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.

Korean Food and Chinese Papers

Just a short entry to check in. Tonight I went out with a large group of classmates to a Korean restaurant, and we made our Korean classmates order for us, and so had our fill of spicy grilled and stewed meats, vegetable wraps and spicy pickled cabbage. We were also rather insistently presented with multiple rounds of Korean rice wine, so it became quite a renao evening (loud and boisterous).

Other than that, my day has consisted largely of writing an essay for my one on one class, describing the special characteristics of the second generation of nongmingong as opposed to the first, and watching segments of the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, which I have not seen before. Nongmingong are workers who leave the countryside to work in urban factories, service jobs and construction, and face many of the same social problems as immigrants in America: their census status lists them as rural peasants, and thus prohibits them from enjoying social benefits of city life like education and medical attention, and also lowers their wages and work conditions. I’ve spent much of my one-on-one time learning about the conditions of the nongmingong (literally rural peasant worker) and the history of development which led to their existence. It’s quite an interesting situation. One of the other students here, a girl taking time off between her undergraduate and graduate studies, is pursuing Fulbright supported research on the status of female workers in this group.

In any case, I had a great night out last night, but have come back early tonight to get some decent sleep and finish watching Pride and Prejudice. Tomorrow I’ve got some reading to do, and I think I’ll bike over to a coffee shop near West Lake to get it done.

Tea for Two

Posting this entry gives away some of the secretive process of buying souvenirs for some of my readers, but I think it’s just too good not to post. Last Sunday Xueqin and I went on our shopping excursion and ended up at a tea seller I’d heard was a good place for tea purchases. Hangzhou, is a city historically known for its silk, its tea, and according to my Lonely Planet guide, its wooden fans and scissors. The brand of tea associated with the area is Xihu Longjing, or West Lake Dragon Well tea, a type of green tea with a very clear flavor and slightly bitter taste. I plan to buy some Longjing to take home, as it’s very region-specific and practically synonymous with Hangzhou, and good to drink.

We entered the shop, which was filled with large glass jars of loose tea leaves. I am somewhat inexperienced at judging and evaluating teas, so I was needless to say at a bit of a loss, and explained to a helpful salesperson that I was looking for a good but not top quality Longjing to buy some gifts. His English, at least in terms of selling tea, was about on a par with our Chinese, so we had an interesting mix of languages flowing around as he pulled out a jar marked “68 yuan” (about 10 dollars), and explained that this was from the spring harvest and would soon be sold out, then brought us to a table with a small tea set and proceeded to serve us several rounds of tea.

First, he poured hot (but not too hot) water into a glass with the tea, then immediately strained the water, poured it into four small tea cups, and then dumped everything out, in order to wash the tea leaves and cups. He then repeated the process, allowing the leaves to brew only slightly longer, and presenting us with the tea to drink and comment on. I’m no expert, but it was good tea, and the bitterness was much more subtle than that of the teas I’d had before, which had steeped for long periods of time. He explained that the third or fourth cup usually has the best flavor, and that you don’t want to steep the leaves more than about five times. We smiled and nodded and pretended that this was the sort of thing that we knew about, and I asked about how the tea was sold.

Tea is measured by the jin, which I thought was a kilogram but in fact is 500g. I determined that it was possible to buy a half a jin, and asked for two half-jin boxes (no, not the frilly gift boxes set into the lined larger box, just the tea, thanks). I was already a bit bewildered by the measurements, which were not only metric but also Chinese, and which I’d never studied, so I kept asking about how much tea there was altogether, in each box, etc. I was convinced I’d accidentally ordered a very large amount of tea, but they reassured me that each box had 250g, and as I saw, each was about the size of a liter nalgene. Mistake there was, however, as I handed the cashier 100 yuan and received a blank stare. No, no, it’s 680 yuan. Excuse me? I looked again at the jar with the loose leaves. There, in very large print, the number 68 yuan. Beside it, in smaller print, was written “/50g”. I stopped dead, looked at Xueqin, and we both said something along the lines of “holy shit”. I mean I know good tea is expensive, but it never occurred to me that a mid-range tea at this place (the lowest price I saw was 20, and many were up to 180 and above) would cost 200 dollars per kilogram! Especially since I know a friend bought a half jin somewhere else for 30 yuan.

I offered some flustered apologies and explained that there was no way I could afford to spend 100 dollars on tea. The salesman, eager to be helpful, asked if I had a Visa card. I explained again that I was very sorry (the Chinese phrase is actually “I am embarrassed that I have made a mistake” and though it is used for any situation from stepping on someone’s foot to being late to meet someone, it was particularly fitting here) and the two of us left, still floored by the nonchalant way with which this very friendly guy about our age figured we could just drop that much money on tea. So sorry guys, no one is getting 50 dollars worth of tea, you’ll have to settle for either one cup’s worth of the good stuff or something slightly lower grade.