I Grew My Boobs in China (18 page)

Finally, a muffled, “Okay, this is it!” brought me back to the present. “Sharpen your elbows,” was our fearless leader’s only instruction. Raising them up, I barged my way through that sardine tin on wheels and stepped onto the curb, only to find myself in yet another crowd. As we sifted through the bystanders, a few would separate from the regular crowd and come running at the sight of us, holding up photos and poster boards of the guest houses they represented and the restaurants they wanted us to visit. Before I knew what was happening, we were following someone to #4 Guest House in Dali.

Dali waited for us as if with open arms. Here we planned to take a well-earned rest. Conveniently, Mom’s birthday the next day offered a perfect excuse to sit back under a straw hut in a beautiful courtyard and relax for once. I was finally allowed to soak up some of this beauty rather than watch it whiz by me on buses, trains, or bikes. A four-bed dorm that cost three dollars per person per night was home for the next four days. I walked in and collapsed on my bed and didn’t move.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A slit of light peered directly in my eye through the wooden shutters early the next morning. I first responded by burying my face under another, slightly less comfortable pillow before I remembered what day it was.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” we groaned a little less enthusiastically than usual as we rolled our stiff bodies out of bed.

“You could be home right now, you know, having a nice party with a cake,” I suggested.

“Are you kidding? I never liked parties. This is way more fun! I’m going to get a massage today! What more could I possibly ask for, other than maybe a Dr. Pepper? Oh well,” she added in a quieter voice, “maybe a pizza. That would be lovely, too, but that’s probably not possible either, even on my birthday.”

“You’re definitely not going to find your Dr. Pepper, and even if you could, we wouldn’t let you. But we might be able to find you a pizza,” Ammon offered.

“Oh, and I’m finally going to buy a jade bracelet,” she added, deciding she would splurge and get herself at least one souvenir. All the buses we’d travelled on stopped at several little jade outlets. They were always glossy shops with all kinds and shapes of jade arranged in pretty glass cabinets. Even after umpteen jade store stops, the domestic Chinese tourists would still get out and ogle each display, oohing and aahing all the while.

“Is good luck.Omen. Good luck,” the merchants in towns closer to bigger cities where many knew a smattering of English often told us as they bowed their heads. “Yes, yes. Is luck!”

Presenting the fifteen-dollar expense that a jade bracelet would incur gave Mom a little more leeway with Ammon if labelled as a birthday present. After some fresh, fat banana pancakes, we set off on our shopping expedition to see what kind of deals we could find.

Voices calling out a tranquil “Hallo!” came from merchants everywhere. They magically appeared from shaded spots behind stalls and from around corners in alleyways as we approached.

“Whoa, these guys are everywhere!” Bree exclaimed as one snuck up from behind her, again with the same “Hallo!”

“Country? Country you?” these persistent men and women would ask, their delicate eyes observing us closely.

“Canada,” one of us would respond.

After a few puzzled looks, they would exclaim, “OH, Janada!” correcting us with big smiles on their faces.

“Okay, whatever you say!” Bree would retort shamelessly.

Merchant women ran from their shops to attack us with the gidgets and gadgets they were trying to sell. Hairclips in my hair, bracelets around my wrists – they’d squabble to adorn every part of our bodies.

Peeling the bracelets off as fast as they appeared on her wrists, Mom asked, “Where did you go?” turning to Ammon who had vanished in all the excitement.

“What? You mean, while you guys were getting mobbed? To get this,” he said, holding up a bottle of water.

“How much did you pay for it?” Mom asked, while politely shaking her head at the two women on her heels trying desperately to make a sale.

“Two,” he said, waving a confident hand of dismissal to the women.

“Really?” She exclaimed, and then she reconsidered for a moment. “Wait, two what?”

“Dollars. What do you think!?” He said sarcastically. “Yuan. I don’t even carry dollars.”

“What!!?? I paid five!” she exclaimed, as he smiled smugly and continued moving ahead. “How did he do that? Did you see what shop he went to?”

“While we were getting mobbed?” I repeated, reminding her that I’d been far too preoccupied to pay attention to where he’d gone.

