Beijing Shopping

In Moscow on the Hudson, the Robin Williams character, a Russian defector, goes into a New York supermarket and faints: So many brands of breakfast cereal! Whereas my head merely spun when I shopped for headphones and encountered hundreds of choices in a building near me. It’s an electronics mall, full of office-sized booths each with a different owner and product line. Maybe eight specialize in headphones. In Berkeley I live miles from a Circuit City where I might find four or five headphones I’d consider. Radio Shack is closer; they might have two or three possibilities. In Beijing several of these electronic malls are near me.

During my Chinese lesson with the girl who sold me my cell phone I told her that after the lesson I was going to shop for headphones — the electronics mall is across the street. How much do you want to spend? she asked. About $40, I said. Because you are a foreigner, they may cheat you, she said. Her boss went away and came back with two choices. One was $40, the other about $60. After the lesson I went to the mall. I found the $40 headphones. Price: $9. Before bargaining. I went back to my teacher and told her what had happened. She spoke to her boss. She came back and said: Maybe it wasn’t the real product. As if someone would counterfeit a brand (Somic) you’ve never heard of. It was exactly the same item.

“One bed two dreams” is a Chinese proverb. Here the two dreams were $9 and $40. In One Billion Customers, James McGregor writes, “The Chinese will ask you for anything because you just may be stupid enough to agree to it.” It has nothing to do with being a foreigner. “In China business, the expectation is to be cheated,” says McGregor. A friend of mine graduated from Beijing University, one of the top two schools in the country, with a finance major. She got a real estate job in Shanghai, her home town. When she got there her salary was half of what she had been promised.