I wake up the first time at 4:30am. I remember I’m in China. I remember this because my stomach is broiling itself. It gurgles audibly. I don’t have to piss. I’m not nauseous. It seems my body woke me just to alert me to intestinal chaos: it nudged me in the night to say, “Bro, can you believe this shit though?” My body has a point: I’m a bag of thin skin encasing whitewater. I would make a joke about rapid classes, but I don’t remember them, because I never truly converted to the Church of Colorado. I go back to sleep, soothed by the churning lullaby.
_ _ _
In the morning proper, I try to make food. I have a pan with a wobbly handle that cost forty kuai at Chinese Wal-Mart, and a hotplate, and some eggs. And salt: a bag of salt with an expiration date in Obama’s first term. I’m hungry enough to ignore my 4:30 wake-up call and enough to ignore clothing. (“Pants could take days!” I explain to myself. It is possible I am experiencing jetlag.)
The Wal-Mart-branded “Good Deal” “olive oil” spits and hisses in the pan. I attempt to drizzle the salt over the eggs, but miscalculate and flood the pan. The pan, angered, seethes and gurgles and throws oil at my exposed groin. The oil nicks my leg, which feels bad, but much better than an inch inland. I resolve henceforth to (1) apportion salt with a utensil, as the Lord intended, and (2) never again cook naked, because I do not want to make that call:
“Hey, Mom? Yeah, I’m okay. No, I’m coming back. Yeah, back. What? Oh, burnt my penis. No, no, penis. PEE. NESS. Not, not off. Hmmm? Okay, so, have you seen a squirrel on a skewer? Skinned? I don’t know, in a movie. Oh god, like none at all. Yeah. Grandkids? I just wanna urinate without passing out. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Love you too.”
The eggs taste like a salt mine. I step into the halls – clothed – to find Tom Collins walking towards his room, bathed in sweat. “They have a gym!” he says. “Not much to it; up on the sixth floor. Did a light workout.”
I’m starting to wonder if Tom is one of the non-Damon assassins from the Bourne movies. “Oh, cool,” I say, in a tone I hope doesn’t betray puppy joy at seeing somebody I know.
“Gonna take a quick shower, then maybe head back to Wal-Mart to stock up!”
I’m such cliché: moving to China just to live at Wal-Mart.
_ _ _
I had forgotten life without a mobile phone. I used to have such a life, but I also used to be twelve years old. Without a walkie-talkie connected to the universe, life is more serene; more focused: you can’t be pushed off your thoughts. If you’re unpacking, no one interrupts. If you’re heading to Chinese Wal-Mart, you choose products carefully and dodge cars with increasing finesse. You also, unfortunately, have to make plans the way the pilgrims did: “See you at this rock this time tomorrow!” (Whenever you hear stories about love at first sight and coming back from The War to his loving wife and waiting every day for her letters, remember that at the time, devotion was literally the most exciting thing you could experience during a weekday. Give Grandma a mobile phone in 1937 and see if she marries the first square jaw she meets.)
In this way, Tom and I know that we are supposed head up to French 75’s room at 2pm: Last night, she promised to take us to the wet market.
“It’s very local,” she said at the time.
“What makes the market wet?” I asked.
“It’s just very fresh, and very local,” she nodded. So I said I would go to the wet market.
75’s door is decorated with a cardboard poster of Mao giving a kind of salute that borders Nazi. Mao’s face is cut out; so at one time, it looks like it was the sort of thing you could stick your face into, to be Mao for a picture. French 75 doesn’t answer the knock. I now remember that before cellphones, you learned a plan had been cancelled by keeping your half of the plan. But then I hear a rustle, and she is real: not a spirit induced by hunger to guide me through my first night in China. And not a spirit because spirits, unencumbered by bodies, can’t suffer crushing hangovers.
“Heeeey,” she croaks. “I was out late last night.”
Tom and I make unconvincing surprise noises. We walk in.
75’s room is like another country. She has strewn the walls with tapestries. She has couches. There’s a very low coffee table wearing a scarf, and the miniature refrigerator has a shawl, like it’s in a Soviet bread line. There are a lot of plants, and an intricate tea kettle. There are posters from everywhere she’s traveled, and stickers to the same effect. She has a shelf full of DVDs and a DVD player, which makes me feel like I’m swimming rapidly back through time to reach MapQuest. There is a massive map of her hometown, which is a Canadian island. If you were making up this person, she would be from a Canadian island.
