Misunderstanding and Being Fleeced

By JAN WOSTYN

IS IT WORTH IT? A tourist looks at some jewellery in a downtown Lhasa market and seems to be wondering if the price is right

During the two years I have lived in China, I’ve come across many foreigners from all over the world, each one of them with their own unique experiences of life in China. However, one of the shared experiences seemed to be that most of them had been ripped off at least once. Some claimed that Chinese taxi drivers never take the shortest route, others felt that they had been ripped off at tourist spots and the most common complaint was probably the fact that ordinary Chinese sellers always charge more when the buyer happens to be a foreigner. As for me personally, yes I have had my own frustrating rip-off experiences as well. Nevertheless on closer investigation it seems people often think they have been ripped off, when in fact what has happened was a simple misunderstanding. Some examples.

Once I was having a coffee with some friends on the balcony of a cozy coffee bar in Xiamen, a charming coastal city in Fujian Province. All of a sudden one of the waiters asked us if we could help them to translate because there was a disagreement with some foreign customers about their bill. It turned out that two Finnish guys, who barely spoke Chinese, thought there was a discount of 8 yuan on every drink, whereas the real discount was 20 percent off on a limited number of fruit juices. Evidently, their lack of knowledge of the Chinese language caused the misunderstanding and this was obviously no case of Chinese deceiving foreigners.

On a trip to the amazing earth buildings of the Hakka in the mountains of Fujian Province, I once ended up in the idyllic village of Tianluokeng, together with three friends. We decided to spend the day, got cheap rooms for 20 yuan per person and then went to look at the village from a vantage point. When we got there, we were surprised to find a ticketing office charging 20 yuan each for the view. We all thought this was too expensive, but then found that the ticket also included the entrance to the village itself, which we had entered through a hiking trail and therefore had not passed the ticket office in the village. Grudgingly, we decided to buy the ticket, so as not to miss the view. In hindsight I don’t think the ticket price was really unfair, as the village was very well preserved and tourist infrastructure had been set up in this remote village in the mountains. My colleagues disagreed and kept saying Chinese always try to get the foreigners’ money, a complaint which in this case was unjustified as Chinese also had to pay the same ticket price.

In Hukeng, a small town in Fujian Province, my sister and I were waiting for a bus to take us back to Xiamen. My sister decided to buy some bananas on the other side of the street, while I waited at the bus stop. When she came back with two tiny bananas, she told me that she’d paid no less than 5 yuan, which seemed way too much to both of us. My sister explained that the old woman selling the fruit had put up five fingers to indicate the price, so she just paid 5 yuan knowing it was too much. When we went back to complain to the woman, she was standing there smilingly with 4.5 yuan in her hand. It turned out that the five fingers had meant 5 mao and not 5 yuan! She explained to me that she had wanted to give my sister change, but she had rushed off. Another misunderstanding, not a rip-off.

During my one-year stay in Xiamen, I frequently took taxis, as they are quick and cheap. It is true that taxi drivers often tend to take the quicker but longer and thus more expensive route. They probably assume you want to take the quickest route, unless you explicitly tell them to drive through traffic jams. On one occasion however, a young taxi driver who was supposed to take me back to the university, headed in the opposite direction for a long detour through the center of town. I got angry with him, scolded him, told him to turn around and take the shortest road. The young man did what I said but seemed terribly insecure and nervous. After watching him I realized he was an inexperienced driver. Arriving at the university, he said I could pay less than the metered price. It transpired he was an immigrant from Henan, arrived in Xiamen just a week prior. I felt terribly sorry about having scolded him.

Some “obvious” cases of Chinese ripping off foreigners may well be caused by simple linguistic misunderstandings, incorrect evaluation of certain situations or wrong interpretations of people’s behavior. I certainly don’t want to claim that all Chinese people are totally honest toward foreigners, but I do believe that sometimes foreigners, including myself, unjustly accuse them of deceit.