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Life in China Tea Shops And Tricksters
Life in China Tea Shops And Tricksters | Tea Shops And Tricksters |
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I’d kicked myself for not standing up for the Chinese more when a friend of my father’s swanned over to me the night before my flight and warned “watch out for those Chinese, they’re a dishonest bunch.” I’d decided to bite my lip rather than get into an argument and had regretted it ever since.
But as I sat in a tacky looking tea shop in Beijing’s Wanfujing shopping district faced with a $120 bill for two teas I hadn‘t drunk and a bowl of fruit I hadn‘t ordered I started to think that maybe I had been wrong to so easily discount his words of warning. Twenty minutes before, two young women had spotted me strolling through one of the district’s vast shopping malls and, after a friendly chat, had convinced me to come for a tea with them so they could “practice their English”. My suspicions should have been aroused when they walked me to an empty, themed tea room hidden behind the mall, nodded to the waitress, directed me into an enclosed booth in the corner and ordered two extortionately priced teas and a bowl of exotic looking fruit. But it was only my third day in Beijing, a city I hoped to live in for the foreseeable future. I was in a naïve state of travel-induced excitement and the last thing I was thinking about was being conned by two chatty English students. Now here I was, shut away in the corner of a tea shop with two girls who in seconds had turned from charming to insulting, a sour-faced waitress adamant that I should pay (“give me dollars, give me Euros”), an appalling lack of Mandarin and a bill for enough cash to buy three brand new bicycles or two nights in a five-star city hotel. After a lengthy argument, threats by the waitress to call security and a fake display of tears from the students, I paid a third of the bill (the equivalent of one week’s rent) and stormed out. My new found scepticism was close to being compounded when I cut across Tiananmen Square a few hours later only to be harassed by the ‘art student’ gangs who gather there to try to trick tourists into shelling out $200 a piece for badly made prints. But I was saved from slipping into a state of permanent distrust and bitterness when my housemate later recalled that he had had exactly the same experience - with the slight difference that the English students he ate with were simply good-natured people who wanted to chat, rather than con, their new friend. And so it seems that in China, like anywhere else in the world, it’s unhelpful to make generalisations about the people. Since the incident in the tea shop my experience of Beijingers has been that they are overwhelmingly honest - contracts may not be worth the paper they are written on and saving face has led to a few disagreements but I’ve yet to be swindled by a cabbie, shop keepers have chased after me waving money when I’ve unwittingly overpaid them and I’ve been wined and dined by a group of complete strangers. Tom Mackenzie Tom is a British journalist who moved from Finsbury Park, London, to Chaoyang District, Beijing, at the beginning of the year. Having spent nearly three years as a reporter for a weekly tabloid covering stabbings, shootings and celebrity shenanigans in north London he decided it was time for a new challenge and moved to the capital in a bid to learn the lingo, dabble with some freelance writing and familiarise himself with Chinese culture. |
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