French 75 herself is doing that thing where she wears just about nothing. “I’m going to get dressed,” she announces. “Make yourselves at home.”
Tom Collins does. He makes this kind of positive frown, like DeNiro. “Not so bad!” he decides. “It’s very homey.” We have some tea.
When French 75 is ready, we set out. At the bottom of the stairwell, in the little kiosk, Mr. Super greets us.
“Oh, Ni hao!” French 75 is effusive. Her Mandarin has the same slant as her English.
“Ni hao; ni hao!” Mr. Super is very happy to see her. They speak for a minute and Mr. Super laughs a lot, and I am 75% certain I hear the word “door,” until I remember I don’t know the Chinese word for “door.”
“He’s the greatest,” says French 75 as we walk on. “He’ll help you with the water when you pay him.”
“What now?” I ask.
“You know how you can’t drink the tap here?”
I had noticed.
“You buy this little cooler system from him, and then he gives you the water jugs for like fifteen kuai.”
“So like an office water cooler?”
“Yeah. I get two jugs at a time, so that when I’m out of one I have backup. In case he’s not around when I need another one.”
“When is he not around?”
“Oh, he’s like always around. Just sometimes he’s out. And then Ms. Super is there.”
“Who’s Ms. Super?”
“You’ll see her when Mr. Super isn’t there. But he’s pretty much always there.”
I decide to buy three water jugs at a time.
We walk out into the early-afternoon haze, which is different than the morning haze in that it happens in the afternoon. French 75 takes us out the main gate this time. It’s the way I came in yesterday in the van. We walk along the track and field, past more square buildings, and across the basketball courts. I count: there are 28 hoops. Across the field, one of the eight-lane highways glowers down from about fifth-story height. Behind that band of concrete, there are two identical housing complexes, then another two identical housing complexes, and then behind them many blocks of housing made from one building. Copy, paste.
I start to get my bearings, and I start to realize how large the campus is. It’s the better part of a mile just to the main gate. Fortunately, there’s a gate right next to our room-box, which is the word I now use for building.
“Yeah, but you’ll mostly use the main gate,” says French 75.
“Why?”
“They lock the one near us during the weekends. And late on weekdays.”
“Why?”
She shrugs.
We emerge onto Baise Lu: Baise Road. I glimpsed it yesterday before we turned into campus. “They have all the shops and restaurants here,” says 75. “I’ve eaten at like every one of these.”
There are a lot of them: the street is all storefronts, most not more than ten feet wide. Mostly glass facades. Mostly large characters on the glass. There are false wooden planks over some stores, but the majority sport faded glass logos in greens and yellows and reds. The titles are all a jumble in English, when they have English: “Northwest Shal Snaks” decrees one, which I have to think is an order. “Chickism,” declares another. Should you wonder about the tenets of Chickism, a handy primer on the doctrine is provided: “Adhere to the Taste,” it explains. “Adhere to Ingridents of the Most Pure.” (In the third act, a chicken dies for your sins.) The fruit shop “Fresh Delicious!” really swings for the fences: “Preferred Boutique Sincerely for You.” I am spoiled quickly, and disappointed with less imaginative offers: “Tawan Chikkn Fresh”? Fuck you! Right down the street is a preferred boutique sincerely for me!
“Oh, that place is brand new,” French 75 points. The sign reads “Est. 1999.”
The sidewalks bubble with people and scooters; the scooters snake on and off the street. Above the storefronts are apartments. Behind the storefronts there are also apartments: massive walled compounds not so unlike International K-12. The sidewalks are marked by neat rows of raised asphalt; guidelines, perhaps, of some kind. There are chunks of fence between the street and the sidewalks. “That keeps them from driving on the sidewalk,” 75 explains. The sidewalk is very damp. Pools congeal in unlikely spots. There are cigarette butts in the pools.
We walk a while, with 75 commenting and Tom Collins mostly reverse-nodding. “Hmmm,” he says a lot, which is a sort of affirmative noise from him.
