Noise

With apologies to my favorite first sentence of all time:  I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

Okay, not quite.  I write this sitting in the Beijing airport.  I'm at Gate E31, preparing to board a 13+ hour flight back to the United States for Christmas.  This place is all glass and chrome and marble: the wall to my right slants out like the main branch of the Seattle library, and if I look to my left I can see the little airport train scooting along through another massive wall of windows.  There's a yellow charging station next to me, with strict instructions to "keep children away from the socket," but it doesn't work.  I tried.  If I didn't have headphones on right now, I'd be listening to the same three Christmas songs on repeat; as it is, I'm listening to a combination of Jessie J, New Orleans jazz standards played on the harpsichord, and the Mikado.  I really hope my iPhone doesn't run out of batteries.

It all seems as if it should be really glamorous and chic, marble and glass and chrome.  But really, I think the marble is just easier to mop, and the chrome is dingy, and the windows just let in the concrete of the airfield outside.  The overall effect is of a wide, enormous grayness: of modernity gone depressing.  As out of the way as my gate is, there's no bustle, no typical airport insanity, which should make me feel better about the world, but instead it's just this: every now and then there's a Western tourist going home, bitching mournfully about the size of the airport, or an exhausted-looking worker, pushing a comically large stack of baggage carts in front of them, or a small child flipping out.  There's no noise, is the thing.  Just people wandering through, each mini-drama playing out -- or not -- in isolation from each other.  I never thought I'd say this, but airports need noise.

Yesterday I went to the Yashow Clothing Market, a place normally guaranteed to bring noise, especially on one of the last Saturdays before Christmas.  Yashow is one of the big, informal-seeming markets in Beijing, which also include the Pearl Market, the Silk Market, and (sort of) the Dirt Market.  Yashow is the clothing market, but you shoudn't make the mistake of thinking that means that you can only buy clothes there.  No, pretty much everything you could dream of is on sale at Yashow Market: clothes, yes, but also electronics, bags, shoes, luggage, jewelry, cookware, and trinkets both cheap and pricey.  (We'll get back to the issue of price in a minute.)

First:  Yashow is a massive, bleak concrete building.  It's hideous.  You're a little afraid of it the first time you go in; you wonder if it'll be as overwhelming as that one time you wandered into Chunking Mansions in Hong Kong.  You take a deep breath and walk in the front door.

Then:  As soon as you're inside, you become aware that what seemed on the outside like a vast, bureaucratic nightmare is instead a rabbit warren of stalls.  On every side of you are stalls, with athletic gear, touristy shirts, and  jackets.  In front of you is an escalator pointing up, and you can see the clothing hanging in the stalls on the floor above.  On the floor below you, you'll find mostly bags and shoes.  The second floor has Western-style clothes, and the third has Chinese-style.  The fourth is a catch-all, with jewelry and Mao caps and chopsticks and figurines and Christmas tree ornaments and electronics and Little Red Books.

Most of the vendors wear matching vests -- sort of a blue and purple paisley thing -- which you assume means they all work for the same company, and that these stalls aren't in competition with each other. You really couldn't tell, though, because they all call out to you, telling you to "Look!  Look!" at their necklaces, dragon statues, hoodies, or Beats by Dre headphones.  "Hello!" is the universal attention-getter (just as the grocery store clerk impatiently snaps "Nihao!" at you when you clumsily stand in his way at April Gourmet or Jenny Lou's), and you feel simultaneously like the most popular person in the world and also like you should probably immediately run back to your apartment and hide under your bed.

Once you've mostly squelched that last feeling, you can start to haggle.  This is easier if you have a friend with you who knows what she's doing, as I did the first time; you watch her exchange potential prices on the vendor's old, battered calculator, each combatant keying in a price to show the other, and you watch the mutual displays of exaggerated consternation. You watch her laugh and joke with the woman she's bargaining with, nonchalantly sticking to her original offer and refusing to pay a single RMB more than her initial price.  You watch as she faux-casually picks up another item in the stall, asking, "Cheaper for two?"

