Little Emperors (18 page)

We finish and wash our hands, and the girls drag me back to Yvonne's bedroom. Yvonne pulls a stack of photo albums out of a drawer under her bed. We all sit on the edge of the bed, and Yvonne flips the pages for me. There is Yvonne as a baby and a preschooler. Yvonne in an amusement park. Yvonne dressed up for ballet. Yvonne on a bed surrounded by her
stuffed toys. Yvonne standing in front of a shiny black Mercedes.

The author makes “crazy” dumplings in the house of Yvonne, one of her students
.

She flips another page and there, alone in the middle of the paper, is a black-and-white, passport-sized photo of a teenage girl wearing a cap with a star. “She is my mother,” Yvonne explains. From the photo I can tell that, like most of the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution, Yvonne's mother was a Red Guard. What, I wonder, would she have thought of her future daughter's lacy pillows, piano lessons, English teacher, and closet full of toys back then?

Her mother calls from the dining room, and Yvonne snaps the book shut. “Miss Dionne, it is time to eat lunch!”

We go back to the round dining table to eat our
jiaozi
and try to guess whose “crazy dumplings” we are eating as we pop them into our mouths. The girls watch how I use chopsticks and again chime, “Good, Miss Dionne. Good!”

After lunch, Jessica invites the girls and me to her apartment across the courtyard. In her room, she pulls stamp albums off her shelf and shows us her collection: Chinese watercolour paintings, Chairman Mao on the Long March, an American stamp with
LOVE
in colourful balloon letters, stamps for each sign in the Chinese zodiac. She takes a small wax envelope out of a drawer in her desk and places the rooster zodiac stamp into it. “Miss Dionne, for you!” she says, and hands me my Chinese sign.

Then Jessica takes her Chinese-English picture dictionary from her shelf, and the three girls begin teaching me page after page of Chinese words for colours, animals, bathroom fixtures, and kitchen appliances. Much to their disappointment, I can recall only a small fraction of what they teach me when they quiz me at the end.

The telephone gives a shrill blast. It is Yvonne's mom looking for us. Yvonne takes the phone, speaks for a moment, then cups the receiver in her hand. “Miss Dionne, dinner, my house, okay?”

“Is it okay?” I ask. I've already been with them for four hours and I don't want to overstay my welcome.

“Okay!” she replies. She says something quickly to her mother and hangs up. We say goodbye to Jessica and Theresa and go back to Yvonne's house.

While waiting for dinner, Yvonne and I sit on the sofa and watch Japanese cartoons dubbed into Cantonese on Hong Kong TV. When the cartoons are over, Yvonne flips channels to a nature program. As different animals appear on the screen, I ask her about them. “Yvonne, do you like snakes?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you like mice?”

“Cute little mice — yes. Big mice — no.”

Her grandfather, who knows a little English, is sitting in an armchair next to us and chuckling. He points to the animal on the screen and says,
“Laoshu.”

I look at him, puzzled, and ask,
“Wo shi laoshu?”
— “I am a
laoshu
?”

He bursts out laughing and shakes his head.
“Mmm. Bu shi. Ni shi laoshi!”
— “No. You are a
laoshi
!” — he corrects, pointing at me.
“Ta shi.”
He points at the TV screen.
“Ta shi laoshu!”
— “He is a
laoshu
.” Then, between chuckles, Yvonne's grandfather guides me through the subtle pronunciation difference between the Mandarin words for
teacher
and
rat
. Great, I think, how many people have I told,
“Nihao. Wo shi yingyu laoshu”
— “Hello, I am an English rat”?

Yvonne's mother calls us to the table for dinner. I immediately wish I was more specific when Yvonne asked me what I like to eat. On the table near Yvonne's grandma sits a plate of chicken toes, all curled up in a brown sauce. Next to that is a dish of sliced pigs' ears and a plate of whiskery pigs' knuckles. Thankfully, there is also a plate of
doufu
with vegetables. Near me, there is a plate of what looks like dark chicken meat. “Yvonne, what's this?” I ask quietly.

