False Beginnings

BEIJING - The last few days I've rushing between preparing for
midterms, last minute gatherings and other things that always seem to
pop up just before a vacation. One of them is a looming writing
project, which I've been putting off for some time. The assignment is
to talk about my study plan in China. I wound up going with a
straight-forward approach, but not before going through several drafts
where I found myself writing in the language of this blog. Here's one
opening paragraph that I decided not to use:

"As I prepared to sit down, the old woman smiled at me. I showed her
my train ticket, just to make sure I was in the correct row. She
nodded, and I took my place in the carriage bound for Guangzhou. I had
many questions for my cabin mate: Did she have any children? Where did
she buy her crisp blue shirt? Who was her best friend? On this, my
first trip to China, I wanted to know everything about the country I
had studied for so long back home. But I had no Chinese to ask this
woman my questions, no way to know the thoughts, feelings and hopes of
the people around me. I felt as if I was exploring the country with
only one eye, half-blind to my surroundings. When I returned to
America, I decided to enroll in a Putonghua course."

Line 'em Up

BEIJING - Every once and a while I'll pass by a random line. It's a clearly a line, a bunch of people standing roughly parallel to one another, each one either checking his or her watch, staring at the sky or loudly conversing with the person in front of them. What it is will be apparent, but why they are standing in line is a mystery.

 

Some how it seems rude to ask people why they are waiting in line. People waiting are usually grumpy, and I think asking someone why they are standing in the middle of sidewalk when they could be actually doing something is a bit dangerous. Once I waited eight hours to get the autograph Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan. I imagine if someone came up to me around the sixth hour and asked, "Hello. Why are you waiting here?" I would be seriously tempt to punch them in the face.

 

So the only way that I actually familiarize myself with these random lines is by the standing in them. A couple days ago I had the perfect introduction to a new kind of queue in China: the railway ticket booth. Most train tickets in China can only be reserved four days in advance, leading to huge queues several days before a vacation period. Because by the time train tickets are available plans to visit such and such a place have inevitably already been established. The train ticket isn't just something you'd like to get, it's now very necessary.

 

I stood in the line at the Wudaokou ticket booth for 30 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, only to be told that tickets didn't go on sale until 7 p.m. That meant coming back for an hour long waiting encore in the evening. Both times I stood on the sidewalk, in between a hospital gate and a condom vending machine, staring at my watch and looking down at the sky. Once I tried saying hello to the person in front of me. The woman just smiled and turned around; I guess she's not one for line conversation.

 

I did manage to get a train ticket in the end, and I'm now very familiar with the railway ticket booth queue. The next time I see a bunch of people standing on the sidewalk a few days before a vacation period, I'm going to feel rather sorry for them.

 

(This post is really just a roundabout way of saying that tomorrow I head out west for a week-and-a-half long vacation. I'm taking the train to sunny Lanzhou, the place where Han, Muslim and Tibetan China collide. Hopefully I'll be able to update from the road, but who knows.)

Twenty/Twenty

BEIJING - At 4:20 a.m. this morning, hundreds, if not thousands of college students across America woke up in the middle of the night, went out to a nearby quad, grassy field or wooded area and smoked some marijuana. At the exact same time of Beijing, I was sweating over a puzzle map of China, desperate trying to figure out where to place Jiangsu Province.

 

It wasn't until two hours later, over a perfect munchies snack of french fries, a milkshake and onion rings that I realized I'd missed the magic moment.

 

You might think no one in China would really care about 4/20, and I suppose for the vast majority of the 1.4 billion people here that's true. Easter came and went without anyone noticing. But with oodles of American students around, people have at least been talking about the holiday for quite some time.

 

First we had to explain the holiday. Apparently people from England, Korea, and Kazakhstan don't celebrate 4/20. It's easy to describe what you do on 4/20 -- smoke -- but why it's done is more illusive. Is it because 420 is the police code for marijuana use? Celebrating Hitler's birthday? Because some people in California in the 1970s got out of class at 4:20 in the afternoon? No one here seems to sure, and since Wikipedia is blocked in China the argument can't be settled. Needless to say, the Americans were able to get the basic idea of the holiday across.

 

Then there's the problem of actually celebrating. Drug use in China isn't encouraged. Being found with a relatively small amount can lead to a bullet in the back of the head, although a more realistic outcome would be instant deportation. Nevertheless, it seemed every expat I ran into had heard about a way to score some.

