Silk Street Market!
Today definitely ranks as one of the three most.fun.days.EVER in Beijing so far!! (The other two are the ones I spent with Sara... YAY those were super-fun even though I was wayy jet-lagged). This morning I was bumming around in my room studying for a change when my friend Ai-xia came to ask if I wanted to go to the Silk Street Market with her and a few of her friends. Ai-xia and her friends are some of the very few Asian students in second- and third-year Chinese here, and while I'd hung out with Ai-xia a bunch and we were very tan de lai as we say in class (meaning we got along just swimmingly) I sort of got the impression that her friends looked down on my because my Chinese was not as good as theirs. I almost said no, and I sort of wanted to especially after Kevin called and I couldn't talk to him because I was getting ready, but I am so very very glad I went! We had soooo much fun, and Ai-xia's friend Gong-hai warmed up pretty quickly, and we were soon hitting the market stalls like we'd known each other for ages.
It was pretty funny to watch the vendors' tactics... the Silk Street Market is enormous, super-nice, and much-attended by foreigners (outside restaurants included Subway, Starbucks, even a TCBY -- crazy, right?), and the vendors are wayyy aggressive, pawing at your arm, sometimes literally dragging you into their stalls. The funny thing was that they would completely, completely ignore Ai-xia (who is Thai) and Hai (who is Vietnamese) but latch onto me like very vocal barnacles. "Pretty lady, come look inside!" "I have Gucci, Prada, Coach, you like?" "Hello, you come buy?" "Hi beautiful girl, look my bags, very nice, for you special price, very cheap..." on and on and on like some endless, fairly grating chorus. Some of them would get even more excited when I told them (in Chinese) that I wasn't interested, thank you... "Ah!" they would switch into Chinese, "You can speak Mandarin, come look, for Chinese-speakers I give you extra-cheap, come, come!" My tactic was to pretend I couldn't hear them, or couldn't understand English, and to try to shake them off when they grabbed me. Going with Ai-xia and Hai was especially awesome since even though they are both in second-year Chinese like me, their Thai/Vietnamese accents sound more fluent than my American kou yin, and (here is the major point) while they may not have spoken too much more Chinese than I have, they have definitely done more bargaining than I have ever in my life. We had such a blast chatting with the vendors, bargaining and joking, using part-Chinese, part-English, and sometimes even Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, and Spanish (one vendor astounded me when it came up in conversation that I could speak the language, with a perfect-sounding "Hola, como estas? Eres muy bonita! Mira; mira! Muy barato!")... talking not just about what we were buying (or not buying) but about our time in Beijing, the vendors' lives, families, boyfriends/girlfriends, and so on. With the boldness characteristic of Chinese questioners, all the vendors wanted to know if Hai and Ai-xia were dating (they're not). After a moment of counfusion, the vendors would then turn to me to ask the same: "Ta shi bu shi ni de nan peng you?" "Bu shi, bu shi." I would clear things up immediately, but one vendor was particularly insistent. Hai was buying a coat for his mom. "He would make a very good boyfriend," she told us in Chinese. "He takes good care of his mom." "But I already have a boyfriend," Ai-xia explained in Mandarin. "Thai?" "Taiwanese." "Oh." The vendor turned to me. "You also already have one? A Chinese one?" "Taiwanese also," I told her apologetically. She pursed her lips. "You girls like Taiwanese people?" she asked, one eyebrow cocked: a potentially politically-loaded question. Ai-xia and I looked at each other briefly. "I like my Taiwanese person," I said tentatively, which apparently sounds a lot funnier in Chinese than in English, because the vendor immediately burst out laughing and the tension was thankfully broken.
We basically shopped until we dropped (or until we ran out of money, which happened at about the same time) before hailing a taxi home, grabbing some dinner in the restaurant on our building's main floor, and returning to our rooms to study and contemplate our awesome purchases. The real fun wasn't the act of acquisition, though (a good thing, since I let Ai-xia and Hai do most of the buying), or even the at-times-ferocious bargaining -- it was the sheer enjoyment of using language to interact in a fun and friendly way with native Chinese people as fascinated by us as we were by them. It was just great. What an awesomely fun day.
posted by Kelly @ 9:42 下午
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