Forbidden City

Alex decides he has no choice but to make the best of his stay. He finds himself a map of Beijing and begins to study it while his father and Eddie work. It seems to him that his “[d]ad and Eddie are getting busier every day” (35), and Alex has no intention of just sitting around the hotel all day. He came this far and wants to see China.

He also wants to get out of the hotel quite badly, especially after noticing “something moving high in the corner where the wall met the ceiling. A video camera […] watching people in the lobbying” (35). The creepy sensation of being watched leads Alex to press his father to get him a used bike. His father is hesitant at first but agrees when Alex says he will take a video camera along and shoot whatever he sees. As always, this is his father’s main concern—getting the story.

Alex enrolls in a Chinese-language class at a school for foreign diplomats’ kid, and even though he says what he’s learned “doesn’t sound like much, the way Teacher Huang puts it to us, we are learning a lot” (37). It is a difficult school to get into, but