Nancy McCabe

Back to China

Wal-Mart in Translation

For Cindy and Janet

From a distance, on first glance, Wal-Mart in Guilin looks pretty much like any Wal-Mart in the U.S.  But then there’s the Chinese characters underneath the familiar logo.  And, instead of a parking lot in front of the building, there’s a square where people gather and music plays and vendors sell dumplings and meats and slices of watermelon and packaged ice cream treats. Since the parking lot is an underground garage, I doubt that people camp in RVs there.  Actually, I’ve never seen an RV (or, for that matter, an SUV) in China.  Alongside the square is another lot with row upon row of motorbikes, in Guilin apparently the most popular form of transportation, edging out bicycles by at least twenty to one.

Right inside next to the KFC is a sloping electric walkway that takes you to the second floor and the entrance to Wal-Mart.  Like in the U.S., greeters stationed at the door come running to slap stickers on any item you bring in with you, but they don’t otherwise proffer greetings.

From a distance, the Wal-Mart shelves look pretty much the same as in the U.S., though shorter, so that you can look from one aisle into the next. While all the labels are in Chinese, color-coded products like Herbal Essences shampoo were easy for Sophie to identify.  She picked out some Hello Hydration and None of Your Frizziness, or at least we assumed that’s what the bottles contained. I’m still a little suspicious about whether you can really buy None of Your Frizziness in China, since I appear to be the only person in China with frizziness, particularly in this tropical region where the humidity turns my hair three times its normal size by the end of every day.

The clothing displays with white mannequins and models in the ads painted on the wall, the appliance section that carries many varieties of rice cookers, the toy and toiletry aisles all tend to be relatively deserted.  One night, though, there must have been a great deal on hideous rubber punching bag-like toys in the shape of some unfamiliar blobby cartoon character, because everyone was snapping them up. There are always crowds in the entertainment section, people playing with computers and reading books, leaving small children planted in front of TVS that show cartoons.  In front of the big screen TVs along the edge, a small theater has been created with rows of benches where sagging husbands and boyfriends watch sports and nap.

Alongside yet another slanted electric walkway, piles of boxes and packages allow shoppers to grab bargain items on the run: candy, batteries, and condoms. At the top of the escalator is the grocery section, with giant-sized bottles of corn oil and labels that we recognized: Great Value, Pringles, Oreos, Cheetos. Then we looked closer.

Great Value products include huge quantities of dried mushrooms and preserved plums, cans of congee, Xinjiang Hetian Jujube, which Sophie described as like big wrinkled sausage balls, Hawthorn Sweetmeat Coil, another snack that looked a little like American dog treats, and preserved fish, four entire fish dangling upside down in each package, watching us.

We’ve spent a lot of time in the snack aisles reading labels: Great Value Microwave Popcorn—creamy sweet flavor. Pringles in cucumber, seaweed, and Hong Kong Fish Ball flavors. Among the shrimp flakes and pea snacks, Cheetos—chicken, steak, and milk-flavored.  Near the osmanthus, coconut, and corn-flavored candy, near the coffee, blackberry, and blueberry gum, Oreos, with grape, raspberry, and banana filling.

The meat and deli sections carry mostly dumplings and fried bread, though once we paused before some elegant looking cooked ducks, their necks twisted gracefully to gaze back at us. We’re not used to even acknowledging that our food was once alive, much less celebrating it as these artistically arranged ducks seemed designed to do.

Walking down the street the other day, Sophie said, “That chicken is making me nervous.”

“What chicken?” I asked.

“You seriously do not see the chicken?” Sophie asked.

I’d been studying the packages and purses at the feet of motorbike drivers, and now looked up to see a woman ahead of us carrying a chicken upside down, holding its feet.  It hung there limply, then suddenly raised its wings and swung up into the air in a desperate frenzy of activity.  The woman tightened her grip and, defeated, the bird dropped down to dangle helplessly again, doomed, presumably, to become the woman’s dinner.

So far we haven’t seen any live chickens in Wal-Mart, though in her book Dreaming in Chinese Deborah Fallows reports duck carcasses hanging from hooks at the Beijing Wal-Mart and tanks in the meat section full of live turtles and carp.

