Little Emperors (15 page)

The kettle is ready. The young woman runs steaming water over the cups and teapot, then lifts each with bamboo pincers, swirls the hot water around, and dumps it into the ceramic tray. Puffs of steam rise from the bamboo grate like the breath from tiny dragons. The young woman breaks a few twigs into one of the large cups, pours more hot water in and, holding the lid in place with her finger, swirls it around again, then pours the tea into the small teapot. From the teapot, she spills tea into the thimble cups.

I take one of the cups and sip the tea, and they motion for me to drink the other one as well. The young woman continues making tea as I empty each cup. The tea tastes more strongly of black licorice each time.

The women try talking with me, but, seeing their attempts met by my confused looks, they pull out a notepad and write their questions down in Chinese characters for me. This usually just makes matters worse, but, luckily, I recognize the characters for
mei guo ren
—
beautiful, country
, and
person
— meaning “American.”

“Bu shi. Wo shi jianada ren,”
I answer, using one of my two Mandarin phrases — “No, I'm a Canadian.”

“Ah! Jianada ren!”
they answer, their eyes lighting up.

I drink a few more thimblefuls of the ever-stronger tea and check my watch. It is 8:30. I motion that I have to leave. They nod. I pull out my wallet and ask them my second phrase in Mandarin,
“Duoshao qian?”
They motion “No! Nothing! It's free!” I wave “Thank you!” as I step down from the shop, and they wave “Goodbye! Come again!”

I tuck the plastic bag of tea into my shoulder bag and start through the dark market toward home. I lick my lips. The tea has left a bitter taste, but also a grin.

It is 4:00 a.m. I can't sleep. What fitful sleep I do have is filled with dreams of teaching the “This is My Pencil” song. The National Day holiday at the end of this month won't come quickly enough.

I was hungry when I woke up, so now I am eating the moon cake that Jacob at Number 1 School gave me. Moon cakes are quite heavy.
They are about the same size and weight as a stone that fits perfectly into the palm of your hand. I love the moist crust on the outside and the sweet lotus paste inside, but the salty boiled egg yolk in the middle is an acquired taste. Since I haven't yet acquired this taste, I am carefully picking around the egg yolk with the little plastic pitchfork that came with the cake. The yolk is supposed to represent the moon. It is a far better symbol than it is snack.

I am getting quite a stack of these moon cakes — a tin from the vice-principal at Number 1 school, a tin from the principal at Number 2 School, this one from Jacob, another one from Marie, and another whole box from Russ. Celine and Rhonda have been collecting quite a few, too. Our fridge is bulging with moon cakes!

Today, when I entered the gates at Number 1 School, Russ, William, and Brian were taking their gym class in the schoolyard. The class was learning to line up straight and turn on command, like naughty little soldiers in green-and-white track suits. I stopped to watch, and Russ waved to me. His teacher promptly scolded him for not paying attention. Russ resumed staring straight ahead with the other children, turning north, turning east, turning south, turning west. I disappeared into the conference room so I wouldn't get him into any more trouble.

When he came in for his class, Russ handed me a red box full of miniature moon cakes. He looked up and asked, “Miss Dionne, do you like?”

“Oh, yes! Thank you, Russ.”

The box is beautiful. On its cover, framed by a crimson border crowned with gold Chinese characters, a woman in sepia robes sits next to a tree, holding a fan and looking coyly off to one side. This is the woman at the heart of one of the Mid-Autumn Festival legends, Chang E.

Every week, little Cailey delivers a copy of the
Guangzhou Daily English Edition
to my classroom. This tiny, cheery newspaper explains that there are at least three legends about the origin of moon cakes. The most popular one is about Chang E. She was the wife of an invincible hero, a man famous for his archery skills and for having saved his people from drought by shooting down the surplus nine suns that once occupied the heavens. One day, while he was out doing whatever invincible heroes did, Chang E got into his Elixir of Life. She drank too much of the potion and immediately became immortal. She rose off the ground and soon found herself trapped on the moon, the dwelling place of immortals, with only a rabbit and a laurel tree for company. According to the paper, “people have moon cakes, whose round shape symbolizes
family reunion, to express their sincere wishes for Chang E's reunion with her husband.”

