Fa piao

Above is the only word of Chinese I have used so far. It’s the first one I learnt, and is still the only one that Peter’s boss knows after nearly a year in China. What could be SO important?, you may ask. It doesn’t mean ‘Hello’ or ‘Thank you’, though I can just about manage both of those as well. It doesn’t mean ‘Toilet’, or even ‘Beer’, which are the two words we always say anyone should learn (preferably as a pair!) in any language.

No, prosaically enough it means ‘receipt’. But not just any old receipt. The little scrap of paper printed in purple ink which is spewed out by your Chinese cash register, just like any other the world over, is not a fa piao. Oh dear me no. A fa piao is a special receipt or tax invoice which is issued separately from the basic receipt, and is required for claiming anything back on expenses, which means that we need one for every hotel, every flight, every meal in a restaurant, every trip to the supermarket – be it for a monthly stock-up or just for a pint of milk (not that you can get a pint of milk, but that’s another story) – every household appliance, kitchen utensil, book, essential item of clothing, probably non-essential item of clothing, and so on. Fa piao, fa piao, fa piao.

Here’s how my first attempt at obtaining one went. Last Friday I popped into the supermarket near the hotel in Harbin. Having ridden the storm of Chinese shop staff pestering you with their incessant sales pitch and refusing to be deterred even when you make it clear you have no idea what they’re talking about, which happens whenever you go shopping, I took my goods to the checkout and as she handed me the receipt, bracing myself, I ventured, ‘Fa piao?’

She said something and gesticulated in the direction of the exit. I’d been expecting this, as I knew that it would be issued at some kind of customer service desk, so I smiled, nodded and headed that way. At the exit into the main shopping mall, a bored-looking girl was checking and stamping – well, glancing at and stamping – everyone’s till receipt as they left the shop. ‘Fa piao?’ I tried again, a little less sure of myself. Without looking up she waved her hand further on, and eventually, about 100 yards outside the shop proper, was a desk proudly proclaiming ‘ISSUE TAX INVOICE’ in English, along with a lot of Chinese stuff.

A staff of three girls in red polo shirts were behind the desk, and a lone female customer sat on one of a row of red plastic stools in front of it. Confident I was in the right place this time, I approached the desk and offered my till receipt. ‘Fa piao?’ I repeated once more.

‘Blah blah blah blah fa piao blah-blah blah blah. Blah!’ she replied in some agitation, shaking her head and gesticulating animatedly.

I couldn’t see how this could possibly be the case. As supporting evidence I pointed to the ‘ISSUE TAX INVOICE’ sign above my head with an expression of some affront. ‘Blah blah! Blah blah blah-blah blah. Blah-blah. Blah blah blah!’, she insisted.

‘Sorry, I don’t understand’, I said, feeling like a fool. All four of them were staring at me now. The three girls looked at each other and laughed. ‘English?’ I asked hopefully, although for some reason I found myself pronouncing it ‘eengleesh?’, as though me sounding foreign would somehow help us to understand one another. More looks and more laughter. Laughter in China, I tried to remind myself, is often used to cover social embarrassment and doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re hilarious. Though in this case it may have done. Eventually the lady sitting at the counter came to my rescue. ‘You can take this’ (indicating my receipt) ‘and come back in two days’, she said. Without waiting to try and find out why, I said ‘Ok’ and scuttled off.

At the weekend, Peter went to the same supermarket for more stuff, and came back announcing that fa piao’s were only issued on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I have no idea how he found this out, but on Monday morning I duly presented myself and my two receipts at the fa piao counter. Monday morning was clearly peak fa piao hour. There was a queue, headed by a lady with what looked like her entire extended family in tow and a giant wad of receipts, which the red-shirt girls were arguing with her and each other over, whilst jabbing at a calculator and attempting to convert them into multiple fa piao’s.

I sat on one of the stools and waited. Impatience in China, I intoned inwardly, quoting one of our guide books, is seen as a serious character flaw – though in fact this doesn’t seem to apply to queue-jumping which is more of an Olympic sport, and one at which they excel. The enforced delay enabled me to check out a sign listing the other services offered at the desk, which included ‘Umbrella service on raining days’, ‘Give straws small spoons, toilet papers’, and ‘Filling with air the bicycle wheels’. I also observed the fa piao issue procedure, which involved adding up the receipts and filling in the details in a small triplicate book. This book had no perforations so they sliced each page out with a razor blade, carefully cutting around different sections on the stub according to some unknown criterion, and then finally used the razor blade again to slice off the bottom centimetre of the till receipts showing the totals, and stapled these to their copy of the fa piao. Nothing to it, I thought. I can handle this.

I did notice that the customers appeared to be telling them what to write and that they were asking a lot of questions, but thought maybe these people had special requirements or that they were just chatting. However, when it finally came to my turn (which wasn’t before extended family lady had left, come back again and leaned over my right shoulder to rant loudly for a full five minutes) she asked me a question. I looked blank, so she turned over the receipt, wrote something on the back in Chinese characters and looked at me expectantly. I shook my head again, she gave up and went on the the next person (a guy on my left who’d been desperate to push in front of me the whole time). I waited a minute, saw she had no intention of pursuing my case and then left.

Peter, at lunch: ‘Oh, they just want to know who to make it out to.’ (How does he KNOW this stuff?). ‘Here, take my business card. Give them this company name. It’ll be fine.’ ‘Are you sure that’s all they need?’, I say. ‘Oh yes, definitely’, he says.

So, fa piao, Take Three. Monday afternoon. I return to the desk. Smaller queue. Girl who tried to serve me in the morning goes past, smiles at me. I wave the business card with a knowing look. She smiles again. Guy with the girls behind the desk this time, who seems to want to take charge. ‘Blah blah fa piao blah-blah?’ he enquires on seeing me. I nod. He nods and indicates the queue. I nod again. So far so good. I wait. Again.

Alas, however, the magic business card seems to cause no end of confusion. Whether this is due to the fact that it’s a company they’ve never heard of, or the illegibility (to a Chinese person) of the acronym-style logo, or what, is unclear, but the girl runs off into the back office with it, gets all three of them looking at it; they turn it over and over, looking at both the Chinese and English sides; lots of animated discussion. I keep trying to explain, but the girls seem determined not to understand, and the guy keeps writing long screeds of Chinese on a piece of paper, finishing with a question mark, and then pushing it towards me with an enquiring look. For goodness sake, I want to say, I’m foreign, not deaf – how is you writing it down supposed to help?

Finally he takes the card and writes some version of the company name on the fa piao. He gets the calculator and tots up my receipts. Great, I think, hallelujah, we’re there. But no. He asks me something else. I shake my head. He goes through the ‘writing it down’ pantomime again. Exasperated, I say in English, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t read Chinese!’ This results in him getting his mobile out and calling Management. The conversation was, obviously, all in Chinese but was utterly comprehensible.

Fa piao guy: Sorry, boss, we got a bit of a situation down here. Idiotic foreign woman wants a fa piao but we can’t get any information out of her.
Boss (on phone): How much is it for?
FPG: Not much, about 300 yuan [about 25 quid]. Tracey here says it’s the second time she’s been in today. Doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. Bloody ridiculous. Thing is, she’s holding up the queue and we wouldn’t want anyone getting impatient for a minute, now would we?
Boss: Well it’s not worth losing sleep over, Dave. Just give her the damn fa piao and get rid of her.

So they did. I suspect all of us are traumatised by the experience.