We turn, finally, down a street that looks pretty much identical to Baise Lu. I don’t see any indication of a market: the shops here seem even smaller and dirtier. The storefronts are open and shallow: only a few feet of depth; no doors.
“Oh!” 75 squeals as she spies one. “This is so good! Here, you have to have some of these.”
Everything I have ever read about food poisoning makes an impassioned plea that I do not have some of these: these are small shells of dough encasing meat. You can see the meat hanging out of the meat grinder in the back of the shop, which is about six feet behind the front of the shop, which is basically a tiled closet with no door on a sidewalk in Shanghai. The shells are cooked till the bottom is burnt on a large, crusted, circular stove. The man and woman inside this kiosk do not wear gloves. There are particles of meatstuff on the woman’s hands. The man grins and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Ni Hao!” he leads. He’s draped in sweat.
“Ni hao!” 75 chirps back. She selects her dumplings and laughs when the man points at her hair (it is blonde, I agree).
Tom’s up next. He knows a little Chinese, because of the overlap with Japanese, and manages, by pointing, to acquire dumplings. “Hmmm!” he frown-nods, pleasantly. This appears to cut through the language barrier.
Then it’s my turn. “Uh… ni hao,” I try.
“Ohhh, nihao niaho,” the vendor agrees. He spreads his hands over his work (“And he said unto Him, ‘All these things I will give You, if You [pay me a small amount of money].’”).
I’m frozen for a second, but I’m trying: I learned numbers online before I got here. I can do this. I want three. I want…
“Uh… san,” I try.
“Oh, ge,” corrects French 75. “The counting word.”
“Oh, okay; uh… san ge… zhege.” Lit., “three things this.” I point. I get dumplings.
Now it is time for me to learn a pair of lessons about China:
(1) Counting Words are For Real
I had forgotten: In Mandarin, you don’t say, “May I please have three dumplings.” First, “May I” and “Please” don’t really enter into it – it’s a point and shoot culture. Second, “three dumplings” reads as “Hey, you know the number three, right? It’s a number. Unrelated: dumpling! Just one, probably, because word endings tell you jack shit about singular and plural classes!”
You have to use counting words: the sentence in English would be something like, “I want three numberword! dumpling [by context, dumplings plural].” Without that word, you’re out to sea. I’d heard of this before touching down in Shanghai, but only now is it coming back to me: You use different number words for different classes of things. So in the end, what you’re saying is, “I want three CLASS[FOOD ITEMS] dumpling[s].” And there are a lot of counting words, and they’re not super easy to remember – the class for roads also include pants, for instance (they’re both long and thin – do I have to explain this?).
The word 75 is using – “ge” – throws me, because it’s the class for “common objects” and regular people. (There’s a better word for distinguished people – you’re now asking me, “Is China super classist or something?” and I’m telling you, “Let me tell one story at a time here.”)
“So, for food it’s ge?” I ask 75.
“You can use ge for like anything,” she says. “Sometimes you need another one, but it’s mostly just ge.”
So much for CLASS[STREETS/GARMENTS].
(2) Food is Very Hard to Eat
So, you’re a cool American, huh? Went to college? Have intentionally started a sentence with, “Actually, in many cultures, it’s common to…”? (Probably many times? You’re so fucking deep!) Went on a trip somewhere one time that was like real and authentic? Have some opinions about Thailand? Surely you can use chopsticks then, yeah? Well fuck you.
Food in China isn’t hard to eat for reasons of quality (well… that’s another topic). It’s physically difficult to eat. Your pussy-ass American chopstick food was like some goddam shrimp fried rice, or some $16 pad thai inexplicably sold at Panera Bread: it was chopped into tiny morsels to fit neatly into your fucking weak American mouth. Time to gear the fuck up¸ asswipe: In China, they give you one of something, then a pair of chopsticks. Not one slice of something: a whole foodstuff. Imagine if you were given chopsticks for a fried egg and some toast. You’re getting there: just add rice and noodles. And you can go straight to hell if you ask for a goddam knife, you fucking ingrate-ass savage. You got your ‘sticks, dipshit; the fuck else do you need?
