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March 4, 2005

Haggling for 10 RMB

So I say, Great! I know how to get us to where he wants to go. His wife told him the previous evening to get her one of these Prada knock-offs, but one in yellow. We'd seen one over the weekend in a backstreet "warehouse" that was hidden from the police because, apparently, there are legitimate knock-offs and illegitimate knock-offs. (Not to be confused, of course, with legitimate and illegitimate knock-ups.)

So we head back to the Renaissance in Pudong, write up the report, and head out to Yu Gardens again. We dodge males and females, most of them seemingly half my size (I'm just over six foot and my boss is as well, and he really stands out because of his curly gray-white hair... all around us is a sea of black hair) and they're surging up to us every five feet crying, "Rolex? You need watch?" and I think, Gee it's like they don't realize I've been asked that same question by 20 different people in the last block. And besides I already got my wife a geniune Franck Muller the previous day nearby, which normally costs $11,000 anywhere else and I got it for 350 RMB, about $43 US ($1 US equals 8.25 RMB).

I get us to the right street stall, but no one's there and I motion to some of the guys standing around, since my Mandarin is, uh, nil, and they point to a guy who happily leads us back to the alleyway behind the storefronts.

There's always a bunch of tiny apartment shanties everywhere, and he takes us past the place we visited over the weekend, and I stop and point to it and say, "Hey! This is it!" and he smiles and nods and motions us to follow him, saying "Same, same."

So we follow him through the narrow walkways into even more shanty-like conditions, with clothes hanging on lines, and people of all sorts milling about. It's all relatively clean compared to other places we'd seen and there's no danger signals going off on my inner radar, so we follow him through an open doorway and into a small 9' by 9' low-ceiling room with curtains on three sides and cheap flourescents washing out the colors.

He locks the door behind us (No police!) and draws back the pale green cotton curtains, revealing all kinds of purses, Prada, Gucci, Coach, Louis Vuittan, and we know they are real leather because he whips out a lighter and waves the open flame under a purse to prove they're not plastic and says, "See? Geniune, rea' reather!" and we smile and nod with him, but he doesn't have the yellow real-leather Prada, just a black one, and that's no good, so we point to it and say, "Yellow, yellow Prada."

And we make ready to leave, and he stops us nodding, "No, no, yellow, okay" and pulls out his cell phone (everyone in Shanghai, no matter their economic condition, seems to have a cell phone) and makes a call, and he talks rapidly, forcefully, finally getting the message across to whomever he needs to get the message across to, and he says, "Okay, okay, wait" and he pulls out several little suitcases of watches to keep us occupied, which we aren't all that interested in, we came for a very specific purse.

And then he pulls out the Mont Blanc pens, excuse me, a Mont Blanc collection of fine writing instruments, but instead of hundreds of dollars, we can get rea' ones for 80 RMB, about 10 bucks US, but that's not good enough for us so we do the haggle and get him down to 70 RMB, and we each get a pen, because they actually seem to write well, and they look and feel good.

And we're still waiting for the yellow Prada, but we figure that we should settle on a price, so we pull out the black Prada and he pulls out his calculator (there must be thousands of these being used in street stalls every day in Shanghai) and he punches in 480 RMB, which is $60, an outrageious amount (I got a nice Coach two days earlier for 160 RMB, down from 350, and I know if I had walked away a few times, I could have saved at least another 20 or 30 RMD, that is $2 to $4 US) and so we get him down finally to $320, because there is a matching wallet inside and a colleague got one just like it for nearly that amount the previous day, and we're just considering haggling for 10 RMB more, when the ceiling creaks.

We look up and our smiling salesman says, "No worry, no worry, it's just my wife" and for the first time we notice that in one part of this low ceiling is a 2-foot square cutout hole and a small ladder. And a small smiling woman comes down the ladder with their son, who's less than 2 years old.

And everything slows down.

I notice that there's a small refrigerator in this little warehouse. Some cosmetics sit on a small shelf above the refrigerator.

There's a mirror on the wall, placed in such a way that by easing over to it, I can look up into it, through the hole in the ceiling and get a reverse image of the corner of a mattress, a tiny dresser and a chair.

I look at my boss. It dawns on both of us that, Oh My God, this tiny little split level 9 by 9 warehouse is a family home.

And they're all smiling, including the boy. Just then all desire goes out of us to haggle over 10 RMB.

The yellow purse arrives, we pay more than we had agreed, and all three of them are very happy having done business with these Americans. He presses his business card into our hands, even though it's completely in Chinese. We're his new friends.

We leave them with their smiles, which we know include a glowing satisfaction at our thinking we're leaving with such incredible bargains...

...and thinking back on their smiles, the smile of that child, I'm sure we did.

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Posted by witnit at March 4, 2005 12:00 AM

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