The art of haggling

BEIJING - It's a warning all inveterate Chinese travelers pass on.

Can't make it, otherwise, they say. You'll be branded a gullible tourist, a cultural diletante, and there is no stepping back from such indignity.

Learn it swiftly and adopt it as if you were born with such acumen, they say.

Haggling.

Like dumplings and rickshaws and smog, haggling is just part of China's culture. For some reason, fiercely volleying numbers back and forth is part of the canon to souvenir shopping there.

Easier than it sounds, immersed in the turbulent din of a busy Beijing street, where street vendors fling out offers for the wares they stock in red cases or string along their arms.

I had promised my boyfriend a knock-off Rolex, and spying a woman with a red-lined case of tickers, I halt.

Can't be so hard.

The peddler's cheeks swell in a grin. Her fingers grip a watch and hold it out to me pointedly, as if forcing me to buy it by will.

"Thirty dollars!" she exclaims.

For what she's holding? Outrageous.

"Bu, bu," I stutter hastily the Chinese word for "No." My mind races. What other monosyllabic words do I know to convey my cheapness?

Steady, I tell myself. You got this. Kind of like learning to ride a bike, only instead of falling you get totally ripped off.

This vendor is looking confident. Too confident.

All around me, customers and peddlers are embroiled in their own small crusades for trinkets. I envy their easy volume, their irate expressions.

How do they pull it off?

I think of my money. The hard hours devoted to earning it.

And inspiration comes.

I feel the rise of confidence within, part anger, part exhaustion and jet lag mixing into something toxic as my chest swells with air.

"ONE DOLLAR!" I roar.

It makes no impression as she laughs.

"No," she chuckles. "Thirty dollars."

Sheesh.

We throw numbers back and forth: One dollar. Thirty dollars. One dollar. Twenty-five dollars. Ten dollars.

We decide on $15, and she nods and accepts, maybe too quickly. I have a feeling I'm still getting screwed.

Whatever. The watch is now stuffed in my camera bag. Mine. Somehow better than any other souvenir I've obtained before. It's been fought for, earned. My spoils of victory.

Elation making me giddy - or maybe it's just all the exhaust in the air - and I saunter off, preparing for the next excuse to declare firmly, definitively: "Bu."

Alecia Warren is a reporter for The Press who is touring China with other North Idahoans through the Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls chambers of commerce.