Free Little Emperors by JoAnn Dionne Page A

arrive casually in shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers. Ben, in his oversized Chicago Bulls shirt, long baggy shorts, and backward baseball cap, looks every bit the all-American Chinese kid.
    Monday is also the first day of work for my new teaching assistant, Echo. When the teaching centre first told me her name, I imagined, with such an odd choice of English name, she might be a Chinese hippie. But no — she’s far from it. She is, instead, rather conservative and bland in her white polyester blouses and beige skirts. There was no particular reason for the name Echo, she explains to me, just that she liked the sound of it. Every time I say her name, I imagine someone shouting into the Grand Canyon — ECHO, Echo, Echo, Echo, Echo , Echo  . . .
    Monday is also the first of July — Canada Day. I would have completely forgotten about it if the Canadian consulate hadn’t sent us gold-embossed invitations for its party at the White Swan Hotel. The party is very Canadian. There are polite speeches about Canada’s friendship with China, overly friendly people wielding business cards and networking, a long buffet table at which people line up and say “Excuse me” and “I’m sorry” if you accidentally bump them. How strange to be in a crowded room and have no one elbow me in the gut! How strange to line up and have no one bodycheck me out of the way! And just as I was getting used to China’s post offices.
    Monday also marks the beginning of the countdown. A year from now, the British will hand Hong Kong back to China. Three hundred and sixty-five shopping days left, Hong Kong.
    Now that Miranda is gone, so is my lunchtime translator. Echo seems uninterested in becoming my friend and bolts out the science room door as soon as the noon hour class is finished, leaving me to forage on my own at lunch. So unless I’m going to eat peanut butter sandwiches for the rest of my time in China, I’ve got to get a handle on Chinese. Can it be as hard as it looks?
    I walk to the book centre in Tianhe, a district just east of our apartments, and find a Mandarin-English phrase book for only eight yuan. It looks good. It has sections on the basics, plus food, shopping, and getting around. Thankfully, it devotes only a page to pronunciation and has a dictionary in the back where I can point to the Chinese characters in the event no one understands my garbled tones and I accidentally call someone’s mother a horse. Flipping through the book, I spy the phrase for
When does the bar open?
(
Jiu ba shenme shihou kaimen?
) and, a few pages later, the ever-useful
Do you think China’s present urban reform is making progress?
If I’m only at the phrase book stage of this language, I doubt I’ll be asking anyone
that
. I will, however, memorize the one about the bar.
    In order to teach myself how to read, I buy a book called
Fun with Chinese Characters
and three packages of children’s flash cards. I also buy an ink stone and some brushes. I want to make a hobby out of learning to write Chinese.
    Although I’ve barely cracked their code, I am beginning to see Chinese characters as more than bewildering signs in some vast and complicated symbol system. Each one is almost like a tiny, self-contained poem. They turn out to be a lot softer than their sharp edges suggest, and they’re not nearly as intimidating as they seem to be when writ large and red on city walls. For example, a movie or a film in Chinese is not merely a movie or a film, it is
dianying
— electric shadow. Imagine that.
An electric shadow
. Isn’t that exactly what films are? Isn’t that perfect?
    Some of the simplest characters also provide insight into the Chinese psyche, or at least illustrate the traditional male dominance in the culture. For example, the symbol for
good, hao
, is made from the signs for
woman
and
child
squeezed together. The symbol for
peace
or
contentment, an
, shows the