5/10

Tiananmen Square

An American is baying in the lounge by the boarding gate. Do they even know how to talk normally? Another bays on the bus from Beijing Capital airport into town. He is with a woman who must be a guide of some sort. She laughs at what she must be taking as jokes (or wants him to think she is understanding as jokes), and touches his arm, rather intimately. I wonder whether she is hoping to get herself a Western husband. Do the Chinese do that? A couple of times people have asked me how easy it is to go to Australia for Chinese but they have barely seemed interested in the answer. Maybe they are being polite in some way.

I have not yet seen anything of Beijing because no sooner have I arrived but I must make plans to leave. That is how it is here. You don’t just turn up at the train station and get a ticket, not unless you want to stand up for 12 hours. (Even then you are unlikely to get a ticket if you do not book ahead.)

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The street food in Beijing looked more edible but I was feeling listless and couldn’t rouse up the energy for bargaining. In India, a street vendor will not let you walk away without buying what they have to offer. If you suspect that what they have would cost a local five rupees, you will pay 10. You can probably get the local price if you keep going for a long session of haggling (but 10 rupees is 30ish Australian cents, so you could just not bother). But here the vendor seems to believe that if the price must be reasonable, they will let you go. Either that or I’m misjudging the prices. But it can be ridiculous. I know that a pedicab will cost a local two yuan a kilometre (it says so on the side of the cab). But you say “Take me to Longdong Street” and once you have made the driver realise which street you mean, he will say 20 yuan. What the fuck! It is 2 km, tops, if he goes the long way. So maybe you say 10 yuan. A taxi would be 10. The guy looks at you like you have just suggested that he present his dear old mum for one up the bum. He thinks hard. Eighteen, he says. Ten, you say. You begin to walk away. But there’s the thing: he lets you go. There is no way he can find anyone who will pay 18 yuan. He will have to do three trips, likely, to make the 10 you offered. But he would rather kill himself right there than let you pay only twice what the softest local would pay.

It is the same with anything with prices not marked. A bunch of grapes in Shanghai, with prices marked, 1.5 yuan. In Suzhou, no prices, 17 yuan. No, I say, not 17. Greengrocers would live in mansions at those prices! Okay, he says, 15 and it’s a bargain. A slice of melon from a street vendor; that’s a cheap snack, right? No. That’s five yuan. Just less than an Australian dollar. I say, maybe five mao. The vendor is horrified. Five mao for this wonderful slice of melon. The luowai must be crazy. But I point at the pile of change on her cart. It is all small, mao and five-mao coins. What can you do? It has ever been this way: you are going to pay for being white. You know it, they know it. But how much should you bargain over pennies before you either say, actually, I just want a slice of melon at just about any price and I cannot be doing with this, or I will not even begin this process, keep the melon, I’ll just buy one from a Carrefour if I pass by one?

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Honour guard for the national flag, Tiananmen Square

I was talking late at night with the travel agents at the Far East Hotel. The girl says she is from Guangzhou and that she is 22. She might be. She might also be 32 or even 42. It’s impossible to tell. The guy says he is also 22. I suppose he could be. He is trying to learn better English so that he can study in London, so I am sitting and talking with him for a while. He says he speaks putonghua with a southern accent because his mother was from the south. Of course, I cannot tell. His English is very bad. The girl’s is better; she has learned not to lose her final consonants. She doesn’t want to go to London; she would prefer to go to Canada, to “Wincowa”. It takes me a while to work out that she means Vancouver. The guys says he is taking his girlfriend to Tianjin tomorrow for the Moon Festival. He likes the beach, he says. Yes, I’m thinking, you and several hundred thousand others will be loving the beach tomorrow.