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China Travel

"So I didn't go to church in China, but sometimes when I saw a bird in the grass I dropped to my knees and marvelled as it twitched there." -- Paul Theroux, 1988, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train through China, p. 115.

Field Guides | Finding Birds | Background | Weather & Dress | Money | Shopping & Bargaining | Mandarin, the Spoken Language | Characters, the Written Language | Food & Drink | Sanitation, Health & Safety | Miscellany 

• Credit cards. Credit cards are not widely accepted. Hotels and gift shops aimed at western tourists do usually take plastic, but don't expect to charge at most stores or even at the finest restaurants.
• Where to bargain. Almost everywhere. Price tags, when there are any, are starting points for negotiating, even in upscale stores catering to westerners. If bargaining is not in order, the sales person will politely explain that. The only place we encountered where one obviously did not bargain was a Costco-like discount department store in Suzhou where the natives shop.
• Why bargain? It is very important to bargain. Not to bargain is to be considered arrogantly wealthy (and perhaps a little stupid to boot). The average Chinese person of course knows that westerners have more disposable income than they do, but probably they cannot conceive of how great the disparity really is. Even when the asking price seems ridiculously cheap, don't be the "ugly American" and pay the asking price as if money didn't matter. Actually, when you overcome any hesitancy to bargain, you'll find it is a game enjoyed by both parties.
• Negotiating. In most cases you can make an appropriate offer and the seller will counter by roughly splitting the difference, and that will be acceptable to both parties. In some cases, though, protracted bargaining may be in order if the asking price is ridiculously high, as it tends to be for expensive items in upbeat stores like factory gift shops and Friendship Stores. Sometimes, if a price cannot be agreed upon, seeming to give up and leave will trigger a new offer. In that case it is likely to be a final offer so either accept it or forget the whole thing. Indeed, you should always be prepared for the possibility that no agreement can be reached, even on inexpensive items. At the Great Wall I bargained for an overpriced tee-shirt at a souvenir stall, having in mind a cost about equal to that of souvenir tee-shirts on the street in Beijing. The woman would come down only a little below her asking price, probably because she had a lucrative monopoly going, so I don't own a tee-shirt with the Great Wall on it. And there is at least one woman in China who now realizes that not all Americans are rich and stupid.
• First offer. If there is not a price tag (as with street vendors, for example), the seller will quote you a price in English or show a value to you a pocket calculator. Street vendors inflate their prices more than stores do. My first offer to a street vendor was usually half the asking price, but in a store about 3/4 is usually the better first offer. If your offer is way too low for the seller to counter reasonably, he or she will sometimes just ask for a better first offer. Once I had a first offer of half the asking price accepted by a street vendor, the transaction inadvertently helped along by our tour guide who was trying to get me on the bus where nearly everyone else was already seated.
• Get item first, then pay. Once the price has been settled upon with a street vendor, get the item in your hands before giving payment. That prevents an unscrupulous vendor from claiming some higher price once he or she has your money in hand. At stores and shops such a precaution is not necessary.
• Give exact payment. Once a price is settled upon, try to pay the exact amount. Especially with a street vendor, never offer a large bill for which you would need change. (And of course, never flash a big roll in public.)
• Keep track of purchases. Upon returning home, you will need to state for customs the total worth of items being brought back. Therefore, keeping a list of your purchases and their costs is a useful habit. Unless you exceed the limit (which is currently $400 per person for the U.S.), you probably will not have to itemize purchases for customs. Nevertheless, having that list of what you bought and how much you paid will bail you out of an unusual scrutiny.
• Buying silk. I recommend buying silk in a department store as we did.  The stores in silk factories are expensive, although some things offered there may be difficult or impossible to find elsewhere (e.g., comforters).  If you buy from a street vendor beware of two tricks.  One is to get you to buy a group of silk scarves that are individually wrapped in cellophane. Insist that you open each package and inspect the scarf carefully in good light, and if OK hold onto it so no switches can take place.  Many wrapped scarves have holes or other defects.  The other trick can happen in wrapped or unwrapped items: providing rayon instead silk.  Ball the cloth up in your fist: if it feels warm (like putting your hand on styrofoam), it is rayon; silk is neutral ("cool") to the touch.
• What is not a bargain? In his book Riding the Iron Rooster Paul Theroux wrote "...the best buys in China are not in the souvenir shops and Friendship Stores--not jade carvings, cork sculpture, ivory letter-openers, stuffed pandas, turquoise jewellery [sic], cloisonne, brassware, plastic chopsticks, lacquerware, bone bracelets, or the really dull and derivative paintings on scrolls."  I agree that these are not bargains, but a small stuffed panda or cheap chopsticks with Chinese characters on them are still worthy souvenirs.  And I too have never seen "jewelry" spelled that way.  (Electronics and most other hi-tech stuff is made in Japan and therefore expensive in China--in fact, expensive in Japan as well.  I priced a Sony camcorder in the duty-free shop in the Tokyo airport on the way home, and found that the same model is cheaper in the U.S.)
• What is a bargain? Theroux continued, if you want to buy quality things at bargain prices, he would recommend "...socket wrenches, screwdrivers, water-colour paints and brushes, pencils, calligraphy, sturdy brown envelopes, padlocks, plumber's tools, wicker baskets, espadrilles, T-shirts, cashmere sweaters, bonsai trees, silk carpets and silk cushion covers, tablecloths, terracotta pots, thermos jugs, illustrated art books, herbs, spices, and tea by the pound."  He also mentions bamboo bird cages "...though the thought of keeping a bird in them is depressing" and bamboo or porcelain cricket cages.  His 1980's recommendations may no longer apply specifically, but the general principle stands: practical things that the Chinese themselves buy will be cheap if made domestically.  I bought a pair of folding reading glasses (which I love, by the way) for about $4 and when returning to the States saw the same thing in K-Mart for $15.

