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By Root 1231 0

I’d haggled for what I estimated, by this point, was my twenty-eighth umbrella in China. I did not have twenty-eight umbrellas in my possession, of course. The world is divided between those who lose umbrellas and those who don’t. I lose them. But it wasn’t merely the damp spittle that conjured up a city in the Ruhr Valley. From the Bell Tower, I could see a sign informing me that Starbucks would be brewing soon. There were two McDonald’s within my line of vision. The streets that fanned out from the Bell Tower were all lined with bourgeois retailers. Before me, there was an enormous new shopping plaza. It seemed so comfortably prosperous. Like Dusseldorf.

Even the beggars in Xi’an were fat. In front of the Bell Tower Hotel, two obese teenage girls glided by on pullies in the rain, showing their curled feet and bent toes to any and all. The idea being, apparently, that they had suffered cruelly from bound feet. Surely, the upscale tourists who stayed at the Bell Tower Hotel would greet these girls with hoots of derision. Binding feet had ended generations ago. There wasn’t a woman alive in China whose feet had been bound. And then I watched a couple in their North Face parkas drop 50 kuai into their fat hands, and suddenly I was filled with admiration for these enterprising youngsters. The tourists would go home with tales of the poor young women disfigured by bound feet in Xi’an, and the girls would go to McDonald’s. And then I came across a man on the sidewalk who was missing a third of his head, as if it had been sliced off by a blade, a blade that had also taken both arms, and who stood painting calligraphy on the sidewalk before taking a microphone between his stumps and belting out a few tunes. Okay, I thought, so maybe Xi’an isn’t like Dusseldorf after all.

Nevertheless, I was struck by the prosperity evident in the streets spilling out from the Bell Tower. I even found a bookstore with an English-language section, and as I perused their eclectic selection of titles I wondered how the censors had missed Penthouse Letters. I bought a book about Harry Truman, and as I went to pay for it I noticed the bestseller list hanging on the wall. And who might we find at the summit of the Chinese bestseller list? The Da Vinci Code by the nefarious Dan Brown.

I had more to shop for, however. When I’d left months ago, I’d packed for spring in Beijing and summer in tropical Hong Kong. I was no longer in tropical Hong Kong. It was November. Indeed, before my journey’s end I had plans to go up to Harbin in the far north of China, where the newspaper confidently informed me that it was presently well below freezing, suggesting the need for a warm coat. I did not have a warm coat. To rectify this deficiency, I wandered around downtown Xi’an popping into stores and trying on coats of various styles and shapes. I, frankly, often wished that men’s fashion had remained frozen in 1940 so that every day I’d know to wear a gabardine suit and a fedora and I wouldn’t have to spend any time choosing what to wear and wondering what my sartorial choices might reflect about me. I didn’t care about clothes. But I also didn’t care to look like a dweeb. So, I suppose, I did care. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to reach into my closet and grab my gabardine suit and my fedora without another moment’s thought. It’s a complicated mind, that of the male animal.

So I walked around Xi’an trying on coats, where it soon became clear that I was getting ahead of myself wondering about style issues, because as I tried coat after coat, it became evident that Chinese men, apparently, did not have shoulders. I couldn’t find anything that fit. I walked into a high-end mall, and ambled past a woman playing a grand piano, and loped among stores selling Polo, Versace, Hugo Boss, and other upscale brands, and wondered who in China spends $5,000 on a coat. And was there some essential Chineseness being lost as the Chinese started to buy cars and condos and lattes and $5,000 coats? And was this good or bad? Will we all be united in consumerism? And then I realized there