Country Driving [36]
“What’s up with this?” Goettig said at last.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I haven’t driven this road before.”
The banners stood before cheaply built shops of cement and white tile. Strange stones is the Chinese term for any rock whose shape resembles something else. It’s an obsession at scenic destinations across the country; in the Yellow Mountains you can seek out natural formations with names like Immortal Playing Chess and Rhinoceros Watching Moon. Collectors buy smaller rocks: sometimes they’ve been carved into a certain shape, or maybe they contain a mineral pattern with an uncannily familiar form. I had never understood this particular obsession, and the sudden proliferation of Strange Stones in this forgotten corner of Hebei mystified me. Who was buying all this stuff? Finally, after about twenty banners, I pulled over.
Inside the shop, the first thing I noticed was that the arrangement seemed odd. The lighting was bad, and display tables completely encircled the room, leaving only a narrow gap for entry. A shopkeeper stood beside the gap, smiling. With Goettig behind me, I squeezed past the tables, and then I heard a tremendous crash.
I spun around. Goettig stood frozen; shards of green lay strewn across the concrete floor. “What happened?” I asked.
“He knocked it off!” the shopkeeper said. He grabbed the hem of Goettig’s coat. “Your jacket brushed it.”
Goettig and I stared at the scattered shards. Finally I asked, “What is it?”
“It’s jade,” the man said. “It’s a jade ship.”
Now I recognized pieces: a corner of a smashed sail, a strand of broken rigging. It was the kind of model ship that Chinese businessmen display in their offices for good luck. The material looked like the cheap artificial jade that comes out of factories, and it had absolutely exploded—there were more than fifty pieces.
“Don’t worry about it,” the shopkeeper said brightly. “Go ahead and look around. Maybe there’s something else you’ll want to buy.”
We stood in the center of the room, surrounded by the ring of tables like animals in a pen. Goettig’s hand was shaking. “Did you really knock it over?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t feel anything, but I’m not sure. It fell down behind me.”
I had never seen a Chinese shopkeeper react so calmly when goods were broken. Now a second man emerged from a side room, carrying a broom. He swept the shipwreck into a neat pile, but he left it lying on the floor. Silently, other men appeared, until three more of them stood near the door. In the past I had heard about antique shops where owners broke a vase and blamed a customer, and now I wondered if this technique had been adopted as a roadside scam. It made sense: so many motorists in China are rookies with money to burn.
“What do we do now?” Goettig said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we just buy something.”
A few Strange Stones looked like food. For some reason this has always been a popular Chinese artistic motif, and I recognized old favorites: a rock-hard head of cabbage, a stony strip of bacon. Other stones had been polished to reveal some miraculous mineral pattern, but in my nervousness most of the shapes looked the same to me. I selected a smaller one and asked the price.
“Two thousand yuan,” the shopkeeper said. He saw me recoil; it was nearly two hundred and fifty dollars. “But we can go cheaper,” he said quickly.
“You know,” Goettig said, in English, “nothing else in here would break if it fell.”
He was right—it was all Strange in a strictly solid sense. And why had a jade ship been there in the first place? As a last resort, I hoped that maybe Goettig’s size would discourage violence. He was six feet one and well built, with close-cropped hair and a sharp Germanic nose that the Chinese found striking. But in truth I had never known anybody gentler, and we shuffled meekly toward the door. The men were still standing there.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I don’t think we want to buy anything.”
“Zenmeban?” the shopkeeper said softly. He had stopped smiling, and now he pointed at the shards on the floor. “What