One of the first things that the tour guides told us about shopping in China was to beware of the mosquitoes.
And they're not talking about the blood-sucking kind. At least the insect kind.
No, this term mosquito very aptly describes a class of merchant - a peddler, maybe - very common in touristy areas of China. They wait for you to depart tourist attractions and areas and then swarm onto you like mosquitoes smelling fresh blood. And in some places, like exiting at the north end of the Forbidden City in Beijing, they were so dense it felt like crawling up out of a grave to fresh air just to be free of them. In that case, it seemed like half a city block of densely packed mosquitoes all pawing and fawning and showing and for a claustrophobe like me, it was a gauntlet of “hell no.”
Our first real experience with mosquitoes came after the very first factory place we went, the Pearl factory. Nicole and I weren’t the last ones out, but by the time we came out, we were greeted by members of our bus looking into little suitcases that the mosquitoes had brought by. The first one I saw had a case full of watches. Mostly Rolex. All fake.
What caught my attention was that not all fakes were created equal. There was quite a bit of negotiation over a particular Faux-lex that had a sweep hand. These mosquitoes would ask $30 and negotiate down to almost nothing for watches with discrete second hand movements, but offer them $20 for these and they acted indignant.
With that encounter, I learned to be very careful about what was what.
But you can’t swat at these mosquitoes. No, these are people, and even if they are not behaving decently, turns out you can’t hit them. Our “swatter” was the Chinese phrase “bu yao” (pronounced “boo yow”, meaning “no want”). We started off by saying it pleasantly enough, except they persisted and persisted.
Until our tour guide informed us that you can’t be giggling or smiling when you say it. Of course, because it sounds like “booyah”, I had trouble saying it with a straight face. After that advice I could be found walking through the mosquitoes angrily muttering bu yao, bu yao, and suppressing my giggles.
But that didn't always work. The slightest interest, and that means that these mosquitoes will bite until they draw blood. On the third day, we were going into the Hutong to have lunch with a local family. This was certainly one of the coolest parts of the trip. The Hutong was a style of neighborhood that's been almost wiped out. It is characterized by narrow alleyways, and houses with little courtyards.
Also, poverty.
The Hutong district in Beijing has been preserved and allowed to stay as an example of the old style of living, but the people who populate the neighborhood seem to be relatively poor. Our tour gave us the opportunity to ride into the Hutong on a bicycle rickshaw and have a local lunch cooked by a husband and wife team in their own home.
We departed the bus at the entrance to the Hutong and were swarmed by the mosquitoes as usual. There was a woman selling silk bags and little purses that Nicole liked, and so she bought a bunch of them. Nicole, looking for a fake watch for her dad, expressed interest in one gentleman's wares.
She wanted the nice sweep hand watch, and was willing to part with a twenty for it, but he was not having it. Yet he still wanted to make a sale, and started offering combinations of the other watches in the case for lower and lower prices. He latched onto her and would not let go. He knew she had money from her previous purchase and no amount of bu yao would get him to leave us alone.
But we figured that we'd soon be on a rickshaw and riding into the Hutong, and therefore we'd be away from these mosquitoes, especially this one. We figured wrong.
We boarded our rickshaw, and our rickshaw operator started pedaling down a narrow alleyway. A block away from where we started, we relaxed into our seat, grateful to be away from the mosquitoes.
All of a sudden, someone talking to us from the left. "Two for twenty!"
The guy was on a bicycle, and he'd caught up to our rickshaw! He was still trying to make the sale! He had latched on to us suckers, and was sticking his proverbial proboscis into our ankles.
And as our driver angled around corners, hurried down narrow alleyways, and dodged oncoming bicyclists and mopeds, our mosquito held on. Then he did something crazy.
He threw his case with all his watches into Nicole's lap! And all of a sudden, she was shopping in her lap! And negotiating out the window of a moving rickshaw! In the craziness, I can't really remember how everything went down, but I think ultimately she grabbed three of the watches, stuffed a $20 bill in the case, and tossed the case back at the mosquito.
He had his sale, and she had a few watches. And we were able to have a very nice lunch in the Hutong with a family that kept wicked big and colorful crickets in little cages hanging on the wall that they occasionally took out to the cricket fights (no kidding).
After lunch, we came back out into a swarm of some of the same mosquitoes that had chased us into the Hutong. As we were preparing to leave, one of the mosquitoes we recognized grabbed up a bike with a kiddie seat on it. In getting on the bike, she seemed to break the child seat.
And on top of it, we don't think the bike was hers. We think she was "borrowing" it so she could make the sale!
And she rode us down, again with a harrowing Indiana Jones-style chase through the narrow streets of the Hutong. Nicole was yelling at her "No, No!" But the woman persisted until our rickshaw driver turned to her and shouted "NO!" He was our hero of the minute, and we couldn't stop laughing.
We were warned as sternly against buying from the mosquitoes as not to eat street food. We figured it was to ensure that our sales went to our tour guides or people that gave them kickbacks, but they did offer some good reasons not to purchase from them. The best reason they offered was that we have no idea what counterfeit Chinese money looks like, and that these people are quite likely to take large Chinese bills that tourists give them and return the change as counterfeit and pocketing the difference.
That didn't really stop us from buying the occasional thing from them, though. Never had any real problems with it.
Next up, Markets!
No comments:
Post a Comment