Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China Page 13

  BARGAINING IN BEIJING

  When Margaret and I arrived in Beijing to start our spring break, I could feel the difference in temperature as soon as we walked outside the airport to get a taxi. It was still chilly there. We dug our jackets out of our bags and waited in a long line to get a taxi. After just thirty minutes in the nation’s capital, I could already tell that the people in Beijing stared at us less than in the smaller cities we’d been to. They seemed taller, too. When we got in the cab, I showed the driver our note that Linda had written out stating which hotel we were staying in.

  It took us thirty minutes to drive into the heart of the city where we were staying. The hotel was on bustling Wangfujian Road, one of the most famous roads. It was kind of like the Fifth Avenue of Beijing with overly expensive shopping and restaurants and hordes of people milling around, taking in the scenery.

  Walking inside the hotel, I felt like I was entering the Chinese Taj Mahal. There were white marble floors, plush oriental carpets, a grand piano and a huge restaurant on one side of the lobby with an intimate café on the other side.

  My sister’s best friend Harold had made the reservations for us. Margaret and I were just happy to be in a hotel that didn’t have mattresses that felt like wooden boxes and dingy floors. Our room had comfy beds with thick down pillows and comforters. There was a large tub in the bathroom next to a standing shower. We were in a luxurious heaven.

  Jennifer and Harold had spent their first day in China at The Great Wall. They came back exhausted and sweaty with their backpacks on. I was so happy to see my sister’s face that I could hardly stop hugging her. It was so nice to see someone who loved me.

  The first night in Beijing we all ate at the Japanese restaurant on the first floor of the hotel. Harold is Haitian by descent and the worldly food connoisseur of the group – he loves nothing better than finding new and interesting things to eat in the cities he visits. And real, fresh Japanese food was one of his favorites. He picked the restaurant we went to each night and he started thinking about it every morning at breakfast.

  Harold and Jennifer met in medical school and had been best friends ever since. Amazingly, in Beijing, I was no longer the main attraction. Harold was.

  The next day when we visited Tiananmen Square, at least ten Chinese people eased up next to Harold (and his smooth dark skin) to get a picture beside him. At first they didn’t even ask. They just stood near Harold and smiled until their companion could snap the shot.

  When he gave them permission with a big smile, a line of Chinese formed to pose with him. Among them were Buddhist monks, Tibetans and young children. We decided that if we ran out of money in Beijing we would charge the Chinese for taking pictures with Harold.

  (a monk that slid up and held hands with Harold)

  That first full day we visited Tiananmen Square, The Temple of Heaven, The Summer Palace and The Forbidden City. It was an all-day trek and because it was the country’s spring break, every place we went was packed with thousands of Chinese tourists snapping pictures and clamoring together in large groups, wearing matching hats. The architecture was all the same and the stories everywhere we went were about an all-powerful emperor, their wives and thousands of eunuchs.

  My favorite sight was The Temple of Heaven, a large sanctuary with a vast empty space around it. It was a clean and calm place with fewer tourists. After visiting places like Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City that were cram packed with people on vacation, it was a bit like heaven to not be walking amidst a crowd and being pushed and bumped into along the way.

  Margaret, Jennifer, Harold and I were all so exhausted after a day of touring the country’s capital that we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the posh shopping mall near our hotel on Wangfujian Road and all fell asleep in our cushy beds at 9:00 p.m.

  The next day my shopping adventures began. Jennifer, Harold, Margaret and I had an all-inclusive breakfast at the hotel. Then Margaret went with a tour group from the hotel to see The Great Wall. The rest of us headed on foot to a five-story shopping center called the “Silk Market” on Chang’An Avenue. It took about thirty minutes to walk to the shiny, stand-alone building that was five stories high. There were so many people crowding into the building that we had to squeeze in the entrance. Once we pushed past the initial crowd, we found ourselves surrounded by stalls of merchandise in neat rows.

  There were Northface and Timberland jackets and fleeces in many stalls. There were men’s and women’s Polo shirts and sweaters in others. A little further down, there was a wide assortment of name-brand sports shoes. We decided that this was the apparel floor. We took our time browsing down rows before starting to buy. We listened to other people haggling with vendors and pulled away from the ones that grabbed our arms and tried to herd us into their stall by saying things like,

  “Pretty lady, you like?”

  After doing a full lap around the first floor, we broke apart from one another. I went straight for stalls carrying silky Chinese robes. I’d been daydreaming about surprising George when I got back by wearing one. Before I could use my Chinese to find out how much the robes cost, the vendor said in English,

  “400 Yuan.”

  She was a lady with black hair tied into a ponytail. She picked up the robe and started to try and get me to put it on.

  “You try. You will like.”

  I figured in my head that the price I had been quoted was about 62 dollars, which was ridiculously high considering that the odds that the robe was actually silk were nil. But it was a very pretty dark blue color with a large pattern of a dragon sewn on the back.

  I remembered that the Aston teachers had told me that the prices might be as high as 800 percent in Beijing. Jean had also told me about getting a robe for 25 Yuan in Hangzhou. After waiting for my response the woman finally asked,

  “What is your price? You say.”

