Cracked.
Five Flavors of Chapstick,
a Huge Bottle of Booze,
and Crackboy with Chisels
Enliven the Xi'an Experience.
What Do You Think
the Sheep Stick Tastes Like?
By David James
DATELINE: Friday, February 21, 2003
Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China
One vexing thing about Xi'an is that it's pretty dry. So my lips are crackin' and splitin' all over the place. It finally got to the point where I decided to break down and spend the twenty cents for chapstick.
I wandered over to the pharmacy to buy some, but I had no idea what the word for chapstick was in Chinese. I attempted to explain that my lips were "gan pi" (dry). And I needed them to be "shi" (wet). The female clerk seemed baffled at first, and then she was strugglin' mightily to suppress a smile.
I supposed she was amused at my American accent, but the truth is that my recollection of the word for "dry" was a more than a little off the mark. Later I remembered that my pal Matthew did indeed say that "gan pi" was the word for dry, but only after he told us that there are two kinds of local beer, Hans 2000 and a generic flavor known as "dry beer," which is called "gan pi."
'My Lips Are Dry Beer.'
So the scene in the pharmacy was like this: A foreigner walks into the place, strolls up to a counter, and — proud of his mastery of the Chinese language — says, "My lips are dry beer. I need something to make them wet."
I think it was just too much for the clerk to handle. She sends me to another counter. I'm sure she was communicating with some weird hand signals and pointing when I had my back turned, because by the time I got over to her friend's counter, the second clerk was anxious to hear for herself what had caused all the subtle commotion across the room.
I repeated that my lips were indeed dry beer, and that's why I had been sent to her. She goes through a series of hand waving maneuvers, saying something unintelligible to me, and then sends me back to the first counter, biting her lip to keep from laughing. At this point I'm sure that I was the only one in the entire pharmacy who wasn't in on the joke.
Back at the first counter, all I heard was suppressed laughter while the clerk said: "Oh" ... snicker snicker ... "you want chapstick" ... chuckle chuckle.
Five Flavors of Lip Balm.
Happy to have communicated this entirely in Chinese, and still oblivious to the joke, I was feeling in full control of the situation. On the counter before me she sets down a mysterious array of five "flavors" of chapstick.
#1. Peach
So far so good. If all else fails, I can come back to this one.
#2. Grape
Hey, hey, hey, looking good. Grape I can handle.
#3. Strawberry
Now I'm happy! I'm a big fan of strawberry chapstick. In fact, the strawberry chapstick I carried around when I was a mere kid used to have big teeth marks in it. Yes indeed ... BIG fan of strawberry.
#4. Avocado
Hmm ... not a common flavor, but each to his own.
#5. Sheep
Uh... mmm ... excuse me? Sheep? I'm not sure if this flavor was supposed to represent some abstract cultural meaning I couldn't decipher, but even in China, one might admit to some surprise over a flavor called Sheep. I mean, I've never licked a sheep before. And what would your girlfriend say? "What is this!? Sheep flavored chapstick! I think we're going to have to break up. I never did like kissing ewe."
I opted for the strawberry. Was I a little curious about the other flavors? Maybe. But hey, a kid has to have his strawberry fix, doesn't he?
In China, chapstick is just a taste of some of the differences 'tween this place and home.
A Broken Key
Opens the Door to Adventure.
It was late one night, a Sunday night to be precise, and we (me and my friend Marlin) had just gotten off from a long day of teaching. We were invited to a going-away party for one of our fellow teachers, but stopped at a fried noodle joint to have a quick dinner. Since our apartment was nearby, I decided to race home and change for the party. I told Marlin to wait for me as I dashed out the noodle-joint door. At my place I took out the key, put it in the lock, turned it to the right, and SNAP! The stupid key broke off! This definitely stinks! After a futile attempt to extract it, I headed back to the restaurant. It was 10:30 p.m. All the key makers were surely in bed. After consultation with my roomie, we decided to wait until morning to figure out how to get into our apartment. Surely one of our fellow teachers at the going-away party would offer a crash pad for two outcasts.
Since this was a going-away party, we decided over noodles to get a little going-away present for the guest of honor. We were thinking of what to bring when all of a sudden it hit us. A bottle of premium booze would be a great gift indeed!
Some Time Ago....
FLASH BACK: Some months ago at a very nice Hunanese restaurant (Hunan is a province of China), we sat down beside a table of revelers, locals who were drinking and yelling and having a good ole time. Almost as soon as we foreigners sat down, some of our liquored-up neighbors decided to chat us up. Our dear pal Matthew, the fluent one, was still with us at that time, so we had an able translator. The local guys asked, "Where are you from?" When we said "America," one of their pals pulled them back to the table, but they broke free and chatted us up again. "What are you doing here?" We told them we were teachers. Again, one of their sober friends pulled them back to the table. Again, they broke free. "You said you're from where?" "America". Well, the tug-of-war went on and on until the rowdy group decided to go. All of them except one guy, one of the "happy" guys, who was not too drunk to carry on a conversation. We invited him to join the six of us, and he graciously accepted. All of a sudden there appeared on the table in front of us a bottle of very high-class liquor. What to do, we mumbled and wondered: If the booze on the table knocked us out like it did the Chinese guys who had just left, then maybe we shouldn't imbibe. "We're working now. We can't drink too much," Matthew said on the group's behalf. But then, Marlin and Deborah broke solidarity and decided to have just a little taste. Wow! Great! In no time we were all toasting and boasting, time and again, buying more bottles, and thoroughly enjoying the moment of boozy fellowship.
