逛街 Going for a stroll

There's a word in Chinese, guàng jiē (逛街), which basically means to "stroll the streets." My Chinese friends use the word more often than you would think. In the United States, we use the phrase "go for a stroll" intermittently at best. For me, the term brings to mind retired elderly perched on leaf-covered park benches in autumn, post-dinner expectant newlyweds on cool summer evenings, or shopping-bag laden arms and rosy cheeks before Christmas. The times to "go for a stroll" are ordinary and momentous. Sure, "strolls" do not have the significance of weddings or graduations, but they also embody times when the body is active, the mind relaxed, and time abundant. Quite different from a "walk" or a "breath of fresh air."

Walking the streets in Hanzhong (a small Shaanxi city south of Xi'an)

Yet, in Chinese "stroll the streets" is said with a different timbre and frequency which has led me to believe that the translation is lacking in the nuances that "strolls" have come to possess. For example, working out at my gym, I asked one of the trainers, a short 30-ish muscle man with a wide face and wider grin, how his vacation was.

He replied, "I spent it with my girlfriend."

"What'd you guys do?"

"Guàng jiē."

This term, guàng jiē, is obviously not the same as "to go for a stroll." Nobody describes the time they spent off work as "going for a bunch of strolls." That makes the stroll seem too trite. At best ,you went for one really good stroll during you vacation.

In any case, this brings me to the point where I reveal that there's also another translation for "guàng jiē" which is to "window shop." This translation is probably how the phrase is used more often than not. Although the actual two characters do not really relate to shopping, the current usage of the phrase has adopted this implication. However, while this translation does a better job of describing the activity and thoughts involved, I still think that it does not totally encompass how guàng jiē is used. Another example from my friend Shijia, a 20-year-old college student at Jiaotong U.

"What do college kids like to do for fun? What kind of activities?"

"I don't know. Play computer games, go to karaoke, guàng jiē."

Again, I don't know that any college students I know would include window shopping amongst their activities. They might do it for fun, but few would consider it a hobby or activity. Therefore, I think that guàng jiē needs a third translation, one that looks at the context that the phrase is used in and the conditions in which its users live.

I've been lucky enough to have gone guàng jiē-ing more than I've wanted to with my Chinese friends. It seems that it is a good activity to do when you want to talk to someone and be their friend. The usual spot in Xi'an to guàng jiē is East Avenue (Dōng Dà Jiē) which is a street lined with all kinds of clothing stores. It's been to described to me as where "all the pretty girls (美女 měinǚ) are" or as always "lively (热闹 rènao) and trendy (火 huǒ)." It's here that 3 of Xi'an's 4 Starbucks are located. It's here where you can see the newest movies in the cinema. It's here where all the foreigners go to go clubbing at night. It's here that you can buy squid on a stick as you walk past stores selling Nike, Adidas, Lining, western suits, dresses, fashionable clothes, not fashionable clothes, records, graffiti spray paint, tattoos etc. Anyhow, after several trips to East Avenue, I've discovered that guàng jiē is to window shop, but it's also equivalent to "hang out." When people say they went to guàng jiē with their friends, they use it in the same way my friends and I back home would say "hang out." So in the example aboves, if you replace guàng jiē with "hang out" it sounds normal.

In a country where space is limited and costs money, China's youth don't have many places to "hang out." Having a semi-private place to sit around and shoot the breeze is not easy to come by. There are just too many people. Undergrad dorm rooms have between 4 and 6 students. There are not really common rooms to speak of, and anything that you would consider a common room is freezing cold. Thus "hang out" space is at a premium in China, and so the price of "hang out" space is far too much for the average college student. Starbucks or China's coffee houses offer places to sitt and chat (many of which have actual rooms for groups of people), but the average cost of cup of coffee in China is around 20 RMB (~$3) which is very expensive when you consider that you only make 4RMB/hr working part time at KFC. So guàng jiē-ing allows friends to "hang out" while on the move. They walk from store to store which is playing cool music and has heating, or AC as the seasons determine). They munch on the street food and sip hot drinks. And they just hang out as they walk around.

With all that said, I think it's also interesting to consider that "hanging out" for China's youth is very much entwined with shopping, with materialism. There's a couple ways you can look at this. The first is to consider that materialism is exactly what is hot in China. Not that it's not huge in the rest of the world, but it's precisely because materialism is prevalent throughout the first-world nations that it has captured the fascination of China's up-and-coming generation. To buy things is to buy prestige. However, what things should one buy? I would argue that going out as groups of friends provides a platform on which to discuss this question. Going from store to store talking about which backpack is nice or what shoes are cool helps to establish what the symbols of prestige are in a society that from the 50s until the 80s was told not to look upon material items as markers of prestige and class (for lack of a better word).

However, that's an argument that would need a lot more research. Another interesting thing to consider in a city like Xi'an is that it is necessary to guàng jiē. Guàng jiē-ing is confined to simply very popular streets like East Avenue. Xi'an, and all Chinese cities, are filled with stores. Streets are just lined with them, each one selling its own product. Unlike the U.S., grocery stores and department stores have only recently made their entrance onto the scene, and in fact their prices are rarely the best ones. However, after living here for almost five months the tiny, specialized stores have lost their charm, and I find myself craving the convenience of a one-stop-shop Walmart. Anyhow, survival and comfort living in a Chinese city relies on your ability to know the streets, to know where the store that sells vegetables is, where the store that sells bread is, where the store that sells beef is, where the store that sells goat is, and where the store that sells donkey meat is. You don't realize how many things are in your live until you have to run around buying them all at different stores. What is more, any China expat will tell you that many items (sports equipment, musical instruments, printers, TVs, underwear, Christmas decorations, etc) are all concentrated on one single street or market. So, it's imperative that you have a little bit of knowledge about where these places are, and thus it become imperative that you guàng jiē and explore a little. At least that's what I find myself doing, and it's wonderful. Each street brings something new. Maybe with time the internet will map all this out for us, but China's Google (baidu.com) is yet to have complete listings of all these tiny little stores. In a city where most people can't just drive to the store to pick everything, why not just go for a stroll?