The Chinese Onion Incident
From 18 February 2010
When one thinks of Walmart, they likely have a mental image of shopping chaos. I know I do, anyway. Walmart in my home city was always overly crowded and overly loud, a hectic experience rife with sensory overload.
That also is a fair description of a city in China.
So when we encountered a Walmart in China, we had to investigate. We are, after all, constantly preaching the benefit of adventures... and what greater adventure is there than an inner city Chinese Walmart? We needed to pick up some groceries, and were hoping to find a few items to make tacos for some expats that were a bit homesick for food other than the local flavors. Beijing and Shanghai would likely have markets that sold a lot of western food imports; however this smaller city did not.
Upon entering the Walmart, our expectation of a sensory overload was immediately confirmed. It was crowded, bright and colorful. The grocery section was crammed with all sorts of items, many we recognized but also quite a few we didn’t. But most noticeable were the women standing on platforms, shouting over each other and gesturing towards a bin alongside them, trying to convince the shoppers to pick up the wares they were sponsoring I assumed.
We grabbed our basket and pushed our way through crowds toward the produce section. Amongst the chaos that was swarming around us, we found a bin with onions. Grabbing one that looked surprisingly nice, we threw it in our basket and sought less hectic areas. There was a bakery of sorts, and while they did have some types of bread they really didn’t have much we recognized, let alone tortillas. We picked up some sort of thin, flat bread that resembled a crepe – likely made for Peking Duck or some similar dish. We found shredded cheese (we assumed mozzarella), but could not manage to find any canned beans. We did get a small bit of dried mung beans, just to have something even though they would need to be prepped a day in advance.
We also walked through the housewares section, and had to push through a crowd gathered around a table frantically digging through clothing, as a guy on a platform was shouting out what I assume were crazy sale prices. In a calmer aisle we had managed to find a couple nice Chinese style tea mugs, with the ceramic infuser that sits on the lid after the tea is made. We got these as nice practical souvenirs, but we also bought them here for the looks we are sure to get back home, when asked where in China we got them, and we say “Walmart”!
We made our way down to the cashiers, which proved to be the most hectic part of the whole store… though that part isn’t much different from our own Walmarts here to be honest. We waited patiently in line, as patiently as was possible despite the obvious efforts of everyone around us trying to see exactly what the westerners had in our basket.
Finally, it was our turn. The cashier- an older lady with a sweet disposition- began scanning our items.
Beans were scanned, and put in a bag with a pleasant smile. The mugs were scanned, and carefully wrapped in paper before being put in the bag. Then she gets our onion. She holds it up and says something to us we didn’t understand.
“Yes, that’s our onion,” I said, after some bad attempts at saying something similar in Chinese. I'm not sure she understood English at all. She certainly didn't understand my horrendous Mandarin.
She smiled a big smile, nodded at us, and… threw our onion straight into the trash can!!!
It wasn’t just any throw though, but with a pleasant smile and a deliberate motion like a Michael Jordan dunk, she trashed that onion with force. A strong, audible thud sounded out as our onion- the cornerstone of all Western cooking- met its early end in a Walmart checkout trash bin. The lady continued scanning the rest of our items with a pleasant smile as if nothing had happened while we stood there in total shock. That was our onion! The look on our faces must have been majestic, as a boy in his late teens behind us was laughing near hysterically. He caught enough composure to explain to us, in near-perfect English, that we needed to weigh the onion and print a label for it in the produce section. Fair enough, some stores also do that here. But we will still never know what she said, or why she seemed to take such calm pleasure in the forceful demise of our poor onion.
And you know what? We never did make those tacos…
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