Bracelet Blackmail

I wrote this piece circa 2012, after I took a trip to several countries in Asia. I was never able to get it published, so I figured I might as well post it here. I was reminded of it while reading a book by Jan Wong called Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found in the New Forbidden City. This piece feels to me like a less polished, smaller version of Wong’s book, down to the slightly huffy subtitle.

I’m a bit conflicted about the tone of both this essay and Beijing Confidential, about which more later.

“If you don’t take this bracelet, then you don’t like Cambodia.”

The little Cambodian girl is six years old, or maybe seven, or maybe five. She must be around four feet tall, but her skinny frame, and my own delirium from the sun, makes me think that she doesn’t even come up to my knee. Her dark hair is dry (also from the sun?) and uncombed.

What she’s doing is she’s trying to give me a bracelet. It’s a cheap brown thing, made of bamboo or reed or some other plant material. She and I stand just outside an Angkor temple. I can see the tall stone structure, and even though I’ve already visited a few of them, it’s still an impressive sight.

Local businesspeople have set up booths along the wooded path to the holy place, so that it’s impossible to approach without pushing through a pack of vendors. They sell: drinks, postcards, T-shirts, books, bracelets, &c. I say “pushing,” not in the literal physical sense, but in the psychological sense where I put my head down, and my gait becomes resolute, and I enter a shell of pure focus, and just keep moving forward, forward, forward. Some of the more aggressive vendors actually jump in front of me, and I have to bob and weave to evade them.

I don’t want the bracelet that the little girl is giving me. She claims that it’s a free gift, but of course, the idea is that it will plant the seed of guilt in my mind, which will make me come back and buy something later. It is basically blackmail. I try to wave her off with my right hand. My left hand is resting on the camera bag which I have hanging by my hip. She spots this opening, and plunks the bracelet down on my left forearm. It itches because my skin is sunburnt.

I keep pushing forward, annoyed, and I accelerate, as if I’m trying to get away from a swarm of gnats. I don’t quite break into a run because it’s too hot for that. Also, people are watching, and it’s embarrassing to run away from small harmless things like gnats or little girls.

My forward momentum makes the bracelet fall off my arm, and it lands in the loamy, red Cambodian dirt. The little girl picks it up again, and somehow her short little legs can keep up with my long strides, and that’s when she says:

“If you don’t take this bracelet, then you don’t like Cambodia.”

I’m writing this several weeks after returning from my trip, and I still can’t say or even think the word “Cambodia” without hearing it in the little girl’s voice, and then hearing my mind’s ear fill in the rest of the sentence in her nasally, sing-song accent. It is haunting me.

If you don’t take this bracelet, then you don’t like Cambodia.

As I continue towards the Angkor ruins, I have a grin on my face, the kind of false grin that I tend to put on as a friendly veneer whenever I need to mask my confusion or social anxiety.

It’s my third week away from my home in Toronto. Cambodia is the fourth and final Asian country on my itinerary. How did I get here, thinking of this girl as I would think of gnats, and as the subject of a false grin, instead of as a human child?

My first stop is Beijing, where my friends and I have hired a local tour guide. She is a cheery young woman named Kathy, who often punctuates her sentences by looking you right in the eye and saying, “Right?”, as if she needs to confirm that you agree with her at all times, e.g. “That was a good restaurant… right?”; “It is very beautiful… right?”

There’s a standard set of tourist attractions that everybody sees in Beijing, and Kathy covers them well. The scale of the city is so large that each time we enter a temple or palace, it feels like going to a different city altogether. Everywhere we go is crowded. We often see tour leaders waving big fluorescent flags, trailed by a tour group wearing hats of the same fluorescent colour. I think they look silly, until I realize that I’ve been separated from my friends and Kathy, and I try to look for them in the faces all around and I start to panic and wish I had a fluorescent hat of my own. The smog makes it hard to breathe.

In front of the Forbidden City, we see a woman being apprehended by a plainclothes police officer for selling souvenir picture books. The officer grabs her by the arm and she starts wailing, pleading. Kathy explains the situation to us, that vendors are prohibited in certain government-prescribed areas. “It’s scary… right?”

Where merchants are allowed, they see that we have a local with us, so even the aggressive ones keep their distance. Kathy’s presence acts as a sort of shield, with one notable exception, which I will return to later.

