The China Match

Or, perhaps more accurately, “How to lie to the Chinese.”

Today’s just going to be some random highlights from the Shanghai trip, because I don’t really have time to cover the whole thing and this gives me an excuse to be lazy with regard to fluidity. In return you get a bunch of little anecdotes as opposed to the standard long-form craziness. Everybody wins!

Day 2: Mike took us to People’s Square, which is a pretty standard Wangfujing-esque street ‘o’ chaos. Notable for: its pretty substantial, utterly nonsensical, almost certainly dangerous vehicle traffic; having at least three pizza huts within one mile of one another; the HJ building (Connor and Mike have very dirty minds. Plus we’d just been talking about how KTVs — usually karaoke bars — in China are occasionally “all inclusive,” if you understand); and the fact that it dead ends into the Bund.

The Bund basically consists of another mile-long stretch of buildings that some brits set up in the early 20th century. It’s one of the biggest attractions in Shanghai because it’s so damn pretty, plus it runs along the bank of the Huangpu river and consequently has an incredible view of the city skyline.

Moreover, the Bund area features a way to cross the Huangpu river called the Sightseeing Tunnel. This was the sum total of my knowledge about the thing until it was time to get on, at which point Mike asked “you remembered to take your hit of acid first, right?” God, I wish I had. Turns out the Sightseeing Tunnel is an experiment in “Personal Rapid Transit.” All well and good, except that after they load you into the little gondola-sized subway, they play techno music and flash lots and lots of lights at you and drive you past a bunch of creepy wind-flail dolls and say random shit like “Nascent Magma” and “Paradise…and Hell” in creepy English and Chinese and basically it is terrifying and ought to be avoided. Whew.

P.S., the other side of the river is also really pretty.

Day 3: Started with a temple nestled quaintly under a bunch of skyscrapers, because this is China, dammit. Zoning laws are for scrubs.

After that, though, I had my first practice with lying to people in China. We were attempting to go up this building (the one that looks like a bottle opener) because it’s the tallest one in Shanghai, and is actually the tallest observation deck in the world, which is kinda cool. After our first three lines (as evidenced by the expo, the Chinese love their lines), we were able to actually buy a ticket, at which point we realized there was a student discount. For kids seventeen or under. Which would be a problem, had my Qinghua ID not been misprinted to say I was born in 1900…
Long story short, the people at the desk were presented with a six foot tall kid with like 4 days worth of scruffy beard presenting a Chinese college ID that says he’s 110, insisting in Chinese that he is seventeen years old and fervently denying that he has any other forms of identification on his person. They were, understandably, kinda at a loss for thirty or so seconds, after which the people behind me started complaining and they gave me the discount. This was a good warm up for later that night.

Anyway after I believe five lines we actually made it up the damn thing, at which point Connor became really uncomfortable at the combined height and ever-churning chaos of Chinese dudes running around and yelling a lot, which is pretty standard. If you’re curious, this is what Shanghai looks like at night from the tallest observation deck on Earth. And here it is from over a urinal. Coolest pee I’ve had in a while.

Ok last story for the night, because this post is getting long: after the bottle opener building, we went back to the world expo. Unfortunately it was about 9.30 by this point, and the expo stops selling tickets at 8 and stops letting people in at all at 9. Of course, we only learn this after we buy tickets from a scalper (an expo parking lot attendant) who promises that the doors are open until ten. We buy his tickets, and go to a random exit of the fair to make sure we can get in. The guy tells us the actual entry times, which is disappointing. So we turn around, and have made it about twenty yards when I turn to Connor and say “F*** it, this is China, lets bribe them.” Mike freaks out a bit and retreats, which sucks because his Chinese is better than mine. Connor’s all for it, though, so we go up to the entry guards and I tell them how important the expo is to me (in chinese of course) and offer the two of them 200 kuai. Considering that it was $30 US, that’s not very much of a bribe. They refused the money, sadly, but they were happy enough with me for trying to take me to their buddies at the actual entrance. So he walks me over there, and the entrance people are like “hell no, doors closed forty five minutes ago.”
So I start lying.
A lot.
“I’m going back to Beijing tomorrow,” I say. “I promised my friends I’d take pictures, and the swindler (new vocab word!) who sold me the tickets said I could get in! I’m very sorry about this, but the expo is very important to me, and I’d like to see it just once” This stream of lies continues for maybe a minute, at which point they cave and go ask the police officer if it’d be ok to let us in.
The police officer is having none of it, at first. But then I start complimenting China, telling him how this expo is famous all over the world, and how important it is for the country and how much I want to show China off to my friends. He liked this. We got in. It was definitely the best Chinese I’ve ever used; Connor told me afterward that he’s never heard me that fluent before. I suspect this is because my real first language is deceit instead of English — when I was trying to lie to the officer, I was way more concerned about making the lie convincing than I was thinking about the actual Chinese, which just came automatically.

We rounded out the evening by getting some beer and Irish cream in the pub next to the Ireland pavilion — naturally the very last building on the grounds to close — and running around the Expo at night. A lot of the groundskeepers were actually really cool about letting us poke around their pavilions a little bit, so even though most things weren’t open the trip was definitely worthwhile.