She thinks for a moment. “It's Ernie's friend,” she replies. “Rubber Ducky . . . ducky!”

Ah! Duck!
I think, relieved. Then I realize I have been teaching a generation of Chinese kids to say “Peking Rubber Ducky.”

In lieu of dinnertime conversation, which we manage a little, Yvonne's grandfather gets me drinking. He instructs Yvonne to go to the fridge and get a six-pack of Heineken, snap one open for me, and pour it into my glass. As she does this, her father takes pictures. I feel strange drinking in front of Yvonne, and imagine the gossip whirling through the schoolyard Monday morning —
Miss Dionne drinks beer!
— with photographic evidence to prove it. I also feel strange because Yvonne's mother and grandmother are drinking nothing stronger than tea. Only the men and I — the hard-drinking Western woman — drink.

When we finish eating, Yvonne's grandfather pulls a clear bottle with a red label from the liquor cabinet. “Do you want to drink this?” he asks in English.

“What is it?”

They pass the bottle down to me so I can sniff its contents. It smells like rubbing alcohol. My nose crinkles, and I am just about to say no, thank you, when her grandfather tells me, “It's
Wuliang jiu
. China's famous drink.”

To be polite, I nod, but motion that I just want a little, little, little because my cheeks are already burning from the beer. Her grandfather obliges and splashes a bit into my glass, then more into his son-in-law's glass, and then even more into his own.

We raise our glasses. They shoot it back while I take a tiny sip.
Firewater!
I cough as it burns my throat, speeds down my esophagus, and sears through my intestines. Then it subsides and I feel calm. I glance down and see there is still quite a lot in my glass. “Good for your throat!” says Yvonne's grandfather, pointing at his neck.

He pours more into his son-in-law's glass and then more into his own. They raise their glasses again and cry,
“Ganbei!”
— “Drink it all!” We do, and they cheer as I place my empty glass on the table.

After dinner, everyone sits in the living room. Yvonne's mom pours more tiny cups of tea while Yvonne shows me how to fold thin strips of paper into puffy little stars. I catch a glimpse of my watch. It's 7:45! I tell Yvonne that I have to leave at 8:00. She jumps up and exclaims, “I have . . . for you!” and runs to her bedroom. She brings back a small pink paper bag on which she has printed
TO MISS DIONNE, FROM
Y
VONNE
and today's
date. I open the bag and pull out a tall glass, an ice-cream sundae dish, brimming with folded paper stars.

“It's a sardine sundae,” Yvonne says, remembering Oscar's favourite food in Unit Six.

“Oh, Yvonne, thank you!” I pick out one of the stars. “In English, this is a star.”

“Star.”

“How do you say it in Chinese?”

“Xing-xing.”

“So,” I conclude, “this is a
xing-xing
sundae.”

“
Xing-xing
sundae!” she repeats, giggling with delight.

Her grandfather points to the multitude of paper stars. “She made all of them, all by herself,” he explains with pride. “She has a —” he pats his chest “— a big heart.”

It's time for me to go. I pack up my school bag and my rooster stamp and my
xing-xing
sundae in its pink bag. I say thank you to Yvonne's family, then she and her mother walk me to the nearest corner to help hail a taxi. One pulls up, and I thank Yvonne and her mom once more as I jump into the front seat. I wave to them until the taxi goes around a corner and out of sight. I turn and smile at a crack in the windshield.

It's not every day you hold a bowl full of stars in your hands.

Gerry accompanies me through the alleyway to the grocery store behind Number 1 School. As we walk between rows of tightly parked bicycles, he teaches me to count to ten in Cantonese.

“Yat . . . yi . . . saam . . . sei . . . ng . . . luk . . . chat . . . baat . . . 
gau . . . sap.”

