Little Emperors (32 page)

Anna awaits her turn in the dress rehearsal for the Hong Kong Handover celebration at Number 1 School
.

All this hubbub, and the fact that the school's final exams are just around the corner, has left my students very little time for their homework. I asked them to draw their interpretations of the Hong Kong handover in order to decorate our classroom in the spirit of the event, but only three students handed pictures in. Connie and I watch a bit more of the rehearsal, then go inside to put up the three pictures.

Two girls drew themselves with blond hair carrying shopping bags past skyscrapers. Jane, however, drew a map of Hong Kong with a giant Chinese flag planted firmly on Hong Kong's Victoria Peak. Pencil crayon fireworks sprout from Hong Kong, the Mainland, and even Taiwan. In black felt marker at the bottom of the page, Jane has written “Hong Kong velcome China!”

“Looks like Jane considers Taiwan part of the Mainland,” I say as I tape her picture to the wall.

“Yes,” Connie answers, peering at the drawing. “She will make a good Party member someday.”

“I think she means, ‘Hong Kong,
w
elcome
to
China' . . .”

Connie smirks as I correct Jane's caption with my red pen. “I think it should be more like ‘China, welcome to Hong Kong!' ”

“Fireworks!” someone shouts.

“Either that, or China has commenced bombing!” someone else yells in reply.

High-pitched whistling screams through Hong Kong's night sky, then explodes, sending thunderous echoes bouncing between the buildings all around us, shuddering glass and steel. We can see nothing on this small neon-lit side street, so we run toward Nathan Road, toward the noise, toward the crowd.

We meet the crowd and are quickly swept into its tow as it surges down the street toward Victoria Harbour. Fireworks erupt in gorgeous, violent explosions above us. We stare at the sky in wonder, letting out a collective
Whoa!
with the crowd at every blast.

We scurry through pockets and openings in the crowd as the sky continues to burst overhead. We weave our way around people in a human train, keeping our eyes firmly fixed on the person ahead of us. More than halfway down to the harbour, we glance around and notice we have lost most of our dinner companions, leaving only a party of six — Serra, Shelley, Amanda, Tina, Steph, and me.

The crowd becomes more concentrated the closer we get to the harbour. We push and squeeze and pull our way under the neon signs, under the dragon writhing out from the windows of the Holiday Inn, through to the edge of Salisbury Road, where the sheer density of the crowd forces us to stop. The heat of thousands of bodies presses into us as we stand, wedged in, watching the final fireworks burst, then fall in weeping willows of sparks.

When the last firework fades, the crowd immediately disperses and flows back up Nathan Road, a river in reverse. Loosened from the crowd's grip, we stride west on Salisbury Road, staring up at the sky as it begins to rain again, hoping for one last firework. We snap a few photos, particularly of Serra in her Cat-in-the-Hat British flag hat, then return to follow the crowd back up Nathan Road. It is time to begin celebrating this transfer of sovereignty in earnest. We duck into the entrance of Mad Dog's Pub.

We plunge down the stairs into the depths of the bar and are met by the thump of dance music and a wall-sized TV screen. Steph patrols the place for an empty table while others go to chat with people we see from Guangzhou. I stop short in the middle of the empty dance floor, alone in
its flashing lights, transfixed by the images on the giant TV. At the bottom of the screen, it says, “CNN live: Chinese troops entering Hong Kong.”

Funny, I think, how things only become real once you see them on TV.

A crowd gathers around the screen. We watch as dozens of green army trucks, their backs lined with pin-straight soldiers, line up at the border. Ahead of them, shiny buses filled with more important-looking army officials stop at the checkpoint one by one. These officers, decked out in the Chinese military's finest olive-and-red uniforms, stare straight ahead, ignoring the glare of TV camera lights. Navy officers in white uniforms march alongside this intimidating cavalcade and, with one high step, come to a standstill.

