Little Emperors (23 page)

In the spring, when the book first came out in Canada, one of the other teachers asked her mother to send it here in a care package. The parcel took forever to arrive, and, when it finally did, it had obviously been tampered with — leaving only a few T-shirts, two bags of crushed Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and no book.

I got my copy safely over the border, however, and although I haven't started reading it, I bring the contraband book to school on Tuesday to
show Connie. Just before we sit down to continue wrapping presents, I close the class door and reach into my shoulder bag for Wong's book. “This book is written by a Canadian, and . . . here's that picture I told you about yesterday. The man standing in front of the tanks.” I crease the book open at the page and hand it to Connie.

“Oh, my God!” she says quietly as she takes the book, moving it closer to her nearsighted eyes for a good look. Silently, she studies the picture while I cut lengths of red ribbon and measure out wrapping paper. Then she flips through the book, stopping and holding it up to her nose whenever a picture catches her attention.

“I never saw this picture,” she says at last, pointing to the picture of the man in front of the tanks. “But I remember this one . . .” She flips a chapter back and points at a photograph of a soldier who was hung from a bus window, disembowelled, and set on fire. “I remember this picture in the newspaper. It was to show the danger of the students when they have no control.”

She continues looking through the book and stops to read photo captions or entire paragraphs. I continue wrapping gold-and-silver pencils and handfuls of candy.

“What's
communist
?” she asks suddenly, turning the book toward me and pointing to the word on a page.

“What?” I look at her in amazement, almost laughing, almost saying, “You mean you don't
know
?” Then I quickly switch into English-teacher gear. “Well . . . it's like . . . the opposite of capitalist. For example, America is capitalist and China is communist.” She wrinkles her brow at me, so I try again. “Capitalists want to make money by getting other people to do work for them. Communists want to work for the people and share the money with the people.”

Connie is thoroughly confused by my bumbling explanation and reaches for her little red English-Chinese dictionary. She lets out a laugh when she finds the word, then looks me in the eye. “Guangzhou is definitely
not
communist!”

“That's kind of true, isn't it? Some days, I think Canada is more communist than China!”

“Really?” Her eyebrows pop up.

“Yeah. In Canada, if you get sick, the government pays your doctor and hospital bills. If you lose your job, the government pays you. If you have kids, the government pays you. When you get old, the government pays you.”

“Really . . .” Her voice trails off as she ties some ribbon. “I think China wants to be like Canada someday. Once China is rich, we will be like Canada.”

“Do you think China will ever go the same way as Russia?” I ask, wondering if she thinks that perhaps one morning China will wake up and find itself officially no longer communist.

“No, that won't happen here. I don't think the government will say, ‘We are not communist.' But they will let people do more and more. Make business. They let do, they just do not say it.”

“So people will drive Mercedes-Benzes but still say, ‘I'm a communist'?”

She smiles and nods. “Yeah!”

One book I couldn't find in Hong Kong last weekend was
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. I was determined to make the story the centrepiece of my classes' parties, so when I couldn't find it, I made stick puppets to help relay this Christmas classic to the kids. I coloured and cut out the Grinch, his dog, his sled, Cindy Lou Who, and others, and taped them to the end of disposable wooden chopsticks. I painted a mountain and a village on a cardboard backdrop. Then, to the best of my memory, I wrote the gist of the story down in a small notebook and gave it to Connie a few days before Christmas so she could decide how she wanted to translate it.

“I think I'll tell it in Mandarin,” Connie says when we meet early at Number 1 School on Christmas Day to go over our party plans. “It's an important story. Cantonese is maybe too casual for it, so I think
putonghua
is best.”

We prop the puppet show backdrop on two chairs and double-check the number of presents in each plastic bag. I reach to turn on the Christmas tree lights.

“Oh-oh.”

“What? What's the matter?” Connie asks, glancing up from her story notes.

I roll my thumb over the light switch. “I think the electricity is out.” I flick the switch for the ceiling fan and lights. Nothing happens. “Yep,” I sigh. “Today of all days. Oh, well . . .”

“That's typical China,” Connie says, reading my mind.

Soon giggles gather outside the door, and Gerry and Gary are pounding on its planks, shouting, “Open the door-ah! Miss Dionne,
open the door-ah! Christmas party-ah!” Connie and I don our Santa hats, look at each other and, with a deep breath, unlatch the bolt. The kids come avalanching in, nearly pushing us over, most wearing Santa hats from Pizza Hut for the occasion.

Some have brought homemade and store-bought decorations for our plastic tree. Isabella sashays in wearing a silver streamer tossed over her shoulders like a feather boa and immediately wraps it around and around our tree. Gerry brings a small plastic stocking and balances it on one of the tree's branches, bellowing, “This is my Hong Kong foot-ah! Ha, ha, ha!” In the second class, Jacob comes bounding in armed with a can of spray snow and covers the tree in an artificial snowstorm. Then he sprays the chairs, the walls, and the back of Yvonne's jacket until we finally catch up to him and confiscate it.

We teach a quick rendition of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” then have everyone crowd around on the floor for the Grinch puppet show. In our third class, the Grade Ones, usually so hyper and out of control, sit breathlessly still for the story. They get so involved in it that when the Grinch begins stealing presents from the Whos' houses, husky little Ian jumps up, fists raised, ready to punch the Grinch. When the story finishes, the kids clap wildly.

“Can anyone tell us the meaning of this story?” I ask.

Chubby little Sandra pops up and answers, “It's a story about love and forgiveness!”

Connie translates her answer. “Excellent, Sandra! You're exactly right. Now does anyone have a question about the story?”