More about Kathy first. It’s clear that she’s fond of explaining small facts and details. Some of this is for the purpose of planning our excursions: “We will take the subway for two stops, and transfer to Line 2 for three stops, and then walk for ten minutes. We will arrive at our destination in forty-three minutes.” But her habit of quoting numerical facts and figures also applies to subjects other than the purely procedural. I don’t know if it’s because we keep asking her about it, but she always circles back to one topic: money, and how much (or usually, how little) things cost here. Gas costs x amount, which converts to such-and-such Canadian dollars. It costs so-and-so to see a movie. A bottle of mineral water costs this many yuan. And things are indeed cheap, and she is perhaps enjoying our incredulous reactions a bit too much, like low prices are, for her, a point of national pride.

The exception I mentioned earlier, the place where Kathy cannot shield us from Aggressive Vendors, is a place called the Hongqiao Pearl Market. She cannot shield us, not because she is incapable, but because the market seems to exist specifically to allow merchants to accost tourists. The tourists have a fun time haggling, and it’s all part of the genuine Chinese experience.

Kathy seems conflicted. She wants to help us bargain for low prices, and before we go in, she whispers to us that we can negotiate down to around 20% of the price tag on most items. This will be the absolute minimum though, because the vendors will be making very little profit, if any. After she tells us this, she shuts up; I think she feels like she’s betraying the spirit of the whole operation. But my friends and I hang on to this information like a secret weapon.

The market is a multi-level, vaguely industrial building. The shop booths are laid out, open concept, on all sides of a grid of narrow walkways. Nothing separates shopper from shopkeeper. They can reach out and grab you, and sometimes they do. They sell: shirts, cameras, pants, phone accessories, trinkets, paintings, laptop computers, &c. The place is called “Pearl Market” because there are a couple of levels devoted entirely to pearls. How the twenty-five to thirty pearl booths, all selling the exact same things, compete with each other and determine fair pricing is a microeconomic puzzle that remains, to me, unsolved.

The market is somehow both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at once. I feel a bit overwhelmed and overstimulated. I don’t enjoy crowds, especially if it involves being yelled at from all sides. I deal with this by not making eye contact with, or talking to, anyone; not even to say hello. Once I’m in my shell, the vendors have no chance. I buy nothing at the Pearl Market.

I do, however, watch my friends haggle. They end up buying some small wooden and jade figurines. Negotiation proceeds via both parties punching numbers into a big plastic-buttoned calculator, and pointing, and hand-waving. When they settle on a price, close to the secret 20% mark, the shopkeeper accepts it with a sort of tragic sigh, the defeat evident in her face.

Even though I’m not involved in any transactions, I start to feel a little guilty that we (my friends and I, or maybe all Western tourists) have come here and robbed these poor merchants of their profits, just to save what amounts to the price of a couple of Starbucks lattés on a piece of unique handcrafted art.

But then, something else hits me: this practice of measuring prices in terms of Starbucks lattés is a cliché, and one that comes from a position of privilege. Here are some things that we are constantly told we can do if we skip the daily coffee: send an unborn future child to university, pay off a mortgage sooner, sponsor a child in a Third World country. And yes, maybe even help a poor Chinese merchant make a profit.

Only smug, well-off people who can afford to go to Starbucks every day think in this way. I realize that I must be one of those people.

Karon Beach in Phuket, Thailand, is pretty much the exact opposite of Beijing, in terms of mood, air quality, population density, and general comfort level. The town consists of a beach and a main road with shops and restaurants, and not much else. I don’t know whether it’s the lack of smog or the lack of crowds that has me breathing more freely than I ever did in China.

Right next to the beach, there’s a structure which houses a row of open-air restaurants. Think of your average strip plaza and imagine the front wall removed. Such an architecture allows diners to dine in the path of ocean breezes, which is a not unpleasant way to dine. Crucially, there’s a roof, which provides shelter from the sudden, brief, intense rainstorms that darken the skies from time to time.

During one such storm, my friends and I are forced to take shelter beneath the roof of this structure. We’re hungry, but all of the restaurants look the same to us. They sell: pad thai noodles, tom yum soup, crab, fish, curries, &c. With little to distinguish between these restaurants (it’s the pearl booth microeconomic puzzle all over again), the only way we can make a decision is by how loud the restauranteurs are yelling for us to come in. We end up going to the one where the sales pitch is given by a wiry, tattooed guy with spiked hair and multiple facial piercings.

The food is good, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve been bullied into eating here.

Of our four destinations, Kuala Lumpur is the city that feels most familiar. The shopping experience here is one that I’m used to: impersonal, laid-back shopping in large malls. It is acceptable to just say, “Just browsing,” and leave it at that. And I mean, just saying, “Just browsing,” in English, and not going through the flurry of awkward hand motions that were common during our dialogues with Chinese and Thai locals.

