Haggling

When we were growing up in New Jersey, we would often go to Chinatown in New York City for a good meal and then Chinese groceries at the local shops. We were often embarrassed to enter the shops with my mom because she would always haggle with the shopkeepers, trying to get a bargain. It was even worse when she did it in New Jersey where it just wasn’t done. Sometimes though it would work and so it went on.

I thought that this was simply something my mom did. Little did I know that in China haggling is de rigeur. When you want to buy an item, you find out what the price is and then offer anywhere from a quarter to a third of the price. They will certainly lower the price. If they don’t come down to what you want to pay, walk away. Often they will chase you down with a lower price.

At first this dance was getting kind of old. I was like, “please just tell my how much it costs.” But it’s just the way it’s done and you just don’t pay the first price that is offered.

One dollar is equivalent to eight yuan. Sometimes, you have to keep yourself from getting carried away with the haggle. Once, I was haggling over the price of a t-shirt. The salesperson had come down from 80 RMB to 25 RMB and I was haggling over another 2-5 RMB. It finally occurred to me that I was getting a t-shirt for about $3 and the 25-50¢ I was holding out for wasn’t going to kill me. I had gotten caught up in “sport haggling.”

Obviously knowing how to count in Chinese is useful but all salespeople have calculators. They will enter their price on the calculator and show it to you. You then take the calculator and enter in your offer and then the game begins.

Another way to communicate is by using the Chinese system of hand gestures to communicate numbers. They have a great system of counting to ten using one hand. Here it is:

Here’s some related trivia, in basketball, jersey numbers used to be limited to numbers 0-5 such as 1 to 5, 10 to 15, 20 to 25, and so on. This was so that referees could easily use their hands to signal to the scorekeeper the jersey number of the player who committed the foul.

Learning Chinese as a child

Today, Hua Mei has her first day in preschool. Wow, that was fast. It’s kind of exciting, scary and sad. She’ll be going to a Chinese immersion preschool twice a week. It’s not far from Karen’s work so that is really convenient.

I expect that Hua Mei will learn Chinese pretty quickly. I try to speak some Chinese to her at home. She has also been taking Chinese class for a year on Saturday mornings at Macalester. She has a good ear and her tones are much better than mine.

We also have a number of childrens dvds that Hua Mei will watch. She really likes the two Follow Jade dvds. We also have some dvds of the Mei Mei series which I think are good but Hua Mei prefers Jade. She’s also likes to watch the Ni Hao, Kai-lan series. It just finished its first season of twenty shows on Nickelodeon. A second season has been ordered.

The Special Edition Mulan dvd has a Mandarin language track that Hua Mei asks to listen to occasionally. We also watch a Chinese cartoon called Da tou er zi, xiao tou ba ba that she likes a lot.

It’s our hope that Hua Mei and Xia Mei will both be fluent in Chinese. When my family lived in St Louis, Grace and I both took Chinese language classes as kids but after we moved to New Jersey, we did not have that opportunity. Even though my parents conversed in Chinese at home and also spoke to us in Chinese, we always replied in English and so never really learned the tones and our vocabulary is fairly limited. Our understanding is okay but our speaking is poor. Having formal classes should help Hua Mei and Xia Mei a lot.

Update: Evidently pre-school went well today. Hua Mei came home and asked to watch Jade and then Kai-lan.

Speaking Chinese

As we start to plan our trip, I’m going to need to brush up on my Chinese.  I can understand some since my parents spoke to us in Chinese when we were growing up.  Unfortunately, we kids always spoke in English. I can speak some but my tones are dire.  My vocabulary isn’t particularly extensive and I am blissfully illiterate. While working at the U, I audit a year of Chinese so I can at least read pinyin which helps with phrase books and dictionaries.  Before we went to China last time, I went through the Pimsleur Mandarin series.  That was excellent and helped a lot. The nciku website is also an excellent resource.  We’ll bring a pocket dictionary and the Chinese at a Glance phrase book was very useful while we were there.  I’ll try to study that over the next couple of months.

Actually I was amazed at how much Chinese came back to me when I was over there.  For the most part, people understood what I said and I was able to converse.  I even was able to have conversations with cabbies when we drove around Beijing.  Words flowed out that I don’t think I could have recalled if you asked me.  That was pretty cool.  I was also able to follow along watching some TV shows.  Someday I would love to live in China for six months or a year and finally become fluent.

I’m looking forward to having my older sister Grace with us.  She has a much better vocabulary than I so that will help a lot.  In addition, Karen and Natalie are both taking Chinese classes at Minnesota China Academy Saturday mornings at Macalester.

Since most people speak Mandarin throughout China, we should be in pretty good shape in Jiangxi. Last time when we were in Guangzhou, I was able to get by just fine with Mandarin. Karen could speak a few words too and she got the reputation on Shamian Island as the American who could speak Chinese.