The China Match

“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.

To the victor go the bootleg spoils

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！

Because I like to be Fair and Balanced, here’re some reasons why China is incredible.

• 

  Free food is good food

  Chinese food is, for the most part, absolutely awesome. I haven’t really had a bad meal yet except for a mishap at the forbidden city when I botched some Chinese and ordered the wrong thing. Wound up with like some bizarre really-tough-meat dish that was just a problem. The vast majority of the time though, the food is delicious. We also get these free lunches every day, which have been a great way to expose oneself to new foods that wouldn’t necessarily get ordered otherwise.  I’ve found some bizarre but tasty new dishes in this fashion. Aside from this kind of food, there’re also bakeries and ramen shops and all sorts of restaurants scattered around campus. Tomorrow  we even get access to the university dining halls, which are, as always, stupidly cheap.

• The Tsinghua campus is a great place to live. We’re in a section of the school where all the roads are closed off to cars, so there are just fleets of bikes rolling around everywhere — getting around on a campus that’s nearly the size of UT is, therefore, shockingly easy and convenient. Also, our school is built on the site of the royal garden of the Qing dynasty (清华园), which ended in 1911. Consequently you’ll be biking around and just randomly discover parts of the old garden, which are beautiful. Beyond that, the campus also has lots of supermarkets, bike repair shops, banks, and really everything else. If it weren’t for how awesome Beijing is, there’d never be any reason to leave the campus at all, which brings me to…
• The city.
  

  This is a 15 minute bike ride from the lake above

  Say you need a new cord for your Nintendo wii. Say you need a club where the entire dancefloor bounces up and down. Maybe you just want to go watch a world cup game on the lagoon in hohai. Or you want to eat at Pizza Hut. Or you want to go to the forbidden city, or the summer palace. Or see your friends at Beijing U. For the most part, this is 10 kuai — about $1.50 — away. Going down by tiananmen will run you around 45 kuai on the outside, a bank-breaking eight bucks. I’ve been here 4 full days. Haven’t even THOUGHT of going back to the same place twice. For food, for shopping, for anything. There is just so much stuff so close, it’s mind boggling. For instance, I wanted an electronic dictionary yesterday. So we biked over to a gigantic electronics warehouse maybe twenty minutes from our dorm, and got one. This store was incredible — if it was electronic, you could get it… if you were willing to do some

• Haggling.
  

  Jackie with the dictionary, in front of the store he conquered.

  A huge cultural adjustment to make when coming to China, I’ve gradually come to realize that for the most part, price tags are meaningless. Aside from big department stores and fancy restaurants, you can ALWAYS bargain to get better prices. Considering that the prices here seem three or four times too low already, this is a little weird at first. For instance, my bike would have cost 200 kuai, but because six of us were buying and we all threatened to walk away, we got it down to 140 a piece, with a lock and basket thrown in for free. 200 kuai is only thirty dollars. But taking that price would have been ridiculous — why pay thirty when you can get twenty, plus a good lock? The guys at the electronics store tried to sell me my dictionary for 1000 kuai, or 150 bucks. Similar products in the US cost about 200. 1000 kuai is ostensibly an OK deal.  However, I had a secret weapon named Jackie, who speaks fluent Chinese. He wore the increasingly-angry frustrated salesmen (I was about to pay the thousand) down a hundred kuai at a time, until it was down to 700, their ‘lowest price.’ Jackie then mentioned that there were 49 other kids looking for dictionaries who lived fifteen minutes away. I ended up paying 630 kuai, Jackie having singlehandedly saved me $55 USD.

• The way batteries are sold. Oh, so you’re buying batteries? Surely you will be more willing to favor our brand if we throw in a gluestick or pocket knife in the package, right?

Initially this post was gonna describe my living situation and daily routine, but now I feel like making a small list of the little things I’ve noticed in China that it never even occurred to me that I’d miss. EDIT: changed name for consistency

• 

  Click on this picture to see the larger image, then look at the expiration dates.

  Food that isn’t expired. I can’t stress how frustrating this is. Granted, this wasn’t surprising on a lot of sketchy street vendors that hang around campus, but I was completely blindsided by the lack of ‘fresh’ food in grocery stores and convenience stores. In my vast, three-whole-day experience here, I’ve come to accept that any ‘western’ product at all, even if it’s Chinese Fanta, expired about two months ago. This is true whether you’re buying it on the street, at a 7-11, or even in the closest thing they have to an H.E.B.   ***EDIT*** according to Albert and Will, both legitimate Asians, this may well just be the manufacture date. If this is true, that’d be great.

• Mattresses. You ever been so tired that you just want to come home and jump into bed? Here, that’ll get you a broken tailbone. We’ve got maybe a four-inch-thick mattress _protector_ between us and the comfy, comfy metal and wood.
• Grocery bags. Hope you’re wearing cargo shorts.
• Tap water/recycling bins. China’s a bit like Mexico in this respect. You have to bring bottled water everywhere, and just throw the bottles away. This is due to the presence of metals in the public water. Companies apparently use said water sometimes in their products, so consequently you’ll open a beer up only to discover that it tastes uncannily like rust. Happened to the girl next to me last night. Was kinda funny but also pretty scary, to be honest.
• Toilet paper. Bring your own. You won’t find it in practically any restaurants or other stores in China. It’s only in some of the stalls in the dorms. You get used to carrying around some toilet paper in your pocket at all times, but it’s still pretty bizarre.
• 

  Fantastic.

  Toilets that don’t require you to squat. I thought I was done with this shit when I left Japan two summers ago. Imagine my surprise when I opened our bathroom stalls and was confronted by this:

I don’t mean to whine, though. Really, I’m having an excellent time, and most of this stuff just makes me laugh. Just gotta get used to it.