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Aug. 26, 2006 For 8 months of the year and a half that I lived in China (1997-1998), I lived at 3 Xiaoshiqiao Hutong, near the subway station called Jiugulou Dajie, on Beijing’s north side, about 3 or 4 miles due north of Tiananmen Square. I had been living in the Fenglong Bingguan, a hotel on the south side, where I’d been paying about $375 per month. A charming lady whom I met on the Beijing-Hong Kong train when I returned to Hong Kong to renew my visa helped me to get the apartment on Xiaoshiqiao, which cost only $213 a month, and so enabled me to stay just a little longer in China. Jiugulou Dajie is the name of the adjacent street too. This street was a veritable nightmare of cars, vans, bicycles, carts, stalls and pedestrians, all tossed together in maddening chaos. Not only that but also the street was often full of litter. Chinese have the bad habit of throwing things around, even when wastebaskets are provided. I’ve seen a man toss half a watermelon rind on the street just as nonchalantly as if it had been a cigarette butt. Xiaoshiqiao Hutong has been in existence since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), but most of the buildings are probably 75 to 125 years old. Unlike most hutong, my hutong had very little foot traffic and was perfectly straight. Anyway, how does one make a call from a public telephone in China, since China has no coins? The answer is easy. Some individual with frontage on the street puts a telephone, just like a home phone, on his windowsill, and passers-by dial the phone and pay the proprietor in cash afterwards. At the time of my residence there, a phone call cost 3 yuan (4 cents). There were several telephone places along Jiugulout Dajie, the larger street, each with two or three phones, and since the street was always thronged, there were generally several people waiting in line at each phone. There was never a free line. Still I hardly imagine that anyone was getting rich, because he would still have had to pay rent for the room and pay the phone bill. If 2 cents of the 4 cents per call went for overhead, 100 calls a day would mean a profit of only $2. However, in China any poor person that makes as much as $100 a month is thought to be doing fairly well. There was also a lady on Xiaoshiqiao, the lane that had little foot traffic, who had a single phone on her windowsill. This was within 50 feet of my door, and I used the phone several times. I noted however that, unlike the other phones on the big street, this phone had few users. At morning and evening rush hours, there might be a person or two at her window. But during the day, there were few, and at night, of course, none. I’d be surprised if she made even $2 a day. I was wondering how she could possibly exist on an income like that. So one day when she was out, I peeked into her room, which was bare and dingy, furnished with a rickety bed and a gray sheet. There was a privy outside, shared by four or five such tenants. My own landlady, Yang Xiaohui, had shown me a room that she owned in another building, which I wish I had known about earlier, as it was only $60 a month, but actually cozy and charming in a way, though it had a privy. I mention this only because it enabled me to surmise that the phone lady’s apartment, which was smaller and older, may have cost no more than $30 or $40 a month. This would suggest that the lady ate on $1 a day at the most. This means that she probably had youtiao, wok-fried pastry, in the morning, and something like fried perch at night. There are some other Chinese food ítems in the same price range, like roujiamo, chopped beef on a muffin, or baozi, a dumpling with a dab of paté in the middle. People who eat on $1 a day or less are legion in China. Chinese people would just laugh if they heard of Anericans who earn $20,000 or $30,000 a year and still cry poor. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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