Condom conundrum

Six thousand impossible things before breakfast

3. Condom conundrum

cosí fan tutte

'Ma come fai?' This standard greeting proffered by visiting Italian businessmen puzzled me. How was I doing ? Were they referring to the absence of air conditioning in our office, deeply felt by perspiring local staff, and more vociferously by sweaty foreign experts passing through ? Or casually observing that our communal-dishes-only canteen would not have stood up to any close public health scrutiny, not if the inspector was in full possession of his or her visual and olfactory powers? My Italian was progressing far more rapidly than my Chinese - two of my colleagues had Italian as their only foreign language, so even if my Chinese didn't sound Chinese, at least my Italian did - but I was way behind on cultural issues.

'How do you do' is what visiting Brits would say, glancing nervously at their watch in case I launched into a reply . 'Why on earth didn't you get a job with a German company?' said my compatriots, reprovingly. 'Where can you get a decent meal and some wine around here?'' French visitors would ask. 'Mind if I borrow 20 bucks? The banks are closed and I need to go to the post office to call home about the ice hockey results, ' my Canadian neighbour at the YMCA came out with by way of introduction. 'We must have a chat about Moscow sometime', said the Polish consul, kissing my hand promisingly. No possibility of misunderstanding there. But 'Come fai?'

It took me a while to figure out that this persistent inquiry in fact concerned my sex life. It turned out that our Italian visitors were doubly concerned on my account: a) were my needs being met in this lonely outpost (not a few gentlemen kindly offered their help in this respect), and more importantly, b) how did I manage to keep my Chinese colleagues at arm's length, propositioning me all the time, as they surely must ?

Now it was their turn to be puzzled: I had no trouble whatsoever to report on that front. I felt the only reason my colleagues knew I was of the female persuasion was that they had been told. My name alone was a bit dodgy - Ya-li-shan-da, like Alexander the Great. No self-respecting Chinese woman would go round with a man's name. Chinese men were often said, by fellow Chinese and foreigners alike, to harbour feelings of envy and inferiority vis à vis their Western counterparts. Whatever the truth of this claim, I had the distinct impression that they secretly felt sorry for the kind of women the latter had to put up with. Large and loud and graceless. Whereas it was a grudgingly tolerated fact that some Chinese women married Western men - women are expected to "marry'out' and become part of the husband's family anyway - the attitude towards marriage between Chinese men and Western women was downright contemptuous. 'She couldn't get a husband back home, and he only married her for her passport/money etc.'.

It usually took some doing to convince Italian visitors that my work environment was entirely devoid of sexual harrassment. This seemed to depress them more than the lack of essential modcons such as wallpaper, toilet doors, photocopiers and electric typewriters, and not even the presence of a freshly imported espresso machine reconciled them to this unnatural state of affairs. 'The Chinese must be a totally undersexed nation' was the inevitable conclusion. Then again - there were rather a lot of them about. Was it possible that they had never even heard of condoms, this most basic form of contraception? Thus the conversation would turn from 'Come fai?' to the even more intriguing 'Come fanno loro?'

I decided to investigate.

The easiest way would have been to ask someone. Only whom? My Chinese colleagues were all male. The older ones would have found the question most inappropriate; the ones my age or younger, I suspect, were just as curious to find out as I was. But there was a large and much treasured English-Chinese dictionary in the office. I lifted it from the shelf as discreetly as I could and leafed my way through to the letter c. The minute print made it necessary for me to subject each page to careful examination so as not to miss the word in question.

'Ya-li-shan-da, my friend! What is it you want to know ? Why not ask me rather than waste time with big dictionary?' Xiao Yuan, our office scholar and jealous custodian of the dictionary, pounced on me out of nowhere. It was a delicate moment. At university Xiao Yuan had distinguished himself in Chinese history, literature, calligraphy and French, and was currently translating Stendhal's 'Le Rouge et le Noir' into Chinese.

I had mixed feelings about him. He was rightly proud of his academic achievements and resentful of the fact that business management had replaced learning in the general scheme of things, certainly where material gain was concerned. He was a scholar by inclination, yet not quite unworldly enough to renounce his share in the economic boom China was experiencing. He also had a wife and baby to support. I had the impression that he detested most of the foreigners he had to work for. While his education carried prestige with his Chinese colleagues, few businessmen from abroad were able to appreciate it. He felt bitter about the fact that they had easy access to every kind of comfort, when he had to queue up to buy milk for his small son, not always successfully. As in much of southern China, dairy products were not easy to come by in downtown Shanghai, and even less so if you only had local currency to pay with. I would have felt a great deal of sympathy for him, had it not been for the lurking arrogance I sensed beneath the veneer of picture book modesty and politeness. I also felt he was constantly trying to catch me out, gloating over my every linguistic, social and other kinds of blunder, which made me uncomfortable in his presence. I nearly jumped sky-high.

