Friday: Round Two

We had just been prodded, poked, weighed, measured, and ultrasounded (see "Friday: Round One"). We were hungry and restless, so we headed out for our trip to YuYuan (or, in English, Yu Garden).

I'd heard about Yu Garden plenty of times from the girls; apparently it's something of a shopper's paradise made up of little stalls and big stores all selling pretty well everything you can imagine. Not really being the shopping type, that description didn't excite me much. But the girls kept talking about it, and since we were already well down into Shanghai proper, I figured I might as well go and see what all of the fuss was about.

It's really a lovely place. I don't know the origins of the area, but it looks like a large complex of original pre-Communist buildings (which, outside of the Bundt, are less common in Shanghai than I could wish for), so the architecture is all classic Asian: sloped roofs, black tiles, and big wooden beams with characters painted on them. That was enough to ingratiate Yu Garden to me, even if it is just a glorified mall.

Once inside, we chowed down on some traditional Asian McDonalds food and headed out to look at the shops. This can be a bit hard to imagine if you've never been outside North America. In the West (at least, most places I've been), you tend to have several big stores. Here, you see dozens of tiny stores (and tiny is no exaggeration; some were just big enough for a display counter and a chair), most of which sell the same thing. If you want to buy a scarf, there are probably twenty tiny shops that sell scarves. If you want fancy chopsticks, please check out any of our fifty chopstick specialists, most of whom will be carrying the exact same items. It's kind of weird at first, but you get used to it.

My main interest was in "authentic" Chinese items; art, gifts, clothes, etc. Of course we wanted to get some gifts, but I think that traditionally-styled Chinese art is very beautiful, and I just like to look at it. Although I did get one bit of art as a present for someone, my personal acquisitions consisted of incense (to freshen up the room a bit), a deck of playing cards (purchased because every card features a picture of Our Glorious Leader, and the top card on the deck had a shot of Mao with the word JOKER stamped across it in big letters), and some kind of hacked Nintendo DS game.

The main activity in Chinese-style shopping is bargaining. When someone (particularly a rich-and-stupid-looking foreigner) strolls into a shop, picks up an item, and asks the price, the discerning Chinese shopkeeper will quote a price three (or more) times higher than what they are willing to sell it for. The seller and buyer then engage in verbal fisticuffs: the former bewailing his poverty and the needs of his family, while the latter decries the apalling greed of the former and repeatedly insists that the item is really worth nothing at all, and that he is interested in it only by way of boredom or charity. Even if you don't want anything, merely entering a 10' zone surrounding the seller is enough to make them start shouting "Hello! Hello! Looky-looky! Best price!"

If you don't spend at least two solid minutes arguing about the price of something, you're getting ripped off. I learned this with my deck of playing cards; I asked the price, and she said 40. "Si shi [forty]?" I scoffed, "Ar shi [twenty]!" "OK," she replied. D'oh! I should have paid five! The negotiations often become personal. When I was haggling with the seller over my DS game, the seller began to reinforce her offers by telling me that I was very handsome, and she was offering me the handsome price.

Fellow teacher Paul Wagner learned the hard way that even attempting the ridiculous is no guarantee of being left alone. We were standing by a ladies' clothing store, waiting for my wife to finish purchasing a jacket, when Paul made the tactical error of glancing in the direction of a fancy chopsticks shop ten feet away. The shopkeeper immediately lunged across the counter and thrust a few of her choice products under Paul's nose. "Very nice! Very beautiful! Only 350!"

Attempting to escape, Paul mumbled "Tai kue le, tai kue le" (too expensive).

"What's your best price?" countered the seller.

"Uh . . ." responded Paul, thinking not quite fast enough, "50."

"50?" the woman fairly screamed, feigning a myo-cardial infarction, "No, no! True best price?"

"50," repeated Paul stubbornly, hoping that the woman would move off. His hope was in vain. For the next fifteen minutes, Paul argued with the chopsticks-seller. Each round, she would offer a slightly lower price. Each round, Paul would doggedly reiterate that he would not pay more than fifty. After the first such exchange, he began to add that he did not really want the chopsticks at all and that he was just waiting for someone. Several times, he attempted to leave the shop area, only to be seized by the diminuitive owner and physically dragged back to the bargaining counter. When Des was ready to leave with her coat, Paul was the not-so-proud owner of a fine pair of jade chopsticks, purchased for a mere fifty RMB. And I have to say, he's an inspiration to us all.

Dave