Still brave? Think your chopstick skills are hot enough that you’ll be able to manage an entire goddam tomato? Because chopsticks have scored ends which help grip the food? Fuck you again! All you get are these wooden chopsticks slightly longer than tweezers. You have to navigate entire muscle groups of a fried animal using a pair of splintery twigs. Ni hao, bitch!
(Here ends the lesson. Now, let’s apply what we’ve learned!)
I get my two dumplings and standard-issue twigs.
“Careful,” says French 75. “They’re really hot. You have to bite and slurp.”
“Hmmm!” Tom Collins agrees. “I had these last time I visited [exciting place in Asia]!” (I’m starting to get annoyed when he says shit like this. I’ve, like, been to Burbank.)
The reason you have to bite and slurp is that these are tangbao: soup buns. There is soup inside of the thick, bread-like skin; which is neither quite a roll nor a noodle shell. You must (a) hold the large, slippery complex of soup and meat and shell with your doll-sized chopsticks; then (b) bite a small hole in the shell – not so large that the soup spills out – and finally (c) slurp out all the soup, so that your first bite doesn’t explode across your face. It’s all pretty sexual.
After the size of the chopsticks, the greatest difficulty is that the soup is the temperature of the sun, after the sun has just done some really solid cardio (“You can’t set if you don’t rise first!” is the motto at the sun’s gym). I’m also trying not to touch anything: I’m in a foreign continent with precious little sleep, and the last thing I need is a stomach bug to dislodge my lower intestine. I carefully unwrap the chopsticks, and grasp only the side I haven’t touched – the maneuver is similar to peeling off latex gloves. I balance my little cup of dumplings and pinch the first one. I drop it a few times, and punch a hole in the shell of an innocent bystander dumpling (it was its last day on the job, too). As I do battle, French 75 starts on her second. “These are so good,” she mumbles through a mouthful. I switch tactics, and manage to sort of balance the dumpling on the twigs more than clasp it. I steel myself, and bite.
It’s the second time today I’ve spilled something hot on myself. When I finally get to the dumpling itself, I think it tastes good, but it’s hard to tell since I have scalded the buds off my tongue. Tom Collins seems to be enjoying it. (Bastard.)
“All right!” French 75 chirps. “Let’s go into the market!”
“Where?” I ask. All I see are greasy storefronts lining the block. The second floor of this building is stale, gray concrete. It looks abandoned to me.
French 75 leads us into one of the storefronts, except that this storefront is actually a door to the guts of the building. It has two stories inside: there’s a creaking, ash-smeared escalator leading to the second level. And it’s packed: packed with stalls and vendors, packed with shoppers, and packed with boxes and mounds and clumps of stuff: fried ducks, with the heads on, hang from the metal frontpiece of one stall. Boxes and packages seem to comprise the walls of another stand; this one for fruit. There’s webbing – of lights or wires – over most of the compound. Wood, plastic, and metal dividers and racks partition the vendors from each other; barely. The floors are pocked concrete, and while I’m normally into the five-second rule, I’m pretty sure anything you drop on it will burn away as if dipped in acid. (“If you eat of it,” said the O.G. Hebrew God, “You will surely die,” because he shopped at this market.)
75 takes us up the escalator. They’re mostly selling produce up here, along with some nuts and eggs. There’s something approaching organization at play: the islands in the center are piled high with greens and roots. The sellers against the walls hawk spices and ancillary products. Vendors stand in the middle of the islands, arguing with customers. Clusters of greens are weighed and bagged amid the verbal crossfire. The sound is like having a horsefly trapped in your ear canal. The smell is too varied to be described, and this should not be construed to mean that the smell is good.
I’m very lost up here; stained in sweat and dumpling soup and ignorance. I stick close to French 75’s hip, letting her block for me. She is a star up here: Whenever she approaches a vendor, other vendors yell across the way, offering questions for the first vendor to pose on their behalf. She smiles and says “hao” (good; okay) a lot. I hear her tell someone she’s Canadian, and this information gets passed down the line: “Jya-na-DIE-wren!” “Jya-na-DIE-wren!”
I learn from watching how to order. Then I try to order, and fuck it up a bunch of times, and learn a little more by doing: You point at the item you want, specify the number of it you want – weights and measures are far outside my vocabulary – and wait for the price.
