Little Emperors (13 page)

This evening, just home from work and again digging through my bag for my keys, I hear the video player coming from next door. An American voice is speaking. I pause, listening, key in the lock. The voice on the video earnestly declares, “I've gained my freedom, and I swore when I gained this freedom, I would help others attain it. I'm not simply selling a product: I'm giving people opportunities. Opportunities for their own freedom . . .”

I turn the key and step into our apartment. If or when communism ceases to exist in China, perhaps it won't fall quite as dramatically as it did in Eastern Europe, symbolized as it was by the smashing of the Berlin Wall. No. Instead, communism in China may just simply dissolve — with the help of a little dish soap.

I walk over to Teem Plaza and into Saturday afternoon shopping pandemonium. The biggest crowd is milling around a booth in the middle of the mall. I go closer and discover that it is a Kellogg's promotional counter. People are pushing their way to the front of the line for the free samples of Corn Flakes, Bran Flakes, and Rice Flakes that harried cereal reps are handing out in plastic cups with a splash of milk. I join the fray and soon squeeze to the front. A young woman hands me a cup of Rice Flakes and a plastic spoon, and I turn and squeeze my way back out of the crowd. I stand on the sidelines, eating
my cereal and watching the melee. The Rice Flakes are good, but the milk is warm.

I figure out that if people buy a large box of cereal, the Kellogg's girls give them a free plastic bowl shaped like the company's rooster logo. I check my shopping list. I have to get cereal, anyway, so I may as well get a bowl to go with it. I push once again into the crowd. At the counter, I point to a large box of Rice Flakes on the shelf. The Kellogg's rep grabs the cereal, reaches into a large cardboard box for a rooster bowl, and places both into a plastic bag decorated with the Kellogg's logo. She hands it to me with a smile, says, “Have a nice day!” in English, and immediately focuses her attention on the person squishing up behind me.

I pop out of the crowd and continue strolling through the mall. Suddenly, I hear loud, familiar dance music. Is that Ace of Base? I look up to the second floor, toward the music's source, and see another huge crowd. I take the escalator up to see what is going on, but the crowd is too dense to manoeuvre through. I go over to the other side of the mall where I can watch what is happening from across the atrium.

There is a stage and bright lights. Tall, gorgeous women sashay out onto a catwalk, showing off the latest in colourful miniskirts, blouses, and sunglasses. Little kids totter out in the newest creations from Mickey & Friends, while middle-aged matrons step out in classic suit jackets and skirts. Other than the scrawny male models, whose posturing at the end of the runway seems comically awkward, the fashion show is a slick affair. The same Ace of Base song keeps pumping out of a towering pair of speakers.

The fashion show ends, and I go to get my groceries. All this consumerism has made me thirsty, so I buy a Pepsi just before leaving the mall. Sipping my Pepsi and swinging my grocery bag, I skip out of Teem Plaza's sliding glass doors, humming the Ace of Base song now stuck in my head. I skip past the dancing fountains; past the Reebok billboard with tennis star Michael Chang saying,
I
'
M LIKE THE GREAT WALL
:
NOTHING GETS BY ME
; past the book centre and its Amway office; over a bridge, over a river of thick, black ooze.

I stop in mid-skip.

What am I doing?
I look down at my shopping bag, at the Pepsi in my hand. Oh, God! If getting a box of Rice Flakes at a mall makes me so damn peppy, if eating nachos at a Hard Rock Café and sucking on 7-Eleven Slurpees makes me so grateful,
why
did I bother coming halfway around the planet? Why am I rejoicing at the shopping mall–estation of
the world — where difference is bulldozed daily and soon everyone will be eating the same food, drinking the same drinks, and using the same laundry soap? I must be demented.

Why is it that when different cultures and developing nations begin opening 7-Elevens and selling Nike running shoes that we, in the arrogant West, deem it “progress”? Look at this grey sky. Look at this black river. Is this progress? At what price? And what will become of this place if it ever reaches the wasteful consumerist levels of North America? What will happen when China becomes filled with two-car families?

