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you do about the future. In Chinese there’s no “he” or “she”. Both are
ta
.
    As if that isn’t enough, we learn Chinese by writing the words in Pin-yin. Except some letters are pronounced differently from English. X is
Hss
, so Lao Xu sounds like
Hssoo
. Q is a hard ch sound, Zh is like our J, and Z is a sound English doesn’t really have!
    Enough of that. I go to school in the mornings, then head down to the Friendship Store to get a pop and a snack. In the afternoons I pack up my gear in my backpack and go out for a reconnaissance trip. I take some food, a couple of Cokes, a million battery packs, the 8mm camcorder, videotapes, my audio recorder — which I haven’t used yet, but you never know — my Walkman and some rock ‘n’ roll tapes, and my vhf two-way radio. It’s a little thing, about the size of a pack of cigarettes or pager, with a range of five or six miles in the city and five times that in the country. It has a power-saving feature when it’s on receive mode so I can leave it on while I’m out and be sure the battery won’t wear down. Dad can call me anytime he wants. We use channel one.
    What I did, I bought one of those bamboo baby seats a lot of people have on their bikes. It fits on the rat-trap carrier behind the seat over the rear fender. I tie the camcorder to the carrier so it points out behind me, put it on autofocus, and lock it on. I have a little box with a hole in it that covers the camcorder but allows the lens to protrude a little. When I get to a part of the city I think is interesting, or that I think Dad might find interesting, I just get off the bike, lock the camera on, remount and ride slowly along.
    I tool around the streets, exploring. I’ve been through the Forbidden City — which looks mostly like a ghost town, with expansive empty courtyards — and saw the Nine Dragon Wall, out to the Summer Palace, which is an hour’s ride to the outside of the city past Beijing University, and to the Temple of Heaven Park. Those places were weird, in a way. One minute you’re in a noisy, polluted city. Then you walk through a gate and blink your eyes and suddenly four or six hundred years disappear. You see graceful, elegant buildings with glazed roofs, wooden latticework on the windows, and quite cool interiors. Gnarled ancient pines stand in peaceful courtyards. Except on Sundays, when the places are packed with people.
    The most fun I’ve had is hopping on my bike and exploring the parts of the city the tourists don’t get to or even know about. A lot of Beijing is old residential neighbourhoods where there are
hu tongs
— alleys — instead of streets, with walls along the alleys and gates that lead into courtyards. I read that these walled neighbourhoods were designed to be easily defended in times of war. So naturally I had to check them out.
    One day I took a walking tour of Tian An Men Square. Lao Xu told me I could pick up a lot of fairly recent Chinese history by visiting all the spots there, and Eddie added that if I got bored there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken place at the south end of the square.
    The square is mega-huge. It’s almost fortyhectares, with trees lining it on the north/south sides. I wandered through the Museum of the Revolution and the Museum of Natural History. Then I walked across the sun-baked square, past the tourists and kite flyers and families and popsicle saleswomen and professional photographers, past the tall square pillar of the Monument to the People’s Heroes with the gold writing on it, to the west side where the Great Hall of the People is. The PLA soldiers stationed at the doors, with their wrinkled green uniforms and green running shoes and old bolt-action rifles, didn’t look too intimidating to me. I strolled past the Mao Ze-dong Memorial Hall and the two tall blockhouses that were once part of the city wall. They’re called “gates” in Chinese. Then I crossed Qian Men Lu — Front Gate Street which is even busier than