Dreaming in Chinese (8 page)

8
Thanks to Orville Schell.

Lǎobǎixìng
Common folk

5.
China’s Ordinary Joe

W
HEN WE FIRST
moved to China, I would fight to escape crowds, seeking out the quiet alleyways or at least the less-crowded side of the street. It is difficult to avoid a crowd in a country of 1.3 billion people. Crowds gather to exercise in the parks even at the earliest hours of the morning. At noontime, lines swell in front of the best dumpling or steamed-bun stands. On trendy city streets, day crowds of office workers meld into night crowds of shoppers who browse the vendors’ sidewalk blankets spread thick with cheap jewelry or hair clips in summer, and gloves or warm socks in winter. Crowds beget crowds beget crowds.

Then one day I learned about the value of crowds. I was standing nearly alone at a corner crosswalk; there were just two of us pedestrians. As I stepped off the curb onto a one-way street, with oncoming traffic stopped 30 yards to my right and the green Walk sign blinking in my favor, from the left shot a motor scooter—which hit me and knocked me to the ground. I was bruised and bloody, my shoes and books scattered. The scooter driver was immediately long gone. After that day, I shifted allegiance and sought the center and safety of crowds. I embraced any crowd of
lǎobǎixìng—
the common folk, ordinary people, the average Chinese Joe—that I encountered.

Lǎobǎixìng
: one of the first words foreigners latch on to, it’s easy to hear and easy to say.
Lǎobǎixìng
. Lao-by-shing: three long, languorous syllables, standing out among so many strings of short, choppy words.

I overheard it in conversations on subways and elevators, or as I passed old men chatting on park benches. It popped out from the drone of talk radio inside taxis or on the TV news, describing mobbed train stations or the hordes at gala openings of new shopping malls or at holiday temple fairs.
Lǎobǎixìng
was right there, entrenched in the middle of normal, everyday, chaotic, crowded life in China.

Lǎo
+
bǎi
+
xìng
literally means “old” + “hundred” + “names.” In Chinese it has become a shortcut to convey the sense of “everybody,” since most of the Chinese population share the same family names. Indeed, today, some 85 percent of Chinese people share only 100 such names. Imagine the implications.

The dictionary definition, “common folk, ordinary people,” is pretty good, but it feels far too sterile.
Lǎobǎixìng
is one of those words where you need to get a feeling through stories or experiences to understand the gist.

Other languages have words like this, words that carry a lot of baggage:
citoyen
during the French Revolution,
Volk
in Hitler’s Germany. When John F. Kennedy stood at the Berlin Wall in 1963 and said “
Ich bin ein Berliner
,” the world knew exactly what he meant, which was much more than simply a person who happens to live in Berlin.

So it is with
lǎobǎixìng
. Being a
lǎobǎixìng
is much more than being a common or ordinary person. And early on in my time in China, I decided that understanding
lǎobǎixìng
was vital to understanding something of the inner life of the Chinese. I set out to learn what it meant. Who are the
lǎobǎixìng
? Where do you find them? How do they behave? What do they want?

I polled everyone I saw, asking them to tell me who they think the
lǎobǎixìng
are. Here is a sampling of what I found.

A Chinese academic told me, “A
lǎobǎixìng
is anyone but a high Party official.” A young Beijing city woman told me that
lǎobǎixìng
is almost everyone in China, except the very politically powerful and maybe very famous people. A veteran American diplomat and a seasoned French businessman both told me wearily, “A
lǎobǎixìng
is just an ordinary person.”

“Can rich people be
lǎobǎixìng
?” I pressed. Some respondents said yes, and others said no. What about professors or doctors or entrepreneurs? Same mixed response. One Chinese friend who really got into this line of questioning elaborated that
lǎobǎixìng
themselves would not consider a movie star to be a
lǎobǎixìng
,
but a movie star would probably consider herself to be one.

There was consensus on one point. When I asked people if I could be a
lǎobǎixìng
,
the response was quick and unanimous: “No, you are not a
lǎobǎixìng
.”

Through Chinese history,
lǎobǎixìng
has always referred to the have-nots, rather than the haves. And the focus on what the have-nots lack has shifted through China’s political, economic and social upheavals. In dynastic times, it was about having (or not) the power to rule: there were the emperors and imperial people, and there were the
lǎobǎixìng
. During the Cultural Revolution, the term was political; there were Mao’s political insiders, and there were the
lǎobǎixìng
. Now, it is economic. Bloggers rant on this theme: “
Lǎobǎixìng
: the common folk; the
People
in the People’s Republic of China; the cab drivers, office workers, migrant workers, small shopkeepers, beauticians, food sellers, the people on the street. In essence, it’s all those who are trying to make the staggering adjustments to survive.”
⁹

In some circumstances, the word
lǎobǎixìng
is conspicuously avoided. At the showcase military parade in honor of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic, President Hu Jintao deliberately invoked the Party-speak of the Maoist era, bypassing
lǎobǎixìng
for the culturally laden period word
tóngzhì
. Standing tall through the open roof of his big black limousine, Hu inched along the parade route and cried out to one flank after another of starched and precise troops, “
TONGZHIMEN HAO!”
. “COMRADES, GREETINGS!”

Tóngzhì
(and its plural
tóngzhìmen
) is bluntly “comrade,” and it is now usually only heard either in formal Communist Party-talk, among some of the older generation who are stuck in the past, or on the cutting edge of new China, where
tóngzhì
is code for gay.

I wish I had learned all this earlier; the first Chinese book I studied before we left for China was a 1984 edition,
New Chinese 300
, which liberally invoked
tóngzhì
as a general term of address. So, I went around Shanghai in our early weeks greeting everyone I met with this old word
tóngzhì
, which was heard either as a die-hard Communist throw-back or as New Age ultra-hip slang. I had no idea what I was doing.

I wondered how I could get beyond the word and the definition of
lǎobǎixìng
to the nuances of how they live and what they want. Perhaps I could poke around the edges of
lǎobǎixìng
life and try to mingle my life with theirs. I thought my best shot for getting any traction was at a venue where we naturally mixed, an everyday kind of place where the
lǎobǎixìng
were prevalent and where I could feel comfortable. What better place than shopping? I set out to shop with the
lǎobǎixìng
; I would shop where they shopped and buy what they bought.

My first discovery about
lǎobǎixìng
shopping was clear: the importance of a good deal. Everyone loves a good deal, and
lǎobǎixìng
really love one. There is a drugstore in Hunan Province, in the middle of China, named
Laobaixing
Drugstore. The chain is billed as the “price killer” of drug retailing.
¹⁰
On opening day of a new
Laobaixing
Drugstore in the city of Wuhan, the store was mobbed by 20,000 people,
lǎobǎixìng
shoppers who smashed the glass doors in their eagerness to reach the bargain-basement-priced products.

This rang true to me. Shopping at our local Wal-Mart in Beijing (which is not like any Wal-Mart you may have seen elsewhere in the world; it truly caters to the Chinese taste, with touches like duck carcasses hanging from hooks and tanks full of live turtles and carp, for dinner), I saw raucous fisticuffs break out among the Chinese shoppers over the free giveaway shopping bags. In an extreme example of
lǎobǎixìng
shopping from late 2007, a crowd stormed a Carrefour grocery store in Chongqing for a 20 percent discount on cooking oil, and killed three people. To be fair, I read a similar report about a year later about a stampede over pre-Christmas discounts on digital cameras at a Wal-Mart on Long Island, which ended in the death of a store employee.