Small Victory

Sometime in the November of my first year in China, I went across the street to buy a recharge card for my cellphone from one of the many newspaper stands lining our street. I bought the card without much trouble, and, since I’d bought plenty of them in the past, I brushed aside the salesman’s instructions as to how to use it. Yeah yeah, scratch the back, type in the code, I’m not an idiot. Only when I got home that the code-covering stuff refused to be scratched away and, in trying, I scratched the code underneath to smithereens. The card, which at 100元 (about $15) was probably my biggest purchase of the week, was totally useless. This hadn’t happened with any of the other millions of phone cards I’d purchased—either it was fake or defective.

Here was a turning point of my time in China. Up until then, my Chinese had been what I’ll call the “Fine as long as everything is fine” variety. I could ask for things and say thank you. Clarifications, subtleties, problems, and disagreements of all sorts were way out of my league. But something about that phone card lit a fire under me. That was my 100元, dammit, and I was gonna put it on my phone.

I stomped all the way back to the newspaper stand, thrust the ruined card under the vendor’s nose and started yelling in what was probably barely coherent Chinese about how he had sold me a defective phone card and how I wasn’t having any of it. He yelled right back at me that he had TOLD me I had to scratch it off LIGHTLY (So that’s what he was saying before when I thought he was just explaining how to use the card. Oops. Whatever.). I demanded a new card or my money back. The man, who was probably not used to having to work so hard to understand a shouting match opponent, finally told me that he would write down my name and then I could come back in five months and get a new card. Five months? FIVE MONTHS? It seemed like a strange tactic, since the cards don’t expire for years, and I wondered if he was hoping I’d just forget. NO WAY, PHONE CARD SELLING MAN. I’LL SEE YOU IN APRIL. He wrote my name—裴莉—on a piece of paper and I left, not sure if I’d won or not.

So I came back in April and explained my plight to the completely different person now sitting in the stand. To this day, one year later, I have no idea whether this new person had any idea who I was, whether she’d ever seen my name on the little piece of paper, whether she believed my weird story. But you know what happened? 1. SHE GAVE ME A 100元 PHONE CARD. 2. Every time I pass her stand, we wave and smile at each other. I’m honestly not sure which is a bigger victory.