Little Emperors (28 page)

“About two hours.”

Four hours later, we pull into Zhuhai. Dusk is falling on the city like ash from its nearby smokestacks. We run to the connecting bus station, only to find all the day's buses to Zhuhai Port long gone. Jimmy and Billy flag down a sooty minibus along Zhuhai's main street and, after they haggle with the bus tout over the price, we jump on. We finish the last of
the Oreos and Chips Ahoy as we bump down a dark country road, tree branches scraping the side of the bus.

We arrive at Zhuhai Port in absolute, utter darkness. “I think we are too late to meet Linda,” Connie says. The plan was to meet Linda and some of her other friends at the port, then go together to camp on an island. “I think they already take a boat this afternoon. We can't take a boat now. It is too late. We have to stay here.”

The minibus drops us off in the parking lot of the Port Hotel. The parking lot is deserted except for one white minivan, and it is just leaving. A man hangs his head out one of the back windows, retching loudly and leaving puddles of vomit in the van's wake. We go into the hotel, where room rates for Chinese nationals versus foreigners are displayed on the wall next to the reception desk. The clerk clearly wants to charge us the latter, far more expensive price. We leave and go in search of someplace else to stay.

Weak spots of light from our 7-Eleven flashlights guide us along the pitch-black road, through a small field of tall grass, and along the gravel of a secondary road. Our flashlights die just as we reach a row of minibus repair shops, restaurants, and beauty parlours in the middle of nowhere. We go to one of the brightly lit restaurants and sit at a table outside under a canopy of mosquitoes.

Jimmy, Billy, Kelly, and Connie begin chatting with the restaurant's owner, a solidly built, brisk-mannered middle-aged woman with painted eyebrows. She is from northern China and speaks to us in Mandarin. She also seems to be the owner of the hair salon next door, or the madam of the young women who work there.

It is a slow night for them, so the young hair washers gather around our table and stare at me. They whisper phrases in Mandarin I can understand, phrases I've heard many times now, like the inevitable “What a long nose!” The madam gives me a good stare, then asks Connie, “Is she Russian?”

“Bu shi. Jianada ren,”
we answer together — No. A Canadian.

“Ah!”
She nods.
“Meiguo ren!”
— An American!

Whatever. I am too tired, and too intent on digging into the plates of dumplings and noodles arriving at our table, to argue. My companions continue talking with the madam as we work our way through the food. Soon — courtesy of the madam's various levels of
guanxi
, or connections, in the area — they have fixed a minibus ride to a small town nearby that has a hotel that will take us. As we finish the dumplings and the madam
goes to make phone calls to her friends with minibuses and hotels, two men in military uniform saunter into the restaurant.

With their red-and-gold epaulettes and gold-starred caps, they seem to be of fairly high rank. Their faces are flushed from either the heat or booze, or both. They sit inside under the fluorescent lights at what appears to be their usual table and are immediately brought two large bottles of beer. Two girls from the beauty salon leave our table and scamper over to the officers' table. One sits to chat with them. The other begins to massage one of the officer's shoulders. I stare at them. When the officer notices out of the corner of his eye that I am watching, he shrugs the masseuse off with an annoyed wave of his hand.

A minibus sputters up alongside the restaurant. We pay the madam for our dumplings, thank her for her help, and leave.

The minibus driver lets us off in front of a tire shop. The hotel is on the second floor, above the Michelin Man's head. It is a hotel of scarred linoleum floors and stained yellow walls. We check in with the grumpy and suspicious young woman behind the desk while a group of middle-aged men, lounging in their underwear in the open room across the hall, stare at us.

Jimmy and Billy take their key and head to their room on the floor above. The desk clerk escorts Connie, Kelly, and me to a room down the hall from the lounging men. Our room's decor is consistent with the general theme of the hotel. Electrical wiring sprouts from a big hole in the bathroom wall. A chunk of garden hose rammed onto the bathtub's faucet is the shower. There's a Western-style toilet, but all the flushing mechanisms have been ripped out of its open, bone-dry tank. The room has an air conditioner and a TV, the former dripping water in a steady stream all over the latter. At risk of electrocution, we turn on the TV and learn it operates only on volume 10.

