Beijing Blog Part 3: The perfect metaphor for China

June 2, 2009-(Wangfujin Night Market- Beijing, China)

In the evening, we visited Wangfujin for the first time in a very long time. Wangfujin, a famous shopping district in China, is known for its high-class department stores and six-story mall. For the less wealthy however, it is known more for its night market.

For those of you unfamiliar with what a night market is, imagine a whole city block with stall upon stall of food vendors, all selling their wares for less than 10 RMB (about $2 US). Kabobs are the name of the game here, though there are other types of foods like dumplings and shumai.

This market is also where you’ll find some of the more exotic foods that China has to offer. Just walking to the first stall was proof enough of that fact. It sold starfish kabobs, scorpion kabobs, and silkworm kabobs…among others. Another stall sold beetles, seahorse, and snake meat.

I myself did not have the stomach to try any of the preceding foods, but I did have myself some delicious lamb, dumplings, shumai and some bamboo rice.

What caught me by the most surprise, however, was not the many sights and sounds of the night market or the rush of cars on the adjacent Wangfujin street, but the fact that the market itself was the perfect metaphor for life in China today.

The market itself is literally no more than 20 feet wide, yet, within those 20 feet contained people of all incomes levels. Everything from the wealthy nearest to the markets to the poor digging food and empty plastic bottles out of the trash cans, the sight truly was enlightening, to say the least.

But perhaps the saddest thing of all was seeing the poor, poverty-stricken individuals grabbing kabob sticks from the trash cans and eating the leftovers and doing their best to sell water or beer to un-wanting tourists who had loomed too close to the edge of the street.

For I had read it before in textbooks numerous times, but I had never before seen it with my own eyes just how much capitalism had created this humongous gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country. And when you’re a have-not, in Beijing, you just have to do anything to survive I guess.

Even if the food was cheap and the road busy and the lanes crowded, I feel like on my first full night in Beijing, I already had a culture shock not because of the reasons I just stated, but because of the profound metaphor this night market had been for China in general and how important it was for my time here in Beijing. I can only hope all of my enlightenment moments aren’t as sad as this one though…