You watch as she inevitably gets the price she wants.  She and the vendor smile, exchange money.  Sometimes the vendor is angry and hands us over to an assistant; you feel guilty about this, but your friend assures you, "It just means we got a good price.  If she wasn't making money, she wouldn't have sold it to us."

This is true.  In general, white Westerners can haggle a price down by about 50% at Yashow; Chinese people can get it down by about 70%.  One of the students at our school wrote an extended essay about the ethnicities and linguistic capabilities of those who shopped at Yashow, and how those characteristics changed the discount they were able to receive.  I know I never get the best deals when I go there, but I also never pay more than I want to, and I figure that as long as the vendor and I are both happy, everything worked out okay.  I don't mind if I'm getting a little ripped off.

(Side note:  I bought some art from a local artist while I was in Xi'an.  His name was Ding Jitang, and I was not aware that the old man in the back of his shop was, in fact, he, and neither was I aware that the middle-aged woman who sold me his paintings was his daughter.  I got caught up in the haggling, and thought I was doing a pretty good job.  I got the price down by about 30%, and when I realized that the artist was actually in the shop, I decided to just stop.  The woman, delighted at how much money she'd gotten out of me, gave me one, then two, and then three packs of postcards in addition to my paintings.  For a few days, I fumed about how badly she'd beaten me at the haggling game, but still: if I'm going to be ripped off by anyone, it's going to be a local artist.  And it just didn't feel right to bargain the man's paintings down when he was right there.  Call me a clueless Westerner if you will; I'll take the criticism.)

Yashow is closing down on December 31.  Reports on when it will reopen differ:  some say it will be back in March, others that it will reopen in March but half of it will be an H&M and half of it will be stalls (and WHY there needs to be another H&M when a brand new one opened up just next door a few months ago, I have no idea; I mean, I like that I have some affordable fashion that occasionally fits me available somewhere in Beijing, but damn, Swedes, you do not need an H&M on every block!).  Some say that it won't reopen at all.  Any of these are possible, but let's face it: the likelihood is that the Yashow we've come to know and hate/love/hate-love will be no more.

I wandered through its stalls yesterday with that idea in mind.  It was relatively subdued; only a few vendors called out to me, and while it was crowded, I didn't feel quite as claustrophobic as usual.  I looked at wares I never have before:  bags, jewelry.  I barely bargained at all.  The vendors were quoting prices so low that it was clear they weren't even trying to make money: they were just trying to sell their product at cost.  I was with a new friend who speaks Chinese, and she asked a few of them where they would end up when Yashow closed.  One woman said that she would try to move her store elsewhere.  Another two said that they would go wherever "the company" sent them.

This isn't a tragedy, then.  People aren't being drummed out of their jobs, and no beautiful old architecture is at stake:  it's an ugly concrete building that could probably crumble to bits in minutes.  I'm sure it's for everyone's safety that it gets renovated, and that it'll probably even be a better place to work once it reopens.  But just as always happens when you're about to lose something, I'm a little bit misty about its impending departure.  (Not actually misty; I'm not that far gone.)

It's just so unrepentantly ugly -- there's no pretence there, no glass and marble and chrome trying to class up the joint.  It's full of brightly colored sweaters and fake Coach bags and strings of pearls and wildly painted ceramic cats and splintery chopsticks that you would never, ever use, and vendors who are jerks and vendors who are nice and vendors who remember you and vendors who laugh out loud, mouth wide open and eyes creased shut, when you best them in a deal.  It's a gorgeous place, really, in its ugliness.  Brash and exhausting and confusing and garish.  I'll miss it.

And now I'm in the airport.  I have an hour before my flight boards and then it's off to New York, and a different kind of noise:  arrogant and blustery, warm and aggressive and sharp and funny.  There'll be Reubens and friends and bagels and shopping and maybe even some snow.  I'll miss China when I'm there, it's true: I'll miss the brutality of day-to-day interactions, the game of riding my bike through traffic, the cozy apartment I've built for myself, and those beautiful moments when I share a brilliant smile with a complete stranger.  Still, though, New York?

I can't wait.