The second legend has to do with an emperor of the Tang Dynasty. This emperor fell into a deep sleep and dreamt of making a journey to the Moon Palace. On this journey, he brought delicious round cakes with him. When he awoke, he told his courtiers about his dream and described the cakes he ate in the Moon Palace. As the paper puts it, “the cakes carried by him into the fairyland on the moon came to be called moon cakes.”

The third legend is my favourite. It explains that moon cakes may have had a rather subversive beginning. Unable to endure the cruel tyranny of one of the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty, some people decided to stage an uprising on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. In order to spread the news of the rebellion secretly, they hid tiny notices inside small round cakes detailing the time and place of the revolt. “Consequently,” the paper points out, “it was moon cakes that helped them to succeed in holding the uprising.”

The paper also gives some tips on eating moon cakes. It warns against eating too many of them. If you eat too many moon cakes which, the paper admits, are high in sugar and fat, you “may suffer from indigestion, diarrhea, and pain in the stomach.” The last tip warns against being killed by moon cakes. According to the paper, moon cakes easily become mouldy if kept too long and “people can be poisoned by eating the mouldy ones.”

I wonder if we will be able to finish all the moon cakes in our fridge before they become lethal?

Oof
. I am full. The moon cake is now resting in my stomach, its egg yolk discarded in chunks in its plastic wrapper. It is 5:00 a.m. An apartment over in the next building has had its TV on all night. Time to go to sleep.

The female vice-principal at Number 1 School comes down at our break and tells us we will soon have our own classroom on the fifth floor. As we follow her upstairs to take a look at the room, I can't help but feel excited. I feel as if I have finally arrived, as if I have finally been accepted by the school. At last — our very own classroom! I am thrilled to be getting away from the cavernous conference room, away from the main gates, away from public view.

We get to the fifth floor and discover that our new classroom was once a toilet. It's one of the renovated washrooms, a by-product of the summer's Toilet Revolution. The room that was going to be the school library is now Miss Dionne's English classroom.

It's tiny. It's about the size of a cell at a lunatic asylum — which, with the way children's screeches bounce off ceramic floors and walls, it may very well turn out to be. A wooden plank door has been installed. It is painted grey and sits a bit crookedly in its frame. The new window at the back is very big and looks out onto the small street and apartments behind the school. Still, there is no disguising that it was once a toilet. Sealed plumbing pipes stick out of the walls. I slide the window open and let in some fresh noise.

“Lady principal says she will have men put bars on the window so kids won't fall out,” Echo explains as I look at the street five storeys below.

“Okay.”

“And she will have school doorman install a fan and bring in some little wooden stools for the kids. And bring you a desk and a bookshelf, too.”

“Okay.” I can't imagine how we are going to fit all that furniture into such a small room.

“Of course, she will have kids come mop this dirty floor before we move in.”

“Okay.”

“Do you like it?”

I glance over at the vice-principal. She beams with pride over the reincarnation of the little room. I smile back at her and nod. “Yes. It's perfect.”

It is official. I am teaching in a renovated toilet. It is the pinnacle of my career. We move in today, the same day as the Mid-Autumn Festival.

There is some confusion as students try to figure out where we are (apparently few bothered to read the note Echo taped to the conference room door). When the kids finally burst into our new classroom, they laugh and howl and joke about how they are learning English in a “special W.C.” Some mime squatting and grimacing over a toilet. Little William looks up at Echo and tells her, “Being in this room makes me want to pee!” Echo quickly translates his message for me.

“Don't you dare!” I say to him. “Don't you even
think
about it!”

Gerry enters the next class just as all his classmates are settling into their seats. He hands Echo a piece of paper and stands waiting for her to read it.

“What's that?” I ask, looking up from my attendance sheet.

“It's about you. Gerry wrote a story about you.”

“Really? Why?”

“His Chinese composition teacher told them to write a story about an adult they admire. He wrote about you.”

“What does it say?” I ask.
You mean I beat out Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Chairman Mao, and Deng Xiaoping?
I think, amazed. I look over at Gerry. Usually the class loudmouth, he now seems oddly quiet, even bashful.

