Wuxi Drift: The Slow and Infuriating

“So, in an attempt to convert this blog/forum/space from a place for me to go on unsubstantiated rants about various things that I don’t know enough about or whatever it has become into a real blog or at least something more closely resembling a real blog, I’ve decided to try to post things more frequently. So for the time being please enjoy this probably misguided and likely short-lived attempt to speed the pace of my posts.”

Ahem, right, well, I wrote that about two days after I posted the last entry. It seems that my attempt to convert it into something more closely resembling a real blog wasn’t so successful. Instead of trying to come up with some sort of lame excuse of my own, I’ll let the immortal words of Jake Blues as he groveled at the feet of an angry Carrie Fisher do the talking for me: “Honest... I ran out of gas. I, I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD.” Yeah, well, all that stuff happened and I didn’t finish writing this entry until now. I mean, how can you argue with floods and locusts?

Anyway, I’ve wanted to write about this particular topic since the first few weeks I got here. I suppose laziness had a lot to do with my not writing anything about it until now. Aside from that (and the locusts), I really have no excuse for not having given you guys a window into what it’s like to go shopping for food here a long time ago. It’s definitely a different experience than back home, that’s for sure. Obviously the sheer volume of people packed into the space available for breathing and moving is far greater than anything I can remember back in the States. I suppose I should mention at this point that I live about two minutes from a very large supermarket called Carrefour. It is a French-owned chain of supermarkets that is extremely successful in China. Like when they have sales on staple items, people’s lives are literally in danger. That’s how popular the chain is here.

Anyway, I live near one of the two that we have here in Wuxi, so I tend to go there a lot. It also happens that I have to pass by the building on my way to work every day, so I get to endure being pestered by people trying to hand out flyers for who-knows-what on a twice-daily basis. I frequently get harassed by people handing out flyers for the gym across the street where I already belong. I don’t know how to say that I’m already a member. Not that it would matter anyway as there somehow seems to be a fresh rotation of people out there every day, resulting in my getting bothered pretty much without fail. A couple of times I think I’ve managed to give a scowl fierce enough to deter some of the younger, more timid girls, but that’s about it. For a while, they pushed a flyer on me that had some ghastly picture of what appeared to be an older woman doing the splits in full 80s workout paraphernalia, but fortunately those times have passed. It really did look like one of the Golden Girls was limbering up for some yoga or Tae Bo or something. I think the first time I saw it, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. After a moment’s consideration (and throwing up a little bit in my mouth), I think I cringed involuntarily and resolved to try not to look at it again.

But back to what I was saying about shopping here. After I penetrate the outer wall of flyer-wielding scouts, I have to pass by the entrance/exit to the scooter-parking alley thingamajig that’s connected to the Carrefour building. Crossing the mouth of this thing is like those times in Mario where you have to jump over some chasm or tube, except that there’s some ball of lava or spiky flower that issues forth from the chasm or tube that tries to kill you. Fortunately, these objects tended to appear at regular intervals, thereby allowing you to time your jump and escape the object. Naturally no such interval exists in this situation and you must cross at your own peril. At this point I should mention that people here regularly drive their scooters and bikes on the sidewalk at the same velocity that they would if they happened to be on the road or on the designated road that exists just for them next to almost every road in China. Why don’t they drive on this road you might ask? Well, if anyone knows the answer to this question, please let me know. But for now, I’m going with the “because it’s China” explanation. It works well for most things here.

Anyway, because people lack either the common sense or the manners to decrease their speed in deference to relatively helpless pedestrians who may be walking on the sidewalk, you can never really tell how fast people are going to come out of this thing. So you can approach this problem in one of two ways. You can slow your pace to a crawl in the hopes that you can catch a glimpse of an oncoming vehicle and take evasive maneuvers before it can strike you or you can act like a Chinese pedestrian normally does while crossing the street and focus your gaze straight ahead, thereby making it look like you don’t see the aforementioned oncoming vehicle. In the latter case, the burden of making evasive maneuvers thus shifts from the pedestrian to the operator of the vehicle. However, in most cases, the pedestrians just outside of the Carrefour inexplicably abandon their normal stony gaze and adopt the creeping strategy, thus creating a sizable mass of people near the entrance to the parking alley, ironically making it more likely that someone will be struck. I choose to adopt the stony gaze strategy whilst increasing my walking speed, hoping that I won’t be T-boned by some vehicle and sent crashing into the wall of scooters that serves as the left flank of this gauntlet. I haven’t been hit yet, but there have been some close encounters.

