Free Little Emperors by JoAnn Dionne

ask, “Miss Dionne . . . ?” Miranda assures them that I’ll be around for a while. They look relieved.
    In the all-girl class at Number 2 School, Miranda announces her departure at the end of the lesson. The girls leap off the choir benches and crowd around Miranda and me, pushing books and papers and pens at us from every angle. They want our autographs! While I’m signing one book, someone thrusts another right on top of the one I’m trying to sign and screams, “Miss Dionne! Miss Dionne!”
    I look over at Miranda, wrestling with her own pack of autograph hounds. She rolls her eyes. “Oh! These crazy kids!” She laughs. “Theywatch too much Hong Kong TV. Always see music star and girls screaming, ‘Sign! Sign!’ It’s crazy!”
    Friday is Miranda’s last day of work as well as the end of the kids’ regular school year. Monday marks the beginning of the students’ summer holidays. This doesn’t mean the end of Miss Dionne’s English lessons, however, only the beginning of our hot weather schedule. Classes begin at 8:00 a.m. and end at 1:30 p.m. — just in time to prevent our brains from roasting in our skulls in the midday heat.
    Monday is also the beginning of my resolution to take the bus to work, rather than taxis. The bus schedule is erratic at best, so I have to leave the apartment at 7:00 in order to catch a bus that will get me to school sometime before 8:00. The bus stop isn’t far. I hurry through the alleys below the apartment, passing a courtyard with rows of elderly people swimming silently through their Tai Chi. Then I cut through a market. The smell of the market, with freshly opened pigs rolling in on the backs of motorbikes, is quite a shock to my sleepy olfactory nerves at such an early hour. I leave the market and cross over Huanshi Lu on the pedestrian walkway, then backtrack half a block to the bus stop. Then I wait. And wait. And wait. I strain my eyes looking down the road for the 522, the bus that never comes. Cars pass, motorcycles pass, trucks, bus, bus, bus, but no 522. Sweat trickles down my spine and pools in the small of my back. It’s a sauna and it’s only 7:20. Suddenly, there it is, the pink-and-white 522, lumbering toward me in the early-morning sun. I hop on, stuffing two yuan of tiny jiao bills into the fare box, and search for a seat. Some mornings there is almost no one on the bus and I can sit in any seat I want. Other mornings the bus is packed, so I have to stand in the aisle and swing from the ceiling straps around sharp corners. Other times, there is still one free seat, but it’s covered in vomit, so I have to stand, anyway. Ten minutes later, I jump out as the bus slows near the Wu Yang turnoff on Guangzhou Da Dao, and I’m ready to start my day.
    The schools are quiet now. Ours is the only class in the entire five-storey concrete cavern of Number 1 School. The playground is a ghost town, the ping-pong tables, still lifes. Number 2 School has moved us from the music room on the fifth floor to the Marx, Engels, and Leninroom on the ground floor so we won’t disturb the teachers on summer holiday upstairs.
    As the children at Number 1 School file into class Monday morning, they seem transformed. I thought they would be hyper with summertime energy, but instead they are as quiet as their deserted schoolyard and pay perfect attention to the lessons. Perhaps they are as stunned as I am this early in the morning. Perhaps they can finally sit still for my class knowing no other classes will cage them in during the day.
    The kids also look different. Instead of their green-and-white school track suits, they now come to school in their own clothes, in a rainbow of colours and an array of personalities. It takes me a moment to recognize them again. Some girls, who seemed so tomboyish in their school uniforms, come in bright sundresses, others in frilly, poofy skirts. Most boys