The troops stop at the border. The music in the bar keeps pumping. The dance floor's coloured lights flash on the screen, dotting the soldiers' faces and mottling their uniforms in psychedelic rainbows. As the music speeds up, the troops on screen begin marching into Hong Kong, marching in to a disco beat . . .

Ah, ah, ah, ah . . . Stayin' alive, stayin' alive
 . . .

We watch as People's Liberation Army buses and trucks and soldiers whir past in front of us, taller than us. At any other time in modern history, communist troops roaring over the Hong Kong border would have had people running to Victoria Harbour and frantically rowing away from the territory, wide-eyed with panic. But here we are, beers in hand, partying, just down the road from it all. Perhaps we are not unlike Nero and his fiddle, but watching the Chinese troops coming in isn't, on this night, frightening in the least. In fact, with the big TV and flashing lights and thumping music, it all seems rather . . . funky.

Steph shouts that there are no free tables, so we head out. As we start up the stairs, I glance back at the screen. The last tail lights of the last truck cross the border and disappear into the darkness.

We visit a few other bars, then make our way back down Nathan Road through the crowd, past the Peninsula Hotel on Salisbury Road, past the old station clock tower — which tells us it is almost 11:30 — and into the Star Ferry terminal. We are herded onto a boat almost immediately and soon find ourselves across the harbour in Central.

We follow Steph up a steep sidewalk toward Lan Kwai Fong, the trendy bar district tucked behind the skyscrapers. We meet another huge crowd and push our way through, only to be stopped by steel barricades and a line of Royal Hong Kong Police who, within minutes, will no longer
be Royal. Steph's bottle of champagne pops, startling the police. They flinch and glare at us as bubbles foam down the side of the bottle. A space between the barricades opens up, and Steph squeezes through toward the street party. Seeing Steph's escape, the police swing the barricades together, trapping the rest of us behind them.

The crowd around us becomes bigger, pushier. Voices keep asking, “What time is it?” and
“Gei dim ah?”
Different answers bounce back as the zero hour draws nearer.

Steph hands the open bottle of champagne back over the barricade. I grab its foil neck and take a swig. It is warm and fuzzy and burns the back of my throat. I hand it back to Tina, who takes a drink and passes it behind her. A few moments later, the bottle is back in my hand. I lean my head back for another drink just as cheering erupts from the crowd ahead. Damn! I nearly choke as I tear the bottle from my lips and check my watch.

It is midnight. It is official. Hong Kong, the world's freest economy, is now part of China, the world's largest remaining communist country.

The cheering sweeps closer, and I raise the bottle above my head, letting out a drunken
“Wooooo!”
The police swing the barricades to the side, and we swarm in to join the rest of the party on the steep steps of Lan Kwai Fong.

The area is packed. The bars wall-to-wall. We wander up and down the street through the cheering, whooping crowd. People stagger by wearing Chinese army hats cocked sideways. Women, both chunky Westerners and slim Chinese, teeter by in silk cheongsams carrying one-litre bottles of San Miguel beer. We stand at the top of one of the streets and watch the crowd jostle by as we finish off the champagne and start in on cans of Heineken. Chinese flags sail by as Superman capes.

We find a piece of curb and sit down. A very tall Caucasian drag queen saunters by. He towers over the crowd in his platinum wig, red sequined jacket, spike heels, and Union Jack pencil skirt slit high up the back of his endless legs. “Maggie Thatcher?” we wonder out loud. “
Queen
Elizabeth?”

“Hello, girls!” he says, and stops to chat with us. He introduces us to a shorter drag queen, a Chinese man in an unruly black wig and navy blue business suit jacket and skirt. “This is Anson Chan,” the taller man purrs. “The only woman who can put a smile on Tung Chee-hwa's face!” They sashay away, arm in arm.

As a French TV crew interviews Serra in her Cat-in-the-Hat hat,
which she has now turned inside out, revealing the five stars of the Chinese flag, two tipsy young Chinese men crouch near us.

“Hullo,” they breathe into my face. “What your name?”

“
Wo shi
JoAnn,” I breathe back.

