Dreaming in Chinese (9 page)

Lǎobǎixìng
shopping at Wal-Mart in Shanghai

Such shopping behavior is partly about a good deal. But, as I learned on my own, it is also driven by the urge to simply get what you can. It is possible to find lots of things in China if you look hard enough and have enough money to buy them. But for
lǎobǎixìng
, the daily fare is thin. I soon found that my regular list of staples, the things I always needed and could count on finding, had shrunk to four: peanuts, yogurt, Tsingtao beer and whatever jars of jam or the like were not more than six months beyond their supposed expiration date (my self-imposed standard). My former list included more items, but the melamine scandal, bird-flu outbreak, and various other tainted-product scares wiped milk, chicken, eggs and toothpaste from my shopping lists, and we got used to life without them.

I gave up dreaming about what would be in my American fridge back home: the cheeses, the olives, the mustards, the crackers. The steps needed to secure those things in China—the cross-town trips, the burdened traipsing home through crowds, and the inflated prices—were usually not worth it. One of our saddest days was when the authorities suddenly started planting cheese-sniffing beagles at the Beijing airport customs booths, making it absolutely clear that contraband cheese was a no-no to bring into the country. Our small circle of expats tracked the sniffer-dog sightings and sent around “cheese alert” e-mails to warn traveling friends heading back to China with cheese.

Instead, I learned to keep alert to opportunity that might come my way on the sidewalks where I walked along with the
lǎobǎixìng
. Occasionally, this strategy paid off.

Out on the small back streets, I might stumble upon a farmer from the countryside balancing baskets of fresh cherries over his shoulders, or a vendor and his 60-year-old tricycle cart piled high with heaps of terrific sports socks that looked like they fell off a Nike factory line in Guangdong. You never knew what you might run into. I was swept up in the enthusiasm of this
lǎobǎixìng
style of opportunistic behavior. I always left our house with a few
rénmínbì
, an extra shopping bag and a sense of promise.

Occasionally, I made out like a bandit. One day, in a grocery store, I swept clean a shelf of microbrew beer for my husband and three giant jars of mustard, leaving none for future shoppers. It was victory tinged with guilt. What would the next expat shopper think, when looking for beer or mustard? I couldn’t afford to think about them. Every man for himself, in modern China!

Another day, I looked in vain for a yoga mat, but instead tripped over dozens of frozen hind legs of pork, tossed onto the sidewalk in front of the sporting goods shop. Mountains of prosciutto, suddenly right there! This was so tempting; I imagined how excited my husband would be if I returned home with a giant prosciutto.

That was like one of those moments when you realize you are dreaming in a foreign language: I realized that I was thinking like a
lǎobǎixìng
. I was so close to securing that pork shank. But finally, I crept away, with the words “possibly dirty, very likely gone-bad prosciutto” nagging me.

If you took away the opportunistic part of shopping, the giant random fleamarket experience that is shopping in China, I wondered, what would be left? With no strings attached, what would
lǎobǎixìng
really want?

Answers to this question came from a variety of sources, via snippets from conversations and comments in books and newspapers, all confirmed by what I saw and heard myself.

From a sociologist’s tome:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the consumer items people sought …
a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine.

In the 1970s and 1980s they wanted …
a colour television, a fridge, and a washing machine.

By the late 1990s, they aspired to …
take foreign holidays, purchase computers and cars, and to buy their own homes.
¹¹

From a travel chronicler in 1988, as told by a market trader:

What people used to want were a bicycle, a radio, and a gas stove. Now, the Big Three are a refrigerator, a cassette machine and a color television.
¹²

At a conference I attended in Beijing in 2009, about the Internet, censorship, technology and commerce, one exasperated Chinese participant finally blurted out that people, the
lǎobǎixìng
, aren’t as preoccupied as Westerners about free speech and an uncensored Internet: what
lǎobǎixìng
really want, he said, are …
a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a color TV.

This comment could have been taken straight from the Chinese government’s stimulus spending package during the economic downturn of 2008–09, when it was offering a double-digit rebate to farmers for … refrigerators, color TVs and mobile phones.