We stay in a hotel within walking distance of the famous twin Petronas Towers. At the base of the Towers, there’s a large, glitzy mall called Suria KLCC. They sell: high-end fashion, jewellery, ethnically diverse food in food court, brand-name athletic wear, handbags, &c. KLCC becomes the default destination for our group when we don’t have any specific place to go. We’re drawn to it for its familiar Western feel, but it’s just foreign enough (e.g. clothing brands we don’t recognize, a bookstore where books are wrapped in clear plastic film, a snack stand for durian-based desserts) that we still feel like we’re touristing and therefore not wasting time at the mall again. It’s the prototypical East-meets-West experience. I think we go there every day, but I’m not sure.

One of the purposes of our trip is to attend a friend’s wedding. The bride’s family lives in Malaysia, and we meet and chat with some of them. When we mention KLCC, they immediately suggest that we go to Chinatown instead, because there are much better deals to be had there. I’m hesitant because going to a Chinatown seems redundant after having already been to China, but I’ll go, if only for the opportunity to see some more East/West clashing in action.

The centre of Chinatown is Petaling Street, which is less of a street than a narrow alley lined with shop booths on both sides. Pedestrians walk all over the road, but once in a while, a horn sounds, and everyone disperses to let a car or motorcycle through. Most of the vendors promote (by shouting) cheap brand-name clothing items which are surely knockoffs.

After a while, I’m feeling a little dazed and starting to go into my shell again. I’m looking for escape routes, and that’s when I have my most direct encounter with an Aggressive Vendor. A short stocky man sneaks up beside me. He has in his hands the thin cardboard sleeve of what I recognize to be a pirated DVD. A second later, I notice that the artwork on the sleeve is of a pornographic nature. Like, nipples are visible.

“Sex movie,” he says in a quiet, nervous voice.

(Now is a good time to mention that I am Chinese-Canadian. I believe that this gives me a slight immunity as most of the A.V.s in China and in KL Chinatown don’t pester me as much as they pester my Caucasian friends; they don’t like to harass their own kind, I suppose. Or maybe they know that frugal Asians will be a hard sell, and not worth the effort. Or maybe it’s just me, because I’m so aloof and disinclined to make eye contact. Having said that, the sex movie guy seems to believe that even frugal, aloof Asians are always in the market for a sex movie.)

“No thanks,” I tell the sex movie guy.

“If you don’t take this bracelet, then you don’t like Cambodia.”

I don’t want to take the bracelet, but I do like Cambodia. It’s this cognitive dissonance that breaks me out of my shell, and I actually interact with the girl instead of just waving her away. I take the bracelet from her outstretched little hand and slip it onto my wrist.

She smiles and says in a pleading but still sing-song way, “Sir, you come back later, sir?”

“Yes, I come back later,” I say.

The girl leaves me alone to sightsee at the temple. I take my pictures and when I’m done, I dread going back towards the main road because I will run into her again. Her blackmail has worked, and now I feel like I owe her something. When she appears, I see that she has prepared a stack of postcards to show me.

“One dollar, sir,” she says. “One dollar ten postcard. One, two, three…”

She flips each postcard from the top of the stack to reveal the next one underneath. It’s a deft manoeuvre, like something you would see with a casino blackjack dealer. By the time she gets to ten, each snap of a postcard is like a crack of thunder, which when combined with her high sing-songy voice, and the added emotional stress of her earlier blackmail, has me firmly back in my shell. I almost do run away from her this time.

A more open and charitable person might fork over the one dollar just because the little girl is so cute. And charity is what it feels like: the postcards and bracelets have little worth, but maybe that little girl could have a decent meal with that dollar. When I get back to the hotel that day, I wonder if I could have been that more open, charitable person, if only my trip had started in Cambodia, and I hadn’t been fending off Aggressive Vendors for two weeks.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but since returning home, I’ve learned that maybe I did the right thing by not doing business with the girl. Many of the child vendors are making money not for themselves or their families, but for organized, sometimes criminal, groups. Allowing them to earn profits only encourages the practice, and keeps the kids out of school.

Armed with this knowledge, I could sell you the idea that my decision not to buy from the little girl was made for the right reasons: to promote social change, to condemn the exploitation of children, to stand up for human rights, &c. But that would be untrue. The truth is that I didn’t buy from her, or from any vendors that I encountered during the trip, because of my own personal faults. I am unsociable and detached and aloof, and even cute little girls bearing gifts can’t break that shell.

As for the bracelet itself, I forgot to pack it when I checked out of the hotel. When I last saw it, it was sitting beside the bathroom sink, soaking in a puddle of soapy water, an abandoned souvenir.