The 250 Square Foot View

By Bobby Calise

“One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.” -Charles Dickens

I stumbled upon that Dickens quote a few weeks ago and immediately thought of my trip to China. This time last year, my girlfriend and I were backpacking south from Beijing down to Hong Kong, with a five-day stop in between to visit my brother, who was teaching English at a Chinese university about an hour outside of a city called Guangzhou.

Our two weeks in China were exhausting. Most nights we went to bed emotionally drained from the series of miscommunications from earlier that day. Food, in particular, was a constant struggle. The pinyin menus included items like “broccoli rape” (presumably broccoli rabe; we didn’t ask), and a Chinese waiter’s standard procedure on vegetarian orders was to smile and nod as if to say, “Yes, we have that,” and then just serve the dish normally with plenty of meat.

After a few days we got used to the cuisine. (We’d simply look at each other and say, “Noodles?” “Yeah, noodles. And beer.”) But it took a little longer to acclimate ourselves to the aggressiveness of China’s tourist-hounding sales force. The first few times someone tried to sell me something that I didn’t want, I’d politely smile and say “no thank you.” But after two or three days of this, I became more annoyed and less patient. It became a game for us: Spot the Salesman. “Watch out! Guy approaching on your right selling glow-in-the-dark Frisbees! NO THANK YOU NO THANK YOU NO THANK YOU.”

Looking back through that same Dickensian lens, I see now that it took progressing stages of politeness, aggravation, and ultimately appreciation for me to accept the persistent sales tactics in China. A former salesman myself, I can still recall some of the craftier pitches we came across:

Granola from a Street Vendor (Beijing)
Granola with dried apricots seemed like the perfect snack while biking around the Forbidden City. But between the vendor’s muddled English and my inability to convert kilograms to pounds, he managed to slice off twice as much granola as we requested, and this led to an argument over price. In the end I couldn’t tell who ripped off whom, but the granola was delicious.

The Great Wall (Beijing)
It’s easy enough to sign up for a tour of The Great Wall. (In many cases it can be done right through your hotel.) However, the Wall was just the first stop on an eight-hour excursion that included a sneak peak at a jade “gallery,” which had our tour group listlessly wandering through a Macy’s-like showroom of jade bracelets available for purchase; a “silk factory,” which found us in back room warehouse full of Chinese silk comforters for sale; and finally a 30-minute foot rub from a college age Chinese “massage student” which also included a free consultation from a Chinese “doctor.” He read the lines in my palm (which any good doctor would do) and explained that my kidney and liver issues—which I was hearing about for the first time—could be easily remedied with a few herbal treatments, which he just happened to be selling.

Touts (Yangshuo)
A young man named Kim found us wandering near a bicycle rental stand in Yangshuo and helped us find our hotel, even picking out a restaurant for our lunch. We mistook his initial friendliness for clinginess, before realizing he was actually a tout, whose jobwas to latch onto tourists and give them an insider’s tour of the area for an unnamed price. These young men and women camp out in tourist hot spots within Yangshuo (such as a bicycle rental stand) wearing comfortable shoes and small shoulder bags so they can spring into action as soon as someone looks like they might need some guidance.

Bamboo Boat Ride (Yangshuo)
After negotiations with a street-side travel agent (we settled on 160 RMB total), we followed the agent’s motorcycle-riding colleague on our rented bicycles to the Yulong River, a popular tourist attraction in Yangshuo. We were paired with a young bamboo boat driver who spoke the bare minimum of English. A few minutes into the trip, the river reached the first of several drops, this one about three feet down. As we braced ourselves for splashy impact, a photographer on an anchored bamboo raft feverishly snapped pictures of us on his digital camera. When our driver led us over to the photographer’s raft—it seemed the drivers had instructions to make as many stops as his passengers will tolerate—we saw that this was actually a one-stop photo shop: a PC and monitor to pull up the pictures and let customers choose their favorites, and a printer and laminating machine to create and sell a finished print. Gimmicky or not, we were so impressed with the photog’s ingenuity—I mean, where did he plug everything in?—that we forked over 30 RMB for the keepsake.

Moon Hill Postcard Lady (Yangshuo)
The long, steep stair climb up Moon Hill led us to a doughnut-shaped mountain top and a few snapshots of Yangshuo’s tree-covered, cone-shaped crags. On the way back down, an old Chinese woman somehow caught up to us. She spoke quietly, mostly in cryptic hand gestures. (She only seemed to know how to say “U-S-A” in English.) “Yes, we’re from the U-S-A,” my girlfriend responded. With that, she opened a little notebook and showed us hundreds of messages written in English from well-wishing tourists, always with a similar sentiment: “What an amazing lady! She’s 69 years old and climbs Moon Hill every day! Please buy postcards from this lady!” Acknowledging that we were probably being duped, but too polite (and too hot and tired) to say no, we bought ten postcards from her. When we reached the bottom, we bought another ten postcards and several bottles of water from two other old women who had “volunteered” to watch our bikes because the rental place had “forgotten” to give us locks.  Well played, China.