Little Emperors (30 page)

“Miss Dionne!” comes a sudden, small voice.

We spin around to see Lisa sitting cross-legged on a bed in the room we have just passed. In her floppy white hospital pajamas, her head wrapped in a turban of linen bandages, she looks like a tiny beige Buddha.

“Lisa!” we quietly cry, rushing into her room. “These are for you!”

“Puppy!” she squeals in English as she reaches for Snoopy and hugs him. “Puppy, puppy, puppy . . . Thank you!” Without her hair, Lisa's ears look huge, her eyes doe-like but distant with morphine.

Connie hands the flowers to Lisa's mom, who props the bouquet on the night table. She indicates two chairs at the foot of the bed. We swing them around to the side and sit down.

“We're so glad you could visit,” Lisa's dad tells us. He is sitting on the end of Lisa's bed, leaning up against the wall. “She was very happy when we told her you were coming today.”

“Yes,” Lisa's mother says, smiling. “This morning she told the doctor to wrap her head really well. She told him, ‘My English teachers are coming. I don't want them to see my scar!' ”

“Because it's ugly,” Lisa adds quietly.

“Is it that bad?” I ask Connie to ask them. “Where did they cut?”

Lisa's dad traces his fingers lightly over her bandages, following the hairline of her forehead. “Here to here to here,” he indicates. “The surgery took four hours.”

“Four hours? That's a long time . . .”

“Yes. They wanted to make sure they got it all. We were worried that there might be damage, but the doctor says she's okay.”

“Lisa, how do you feel?” I ask.

“Miss Dionne, I was very, very scared,” she answers in English, cradling Snoopy. “Now I am tired. I have a headache.”

“I guess so,” I say, then ask, “Where's your sister?”

“Lily is at home. She is watching TV. Miss Dionne, she was crying and crying.” Lisa points to her bandages. “She was scared!”

Lisa's mother explains that Lily was biking with her sister when the accident happened. She ran home to tell her parents while the truck driver radioed an ambulance. Lily managed to stay calm, despite the big truck, despite the blood, but burst into frightened tears when they arrived
at Emergency and she saw her older sister lying on a stretcher surrounded by doctors. “Lily doesn't like hospitals, so now she is at home with her grandmother.”

“The doctors here are good, but look at this place,” her father huffs, waving his hand toward the room. “It's so crowded.”

It is. In what would be a single-occupancy room in Canada, there are five people. Across from Lisa, on a bed near the window, a young man lies asleep, his head thoroughly bandaged, a heavy cast on his arm, thick scabs covering his knees.

“Motorbike accident,” Connie whispers.

At the end of Lisa's bed, a full-sized cot holds a tiny baby in its white centre. The baby's parents lean anxiously over him on either side, their faces concentrated in worry. Lisa's mother says something in a low voice.

“That baby has water in his brain,” Connie whispers once more. “It is very serious.” Beyond the infant, two elderly men, their heads also bandaged, lie sleeping in beds on either side of the door.

“How much longer will Lisa stay here?” Connie asks her father.

“The doctor says maybe she can come home next week.”

“When will she come back to school?” I ask.

“Maybe in June . . .”

“Only when my hair grows,” Lisa whispers.

“We'll see, we'll see,” her father answers. He rests his hand on her thin shoulder.

A light gust of wind rustles leaves outside the open window. The curtains of rough cotton — the same cotton as the hospital sheets and pajamas — billow into the room. Lisa's eyelids grow heavy, her eyes droopy. I glance at my watch, then at Connie. It is time to go.

We thank her parents and stand up to leave. “Lisa, we have to go now,” I say. “Don't let your puppy get scared in the dark tonight.”

She lies on her side, resting her wounded head on her pillow and hugging Snoopy close under her chin. “Thank you, Miss Dionne. Thank you, Miss Connie. Goodbye,” she says. She waves to us, then closes her eyes.

Connie and I walk back down the path toward the hospital's main gate. I am relieved to feel the sun on my arms, relieved to be heading back to the street alive in its chaos. Like Lisa's sister, I am not a big fan of hospitals.

“Lisa's much better than I thought she might be,” I say as we pass the fruit vendors. Before the visit, I imagined she might be hooked up to machines or far more badly bruised than she is.