 

The least connected were headed to Sanlitun, the main embassy and expat region, where they could purchase a little from Africans on the street who crawl from bar to bar asking tourists if they want "something special." Other people had moved up to the level "of knowing someone." One friend said he knew a guy who grew plants in his apartment. Apparently he was a novice though, because the plants were all male and contained very little usable product. Other people had even more advanced contacts, connections with the Hong Kong drug trade or some other dangerous acquaintances.

 

I might have been in class for 4:20 on 4/20, but I made it downtown later in the day. The sweet smoke was definitely in the air at Sanlitun, in bars and on the street. An American holiday was making inroads in the land of the dragon, one puff at a time.

Have it Your Way

BEIJING - I have passed another language milestone: today I ordered an entire meal at McDonald's in Chinese.

 

They don't teach too much of the necessary vocabulary for ordering in an American chain restaurant in the Tsinghua classrooms, so I've largely had to figure out how to say the necessary things on my own.

 

Sprite I learned a couple days after arriving, when my Malaysian roommate woke me up at 3 a.m. to announce it was snowing. "Snow! Snow!" he said, incredibly excited. Having just come from Siberia, I was less than impressed, but used it as an opportunity to learn that snow is 雪，also the first character in Sprite.

 

Hamburger probably came first, I think I might have even learned this on one of my trips to China three years ago. The Chinese way to say it is "HAN-BAO-BAO," an adaptation of the English word that's distinct enough that a person behind the counter in Chengdu or Guilin might know that you're talking about the round bun with the piece of meat in the middle.

 

Then there were the French Fries, which I just put together today. In class I recently learned that "条" is a word to count long, skinny things. Roads, rivers and dragons all qualify. It makes sense that a french fry would also be in the word, so when I saw it as the second character on the McDonald's menu, I wasn't suprised. But I was a little taken aback at the character before it: 薯. We'd just learned that in class too.

 

So there it is: 一个中雪碧， 两个汉堡包， 一个种薯条.

 

That may be some pretty busted Chinese, but at 3:00 p.m. on April 22, 2007, it got me a pretty tasty lunch at the Wudaokou McDonald's.

The Fish Fiends

TIANXIANYU, China - The old widower warned me about the fish. If only I had listened.

 

I fell in conversation with this woman, whose name I never caught, because she had the smart idea to create makeshift seats in the middle of a near-vertical pitch of trail. The path leads from a parking lot up to the Jiankou section of the Great Wall, a tortorus mile and a half that ends with a scramble up a handmade ladder.

 

The view from the top is fantastic, and the Great Wall here is crumbling and largely unrestored. Coming to section like this (there are many) is much preferable tramping around Badaling, the completely rebuilt and hawker-filled section close to Beijing.

 

After the steep hike up and the equally steep journey back down, I happily took the old woman up on her offer of a seat in a make-shift mountain shop.The woman had carefully placed newsprint over a few flat stones, put up a thin canvas tarp, and sold drinks to passing hikers. She charges 6 RMB for a bottle of water, and 8 RMB for tea or coke -- about a 400% markup from the bottom of the mountain.

 

While I didn't get her name, I did find out the woman had two children, one studying to be a lawyer, the other in school, is widowed, and moved to the village just a few years ago. She spent a great deal of time explaining to me which characters were in the village's name, first by saying what words they were in "tian as in field," then drawing them in the dirt with a stick. By the time my first friend showed up at the drink station, it was very clear that we were near the village of 田仙鱼, and not say, in 天线与 (these would have the same romanizations).

 

Then the woman decided ask a couple questions. Naturally, the first our nationality, and after that what we were doing after the hiking. Eating, I replied. The woman then gave me some advice. The people at the bottom of the mountain were cheaters, she said. You would order an eight pound fish, and then they'd swipe for it for a two pound one but charge you for the larger amount. Be careful, she said.

 

I thanked for her advice, bought a bottle of her overpriced water and headed down the mountain. Thirty minutes later we arrived, dirty, sore, and quite hungry. Rather than charge admission to their section of the wall, the residents of Tianxianyu have placed a large resident specializing in fish at the wall's access point. The fish are kept in several large outdoor concrete tanks, and visitors are encouraged to catch their dinner, which is then fried and served at a nearby table.