The first thing I learn about these transactions – other than that the way I pronounce everything is apparently hysterical beyond telling – is that the wet market is not an efficient market. The greens you can get for effectively no money: a pile of spinach-like leaves will run you some fifteen to twenty U.S. cents. The second thing I learn is that “pile” isn’t hyperbolic shorthand: if you underestimate cost, you get a backpack full of some indistinct plant stuff.
We take credit cards for granted in the U.S., and we do this because they are easy to carry and offer the illusion of safety (and of wealth). The other advantage, which we don’t often consider, is how fucking unwieldy coins are. Even when we do pay cash Stateside, we swap bills. Here in China, I’m learning that the real sales pitch of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” isn’t charity: it’s the convenience of unloading a goddam dime from your pocket. In minutes, I have a bag that looks like a greenhouse and pockets overflowing with coinage of microscopic denomination. I fear for the structural integrity of my shorts. I am very determined not to give every vendor in this place their favorite story of the year. (“And then this white fucker – the one who can’t do arithmetic and apparently eats fourteen tons of green shit per week – lost his goddam shorts in the middle of the market!”)
I manage not give the vendors this story, but I do give them clinical depression as I try to (1) understand the amount they’re asking for, (2) translate that amount to the number and types of coin I need, then (3) extract those coins from the pile of other coins in my hands and then pockets. They are much more excited by French 75. (“Zai jian!” she coos to them.)
When we’re finished, I have no idea what I’ve bought, though I have a lot of it, and no conception of what I’ve spent, though I can guess not much. So far, I remain terrible at eating and purchasing, which I feel will be necessary skills in China. I also remain dependent on French 75 and Tom Collins to stay alive. I’m going to have to be very good friends with English De Niro.
_ _ _
We walk back into the school. French 75 waves at the guards, who grunt back at us over their cigarettes. “That’s where you get your mail,” she says. The guards eye me like a stray dog. They eat dogs in China. I don’t like my odds of ever receiving a package.
We move on: down the brick pathways and over the basketball courts. There are three guys out there now – Americans, or at least Canadians. French 75 rushes across the court to greet them.
Tom and I are introduced in order:
High Life has a drawl attached to no spot on the map, a reedy mustache, and the strange body natural athletic drinkers sometimes achieve: doughy, but somehow lithe; heavy in the shoulders.
Diazepam looks like Clark Kent: he has the sort of torso achieved by consciously working out individual muscles, and a big grin that he doesn’t seem to entirely control – it is very difficult to tell if he is friendly, shady, or missing hardware.
Four Loko wears athletic shorts past his knees, socks high enough to meet them, shoes the size and shape of an airliner, and a backwards flatbrim stuffed into his forehead. When he introduces himself, he sounds like he’s impersonating Nelly – like he’s trying to be the sort of black man popularly imagined and marketed in the early 2000s to kids who were not black. (Four Loko is not black.) He looks like he was probably thirteen when “Hot in Herre” dropped. He says “Aiight” a lot.
They chat a little with 75, and continue to shoot hoops while doing this. Four Loko asks me how I like it.
“I dunno,” I say. “It’s my first time trying something overseas. How do you like it?”
“China’s real cool, man,” 4L assures me. “The pollution sucks, but whatever.” As he says sucks, really leaning into the word, he shoots and drains a fadeaway. I am not sure I trust him about the pollution.
As we depart the court, French 75 tells me, “Those are some of my very best friends in the world, here.” The knot in my stomach tightens, though that could be the soup dumplings.
When we make it back to the housing compound, new tenants are unpacking. The lobby, empty a day ago, is crammed with electric scooters. Most are plugged into wall sockets. Boxes and muddy suitcase tracks cover the linoleum. A girl covered in sweat is emptying luggage into her room. We introduce ourselves. 75 doesn’t know her: she’s new. Her name is Shirley Temple.
“When did you get here?” I ask.
“Like, an hour ago,” says Shirley. “Do you…” she looks up cautiously. “Where can I, like, get food here?”
Tom and 75 are going for a run. And I want to join – I’m restless and bewildered and want to clean my crowded mind. But just about 24 hours ago, I was standing where Shirley is standing. I sigh.
“Yeah, I know where Wal-Mart is.”
Atlas had his rock. I have Chinese Wal-Mart.