I understand the concerns of food safety, poisoned baby formula, unsafe tires, lead in the toys and whatnot, BUT…it’s the little things about shoddy Chinese merchandise that get me most. By way of example: YJ and I recently purchased a few paintings–not an original Picasso to be sure, but not the sort of stuff you pick up at the Silk Market. The problem is hanging them. Our walls are made of a strange material that is too hard for hammers and yet crumbles mysteriously when you try to drill/screw anything into the surface.
So we went to the local market to look for those ubiquitous little “sticky hooks”, finally finding some plain white ones. (Meaning: without flowers, bugs, butterflies, bunnies, or cutesy ungrammatical English.) We took them home, followed the little instructions: 1) place on wall 2) wait 24 hours 3) hang pictures. The pictures were not heavy and we used two or three for anything that weighed more than say, our hamster.
Sure enough in the 12 hours since, our walls have been raining paintings. I mean it’s a downpour.
I mentioned this to the shopkeeper who sold the hooks–Yes I know, but I like truly futile quests with a high risk of humiliation, I am, after all, a grad student–and she replied that these kinds of hooks were “不好用.” (not useful.) When asked where she hid the useful ones, she shrugged and proceeded to ignore me. I asked again and she replied with a huffy “那边儿” (tr: “over there” but what it really means is “I have no idea so why don’t you leave me alone.” Ask most Beijingers for the location of anything not immediately in front of their noses and 8 times out of 10 this is the response you get. Such is.)
Okay, rant over.
2 responses so far ↓
1 musafiremes // Oct 8, 2007 at 7:05 pm
What a bleak picture…am seriously thinking now whether I should apply for a postdoc position in China…not to say I haven’t had any nightmares with one of her particular citizens even here in the US, right here within my own research group, but the good thing is here, they’re the ones who’d have to adapt, and not the other way round. Thus, things have improved a lot, thankfully.
2 Froog // Oct 9, 2007 at 8:35 am
I did eventually manage to get some picture hooks nailed up. The problem was finding a decent hammer. The first one I bought, the head wasn’t actually attached to the shaft in any way - it came flying off at the second or third impact, and nearly took my eye out.
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