When I look around at all these billboards and flashing advertisements, I don't see progress so much as a repetition of the past. Is this influx of Western and Japanese goods into China not just another form of colonialism? Instead of carving Chinese territory into protectorates under English, French, American, German, or Japanese control, is it not now being divided into “market share” by multinational corporations in much the same way? Proctor & Gamble, Nike, Adidas, Siemens, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Shell, and countless others have firmly staked their territory here, scrambling over each other to reach the dream market of a billion consumers so long denied them.

While it is true that most foreign companies must enter China in a joint venture with a Chinese partner, the profits don't trickle all the way down to the man on Huanshi Lu. They land in the hands of a few, most likely in the questionable hands of arms of the Chinese government. Ultimately, the largest profits reach the suit pockets of a few men at the top of large buildings in New York, Frankfurt, or Tokyo — modern-day lords reigning over their worldwide kingdoms. They don't encourage local industry or local enterprise, only local dependence on a corporation — modern-day serfs dependent on their masters.

I myself am not innocent in this equation. What am I doing here? I am teaching English. I am the equivalent of a modern-day missionary — spreading the good word of English to lost, non-English-speaking souls; saving them with prepositions, articles, and verb tenses; incorporating them with Western values as I feed them our idioms and clichés. Am I assisting Chinese modernization, or am I the unassuming storm trooper of Western neo-imperialism?

I shouldn't pretend that China is the unwilling victim being crushed under a Western capitalist steamroller. If China didn't want these foreign companies here, they wouldn't be here. Vast tracts of Chinese history are based on keeping, successfully or unsuccessfully, the foreign
out
— from
the Great Wall to the Boxer Rebellion to the Bamboo Curtain. But the people in Guangzhou seem to enjoy their Westernized life. How else can you explain the Saturday afternoon crush at any McDonald's in the city? Or the teenagers from the middle school crowding into the 7-Eleven after class, shouting to their friends and sloshing green Slurpee on the floor? How else can you explain the glee of a young family wheeling a big Panasonic TV box out the front doors of Teem Plaza?

We are witnessing China's ironic age.

“Communist China” is an oxymoron.

Some days it is so invigorating to watch how quickly things change here, how fast things move. Life is undeniably better in Guangzhou than it was twenty, ten, or even five years ago. Heck, life is better now than it was five
months
ago! And things improve daily.

Just as I settle on this thought, that it is all okay, that it is all for China's good, I think of the man who rummages through the garbage cans on the corner of Shui Yin Lu for food at night, a dim flashlight taped to his hat. And of the deformed and limbless beggars crawling across the pedestrian overpasses, wailing for passersby to drop a few jiao into their tin bowls.

All of this is happening at once, right now, all over Guangzhou. All over China.

It is hard to know what to think anymore in such a confusing, contradictory place. Excuse me as I step down and pack up my soapbox, Tide logo and all.

This morning after our staff meeting, as I walk from the teaching centre on Shamian Island to the bus stop across the canal, I see two heartbreaking sights.

On the other side of the bridge, a tightly squeezed crowd is standing and staring at something on the ground. At first I can't see what the people are looking at. As I get closer, I hear shouting, and I think they must be watching an argument. Then I see what they are staring at. There, on a homemade skateboard rigged with hand pedals, sits a tiny midget of a man, his head the size of an adult's but his body no bigger than a doll's. He is screaming and laughing maniacally at the crowd and trying to pedal away. I turn my head. I don't want to join the shameless mob in staring at the deformed man.

Then, while standing at the bus stop, I watch a woman walk toward me carrying four large, bulging plastic bags. Suddenly, she twists her ankle in a small pothole, her plastic sandal snaps, and she stumbles, dropping all of her bags and nearly falling to the ground. As she straightens up, I see her mouth tighten and her eyes squeeze shut so she won't cry or scream. She limps in small circles, rubbing her leg as people walk past her on all sides. The look on her face shows pain, despair, frustration, everything. She picks up her bags, and as she limps past me, her mouth drawn and quivering, her eyes scrunched and welling with tears, my heart sinks. It snaps. Her day will be hard enough, I think, without this small but painful event happening along the way.

