit down and answer quietly, “Yes, I do.”

Next, it is the
Sesame Street
characters' turn under the glare of public scrutiny. What do the kids
really
think about these bug-eyed creatures in their books, anyway? I decide to introduce democracy into my classroom and have a vote. I place all of the Muppet picture cards along the chalkboard tray.

“Now, before we start,” I explain to the class, “remember that you vote the way you feel. Raise your hand for the character
you
like, not necessarily the one your friends like.”

Echo translates my instructions. The children nod.

“Okay. Who likes Big Bird? Raise your hand.”

Big Bird's fans raise their arms. I write the number on the board.

“Who likes Cookie Monster?” Arms go up. “Uh, Annie, Glen, Stacey . . . you can only vote one time. If you like Big Bird, you can't vote for Cookie Monster, too. One person, one vote.”

Echo translates. The kids nod. We start again.

At the end of the election, we count up the votes. They indicate bad news for Big Bird. In a class of twenty, only one student considers Big Bird the best Muppet for the job. Ernie, on the other hand, receives a whopping 40 percent of the popular vote.

After the polls close, we put the students in pairs so they can practise asking each other
Do you like . . . ?
As I wander through the classroom checking pronunciation, I overhear Grace ask Calvin, “Do you like Miss Dionne?”

I stop, turn, and watch Calvin as he formulates his answer. He looks up at me, gulps, and squeaks, “Yes, I do.”

Good answer.

I may allow some democracy in my classroom, but I am still a dictator at heart.

This morning as I walk up to the science room, I am greeted by a pile of washroom rubble — slimy bricks, smashed porcelain, sections of rusty pipe — at the top of the stairs on the third floor. A trail of crushed concrete from the back of the pile points toward the completely gutted washroom. Its floors and walls are nothing more now than scraped brick. The wall separating the girls' toilet from the boys' has been completely torn away overnight. As I tiptoe my way around the toilet debris, I realize I am witnessing history in the making.

The Toilet Revolution has come to Number 1 School!

I heard about this revolution before leaving Canada. My family had just finished helping me move furniture into my sister's apartment. We were flopped out on the sofa watching CNN when a story about the great Toilet Revolution sweeping the People's Republic of China came on. The reporter showed before and after footage of China's drive to modernize its washrooms. He explained that the Chinese government had commissioned a worldwide design contest for new public toilets. The winning designs came from as far away as Italy, Sweden, and Australia.

“Well, Jo,” my father said, “it looks like you're going to China at a very important time in its history.”

“Yeah!” snickered my sister, thumping me on the leg. “The Toilet Revolution! Ha!”

Luckily, I brought my camera to school today. At my break, I go to document the revolution's progress. The revolution is moving from the top of the school down. The toilets on the first and second floors are still in their original state. They are smelly and cramped, with sinking floors, stained tiles, and no doors.

Click
.

The toilets on the third floor are in the same state I found them in this morning — gutted — with their former contents spilling out onto the balcony.

Click
.

The toilets on the fourth floor, however, sparkle with the results of this glorious revolution. The new white tiles gleam! The smell is gone! Now that the genders will occupy alternate floors, the washroom is twice the size it once was, and a new wall near the entrance shields its interior from passing eyes. Although there are still no individual flushing mechanisms — it is still one long trough running underneath all the stalls — there are two water boxes up in the corners that fill up and —
whoooosh
— clean out the trough on a regular basis. The barrel
and bucket are gone! Most of the stalls are still separated only by half walls and have no doors, but there, over in the corner, stands a full-fledged stall with
real
walls and a
lockable
door!

Click
.

Up on the fifth floor, they have removed all the stalls, cemented over the trough, and put in a big window to make a new, completely white-tiled room. I ask one of the students what the school will do with the room. She tells me it will be the library.

Click
.