Connie nods. “Yes, she is fine. She is just only worried about her hair. She wants it to grow back.”

A commotion rises from the Candy-Kitty-Joyce corner. I am writing new vocabulary for the Grade Six class on the whiteboard, but keep having to turn around and tell the three girls,
“Shhh!”
I imagine myself in wire spectacles and a greying, tightly pulled hair bun as I look at them and say, in perfect schoolmarm tone, “Girls, be quiet, please!”

Their gaggle dies down for a second, but as the tip of my pen lands back on the board, their voices grow again in volume. I turn. “Candy! Kitty! Joyce! Listen, please!”

They stop for a moment, but soon arms are flailing and books are shuffling and the three are whispering and giggling nervously. I am getting impatient and annoyed and tired of having to stop the lesson every two seconds. Connie walks over and stands in front of the girls. They become more agitated and whisper urgently to her. Thinking they are including Connie in their fooling around, I go from annoyed to angry. I stand, hands on hips, and wait to hear what all the fuss is about.

Connie turns to me and points at Joyce. “She got her period.”

A jolt ricochets down my spine. I am momentarily stunned by this news. Then I regain my senses and roll the whiteboard to the side, clearing a path to the door. “Okay, Joyce, you can go,” I say quietly.

She hops up and quickly shuffles to the door. Kitty goes with her, shielding Joyce's bum from the eyes of the class with her
Yellow Book
. The class roars and laughs — the boys yelling, the girls giggling nervously behind their palms. Once Joyce is safely out the door, Kitty returns to her seat and covers Joyce's stained chair and notebook from the prying eyes of the class, now crowding around to see what is going on.

Coolly, I get everyone to sit down and continue with the lesson as if nothing has happened. Inside, however, I am shaken and have to force myself to concentrate on what I am doing.

Class ends and everyone lines up at the door. Candy holds Joyce's lightly stained notebook between her thumb and forefinger while others point at it and scream. Still others hop out of line to go inspect Joyce's wooden stool, shouting and pointing at its slight smudge of blood. Connie and I manage to get everyone back in line and out the door.

I slide the bolt shut and turn to Connie. “I can't believe that happened in our class!”

“I know!” she exclaims, her laugh quivering. It has shaken her, too.

“Did the other kids realize what was going on?” I ask, dabbing some bottled water onto a tissue.

“The boys were yelling, ‘She shit! She shit!' But I think the girls knew. Maybe.”

I wipe the stain off Joyce's chair. “How old is Joyce?” I ask.

“Twelve.”

“Hmm . . . She seems younger.” I throw the tissue in the garbage. “But that's about right. I was twelve, too.”

“That is young. I was fourteen. I was the last in my middle school. I thought there was something wrong with me.”

We silently lock up the classroom and head downstairs for lunch. As we pass through the school gates in the mid-afternoon sun, I glance back at the school, at its mango trees, its empty playground, its five floors of concrete. Behind its long rows of barred windows, children are reciting their lessons in unison or quietly copying characters off the blackboards.

“These kids are growing up, Connie,” I say.

“I know,” she replies simply.

Tonight, completely by coincidence, Jan introduces me to Hugo. We are at Kathleen's Restaurant having a beer when Hugo stops to chat with us on his way to the bar. He's from Mexico — olive-skinned, wiry, and goateed — and is by far the best dancer in the Guangzhou ex-pat microcosm. I've seen him many times before, but have never met him.

“JoAnn, this is Hugo,” Jan says, introducing us. “He knows more about feminine hygiene than any woman I know. It's scary.”

Hugo, it turns out, is a manager in the feminine paper products division at the Proctor & Gamble plant here in Guangzhou. He soon proves his depth of knowledge and talks animatedly about “heavy flow days,” “bunching,” “night leakage,” “panty soiling,” and “gush.”

I sip my beer. “What do you mean by ‘gush'?” I ask.

“It's, you know, when you've been sitting a long time and then you stand up and suddenly it all flows out,” he explains, making graphic hand gestures.

We stare in momentary disbelief.

“You
know
about that?” asks Jan at last, incredulous.

“I didn't realize there was a corporate term for that,” I say.

“Oh, yes!” he says, adjusting an invisible tie. “And I have to give talks about this wearing a suit, too!”