 

The loads of Chinese tourists (strangely not climbing the wall, just here for the food) should have been a clue that something was up. The ridiculous idea of casting a hook into a concrete bowl in order to catch dinner should have been another clue. And the fact that a woman who makes her living by over-charging tourists told me that they over-charged at this restaurant. Then there was our driver, egging us on by constantly saying, "The big here are really big! So big!"

 

Yes, the fish restaurant was a tourist trap.

 

They tried to charge us 15 RMB for soy sauce, 10 RMB for a bottle of water, and when asked recommendations only pointed to the most expensive things on the menu.

 

But the worst thing of all was the fish. We ordered a plate of smoked fish. Ten minutes later, two small fillets arrived, each well seasoned and quite tasty. I quite liked it, until I saw the bill. The tiny pieces of fish amounted to 2.5 斤, or nearly three pounds of fish. I'm quite convinced the staff actually did switch out the fish, giving us a smaller fish but charging for a big one.

 

So please, come out here, expierence the Great Wall in a pretty natural setting, but for God's sake, listen to the old widower when she warns you about the fish.

With A Poster, It's Paris

BEIJING -- I asked the tiny noodle stall's lone occupant, a middle-aged woman wearing a blue apron, if I could see a menu.

"It's right there," she replied, and pointed to a series of hand-painted signs hanging on one wall. I squinted, trying to read the slightly messy handwriting before decided on an order of 肉丝炒饭, or sliced-pork fried rice.

I asked the woman if they had any cold drinks, and when she replied that no, they didn't, I went door and bought a cold ice red tea.

"Cold drinks are much better than warm drinks," I said as an explanation, and the woman smiled.

The restaurant wasn't the smallest I've seen in China. There were six tables, each with three or four stools, a small container of crushed red pepper and a napkin basket. On the walls of the restaurant were three massive posters, each one several feet wide and in a plastic frame. The one under my table showed the Eiffel Tower with few Parisian fountains in the foreground. I asked the woman why she'd put up the picture.

"Because it's a nice picture, very lively," she said.

My food arrived -- a huge mound of rice covered in soy sauce, with a fair amount of sweet pork mixed inside. As I chomped away, a man with brown pants and a funny mustache entered the restaurant. He carried a plate, which he stuck in a microwave sitting the table closest to the restaurant's rear, and then came over to talk with me.

"Why aren't you drinking beer?" he said.

"Because it's too early for beer. Tonight I'll have some beer."

He picked up my book that I'd placed on the table.

"What's this?" he said.

I'm reading Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize winning tale of love and tragedy during the years leading up to and during the Russian Revolution. I tried to explain the plot of the book in my limited Chinese.

"The story takes place 100 years ago. There's a Russian doctor. He falls in love with a very beautiful young woman. Then there's a--"

I had to pause here and go for my yellow dictionary and look up the word for war. When I read the dictionary's first entry zhanzheng, the man didn't understand. I tried again, but with no luck. It's probably best that I didn't have to continue my book summary, as I would have to look "revolution," "exile," "Communism" and "Siberia," before long.

The man then took my dictionary and started flipping through the pages. He giggled at a few entries, but I when I asked to see what he was laughing at, he showed me the word "swat." I don't think that's terribly funny.

The microwave timer went off and the man fetched his plate and walked out the door, leaving me to finish my rice.

This is nothing special -- a cheap meal, a couple of new conversation companions, and a pretty good time. It seems I can't duck into a back alley with meeting someone interesting; a person who throws up a picture of the Eiffel Tower to make sure quiet cafe seem busier, a man who thinks I should drink in the middle of the afternoon.

"Your food is very good," I told the restaurant owner before leaving. "I'll be back to look at your wall again soon."

Beibei

BEIJING -- I met Beibei on the side of a small stream flanked by blossoming willow trees, cherry blossoms, and a warm spring wind. It was the perfect setting for a Chinese romance, one of classical novels that starts with a clandestine relationship that turns into a torrid love affair and then ends tragically. But it wasn't meant to be. Beibei, you see, is a baby.

Beibei's not talking yet, but she displayed her disinterest in other ways. Her caretaker, a young woman with a broad smile, tried to make her wave at me, propping up her tiny let arm. She refused to go along.

 

"Say hello, Beibei! Say hello!" the woman said. But Beibei looked tried. At three months old, she's not quite ready for idle conversation. Thankfully her roommates were more than willing to talk as I waited for a friend at the stream's edge. I was only about 400 meters from the Tsinghua gates -- from the stream's edge I could see my dorm -- but this isn't part of the campus world. This place, which the woman told me was Tsinghua No. 8 Hutong, stands apart.

