Wo Er Ma

This month-old article about Wal-Mart bidding for the Chinese chain Trust-Mart brought back memories of my time in Wuhan. (I actually started this post a month ago, then partly because of this post, I got side-tracked with integrating Google Maps with my blog to show various places from my travels—took me quite a while. You can see the result in the "places I've been" link on the right. ) Right behind my school there was a Trust-Mart, and it's where I did nearly all of my shopping for a year. Its Chinese name is 好又多, which means something like "good (things) and many (things)." (Wal-Mart's name in Chinese is 沃尔玛 — it has no meaning really, but rather is phonetic. You can see the literal meaning of each character here.) But I didn't find it that great, and once I discovered some of the other, better supermarkets—Carrefour (家乐福), Fu-Mart (大福源), and even, I'm ashamed to admit, the Wal-Mart which opened up in 2004—I rarely went back. (There was also the much smaller but more spread-out Zhongbai (中百), a branch of which opened directly below my school in 2002.)

Though they might vary in cleanliness and selection, the layout of all the large supermarkets was the same, and I suspect it's so throughout China: They are all housed in a large 2- or 3-story building that looks more like a department store from the outside. When you walk through the entrance, you see several stalls and small shops where people sell clocks, shoes, jewelry, tea, and trinkets. Most likely, there is a canteen nearby. You cannot enter the store itself from the first level. You have to take an escalator to the second or third level, where you may encounter some other stalls before you can actually enter the store proper. Upstairs they sell about every non-edible item you might want in your home in China: TVs, radios, dumpling steamers, office supplies, water heaters, mosquito nets, washing machines, rice cookers, clothes, shoes, dishes, woks, bicycles, weights, toys, mahjong (麻将), toiletries, electric fly-swatters, calligraphy paper, Hello Kitty crap, karaoke machines, dictionaries, pirated CDs and DVDs...

You have to wind your way through all of this stuff—this is China's version of putting the milk and bread in the back—which can be incredibly difficult if you're pushing a cart through weekend crowds. Then finally you get to the escalator going down, and you descend into the smells of food.

At Fu-Mart, you gently sank into the wonderful smell of baking bread, but most other places brought you down right in the fish and meat section, where the smells of preserved salty fish, flattened dehydrated chickens, frogs and eels in aquariums, and all sorts of animal parts, rushed into your nostrils like Henry V's army unto the breach.

As you might have guessed from the brief list of 2nd-floor items I recounted above, there are all sorts of odd things you can find in Chinese supermarkets, and this becomes even more apparent as you wander amongst the food.

Dried shredded fish. Black herbal jello. Geriatric nut powders. Dried string mushrooms. Frozen fish balls. Tree ear fungus (木耳). Tofu that looks like dried corn husks. Spicy pickled vegetables. Curdled pig blood. Lotus seeds. Blackened preserved eggs (皮蛋). Sesame paste. Plum sauce. Red bean paste (红豆沙). All the wonderful Chinese vegetables, such as caitai (菜苔), uncommon outside of Hubei Province, and lihao (蓠蒿). Chinese fruit, like longyan (龙眼) and lizhi (荔枝). Noodles for local dishes such as hot-dry noodles (热干面) and cold noodles (凉面), as well as all sorts of other noodles. Endless varieties of tea. (And that's just what I can remember from a single sitting.)

Then after you check out (without the benefit of conveyor belts like in the US), you had to get your receipt stamped before going out the narrow exit (like the pass of Thermopylae) and back amongst the vendors. Then you did like everyone else does, and which I still do here, living as I do close to a supermarket—you park your cart, heft up your bags, and walk home. If it was raining, you might have caught a taxi or, before they were banned in 2003, a mamu (麻木 - a local Wuhan name for tricycle pedicabs).

All of these wonderful items—sometimes more, sometimes less—were available in the traditional outdoor street markets, which are great places to walk around in, and look at people and things. I didn't shop too often in the markets because, especially as a foreigner, I could never be sure I was getting a fair price. You have to haggle and bargain in the markets, and my general aversion to bargaining coupled with my inability to do so in Chinese guaranteed I would never get the price I could get in the supermarkets.

Yet it would be a shame if the outdoor markets disappeared. I wonder if the emergence of these supermarkets in recent years signals the beginning of the end, and the eventual lessening of variety, especially now that Wal-Mart is on the scene.

Admittedly, the Wal-Mart in Wuhan was much nicer, not to mention bigger, than any Wal-Mart I've seen in the U.S. The building it's in is actually rather stylish, and sells some things you'll never see at a Wal-Mart here. (Actually, those aren't porn videos, but sex education videos with very titillating covers and very boring content.)

So I didn't really feel it that bad or tasteless to shop there, like I do in America, though I went as little as necessary, preferring Fu-Mart above all others.

But I think it's only a matter of time—perhaps a long time given the size of the country and it's population, but witness the rapidity with which McDonald's and KFC have spread their tentacles throughout China (770 and 1,700 locations by November 2006, respectively - source). Once the outdoor markets go, then the variety in supermarkets themselves will begin to shrink. And when it's all over I wonder how much of the weird and wonderful and local variety will be lost, and replaced by a generic cuisine you can find any old place. Just like in the U.S.now that Mal-Wart has opened its doors in China, and is acquiring a Chinese chain as well, is the diversity of the country's food and other products endangered?