Echo translates Gerry's story:

I want to tell you about Miss Dionne. Miss Dionne is from Canada. She came from very far away to help us learn English. She has blond hair and a doll's face. In her class, we learn many songs and games and we have fun with her. When we are too noisy, she places her fingers against her lips and tells us to be quiet. Of course, we obey her. As every day passes, we grow to respect her more and more, and she grows to love us more and more. I am very lucky to have such a teacher as Miss Dionne.

“I can translate this and copy it for you if you like,” Echo offers.

“No . . . no . . .” I answer quietly. “It's perfect just the way it is.”

At the end of the day, after fumbling to lock the padlock to the new room in the dark, I go to Celine's school in Tianhe to help her with her
Yellow Book
final exams. After the tests, Celine and I go for dinner near her school. The moon is huge and bright white and perfectly round in a rare, clear Guangzhou sky. It follows us as we walk down narrow alleyways and past rows of parked bicycles. Occasionally, it hides behind an apartment building, then glides back out to greet us in a celestial game of peek-a-boo.

After dinner, Celine and I wander around her school's neighbourhood in search of children with lanterns. In some ways, the Mid-Autumn Festival is like a Chinese Halloween, but instead of taking to the streets with candy bags and ghoulish masks, the kids carry lanterns. We see a few children with traditional paper lanterns which, from a distance, look like fireflies in the night. Not everyone sticks with tradition, however. We
see one little boy carrying a plastic Donald Duck lantern, and another with a lantern shaped like a Volkswagen Beetle.

We come to a square encircled by a string of red Chinese lanterns. Loudspeakers crackle with waltz music as couples dance around and around the square, gliding smoothly over the moonlit paving stones. One white-haired couple step and dip and twirl with more energy, more elegance, than any other couple. I watch them in wonder, in absolute awe. I catch my breath at the way happiness and grace and a love of life can flourish on this earth. At how it can sneak up and touch you, even in the dust and chaos of a place like Guangzhou.

Celine and I walk under the red lanterns and sit down on some steps on the other side of the square. We continue watching the dancing crowd and all the bright lanterns swaying from tiny hands in the streets. We say hello to some of Celine's students as they walk by with their parents. We watch one small boy run giddily through the square. He trips on a cobblestone and falls flat on his face.

“And so he learns,” Celine says, “that life in China is hard.”

The boy doesn't cry. He pops right back up and keeps going.

Does something in “Store hand luggage safely in the overhead bin” not translate well into Chinese? My feet are propped up on a crate of lychee nuts the man next to me has brought aboard as carry-on luggage. The gentleman in front of me has put a large suitcase in the aisle. The stewardesses have said nothing about it. If it bothers them at all, it is only because they have to squeeze past it to deliver peanuts to the passengers in the seats ahead.

The plane screams into a landing at the airport. The wings wobble as first one, then another, then the first one, then another again, and finally all wheels touch the tarmac. Near the end of the runway, the pilot slams on the brakes in order to test the aircraft's seat belts. That done, there is a collective unsnapping and everyone is up, suitcases in hand and ready to go. We haven't even reached the gate.

Out of the airport, I jump into a taxi and know right away that this is a tough town: the driver sits behind a sheet of knife-proof Plexiglas.

As we leave the airport, a billboard cheerily exclaims,
WELCOME TO SHANGHAI
!

The driver asks in Mandarin where I'm from. I reply in my now well-rehearsed Mandarin phrase that I'm from Canada. He takes that as a sign I must be fluent in Chinese and launches into a guided tour of the outskirts and suburbs of Shanghai, pointing out new buildings at every intersection. I smile and nod and nod and smile. I have no idea what he is saying.

Although I've seen many pictures of them, the European buildings along Shanghai's famous Bund surprise me when the taxi turns a corner and I see them for real for the first time. The taxi driver hears my “Wow!” and immediately, excitedly, begins telling me all about them. The buildings don't seem real. Even as we drive right in front of them, they are like a mirage. They seem to have been plunked down from outer space, beamed to the wrong address long ago and never stamped
RETURN TO SENDER
.