Shoeshine

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There ain’t nothing that causes a fight quite like a bad shoe shine. Mine started last week near the train station, a sketchy place in any country. I was headed to Shanghai for some R and R and had time for lunch before catching the train so I was wandering around looking for adventure.
I found it next to a back alley, beside a woman who was selling fried bread. I was looking for a chance to practice my language skill (or lack…) when a guy started talking to me. I didn’t get most of what he was suggesting but finally figured out he was offering me a shine.
I should have caught on to his insistence. Vendors who are overly eager, the kind that grab my sleeve and start pulling, I’m learning to watch out for those. Anyway, he offered to shine my shoes for 5 yuan, about 60 cents. But the going rate is 2, generous, as locals usually only pay 1. Not willing to get taken by this dude, I offered two. He agreed and ran behind a wall, grabbed his kit and sat me down.
With one foot up, he took a toothbrush, dipped it in a bottle of water and cleaned around the sole of my shoe. A few seconds later, he tapped, the signal for me to change feet. A few seconds after that, he was done, standing there holding out his hand.
“What?” I asked. “Finish the job.” He motioned that my 2 yuan shine was over. No polish, no rag, just a swipe with a wet toothbrush. “C’mon, finish the rest,” I said realizing the nature of his scam. “I’m not paying you 2 quai for that.”
He insisted. I stood up. I remember one of my yoga teachers tell me that in India, sometimes you have to get mad to get things done. I’m not one to raise my voice, because yelling in English doesn’t accomplish much. But I thought, well, let’s see what happens. Just for fun. So I let loose:
“Fuck that, man!” I told him. “I’m not paying you for that. Screw you. You’re trying to rip me off. No way. You suck. Your feet smell and your teeth are bad.” By this time I was looking for any random insult I could find, dressing it up in angry tones. I walked off. He began following me. I turned and began walking backwards. He got aggressive, poking at me. I parried his arms out of the way.
This is not something I wanted to escalate, so I wasn’t going to touch him.I just kept walking backwards down the street, shouting and playing angry. Then getting angry.
A Chinese guy stopped us and asked in English “What’s the matter?” I told him the dude was trying to take me for a rube and wanted 2 quai for doing essentially nothing. Like a judge, he heard my side. Then he listened to the other guy who was still yelling. By now a crowd had formed. Chinese love this kind of street theater. The shoeshiner and the intervener were arguing when others started arguing. Pretty soon five people were yelling back and forth. I just stood back. The thing had a life of its own. Then another guy wobbled up, upturned collar and pocket flaps askew. He started saying something in Chinese, but I couldn’t get any of it because he couldn’t fully control his motor skills. I think he had muscular dystrophy. His speech was halting and choppy, but he pulled two quai out of his wallet and paid the man.
By now Mr. Shine was yelling at a woman. He gladly took the money, but wasn’t letting go of the argument. She was telling him he was a bad man for trying to rip off people let alone foreigners who don’t understand the nuance of “water shoe shine.” I’m sure he felt the same about me, that I was trying to rip him off, but his anger was all toward her. He’d forgotten about me.
Seeing that my savior in the Hound’s-tooth coat had paid Mr. Shine, I dug two quai out of my pocket to pay him back. He refused, just smiled and seemed to feel the money was worth the price of the street theater. I insisted but he wouldn’t hear of it. And Mr. Shine was still going at it with the woman. We left him there yelling away amid public scorn that he was a bad man.

My shoes still scuffed, it wasn’t until the next day in Shanghai that I approached another fellow. There were several waiting outside the Portman Hotel, one of the old swanky complexes thats been modernized. It houses a Starbucks and an Element Fresh, a restaurant that is making a fortune selling good, clean, light food. I’d eaten lunch there and in a city of 12 million, ran into a friend from Hangzhou. Of course. The hotel also houses a City Market, a store that sells all manner of imported foods. I’d emerged with a bag full of coconut milk, mustard, rice vinegar, kalamata olives and other salad fixings. The prices reminded me of shopping in rural Alaska where nearly everything is close to five bucks. I spent $35 and walked into the warm spring afternoon.

“Dor shao qien,” I asked the first shoeshine guy. “How much?”
“Er shir,” he replied.
“Huh?” I asked, not believing my ears.
“Er shir,” he said again. Twenty quai. Two dollars fifty.
“Get outta town,” I said laughing. He grabbed my arm. I twisted to break his hold. I’m getting tired of this behavior.
“Wu quai,” he countered, not wanting to lose the sale. Five quai.
“No way man, I’m not doing business like that.”
A few steps farther on, I found another guy. Five quai, he said. Sixty cents. I knew I was in the high price district so I wasn’t going to bargain too much.
I sat down and he got working, showing me the polishes he was going to use. Quality Kiwi brand. At least that is what the tins said. Who really knows the truth. The shine guy got to work.
Then a second guy approached, offering to sell me a Rolex. Or two. I didn’t want a watch and told him so. I showed him my phone, with its clock.
“This is my uh, my uh…” I said pointing at my wrist.
“Shou piao,” the shoeshine guy offered.
“Dui, zhe ge wo de shou piao,” I said.
The salesman persisted.
“Two watches,” he said. “Just 200 each.”
Nope. Nada. Nyet. No. Bu yao.
Nothing worked. He sat there. Pleading. The shoe shiner complimented my ability to say no in several languages. The salesman kept it up. I kept shaking my head. Time passed. Finally, I started singing, to a tune similar to Achey Breaky Heart.
“I don’t want your watch, your silly fakey watch. I don’t want a rolex from youuuuu.”
Shoeshine guy was laughing. I kept singing. Passersby were slowing and staring.
The price was steadily dropping, but still, no was not good enough. Watch guy persisted. The shine was nearing the end.
“Twenty,” watch guy said. I still didn’t want the watch, even for $2.50. Nope. No deal.
I took out a 20 note to pay for the shine. And then shine guy, surprise, didn’t have change. He had some, but only 12. He wanted me to accept the shine for eight.
“Three,” I countered showing him the coins.
“Look,” you agreed to five I said. “Make change. Ask around,” said pointing at the watch guy. Another shoe shiner gave him two.
“Six, okay,” he said.
“Sorry man, five.” I was arguing over 12 cents. But like with the first shine guy, I just wanted to see what would happen. He found another coin. “Come on,” he pleaded. “Five and a half.”
“I dunno,” I said smiling. “Next time I want a discount…” I walked back to my friend’s apartment, waiting for the next adventure.