“What does this say, Connie?” I ask, pointing to a notice written in red Chinese characters pasted onto the wall next to the TV.

“It says, ‘Don't bring seven bads into the room.' ”

“What are seven bads?”

“I can't remember,” she says, flicking off the TV and jumping back from it. “But I think they include prostitutes and robbers.”

After brushing my teeth at the sink, which drains directly onto the floor, I crawl under my bed's musty, ripped mosquito netting. I am just drifting off when Kelly's voice booms across the darkness, “Put your wallet and passport under your pillow! Not in your bag. The door doesn't
lock. I don't trust the people here!” I do as she says, then dream all night of forgetting my wallet under the hotel's beanbag pillow.

I wake up at 6:30 to the sound of tiny electronic explosions. It is Kelly playing with her Game Boy. We are out of the hotel by 8:30 and soon catch a minibus going back to the port. We are the first people on the bus, so we occupy the back row of seats. More and more people get on the bus as we bump along the dusty road, including two women carrying bamboo poles and baskets. One of the women's breasts are nearly pushed into my face, allowing me to see the small Chicago Bulls insignia embroidered on her red T-shirt.

The bus is crammed by the time we reach our destination, a gravel pit at the end of a land bridge. No one is getting off the bus. We are pinned by the crowd into the back of the still-rolling vehicle. Jimmy slides his window open, crouches in its frame, and leaps out, followed closely by Kelly and Billy. Connie glances back at me just before she jumps. “Can you?” she asks.

“Yes . . . I think so,” I say, and follow her. I crack the crystal of my Mao watch on the side of the bus as I land.

We walk along the gravel pit beside the sea until we come to a row of fishermen's huts and their motorboats. A young fisherman in a burgundy T-shirt and grey trousers approaches us, and Jimmy begins negotiating the price of a boat ride with him. The boatman is deeply tanned, his friendly face weathered by the elements to look a lot older than his lean, youthful body. He and Jimmy finally agree on a price, and we scramble down an embankment of boulders to his boat.

The boat is a plastic fibreglass shell powered by a huge outboard motor. The boatman's wife tosses half a dozen life jackets into the boat as we push off, and the bright vests dance wildly on the boat floor as the man guns it across the bay. A storm is brewing in the south; a dark curtain of rain draws menacingly over the island up ahead. As the clouds roll closer to us, the wind picks up and the ocean swells grow deeper. Undeterred, the boatman maintains his speed and slams us over every bone-jarring wave, soaking us all in white walls of salt water.

The boat docks at the island village where, despite the obvious threat of rain, a few men crowd around shabby pool tables outside a small store. They stop their game to turn and stare at us as we get out of the boat, cross through their village, and disappear on a path behind a cornfield.

The path climbs toward the black clouds. Just as it begins to rain, we round a hill and run into Linda and her friends, who are supposed to be waiting for us at the campsite. They look sunburnt and exhausted. Linda does all the talking in both Cantonese and her flawless English. “Hi, JoAnn! It's good to see you again. I'll explain everything in a sec.”

I wait and watch as she talks to the others. Even on an island in the middle of nowhere, Linda looks funky. She wears a charcoal-grey T-shirt and slim black jeans rolled up to expose punky black sneakers. The British flag is embroidered on each shoe's tongue. She turns to me. “Some of our stuff was ripped off last night. We went swimming and somebody took some of our money and clothes.” She points to one of her friends wearing a windbreaker wrapped tightly around his waist. “His trousers and underwear even got stolen. We're going home now.”

“Do you need money to get back to Guangzhou?” I ask.

“Oh, no, we're okay. Just be careful of your stuff!” she says, waving as they continue toward the village.

“Oh, Connie, that's terrible,” I say as Linda disappears around the corner.

“Yeah,” she replies. “You know, the name of this island is Wallet Island. Maybe it should be Steal Your Wallet Island.”

We continue stumbling along the uneven path. Twigs reach out to leave fine red scratches below our knees, and our T-shirts grow dark from sweat and the occasional splatters of rain. We finally come to a bluff overlooking our destination: a perfect crescent of deserted white sand. It is perhaps three kilometres long, bordered only by grey ocean and a subtropical forest of the deepest green.