 

Three hundred people live in this 胡同 (hutong), a traditional Beijing courtyard dwelling, that have been mostly demolished in the center of Beijing. There's no indoor plumbing, just makeshift electric wires thrown up haphazardly in different places. I think most people here are migrant workers: a sign in front advertising rooms for $120 a month said men and women were welcome, and no  "户口" was necessary. The 户口 (hukou) is a home registration permit, which states whether someone is allowed to live in the city or the countryside. Without a city hukou, housing options are limited to gray-market dwellings on the city's fringes, like Tsinghua Hutong No. 8.

 

Beibei bore marks of this world. She wore a faded pair of heavily-pilled purple pants, and a shirt that looked quite used. They looked pretty poor, but they didn't wallow into despair to their guest. A few minutes into our conversation, Beibei's mother showed up, along with her big brother and girl of around the same age. They had just returned from elementary school, where the 9-year-old brother attends.

 

"Speak some English to this man," her mother said.

 

The brother, a tiny guy with glasses, turned red and refused to talk in any language. A bit of stage frightm I suppose. He wore smarter clothing, a crisp shirt that had obviously been neatly pressed before the school day. In 15 years, he might leave Tsinghua No. 8 Hutong behind for the nearby university.

 

"He's very smart," his mother said, as her son tried to hide behind her back rather than talk to the foriegner.

 

I could have gone on talking all day, but Beibei looked tired. She needed a nap, and I could just make out the distant figure of my friend on the side of the stream. I waved Beibei goodbye, and this time she waved back, as her mother said we could come back anytime.

His Wings Still Flap

BEIJING - Breaking news from the corner of Chengfu Lu and Subway Line 13: 王弟弟/Wang Didi/ Three Thumbs is not in jail. Speaking last night to a crew of Wednesday night drunks, he said his two week absence was spent visiting his mother in Chongqing, not in a cold, hard Chinese jail cell. He didn't comment on why his absence lined up with the police raid on the wing joints, but perhaps he used it as an excuse for an overdue vacation.

 

Next time I'll be more careful in reporting the idle chatter of the Wudaokou community, or the claims of a chicken wing salesman. In reporting on Wang Didi's jail term, he had an ulterior motive. People have to buy their chicken wings from somewhere, and perhaps he thought by telling a white lie, we'd shift over to his grill.

 

The comments I made on China's legal system still stand. I've heard enough examples from class speakers, books, and professors to be convinced that the application of law here is inconsistent and sometimes corrupt. Thankfully, it appears that at least for now, the consequences of bad laws have not affected my circle of friends.

Who Says College Graduates Aren't Employable?

BEIJING - Having hauled myself all the way over here to Beijing, this weekend I belatedly started to investiage whether or not I am actually employable in this part of the world.

 

I'm insulated from the job search for the next few months thanks to language classes, but when a friend rang and floated the idea of attending a job fair downtown, I rather quickly decided to take him up on the offer. I wanted to know what kinds jobs might await after the language class holiday ends.

 

If the Chaoyong Job Fair is a guide, there's a growing demand for English teachers, English instructors, English tutors, English coaches and English mentors. All our professions need not apply.

 

The job fair was held in a fancy hotel in central Beijing, a place where a night in a standard room would cost more than three months rent. The people in attendance certainly didn't appear to be type of crowd that might fancy a night here, although I did overhear one participant telling a rather raunchy story about the surroundings. "Last summer, on our last night in Beijing, my friend hired a prostitute and brought her here. He said the tub in the room was like a swimming pool."

 

That might sound a bit distasteful for a job fair, but I am not sure it would have been a fatal blow at this event. Companies were looking for English teachers, and everyone lucky enough to have been born in an English-speaking country qualified. Most of these people came from private schools and companies in major Chinese cities. These cities, places like Chongqing and Harbin, had millions of people and thriving companies, but precious few foreigners to teach the world's lingua franca. So they came to Beijing to try and woo some of the city's 50,000 foreigners away from the cosmopolitan comforts of the capital city.

 

The farther away the position, the more desperate the recruiter. "Welcome to teach in Foshan City," a private-school teacher from Guangdong said as he thrust a blue flyer in my face. People from Harbin screamed across the aisle for me to sit down.