  I started chuckling.

  “I might offend you.”

  “No, no, you say, you say.”

  I told her that I didn’t want to pay more than 25 Yuan. She immediately threw her head back and said,

  “You are joking! This real silk. See? This good quality.”

  She was rubbing the silk and taking my hand and having me feel it like I could tell real silk by touching it. I knew better.

  I told her that I couldn’t be sure it was real silk. She insisted it was. When I started to walk away, telling her that they were too expensive, her price started to rapidly decrease.

  “Okay, pretty lady. I give you good price. For you 200 Yuan.”

  While that was only 25 dollars, I now knew that she wasn’t selling me a real silk robe and that I shouldn’t pay much more than Jean had in Hangzhou.

  “No, thank you. I can’t pay more than 25 Yuan,” I said.

  After about three minutes of haggling back and forth my offer was up to 50 Yuan. However, the lady wouldn’t budge from 100 Yuan. I decided that I didn’t even care about the robe. I knew I could a cheaper one later. I started to walk off when the lady grabbed my arm and started stroking it saying,

  “This my best offer. This real silk. Good quality. You take?”

  I pulled away, apologized and told her that I couldn’t pay more than 50 Yuan. Finally, when I was ten feet away from her stall, she sold me the robe for 50. Her original price was eight times higher than what she was willing to take.

  I found Jennifer and Harold bargaining for jackets and told them about my experience with the robe vendor. I took them back so they could buy robes. There the haggling began again with the lady. She claimed that she wouldn’t make a profit if she sold the robes so cheap. Finally, as we started to walk away, she gave in and they bought robes for 50 Yuan apiece.

  Harold had been bargaining vendors down to half of their original price because I told him that in Wuhu and Nanjing that was the standard. With this new price range in mind he started bargaining for everything with the mindset of getting the vendor down 800 percent. Many times this was an arduou
s task that might take several minutes, if you could stand it that long. We found bargaining in China required diligence. The vendors were trained to fight for every Yuan.

  Over the course of the day we also figured out that almost all the vendors spoke very articulate English and many of them spoke several languages. I heard one vendor speaking to a woman and her mother. When she heard them speaking Italian to each other she immediately started speaking rapidly in Italian, pressing the sale. The extent of the vendors’ language skills might have only covered the bargaining basics, but it was still impressive how many languages they could speak.

  My sister, Jennifer, did not like the bargaining. She let Harold and me bargain for her. The few times that she did attempt to buy things on her own, she would say a price and stick to it. This would turn the vendor off and even if they might have accepted the price if she had bargained from a lower point first, but they would not take it if she refused to budge on her original offer. It turned out that bargaining in Beijing is a cultural ritual. First, the vendor offered us a price. Then we would say that this price was ridiculous. Then the vendor would say something like,

  “Okay, okay, you say.”

  The vendor might then hand us a calculator or wait for our counter offer. We found that a good rule of thumb was to suggest nearly 900 percent less than the original price. If the vendor walked away from us and didn’t return, then we knew we had started too low and we might offer a little bit more. Inevitable the vendors scoffed or laughed at each of our counter offers, insisting that they would lose money if they sold the item to us so cheaply and that it was top quality.

  Eventually, we would either get what we wanted around the price we wanted to pay or we would walk off. We learned quickly that we could usually get our final price if we started to walk away. The vendors would wait until we had gone about ten to twenty feet and then would call us back, saying,

  “Okay, okay, okay!”

  Sometimes they would then try again to get our price up verbally or by not returning our change or they might act angry with us.

  After this first morning at the Chinese market, we became obsessed with getting the best deals possible. We only took a forty-minute break to eat lunch in the cafeteria, where there was food more like what I was eating in Wuhu. Jennifer and Harold didn’t like it.

  The next day we hit the Hongqiao, or the “Pearl Market,” southeast of Tiananmen Square, which was fairly busy, but slightly less invaded by tourists than the Silk Market. We took a taxi from our hotel to the Pearl Market. There, Jennifer and I also bought fake Rolexes (Folexes) for 50 Yuan. I bought a North Face jacket for 30 Yuan, some traditional Chinese embroidered bags for 10 Yuan each, some cloisonné ornaments for several Yuan and a cashmere wrap for 300 Yuan. This wrap was very expensive by my standards, but after haggling for twenty minutes and going back to the vendor twice, I knew that I couldn’t get their price down any further. I had seen an Italian couple buy one from the same vendor for 500 Yuan.

  Around lunchtime we decided that we wanted to head back to the Silk Market one more time because it was more upscale than the Pearl Market and there were a few more presents we wanted to buy there.

  We had to take a taxi to get back there. The taxi driver in the first cab we hopped into tried to get us each to pay him two American dollars a piece for the ride. We worked out that this was a lot of money for a Chinese taxi going a short distance and asked that he turn the meter on instead. He refused and told us to get out of his taxi. After several more attempts we found a taxi that would take us to the Silk Market and use the meter. Everything was negotiable in China. I found that the trick was to hold out for a better price and be wary of any deal that was too easy.