As we creep down the steep, muddy path to the beach, what seemed idyllic from a distance soon becomes realistic. The path is littered with plastic bags, Coke cans, and chunks of Styrofoam, and the first thing we encounter on the beach is, as if by some cruel cliché, a used syringe. We walk across the damp sand, past dozens of beached jellyfish the size of pillows, and make our way to a fishermen's shack.

Four men, their lean faces tanned to almost leather, sit on the hut's wooden steps smoking a bamboo pipe and gazing out to sea. Inside it is dark. The only light comes from the open door or leaks through holes in the thatch roof. One of the men's wives sits at a table in the semi-darkness. She, too, stares silently out the door at the ocean. Jimmy interrupts her and asks what they have to eat. Fried noodles, fried eggs, fried cabbage, and fresh steamed mussels, the woman tells him, then goes behind the
shack to cook. We sit and wait hungrily as the woman brings each dish out one at a time. The rain stops. We stab at the plates of food with our chopsticks, eating and slapping mosquitoes in silence.

After lunch, we rent a red tent from the fishermen and set it up on the beach. The clouds still threaten rain, but Connie and I stretch our towels out on the sand and snooze while Jimmy and Kelly disappear behind rocks at the end of the beach. Soon restless, Connie and I decide to go for a walk along the beach. We leave the tent and all our belongings in the care of Billy, who has just succeeded in burying himself up to his neck in sand.

As we get farther away from the tent, I keep turning to look at it to make sure Billy is still keeping watch. Connie pats her front pocket. “I'm not worried,” she says. “I have all my money here.”

“I left all my money in my bag in the tent,” I say, turning to look at what is now a red dot way down the curve of the beach. “And my passport, too.”

“Good!” Connie cries over the roar of the waves. She spins around and trots backward in front of me, wet sand flipping up from between her toes. The wind webs her black hair across her cheek. “If your passport gets stolen,” she says, laughing, “then you will have to stay in China with me!”

We wade out into the surf up to our shorts, then run screaming back to shore when a big wave soaks our thighs and spanks our bottoms. We find bamboo sticks and drag them behind us as we continue walking down the beach, leaving wavy scars in the wet sand. We use the sticks to draw cartoons and scratch our names in Chinese on the beach, then to poke at yet another giant jellyfish stranded beyond the surf's reach. We walk until the beach ends in sharp boulders encrusted with large grey barnacles. We whack at the barnacles with our sticks, then turn and head back to camp, passing our names already half erased by the waves and a creeping tide.

When Connie and I return to the tent, our bags are safe, Kelly and Jimmy have reappeared, and Billy has successfully exhumed himself from the beach. We go for a quick swim, then move our tent closer to the fishermen's shack and away from the rising ocean. A Chinese couple in their thirties, tall and beautiful, arrive and pitch a tent next to ours. Later, after a dinner of fried noodles, fried eggs, and fried cabbage, the five of us lounge in hammocks strung among the trees next to the shack until the sky blackens and finally pelts us with huge drops of rain.

We go into the dark shack where the fishermen are playing mahjong. The only light comes from four thin candles standing in their own
wax on each corner of the table. The woman sits in a chair separate from the men and watches them play. The clattering of mah-jong tiles competes with the crashing of rain on the concrete stoop outside the open door. Kelly ties two of our flashlights together with her shoelaces, then stands on a chair and flings the flashlights over a bamboo beam. Billy positions another table under Kelly's makeshift lights while Jimmy expertly shuffles a deck of cards. We sit and play a card game in English. The fisherman's wife turns to watch us.

The young couple have moved their tent indoors and are pitching it on the shack's concrete floor. This looks like a good idea, so we momentarily abandon our card game and rush out into the pouring rain to drag our sopping tent inside. We try to mop it dry with toilet paper but succeed only in covering the tent in strands of white pulp. The fishermen's candles have extinguished into pools of wax, leaving nothing but smoke curling from tiny charred wicks. The fishermen pour their mah-jong tiles into a tackle box, then retire to their bunk beds on either end of the shack, hidden from us by plywood walls propped up with bamboo.

“Ugh,” Connie says. “Cards are so boring.”