On Tuesday, Connie and I finish morning classes and head out to McDonald's to get coffee. As I lock the classroom door, Connie points out a giggling crowd at the far end of the balcony near the music room. From this crowd, Joyce, Kitty, and a handful of other girls break away and run toward us. “Miss Dionne! Miss Connie!” Joyce yells, her ponytail swinging as she jogs down the hall.

“Hi, Joyce! How are you?” I call out as they approach. She and Kitty seem suddenly taller. As they stop in front of us, I realize I am, indeed, looking up at them. Remembering Monday's events, I ask Joyce, “How do you feel?”

“I'm happy, but yesterday —” she and Kitty point downward “— I was scared.”

“Don't worry, Joyce,” I say in a reassuring voice. “It's perfectly normal. It happens to everyone.”

She grins, giggles, and nods. One of her friends asks her in Cantonese, “What did she say?”

Joyce replies, “I don't know,” but keeps nodding. Connie translates, and Joyce nods emphatically.

I listen while Connie talks to them and the girls giggle. I catch bits and pieces of their rapid, melodic chatter and giggle along with them even when I don't know exactly what they are giggling about. I suddenly feel a connection with these girls that transcends age and race and language and nationality; a connection of nature, of biology, of forces beyond our control, forces that work through every woman's body on this earth. Blood, quite literally, connects us all. That, and the dread of public menstrual accidents.

I point toward the crowd of students at the end of the hall. “What are you doing?” I ask Joyce

“We are watching TV.”

“What's on TV?”

She wrinkles her nose and grins again. She gives her whole answer to Connie in Cantonese.

“It is a video about the period!” Connie says. “Look, they are all girls.”

I take a second look. It's true. The crowd is entirely female.

The doors at the end of the hall swing open, and the gang of waiting girls begins filing into the music room. Joyce, Kitty, and their friends shout goodbye to us as they run back down the hallway, ebony ponytails swaying behind them.

“They're so open!” I say to Connie as we go down the stairs. “If that had happened to me in a class, I'd want to hide from everybody for a week!”

“Yes! I would want to die!”

“Instead, they come running up and want to tell us all about it!”

“Yes — so open!”

We laugh and recount our own mortifying high-school “accident” stories on our walk to McDonald's.

I am organizing my picture cards on the table in the music room at Number 2 School when Coco comes up, grabs a sheet of music from the music teacher's pile, and begins drawing something in its margins. With a sly smile, she points to her finished sketch. “Miss Dionne, do you have . . . ?”

I peer at her drawing.

What is it? A bird? A plane?

Oh — a maxi pad.

I ask Connie, who asks Coco, who confirms that her drawing is, indeed, her rendition of a sanitary napkin.

“How do you say that in English?” she asks.

“Maxi pad.”

“Maxi pad,” she echoes. “Miss Dionne, do you have a maxi pad?”

“Do you need one?” I ask back.

“No. The nurse gave me one.”

“Okay, good. Now let's sit down and get —”

“Miss Dionne?”

“Yes, Coco?”

Her eyes twinkle behind her large pink-framed glasses. “Do you have the
red river
?”

“Coco! Sit down!”

Wednesday, the Grade Fives come roaring into class their usual, screaming selves. Jessica, laughing, sits down on her stool and calls me over to her.

“Yes, Jessica?”

“Miss Dionne.” She pulls a square of plastic packaging with the initials
P&G
printed on it from the front pocket of her school bag and smirks. “What's this in English?”

Not again
, I think. “That's a maxi pad,” I reply. Proctor & Gamble has obviously been to the school.

“Maxi pad,” she repeats. “How spell?”

I write it in her notebook, then notice her repeating the new word under her breath throughout the first part of class. Later, as Connie and I are circulating the class to check homework, Jessica calls me over to her again.

“Yes, Jessica?”

“Look at this!” She pulls a booklet out of her school bag. A picture of the blond Japanese cartoon heroine Sailor Moon stands triumphantly on the cover, backed by her legion of similarly round-eyed girlfriends. P&G's logo sits almost inconspicuously in the lower left corner. I flip through the book. It is filled with pictures of Sailor Moon and her entourage explaining menstruation in Chinese.