Death by salesman

You never know what’s going to happen next around here.

On Saturday, we were just getting ready to go out when there was a ring at the doorbell. The screen on our video entry phone (on of the many ridiculous and quite unnecessary mod cons with which our flat is equipped) showed the peaked cap of one of the security guards, peering over a large package. Behind him another figure could be seen, apparently carrying a large pile of boxes.

Mystified, as we weren’t expecting any kind of delivery, Peter let him in. On arrival at the door he profferred one of the boxes and launched into an explanation.

‘Sorry’, said Peter in Chinese, ‘I don’t speak Chinese’.

Ignoring this (as they usually do), the guard continued handing over the package. He showed a list with all the flat numbers, several of which had signatures next to them. It became apparent we too were meant to sign for our box. There was much smiling and joviality. This, it seemed, was a free New Year gift for each flat, from whom we know not, but Peter signed and thanked him and off he went, quite happy.

What do you think it was? Drink? Hardly likely. Sweets? Sadly not. It was – and you’ll all be sorry you’re missing out, I’m sure – ‘Quick Frozen Glutinous Corn’. In other words, corn on the cob. At least 10 of them, loose, in a box. Every home should have one – and if you live here, it seems every home will bloomin’ well get one, whether it likes it or not.

Anyway, having started thus, our day proceeded to get weirder and weirder. We’d decided to go to the main shopping area in the city centre where there are three shopping centres side by side which we’d not visited before. Peter was keen to try and buy some shoes which would serve for wearing in the office and walking there in the snow, rather than having to change into his walking boots twice a day or risk a tumble on the ice.

The shopping centre (we only got to one) proved to be much like every other one we’ve seen in China, namely huge, glitzy, overpriced, and following an identical layout: basement – supermarket; ground floor – jewellery and cosmetics; first floor – men’s clothes; second & third floors – women’s clothes; fourth floor – household goods. Sometimes they have the same pattern but are all on one floor, in which case they replicate the thing horizontally, as it were, in huge long aisles stretching further than the eye can see. I’m not sure who these malls are designed for. Most of the goods are way outside the price range of the majority of ordinary Chinese people so they are quite often virtually empty, but in cold weather people seem to gather there as a social event, and wander around quite happily just looking at things.

Last Saturday – being the Chinese equivalent of the last shopping weekend before Christmas, I suppose – was an exception. I wouldn’t quite describe it as a retail frenzy on a British scale, but the place was heaving and people were definitely buying. There was a festive atmosphere and some live traditional music by the Clinique counter.

Shopping in China is a Trial. When you buy something in these places, it’s a huge palaver. You get take your item to the counter and they ring it through, but then they keep the item and instead give you a bill, which you have to take to a separate cash desk, not necessarily nearby. There, having used your specially sharpened elbows to fight off would-be queue-jumpers, you pay, and get a receipt which you then take back to the original desk to retrieve your purchase. If you then also want a fa piao (see earlier post if you're one of the few people on the planet, it seems, who doesn't now know what a fa piao is!), you generally have to go to yet another desk – usually miles away in an obscure corner of the shop – and queue/jostle again to present your receipt and tell them what to enter into their fa piao computer. (We now have this down to a fine art, by the way, ever since Kevin provided us with a magic piece of paper with all the requisite details written on in Chinese.)

But it’s not just this, or the language barrier, or the different sizes, or not being able to recognise the products half the time. It’s the fact that they WILL NOT leave you alone. The minute you walk into any shop, at least one assistant will immediately leap up, greet you and proceed to follow close behind you as you move around the shop, so that it’s impossible to look at anything. If you do linger over an item for more than a millisecond, he or she will start telling you about it. Protestations that you don’t speak Chinese, or even blanking them completely, have little or no effect. They may hesitate for a fraction of a second, but will then resume as though programmed.

If by any chance they do speak English and you ask them nicely (or even not nicely) to go away and leave you alone so that you can look, they merely laugh and carry on. We once spent about 10 minutes trying to explain to the girl in a Beijing hotel shop that she’d be far more likely to make a sale to a westerner if they were left in peace to look around, but it simply did not compute. Even in the supermarket they employ staff as what we call ‘pointless pointers’, whose job is to stand in front of the shelves and point to the most expensive item in their section while giving you a sales pitch. Maybe it’s just a British thing, but it makes me want to SCREAM!