“Yap . . . eee . . . sam . . . say . . . mm . . . ummmm,”
I repeat, trailing off after number five.

He tries again. I manage to finish six through ten. He claps loudly and says, “Good, Miss Dionne. Good.”

At the end of the alleyway, we look up and see the steel gates of the grocery store shut and locked. We glance at each other. “Oh, no!” We go to a small shop at the other end of the street. As I pay for a bottle of water, the woman at the cash asks Gerry who I am.

“My English teacher,” he says in Cantonese, buffing his fingernails on his T-shirt and inspecting them. “From Canada.” He names all of the colours at the checkout in English and begins counting in English as we leave the store.

The next day, Gerry announces to his entire class that I usually go to the store after their lesson. So, after their lesson, the entire class follows me there. I feel like the Pied Piper, or the Colonel Sanders in the mural over at KFC, as I lead twenty children through the alleyway past the old bicycle attendant.

At the store, the kids surround the ice-cream freezer. “I like, I like!” they chant, then whine, “Miss Dionne,
pleeease
!” I check my wallet. “Oh, okay.”

As I pay for the frozen mountain of Paddle Pops, the cashier gives me a look that says, “Boy, they sure got your number!” Outside on the step, the class swarms me as I dole out ice-cream bars. Breaking from the pack, Edgar dashes across the street to where his father is waiting for him on a motorbike. He shows the ice cream to his dad as he hops up behind
him. His father waves to me. “Oh! Ice cream!” he shouts in English. “You are a good teacher for the children!”

Good teacher? Possibly. Complete pushover? Definitely.

Echo has gone. She got an office job at Proctor & Gamble and wasn't sentimental about leaving my classroom. And now, after a week of solo teaching, I have a new teaching assistant. Her English name is Connie. One of the first things she does is teach me some Cantonese.

“Okay, say,
‘Diu nei loh moh hai.'
”

“Dieu lay low mow hi.”

“Ha!”

She throws her head back, her ponytail bobbing, and releases a stream of laughter at the classroom ceiling. The ceiling fan catches the stream and swirls it into a whirlpool of throaty giggles. I am sitting across from Connie in our tiny toilet classroom. Two Styrofoam bowls of half-eaten won ton soup sit on a stool between us.

“What? What did I say?” I ask as her laughter falls into her soup and she pops another won ton into her mouth.

“This is the first and most important thing to learn in any language,” she says mockingly, pointing her chopsticks skyward as if to make a professorial point.

“What? What does it mean?”

“It means, ‘Go fuck your mother!' ”

“No!”

“Yeah!”

I laugh and lean forward. “Tell me more!”

For the rest of our lunch break, Connie teaches me how to tell people to do a number of unspeakable things to their mothers. Cantonese, it seems, is tailor-made for telling people off. Connie ends the Cantonese lesson with a dire warning never to say these words to anyone.

In our afternoon classes, we prepare the students for their Halloween parties next week. We teach them words like
ghost
and
witch
, even though such things don't officially exist in the People's Republic of China.

The Grade Twos, as usual, take an awkwardly long time to line up and get ready to go. Some shove their books and papers into their knapsacks, only to have everything tumble out again because they forget to close the zippers. Others forget to securely screw the lids shut on their
plastic Thermoses, then accidentally knock them off their wooden stools as they swing their knapsacks on, sending the Thermoses crashing and spilling to the floor.

Connie and I circulate the room on damage control while the Grade Sixes crowd outside the partially open door waiting to be let in. Gerry, as always, is at the front of the crowd, leaning on the door frame and drumming his fingers impatiently. As I help bottle-eyed Alice pick up her books, Gerry barks something into the room at the smaller kids. All of the students behind him laugh. Connie lets out a squawk.

“What's so funny?” I ask.

“Gerry said, ‘Hurry up, you Deng Xiaopings!' ”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” Connie laughs. “We call anyone who is little and slow ‘Deng Xiaoping!' ”