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We stopped by a supermarket to buy some ice cream.  They didn’t have any, so we looked for milk.  We found a stack of milk containers strapped together with large basins.  “Why are they selling milk with a wash basin?” I asked of the two recent high school grads who had accompanied us into the store.  “Ah,” began the young man with neatly trimmed hair, “to drink out of,” and demonstrated drinking milk out of a huge basin.  “What?!” exclaimed the young woman at his side while hitting him a smacking blow to the shoulder, “No it’s not!”  “Oh, right, right, right” continued the young man, “you use it to wash yourself,” here he mimed dumping a pale full of milk over his head.  “Ai ya!” said the girl, precluding further verbal remonstrance by increasing the ferocity of her previously described methods of physical dissuasion.

Later we went to their house.  It was probably the nicest house in town.  We learned they were siblings, the children of rich merchants.  Both of them worked in the police station.  They were both police officers.  We sat on the boy’s bed.  For the benefit of his guests, he turned on the TV, the computer, and the stereo.

“Do you eat fruit?” asked the girl in her inexplicably raspy voice.  I thought she had some in the next room.  Sure, I said.  In the meantime the boy had started chatting online with one of the officers at the police station.  As I looked into the web cam on the boy’s computer and in turn examined the grainy, almost real-time image of what I would expect a middle-age Chinese cop to look like, I wondered what he would think about the foreigners in his town.  As previously noted, when it comes to staying in small towns for the night, the local cops have been less than helpful.  This was a new situation.  Our hosts practically embodied hospitality, but would their boss be as welcoming and blase about our presence?

Soon the chat ended and our friend went on to another chat.  We eventually managed to turn off the TV, then the stereo.  We played some music, the purpose for which we had ostensibly been invited in the first place.  Our host demonstrated his well-practiced dance technique and Kung-Fu.  The girl came back loaded down with bags of recently purchased apples, persimmons, and bananas.

We talked about their jobs.  They both worked in the police office.  The girl was a receptionist, the guy had some sort of other desk job, though he was apparently in training to become a real police officer.  We tried to get the girl to sing a song.  “I can’t,” she explained, pointing to her throat.  “Every day she talks with old people,” said her brother.  “They can’t hear well,” said the girl, in her shouted out voice, “and I have to shout at them.”  “Are all the old people here criminals?” I asked, thinking I’d made a great joke.  “No, no, no, they always lose their identity cards,” said the girl, taking her card out to demonstrate, “I’m in charge of getting people new cards, and the old people are always losing them.”

They told us how important the cards were for Chinese people.  The cards are a national phenomenon, but specific to a certain town or district.  To look for a job, to live anywhere, the card is very important, they told me.  I’ve read in the news that not having a card makes migrant workers easier to exploit, or any sort of migration or movement by normal people difficult.  It’s an important mode of control for the government, and one reason that Chinese cities, unlike cities in other developing countries are not surrounded by slums.

Do you agree with the cards?  I asked, trying to draw some opinions out of our hosts.  Are their any problems because of the cards.  The boy answered.  It’s what the government does, he said.  It’s a way to keep track of the people.  A perfectly reasonable and useless answer.  It was late.  I opted for not pursuing a more vigorous line of questioning for advising him not to fall out of the window, out of which he had been precariously leaning for some time. “It’s OK,” he said, “there’s a thing here.”  We looked.  Sure enough, there was a deck.

Later we walked back to our motel with a big bag of persimmons, which was sadly to rank low on our fruit travelability ranking.  The people who gave it to us, on the other hand, will always hold a uniquely positive place among the Chinese police I will remember.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 7:10 am and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.