During one of the visits my husband and I made to rural Sichuan, this one a few months after the massively destructive earthquake of 2008, we accompanied American friends who were anthropologists with more than fifteen years of fieldwork under their belts in the area.
¹³
We visited a village family, long known to our friends, who were building the house of their dreams.

Their dream was a far cry from the dream of Chinese farmers before Mao’s forced Communist collectivization of the 1950s, when an old cliché held that the ideal rural life was
“30
mu
[two hectares] of land worked by an ox, plus many kids playing on
kang
[earthen bed heated in winter]
.
”
¹⁴

The dream was bigger now. Too impatient to wait for its finish, the family was already living in their house, but short of windows or stair rails, and sleeping on mattresses tossed onto the floor. The shiny new toilet sat in the bathroom, free of any plumbing. Our friends who took us there came bearing the gift that was the family’s fervent desire to own and immediately became the envy of the village: a new washing machine.

These are the
lǎobǎixìng
.

9
http://rudenoon.com/absalletc/archives/27

10
http://tiny.cc/FZwLI

11
Gamble, Jos,
Shanghai in Transition
, Routledge, 2007.

12
Theroux, Paul,
Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China
, Mariner, 2006.

13
Thanks to John Flower and Pam Leonard.

14
http://www.btmbeijing.com/contents/en/btm/2009-01/feature/thegoodyearofox

Nǐ hǎo, Wǒ jiào Mínyì.
Hello, my name is Public Opinion.

6.
A brief introduction to Chinese names

“T
HERE ARE TWO
things you need to be considered a real person in China,” our first contacts told us when we arrived in the country, “a mobile phone and a Chinese name.”

So we fled from the sweltering steam bath of a Shanghai July day into the cool Raffles City shopping mall in search of the Nokia shop. Countless mall rats swarmed the escalators, thronged the open spaces, jockeyed for spots near a stage that had been set up for a live show. There were so many people and so much noise, although no one at all, I noticed, was inside any of the upscale shops. The floors of Gucci, Prada, Diesel and Armani stood empty, a pattern we grew to expect in all the fancy malls around Shanghai.

Shanghai insiders outlined for us the chummy deal that explained the vacant stores: the stores paid rent as a percentage of their sales. So Shanghai, which could afford to underwrite the cheap rents, proudly touted the presence in their city of the classiest global brands. And the shops could add Shanghai to their bragging rights of operating in the world’s classiest cities like New York, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong and Paris. Everyone had a reason to be happy.

The modest mobile phone shops, meanwhile, were busy with shoppers. Mobile phones are cheap in China, and service plans are cheaper. Migrant workers share phones and use them to keep in touch with their home towns and trade messages about the latest factory hirings and firings. Vendors whose tricycle carts are piled high with Styrofoam or plastic or cardboard can afford to own mobile phones. Young workers, students and taxi drivers have phones. People text more than they talk on the phones, because texting is even cheaper than talking. And reception is strong just about everywhere: I have been in subway cars, on elevators, out in the countryside, and always with a perfect signal. Purchasing our phones was easy, and we plunged back into the Shanghai heat.

Getting a Chinese name was more difficult. A Chinese name was critical, our friends said; it would be our credibility, our bona fides. It would demonstrate that we weren’t just here to flit around China, but intended to stick it out for a while. It would make it easier for those we met in China to think of us “real” people. Plus, the Chinese love names, although not necessarily difficult-to-pronounce foreign names.

My husband got quite excited about his name. I think he saw an opportunity for glamour. As an airplane buff, he had his eye on something that would capture the excitement of an ace fighter pilot. His Chinese friends played along. They tried, as is usual, to come up with a name that sounded in some way like his own name, and they also looked for a name that would somehow have an aura of strength, elegance and derring-do. The result, which they agreed met all the conditions, was
Fāng Fēi Jié
. The order of names in Chinese is normally the other way around from Western names; the family name comes first, then middle, then first name.