So I’m back in Beijing safe and sound (平平安安!), and I’ve got a lot of new stories to tell from the trip — they’ll be up on the blog shortly — but first I thought I’d just publish a collection of some of the coolest pavilions that I saw at the Shanghai 2010 world expo. I went three times, so all three days will be mixed together. It won’t be hard to tell which is which, though: day 2 was rainy, day 3 was a late-night visit, and day 5 is everything else.
I apologize in advance to my benevolent webmaster, Mr. Geoffrey Hill, for any data charges he incurs for this post being rather memory-intensive. I promise I will pay you moneys, please to be not breaking my kneecaps.

Without further adieu, the 上海世博 ：城市，让生活更美好。

This one was modeled after sand dunes. Look at it from farther back.

Connor inside North Korea.

That should be about everything! I have a couple more expo pictures but I can mix those into the next couple blogs.

It feels very odd to say it, but I think I just had my first solo Chinese excursion that I can label “authentic” without any qualification. No tour guide, no teachers, no fluent friends to mediate conversations, no other white people anywhere, and most importantly not a word of English. It was really, really cool.

I’ll elaborate, but first I want to talk just a little about the trip itself. As you’ve probably surmised, I’m sitting in my hotel in Shanghai right now; I consider this an accomplishment for a few reasons. First, ordering a taxi last night whilst still just a little drunk (hey, it was the last day of finals) was pretty tricky. It is worth noting here that when the phone robot tells you that there is an “English” option, empirically it actually means “you are still basically going to have to do this in Chinese, but maybe we’ll let a few English, taxi-related nouns slip if we really have to.” Also, my cell kept constantly dropping the call halfway through the reservation, so I switched to Anna’s. Of course as soon as I did they kept calling my phone back so I was at one point forced to hold two simultaneous conversations in Chinese on both phones, which was pretty sucky.
Anyway the reservations got made, and I picked up my four hours of sleep for the second night running, and would have kept right on sleeping had the taxi driver not angrily called me at like 6:05 and demanded to know why I wasn’t outside. Or at least, that’s what I’m pretty sure he was demanding. You’ll sympathize if you’ve ever talked to a Beijing cab driver before — they are a famously heavily-accented bunch, and past a certain point the Beijing accent just sounds like one is attempting to speak around a mouthful of gravel. Add this accent to a crappy $20 phone and the “I have slept for 4 hours and been awake for 20 seconds” state of mind, and you’ve got today’s wakeup.
Turns out that I had forgotten, silly me, that my phone’s alarm clock doesn’t work when the phone is charging. 当然。
Funny thing was that Anna’s doesn’t either, so I called her and woke her up as I ran down stairs, and was able to stall the guy a little bit by loudly grumbling about how long women take to get ready, and apologizing profusely. In actuality Anna got ready even faster than I did (I took four minutes, she took two) and we actually both made it on the cab by 6:10 or so. Not too bad.

The airport was straightforward enough, because most things were translated. There was a small hiccup near the start though, when I went to the desk of my airline and asked for my boarding pass and they told me they were for flight changing only, and that I should go to the “Q.” So I walk until I find a big row of kiosk-style boarding pass machines labeled in groups from A to M. They’ve all got pretty lengthy lines, and several of them have my company’s logo on them. I am here briefly torn between trying to find the missing letter Q and assuming that the lady was trying to tell me in English to get in the Queue in front of one of the China Eastern kiosks. I look everywhere for the former, fail, then decide to pursue the latter. This doesn’t work, and irritates the kiosk people who helpfully yell Q at me some more but won’t show me where it is.
Eventually I just get super confused and embarrassed and wind up having to ask a Chinese lady what the letter Q means (真丢人) at which point she laughs at me and points to the special China-Eastern-Airlines-flying-from-Beijing-to-Shanghai-Hongqiao booth, labeled Q, crammed in some corner alone across the hall from A and B. Damn it, China. Whatever. At least I got to eat some 包子 at the Flavor Tang, which was awesome.

Anyway, the rest of the journey was pretty uneventful. Once I got to the hotel though, I realized I had no plug adapter, and thus couldn’t power my computer. A nerd and his internet are not long parted; as any XKCD fan will tell you, it was an unacceptable situation. So I talked to the front desk about it and they wrote down the address for some random mall like 40 minutes away. The gas station lady said to go to the same place. I grabbed a taxi and had gone maybe a block and a half, though, when I passed this store. “Well gee,” I thought. “Those sure look like the characters for ‘electronic’ and ‘devices’ but surely everybody wouldn’t be sending me 40 minutes away if I could just buy my plug here.” And then I passed this one, at which point I just yelled at the cab driver to stop, paid him like 10 kuai and got out maybe three blocks from where I’d gotten in. If I had just walked for a few streets, I would have passed two very large, very imposing electronics stores. Finding the right adapter inside the second one took me maybe two minutes and thirty kuai; a forty minute taxi in shanghai is like 80 or 90 kuai. Each way. Lesson learned yet again: always wander around a little before you commit to anything here.