The trick (if there is one) seems to be that if you really don’t want to buy, you have to get out fast. If they sense the slightest hint that you are genuinely interested in making a purchase, they get the bit between their teeth and won’t let go. Sometimes this works to their own disadvantage, such as the woman in the same Beijing hotel who was convinced we wanted to buy jade name-stamps with our Chinese zodiac sign on the top and our names specially engraved on the bottom. We liked them, but the price she was asking was astronomical so we changed our minds. She pursued us for two days, finally going to the lengths of engraving our names on for us so that she was then obliged to sell them to us at whatever price we named.

I tell you, the whole experience is so infuriating I’ve more or less given up shopping - which for me is like going into rehab.

So there’s Peter, trying on shoes. Unfortunately he didn’t know his Chinese size, but after a bit of trial and error we ascertained he was a 260 (the approximate length of the foot in millimetres, in case you’re interested – much more sensible than our system). As it was busy, we’d managed to look at several and narrow it down without attracting the attention of the staff, but when it came to the point of asking for the left shoe there was nothing else for it. There were several girl assistants, dressed in smart uniforms with fab red and gold waistcoats, but our case was taken up by a chap whom we’d at first mistaken for a customer, as he was wearing only scruffy jeans and a bomber jacket, with no official badges or markings. However, as he seemed to be telling the girls what to do and they seemed not to object, we had to assume he did indeed belong to the store.

Peter tried on lots of pairs of shoes but none was suitable. When he finally found a pair he did like, they only had them in brown, and he wanted black. This all took some time; you know how it is. Chap in Jeans was highly attentive, but eventually he began to lose patience. He started persuading Peter to try on other pairs in size 255 or 265. Enthusiastic nodding greeted his protests that they were too small or large. Shoe Man kept producing brown ones. It took ages to get the message through that it was black or nothing, but when it did, this was clearly too much. He pointed angrily at Peter’s own shoes, which were brown, as if to say ‘Well, brown ones were obviously good enough for you before, so what’s wrong with mine?’, and started pulling black shoes off the shelf at random and virtually forcing Peter to try them on, irrespective of style or size. He seemed to be at his wits’ end.

After quite a lot of this, I suggested to Peter that maybe today just wasn’t his day on the shoe front, and that maybe we should go and look around the rest of the shopping centre before we actually died. He agreed, and thanking our friend profusely for his help, we set off. But Shoe Guy wasn’t taking No for an answer and began following us. We quickened our pace, and even hid behind some shirts, but as we were about to make our escape upstairs he cornered us at the bottom of the escalator and, grinning, beckoned Peter into what I took to be a stockroom through a concealed entrance at the back of a small shop.

A minute or so later, Peter re-emerged and called me. ‘You’ve got to see this,’ he said. Following him and the Shoe Guy, I stepped through the back of the shop – into a (literally) parallel universe. Attached to the shopping centre we were in, stretching away into darkness, was another narrow corridor of shops running alongside, but where ours were huge and brightly lit, these were poky and dark, with things hanging from the ceiling. Every single shop seemed to sell shoes. There was no obvious entrance or exit other than that which we had used, but customers were milling about as if oblivious to the 21st century going on next door. It was straight out of Harry Potter.

Peter was ushered into one of the little stalls, where our pal and several girls again attempted to bully him into trying on every pair of black shoes they had, becoming quite agitated when he argued that they weren’t his size. Finally I managed to bundle him out and get back onto our own side of the time portal, but our stalker could still be seen hanging about for quite a while, watching us as we walked around, and about an hour later he materialised beside us yet again, several floors up, and seemed to be saying that he had just two more pairs for Peter to try on if he would only come back downstairs. I half expected to see him chasing after our taxi, brandishing black shoes, as we drove home.

Maybe the ski shops of Edinburgh should take a leaf out of this guy’s book.

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.