Little Sister is Watching You

I thought I would tell a little story that you all might find amusing. This one happened a few weeks ago, and it combines two facets of the daily life in China experience. First, the "hardware wars", my ongoing quest to find all of the little fasteners and doodads I would like to have to get our apartment set up properly. Second, the constant feeling that you are being stared at and talked about by scores of Chinese people.

I've explained that first issue in detail already, so I'll skip over it and go on to the second. We get watched all the time. Here in SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) it isn't so bad, because there are a lot of Westerners. However, the deeper you venture into real China, the more intense it gets, and it is often no more than a street away. I've been riding my bike a lot, and whenever I leave the main streets and go into the side neighborhoods, what little Western Civilization there is here disappears instantly. People look at me like I'm the first gringo they've ever seen.

It can get a whole lot worse for others. We were in one local store with an African family in line in front of us, and they were stared at by everyone the entire store all the way to the door. Some friends of ours have a little girl with striking blue eyes, and she gets crowded by women wanting to pick her up. I hear the same kinds of stories from families that are very blond. Garden variety blondeness doesn't seem to attract much attention, but there are several Swedish and Finnish families here, and I can only imagine how much they get stared at (Lars and Ulrika, don't let that discourage you from visiting us).

Local people don't just stare at us, they stare at what we are doing. At the grocery store, they are often fascinated with what we are buying. I still don't understand much they say of course, but I'm learning. They will talk about what we are buying, how much we might be spending, etc. Friends have had incidents in which passers-by go so far as to dig through their shopping carts to see what they have in them.

Back to my story. One of the main hardware items I wanted to find were wall anchors. As I said before, even the Home Depot-type store doesn't have a hardware section. However, I have found that a few items of hardware are scattered throughout the store, placed with other items with which you might need to use them. That is the way I finally found some wall anchors, which were inconspicuously hung on a peg near some shelf brackets. I've since bought several packages, just to keep them on hand.

Chinese shopkeepers and cashiers can be real busybodies, and it is not unheard of for them to arbitrarily decide that you don't actually need to buy a specific something. An extreme example of this happened to a music teacher friend, who failed in an attempt to purchase an accessory for a musical instrument, simply because she couldn't convince the owner that she had one of those instruments at home. I've heard other stories from friends of not being allowed to purchase the last of an item! With such scenarios in mind, I bought my wall anchors only two packages at a time, as I didn't want them to think that I was depriving someone else who might need them for the shelf brackets they were specifically placed next to.

The last time I bought some wall anchors, I happened to also be purchasing some "floating" wall shelves, for which the mountings are invisible once they are installed. I had put the shelves in my cart first. When I picked up my two packages of wall anchors, a store employee happened to be right there. From the moment I touched the packages, it was clear that this small young woman was not at all satisfied with my selection. She really wanted to say something, and she continued to follow me from a distance as I went through the store.

Finally, I passed again by the same spot where I had picked up the anchors, and she made her move. She said something long and complicated that included the word "no", and then she reached into my cart and picked out the anchors and put them back on the peg!

I politely smiled, and I took them off again, saying in English that yes, I did want them. She took them out of the cart and put them on the peg again. This time, she reached into my cart and began to unwrap the shelves. I realized at this point what she was up to. She was trying to show me that the shelves already had anchors included.

I smiled, and took the wall anchors from the peg again. This time I kept them in my hand, which completely flumoxed her. By this time, however, a second, older woman had approached, and the younger woman began to explain the situation to her with a staccato urgency. With the assumption that the older woman was being dragged in because she understood at least some English, I said "I understand, I want to buy these for something different".

The older woman looked at me. The younger woman looked at her. Then, without warning, the older woman reached up and gave the girl a solid "you idiot" slap to back of the head. She said something, and then shuffled away shaking her head and muttering to herself.

The girl gave me a big sheepish grin with a shrug, and then slinked away.

I made it home with my wall anchors.