To China With Love Part III: Shopping

Whenever people ask me what I loved best about living in China, I am embarrassed to give the real answer, which is totally the SHOPPING.  I usually say something trite, stereotypical, and expected, like "the people are so nice, and happy, and friendly." Gag.  I suppose an expat white lady taking full advantage of the exchange rate and the mass quantities of designer look-alike goods to be had in China is a stereotype in itself, but if loving to shop in China is wrong, then I don't want to be right!

I lived in China back in 2001, so I know basically everything has changed since then.  The exchange rate isn't as awesome, the black market is probably more under control (??), and I'm sure there are fewer ancient alleys with little stores and stands selling every-and-anything. But here are some things I loved to buy in my glory days:

1. $1 DVDs. We built our entire collection of children's movies when we lived in China, and this was before we even had children. I tried really hard to make sure these were legal DVDs. I never bought any movies that were still out in theaters, for example. But once I accidentally bought a pirated copy of "What Women Want." (I know, my taste level wasn't all that awesome back then.)

2. Pearls and jewelry (and everything else) at the Pearl Market in Beijing. Oh, Pearl Market! I think of you often and miss you when I am away.  Once I tried to buy a pair of jeans at the pearl market. When I asked to try them on,  two girls produced a thick curtain and held it around my waist. There's a picture of me with a very uncomfortable face in the middle of getting dressed, curtained from the waist down, surrounded by Chinese girls. I know they were thinking about how fat I was, I just KNOW it.  Another time (not at the Pearl Market) I tried to buy a swimsuit, and when I went into a back room to try it on (a swimsuit!) the worker at the store followed me right on back. She stood there, hopeful, waiting for me to get undressed, while I stood there staring at her in disbelief. Finally, I had to call Mike in to tell her I wanted privacy. Oh, privacy! I thought of you often and missed you when I was in China.

3. Phone cards. To call home, of course. Next to the phone cards were Ritz crackers and Oreos, so I bought those, too.

4. Planters cheese balls. Better than any Cheeto you're ever going to touch.

5. Sticks of butter and Hamburger Helper at the international grocery store. Oh, and Haagen Dazs. We've discussed this before. 

6. Puppies.  Men hawked puppies out of cardboard boxes in front of McDonalds and KFC. Once I got in a price war over a puppy and dozens of passersby began crowding around to watch. Although I come across as weakling and a pushover, I was actually surprisingly good at bargaining for a lower price.

7. Pizza from the Pizza Box. They refrained from putting corn on pizza AND delivered.

8. CDs, especially those by STINC.

9. NOT shoes. My feet were considered grotesquely enormous and I was laughed at and thrown out of shoe stores more than once, to my dismay. The shoes there were wicked cool.

10. Kites. I bought a kite from an extremely old man sitting by the side of the road once. It was a huge dragon kite, and the old man held it up in the air, making it dance around, while he did a quiet little roar out of his toothless mouth. "Waahhh" he roared. How could I resist THAT?

This entire post makes me look and sound very superficial, I know.  But put yourself in my shoes for a minute: you're 22 years old, newly married, living in a foreign country wherein you do not speak the language; your husband works all night long and sleeps all day, and you are alone most of the time. What are you going to do? Sure, you can teach English. Sure,  you can get yourself a Chinese tutor (until you can't stand her making fun of your pronunciation anymore). Sure, you can watch a TON of Olsen twin movies on HBO. But, sometimes you just need to venture out, wallet in hand, and take control of your chaotic world. For better or for worse, shopping did that for me. And, yes, the people I met while shopping were kind, friendly, and very happy. And I may never have known that if I hadn't asked them for a better price on a puppy.

To China With Love Part II: Taxis

One good thing about living in China is taking taxis. Maybe things have changed since I lived there eleven years ago, but back in 2001 taxis were cheap, ubiquitous, easy, and safe. I never felt lost or afraid (except when I went to Ancient Culture Street after hours) because I knew I could always hop on a taxi, say the name of my apartment complex (or better yet flash the card with the Chinese on it) and go home. 

I had a complicated relationship, however, with the group of taxi drivers who always waited outside my apartment. In a way, I loved them. They were always there. They were nice and they always took me where I wanted to go. They became familiar to me, and I to them. And this was the problem. With that familiarity came a predictability that I was somewhat ashamed of.

Listen, I'm not proud of the fact that I went to the Crystal Palace (fancy ex-pat apartment building with international grocery store in lobby), purchased, and ate a Haagen Dazs bar every day I lived in China. Some people will tell you that they went to an ancient tea house and lazily passed the day away sipping lotus flower tea, reading Chinese newspapers, and having deep discussions with the local elders every day. But that wasn't me. I was in survival mode, and Haagen Dazs was one of my coping mechanisms.  And those taxi drivers knew this, and teased me about it.

"Crystal Palace!" they would jeer when I walked out the door. Or sometimes they yelled the name of the other fancy ex-pat apartment building with an international grocery store in the lobby. "Olympic Towers!" "Hyatt!"  They would always yell this to me like they had me all figured out.  And they did! And I hated it and was so self-conscious. 

So I started lying to them, defiantly saying, "No, flower street!" They would act surprised, drive me to flower street, then, when the coast was clear, I would get in another taxi and head on over to the Crystal Palace. I did this a lot, but it became exhausting, not to mention expensive. So I gave up after a while.

"Crystal Palace!?" I'd hesitate, then look down and in a defeated whisper mutter, "yes, please."

