My last post was made at the business center inside the Holiday Inn hotel where I was staying. As I got up to leave, the woman who was apparently the attendant for the business center told me there would be a 75 yuan (~ $10) charge for my hour and a half use of the computer. Um... what? A charge?? Since when???
(A) When I asked at check-in whether there was a computer the woman made no mention of there being a charge,
(B) there was a sign in the lobby advertising how wireless access was free,
(C) the last hotel I stayed at in China offered free use of a computer,
(D) the last hotel I stayed at with a "business center" allowed free use of it,
(E) there was not a single shred of paper in my room or sign in the business center itself notifying me of the charges, and
(F) the attendant never mentioned it until I was ready to leave.
For all these reasons I won the argument with the hotel not to be charged. But it was uncomfortable. The attendant apparently was supposed to have told me the rate and didn't, so by complaining I think I accidentally got her into trouble and I feel bad about that. On the other hand, 75 yuan is pretty expensive even by US standards. And you just can't stick guests with hidden fees. The way I saw it, if this had simply been a misunderstanding between cultures, of my American expectations running afoul of the way things are done in China, I would have been in the wrong to complain. Lesson learned, albeit expensively. But this was a hotel very much trying to play "western," and as such I didn't think it at all out of line to make it play "western" properly. Given the disproportionate price of everything connected with the hotel as compared to what the costs would be in the local economy, the American brand name, the American satisfaction guarantee noted on a placard in the bathroom... the hotel is obviously exploiting westerners' desire for the predictability of western hostelry. So I felt it reasonable to hold it accountable for meeting those expectations accordingly.
(Then again, I was hot/tired/cranky after traveling, and which is not a good time to mess with me... On the other hand, by virtue of it being a hotel it should have expected its guests to be hot/tired/cranky at some point and not trifled with them...)
But I note this saga because it was just one of many occasions yesterday where the juxtaposition of East and West became glaringly apparent. The city of Harbin itself is another example. Although the Qin dynasty may have ruled from the general area of Harbin (the city is in the center of the northeast wing of China) it was mostly Europeans - particularly Russians - who developed it into the city it is today starting a little over 100 years ago. Though it became almost 100% Chinese after communism arrived in 1949, plenty of vestiges of its Russian-ness remain in its overall city plan and surviving architecture. Particularly near the river lots of near-century old European-style buildings remain, with most of them marked with plaques identifying in Chinese and English when and why they were built. Though Shanghai also has European-style buildings, Harbin differs in that it wasn't really developed that way by a colonial power. While Harbin may have briefly been under the control of Russia, I don't think it was long ruled by it. I think it was settled mostly by Russian tradespeople who saw it as being a good crossroads, near as it is to Siberia, Korea, Mongolia, and the rest of China to the south.
In fact Harbin today again takes its place as a crossroads. Back when I had decided to go visit it on my trip I thought I'd find a sleepy little town falling to pieces after its original residents were all driven off. Instead I found a bustling metropolis of more than 9 million people, with commercial enterprise everywhere. For instance on the boulevard driving in from the airport there are gleaming new shops of just about every automobile maker imaginable. The main artery in the old section is now a pedestrian shopping zone, with department stores and boutiques and American fast food restaurants taking up new residence in those old Russian buildings. In fact Harbin provides many outlets for purchasing Russian goods (I purchased a matroshka doll of Chinese government leaders to add to my collection), while at the same time hosting at least two of those quintessentially American outlets: Wal-Mart.
While it recently made news that Wal-Mart is about to throw in the towel in Germany, it's expanding in China. (Interestingly so are unions of Chinese Wal-Mart workers, which the Chinese news channel said are constitutionally protected, but that's an issue for discussion for another day.) I decided I had to see what Wal-Mart was like in China, so I went in. The bottom floor was a grocery store, but like no American grocery store I've ever seen. Not only did Wal-Mart carry ingredients unimaginable in Arkansas, but the way it sold them - in gross - would never happen in the US. There were bins and bins of frozen fish. Bins of chopped meat, that consumers would scoop out what they wanted and put into their own bags. Only some meat was pre-packaged and the rest was out for the customers to wrap themselves.
Half of the second floor was dry-good groceries, and the rest of the store was the miscellaneous household goods that you'd normally expect. I decided I would try to buy something made in the USA, you know, for revenge... And I couldn't. There wasn't a single American thing in the whole damn store. There were American goods, yes, but they were all made somewhere outside of the US under license and then imported into China (if that's not where they were made). In thinking about it, I suppose that makes sense. It's both cheaper to produce and cheaper to ship if made locally. There's little that the US could offer that would be so special as to make it worth the higher production and shipping costs to get it to China. But I guess I hadn't expected it to be this way since in Europe you can often find things produced in the US that are imported into Europe and then re-labelled locally.
So my fabulous plan was very nearly stymied until I found the one shelf in the entire store with imported products. They came from all over the world, not just the US (and interestingly the bottles of Jack Daniels and cola apparently came from Great Britain). The American products were pretty much just packages of microwave popcorn (whose grease had soaked through the packaging), Frank's Hot Sauce, French's mustard, and Swiss Miss hot chocolate packets. I think that was pretty much it. I bought the hot chocolate just for the principle of the thing, since I really have no call for mustard right now. And I also bought a bottle of the local Harbin beer. It says its the oldest beer in China. I don't know if that's true, but I thought it was quite good. Now I say this as someone who doesn't really like beer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt if you must, but I find my taste tends to run towards blander, light beers because I don't like the bitterness. This beer seemed to have that proper bitter taste that beer fans seem to like, but was the smoothest beer I have ever drunk. No aftertaste to contort my face - the taste at the beginning was the taste at the end and each sip slipped right down. I would definitely drink it again if I could get it in the US.
But my day wasn't about drinking beer and eating KFC in China (or watching the previous day's Yankee game live on satellite tv, which was a waste of time since it was already the next day where I was so I should already have known how it turned out...). It was about seeing the city and seeing what it had kept of its past. One of the most ornate examples that has been preserved is the former Orthodox church St. Sophia, now the city's museum of art and architecture. There used to be hundreds of different churches and temples all over Harbin - Orthodox, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, etc. This one still had some of its interior decorative painting still visible, although now the walls were hung with pictures of old Harbin, rather than religious icons (although there were a few).
I did find the introductory signs near the entrance inadvertently amusing though: full-on propaganda, not wanting to validate the pre-communist order to things, it nonetheless expressed that it was important to preserve the city's history, even if it wasn't good history, which I think is a good attitude for modern China to have. But in railing about the classism of the past, how the poor were left to fend for their own meager subsistence while the rich spent money "like water," I couldn't help but note the irony of the town now being so consumed with commercialism once again.