Whenever Mom needed to buy something, she’d practically jump over the shop’s counter, waving, pointing, and grabbing for what she wanted. The puzzled women most often laughed and just stepped out of her way, but we had a different take on her shopping behaviour. We thought her behaviour was just plain crazy.

“What? Why? I got what I wanted, and everyone’s happy,” she’d constantly say. She was always interested and happy to interact genially with the locals, but not when it came to bargaining. That was another story entirely.

“Three kuai?!!!!” Mom would gasp in the merchants’ non-comprehending faces, exasperated. Kuai, we quickly learned, was their slang way of saying yuan. They used it the way we used bucks to mean dollars. Placing her mouth close to my ear, she would whisper in a crackly voice, “How much is that anyway?” It almost made me laugh out loud. Bree’s rude demonstration on the train had revealed that attempts to be secretive were largely unnecessary.

The woman was shouting “three” in Mandarin. They often gestured with their hands to tell us the price. I was grateful that Ammon had delivered a quick lesson on numbers and the different hand gestures the Chinese used to represent numbers on the train.

“Three?” I inquired of the woman using the native hand signals I’d learned.

“Ja!Ja!” she said quickly and abruptly, hoping not to lose the sale.

Calculating and also savouring the moment, I finally turned back to Mom and, in the same secretive fashion she’d used with me, I whispered, “fifty cents.”

Smiling as she raised two fingers, she said, “Oh! I’ll take two then.”

The woman said “Ja Ja” again, and gave Mom eight yuan in change from her ten-yuan bill. She’d thought Mom was offering to pay just two yuan, when Mom had really been trying to indicate that she wanted two at the agreed-upon price of three yuan.

“I don’t get it. OH! She must have thought I meant two yuan. Oooh, yeah!” Mom gave her two yuan and indicated that she wanted another of the same item, pleased to have paid so little.

Like starving hounds, half a dozen women came rushing towards us to make another sale. They all waved their hands in our faces as they simultaneously shouted out numbers in Mandarin. They’d very skillfully done my hair up while I was still walking, and were now calling out, “forty-five, forty-five,” in an attempt to sell me the same kind of hairclip they’d just put in my hair. Another came rushing from behind with a looking glass so I could see the effect. They continued to chase me with nail polish and other feminine products, and I didn’t know how to handle them. I did the only thing I could think of. I ran to catch up with the rest of the family so I could try to shake some of them off onto Ammon. They certainly would have had their hands in his long hair had it not been out of their reach, but it was as if he were wearing pesticide. Somehow, they just didn’t seem to bother him in the same way.

Just as we were going to cross the street, we were cut off by a donkey-drawn cart full of bamboo shoots, forcing us to stop and let my trailing friends catch up to me again. This time I was positively cornered and pinched from all sides. The determined woman with the hairclips had managed to stuff yet another one in my hand! She continued to drop her asking price. “Forty? Okay, okay. Thirty-five, thirty-five!!” I had two options: buy it or just walk away from her. I still didn’t want it, and I had no money. I didn’t know what to do, so I froze.
Geez, I have to stop for them, but I can’t be left behind.
I’d feebly try to return the items, but the women were relentless.

“Stupid woman! If you don’t take it … Ergh, I don’t want it!” I stomped. Of course she did not understand me, which made it even more frustrating. “I can’t wait any longer. If you don’t want it, then I’ll keep it.” All I knew was that I didn’t want to lose the others. I kept walking away, and the one with the loudest voice kept lowering the price. The other voices seemed to blend into a babbling of numbers, but the “hairclip” gal’s voice was like a shadow I couldn’t escape. When her price dropped to the teens, I began to think I could actually use a hairclip. My long, flowing hair was nothing but a burden in this heat and under these circumstances.
How nice it would be to tie it up off my sweaty back.
I could already feel the cooling difference it made.

I repeated her latest offer of fifteen yuan, and then grabbed Mom’s arm and asked if I could have it.

“Fifteen yuan?!!” she gasped when I told her, as if it were a fortune.

“Okay, okay. Ten. Ten,” the woman said, in a reflex as natural as breathing.

“How much was that again? What was the rate?” Mom asked predictably. I looked at the woman and with raised eyebrows held out a fist which translated to ten without speaking. When she nodded, I turned back to Mom. Meanwhile Mom was having a moment of realization.