We’re not that disappointed that so little is familiar, since our trips to Wal-Mart are largely anthropological expeditions.  There’s not a lot of American stuff that we miss so far.  A cook shows up at our apartment at noon and six each day to whip up fabulous dishes involving meat and fish and eggs and fresh vegetables.  She also often brings us fruit to snack on: lychee, mangoes, watermelon.  Once she cooked a whole fish, head and all, and although Sophie was a little freaked out at food that seemed to be watching her, we turned the eye so it stared at the wall instead of at us and ate every bite.

The Ancient Art of Chinese Street-Crossing

Three years ago, when we were in Beijing and then Xi’an, I flat-out refused to cross any streets unless we were with a guide.  If there was no restaurant on our side of the street, we ate at the hotel. If Sophie wanted to go exploring, we walked up and down the same block, getting to know the five or six shops on it very well.  While we sometimes gazed yearningly at the opposite side of the street, I didn’t feel that as a responsible parent I could allow my child to walk in front of chaotic Chinese traffic any more than I could allow her to sky dive or leap canyons on a motorcycle.

The conventional wisdom is that in China, foreigners should adopt a herd mentality and insert themselves into the middle of packs of experienced Chinese street crossers. Those people know what they’re doing, so do what they do.  And besides, if anyone gets hit and you’re in the middle, those surrounding you will take the most impact. Great advice, but I decided that I’d sooner use my airplane seat cushion as a flotation device than risk crossing a Chinese intersection.

But we’re in Guilin for a month, and it will be a very long month if we confine ourselves to one block on one side of the street.  So I’m trying to overcome my fears.

In Guilin, as in most Chinese cities, even if there’s a crosswalk with a green light, traffic never really comes to a stop.  If you wait for the street to be clear, you might as well pitch a tent on the curb and plan to live there for the rest of your life. Street-crossing involves altogether different techniques than in the U.S.

To begin, you must step off the curb and check the first lane of traffic, often a separate motorbike lane. Is anyone coming?  If so, you must judge their distance and speed and decide whether they will hit you if you walk right out in front of them.  This is just the warm-up leg. If you manage to make it across the lane, you can take refuge on the curb and gather your courage for the extreme sport part of the process: now you have to get across three lanes of honking vans, speeding taxis, barreling compact cars, and double-decker buses bearing down on you.

It’s best to take it a step at a time.  Consider carefully but quickly:  can you make it across the first lane?  Once you get to the second lane, can you keep going within a reasonable amount of time?  Can you then cross the third lane without dying instantly?  If so, you go, and then you land on another curb and repeat the entire process for three lanes of vehicles coming from the other direction.

Once you make it safely across the second three-lane set, it’s tempting to breathe a huge sigh of relief and rest on your laurels, in which case you will be sideswiped instantly by a motorbike coming from the other direction.  It’s easy to forget that yes, there’s an eighth lane of traffic.  Get across it safely to the sidewalk but don’t get too cocky; motorbikes sometimes travel on the sidewalks as well.

It’s one thing to master techniques for crossing the street, but then there’s form to worry about.  Sophie has perfect form.  Her timing and judgment allow her to stroll across the street with the utmost casualness, just like your typical Chinese citizen, not looking the least bit fearful that her life is about to end, even if she claims that she’s really thinking, “Oh my god oh my god I’m going to die I’m going to die.” She likes to make fun of me, at my tendencies to suddenly think “oh my god I’m going to die” and break into a scurry, a jog, or an outright run.

Right now, as I write, she is doing re-enactments of Mom Crossing the Street around the living room.  She says, “You look like a flying bird trying to get away from a. . . “ and then she finishes lamely, “bigger flying bird.”  Then she glares at me.  “I’m too tired to come up with a metaphor,” she says. She hurdles the coffee table and doubles over with laughter at her memory of me crossing streets, but I don’t mind.  I’ve now crossed several streets and am still alive, and now feel confident about crossing the street to explore the five-story Wal-Mart.

Getting Lost in Guilin

Every few feet in the Guilin airport, along the corridor as we deplaned, along the walls as we passed gate after gate, on every post in the baggage claim, was an ad, the same ad over and over: a disembodied face of a Chinese man beaming down on a box of throat lozenges, looking beneficent toward cough drops and all humankind.

We found our luggage and our guide Simon, who led us to a waiting van.  As we headed down the highway, he told us that Guilin is a “small city” of 700,000, named after the short, leafy gui trees that line the road, known in English as osmanthus trees.  Ahead of us rose what appeared to be enormous tree-covered mountains, some low and curved, others jutting up to points. I’d read about these limestone mountains, the inspiration for much Chinese poetry and scroll painting, when I first booked our apartment. Now, we followed the Li River, so high that it lapped against the bank, spilling over into puddles on a picnic area and playground.

