An All-American, Chinese WAL-MART

When it comes to world-colliding-goodness it just doesn’t get much better than visiting a WAL-MART in China. Same WAL-MART smiley faces, same greeters, same low prices, but oh so different.

The deli has an alligator on ice.

You can buy snakes too. They are alive and squirming all over each other. I’m not sure how you get them without getting bit. Do you pick them up with your hands? I don’t see any plastic tongs.

The fish in the tanks aren’t to take home as pets.

There’s karaoke.

There are samples. Whatever happened to samples in the USA?

The toy aisle is kind of small. The only action figures they have are Transformers (cool) and some guy named UltraMan who looks like a real tool. For the girls they have a selection Barbie dolls. They are all Caucasian.

In fact, if it weren’t for all of the Chinese lettering on everything, you would look at the models on the posters and the packaging and think you were home.

99% of the products in the store are made in China. So, when the locals shop at WAL-MART they ARE buying local.

Synergy Barbie

80% of couples who adopt children from China stay at the White Swan Hotel. And every single one of them gets a “Going Home Barbie.”

So told to me by a manager at the hotel:

“Most of the children are adopted are girls and Mattel sees this as an opportunity to attract potential clients. We are on our 3rd series of Barbies. Some families who have adopted multiple times have collected all three.”

Now that’s synergy - a toy company working with a single hotel catering to a very unique niche of guests.

Happy Birthday Garfield!

I don’t remember birthdays. Sorry if I missed yours. But this is one I remember each year. I don’t know why. I just do.

Garfield is about 9 months older than me. That makes him 29. I own every Garfield collection of comics from 1-35. I have several that have been autographed by Jim Davis, Garfield’s creator, who I met when I was about 8 and who, incidentally, lives just outside of Muncie, Indiana, where Annie and I bought our home.

I also have a Garfield pajama bag that would be one of the first things I grab on the way out in the event of a fire.

I know you were all thinking that I was uber-manly, but now you know I have a softer side.

Wal-Mart Crusade: Take One

There are Wal-Marts in China.

I have to go. I love seeing world’s collide. Besides, I’m out of shaving cream and I’m on the last page of my notebook.

2:10 – The quest to find Wal-Mart begins. I set one rule: I’m not allowed to say anything other than “Wal-Mart.” All I have is an address and a vague idea – very vague as it turns out – of where it is.

2:13 – Return to hotel. Forgot metro card.

2:18 - See two school girls on a teeter-totter wearing matching uniforms and eating popsicles – a perfect photo op. After I snap a few photos, they offer me one of the seats. I teeter-totter.

2:22 – Head for metro.

2:30 - An old woman checks out my lower half. I’m guessing that she’s never seen such hairy legs. I do a zipper check just in case. The barn door is open. Oops. I shut it.

2:38 - I’m trying to board the train and, despite being the largest one, I’m getting pushed around. A man with one leg shoves me aside with a crutch and butts in front of me. I’ll admit it – I consider pushing back. I don’t.

2:43 – As the train comes to a stop air rushes up my shorts. This feels nice.

2:59 - I have to switch metros from Line 1 to Line 3.

3:00 – I’m lost.

3:11 – I find the right train and get on.
3:46 – Arrive to bus station where I think I have to take a bus 30 minutes to the city where the Wal-Mart is located.

3:52 - The bus ride to Dongguan is two hours. Doggonit, Dongguan is just too far away to make the trip today. I abandon the quest.

If you want to know how the trip back went, reverse the above timeline. That’s pretty much how it happened again, except for my zipper being down.

Don’t worry. I’m not giving up on Wal-Mart. I have to shave sometime.

I gots to have my internet

My requirements for accommodation on this trip have been real simple:

I want the cheapest room possible with internet. I don’t care what the bathroom smells like or how hard the bed is, just give me my internet!

