Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

Notes From A Little (By China Standards) Town In China

The crowds that throng Singapore’s Orchard Road cannot hold a candle to the manswarms on the streets of any Chinese town (notice I said ‘town’ not ‘city’). Walking about alone on a Saturday afternoon in search of some lunch by myself, I feel a little short of breath while I witness the spectacle of the huge crowds surging forth.

You never really see this on weekdays, because everybody is at their place of work trying to earn a living. But come the weekend, they simply love to go “guang jie” which means simply walking about all over town. It’s hard to imagine how any shop could go out of business here given the pedestrian traffic. Your food would have to be pretty extraordinarily bad for people NOT to come into your shop by accident. Same goes for clothes, electronics and supermarkets.

Recently, many folk here have been receiving SMS’s that say the sender is a victim of the Chengdu Earthquake diasaster and urges the receiver of the SMS to donate money to a specific bank account. Such scams are perpetrated by scoundrels that specialize in sympathy tactics - a common trick in China where beggers are often very old, and accompanied by young children who look drugged or sick.

My hotel GM has been driving me to have breakfast at his favourite restaurant. The food is typical Guangdong cuisine - chee cheong fun, porridge, yu tiao and soya bean milk. Such a breakfast costs around RMB30 - way beyond the means of average wage earners in China. So all the people who regularly eat at this restaurant in the morning are locals (ie. not migrants) who own most of the property in the surrounding area and live off the proceeds of the rents.