Some things in China have clearly succumbed to the pressure of the population and are efficient purely out of necessity. For example, the button that closes elevator doors here actually works: within one second of pressing it, the doors close. You can even use them to slam people in the doors if you want, which is something I once did semi-accidentally when a drunk James tried to follow me home from a tutoring-session-turned-nightclub-visit. (I still don't know how I allowed that to happen.) For safety reasons or simply because nobody's that impatient, I've never known U.S. elevator doors to do that; my friends used to joke about the button being a placebo in some sort of secret large-scale behavioral experiment. That's most definitely not the case here. In fact, I've drawn glares when I'm the closest one to the button and I let the doors close in their own time instead of scrambling to press it.
But quickly closing doors aside, a trip to the supermarket today left me standing in the checkout line forever. I don't know if it's because supermarkets are a relatively new trend here and have yet to get a high enough volume of customers to need a really high-efficiency checkout system or whether this just comes part and parcel of the general Chinese tendency towards inefficiency -- stronger, some have argued, in Sichuan than in other places. I've heard it said that this is partly due to wage systems that expect employees to be on the premises, if not actually accomplishing work, all day every day. (Although isn't that more or less the case with clocked American jobs, too?) I also reckon it's something to do with the fact that labor is awfully plentiful and terribly cheap in China, so there's been little push to automate. These are all rather wobbly claims and I wouldn't be prepared to support them, but one point can stand on observation alone: Chinese people seem about as averse to lining up as kitties are to swimming. You can see this in action when ordering food at street stands, getting on the bus, waiting for a taxi, buying tickets -- anyplace, really, including waiting to check out at the supermarket, where little old ladies have more than once zipped in front of me while I'm not paying attention. It does not make for efficient, orderly processing of customers.
Anyway, the girl ringing up my purchases was also responsible for bagging them, and she seemed to have no particular system in mind for accomplishing this. North American supermarket baggers do their work so efficiently that I'm quite certain they've been through rigorous training on how to approach weight distribution, breakable items, stacking protocols, division of food items from cleaning supplies, separation of meat from foods that won't be cooked, etc. I could be wrong: perhaps it's just enculturation in action, and those are all Western mental categories being subconsciously imposed on my groceries by the baggers? Maybe Chinese groceries live free of this sort of conceptual segregation? I sort of doubt it, honestly -- I think supermarket employees just suck at bagging here. I'm befuddled when I think of all the group training meetings I keep stumbling in on at Chinese restaurants and shops... I can't help but wonder what on earth they're learning. Bookstore assistants don't know where the different genre sections are, supermarket employees can't bag to save their grannies, receptionists can't transfer calls or find the stapler or make copies, other people spill tea on your lap or tangle you up in the clothing you want to try on; I'm going to cut the litany short before I get carried away, but in general, there seems to be a lot of overzealous-but-bumbling assistance. Which is confusing, when I compare it to my experience of Japanese service. It's certainly true that the emphasis on service is much the same -- that is, the apparent feeling that nothing is worth paying for if it doesn't include three nervous girls in uniform bobbing and hovering. Japanese service, however, tended to be crisp and quick and slick to the point that I felt bumbling and oafish just standing there trying to buy something. But I really need to break the habit of comparing China and Japan; it really is sort of apples and oranges. Or maybe yuzu and pomelos? Except it turns out that I've never actually tasted yuzu, so I have no idea how it compared. And they're both citrus, right? So that may not be apt at all, merely gratuitously regional.
Er, anyway. Potential bigoted speculations on cause aside, I had been cut in line by a young mother and an old couple before I finally made it to the register (I really must learn to queue more aggressively), and the ringing up and bagging up took another ten minutes, so by the time I made it to the elevator I was getting a little agitated. And then elevator appeared to have been programmed in some peculiar and not-obviously-systematic way, and since everyone else wanted to be shuttling between the first and third floors and only I wanted to go to the fifth, it swept from my floor to the ground floor without ever going higher at least six times before I lost count. And so I nervously and absentmindedly consumed an entire packet of sub-par Oreo knockoffs (which is to say, cookies labeled as Oreos, only in Chinese, and with a different taste from normal, which I suspect is due to cheaper ingredients). They're never really as satisfyingly Oreoey as the ones my mother so scrupulously withheld from me as a child: maybe just because these are easily accessible whenever I want them? I still suspect the ingredients. And in any case, I ate probably 15 or 20 of them by the time the elevator finally decided to go up past my floor, and I spent the rest of the evening regretting it pretty fervently.
Which brings us back to what is probably the only really worthwhile part of this much-more-windbaggy-than-planned post: the title. And that's how you say tummyache in Chinese.
Phew. There. I hope that was edifying.
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Monday, April 28, 2008