  The thrill of bargain shopping in Beijing is a lot like the thrill of finding an item on sale in the West, taking it to the checkout counter and finding out that it was marked down even further. While it was fun, and I was glad to be buying souvenirs, I still got tired of being touched by the vendors, and haggled down to the last Yuan every second I was in these markets. It was just as exhausting as holding broken English conversations all day.

  After being with Jennifer for the first three days of my spring break week, I knew that I didn’t want to spend a second away from her or Harold. The last two days, when we had finished our shopping and were just going around to different parts of Beijing on our own, I still didn’t want to go to The Great Wall because it would have meant spending a day away from them.

  When my students and co-workers learned that I had gone all the way to Beijing and not seen The Great Wall they were horrified. Many of them dreamed of going to Beijing to see and walk on The Great Wall. The Chinese even have a famous saying: “You are not a hero until you have climbed The Great Wall.” As it turned out, I was not a hero. I was a homesick traveler who just wanted to shop and be with her sister.

  (Jennifer and me outside a Beijing duck restaurant)

  DIANNE

  On a warm spring day, my life in China changed. I was sitting in my ten o’clock class listening to students give presentations on American magazine advertisements when Margaret peeked her head into my classroom. I was positioned in a tight row of connected seats on one side of the classroom. My student, Kristy, was at the front of the room waving her hands in the air and expressing her disgust with the fact that Americans draw ugly cartoons about their president.

  At noon, I was supposed to have lunch with Linda, Margaret and Dianne. Margaret had come to tell me that Dianne had gotten a headache and had been taken to the hospital. We would have to postpone our lunch. I thought the school officials were probably being too protective of Dianne – she and I had just had tea together ten minutes before my class began and she was fine. She hadn’t said anything about a headache to me.

  Two weekends before, the higher powers at the school had decided not to let her go on a trip to Yellow Mountain with us because they said she was too old and they couldn’t be responsible for her health. It had really pissed me off. Dianne was in great shape for a sixty-year-old woman and there were lots of other geezers trekking around the Yellow Mountain range when we got there. Now they were shipping her off to the hospital for a headache. It seemed ridiculous to me.

  After class I went home to check my e-mail. I got a telephone call from Linda and she sounded panicked,

  “Hello, Leanna?”

  “Hey, Linda.”

  “Yes. It’s Linda. Dianne is at the hospital because she has very high blood pressure and a headache and she wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay, put her on,” I said.

  “Leanna?” she whispered.

  “Dianne, hey, how are you?”

  “My head hurts and they won’t give me any Panadol. Do you have headache medicine?”

  At first, I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Then I remembered Panadol is the Australian Advil.

  “Yes, I have some…do you want me to bring it to you?”

  “Yes. And they won’t let me use the toilet. I have to go to the toilet and they won’t let me use the toilet. Please tell them to let me use the toilet.”

  This sounded insane. What were they doing to Dianne not letting her use the bathroom?

  “I will, Dianne, and I’ll bring you some medicine right now.”

  “Hello, Leanna?” Linda said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Linda, please come to the hospital. Dianne is not cooperating with the doctors and I think you could help to calm her down. She needs to be very still.”

  “Okay, I’m coming right now. Can you tell the taxi driver how to get me to the hospital?”

  “Yes. A student will be waiting outside of the hospital for you when you arrive.”

  After I got off the phone, I found my Advil. As an afterthought, I grabbed my camera. I thought I’d get a picture of Dianne in the hospital so we could laugh about it later. I stuffed them into my purse.

  Running out of the apartment I bumped into Margaret coming home from lunch at Pizza Hut an
d got her to come along.

  My heart was starting to race as I told Margaret what Dianne had said. I could not imagine why they wouldn’t let the poor woman use the toilet.

  When we reached the hospital, the anxiety I had been feeling started to grow into real worry. The hospital was the one place in China that I had decided very early on not to visit. I had heard horror stories of bloody clothes lying about, dingy linens, and outdated methods.

  As promised, David, a student of Dianne’s was waiting dutifully for us at the curb in front of the building.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Dina is very ill.”

  The building looked like any regular, American, brown brick hospital from the outside, but as soon as we set foot inside, I was reminded again that I was in a third going-on-second world country. The walls were grayish and there was trash lying like faded holiday decorations on the floor. The patients wore their regular clothes and looked ashen and hot in the May heat. And the equipment looked like it came off of the set of a World War II movie.

  David, Margaret and I rushed to Dianne’s room. I knew where she was by the swarm of Chinese people loitering in the hall. I found her looking miserable as five Chinese people, including Linda, ate smelly noodles and vegetables right over her in the shoddy hospital room. Dianne reached her arms out. When I offered a hand, she clung to me like a child having a panic attack. I sat on the bed and was immediately angry at the mob surrounding her. It was so degrading to have these people slurping down smelly Chinese food over Dianne. She kept holding her head with one hand and complaining of the terrible pain. She begged me to get the doctors to give her headache medicine.