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deal. I can hang in for as long as we planned, but after that I’m out of here. Even if I have to go back alone.

I got up at around nine this morning, which is practically the middle of the day in China. I heard Dad, Eddie, and Lao Xu in the office, so I slipped into the bathroom, showered and returned to the bedroom without disturbing them. I didn’t really want to talk to Lao Xu this morning. I could hear the word processor keys clicking in the background while Lao Xu yelled into the telephone, shouting “
Wei!
” every few seconds.
    I went to the hotel dining room and had some toast, then I cruised the hotel shops for postcards. I got some with pictures of the wall or Forbidden City on them, plus a map of Beijing, and a copy of
Beijing, Old and New
. I was forming a plan of what I wanted to do for the next week or so to kill time.
    I went and sat in the lobby coffee shop and wrote a card to Mom — Dad said I should write to her once in a while — and watched the tourists strolling by or browsing at the long glass display cases across the lobby where they sold everything from lacquer ware to stuffed pandas.
    I opened the map, pleased to find that the streets were named in Pin-yin, the alphabetic system the Chinese use to teach kids how to pronounce the characters in the national language, Mandarin. Because the names of the streets and sites were written in this way, I could read them and follow the street signs, which were written in Pin-yin as well as normal Chinese characters.
    I love maps. I think I got hooked on them from my interest in military history and restaging battles. I like to just sit and read them sometimes, sort of getting a picture of a city’s layout in my head and imagining what strategies I’d use if I were invading or defending it. Toronto, for example, is easy. All the streets are laid out on a north-south/east-west grid, except for spots like the Don Valley or the Humber River where the course of the rivers sometimes leads to streets whose direction varies from the pattern.Beijing was the same, I saw right away. The map showed the Forbidden City pretty well in the centre with Bei Hai, a long lake, to the west of it. The map showed where the old city walls once stood. The walls and most of the gates have been torn down.
    The plan I mentioned that was forming in my mind was this: I’d see if Dad would let me buy a bike so I could get around on my own. Then, with my map and copy of
Beijing, Old and New
I could tool around the city and see what I wanted. Dad and Eddie seemed to be getting busier every day, and even if they weren’t I doubted Dad would want to go exploring with me. There’s no way I was going to sit around in the hotel all the time.
    I sat back and looked at the tourists some more. Then my eye caught something moving high in the corner where the wall met the ceiling. A video camera. I could tell from the angle that it wasn’t pointed at the display cases. It was watching people in the lobby.
    It made me uncomfortable to think that in some little room in the hotel someone was eye-balling us all. It really bugged me. Alex, you’re getting paranoid, I said to myself. After all, I had seen them in stores in Toronto. Still, I felt exposed, examined. I guessed the feeling was just fallout from what Eddie had told me about Lao Xu. Then I remembered something Eddie had said that night that sort of went by me at the time. He said that someone is probably reporting to someone about Lao Xu.Maybe Lao Xu feels just as bad about the situation as I do.

    “Well, I don’t know,” Dad was saying in that tone of voice parents use when they
do
know and the answer is going to be no.
    “Come on, Dad, I’ll be all right. I’m not a baby, you know.”
    “But what if you get lost?”
    “How can I get lost? I’ve got a map.”
    “I can help, Ted.”
    Until then, Lao Xu had kept out of the discussion — that’s what Dad calls an argument.
    “I can write something on a card for Shan Da. If