MANDARIN, THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE. Most visitors would like to be able to say at least a few words in the language of the country they visit. China’s language that we know by the name Mandarin (a Portuguese word) is to the natives putonghua, meaning “common speech”. Mandarin is the official language and is based on the dialect of Chinese spoken in the Beijing region. (The Cantonese dialect is pronounced so differently that it is virtually a separate language.) Here are some notes about the spoken language and its phonetic spelling with Roman letters.

• Audio tapes. Having a tutor or taking a course from a native speaker is the best way to learn to speak and understand the spoken language. The next best way is a language tape or language software that includes sound. Both come in many varieties and at various costs. For any westerner who has never learned an oriental language, this will probably be the greatest linguistic challenge ever faced.

• Phrase books. Phrase books were invented for those of us who lack the leisure to learn more than the rudiments of a new tongue before traveling to some place where it is spoken. These little books work pretty well for Indo-European languages whose phonemes are largely similar to those of English. The one I bought for Mandarin, entitled Just Enough Chinese, was a minor disaster as my review on the Amazon.com web page documents. Unfortunately, the phrase most people want to learn first (“thank you,” spelled xiexie) is difficult to say correctly except by imitating a native speaker. There is a use for a Mandarin phrase book, however, if it has the phrase written in Chinese characters: find what you want to communicate and point to the phrase while showing the book to your”listener.” Two other phrase books that include Chinese characters are Lonely Planet's Mandarin Phrase Book with Two-way Dictionary (4th edition, 2000) and Berlitz's Mandarin Chinese Phrase Book and Dictionary (1998). Dan Wiegmann reports that Barron's Chinese at a Glance also includes the characters for the phrases.  I cannot vouch for either the correctness of idiomatic expressions or the accuracy of the phonetics in these phrase books.

• Phonetic spelling. It is much better to learn to pronounce romanized spellings of Mandarin words than to depend on fractured phonetics of phrase books. The official spelling system of China is called pinyin. (It is not used in other Mandarin-speaking places in the world.) If your phrase book also includes the pinyin spelling along with the Chinese characters, as all the phrase books mentioned above do, then the book can prove useful in pronouncing Mandarin. Start your pinyin education here with some place names.

