I discovered Xiang Yang Market, or Xiang Yang ShiChang, pretty early on in my life in China. This is something that everyone did - find their way to Xiang Yang Market, for a little bit of shopping heaven. It is pretty common knowledge that if you wanted to buy fake Guccis, or Diors, or suitcases or whatever else, Xiang Yang Market was the place to be.
When I arrived in Shanghai, I did not have too much by way of warm clothes, and I popped in there pretty quickly. When I was wandering about the place, I passed an Indian family, and they looked straight through me. We, as a nation, do behave oddly with each other. Ego precedes the joy of seeing another brown face in the crowd. When the initial barriers of ego have been overcome, you are faced with different aspects of the same ego barrier - where you work, what car you drive, whether your company flies you home by economy or business become the first topics of conversation, before you are slotted into a category and consigned to the appropriate dump.
Anyway, I did not have a clue about how to start a conversation in Chinese those days, so I found the prettiest shopkeeper, and decided to negotiate with her. It is easier to do this with someone of the opposite sex, as a little bit of play acting, a little bit of harmless flirting become acceptable tools of bargaining. I employed the tactics of mock crying, showing her a bit of non-existent tearing and fraying in my clothes, to indicate that I was too poor to pay the price she was paying. She pretty much employed similar tactics, and finally with a laugh and a friendly hug, we concluded our bargain. I was all set for the Shanghai winter!
Scenes like the one above are not too common. The shopkeepers normally do not get too much time to sleep. So, a catnap is about all that they can manage.
Expat wives are shrewd things. They realize pretty soon on, that almost no one uses genuine, branded stuff. They all buy and use fake stuff. This way, most of them end up wih more bags than they know what to do with. Typically, therefore, at the end of their stay in China, they have a garage sale to get rid of their excesses at Xiang Yang Market.
The men follow a different pattern. At office, in their suits and ties, they deplore the loss of intellectual property, and in the evening they make a bee line for Xiang Yang Market.
Xiang Yang Market is a forgiving place. As long as you are there to shop, it welcomes its heart to you, with the love of an all knowing lover. If, however, you go there to lecture and pontificate, she will turn on you with the vengeance of a lover scorned.
Beware, therefore! Shop to your hearts delight, and do nothing more.
Revel in the orgy of shopping that Xiang Yang offers you!
Love your photographs, Rajiv!
Note: Shopping in Xiang Yang!! :-)
Posted by: Mary Lascelles | March 14, 2011 at 05:39 AM