Taxis really were a huge part of my China experience.  One of our best friends in China was our taxi driver, Yu Jun, who stalwartly drove us an hour out of town to attend church every Sunday. One of my biggest regrets in life occurred with a taxi driver, to whom I yelled "screw you!" after a heated debate over the bill. I really wish I hadn't yelled that. It's the worst thing I've ever done, I think, especially since the difference was barely even two U.S. dollars. (There's just this feeling when you are in China of not wanting to be the stupid foreigner who everybody can rip off. It can possess you if you allow it to. I say, let them rip you off! What's a few dollars in the grand scheme of things? I learned this the hard way, though.) 

One time I stayed at a friend's house watching movies until two in the morning. I was not sure exactly how I was going to get home at such a late hour, but luckily there was an old yellow bus taxi out on the street. I flagged it down, said my apartment name, and the man dropped me off. I looked in my wallet and realized I didn't have any small bills, and the man was out of change. I was totally prepared to just have him keep the change (the ride was 3 yuan and I had a 50), but he waved it away and let me take the ride for free. This was very touching. A lot of things like this happened to me in China.

Taxi drivers were endearing middle aged men who chain smoked and probably had a wife and child to support at home. They changed the radio station when I got in the car, trying to find something that a foreigner would like. One time during my long ride out to teach English at Nankai University, an exuberant driver sang the words to a techno song I had never heard before. There were only two words in the song, and I'm sorry to say that those words were "house sex." They just said those words over and over. So there I was, sitting in the back of this taxi while the driver (blissfully ignorant of what the lyrics meant) repeated those words in a loud voice over and over again. I think he was totally trying to show off and I am sure he would have been embarrassed if he knew what he was saying. 

I always felt a camaraderie with taxi drivers. After all, taxi drivers were with me everywhere I went. They shared in my adventures. They knew my patterns and habits. Their world of barely controlled chaos, swerving through streets, dodging bicyclists, pedestrians, and other taxis, forcing their way into the massive wave of moving things, and then out again, became my world, too. I often cringed and said silent prayers in the back seat, but somehow I knew I would be safe in the care of those drivers, who became surrogate fathers to me as I made my way around town, going from one Haagen Dazs bar to the next.

To China, With Love Part One: Ancient Culture Street

I think it's about time I faced my complicated love-hate relationship with China.  I've talked about it a little bit before, but I never wanted to go into too much detail because if there's one thing I hate, it's a romanticized travel-log. But it's been 11 years, and I think it's all right to reminisce a little bit, especially because if there's one view I don't have of China, it's a romanticized one. This is the real deal, dudes.

SO, I married Mike and all, and then a week later we sat in the Portland, OR airport waiting to board our little prop plane that would take us to Vancouver, Canada, and then on to China. I was so distraught about leaving, so overwrought, that I just stared at the ugly pattern on the carpet to keep myself from totally breaking down. To this day, when I look at the carpet in the Portland airport my stomach churns. My mom was there. At 22, I had never left the country before, had never really been anywhere at all, so this was HUGE. When it was time to go, the pattern on the carpet failed me and I started hysterically crying. I cried all the way out to the plane, up the stairs, down the narrow aisle, and into my seat. I cried all the way to Vancouver, basically. People were staring at me. They probably thought Mike had kidnapped me. He probably wondered what mess he'd gotten himself into. I still hate prop planes so much.

In Vancouver I made a life-changing, grown up decision and had lettuce and tomato on my hamburger at Burger King instead of just eating it totally plain. "I'm married now," I said to myself, "it's time to stop asking for plain hamburgers." I was having breakthroughs all over the place!

The first thing I noticed when we finally got to our little, oddly-shaped apartment in Tianjin was the salmon colored leather couch and chair in the middle of the room. Everything was totally weird and foreign, but it wasn't as weird and foreign and scary as I thought it would be, and that was a comfort. Plus, Mike had really scared me by saying I wouldn't be able to get chocolate in China. He was way, way off.  There was also Diet Coke, so I knew everything would be okay.

Mike worked the night shift building clean rooms at a Motorola plant. He worked from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m 6 days a week. It sucked so bad, because he just slept all day when he was home, and his sleep was fitful and unsatisfying. It also made him walk and talk in his sleep, to both hilarious and puzzling results.  He was always tired and I was alone most of the day and night in a country where I did not speak the language and knew nothing of the social rules and customs (like spitting in the street and throwing chicken bones on the floor of restaurants, but that is for another post).

I wasn't going to let my solitariness stop me, so on the first night I was officially by myself I got in a taxi and asked to be driven to "Ancient Culture Street" where you can buy scrolls and art and souvenirs, etc. The cab driver looked at me like I was insane when I told him where I wanted to go, and he said something in a very concerned and earnest tone, but I didn't understand. I just kept showing him the card that said "Ancient Culture Street" in Chinese.  Finally he gave up and took me there. After I paid him and shut the door, I turned around and saw that Ancient Culture Street was closed for the night. It was totally boarded up, dark and scary, with a few stragglers lurking in the shadows.

This is what it looks like during the day: cheerful, welcoming, ancient-culture-y. At night, it was totally freaky.  But I couldn't let anybody know that I had made a mistake so I just walked along Ancient Culture Street, pretending I had a purpose in being there and that I knew what I was doing, praying the whole time that the cab driver who brought me there would drive away so I wouldn't have to come crawling back to him with my tail between my legs, admitting that I did not, in fact, know the operating hours of Ancient Culture Street, and that I did not, in fact, know what I was doing AT ALL, and that I did not, in fact, have any business being in China.  After about five minutes of walking along the scary dark alley, I hurried out to the main road, hailed a taxi (mercifully not the same one I had come in), and drove home. I felt humiliated and defeated, and yet I was also proud of myself for having ventured out on my own at all. It was the ice-breaker that led to many misadventures for me in Tianjin.

It was the first, but not the last time I would have to pretend I knew what I was doing in China.