• How to say “Beijing.” It's just a personal bugaboo, but the common American mispronunciation of the proud city's name grates on my ears. It's properly said "bay-jing" with the second syllable as in "jingle." For some curious reason, many Americans use a sliding French J (as in Jacques), which sound does not occur in Mandarin. Use instead the sharp American J (as in Jack).

• Pronounce “Suzhou.” That’s another city’s name that is easy for Americans because it is like two common English given names: Sue-Joe. The zhou syllable is useful to learn because it occurs in many other place names (e.g., Hangzhou, Zhouzhuang). Notice that the ZH of Suzhou is said almost exactly like the J of Beijing, and Western ears cannot hear any difference without a lot of experience. The J phoneme is one of three consonantal sounds that have two different spellings used to specify the pronunciation of the vowel that follows: ZH=J, Q=CH, and X=SH, all pronounced as the second one of the pair would be in English. Most Chinese consonants are in fact sounds that occur in English; itÕs mainly the vowels that are difficult.

• Say “Shanghai.” You probably already know that the diphthong AI is pronounced “eye” like the AI of the English word “aisle.” Unfortunately,”shanghai” has become an English verb whose first syllable we pronounce with the uniquely American nasal A, which the Brits love to parody. The Mandarin A, however, is a broad one, like ours in “ah,” “ha” or “father.” When you see A in a pinyin spelling, think “ah, ha!” Avoid pronouncing the Tang dynasty as if it were an ersatz orange juice invented for astronauts.

• Tone deaf. A frustrating aspect of Chinese pronunciation is the four tones of vowels, which are difficult for us to hear and even more difficult to imitate. For example, the word ma said in first tone means mother but in third tone means horse, a confounding to be avoided. (Second and fourth tone pronunciations have still other meanings.) Good luck in learning to speak and understand Mandarin!  

CHARACTERS, THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE. Probably everybody knows that Chinese characters constitute an ideographic script totally unlike our alphabetic writing, which represents (however inconsistently) our spoken sounds. Like sign language of Native Americans, the characters allow communication among people of different Chinese dialects and are even used in Japan with more or less the same meanings. The usual tourist really doesn’t need to know any characters to get by in China because the most important things usually have reasonably intelligible English writing along with the characters (see photo below)-- but its a lot of fun (and occasionally quite useful) to be able to read at least parts of signs. Furthermore, Chinese writing is perhaps the most exotic and oriental aspect of a visit so why let it remain inscrutable?

A reasonably intelligible English version is usually included on critical signs, as here is the Shanghai airport, 20 October 2001.  Digital photo by Jack P. Hailman.

