Surely there is no scene more desperate than a bazaar full of knickknacks with no tourists around to buy them.
I visited several such bazaars in Xian. When buyers disappear, vendors develop neurotic pathologies, like zoo animals deprived of the freedom to hunt.
They followed me around, narrating my perusal in a strange, autistic monologue. “Tea pot… chop sticks… clock… bamboo… beautiful, beautiful… Mao… painting… cigarette lighter… tea pot… very cheap…”
“Yes,” I would say. “This sure is a tea pot. And I can see that it’s very cheap.” The sarcasm was an attempt to get a little breathing room. It never worked.
Some vendors pressed into my hands a steady stream of tasteless garbage that I would never in a thousand years consider buying. They were often so insistent that I was unable to browse the items I found actually interesting. Presumably the vendors were gauging my tastes based on the past purchases of fellow tourists. All I can say is: shame on you, fellow tourists. How does that watercolor of the panda mother with her cubs look on the wall of your TV room? Are you still happy with your purchase of a set of erotically carved bamboo tiles?
The most interesting bazaar was the outdoor antiques market at the gate of the Taoist temple. The market was distinguished by its almost total lack of antiques.
I wanted to believe that the items on offer were antiques. If only the vendors hadn’t all been selling identical wares, giving the impression that a massive factory somewhere in the Chinese heartland is churning out collectibles by the truckload.
If only the wares weren’t caked in soil, giving the impression that they had only recently been exhumed from the vendors’ backyards in a hasty aging process. The Chinese seem to believe that the greater the amount of dirt on an object, the older tourists will think it is. I wonder if real archaeologists work this way. “Man, this amphora is filthy. It’s gotta be, what, nine, ten thousand years old?”
If only so many of the objects weren’t such obvious fakes, such as the perfectly preserved dinosaur skeletons or the antique coins with misspellings.
Nevertheless, authenticity isn’t the issue in an antiques bazaar. The important thing is to be satisfied with the price you pay, given the assumption that you are purchasing a forgery.
As the only tourist in the market (a buyer’s market, if you will) price wasn’t much of an issue. Adam Smith was in my corner, and the vendors were about to get a taste of the invisible fist.
Not that I relished the situation. I’m the sort of mushy capitalist who feels guilty when I get too good a deal. But I steeled myself with the thought of how much I would hate my purchases when I got home, and entered the ring.
Bargaining was embarrassingly easy. Typically, I started by writing down an offer of effectively zero. Say, five yuan. The vendor would smile (the smile itself a sign of desperation) and give me a slightly condescending look that was meant to suggest, “Clearly you are not experienced in the art of appraising priceless antiquities. Let me suggest that you start with a higher bid.” They would hand the piece of paper back to me, I would cross out the number 5, and then write the number 5 again, this time underlined.
The vendor would then make a counteroffer, say, 120 yuan, and indicate with a jocular hand motion that now was the time for me to make a real bid. You know how this works, the vendor would imply. We’ll go back and forth for a few minutes until we meet in the middle. Everyone walks away a winner.
So I would right down the number 5 again. If we hit an impasse I would develop a sudden interest in the neighboring stall. Often I had an audience of twenty people for this bargaining process. No one had anything else to do.
The final price was usually somewhere around ten yuan. I’d like to say I was getting great deals, but probably I was just paying fair price. (Because many of these items will likely end up as gifts, I want to stress that their true value, if one can even measure the value of such rare and beautiful objects, is likely in the tens of thousands of dollers. Excuse me, dohlars. Dahlyrs? It’s the thought that counts.)
Then I went insane and bought an “authentic Qing dynasty painting.” I had been debating with myself whether to buy any artwork. The little haloed, harp-strumming interior decorator sitting on my right shoulder kept needling me about the fact that I was never going to be able to pull off “East meets West” decor in my hypothetical future apartment. The pointy-tailed, pitchfork-toting decorator on my left shoulder kept hissing in my ear about how cheap the artwork was. And artwork is definitely an area where you want to shop for value.
Then I spied the old painting, which stood out for not looking exactly like all the other artwork being peddled to tourists. (“Four seasons! Four seasons! Spring, summer, fall, winter!” the art hawkers keep shouting at me, perhaps in the hope I’d go for the boxed set.)
The seller claimed the work was 200 years old. Even if it was a Qing Dynasty painting (and that’s a mighty big if), it could have been considerably younger than that. The Qing Dynasty ended around 1911.
I scrutinized the painting for signs of fakery, but quickly realized the futility of doing so. All I could say for certain was that the painting was fairly weatherbeaten, with a water stain at the top and numerous little nicks and tears in the yellowing rice paper. But it was in decent enough condition, and it did have a certain weathered appeal. The goateed decorator on my left shoulder prodded me with his pitchfork.
In minutes the deal was done. I spent a good bit more than I had intended, but not so much as to violate the Satisfaction Principle. I made straight to the post office to mail my goodies home.
The postal worker took one look at the items and dug out his dictionary. Shaking his head, he pointed to the phrase “historical relics.”
Digging out my dictionary, I pointed to the word “fake.”
He flipped a few pages and pointed to the word “receipt.”
Receipts? For a bunch of fifty-cent items bought off blankets at an outdoor market?
“Don’t be such a dickhead,” I said. In English. While smiling. Then I packed up my ancient treasures and headed back to the hotel.
So now I’m toting a load of “historical relics” around China, including a six-foot “Qing-Dynasty” scroll, wondering how the hell I’m going to sneak these items out of the country. If I can get everything to Bangkok, I’m probably safe. I only hope the airport security guards are either complete philistines or sophisticated enough to know bad forgeries when they see them.