My bus pulls up, squawking its various stops through a scratchy loudspeaker. I hop on and am off to my schools, my safe little corners of China.

Now that we are back to our regular schedule, I realize just how much I miss Miranda. I miss hanging out at her house at lunch, watching soap operas and talking about men and dogs. I wonder if she is in the States now.

Echo has never really warmed to me, and I begin to dread seeing her every morning. At lunch, she either disappears without a word or slips on her Walkman and takes a nap on the rattan sofa under the window of our new classroom. I bring my lunch from home, sit at the big oak table on the other side of the classroom, and work. The only good thing about not getting along with my teaching assistant is that I actually get a lot of work done
at
work. I am already a month ahead in lesson plans.

Recently, Echo has taken to sitting behind me during classes and burying her nose in a newspaper or doing her nails while I teach. My shoulder blades tense with every click of her nail clippers. I grit my teeth when the occasional nail clipping —
ping!
— flies past me. When my acrobatic mimes for explaining new words fail to give the kids anything more than puzzled looks and they begin to cry out in Cantonese,
“Mat ye yi si ah? Mat ye?”
— “What does it mean? What?” — I have to stop everything, turn around, and ask Echo to help us. I may as well be teaching alone.

Today, I try to make more of an effort to get through to her. I ask her out to lunch before either of us can escape into our Walkmans. Over a lunch of
wan tan min
and
saang choi
— won ton soup and boiled iceberg lettuce — we chat about our students, our families, and life in Guangzhou. Everything is fine until, just before we get up to go, she says, “Chinese food is better than Western food. It's healthier. Western food is fat.”

I point to the oil in the bottom of our dishes. “What about this?” I ask.

She dismisses it with a glance. “Westerners are fat.”

What does she think?
I wonder.
That everyone in the western hemisphere eats steak, fries, and ice cream three meals a day, every day? That all we want to eat are McDonald's hamburgers?
I want to tell her about my strictly vegan friends back home, about the unending variety of food in Canada, but don't bother. We pay our bill and leave.

We arrive back at Number 1 School to find all the children cleaning the school. A few are waiting outside the conference room to ask our permission to clean it. We open the door and let them in. As the kids sweep and scrub all around us, Echo asks, “Do the students in Canada have an interest in this kind of thing?”

“When I was in elementary school, we sometimes had to go out and
pick garbage off the playground. But schools in Canada usually hire janitors to clean the buildings rather than getting the kids to do it.”

“Oh. So Canadian children are lazy.”

I bite my tongue. I bite my tongue to defuse my top. I bite my tongue so I won't haul out my mental list of Things Really Wrong with China. I bite my tongue until I can think of a vaguely diplomatic response.

“No, I don't think it's laziness . . .” I manage through clenched teeth. “It's just . . . a different system.”

She doesn't hear me. She is once again immersed in her newspaper. I pull out my books and start yet another lesson plan. Later, as I get up to let the first afternoon class in, I notice Echo is reading what looks like Chinese want ads, a few items circled in red pen.

Tonight, the traffic is almost completely constipated. Motorbikes and taxis drive on to the sidewalks in search of a clear route, but soon even the sidewalks are jammed to a halt. I stand in the carbon monoxide soup of Guangzhou Da Dao waiting for my bus, my sleeve over my nose and mouth in a fruitless attempt to filter out the smog. The 522 is nowhere to be seen. After half an hour of waiting, I give up and hail an almost stationary cab. I have to get away from pollution ground zero.

The taxi isn't much better. Within minutes I am stuck in Traffic Hell. Well, perhaps it is more like Traffic Purgatory. I am trapped between heaven and earth on the highest level of a multi-level flyover in the back of a dark cab, surrounded by shrieking horns and noxious fumes and not going anywhere. Traffic Hell would be any level below this. I count my blessings.

Eventually, the cabbie makes a U-turn in search of another route to Shui Yin Lu. We backtrack past my schools and inch our way out onto Zhong Shan Yi Lu, only to run into yet another traffic jam caused by subway construction. The driver tries a few more side streets and alleyways, but everything, every artery and vein of this city, is clogged.