The People’s Republic of Desire

48 The Little Empress

I decide to take a long vacation in the States. It's strange – when I was in America, I thought of China, but in China, I miss America. After living in the gray city of Beijing for more than a year, I dream of America 's blue skies and green lawns. More than that, I feel part of me has never left America.

I'm not sure why I have chosen this exact moment for my visit, but I feel as though my time in China has helped to soften some of the painful memories I have of my time in the States. Through this vacation I hope to recapture the moments and things that I loved about the country. But perhaps more important, I need to find out if moving to China was really the best way to ease my pain over losing Len and having my heart broken. What better way to test if my experiment was a success than going back to the States? I must find out if I have truly exorcised those bad thoughts from my mind.

Although news on TV about the United States is not that optimistic, from terrorist threats to a bad economy, most Americans I run into still seem carefree. I feel flattered as cars come to a stop in front of me when I cross the road and as strange passersby smile at me. In China, pedestrians stop for cars and strangers don't make eye contact.

I stay at Mother Bee's. Mother Bee was my hosting mother when I first arrived in Columbia, Missouri, for college eight years ago. Returning to Missouri is refreshing. I see the trees dancing in the wind and hear birds chirping in the morning. Missouri is about as far away as you can get from Beijing. I like the idyllic, calm atmosphere. Already I can tell that this is going to be a good vacation.

Mother Bee embraces me warmly. "Welcome back! Your room is still there. Only one student stayed there briefly after you."

To my surprise, I find a voodoo doll in the room. The doll has been pierced on the chest with multiple needles. "Bee" is written on the doll's back.

I bring it to Mother Bee.

Mother Bee sighs, clasping the poor doll, "I gave it to Juju, the exchange student from China! She didn't like it because I got it from Wal-Mart and it was made in China. She said that her parents always bought her the most expensive gifts, ones that are made in either the U.S.A. or Japan!"

"So she did this to you?"

Saying neither yes nor no, Mother Bee tells me about Juju. "Unlike you, seventeen-year-old Juju was a spoiled brat who didn't know how to tie her shoelaces or boil water. Her room was always messy. Once I asked her to clean the room, and she called me a big American imperialist who was exploiting her. She said that since her parents paid me money, I had no right to ask her to do things."

"Now that families are allowed to have only one chi ld, children like Juju are the rulers of their families, dictating to six adults: two parents and four grandparents!" I shake my head.

Mother Bee nods. "I read about it. She might get her way in China by behaving so badly and by being so lazy, but not under my roof!"

"What else did she do?"

"Juju ordered me to wake her up every morning. I gave her an alarm clock and showed her how to use it. Juju felt ignored and threw it away."

"So how did she get up every day?"

"She made her folks call her from China every morning!" Mother Bee stresses every syllable of the sentence to drive home the point.

"Sending kids to the States is fashionable among the new rich in China!" I explain.

Mother Bee continues. "I allowed her to use my home computer. One day I tried to log on to the computer, but it had crashed. I found that she had installed the pirated version of Windows XP without consulting anybody first. I told her that we don't use pirated software in the United States. She yelled at me."

"What did she say?" I ask curiously.

"She said why should the Chinese play by American rules? The Chinese are so poor that they can't afford to buy the official version of Windows. Bill Gates is already the world's richest man – why can't he give the product to the poor for a little money or for free? It's unfair that Chinese silk clothes with hand embroideries cost so much less than shirts with a simple DKNY mark. She even started to talk about the terrorists."

"What happened next? "

"Her mother gave her three thousand dollars to buy the newest Sony laptop. The first thing Juju did after getting the new laptop was to install the pirated Windows XP to upset me. I guess everybody around her in China obeys her without question. Whoever doesn't listen to her is added to her enemies list."

Mother Bee became Juju's enemy. By studying Mao back in China, Juju had learned that an effective strategy for defeating the enemy was to set one against the other. She turned Mother Bee's son, twelve-year-old Tommy, into a defiant rebel.

Tommy washed his father's car windows twice a week to earn some extra money. But then Juju educated Tommy about Karl Marx and the capitalists versus the proletarians. She tells Tommy, "Your parents are the capitalists who have exploited you as a child laborer. It's their parental duty to buy you whatever you want. In China, my parents have never said no to me."

Naïve Tommy was successfully brainwashed and waged a war against his parents, exactly fulfilling Juju's expectations.

"This little Chinese empress Juju sounds like a troublemaker!" I say to Mother Bee.

"As the three-month exchange period was coming to an end, I thought, Thank God, it's almost time for her to return home. Since she dislikes the States so much, she will be happier back there. But…"

"What?"

"One day she disappeared. I called her parents, her school, and her friends. Nobody knew where she was. I reported it to the police. Three days later, they found her in Boston. I learned that she had decided to stay in the United States after the exchange was over. But because of her J-1 immigration status, she was supposed to go back. Then she came up with the idea of seeking political asylum here. She made friends with some Falun Gong people in Boston via the Internet. Guess what? I saw her on TV the other night. She was part of a Falun Gong demonstration in front of the Chinese consulate in Boston. Welcome to America!"