NOW FLASH FORWARD TO THE PRESENT: We knew what we absolutely had to bring to the going-away party: a bottle of that high-class Hunanese liquor.
A Really Big Bottle!
So we head off in a taxi to the restaurant. When we get there, we point to the bottle, all nicely wrapped up, and tell the clerk we want it "to go." They oblige, and then ask if we want to buy some more. "Nope, that's it," we reply, but just then one of them lugs up a huge jug of the booze, informing us that we can have a wholesale special 5-kg plastic jug for only 150 RMB.
I look at Marlin, he looks at me: Are we thinking in unison? This could be ours! Maybe it was the idea of sitting at home and sipping this stuff while talking philosophy. Maybe it was the thought of sharing this delicious and potent elixir with many a dear friend. Maybe ... No, let's be frank: It was probably nothing more than the idea of owning this freaking HUGE bottle of Hunanese liquor that drove us to reach deep into our pockets. We bit, and we bought. We did.
The party went well, and time drifted toward 2 o'clock in the a.m. We decided it was time to say our farewells and find a bed. There were about 15 people there. As best we could remember, we were offered sleeping spaces in seven different places. However, every offer led directly to a living room couch, and each living room was presented as too darned cold for comfortable sleeping. In fact, one guy said that ice formed on his walls every night.
Solution? We knew that the bathhouses stayed open 24 hours. Need I say more? We would simply go to a bathhouse and take a long, really long bath. At the time (it was drifting toward 3:00 a.m. by now), the idea just screamed of genius.
What Do You Think She Said?
So we go back into the city center and begin our search. We find this little place. Turns out that it's not actually a bathhouse, but a massage parlor. They offer a two-hour massage for 20 RMB. And then we could relax for 10 RMB/hour. What more could a man ask for? The fun began.
They take us into this little room for two and start pounding. In retrospect, I'll admit it probably wasn't the best of places to spend the night, but at the time we didn't really care. I was just about to fall asleep when this girl says something to Marlin. We had no idea, so we just shook our heads and smiled.
She leaves the room. She returns with a man. I will try to describe this man, although words cannot do him justice. He looked, as Marlin so adeptly put it, like a man with a crack habit sufficiently developed to make any dealer proud. He puts a leather bag on Marlin's table and unrolls it to reveal a set of steel devices that looked suspiciously like chisels. He glances down at Marlin's foot and says: "Teng?"
I 'Teng' It Might Hurt.
Anyone who has studied Chinese knows that a full array of tonal intricacies complicates the language. Two words with the same pronunciation but with slightly different tones can have vastly different meanings. We didn't really know the meaning of "Teng," so we began to narrow it down — and quickly!
We figured out in an instant that he wasn't offering us soup at this time of the night. We also realized that he probably wasn't going to tell us a story about an ancient dynasty. So there was only one option left, "pain." I was the first to figure this out, and suggested as inauspiciously as I could that the word "teng" might mean pain.
Marlin heard me at the very instant that crackboy began to demonstrate his interpretation of the word as if a series of convulsions were coursing through his body. At the same time he mouthed the dreaded word: "Teng!" Marlin wore an expression like someone being told their child would be circumcised by Dr. Loraina Bobbit. Thus began a game of survival charades, during which we figured out that Mr. Crackboy had entered the room to rid Marlin of a slightly ingrown toenail. The massage girl told us that we needn't worry cause this guy was a medical genius and would fix it for Marlin (hopefully, we thought, with as little amount of "teng" as possible). So he begins.
We Just Want to Get Some Sleep.
Crackboy's hands were about as steady as a California fault line. I know his hands slipped more than once. To cover it up, he just looked curiously at his tool as if to say, "It's not my fault. It's just a defective chisel." I was thinking, "Yeah, I'm sure the manufacturer messed up when they were making that complicated device, being a straight piece of steel and all."
Marlin survived. The medicine man left, and we were informed that our massages were done. At this point I'm sure we were offered "special service." However, our dreary appearance and obvious lack of comprehension earned us a modicum of pity. They let us go to sleep.
We awoke to a different scene entirely. All the lights were out — I mean all of them — and there was absolutely no one in sight. We remembered we were on the second floor, so we stumbled to the stairs and walked gingerly to the reception desk, only to find that the workers were fast asleep and the door was chained shut.
Who to wake up? We chose one of the women, who grunted out a number that we had to pay for our freedom. Payment rendered and accepted, she unlocked the door so we could be on our merry way — and very merry we were to be outside in the cold morning air. We found our way back to the school, got some help getting our door open, and passed out in our own little beds.
*This is the next step toward THE One World Language.
Step Twenty-Three: Your transitive verb in the rice bowl!
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