It came in the form of a book. Andreas Pena works for the Mexican consulate and is fluent in Chinese and English. He’s an accomplished yoga teacher and he’s invited me to stay at his apartment when I am in town. He has lots of books. And he showed me one called Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Here’s the lead paragraph:

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free; free to hate the men who were torturing me or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

I often open a book and read the lead, just to see if investing my time will be worth it. Life is too short for crap books.
Roberts spends the next 900 (!) pages describing his time in India, living as an escapee from an Australian prison, working in the underworld of drugs and crime, all the while taking notes for a book that would take him three tries to write, the first two being confiscated by prison guards.

I made it to page 100 before I left Andreas’s apartment but I want to go back. If you are looking for an adventurous read, with a poetic style, this is a good one. Much better than anything you will read on this blog, I’m afraid.

I put the book aside to venture out again, this time to the Museum of Contemporary Art. It had an exhibition of young Chinese artists. Much of the work was done in video and dealt with the massive change going on. Every day buildings are being razed in the march of progress. I’d recently read in the NY Times that full neighborhoods are being erased. Before long, the author said, the flavor that makes Shanghai special will be gone as the poor will be moved out to the suburbs. Already, the market where earlier in the day I’d bought a purple Gucci handbag for $5, was on the block. It will be gone in two months. None of the vendors I spoke to knew where they’d go. I bought the bag to keep toiletries in. And as a memento to the counterfeiters and hawkers who make Shanghai interesting.

I met a fellow in the museum who’d arrived recently from Beijing. He had a degree in data management but was working in a restaurant nearby. He came to Shanghai just to see what might happen. We entered one exhibit where full-size images of a woman dancing were back projected onto a screen on our right. To the left, a wall of mirrors. The effect put the two of us on the dance floor with the woman. So I twirled, pirouetted, jumped and swooned. The dude looked at me like the crazy foreigner I am, then hopped a half leap on his way out. We saw a few more displays, one about a muslim man fighting with his conscience between keeping his faith and making a living. Others juxtaposed sex and commerce, pretty much what young artists wrestle with everywhere.

Adventure number four arrived at a theater. It is Samuel Beckett’s 100th birthday and a theater company brought some Irish actors to Shanghai for two weeks of plays including one version of Waiting for Godot, in Chinese. I didn’t know much about Beckett other than his name so I asked a guy standing in line.
“I recognize his name,” I said. “But I’ll just admit I am ignorant. Can you tell me something about him.”
“Well he was known as one of the Existentialists,” he said, an Ohio accent coming through. “I did some of his plays in college but don’t know much about him either.”
Hmm, two ignorant Americans standing in line to see a play we didn’t know anything about. As it should be, I say. If we knew about the play, then why go? Kinda like why get out of bed in the morning if you know what the day will hold.
I was pleasantly surprised. For an hour, I sat transfixed by this Irish actor playing Molloy, reciting a monologue and evoking a simple-minded adult who’d been trying to survive after having been dropped on his head from an early age.
After the show, I shared the elevator with a woman from the Italian consulate, discovering such only after breaking the silence by muttering lines from the play. For five minutes in the foyer, we shared our reactions to the play, finding common ground amid the existential angst we westerners all seem to understand.


So, for those of you wondering what I’ve been missing here in China, it is art. The power of a good story to ease the burden we all share. While I have some good books and can buy DVD’s of many western movies, one of the compromises of living in Hangzhou is its quiet culture. Without the language skills to understand most of what I see, I live behind a curtain. But the language is coming along and slowly, slowly, the curtain is parting. The benefit is that as a foreigner, I can just be spontaneous and silly and that leads to all sorts of unexpected outcomes. Here’s wishing you a day of serendipity. Maybe I will go explore the mysteries involved in getting a hair cut!

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Comments

[hopeful Wilmington traveler]

Pugnacity and Language
You've got guts HJ, getting into a near fight with little more than non-verbal communication to defuse it, should events go that far. I've always been content with bu hao, or just a vigorous head-shake; but maybe I'm a coward at heart??? My imagination leads me to 'the fight,' 'the ambulance,' ' the hospital where no one speaks English,' and so forth --- besides --- i'm the visitor; it's their country and they have to survive in it long after I'm gone. As the one to two to three week 'observer' I just hope to survive until the next trip, almost always to a different country.--DLS