'You must forgive me, Xiao Yuan. I know how busy you are, I didn't mean to disturb you.'

'There is always time to help out our friends! What is it you want to know?'

'I want to know how to say con- kindergarten!" Prompted by my subconscious, or so it seemed, to get as far away as possible from the subject matter in hand, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

'Kindergarten? It is not my wish to teach my foreign friend a lesson but I think this word begin with letter 'k', not 'c'. '

Great! just what I needed. 'Yes, of course it does. What I really meant was ...'

'Ha, ha! Good thing you have your colleagues to help you ... otherwise waste much time looking under wrong letter. Difficult for Chinese people to learn English, even more difficult for German people ...' he chuckled.

'Is it permitted to join in the fun?' Shen Yi Min, attracted by Xiao Yuan's merriment, looked over my shoulder.

'Ha, ha! Lao Shen, our friend need help - cannot find kindergarten in dictionary', explained Xiao Yuan.

'Miss Ya-li-shan-da, you must look under letter 'k' - I will help you to find it', said Shen Yi Min in a gentlemanly gesture.

Grateful for a distraction, Xiao Xue and Lao Qiu abandoned their morning's labour of watching the telex machine in the event of an incoming message and strolled over to contribute to the impromptu spelling bee.

There was nothing for it, I had to grit my teeth and let everybody help me find 'kindergarten' in the dictionary. By the afternoon it would be all over the embroidery corporation building: not only did Miss Ya-li-shan-da not know the first thing about business, even though she was paid far more than everyone else, but she also couldn't tell the difference between a c and a k.

I suspended my research for that day.

But my life as a foreign guest was making me increasingly cunning. I planned my next onslaught on the dictionary for egg day. My colleagues had managed to convince the kitchen god that Westerners a long way from home needed eggs at least once a week to sustain their bulky selves, so the canteen had begun to serve eggy dishes on Thursdays.

At five minutes to twelve everybody was in their starting blocks to shoot off to lunch the minute Zhang Kun-hua said.

'Please go ahead, I need to go to the bathroom', I said.

'We will wait for you', said Shen Yi Min.

'No, no, please don't wait, really. I'll be up in a minute.'

As I had calculated, the pull of the scrambled egg proved stronger than Mao Zedong Thought, which as a rule opposed private venture, even in the direction of the lavatory.

With my colleagues safely out of the way, the strategic moment had come. I grabbed the dictionary and looked under 'condom'. Good grief! There was a daunting half-page crawling with Chinese equivalents, in tiny print. I selected the one that looked easiest to write, and copied it down in my mentally retarded foreign hand. Now for the fieldwork.

On my next day off I walked into a chemist's shop on Nanjing Lu, where the sight of a foreigner was perhaps distasteful, but not inhabitual. There were very few customers and my turn soon came. I held up the scrap of paper to the man behind the counter, fully expecting him to shrug his shoulders uncomprehendingly. But no - he nodded immediately and walked away. We were off to a good start! At this point I noticed I was rapidly gaining popular support. Since I entered the shop a cluster of people had started forming around me and they were now monitoring my every move from a close angle. The chemist came back with four more or less identical boxes which he set out on the counter, evidently waiting for me to indicate the one I wanted. Rats - my experience of socialist economies had taught me to trust in the absence of choice. So what was the difference?

The growing crowd around me clearly knew. One man, pointing at one of the boxes, said something to the chemist, whereupon he put that box to one side. This prompted another spectator to raise his voice in indignation, only to be contradicted by a third and fourth one, and so on. Soon the shop had split up into two factions. Like so many times, I dearly wished I could understand more Chinese. I took the boxes, held them up one by one for inspection and asked one faction: 'Which one would you choose?' 'This no good. Buy the other one.' Vehement protest from the other side. And on and on it went. An elderly woman took pity on me: 'This one for Chinese, no good for foreigners' she pointed to the box on the side. Ah - so the divisive issue was which type of condom was best suited to foreigners. The arguments for and against each one of course still eluded me.

The chemist, who had not taken sides, solved the problem with commendable expediency by selling me all three boxes found suitable for foreigners. The debate was still in full swing as I left the shop with my booty.

My mission had been intoxicatingly successful: I was now in a position to satisfy our Italian business partners' anthropological interest in local contraception methods. In the light of expert, if contradictory, advice so readily provided by a wide range of indigenous consultants, the population could be assumed to be perfectly familiar with the condom and its uses. There remained one question. It wasn't until some time later that a married Chinese girlfriend enlightened me as to the details of my purchase: the options considered suitable for the anatomy of the foreign male were large and extra-large, to the exclusion of small and medium. I would love to know what people were actually saying in the chemist's shop that day ...

Shanghaied, or The Price of Tea in China

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Sid and I act like two foreigners in a Chinese restaurant: you can never keep a bad fish down

Sid gets sick: Professor Wang obliges a foreign friend

Six thousand impossible things before breakfast: the trouble with Chinese