After school, I head to Jusco in Teem Plaza to do some grocery shopping. I cross under the concrete overpass at the corner of Guangzhou Da Dao and Tianhe Lu, emerging from its shadow to find myself at the foot of what looks like a miniature White House. In front of this tiny mansion, white picket fences surround two perfectly manicured squares of lawn. (
Lawn?
In Guangzhou?) On the roof, arranged in an arc on the ends of short steel poles, stand five neon-coloured stars. Just below the stars, two shiny brass letters boldly announce
W.C
.

It is a public washroom. A five-star water closet.

I go up its concrete walkway, cross its small patio, and enter through its automatic sliding doors. In front of me stands a small kiosk where I can, if I want, make a phone call, send a package by courier, and buy stamps or combs or gum or shampoo packets or, yes, even toilet paper. I buy some and climb the curved granite staircase to the toilets.

The ladies' room is spacious and done in Star Wars chic — all black granite and stainless steel. The dozen or more stalls contain sparkling white toilets, two of which are the sit-down Western variety. From my perch on one of these, I can look out a blue window and watch traffic roar by on the second level of the neighbouring overpass. I wash my hands at one of the sinks in the long row of stainless-steel basins. Water magically appears when my hands activate the faucet's infrared motion detectors. The infrared sensors in the hand dryer don't work, however, so I have to wipe my hands on my shorts as I bounce down the stairs, back through the automatic doors, and out onto the noisy street.

Long live the Toilet Revolution!

I keep pinching the skin on my forearms to remind myself: I am still here. I am whole.

I am alive.

I am sitting in a dark café called Minnie Mao's in the surreal town of Yangshuo in Guangxi Province. The room is full of strangers, strange foreigners, with hard, sunburnt noses and red and blond curls. Most wear the backpacker's uniform of tie-dyed shirts and expensive, sporty sandals. They look as if they could have beamed in from anywhere — the jungles of Costa Rica, the mountainsides of Nepal, the beaches of Thailand. They are all staring at the café's TV and watching this evening's video offering, a pirated copy of
Forrest Gump
. I am staring at a candle flickering green through my half-empty bottle of Tsingtao beer. All I can think is:
Today I cheated death
.

Kerry, Amy, and I arrived in this strange town two days ago. We came by minibus from Guilin, where we had bounced in on a flight from Guangzhou . . .

A wall of women with bicycles meets us at the spot where the minibus stops. They don't let us through to the hostel until we agree to take one of their bike tours. Tomorrow, we tell them.
This afternoon, you like, okay?
they reply. No, tomorrow.
Today okay
. No, tomorrow!
Okay, meet me, nine morning tomorrow?
Okay.
Promise?
Yes, we promise!

We check into the guesthouse, have a short rest, then go for a stroll in search of lunch.

In many ways, Yangshuo is the China of Western imagination. The mountains surrounding the town stand alone in the middle of green fields like the exposed humps of underground camels. They are the
mountains of Chinese watercolour paintings, picture postcards, eerie dreams. Winding, hazy rivers thread these mountains together. The river that runs past Yangshuo is called Li. Li Jiang. It is not quite blue, not quite green, not quite brown, but a swirling combination of all three.

The town itself is small and quiet, the only noise being the occasional backfiring
pop
of tractor-trucks sputtering through town. We walk through a compact, bustling market, past tables bright with oranges and eggplants. Barefoot women balancing heavy loads on bamboo poles pass us, as do old men clinking along on old bicycles.

We turn a corner and find a neatly paved lane of shops. And shops. And shops. Shops selling batik wall hangings, painted scrolls, “antique” masks, silk dresses, silk carpets, postcards, T-shirts. I can't help but stare at the Western people milling in and out of these shops. It has been a while since I've seen so many blondes in one place. They look so odd, so alien. The air fills with vaguely familiar sounds. Dutch? German? I catch the precise
T
s of Londoners, the nasal twang of Americans. I eavesdrop not because I want to but because, suddenly, I can.

A darker face confronts us, is talking at us. I give my head a quick shake and realize he is speaking English. We soon discover almost all the Chinese inhabitants of this quirky town speak English.