 

I don't want to teach English. Or more precisely I don't mind teaching English, but it's not exactly the career I had in mind when I came over here.

 

There were thankfully a couple media organizations in attendance. Communist Party mouthpiece the China Daily brought a few free copies of that day's paper -- a sign to check out their Web site. I briefly chatted with a woman from the Beijing Review, although things wrapped up pretty quickly when it became apparent she didn't work for the magazine and didn't really know anything about it. She referred me to the group's Web site.

 

On the way to the exit, I stopped on one final booth, for a Beijing Meteorological association. They wanted English people to read the weather for CCTV-9, the government English language station. A woman at the booth was more than happy to answer my many questions on the job.

 

"So wait, I can be on TV?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Do you need any training?"

 

"No. Maybe we just show you how to point on the map."

 

"And this is on CCTV?"

 

"Yes."

 

So there you have it. Although the print media market is hopeless, in a couple weeks I could beamed to televisions around the world thanks to China Central Television. Being a bit camer shy, I decided not to leave my name. But a couple of my friends did, and pretty soon a star might just be born.

Straight Outta Ulaanbaatar

DARKHAN, Mongolia – After the old Russian woman in the top bunk went to sleep, Sumar brought out his laptop videos.

As our train slowly passed through the pitch-black Mongolian grasslands, Sumar eagerly showed me what he'd downloaded at university in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. First he went through his collection of basketball clips, where members of various NBA teams made incredible shots during the last seconds of important games. Then came a video shot at art exhibition of a Scandinavian man creating shadow puppets using sand in time to a pre-recorded soundtrack. After that, Sumar clicked on the folder called "Music."

He opened the first file. The name was Cyrillic but I recognized the video from the first few frames. It was Nelly's "Hot in Herre," the most popular rap song of 2002.

"I love Nelly," Sumar said. "He's my favorite." We then watched most of the Nelly catalogue, including "My Place," "Country Grammar," "Flap Your Wings," and that song about chilling with my boo. Sumar then asked if I wanted to hear some Mongolian music, to which I quickly replied, "Yes!"

He queued the video on the computer, waiting for Windows Media Player to load. At this point I had only been in Mongolia a few hours, and had just heard the language for the first time as I snuck across the Russian border in a van full of traders, with hidden human cargo in the back seat. The beat started rumbling, a mix of deep bass rumbles and quick drum hits. A Mongolian flashed across the screen, dressed in urban clothing on top of a building at night. He started to rap in a guttural burst, delievering his lines in a way that seemed half rap-half chant. Accompanying the music were gritty shots of Mongolian urban life: monks fighting, police brutality, strippers, poverty and crumbling Soviet buildings. This was the music of Zaya, a song called "Tears of Ulaanbaatar," his first solo recording away from Mongolia's biggest rap group Tatar.

The beats, the songs, the setting: I loved it all. Perhaps this is the way people felt when they heard Led Zeppelin or the Beatles for the first time, falling completely in love with something so unexpected. I knew that I needed to get this record, immediately. Sumar only had the video, but suggested that I try to buy the record in the capital. He wrote down the name of a couple record stores in Ulaanbaatar and included a couple of Mongolian swear words to boot: Alna shuu! Muu nohoin gölög min! If I remember correctly, this translates to something along the lines of "Fuck you! I fucked your mother last night!"

The next morning I set out to find the Zaya album. At the State Department Store they didn't know anything about it. Hi-Fi Records said it wouldn't be out for another two months. The Hip-Hop Clothing Store no longer sold music. This being Mongolia, the options pretty much ended here.

With no music, I collected stories about the rapper. People in Ulaanbaatar told me about concerts they attended for Zaya's old group Tatar. They talked about the group incited a riot and the police started beating the crowd. A Peace Corps worker in Beijing told me that he'd seen the video six months earlier, but hadn't heard anything about a release. A Mongolian on my floor here in Tsinghua – who, the first time he met me, said, "What up Motherfucker!" – definitely wanted to buy the album, but definitely didn't have it yet. Another student offered to mail me a copy when she went home on spring break.

Then last night I was bumming around on Youtube, when I put in the name "Zaya" and "Ulaanbaatar." One result appeared, and it was the correct one. So now, thanks to the magic of the Internet and a poster named Munko, I can share the video with you. Enjoy:

Running "A-fowl" of the Law

BEIJING - I'm outside, running past the Zijing Dormitories. I'm hurrying to reach No. 23, my own building, before the clock hits midnight and the shower turns off for another eight hours. It's been 48 hours since my last shower, and I'm desperate to make it to this one. Fortunately, I reach the entrance in time and am now clean.

