Going back to a place, it's always easier to find things. This is not only because you remember where stuff is, it's also because you now know what to look for. But sometimes you can look all you want and still not see.
For example, the first time we were here, we wanted to buy rain ponchos to wear when riding our bikes. One of Deb's teachers at Harvard had brought a poncho back from China. It was colorful and practical, and surprisingly well made. So when we first moved here, we resolved to buy a couple of them right away.
Except that we couldn't find any place that sold them. We saw plenty of people wearing ponchos, but no matter what shop we went into, we never saw them for sale. We looked in bike shops and department stores, in our neighborhood and downtown, but never had any luck.
Finally, we saw them while we were walking in an underground passageway under a busy road. (In every country that we've ever visited, when they have underground pedestrian crossings, this is a very common place to buy things. Think about the outdoor shopping mall at Downtown Crossing, fill it with independent vendors selling items worth $1 or less, pack in twice as many shoppers, and move it all under Washington Street. That's what it's like.)
China is a not a place where bargaining is feverish, or overpricing rampant, but whenever you buy from a street vendor, wherever you are, you need to be wary. Deb had to try on several ponchos before she found one that fit. What they had wasn't perfect, but it was the rainy season and we were spending a lot of time on our bicycles. And the poncho was red - Deb's weakness. So she bought it for some ridiculous amount.
When they packed it up for us to take away, they folded it all into a small nylon pouch, about the size of a paperback book. Very convenient, and compact, and much easier to manage than an unpacked poncho. Looking at it, you would never think that there was a poncho inside...
And of course, now wherever we went, we saw small nylon pouches, about the size of a paperback book... holding rain ponchos. In the department stores downtown, and in the tiny shops right across the street from where we lived, there were ponchos of all colors and sizes, at quite good prices. We'd been looking right at them, but didn't know what we were seeing.
Sometimes it's not individual items, sometimes whole neighborhoods can hide. When you walk down most small streets in China, what you see on either side of the road are rows of what look like single car garages. They are built of brick or cement, covered with white ceramic tile, and secured with roll-down metal doors. And while they would serve quite nicely as garages, they are used instead as shops. In many cases, they also serve as the homes of the shopkeepers.
At first they look indistinguishable, even with the doors open. They are old and dirty, filled with unrecognizable junk. Maybe one is piled with pieces of ruined electric motors, another packed with bales of scrap cardboard. Many have bare metal bed frames that, during the day at least, do not hold sheets or mattresses, but sunglasses, or used books, or bicycle parts, or any of a number of small items for sale.
But after a while, patterns emerge. When you see a small table with a treadle sewing machine, it is probably a tailor shop. Rolls of wire and plastic hose by the entrance mark a hardware store. Piles of plastic-wrapped toilet paper outside indicates a "convenience store" inside, where they will also sell soda, toothpaste, batteries, and snack food. (Not Fritos and chips, but bags of sunflower seeds, in their husks, and cough-drop sized, individually wrapped candies.)
When you see this assortment, then you are probably in a residential area, rather than a commercial zone. Behind these buildings, somewhere off the main street, will be a market, where fresh vegetable fill the tables (or bed frames) and butchers sit next to slabs of hanging meat and fat, lazily waving a stick to drive away flies.
Once you get used to this, it is very easy to make your way around. We now have no trouble finding a restaurant in this kind of setting. (Look for the bookshelves, stacked with shoe-box sized plastic baskets, holding the wilted produce.) But you don't see all this the first time you look.
And first impressions can be wrong. It took me a while to realize that some barber shops have only one chair in the front of the shop, and in the back, behind a curtain, lots of quite comfortable looking beds. Furthermore, all of the employees are young women wearing short skirts. Even if I was able to read Chinese, the signs would not tell me so, but I can now see that these are not barber shops, but brothels. (Deb is always very careful to make sure that she knows where I am going to get a haircut.)
The difference between looking and seeing was made clear to me some years ago, on a visit to Vietnam. We were sitting in a cafe looking up words in a small English-Vietnamese dictionary. We must have been planning a sightseeing trip because I remember checking the translation for "see." There were two Vietnamese words given and I was wondering which one to use.
While I was busy with this, Deb had begun having a 'conversation' with a small girl, speaking with a traveler's pantomime. The girl looked around 7; maybe she was 10. When I glanced up from my dictionary, she asked with a gesture if she could see it. People often ask to see our dictionaries; they, as much as us, like to know how their words get transformed into another language.
She flipped around a few pages and tried out pronouncing a sampling of English words. We could tell she was bright and inquisitive. She'd have been a good student if she'd been going to school (It may have been her curiosity, coupled with the novelties of the backpacker's ghetto in Saigon, that drew her out of the classroom.)
I decided to try and get a clarification from her to help me decide on the right one of the two words. I showed her the two Vietnamese words for "see" and then made a puzzled shrug to indicate my confusion. She got the idea right away, and began to demonstrate the difference.
First, she pointed her index finger to her eye and then off towards a distant object, and repeated this back and forth a few times until we got the message. That one was looking. Then she took her index finger, pointed it to her temple, and made the "Ah-ha!" face. That one was seeing. This was one of the best language lessons that I've ever had.
Unfortunately, seeing can sometimes interfere with happiness. Deb sees how ugly our furniture is, I see how badly made our bicycles are, and we both become annoyed. But I think we have comfortable chairs, and she loves being able to ride around anywhere in town. We don't always choose to see the right things.
So more knowledge doesn't make you happier. According to the Bible, Adam and Eve only became ashamed of their nakedness after they got knowledge. Before that, they were looking but not seeing. If you look at something without knowing what you're seeing, is that more pure? Is seeing the original sin?
I'll take my chances outside of the garden, and I'll think about that little girl in Vietnam every time I feel the urge to say "Ah-ha!"
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