The Adventure of the Art Students from Xi'an

I was in Beijing with a hundred or so friends, traveling with the New York Oratorio Society, which was giving two concerts in China.

The trip included a tightly scheduled tour of the country under the aegis of the Chinese government tourism office. Like all tourists in China, we saw the Great Wall and after Beijing would go to the central province of Xi’an to see its famous terra cotta army. Our guides—all young, stylishly dressed representatives of China's emerging middle class—declared in every lecture that the new China, with its "special Chinese" version of communism called "capitalism," was an improvement on the old China.

On the day of the second concert, however, those of us who weren’t singing had a precious hour or so of free time. Two of us had already taken the Beijing subway once and gotten lost in the middle of the city. This time we headed, more prudently, for the nearby shopping area called Silk Alley.

No sooner were we well away from our hotel, than we were approached by two young Asian women who asked whether they might walk with us and practice their English. Hardly more than twenty and respectably dressed; they looked harmless enough. “Sure,” we said, and along they came.

As we walked, they said they were art students recently arrived in Beijing from Xi'an. After we told them we ourselves were going to Xi’an the very next day, we felt as if we knew each other better. They seemed like country girls, a little lost and alone in the big city.

Right after that, one of them said, "Oh, our studio is right here—won't you come up and meet our teacher?" Ah, I thought—they're salespeople, shilling for customers. Or worse, a voice in my head warned, suggesting sinister scenarios of which robbery at gunpoint was the least terrifying. But the two young women really did seem innocent and the dire possibilities in my head not really very likely, so with only a little trepidation, we went along with them.

It looked like a real studio, full of tables holding art paraphernalia and paintings lining the walls. Their teacher was nowhere in sight, but they fixed us jasmine tea and led us around to look at the paintings. They were for sale, the young women said, and asked us which ones we liked.

So it really was only a sales hustle. I liked some of the paintings; one set in particular seemed like just the thing for my son the water-colorist. They named a price and when I hesitated, translating into dollars in my head, they offered me a "discount."

I bought the set, and my friend bought another. The jasmine tea wasn't drugged, and no one robbed us. When we got back to the hotel, the packages the students had wrapped so carefully did indeed contain the paintings we had chosen. There was no crime at all, in other words—only another face of the new Chinese communism.

But there was, after all, a mystery: At a late, post-concert supper that night, it turned out that everyone at our large table had been approached by two young women art students from Xi'an. They, too, had been brought to studios, where they, too, had bought paintings. But we had all been brought to different studios—and, from the descriptions, by different young art students from Xi'an.

The small-time entrepreneurs of Beijing, it seemed, have discovered that Western tourists who might boggle at going to a strange place with a strange man will go almost anywhere with personable young women who say they're students from the provinces. And then they’ll do what Westerners do around the world: Shop.

Mystery solved.

©Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009
Photo by Ellen Davidson © 2009