Every time I venture off into the world, I’m always amazed at how much more plugged-in it has become since my previous trip. I’ve hardly gone one day without in-room internet. I’m sure some of you think that I’ve gone soft, but constant access has allowed me to swap emails with local individuals and organizations, call home (I use Yahoo!’s call out service for 1-cent/min), backup my notes and photos, and update this blog regularly.

Today

I pay $3 more for a room with internet. The first thing I do when I get in the room is check the connection – nothing. Crap. The data cable runs out the window and into the room next door into a shoddy looking network. The maintenance guy and I start testing to see where the problem is. When I plug my computer directly into their server it gets a fine connection. Their cable is the problem.

Unfortunately, my cable is too short to run out the window to the server. I joke to the maintenance man that we could drill a hole through the wall. He comes and goes a few more times and still no internet.

Then he walks in with a drill.

My cord has no problem reaching now!

Chopsticks neither chop nor stick. Discuss.

“Where did you learn to use chopsticks?” Huang says. It was part question and part accusation.

A boiling dish of peppers, steak, mushrooms, crab, and a lot of other things sit between us. Chongqing is famous for this dish known as hotpot because it’s boiling hot and lethally spicy to anyone from the Midwestern United States.

I don’t eat Chinese food very often at home. When I do, I don’t use chopsticks if there’s a fork within reach. I’ve always kind of thought that using chopsticks in Ohio was kind of silly. Like I was trying to be someone I was not. Besides, I have trouble enough using a knife and fork.

Where did I learn to use chopsticks?

I remember.

It was on the island of Oahu. I was visiting my Dad’s cousin who had been struck with a lifelong case of wanderlust. At the time he was driving cab by night and sleeping in his van during the day. We were in the Wainae Mountains. After a day of hiking, it was time to load up on sodium and carbs with steaming bowls of Ramen noodles. He didn’t have forks, but he did have chopsticks. He showed me a variety of techniques and left me to choose. It wasn’t pretty, but after a few bowls of noodles, a Hawaiian Chinese restaurant, a Hawaiian Japanese restaurant, I was semi-functional with the sticks.

That’s where I learned. I’m glad it wasn’t somewhere like Bob’s Chinese Buffet in Bucyrus, Ohio.

I relate the details of my Hawaiian chopstick 101 sessions to Huang and dive into the hotpot. The slimy crab meat is being difficult and I’m starting to take it personal.

Related posts: Chinese Chopstick Tax

Real Men Play Ping Pong

Some come to China to study Kung Fu with the masters. Not me. I came for the ping pong.

I went to Chongqing Universtiy to find a translator, which I did. I also found two PE teachers who specialize in ping pong.

As it turns out, I’ve spent the first 28 years of my life holding the paddle completely wrong.

Before I can even think about my last shot, Chen Li launches another ball at me. He is armed with a plastic basket full of balls.

Old habits die hard and Chen Li is a ruthless killer.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Pong. Pong. Pong. There are at least a dozen balls bouncing and rolling around the room. I’m working on my forehand. Here’s what I’m thinking about:

Swing at the elbow. Wrist locked. Eye on the ball. Turn at the hips from a horse stance to a bow stance. Follow through forward and up to my left eye. Aim for the newspaper that Chen Li placed on the opposite side of the table.

When my form breaks down, Zheng Chen stops collecting balls and demonstrates. He even stands behind me and we sort of recreate one of those romance movie moments where he guides my limbs and hips. Of course this isn’t romantic at all. It’s ping pong and it doesn’t get much more manly than that.

Before we begin again, Chen Li offers me some zen, “You must keep your heart on the ball.”

I have no idea what he means by this, but it must work. Everything comes together – my elbow, my hips, the follow through, the newspaper, and, I suppose, my heart. I’m cranking balls back at Chen Li who nods and says “Beautiful” with each perfect shot.

Sweat drips from my brow. I play through pain in my knees and elbows. My hands and eyes are one. I’m in the zone.

