Is it possible that we are paranoid and overprepared? We meet up with Patrick and his ‘special friend’ Molly for dinner, and as we wander down a very dark alley peering in lit but deserted hole-in-the-wall restaurants, trying to decide where to try our luck, they tell us about their day. They had been approached by ‘art students’ like the ones that had approached X on his first day out, but they had been successful with Patrick and Molly and lured them into their ‘art gallery’ [this refers to a typical big-city China scheme: two personable youths with good English fall in step beside you, asking where you come from, how you like Beijing, and if you like art. If you ‘bite’ they take you to their gallery, where you politely admire the art. Upon deciding to leave, they tell you that they wish to present you with a ‘gift’ of their art, and you are pleased to have made a new friend and received such a gift. However, the protocol dictates that you must pay something for it, and they insist, so you give them what they suggest. It is usually far more than the ‘art’ is worth]. We probably should not have told them that we had known about this tourist trick. Once that came out, we started comparing notes. They hadn’t gotten shots, and they hadn’t heard about the chopstick caution. They had been wandering the streets all day hobnobbing with bird merchants, watching people eat bugs sold from street vendors, and eating ‘dubious’ dumplings.
Little white dogs on leashes are everywhere. The guidebook says that people were only recently allowed to own dogs once again [during the Mao heyday, pets were frivolous and forbidden]. Cigarette vendors. The rip-off trade is huge here [no idea what I was referring to, unless it was the number of men who sidled up to us and whispered, “DVD, VCD, good price.” One fellow traveler told us that he had gotten The Lord of the Rings on DVD just the day before, despite its only recently been released in theaters.]. We finally decide on a small but tidy restaurant where the waitress attempts to recommend the most expensive dishes—duck, market-price shrimp. We finally decide on tofu, beef, garlic broccoli. We order TsingTao, four, and each one is about one liter. Molly wants some log-shaped fried batter things that she saw the other patrons eating. They are creamy and white on the inside, and Patrick is afraid they are deep-fried lard. My guess is that the slightly sweet gel within is glutinous rice [they turned out to be rice wine jelly covered in batter]. We eat and poke and wonder about the safety of the food, but it turns out to be both safe and good. When we have finished, the women sweep the plastic door strips aside dramatically and usher us out.
17 May: Today was our Hutong adventure. We rode the metro to Tiananmen Square and mingled with a comforting number of fellow tourists. Little Japanese girls flashing the “v” sign, people carrying cheap Chinese flags on sticks, girls wearing baseball caps. We walk and drink bottled green tea and dodge the junk sellers and about four “art students” of our own. Seemingly everyone wants to know, “Hello, hello, are you American?” We wander the alleys—boys on fast bikes, men pulling metal trailers, tiny children running, old men sitting and smoking. Food, haircut, fruit. People stop talking to us as we move further and further down the hutong [alley]. Do they not want to see us there, or are they just trying to be inconspicuous to us?
Soon we are back to the congested, colorful lane with garbled English signs. We enter the fray and bargain. A MashiMaro watch for me, sunglasses for X. Two dollars. One-fifty. We meander shoe shops and no one bothers us—my feet must be enormous. What size is Chinese 25? It is the largest they have. We become intoxicated by the cheap goods—everything starts to look good. It seems everything in China is one dollar. I want a tee-shirt with silly English words on it and try to ask if it comes in my size. The salesgirls smile at me as though they find the idea ridiculous. Giant American. Finally an older woman puts aside her bowl of rice and little bean items and holds it up to my body. She stretches the fabric. “Good. Beautiful. Good,” she says. I stretch the armhole. “Is it big enough?” I say, and flex my muscle. She laughs. “Too big!” she says, and pulls out another shirt. “Better.” It could be the exact same size, but this one has white racing stripes on the shoulders.
We pick up one of those tacky Mao lighters [that plays 'The East is Red' when you flip the lid] and a weird wallet—“hello kitty,” it says, but it features two very freaky looking rabbits wearing dresses—for Tony and Heather. Earlier we had seen Bendik [X’s colleague] and his friend Hovard and they had regaled us with their laundry list of purchases. Utterly horrifying, the litany of backpacks, North Face jackets, watches, robes, ties, blah blah blah. Tacky, acquisitive stuff, I thought, but oh my, the thrill of the cheap is a heady drug.