Were you mugged or was your wallet stolen?

Happy Black Friday. While all of America parttakes in what is called the biggest shopping day of the year, but in truth really isn't (december 20-24 usually owns the true biggest shopping day) I will be teaching and attending the opening ceremonies of the Chinese International Culture Festival in Guangzhou this evening. I am a guest of the education bureau and my colleagues and I will be accompanied by police escorts to Guangzhou. This makes me feel rather superficially important.

This last week in has been rather action-packed, beginning with the events that unfolded on Friday-Saturday. First you must think, which is worce, to be mugged or to have your purse stolen? In actual fact, the two have the same meaning, but for some reason here in China, people say "oh, you've had your purse stolen" while in New York for example, you would say, "I was mugged." On Friday, three friends and I went to Bao'an (one of the 6 districts in Szn, but it is one of the two which lies outside the SEZ (Special Economic Zone)) to visit Meredith for the night and stay at her school. Friday was quite a bit of fun, when we got to her busstop, we all took motorcycle rides to her school which was about 1km away down a desolate road. That was only the second time in my life that I had ridden on one, the first being with my dad in Phuket when I was about 12. We then were invited to a dinner by her headmaster and vice principals which was very kind of them, but also rather strange as it was 4 twenty-something girls and 4 forty-something fellas at this dinner. They all just assumed that we all didn't speak Chinese b/c Meredith doesn't, so while they were chattering away about us on the other side of the table, I was the fly-on-the-wall and proceeded to tell the ladies what the guys were saying. For some reason Chinese people are obsessed with talking about my "gao bizi" or "pointy nose." They got a lot of time and mileage out of that one, yeesh. We spent the rest of the evening wandering down a local shopping street. It was hilarious; our mission for the evening was for everyone to buy something for under 10 kuai (1.25). We were getting close to the end of the street and only meredith had found a 5 kuai shirt....honestly at that point I couldn't see myself coughing up even 60cents for a shirt that I could have made with a Bedazzler when I was 6 years old. But....we happened upon a 5 kuai bin of shirts that was filled with cotton tshirts with a mushroom applique in the left corner. We decided that each of us needed one in a different color and here was the criteria for the winning shirts: find the ones with the fewest stains and the least amount of snags and holes! Ha, have you ever decided upon shopping goods that way? Thus, 10 minutes later we were each in possession of a holey-moldy-mushroom shirt that each of us willingly sported while playing euchre and choking down 1 gross bottle of chinese beer between the four of us and the outside "jungle bar" by Mere's school.

After promptly falling asleep at midnight due to exhaustion, we awoke by 9:30 Saturday morning and were ready for the highlight of out trip: a 10kuai hair wash at Mere's local salon. It was lovely, for one hour I got a scalp massage, back massage, and they even loosened the joints in my arms (think made them tingle to the point where I couldn't feel them). On our way out to the busstop from the local market street afterward was when our perfect weekend turned into the worst weekend. The four of us were walking one direction and apparently 2 men came up behind us on a motorcycle, slashed jenny's purse strap with a knife, yanked it from her and drove off. They were too far away for mere and I to run and catch them. I yelled at a police officer across the street and said in chinese "look, the thief took her purse" and I pointed to the direction they went, but the officer did nothing, just continued peddling on the bike in the opposite direction. I couldn't believe it, hundreds of people saw what happened and yet did nothing! Jenny was beyond distraught and rightly so. The thieves had cut her under her arm while stealing the bag and she was bleeding and they also had stolen quite the loot. She had 800kuai, a US$750 camera and a bank card in her purse. Julia and I got Jenny on the bus and we headed home, while meredith headed back to her school.

I got a call later that afternoon from Mere telling me that as she was walking home, Aaron (her boyfriend who is with here here) called and she pulled out her cell phone and as she did so, another man on a motorcycle zoome by and grabbed her purse. Luckily since emotions were already running rather high due to the previous incident, she flipped out, yanked the purse back and started screaming, so the man just drove off without the purse.

What a saturday. So, my best friend here had her purse stolen, but if that had happened in NY, you all would have called it a mugging. It's the same thing, however stealing here happens much much much more often. Jenny was lucky not to have been hurt. Over the last week I have heard other more unfortunate theft stories like where motorcyle thieves don't actually cleanly cut the purse away from the victim and the person is actually dragged behind the motorcycle for hundreds of meters until the strap or purse actually breaks. Pretty bad huh.

Basic chinese policy is to mind your own business. This translates into watching people get stolen from and do nothing about it. My tutor John told me on Wednesday that last week he prevented a little child thief from stealing a women's wallet at a downtown busstop, and pretty much everyone at the stop scorned him afterward for getting involved in business that was not his own. I found this interesting, b/c john paints shenzhen people as people who keep to themselves and mind their own business and yet as I walk down any road in china, I can hear people talking about me, I can see men who ride their bikes into tree trunks b/c their head is screwed so far backward b/c they're staring at me. Thus, I have yet to marry these two forms of thinking. Time will I suppose.