Throwing in the Tao

Our Chinese friend looks up sharply from his BlackBerry. "But you didn't bargain with him." He turns to the man and says something in Cantonese. The man sputters. They fire back and forth, short and sharp, and as they do, my friend resumes tapping at his BlackBerry, smiling down at the screen. The man, however, begins to shout. He grabs the jade wheel out of my hand, shoves it into his case of trinkets and closes up the case. Then he covers it up for good measure. People gather around us to stare. Still shouting, the man waves at us, palms down, an unmistakable dismissal, and my friend shrugs and walks away. I hurry after him.

"He's mad because he thought he caught a nice, fat fish." My friend looks pleased with himself. "And I got in the way."

Me, I can't even buy my way to interconnected balance.

On another hillside, outside a colonial cathedral, three vendors have set up a row of tables of knockoff watches, porcelain Buddhas, a crucifix and, lo and behold, more small jade wheels. I pick one out. I ask how much. When the vendor says 120, I say 80; we settle on . . . 100. The same price the one-legged man was charging. The vendor seems happy, I am happy, my friend approves of my neophyte effort at bargaining. I hope that somehow, in the big picture of the universe, this begins to balance out my many failures at A-Ma.

Meanwhile, Ingrid is pointing at another vendor's clock. She points with her whole hand, palm down. Ingrid knows to do this because she is a cautious traveler. Cruising at 30,000 feet, while I was dozing over a paperback copy of The Bourne Identity, she was diligently studying China: A Quick Guide to Customs & Etiquette. Unlike me, she now knows to present her credit card with both hands and a small bow. She knows not to casually pat people on the back, not to laugh too loudly, and not to give gifts wrapped in white or blue paper, the colors of death. The goal of Chinese etiquette, she tells me, is a community in harmonious balance, and that requires its individual parts to always be polite.

So here at the vendors' tables, she politely points at a clock with her whole hand, palm down, the way the Quick Guide said she should. She bargains much more effectively for the clock than I did for the jade: She shakes her head and turns away. The vendor makes his final offer, holds out the clock. She turns back. She takes it in her hands. She ponders it. It's the only one of its kind on the tables, and at last she says, "Okay." Everyone smiles.

While she counts out the money and presents it with both hands, I hold her new clock. It's an old-fashioned, windup alarm clock -- silver bells on top like mouse ears, the metal body painted bright red. The trim is rusted, the paint is scratched. But printed on the cheap cardboard face of this most bourgeois of timepieces is an homage to the proletarian revolution: Mao Zedong in a halo of light, smiling down beatifically on the masses, who march along in green military uniforms and red armbands, up to their waists in a flowing red river, their mouths open, their arms raised. They're holding up Mao's Little Red Book. With every tick of the second hand, one peasant's upraised arm actually waves the Little Red Book back and forth, ticktock, ticktock.

I want this clock. I want it so much that if Ingrid weren't my sister, if she were just another American, I would offer a higher bid right this minute. I'd launch a bidding war, every woman for herself. Not with my sister, though. For my sister to get this clock makes me almost as happy as me getting it. When we were little, Ingrid and I both showed equal talents in writing and drawing. But by the time we were teenagers, Ingrid was the family artist and I was the writer. Without discussing it, without even realizing it, we had chosen not to compete.

As Ingrid and I walk away, we giggle in two-part harmony over her one-of-a-kind piece of communist kitsch.

FROM MACAU, WE TAKE THE FERRY over to Hong Kong, humming from the South China Sea into a forest of giant cranes that crouch over miles of cargo ships, swinging containers into neat stacks on the decks. At the other end of their journey, many of these containers will be hauled by semis down American interstates; they're filled with products manufactured in the new Chinese factories that lie just to the north on the mainland, tying China and Hong Kong together.

Those factories make Hong Kong the busiest container port in the world. If Macau is the party girl, Hong Kong is the smart girl, gateway to the booming Chinese mainland. The skyscraping headquarters of banks and corporations punctuate Hong Kong's foggy skyline. In fact, Cantonese for "go to work" is "go back to work," as if that's where you belong, instead of home with your family. If you're not in Hong Kong to work, what you do is shop so other people can work. The stream of shoppers hurrying along the sidewalks sweeps us along with it. We crowd onto a bus.

The bus twists and groans through Hong Kong's steep hillsides to the Stanley Market, a vast, dense warren of vendors. While Ingrid dickers over an embroidered silk Nehru jacket, I wander across the narrow aisle into a booth thick with tchotchkes. And there, among the plastic figurines and music boxes, I see it.