I’m glad I went to the second store though, because on my way back I wandered down a side street and started talking to this dude about where he liked to eat. He pointed at the place he was standing in front of, which I hadn’t realized before was actually a restaurant. I wonder why. I’m not sure that calling this place a “hole in the wall” would really do it justice, because half of the store was haphazardly strewn around the street in front of it. I do know, though, that they don’t get a lot of 外国人 (foreigners) coming by, because when I showed up like the whole family came and chilled on the porch-ish-thing with me and just talked about anything they could.

As a slight aside to my classmates who bash the 新实用汉语课本, our textbook, it absolutely saved my ass today. I see the menu in this place and the only thing I can fully make out is 炒鸡丁, an extremely recent vocab word which translates — admittedly awkwardly — to (stir)fried chicken cubes. What’s funny though is that just yesterday, I had an oral examination in which I had to tell my teacher what I’d do when a friend of mine presented me with a tasty dish. I had rehearsed a speech about how to praise a good 炒鸡丁 chef and display my gratitude sufficiently. I definitely used about 3/4ths of it today as I was talking to the cook and her family; it was incredible (as was the dish itself. 很好吃）Plus it, along with rice and a fanta, only ran me 10 kuai. Probably one of the best meals I’ve had here.

In any event, I hung out at this place and just talked to these guys, their kids, and their friends wandering by on the street for about an hour. Combined with my hour-long conversation with the dude next to me on the plane, I’ve spoken more Chinese here in one day than I’ve done in probably my past week here combined, and I honestly enjoyed every second of it. I’m going to have a really good time here, I can tell already. Plus, Connor shows up in like 3 hours, so I don’t have much of a choice.

“Open at 10, 15% of what they offer,” they said, “especially if you’re obviously a 外国人(foreigner).” A few months ago, I was hearing this kinda thing all the time — in this case from one of the study abroad briefings, but also from my brother, his Chinese friends, and apparently everybody else who has ever been here. That all sounds well and good, but for those of you who haven’t done this before, imagine finding a jacket on sale in mall or something being sold for $60, and just take a second to think about how weird it would be to look the shopkeeper straight in the eye and tell him “yeah, I’m only paying six for that.”

Because it’s weird as hell. I mean, I guess I’ll get used to it but for now it’s still extremely bizarre, particularly considering how cheap things are to start with. In that example, for instance, the jacket wouldn’t be 60 bucks, it’d be 60 人民币， or roughly nine USD. And you have to act like paying nine bucks for a jacket is outrageous, because obviously paying ninety us cents is much more reasonable. They of course won’t do that, so they’ll haggle you up to 25% of original asking price, and you leave with like a $2 jacket. Most normal thing in the world.

So yesterday, I was in this mall down by the Beijing Zoo, which I actually haven’t been to yet but I’m sure will happen pretty soon (get pumped for future pictures of pandas incoming). It looked like this, except this was by far the neatest, most quiet, and most organized corner in the store. Anyway, this lady in the middle had a bunch of shoes in a very small space, and I wanted some. I hadn’t ever haggled on my own before but it’d seen it done, and I wanted to go out that night for July fourth.

So I go in, ignore the salesperson, and pretty quickly pick out some Nikes that I _kinda_ like; I can’t overstress here how important it is to only appear moderately interested, because the more you look like you want something, the more you’ll have to pay — which might (I don’t actually know) be one reason why girls on average get worse deals than men. I mean, I bet when a girl finds that one purse that matches perfectly with her most adorable dress and she absolutely has to have it, the salespeople can tell and exploit that.

I ask how much they cost, and she won’t tell me, probably because she wants to see how much she can trick the stupid American into paying for fake Nikes. She instead goes to get them in my size and lets me try them on and walk around before she’ll even start to discuss price. Eventually, though, once I look relatively happy with them, she offers 280元, a little over $40. I say I want to pay 50, because I’m not quite ballsy enough to ask for 4 dollar shoes yet.
Note: Her price wouldn’t be particularly unreasonable in the US, but then again shoes there would have been real, and therefore probably wouldn’t have such obvious issues with quality. Here, though, paying anywhere in the ballpark of 300 kuai for anything short of a full, tailored suit is utterly ridiculous.

She tells me my Chinese is great — she is lying — and that she’ll offer me a good price, 230. I tell her to stop joking around (别开玩笑, one of my favorite phrases), then ask for 50 again. She shakes her head, so I get up and just leave the store. I’m maybe five feet away when she pulls me back in. She doesn’t look happy, but says me she’ll go down to one hundred, and that’s her lowest. Which is a shame, because my highest is 60. I walk again. Ten relatively uncomfortable seconds later, I’m paying $9 for nikes. A little while after that I paid another 60 kuai for a dress shirt, but only down from 100.

In any event, I probably could have done way better, but I’m still proud anyway, damn it. Was gonna talk about July 4th here but the post was getting a bit long and it wasn’t that interesting anyway. 再见！