We arrived at Ming Garden, a high rise apartment building in the downtown area, down a long alley of tall buildings and lots crowded with motorbikes. The apartment has wood floors and wood lattice decorations on the walls, screens, arch, and doors separating the bedroom from the dining area and living room from a small alcove along the window. Out the window we can look across at the mountains or down on the roof gardens and flapping laundry of other high rises, a stretch of field beyond, part of it wild and scrubby, part of it cultivated into gardens.  We can also see a schoolyard with basketball courts and children jumping rope, and hear whistles and shouts and music during school hours.

But at first I was too preoccupied to appreciate the apartment and view. That morning in Shanghai, I’d plugged in a converter, which started smoking and emitting a foul odor, and my entire day had been overshadowed by anxiety about getting the computer hooked up so I could meet some impending deadlines. To my relief, we figured it out between us, Ms. Huang the housekeeper, Simon, Sophie, and me.

Then Simon led Sophie and me down a street of honking cars and barreling motorbikes, past noodle shops and fruit markets and China Mobile stores and banks and Wal-Mart, part of a five-story mall with a KFC downstairs.  We arrived at a restaurant with white tablecloths and yellow-covered chairs with skirts, vines of red and pink roses rising to the ceiling behind glass, beads dripping down.  We sat in the midst of a lively, loud party of young men in white shirts clanking bottles and glasses and smoking and eating and rushing back and forth between tables to toast each other.

Simon helped us order, then showed me from the window how to get back to our apartment: turn by the blue billboard, follow the street toward the radio tower.  It seemed simple enough.  We said goodbye to Simon.

But by the time we finished eating, the sun had set, and the blue sign was no longer visible, and the tower had been swallowed up by the darkness.  We emerged from the restaurant onto angled streets and had no idea which way to go.

Sophie has a possessive attitude toward China and considers it incumbent on her to know things or to figure them out, to lead the way rather than to panic or melt down at being hopelessly lost on the busy streets of a city where we can’t ask even the most basic question.  It’s like as soon as we land in China, she becomes the host and I’m the guest, and while she can be a little bossy, this quality of taking charge will someday serve her well. “I think it’s this way,” Sophie said, so we headed down a street, gradually realizing that we didn’t recognize a thing.

Simon had told us that if we got lost, we should just hail a taxi and show the driver the apartment address. But the only taxis we saw were plowing forward at high speeds.  “Where is Wal-Mart?” I asked a man.  I was clinging to a thin thread of hope that he knew a little bit of English, but he responded in Chinese, and we shook our heads.

The man kept following us and talking and gesturing.  It occurred to me that in the U.S., this would not be a good thing, a strange man insistently following two lost females in the dark. I turned on the next street to shake him off, then realized that this street was far less populated. Sophie sent me a nervous glance as the man continued to follow. “Thank you,” I said to the man. “Xie xie.”  But he wouldn’t go away.

It turned out that this stranger had shouldered the responsibility of making sure we got to where we needed to go, and he was not giving up.  “Wal-Mart,” he said, gesturing in the other direction.  “Wal-Mart.” He seemed relieved when we went back the other way, and sure enough, a block later, there was the blue sign Simon had pointed out.  Maybe. Or maybe it was a different bluish sign.  But the man seemed happy, so we headed hopefully down that street, and soon we stumbled across the big Wal-Mart sign.

Mesmerized by the sight of something vaguely familiar, we entered the stiflingly hot, humid mall, took an escalator up to the first floor of Wal-mart, found the crowds and packages labeled in Chinese overwhelming, had no idea where to find groceries or bottled water, and, on sensory overload combined with jet lag combined with stress over knowing that we were still lost, left rapidly.

But then we managed.  Somehow we crossed an eight-lane street, which is a major feat in China where the traffic never comes to a standstill, and somehow we found our way back to our gate and our building and our apartment.  I forgot all about the smoking converter and the freaky feeling of being totally lost, and started to feel like a competent world traveler who might figure everything out after all.

Note to readers: Thank you for reading my blog and for comments and messages on Facebook.  I appreciate them very much but cannot access Facebook, which is blocked by the Chinese government, to send a reply.  I do welcome (and can read and reply to) e-mail at ngm4@pitt.edu.