• Why pinyin is rare. Pinyin was developed to write Mandarin in alphabetic letters, but you rarely see pinyin script in China -- apart from place names, on currency, and a few other special uses. In order to encode every sound, pinyin must use the diacritical marks for the vowel tones. The diacritics are not found on standard western keyboards (or email character sets) and in any case are awkward to use with capital letters. The omission of tonal marks can be circumvented in place names by an awkward mechanism: special non-standard spellings. For example, the two provinces whose names differ only by the vowel tone of the A are distinguished in writing by doubling the letter A in one of them: Shanxi and Shaanxi. Even with the diacritics, however, there are just too many sound-alikes to make pinyin a useful script. Context distinguishes these homophones in conversation, but for many uses of writing there is insufficient context to provide easy reading.
• Literacy goals. In order to read a newspaper, you would need to know about 1500 to 2000 of the commonest characters, a mere fraction of the perhaps tens of thousands in current use. A more attainable goal is to learn a hundred or so of the easiest characters liable to be encountered on a visit to China. Fortunately, there is a wonderful little book written by Julie Sussman to teach you those selected characters: I Can Read That. The accurate subtitle is A Traveler’s Introduction to Chinese Characters, and I think I saw on some sign or another in China every character taught in this delightful book.
• Simplified characters. In order to increase literacy and speed of both reading and writing, the government introduced a number of simplified characters some decades ago. Sussman’s book mentioned in the previous paragraph teaches these simplified characters, but you won’t see them in use outside of China. They are not as beautiful as the traditional characters you can see on Chinese restaurants in the U.S., but I found them to be a lot easier to learn.
• Writing of characters. Each character is written with a standard sequence of strokes, and knowing how characters are written helps you learn to read them -- even if you don’t actually ever write them. I realize that seems strange, but trust me. An attractive paperback called Learn to Write Chinese Characters is by Johan Bjorksten: a book in English written by a Swede to teach formation of Chinese characters. Lots of other books teach fundamentals of writing, including Sussman’s (mentioned above). One must be able to count the separate strokes of a character in order to find it in a dictionary, and that counting is not as straightforward as you might imagine.
• Characters as unrecognizable pictures. Chinese writing began as a series of stylized drawings of objects or more abstract things such as actions and ideas. Writing has evolved so much over the millennia, however, that you cannot guess the meaning of a character by its appearance (with a few trivial exceptions like the numbers one, two and three).
• Bipartite characters. About 80% of Chinese characters are made of two parts, called the radical and the phonetic. (Most of the 200-some radicals also stand alone as separate characters.) The radical reflects something about the meaning of the character and the phonetic something about its sound. Nevertheless, you cannot guess the meaning of a character even if you already know the radical and the phonetic. The main reason to learn to recognize radicals is that one must use them to enter a Chinese-English dictionary. I bought the Oxford Chinese Minidictionary just before leaving for China (published 2001) and carried it everywhere in my admittedly bulging pocket so I could try to look up characters I hadn’t yet learned.
• Character pairs. There is a strong tendency for Chinese words to be of two syllables, and since each character is a syllable, pairs of characters often constitute a word. If you know the two characters of a pair as separate one-syllable words, you can probably guess something about the pair’s meaning. Take for example a pair seen in every city: the character for electric followed by that for speech, together meaning telephone.
• Meaning without sound. As characters are not phonetic representations of any particular spoken language, one can learn their meanings without having to learn how they are pronounced in Mandarin (or Cantonese, or Japanese). That may seem crazy, but it is a unique linguistic experience, and it’s basically the way I did things, later going back to learn Mandarin pronunciations for some of the characters. What great fun it was to be able to read characters on a sign for "long wall" (which we call the Great Wall) or "public peace" the door of a police car (see photo below). I still haven’t the faintest idea how the first three of those four characters are said, but I can read them when I see them.
  
  Police car in Shanghai, 18 October 2001. Digital photo by Jack P. Hailman.

• Breakfast. All our hotels had separate western and Chinese breakfast rooms, and it was assumed that we Americans would all eat in the western room, which we did. The buffets always had cereals, eggs, bacon or sausage (or both), toast, fruits, and so on; sometimes also French toast or waffles (not very good), plus kinds of meats, vegetables and fruits that many Europeans eat for breakfast. Whether we would have been allowed to eat in the Chinese breakfast room if we had asked, I do not know. One of our guides said the fare there was noodle based; in southern China it would probably be rice based.
• Lazy Susan format. All lunches and dinners were of Chinese food served on a large Lazy Susan in the middle of a circular table usually seating eight. Some restaurants seemed restricted to tour groups, but many served locals as well, either in the same large dining hall or in separate smaller rooms. Those people who appeared to be natives ate either at the same type of table we did or at smaller tables, but I don’t ever remember having seen a menu in anyone’s hands.
  
