Thank goodness for the knockoff markets, which reliably stocked larger sizes. Though they had been moved underground, literally, they continued to trade in flagrant, sometimes skillful reproductions of designer goods, and my need for clothes that fit justified my momentary disregard for intellectual property. The touts were so adept that they could somehow distinguish among Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese shoppers and switched the language of their entreaties accordingly. When I walked past one store, the hawker shouted “Shoes!” to me in English.
WHEN I MOVED to China, I knew it would be mean. I expected chaos, overcrowding, pollution, the absence of Western manners and sanitation, inefficiency, and stomach problems. While China was known for rigid control, everything outside the political sphere appeared to be a free-for-all, and daily life in China hardly resembled the regimented totalitarian image that foreigners held. The short—and cynical—explanation was that the government had an unspoken agreement with its citizens: as long as they stayed out of politics, they were free to enjoy the fruits of capitalism and consumerism. Vendors could set up their carts on any public space they saw fit, hawking household goods, fruit, and English-language books, including The Wealth of Nations, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (a novella about the Cultural Revolution), and 1984, with neither shame nor irony. The city buses careened around their routes at reckless speeds, a holdover from the Mao years, when drivers were paid according to how many circuits they made per hour. There were no means for passengers to notify the driver, yet they made all the right stops and always paused to let sprinting passengers catch up. Everything operated according to unspoken and unwritten rules, and it was no wonder why so many Westerners became seduced by China, because the foundation for all this chaos was exactly what they had been told their whole lives that China lacked: freedom.
Nowhere was this more evident than on the roads. For all the environmental hazards in the air and water, the biggest health risk in China probably came from crossing the street. Despite having just one-fifth as many cars as the United States, China had twice as many car accident deaths each year. Though the taxi fleets boasted high-tech touch screens built into the headrests with a recorded message reminding passengers (in English) to wear their seat belts, none of the taxis had seat belts in the backseats. I quickly got in the habit of riding shotgun and not wearing white—the seat belts were so seldom used that they usually left a sash of dust across my chest. Meanwhile, cabbies took my wearing a seat belt as a grave insult. “I’m a good driver,” they huffed. “You don’t have to worry.” City buses swerved into oncoming traffic and cut across two lanes to make their stops. Drivers used their horns so liberally that expats joked about it being the Chinese brake pedal. Drivers could, and did, disobey every explicit and implicit traffic rule on the books. Police, fire, and medical vehicles enjoyed no special dispensation on the roads; nor did police seem interested in pursuing reckless drivers. It was common to see cars stopped in the middle of a freeway, crossing elevated medians, or driving long distances in reverse after they’d missed an exit, and in each case the rest of the cars simply purled around the offender like a stream around a boulder.
The streets follow a design that can only have been created by someone who didn’t drive. (The use of headlights was actually prohibited in China until the mid-1980s, when officials began going overseas and realized it was the norm.) Rights-of-way are completely reversed. The larger the vehicle, the more carelessly it drives, expecting everything smaller, including pedestrians, to give way. I pounded on many hoods of too-close cars, only to get yelled at by drivers for my physical invasion of their spaces or, worse, was ignored completely. In Hebei province, a local police official’s son ran into two university students while driving drunk, killing one and breaking the leg of the other. When arrested, he boasted that his father’s position rendered him immune to punishment. There is no affinity for the underdog in China. There isn’t even a word for it.
To face the absurdities of daily life, expats in Shanghai keep a mantra: This is China. The Middle Kingdom was not so much a foreign country as it was a parallel universe that managed to offend all five senses plus one more—common. China was cockroaches in pharmacy display cases, and employees who reacted to this being pointed out to them by responding, “Yep, that’s a cockroach.” China was people spitting, blowing their noses, or vomiting onto the sidewalk next to me, crowding entrances, pushing, cutting in line, littering, and smoking in the elevator. China was restaurants listing menu items that they never intended to serve (the loss of face from not offering something outweighing having “run out” of it). China was poorly insulated, badly heated apartments, and the ayi leaving my windows open while the entire area was burning garbage. The Chinese were pathological about the idea of circulating “fresh air,” even if it was some of the dirtiest air in the world.
China was people taking an eternity to use bank machines, bathrooms with hot-water taps that didn’t work, soap dispensers that never had any soap, and long, gross-looking fingernails that served no apparent purpose. China was where children were clothed not in diapers but in pants with open crotches so they could easily relieve themselves, and they were encouraged to do so whenever they felt the urge. It wasn’t uncommon to see mothers or ayis instructing children to piss or shit on sidewalks, in public parks, or on subway platforms. I once came home to encounter a girl urinating in the hallway of my apartment building while her father waited. When I asked local Chinese about these behaviors, they either professed to not like it any more than I did or claimed not to notice. Those who tried to offer explanations usually referred to some variation of China’s history of overpopulation and deprivation. If the Chinese didn’t fight for something, whether it was a cup of rice or a seat on the train, they had to do without it.
China was where cheating, cutting corners, and corruption appeared to be so ingrained that I began to question the supposed immorality of it all. Test preparation services advertised that their most expensive packages included actual copies of upcoming GMATs. To prevent cheating on the written portion of the driver’s license examination, some areas required candidates to take tests at computer terminals outfitted with webcams. An American friend who lived in rural China and couldn’t read Chinese made a few phone calls and, on the day of the test, sat before the computer while a Chinese man crawled over on his belly, out of the camera’s view, inched his nose over the keyboard, and completed the test for him.
China is one of the world’s largest markets for digital piracy, and the failure to stop it has less to do with an enabling government (though it is rumored that the People’s Liberation Army controls the pirated DVD trade) than with the sense of entitlement people have about illegally downloaded materials. Chinese watch Internet videos on YouKu and assume that Americans copied it to create YouTube. There are giant retailers in Beijing called Wu Mart. Copying is simply a way of life. Whether it is fruit stands, electronics malls, or factories, the surest bet for a business is to wait for someone else to figure out a successful model, then open up an identical shop down the street with slightly cheaper prices. On Shanghai’s Dagu Road, one of the city’s first expat enclaves, the venerable Movie World had sold pirated DVDs for years. Then along came a new store named Even Better Than Movie World, after which the original place changed its name to No Better Than Movie World.
Underlying all this anarchy was a sense of menace. Though crime in China tends not to be violent, and I felt perfectly safe anywhere, anytime in Shanghai, I couldn’t shake the feeling of a systemic dysfunction. From counterfeit drugs to cooking oil reclaimed from sewers under restaurants, there seemed to be a new scandal every month. Meat so packed with steroids that consumers got heart palpitations when eating it. Vinegar contaminated with antifreeze. Watermelons exploding on the vine from growth accelerants. The most egregious was the revelation that nearly two dozen milk companies had laced their products with melamine, a nitrogen-rich chemical used to manufacture plastics, in order to boost their apparent protein content. The tainted milk caused kidney damage in hundreds of thousands of infants in China and at