“There are six yuan to a dollar, Mom! It’s less than two bucks.”

“Ten, eh? How about five?” she said, cautiously flashing five confident fingers.

Sold! The woman nodded and waved at me to keep it for five.

“We’ll take three of them,” Mom said pointing three times.

“Three?!”

“Yah, I want one,” she told me, reaching in her pocket for a few spare bills, “and Bree probably will, too.”

“Wow Mom. You sure are fun to shop with. You do realize that started at forty-five!” I said, as the mob miraculously dispersed.

“Can you believe they reduced the price from forty-five to five!” Mom rushed to tell Ammon, happy to have bested his earlier success at purchasing water.

“Well, I’d say you guys learned your first lesson of bargaining today. Act like you don’t want it, that’s the trick. Because as soon as you look like you want it, they have the upper hand,” he said wisely. Having conveniently stumbled upon this technique, Mom adopted it enthusiastically. From then on, everything was always too expensive because it could always be had for less.

After a successful day of “window” shopping and sight-seeing, we returned to the guest house with Mom, who had purchased both a full, hour-long massage and a pale green, jade bracelet. We sat in the lovely courtyard later that evening beneath the shade of the straw hut and played our ongoing card game of Daifugō, the original Japanese version of the game Asshole, infamous for requiring players to get up and change their seats according to relative rank at the end of each round. Endless flies swarmed all over our chocolate banana pancakes to ruin what would otherwise have been a perfect setting amidst the lush, inviting gardens and the warm, tropical weather.

“Two Jacks,” Bree said, throwing her cards onto the pile in the middle of the stone table.

“Okay, so I read somewhere before I left that in China, people are only allowed to have one kid,” Mom brought up what was a touchy subject for her, with her four kids. “Is that true. Ammon?”

“Yah. It’s the Family Planning Policy, also known as the one child policy,” Ammon said
.
“Urban people living in cities are only allowed one child, but the rural people living in the villages are allowed to have more. Ethnic minorities can, too.”

“But I thought it was for all of China,” Mom said, sweeping the pile and starting with a low, single four.

“Nope. Only something like thirty-five percent of the population is subject to the one-kid rule.”

“It’s still kind of terrible, though, isn’t it?” I asked, waiting for my turn as I shook some flies off my fork.

“Well, surprisingly, they say it has prevented around two hundred and fifty to three hundred million births since 1978 when it was first implemented,” Ammon told us. I eyed him suspiciously, wondering if he was giving us correct information. Looking at her cards, Mom folded her hand and passed. She then whacked the air in front of her in a vain attempt to clear the air, but I was still stuck on trying to understand how this seemingly drastic plan worked.

“Really? That’s only like, like, no time at all. I thought this was like hundreds of years ago?!” I fanned my fly-infested pancake with my cards before tossing a single ace of hearts onto the pile.

“Yah, that’s why they’re only starting to feel the impact of the policy now,” Mom said, clearing the table for the next round.

“But think about it. Everyone wants sons, so what does that mean for the daughters? If you only get one shot at it, what do you think happens if you get a girl?” Ammon said, planting an unthinkable seed in our heads. “I’m not saying it happens every time, but records show a definite increase in abortions and in the number of unwanted orphans, which still only accounts for fifty percent of the statistically “missing girls” in the 1980s.

“I hate men!” Bree growled.

“What do they do if they DO have more? I mean, it’s kind of hard to stop that kind of thing,” Mom said.

“They can only screw them over financially by levying fines and taking away benefits, that sort of thing. So yah, if a family is really rich and they want more kids, they can just absorb the cost and have more,” he guessed.

“So sad that money rules the world,” Mom said.

“Yah, but you’d be surprised. Somewhere it’s reported that seventy-six percent of the population supports the policy. I wonder if that number will crash drastically when the negative effects start catching up. And if you don’t live in the city, you can just apply for a permit to have a second child if the first is a girl.”

Violently throwing her next cards onto the pile, Bree growled, “Why are they so sexist?!”

“Look who’s talking, Miss ‘I Hate Men!’ But anyway, they can also apply if the first is handicapped in some way.”