Noodles in Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai on Wednesday after a mostly sleepless night.  By the time we got through immigration and the baggage claim and took the shuttle to our hotel, it was 8:30, but mercifully, it was not 8:30 a.m. as it was at home, but 8:30 p.m., almost bedtime in China.

“Can we go to bed now?” Sophie asked.  Our airplane seats had been so cramped, it seemed to me that folding ourselves up and mailing ourselves in padded envelopes might be a more comfortable way to travel.  So now the narrow flat beds at the Shanghai Airlines Travel Hotel were especially appealing.  Except I knew that if we went to bed now, we’d wake up starved by midnight.

“We should eat something,” I said, turning through the room service menu.  There was a “prime beefburger” with “saseage bacon, fried egg and cheese,” a club sandwich with “smoked turkey lettuce, tomato, bacan and fried egg,” “Your own choiced pizza,” which did not involve a fried egg, and noodles with shredded meat, preserved vegetables, and a fried egg.

“Maybe we’ll stay awake better if we move around,” I suggested.  “Let’s go check out the restaurants.”  As if in a weird dream, we ended up at the first floor Dream Bar Coffee Shop staring, bewildered, at a menu of heavy-looking western meals like “Spragetti Bolognase” and a 20-page picture menu of Chinese dishes involving goat and oxen.  We decided to look for a Chinese restaurant upstairs, got lost on the way, had no will to retrace our steps, and found ourselves once again lying on our beds, Sophie with the room service menu propped in front of her.

The menu slipped to the floor.  We stared at it, making no move to pick it up.

“We have to order something and boil water,” I said.  Both tasks seemed insurmountable.  But finally I forced myself to my feet and in a sudden spurt of energy ordered two bowls of noodles and filled the water pot.  Then, overcome with exhaustion, I stared at the outlet on the wall behind the little table.  Crawling under it to plug in the pot seemed like too much effort.

A young man in a red jacket, white shirt, and black pants arrived bearing one enormous bowl of noodles with one ceramic spoon and one set of chopsticks.  I started to explain that we wanted two bowls, but then I changed my mind.  Instead, I asked if we could have another spoon.

He looked confused.

“Two spoons?” I said.

The young man’s confusion turned to alarm.  He rushed over to the phone and shouted rapidly into it as if our room had just caught fire.  Within seconds another young man in the same uniform arrived, looking worried.

“We just need two spoons,” I explained.  I held up two fingers and then the spoon.  Somehow I had gotten across that we didn’t want fried egg with our noodles, but I could not convey the concept of two.  I know the word for two in Chinese, er, but it seemed to be the spoon that was tripping everyone up, and I didn’t know the word for that.

And no wonder—no one who is Chinese eats a bowl of noodles with a ceramic spoon, but with chopsticks before finally dipping out the broth.  I was so exhausted that I was reverting to an irrational American reliance on silverware.  But finally both guys smiled and pointed to the spoon and each raised two fingers and we all said together, “Two spoons!” and then they hurried off and I never saw them again.

So Sophie and I set to work making a mess with chopsticks, a ceramic spoon, and a plastic fork, a supply of which she remembered me packing for just such occasions.  The noodles were very long and they were flying everywhere.  Long noodles are supposed to confer longevity, but after a while life seemed too short to keep wrestling with those noodles, delicious as they were. Sophie managed to roll hers around her chopsticks like spaghetti, but mine kept unraveling and collapsing onto the desk.  And my lap.  And the floor.

I was ready to give up when our doorbell rang and there stood a woman in a red jacket, white shirt, and black pants, bearing another huge bowl of noodles.

“Oh, no,” I said.  “I just needed another spoon. Two spoons.”  I held up two fingers and pointed to the spoon on her tray.  I didn’t really want it anymore, but what could I say?  Bewildered, she handed me the spoon, and I thanked her, closed the door, and went to bed, wondering how, if I couldn’t even explain that I wanted two spoons, I was ever going to be able to say anything more complicated. Things that, it would turn out, might have come in handy the next day, like, “I am lost. Please help me find this address” or “My electric converter seems to be on fire.” But for that moment, I couldn’t even remember how to speak English, so I went to sleep.

Packing for China

So we’re leaving tomorrow, and somehow we have to manage to cram into our duffle bags everything we need for the next six weeks, but our luggage can’t exceed the 44 pound limit for domestic flights in China. Our dining room table is a chaos of stacked baggies filled with instant oatmeal and unscented laundry detergent, of clustered prescription bottles and containers of contact solution and boxes of bandaids and bags of cough drops. For weeks the dining room table has been off limits to anything that’s not going to China. Sophie sets her sweaty soft drink cup on the table, and I say, “Put that there, and it goes to China.” I heave a ten-pound bag of dog food onto the table and Sophie says, “Put that there, and it goes to China.”