Somewhere someone is playing Rocky music. Somewhere a Russian ping pong champ is quaking in his stinky little table tennis shoes.

“Beautiful. Now we work on your backhand.”

Problems

Some are uniquely ours. Some aren’t. I share many of mine with Annie.

While I’m chasing down my clothes, she’s holding down the fort in Muncie, Indiana (voted America’s most American city). We bought it in March and shortly thereafter I left for Bangladesh because my underwear was made there.

On one hand buying a home is a very mature, sensible thing to do. On the other, the underwear thing is a bit weird.

Annie has painted the walls, planted flowers, and done many other things that I probably won’t know about until I return. As fort holder-downers go, I reckon she’s a keeper. But there’s one thing she couldn’t do: keep our air conditioner from dying. Now, I’ve only owned a house for four months, three of which I’ve been in Asia, but even I know that if there is one thing you don’t want dying it’s your central air conditioner/furnace.

Quests are foolish, it’s their nature. They seem even more foolish when you buy a house before leaving and, while gone, you have to plop down $8,000-$11,000 to replace dead appliances. Ouch!

Do you know how many pairs of underwear I could track down with 11-grand?

The important thing about a quest is that you believe in it. I do. And Annie does too. (At least she did until the air conditioner died. I’m afraid to ask now.) I setout with certain professional goals for this trip (get good material to write, write my first book, introduce readers to the people who make their clothes, etc.), but my personal ones were a bit unclear. What was I looking for other than stories?

When I visited Honduras where my t-shirt was made, I owned nothing. Now I have a home, a fridge, and a dead air conditioner. When I visit the workers in their homes, usually a single room, I think of our home. “8-girls live in this room that is smaller than the smallest of our 3 bedrooms. Only two people and a fat, lazy cat live in my big home.”

I found guilt.

This trip is about the way we live and the way they live. And why on earth is there such a difference?

I knew the world was imbalanced, but, you know, I never really knew it. Whose fault is it? Is it the factory’s, the worker’s, the brand’s, the consumer’s, the politician’s, etc.? I don’t think there is a right answer. It’s our world. It’s our problem. We share it.

It is important that we know about the lives of those who support our lifestyle. It is important that we appreciate what we have.

So my air conditioner died and I’m going to be even more in debt than I thought when I return home in two weeks. Poor me. Things could be worse, much worse.

A little guilt isn’t so bad.

I’m just not sure what to with it.

Dam Happy

Public works should not have mascots. They shouldn’t need them. The benefits of the works should speak for themselves and not need to be praised by happy cartoon characters.

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest public work in history, has two loveable mascots. Here they are…

Creepy, huh? But effective. I talked with a handful of people today who live near the dam. When I ask where they lived before the dam, they all pointed down the bank into the water. Some of the families had lived in the homes for generations and were forced to move. The government compensated them up to $10,000/person, built them good roads, and provided them with reliable utilities. But the fact of the matter is that many of the locals used to own land and now they don’t. They used to have land to farm and factories to work at and now they are underwater.

Still, of all the locals I talked to today, not one of them had a bad thing to say about the dam. Maybe the mascots worked.

I don’t know enough about the dam to weigh the pluses and minuses. What I do know is that it is not natural for people not to complain about something happening in their backyard. Especially when that something is the most gianormous dam of all time and now playing in your backyard requires SCUBA gear.

“Spit Propaganda”

Reasons China shouldn’t change: The fact that we are discussing “spit propaganda” in a comment thread. And have a real life scientist (at least she claims to be) weighing her spit on her university’s dime.

Without China and all of its spitters none of this would have been possible. Different is good, China! Ignore all of the anti-spit propaganda. You live in a free country (kinda). You should be able to hack up some phlegm and spit it out whenever you darn well feel like it.

I hope I never see the day when China stops spitting. I’ve never been to Singapore, but a country that will punish you for spitting on the street is not a country I care to visit. I like places with personality. I like places with spitters.

So, please people of China, ignore posters like this…