Ian jumps up. “Why didn't the villagers kill the Grinch?” he asks, still seething. The rest of the boys echo his sentiments with a chorus of “Yeah! Yeah! Why didn't the villagers kill the Grinch?”

“Uh . . .” This is a good question, one I never thought of as a tot. Why
didn't
the villagers kill the Grinch? “Well . . . like Sandra said, it's about love and forgiveness.”

“They should have killed him!” Ian snorts, sitting back down on the floor.

After the story, Connie and I hand out the presents we spent so much time wrapping. A cheer of “Thank you, Miss Dionne! Thank you, Miss Connie!” fills the room, then the sounds of ripping paper as the kids tear into their gifts. Green and red debris soon litters the classroom floor, and the air becomes a hailstorm of ultra-bouncy rubber balls.

At our break, Connie and I take a taxi back to my apartment building
for the staff Christmas party so she can taste the delights of roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and scalloped potatoes. Jan comes up to us in the corner where we are stuffing our faces.

The Grade Six class enjoys Christmas morning at Number 1 School
.

“What time do you guys teach this afternoon?” she asks.

“Start at 4:30,” I answer through a mouthful of turkey stuffing.

“Me, too. My school's on the way. Do you want to take a taxi around 4:15?”

“Sure. Sounds good.” I nod as I wash down the stuffing with red wine.

The three of us leave shortly after four o'clock. We catch a cab at the corner, zip out onto Guangzhou Da Dao, and stop. Our taxi is stuck like a red fly in a web of concrete in the worst traffic jam I have ever seen. The freeway seems to be holding its breath. Absolutely nothing moves. Cars clog up behind us, and soon we can move neither forward nor backward. The hands of our watches inch forward more quickly than our taxi. Four-thirty comes and goes.

“This is
not
good,” I groan as I look around at the cars and buses entrapping us. A panic begins rising in my stomach. The Grade Two Christmas party is supposed to be underway. By five o'clock we are still barely halfway to our schools. I sigh in despair and sink into the back seat.

“My kids are probably protesting by now,” Jan says, glancing quickly at her watch, then out at the cyclists steadying themselves on our immobile taxi.

“How do you mean?”

“The kids at my school protest about everything. When we got a new teaching assistant, the kids walked out of class. They marched up and down the hall outside the class, yelling that they wanted the old TA back.”

Connie is in the front seat, discussing traffic strategy with the driver. She turns to us, crooks her fingers in the steel mesh separating front and back, and says, “Driver suggests we get out and walk.”

Jan looks at me. “What do you think?”

“Well . . .” I squint through the windshield at the traffic bottlenecked in front of us. “It's still a half-hour walk from this point. Maybe we should stay here. We'll be there in five minutes once this traffic clears.”

It doesn't.

Connie discusses a new strategy with the driver. As soon as he is able, he veers onto Zhongshan Lu in search of an alternate route, but that, too, is clogged and we are stuck again. The taxi finally crawls into our school district at 5:25 p.m. — a whole hour spent in what usually takes ten minutes. The taxi becomes stuck in traffic again, so we quickly pay the driver and jump out. Jan runs off through the back streets to her school. Connie and I sprint down the sidewalk toward Number 1 School.

Breathless, we burst through the school gates. Sad cries of “Miss Dionne!” greet us. Cailey runs up to us, crestfallen. I give her a big hug and tell her I'm sorry half a dozen times. I feel two centimetres tall and shrinking by the second. Melanie comes up to us, tear stains where her dimples usually are, and says, “Miss Dionne” in the most disappointed tone I have ever heard. I'm officially one centimetre tall.

Connie and I run to the stairs and leap two steps at a time to the fifth floor. As we climb, children from the Grade Two class fall into step behind us, shouting like sentinels to their classmates in the playground. The children in the courtyard echo their cries and come running. When we reach the fifth floor, Heather and Amy and a few others are sitting against the locked classroom door, cradling their cheeks in their hands, utterly depressed.

We usher everyone in and, looking down at all their sad faces, I feel smaller than the dust ball in the corner. I have ruined twenty little kids' Christmas. Forget about the Grinch — I am the
Gweilo
— the horrible foreign devil — Who Ruined Christmas!

I try to smile as we sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” but gravity works against me. I am miserable. We give the kids their presents,
then shuffle them out to make room for the next, already late class. I glance over at our sagging Christmas tree. The electricity has come back on.

The lights, at least, look cheery.

“Oh, this is a government van,” Connie says, eyeing the black licence plate on a white minivan parked in a puddle. “Someone riding with us must work for the government.”

Connie, her friend Nancy, and I squeeze into the van with other members of the wedding party and a few crates of grapes. We arrive in the small town of Zhaoquing around five o'clock. The men drop us off at the bride's parents' apartment, where we sit on a dark wood sofa, drink tea, eat oranges, and chat with the parents and a few of the bride's friends. Then the bride — Kitty is her English name, one of Connie's classmates from college — shows up looking frazzled and distressed after a day, probably weeks, of running around preparing for her wedding.

Connie and Nancy soon leave with Kitty to get their hair done. I stay in the apartment with Angela and Wanpin, two other college friends of the bride, and have dinner with Kitty's parents.

After dinner, Angela and Wanpin take me to meet another one of their former classmates, a young man who, they tell me, works at the Blue Ribbon beer factory here in town. His English name is Daniel. We meet him in a hotel lobby, then go to the second floor for tea at the Arc de Triomphe Café.

“So . . . you're the beer guy, eh?” I ask as we sit down.

His pudgy face breaks into a smile and he chuckles at my question. He folds his stubby fingers on the table, revealing a gold-coloured watch under his jacket sleeve. “Yes! That's me! I'm the beer guy!” His English is nearly perfect.