Now it’s decision time, and I keep weeding stuff out, putting it back in, adding more, subtracting again. Do we really need all this stuff? Is this really enough for six weeks?

It’s not like we’re going to a remote jungle where nothing is available. Actually, our travel agent tells us that our apartment has a toaster and there’s a Wal-mart across the street, information that has bemused me for days—so does that mean that I can buy bread, not something you see a lot of in China?

And at Wal-mart, is there a passive-aggressive greeter who glares at anyone who doesn’t initiate friendly conversation while obtaining a shopping cart? Do college students entertain themselves by doing cartwheels in the aisles at midnight? Does a dazed elderly man migrate from department to department, muttering to himself and singing opera? If Youtube weren’t blocked in China, would its citizens post videos of the tacky t-shirt slogans and ill-fitting, unflattering clothing of Chinese customers? I know that much of what Wal-mart sells is actually made in China, but I’m curious about how an American phenomenon will translate. I’m also a bit distrustful about finding what we need with a label that I can read.

So I’m packing a baggie of powdered Gatorade, because Sophie once had symptoms of dehydration in Chengdu and I was afraid those symptoms would kick up into an asthma attack and I knew that a drink with electrolytes would probably make the difference. But our travel agency and guides and driver were insistent that we must take her to a hospital for an IV, and I kept saying, “No, I need a sports drink. Please help me find a sports drink.” And finally, after much determined pleading and arguing on my part, a guide and driver helped me scan the shelves of a grocery store until we found some Gatorade, labeled in Chinese but with the familiar lightning bolt logo, and sure enough, Sophie was soon on the mend.

And I’m taking a packet of Chapstick, which won’t take up that much room anyway, because of the Great Chapstick Search in Barcelona, where I couldn’t find lip balm at a grocery store, or at Happy Drugs, which turned out to be a candy store, or at the red cross pharmacies that sold only toiletries, or on the shelves of the green cross pharmacy, which carries actual drugs. The green cross pharmacy did have Chapstick in a top-secret location in a drawer behind the counter, as if lip balms were highly addictive popular street drugs. Or maybe just too big a temptation for shoplifters. Probably the latter, and I absorbed the cost: my long-sought tube of Chapstick was six dollars.

I also have lots of ibuprofen because in China three years ago I could only find the twelve-hour time release capsules, cough drops because I could only locate bitter herbal ones when I had bronchitis, Tylenol because Sophie is allergic to ibuprofen, and unscented laundry detergent because the scented kind gives Sophie hives. Our Kindles are loaded with books, which I bought all at once until my credit card was suspended, because, it turns out, buying multiple books at one time is considered “unusual activity.”

The list goes on and on: a laptop to do my work, pens and paper, chargers, adaptors, and converters, more fun stuff: a few actual books in case of mechanical failure, playing cards, cameras and memory cards, a beanbag panther named Tullah in an evening gown, one of six mascots from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford traveling around the world with faculty and staff this summer. Oh, and extra pants because I accidentally left all my pants at a hotel laundry in Xi’an and had to wear the same pair for the whole trip last time.

All this stuff: my hedges against inconvenience or expense or boredom or disaster, but more than that, against all the anxiety and uncertainty that goes with stepping into unknown territory. I know that there’s always something you forgot and always something you aren’t prepared for and communication barriers that make you feel like you might as well be an infant again without any language at all. There’s the additional stupidity of sleep deprivation and the weirdness of eating dinner when you usually eat breakfast and the woozy feeling that even gravity is operating differently after you’ve been on a plane for 24 hours.

Packing, I’ve gradually segued from denial and avoidance to manic accumulation to mild panic and self-questioning, to, finally, this zen mood where I’m ready to let go of my attachments to stuff and ditch it all and take my chances. I survey the dining room table calmly and take a deep breath. I doubt that I really need any of this.

Which is why it’s a good thing that I’ve planned so carefully in advance and have a notebook full of checklists and a dining room table covered with stuff. Now I can just mindlessly shovel everything into our duffel bags with reasonable confidence that we’ll mostly have what we need.

So that’s what we’re going to do: toss stuff in, zip up the bags, and go.