  Typical Chinese dining table with Lazy Susan in center. Digital photo (by Jack Hailman) taken in Old Winter Palace, now a restaurant, in Beihai park, near the Forbidden City in Beijing.
• Place settings. Each place had a small plate and usually a soup bowl with a porcelain spoon that one might be tempted to characterize as a strange small ladle. A pair of chopsticks was always provided, and usually also a fork. Where no fork was set, you could always get one by asking for it. There was always a drinking glass and sometimes a teacup (see Drinks, below). A much too small paper napkin usually completed the setting.
• Negotiating chopsticks. About five of us on the tour always ate lunch and dinner with chopsticks; a few other persons used them occasionally or for part of a meal. I got more proficient with practice, and when I was "on" could pick up the tiniest bit of anything, but every so often I’d simply lose all dexterity for reasons I could never completely figure out. Go with any grip that works for you, but here’s the "official" way to hold chopsticks. The handle of the bottom stick rests in the V between the thumb and index finger while the shaft is held firm by the end of the ring finger. The top stick--which is the one that moves--is held between the thumb and index finger, and rests on top of the middle finger. When I had troubles, it was often useful to grip the chopsticks closer to or farther from the ends. I’m so right handed that I can hardly scratch my head with the left hand, but for some incomprehensible reason found that I could use chopsticks almost as well with my left as with my right hand. That bit of surprising ambidexterity proved useful when my right hand tired of the unaccustomed demands being put upon it.
• Serving. There was no discernible difference between lunch and dinner. Each course was set on the Lazy Susan by a waitress who did (rare) or did not (usual) announce what it was. Each person took a small amount (or none, if they wanted to pass it by) onto her or his plate. The Chinese take food onto their plates with their chopsticks, but suspecting that was a mechanism for spreading infections, we opted to use our soup spoons for serving as the soup usually came near the end of the meal when the spoon was no longer needed for dishing food onto our plates. Whether the cold that circulated through the group was spread by some unconscious violation of the agreement, I don’t know.
• Courses. The first five dishes or so were appetizers. Then came about eight or more courses of meal, basically dishes of meat or cooked vegetables (or a mixture). The steamed rice was the last of these courses, a sequence that surprised us. Then came the soup, and finally dessert, which was almost always slices of watermelon. When it wasn’t watermelon, it was cantaloupe, which pleased me as I happen not to like watermelon (and I have other peculiarities, too).
• The food. Although I’m usually a very conservative eater, I always ate a little of everything (except watermelon) in China. We often played games guessing what it was that we were eating, but we rarely learned which guess was right, if any. Alan Brush reports of his experience that "If the waitperson didn't know, it was often possible to find someone at an adjacent table who had adequate English to at least identify phyla (or animal, vegetable or mineral)." There was frequently one sweet-and-sour dish, but someone in our group learned that it is not usual Chinese fare, at least in the north; the restaurants had discovered that Americans like it. We never saw a fortune cookie, and I suspect it is an American invention. Although food looked distinctive from meal to meal, in fact it tasted to me pretty much the same. I think it was the monotony of tastes rather than a dislike for the food that drove many people to eat at the KFC next door to our hotel in Suzhou. (They said the menu was virtually identical with KFCss in the States.)
• Regional foods. Mostly our meals typified northern China with some local specialities such as Peking Duck in Beijing and dumplings in Xi’an. Twice in Beijing we ate at a Shandong restaurant (Shandong being an eastern province between Beijing and Shanghai). Some members of our group did not the like Shandong meals, but I found them good and in fact not very different from most other meals. In Shanghai we once ate at a Mongolian barbecue restaurant, which was great fun. You load up your plate with meat and vegetables at a sort of salad bar and the chefs cook the jumbled up whole thing on a huge grill. Chinese restaurants in the U.S. tend to serve mainly Cantonese food typical of the southern Guangdon (formerly Canton) Province. We never encountered manifestly Cantonese cuisine but perhaps there are speciality restaurants in Beijing.
• Drink. One glass of drink came with each meal; any refills had to be purchased. The choice was almost always among Coke, bottled water, and beer. The beer is only 3% to 3.5% alcohol and considered a soft drink in China. Our last dinner in Beijing included a small glass of dark red wine, which packed a wallop, obviously having a higher alcohol content than American and European red wines. A teacup and green tea were provided at fewer than half the restaurants--more in the Shanghai area than in Beijing. In some cases a waitress poured an allotted cup of tea but in other places the pot was left on the Lazy Susan for refills. Teahouses, by the way, seem to be a rare and endangered species in modern China.

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