So once you’ve successfully navigated the ball of lava/speeding scooter obstacle, you can then approach the entrance of the building, which is curtained by those big plastic strips that look they were shredded from one over-sized piece. Every time I go there I still feel like I’m walking into a meat freezer or something. I half expect Uncle Paulie to meet me there with a pair of boxing gloves. I then avoid eye contact with the next wave of flyer hander-outers and continue into the building. The actual supermarket is on the second floor, so you have to walk through the first floor to get there. The first floor consists of a revolving door of shops that seems to change with every new visit. Except that it’s the same four different kinds of shops, just with new owners. It’s like walking into your house every day to find that your furniture has been rearranged in a new setup. Of course this feeling is fairly normal since this was a regular occurrence in my parents’ house back in the US. In my house we didn’t have gnomes that hid the car keys, we had gnomes that moved the furniture. And we actually didn’t have gnomes, we had my mother. After some consideration on this subject, I’ve decided that my mother’s gift from China may or may not be a Chinese construction crew. These guys are capable of anything from rearranging a row of plants to building an entire store in about a day. A new store literally pops up here within a day or two days of the old one closing down. And that includes the destruction of the old shop and the construction of the new one. That’s how fast things change here. I don’t know how they do it. My guess would be shoddy construction materials and methods and dirt-cheap, semi-skilled labor. But that’s just a guess.

After you pass the row of shops and the obligatory KFC, you turn the corner and generally find yourself confronted with a small hedge maze of shopping carts. On the one hand, it’s easier than a hedge maze because you can see over the carts and therefore it doesn’t require the Shining or some other extrasensory skill to navigate. On the other hand, it’s more difficult because other people are also trying to make their way through the maze at the same time, only they’re carrying bags and piloting shopping carts of their own (which they often ditch in the middle to contribute to the maze). Once you’ve made your way through the maze, which grows more fiendishly complex as the day wears on and more and more people leave their carts in the hall, you get to walk past the food court. The food court’s not too bad really. They have cheap, fairly good Chinese food. There’s also a Japanese restaurant there, which seems to be pretty successful despite the insistence of some of my students that Chinese people don’t like Japanese food and won’t eat it. I’ve eaten there a few times and the experience was pretty good. I would recommend it, at least if you don’t mind old people with bags of cans sitting down near you and staring at you until you finish your Coke or whatever other canned beverage you may be enjoying. I imagine that they’re worth money if recycled (the cans, not the people of course), much like in the States. Considering that they (the people this time) don’t really bother me much due to the fact that I’m usually wholly engrossed in the task of eating my meal, it’s not a problem. But I can see how most normal people might find this disturbing.

After passing the food court and a few shops selling wallets, purses, and fake (?) jewelry, you turn another corner and go up this escalator-type thing. It doesn’t actually have steps; it’s just flat like the people-movers in most airports these days. It’s actually pretty useful for bringing shopping carts into and out of the supermarket. On the way up you see signs warning you to watch your head. For some reason unknown to me, there’s a picture on the sign of someone hitting their head on what appears to be a water faucet. As there are no water faucets to be seen on the walls, ceilings, or floors in that area I am puzzled as to the origin of the faucet on the sign. Nonetheless, I remain wary.

Anyway, once you reach the top, you are presented with a fairly normal large supermarket. You make your way to the stacks of plastic baskets near the entrance and pick through them until you find one that is actually clean. The first few aisles are clothes and shoes and things as the supermarket resembles a cross between a Target and a Safeway. If you wander off to the right instead of entering the aisles immediately, you head into the electronics and home appliance sections. These sections can be particularly obnoxious because the store has commissioned the employees in these sections with the task of harassing you if you even approach the aisle to look at something. These people are undeterred by the presence of headphones, my telling them I don’t understand them, my telling them I’m just looking, and oftentimes, my obvious lack of interest in what they are trying to peddle, which is without exception the most expensive product of the lot. I do try to be nice to them because I know they’re just doing their job, but I must say that I would be more likely to buy a product if they would just give me a chance to look at the options before shoving the most expensive one in my face. I may not end up buying the most expensive one, but at least I would buy something instead of rapidly making my way to another section of the store.

Having said this, I’m not sure if I prefer the employees in that part of the store, or the ones in the other part of the store, who instead of actively bothering you take the passive-aggressive approach by standing in the middle of the aisle in large groups chatting. Since this is a Chinese store, there are large numbers of people trying to move through the aisles with their carts at all times, so these employees often function as a clot in the aisle, preventing the vital flow of patrons through the store and trapping many unfortunate shoppers in massive mid-aisle jams. I am usually able to run these miniature blockades without incident, but there have been a few times when I literally had to push someone’s cart out of my way to get out. This is partly due to the peculiar habit of Chinese people to never, ever give up ground once it has been gained in any sort of situation. This tendency most commonly rears it head in traffic situations, but can also apply in almost any other situation. In this case, the shopper has rolled their cart up to the aforementioned clot of people and even after surveying the situation refuses to back up, which action would release the people trapped inside and clear the way for them to go through. I can’t even remember how many times I have seen this in traffic or in the little road that goes through my apartment complex. I’ve seen cars sitting in front of each other waiting for the other to move for minutes on end while both blare their car horns uselessly. Any Western car driver would immediately recognize the need for someone to reverse and would do so as soon as possible so as to clear the way quickly and get on with their business. For whatever reason, that doesn’t happen here. They just sit there in this comical face off until someone backs up. I don’t know if this is a “losing face” thing or if it’s just an ingrained habit not to give up anything once it’s been gained, but it’s absolutely mind-boggling sometimes.

