Money and McDo

For a day or so this weekend I was plagued by the 50 kuai bill that wouldn’t go away. Before I explain, I’ll take a second to clarify terms associated with Chinese money, as I’ve been using various terms interchangeably without explaining. In banks and foreign markets, the Chinese currency is the Renmin Bi (RMB), or the People’s Money. The printed money is the yuan, and prices are generally listed with the character for yuan 元. One yuan is equivalent to ten jiao, which generally come in coin form, though occasionally are very small bills. The cent, called fen, is not used anymore, and though grocery store prices tend to include a hundredths place, they just round down at the checkout. Kuai is a spoken form of yuan, basically equivalent to saying “buck” instead of dollar, and mao is the spoken form of jiao. The difference is people rarely ever say yuan, and I never heard the term jiao until I looked closely at one of the coins. So when I write it’s really hard to talk about something costing 10 yuan, because I’m automatically thinking kuai.

Almost everything in China is done with cash, short of fancy hotels and restaurants. I even bought my airplane tickets in cash. The unfortunate situation is that most of my day to day purchases are about 5 kuai and under, but ATMs dispense 100 kuai bills, so we’re all in a constant struggle to not have to make the person selling you baozi for 2 kuai break your 100. Often we end up buying snacks and bus fare for each other, because it is rare that everyone has the right change. Chinese vendors, from bartenders to cab drivers to sellers of fried rice, are not only irritated to have to make so much change, but also very untrusting of the bills. Almost anyone will inspect the bill for its watermark, and some places with larger cash flow have money counters that also verify the authenticity of the bills.

On Friday I ended up getting passed a 50 kuai bill while we were making change for dinner. The bill looked as if it had been through the wash, and was a bit worse for the wear. Thing was, almost anyone I handed the bill to almost immediately rejected it as a fake, handing it back to me with a disapproving shake of the head and no explanation. The watermark was there, and to me it looked like any other 50 I’ve handled, yet two bartenders, a cab driver and the counter guy at McDonalds all refused it after very little inspection in some cases, and two rounds through the currency counter and an inspection in front of a light in another. I should have asked my roommate what she thought, but instead I took it as a challenge to find an opportunity to buy something in exact change and get away quickly. I know that raises all sorts of economic/existentialist questions about what is money; I mean, if I think it’s real, then to me it is worth 50 yuan, the trouble is finding someone else to whom it is worth 50 yuan, right? In any case it was more irritating than anything else, and I luckily managed to swap it out for a different bill at dinner the next night. The waitress made a big show of counting the money, and offered no objections to the bill, so I figured maybe I wasn’t such an idiot American after all, and perhaps people were just objecting to such worn-out money.

On the topic of McDonalds, I’d have to say I much prefer the Grille at Midd for late night satisfactions of cravings for greasy food (especially since good old 麦当劳, MaiDangLao, doesn’t have mozzarella sticks). Saturday morning at around 3:30 I found myself ordering food at a McDonalds for the first time in about four years. McDonalds prides itself in the fact that you can get an identical Big Mac at a restaurant in Shanghai and Seattle, in England and New England (tangent: I read an interesting article in Time or something over the summer about industrial food makers like Nestle and Campbells exactly fine-tuning their flavorings to the specific tastes of the region in which they’re being sold), so I cannot blame China when I say that the burger was quite unsatisfying. I remember a greasy burger dripping with special sauce and satisfyingly crunch iceberg lettuce. The burger I had was surprisingly tasteless, and I found myself thinking that I could be quite happy never eating one again. Not that I considered abstaining from McD’s a sacrifice: I not only object on principle, I rarely want to eat fast food. Still, it was an odd revelation to have in the middle of the night in a restaurant in China, that I have either lost the taste for it, or become immune to the manufactured flavor of uber-processed food, or they’re just not as good anymore.