Not everyone here in Wudaokou makes it home on time. Last Thursday, Wang Didi never made it home at all.

Wang Didi sells chicken wings in front of a couple Western-leaning bars close to campus. Every time I visited his makeshift grill, wings flew off as soon as they cooked. At 3 RMB a pair, I'm sure Wang Didi cleared 300 RMB a night in merchandise. Even after subtracting for the raw chicken and charcoal, that leaves a substantial sum for a migrant working in Beijing.

Wang's outfit technically lay outside the law. He has no permit to sell the wings, and therefore he operates in China's large black market economy.  In the eyes of the law, his operation was no different than the people peddling fake North Face jackets and "300" DVDs outside of shopping bags.

Last week the police decided to have a random sweep, the kind they sometimes conduct on illegal activities. They picked up the chicken wing sellers, seized their merchandise and took them away.

Two days later, the wings people were back, but Wang Didi wasn't with them. For some reason, he wound up in jail. The wings salesmen didn't seem to know why, but they did say he would be released this upcoming Wednesday, nearly two weeks after he disappeared.

In a very small way, I now have felt the uneven touch of the law in China. Why did Wang Didi go to prison, and not the salesman on his left or right? It all seems so arbitrary.

Tonight I went back to Wudaokou to buy a snack around one in the morning. The main square was lively, nearly at its Saturday night peak. Old women sold Chinese books out of dusty wheelbarrows. Other people hawked pineapples, there were even a few puppies for sale in cardboard boxes. A couple police officers walked around the area, looking disinterested.

Hopefully in a few days Wang Didi will return here. And if he does, I will be appreciative of just how ephemeral his presence here really is.

Market Conditions

BEIJING -- The city's aflame with peach, cherry, plum and several other types of electric-pink blossoms. With the weather so good, I figured it was a good time to duck into the city's indoor markets and walk away with a good deal or two.

 

Unfortunately most of the customers at the five-story complex near Sanlitun Bar Street weren't affected by the weather. They were middle-aged package tourists and businessmen, here because their timetables said it was time to visit. They came armed with fistfuls of cash, strong currencies and no Chinese.

 

All these rich westerners were a major hurdle in my attempts to get the local price. To them, a knock-off Polo shirt is a steal at 80 RMB. Who cares if the real price is 25? The vendors have even less incentive than usual to go down to their true lowest price. With pre-Olympics tourism increasing by month, there's always another German pensioner to buy the North Face jacket I won't buy.

 

I didn't wind up buying anything at the market, but the two hours I spent there with an American and British friend were worthwhile. I got to see the different approaches the vendors took to Chinese and foreign customers, ruthlessly overcharging the latter while trying to fend off extreme low-ball offers from the locals. The vendors usually got the upper hand either way, but even the inflated prices are pretty good.

 

We spent of plenty of time talking with vendors, always a talkative sort. One had me guess her age, and pretended to get offended when I said 24. Her real age was 18. Her fellow Polo seller used us a couple English grammar questions, and I was happy to let her know how she could inform customers that Visa purchases would incur a 10 percent surcharge. Another asked me to write my Chinese name, and then gave me a first-ever compliment on my stroke order.

 

Then we over to watch section, where the Europeans seem more to than happy to pay $30 for Rolex knock-offs than go for $10 on the streets of Manhattan. I guess it's harder to get these things in Vienna than American cities. Then there was the American couple that confusingly paid for their purchase with dollars. The merchants were happy to accept them, but only at the exchange rate of 7.4 RMB to 1 dollar. That put an extra five percent on the all ready over priced item.I was torn whether to interfere with the scene. Should I step in and offer a hand to my fellow foreigners, and save them a few dollars? Or is that money better left in the hands of the Chinese, who I'm sure have less? I decided to stay put.

 

Besides, Chinese isn't a prerequisite to getting a good deal. In the market's basement, I passed a couple Germans with the right philosophy. They wanted a couple hats, and they only wanted to pay 30 RMB for each one. When the merchants refused to go below 100 RMB, they sat down, smiled and proceeded to wait. They had some banter with the sellers, refused to get angry, and put on a look of having all the time in the world. It took the better part of an hour, but with no Chinese or yelling, they got the correct price.