So like I was saying, every time I go in I have to decide whether to blast my way through the food section of the store or go play Pacman with the employees of the appliances section. I might pick the appliances section if only because it’s unlikely that I will have to worry about keeping my footing there. If you go to the section of the store where meat and various other living and/or freshly dead animals are sold, you are likely to slip at some point or other on a puddle of some liquid that couldn’t possibly be water, due partly to the color of the liquid and partly to the viscosity of the liquid. After doing the whole “hands flailing, half-split, feet moving in cartoonish wheels” thing, you regain your balance and look down furiously at what you just slipped on and immediately regret doing so as you inevitably find it to be some shade of brown and of a thickness somewhere between water and phlegm. The main reason this bothers me, other than the fact I spend enough time dodging obstacles on the road outside without having to worry about what sludge I might be stepping in at the supermarket, is that I generally try to maintain a pretty rapid pace while I’m there. Why do I do this you might ask? Well, as it turns out, I am confronted with the worst shopping situation I could possibly face when I go to the supermarket. How so? Every single customer there shops precisely the same way I do. Those of you who have ever been in a grocery store or movie store with me before know that I tend to make decisions very slowly and deliberately. I’m pretty sure that more than one of my friends has been about ready to punch me in the face as I sat there deliberating over beer or some other choice in the supermarket. Well if you think I’m deliberate, you should check out a Chinese shopper. They completely redefine the word.

It’s kind of like being caught in an extended slow motion sequence, which would be really cool if I was dodging bullets, fighting an eight-foot-tall Russian giant with the acting skills and personality of a Chinese dumpling, or roundhouse-kicking someone in the face with a cowboy boot. Alas, none of these things happen when I go to the supermarket, so it’s just me trying to make my way through a crowd of thousands of shuffling Lemmings. It’s really changed my shopping experience from a leisurely, almost cathartic process to one in which I begin with a strictly defined purpose and execute the plan as rapidly as possible while trying to maintain my sanity.

But here I am rambling on and I haven’t even described the phenomenon I mentioned in my title. As it turns out, aggressive employees and the ever-present puddles of mystery liquid aren’t my only problems. Probably the biggest problem is your average shopper, or to be more accurate, your average shopping cart. For some reason that I have yet to determine (though I’m beginning to suspect that it’s simply to increase the exposed amount of shopping cart with which other customers have to deal), all the shoppers at Carrefour pilot their shopping carts at a peculiar angle. Instead of pushing them straight, they turn them in such a way that they resemble those cars in the third installment of the Fast and Furious movies. I believe “drifting” is the term. However, as far as I can tell, the prospect of a shopping cart overflowing with cooking oil, chicken feet, and duck necks that is piloted by either a tiny Chinese woman or worse yet her scrawny kid at a speed unsafe for confined spaces is far more fearsome than the prospect of being struck by some oversized micro-machine being piloted by an equally diminutive wannabe gangster. I almost want to apply the term popularly associated with those cars, “rice rockets,” to the rolling potential shin- and hip-bruises I encounter at the supermarket, but I feel like a might be crossing a line there, so I won’t. I mean, my sarcasm has limits too, you know?

I engineer my exit from the supermarket using a method reminiscent of the movie “Donnie Darko” where the title character can see where the other characters will go in the future. Unfortunately I have no such vision, forcing me to guess the future paths of the other shoppers. On the bright side of things, however, I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal. Anyway, I visually map the expected trajectories of the shoppers closest to me, perform several complex algorithmic operations in my head, and decide the next directional adjustment to my course in something like a tenth of second. I then have to utilize my cat-like reflexes to weave my way through the crowd to the checkout lines, where I get the usual staring routine and people looking into my basket to see what the foreigner is buying.

As I lack a grappling hook and a speeding subway train in the vicinity, it’s harder to make a quick escape after paying for my food than I would prefer. After purchasing my items, I go down the people mover, being careful to watch out for any water faucets that could be lying in wait. I silently mourn the loss of the “Sensuous Breast Cream” ad that used to be posted at the bottom of the people-mover and curse my lack of teleportation abilities. As I make my way out of the place with my massive bag of groceries, I suppress the urge to swing it at anything that stands in my path, or hold it in front of me and crash through the line of flyer-wielders like a bowling ball. Just because some actions are appropriate in America doesn’t mean they’re appropriate here.

Alright, well that pretty much concludes today’s “blog” entry. In next week’s exciting episode, MacGyver defuses the economic crisis and brings peace to the Middle East using a cuff link, a potato peeler, and an empty Coke bottle. Unless of course an old Chinese woman gets to it first… Be sure to tune in!