My inebriated blurb of Mandarin sends the young men giggling. They rush back to their friends leaning against the building behind us with news of their breakthrough. I can hear them confer in Cantonese how to phrase their next question in both Mandarin and English.

They come back.
“Ni shi nali ren-ah?”
they ask excitedly. Their Mandarin is only slightly better than their English, both of which, however, are far superior to my Cantonese. “Where your from?” they ask again.

“Wo shi jianada ren.”

“Oh!
Jianada!
” Whisper, whisper. “
Ganadaai!
Canada! Very good!”

This exchange exhausts my reservoir of Mandarin and runs their English into a brick wall. They run back to their friends. More whispers. More giggles. Too many giggles — I can't decipher anything they are saying in any language. The crowd milling past us begins to blur in front of my eyes. I sip at my beer.

The first two young men return and crouch in front of me. Half a dozen of their friends follow and crowd around to watch. “Kiss me!” says one, pointing to his lips.

The Communist Party in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong, celebrates the end of British rule
.

“No!” I giggle. I pat my flushed cheek.
“Ni do-ah!”
— “Here!”

“Okay,” he says, and turns his head to one side. I lean forward to give him the agreed-upon kiss when he suddenly turns his head and, too far forward to retreat, I get a big smooch on the lips.

“Okay, let's go!” Amanda says, popping up from her seat and saving me from the boys now wrestling to be next in line to kiss the drunk Canadian girl.

At 6:00 a.m., Shelley, Serra, and I stumble out of Joe Banana's in Wanchai, sobered from dancing and exhausted from being awake for nearly twenty-four hours. We run through the now torrential rain to a sheltered street corner and try to hail a cab. Water gushes from awnings of corrugated steel and crashes on the sidewalk in front of us. Night sky fades to morning grey like black ink diluted in water. A dozen taxis ignore us, splooshing us with walls of water as they pass. Finally, a minibus accepts us and takes us under the harbour to Kowloon.

Soon, we are standing in front of the Peninsula Hotel, a half-hour early for our planned 7:00 a.m. rendezvous with all the people we lost along the way last night. To kill time and keep awake, we wander to the promenade along the harbour. Silent and bleary-eyed, we gaze out over the choppy water now the colour of wet cement. The city is dripping, grey. The Peak and taller buildings in Central are cloaked in clouds. Gone is the indigo sliver of the royal yacht
Britannia
from the opposite shore. It was moored in front of the Convention Centre yesterday and left shortly after midnight last night. This morning, there is an empty space where the ship was, as if someone snapped his fingers and made it disappear.
The sun did not set on the British Empire, after all
, I think.
It got rained out
.

We drag our aching bodies back to the Peninsula. “We'd like to have breakfast!” Serra says perkily to the doorman after none of our friends show up.

“I'm sorry,” the doorman firmly but politely replies. “The restaurants are reserved for guests only today.”

“But, comrade, we're hungry,” I say. Beer-stained, rain-soaked, and looking like drowned street urchins, we give the doorman our sweetest pathetic smiles.

“I'm sorry,” says the doorman and closes the door.

So much for the first day of communism in Hong Kong.

We drag ourselves up to the Holiday Inn, where we pick at the buffet breakfast and take turns falling asleep at the table or catnapping
in the bathroom stalls. Later, unable to force down another cup of bad buffet coffee, we make our way to the Imperial Hotel down the street. Legs wobbling, we pass Chinese vendors setting up their fruit and newspaper stalls and red-eyed Brits just now crawling out of the pubs to go home. We collapse on the lobby's vinyl sofa to sleep and wait for a room to become available after noon. It is only 9:00 a.m. Bedtime seems a decade away.

I sleep in spurts on the sticky sofa, waking with every loud noise or whiff of cigarette smoke in the brightly lit room. Finally, at 1:00, the manager comes to tell us our room is ready. The three of us, the three survivors, stand like hunchbacks in the elevator. We get out, swing open the door to room 701, and crash face down on the beds.