There's an old gag list that makes the rounds of China expats, popping up in e-mail boxes from time to time when a recent arrival stumbles upon it and sends it, yet again, to everyone living here. The top of the list includes such gems as:
  • A June 2001 Great Wall Cabernet (mixed with Sprite) is your vintage of choice
  • When someone says 'snack', you think: salted cuttlefish!
  • You get your haircut on the sidewalk.
  • You leave the 'Garbano' designer label conspicuously on the jacket sleeve.
  • You walk backwards in the park listening to a transistor radio.
  • The China Daily is your source for hard hitting, fast breaking, investigative journalism.
And so on. Up to about 300.

Now I'd like to take advantage of my relative Beijing veteran status to add another one:
  • When a new Wal-Mart opens in your neighborhood it's an excuse for a big day out.
I guess that would also be a sign you've been living in Clinton, Arkansas too long, but it works here too. If I were back in my home-town of San Francisco, I, being a card-carrying Chardonnay-sipping elite leftist, would greet the opening of neighborhood Wal-Mart with monkey-rage hoots of alarm. But in China...hot damn! More cheap stuff! Without bargaining!

I wasn't the only one seduced by the thought of a bonanza of well-lit, generic consumer goods within walking distance of my front door. The previous day, a good friend of mine bundled his wife and in-laws off to the spanking, new store. And Mrs. Imagethief and I weren't alone on our visit. We arranged to meet another couple we know at the door. They were shopping for a DVD player to replace the Chinese model that had spontaneously self-destructed a few days before, and then been further condemned by the exploratory surgery of the female half of the couple, an engineer. Sure, they could have gone to Dazhong, the electronics specialist just across the street, but the shrink-wrapped siren call of the Wal-Mart was just too strong to ignore.

Like any good foreign supermarket, Wal-Mart has localized. Chinese seem to have the same appreciation for cheap, made-in-China stuff as Americans. Proof positive that despite our cultural differences, we are not so far apart after all. But it also had six grades of bulk dried shrimp, live turtles with price tags punched through their shells and 4000 RMB ($500)-a-pound dried sea cucumbers.

Of course, there was plenty of grand-opening pomp. A big Sanyuan Dairy stage with a thumping sound system. A promoter wrangling a bunch of shoppers into a contest to see who could stack up the most oranges. Conspicuously fresh and lively seafood in the tanks, as opposed to the moribund, fungus-infested, terminal cases normally found in Beijing supermarket tanks. There was even a guy in a tiger outfit wandering around and promoting...something. I'm not sure what. And it had that most gratifying trait of new supermarkets: brand new shopping carts where all four wheels go in the same direction at the same time.

What there weren't, however, were any floor or desk lamps, which our friends were also looking for. Nor was there a particularly useful import section. And there was an inexplicably awful looking demo disk playing on all the televisions. You'd think if you're going to have a huge wall of spanking new plasma and LCD TVs you'd play a crystal-clear, HD demo desk that would make people actually desire a new TV, rather than some blurry, pixellated, retread piece of crap designed to convince you that your current TV is just fine.

Oh well. Back to Carrefour. It may just be a French Wal-Mart, but there is something about the French-ness that keeps me from feeling like I'm selling out my bourgeois values by shopping there. Plus they have a much better selection of cheese to go with my Chardonnay.