Beijing's Moment

I have a theory that every country changes you in one specific way, making you a slightly different person while inside its borders.

Actually, I just made that up. I still need a decent explanation for how Beijing transformed me, a cheapskate and a hater of shopping malls, into someone who was untrustworthy with an ATM card. It wasn't just a few articles of clothing and a knockoff purse for my wife. I bought a piece of furniture. In China. No, delivery is not free.

At the genteel Chaowai Furniture Warehouse, I had fallen in love with the merchandise -- Ming- and Qing-era antiques and reproductions. Elsewhere, I became fascinated by the remarkably ruthless haggling.

Understand, first, that this sort of negotiation involves more than price. It is also about feigned camaraderie, implied debts and subtle emotional manipulation. If you don't feel like a heartless, exploitive, colonialist sleazeball after buying something, you can know one thing for sure: You have drastically, embarrassingly overpaid.

I'm exaggerating, but slightly. As proof, consider my experience at Xiushui Silk Market, six stories of clothing, jewelry and accessories, many of them name-brand knockoffs.

I was at the market near closing time when one of the many teenage saleswomen offered me a leather jacket for a ludicrous $750. Semi-interested, I countered with $6.

That was fine. My mistake came when, as I tried to walk away, four more saleswomen tugged at my arms. With playful bravado, I asked the young women if they really believed they could stop me, a 6-foot-3 man, from leaving the market. They said they could.

We were all laughing -- and I was gasping -- as the girls moved in for the kill. Two grabbed my wrists. One placed the jacket in a plastic bag and tied it to my forearm. The rest slapped my arms until they turned red.

"You are stingy!" yelled the original saleswoman. "You are stingy!" When I protested that she was the stingy one, another girl clamped her hand over my mouth and yelled, "No more talking!" I fought on, but eventually shut up and shelled out $18 for the jacket, hopeful I'd fought my way to a deal. The girls' gleeful smiles, unfortunately, suggested otherwise.

But there was one sort of purchase I never regretted: street food. At first, it's an adventure. You approach a street-side griddle, point at some fried thing and hope for the best.

But I have limits. At the tourist-packed Wangfujing Snack Street and nearby Donghuamen Night Market, conventional beef kebabs sit side by side with skewers of cicadas, starfish, sea horses and other instances of "nasty on a stick," as one Beijing expat put it.

After a visit, I asked an employee at my hostel about the sticks of small scorpions, which crawled blindly at the air while awaiting the griddle. He explained that, in traditional Chinese medicine, the poison from the scorpions counteracted the poison of illness.