Phoning It In

My phone is never out of reach, a habit I deplore for many reasons, some of them sanitary, some of them just sane. Life doesn't function here without WeChat: I call friends through WeChat. I send messages through WeChat. I use it to order take out, translate Chinese into English, send holiday greeting replete with electronic lucky red envelops filled with electronic cash (which my godchildren appreciate more than the barrel of whiskey I bought them as an investment) and share my location. Real Time Location is my favorite: As my friend and I walk towards one another, we see each other move like cursors on an old Donkey Kong game. To say it's useful is an understatement.　

Back in the early 90s, only a lucky few had their own telephone hard-wired into the wall in China. The phone was useless unless the telephone operator for the building was awake and felt like connecting your call. The operator, usually female, and quite likely bored out of her skull, would sometimes query the caller: Who are you? Why are you calling Liu Ayi now? Don't you know it's nap time? Sometimes the questions were so intrusive that I felt I was on trial at Nuremberg. As I stumbled through in my Level 1 Chinese, I wasn't quite sure if my calls went through out of pity or more out of shock. The pinnacle of intrusiveness was reached when my Chinese brother-in-law tried to phone his parents in Beijing from the US to tell him their granddaughter had been born. Dazed with happiness and probably sounding a bit drunk (which he was) he incautiously sounded a bit too happy, which earned him a grilling from the phone operator. Why was he calling? Was the baby a boy or a girl? Was it worth waking them up from nap time to tell them it's a girl? And finally, Where are you calling from? My brother-in-law - again, dazed with both happiness and moonshine, replied truthfully that he was calling from New York. The operator, infuriated by the idea that someone might be pranking her, snapped "Why don't you just say you're calling from Africa?" and hung up on him.　

I was thrilled when, in the 90s, cellphones were made available. Unfortunately, upon their first release, foreigners were allowed to buy the phone, but not the SIM card to run it. A few lucky friends of mine who worked for a telephone company had phones. As for me - well, my home didn't have even the standard model, so I had to place any calls at the local grocery store, if and when they were open. Finally, in desperation, I marched into a store selling phones and convinced the owner to sell me one. The rules must have just changed because he did sell me both phone and SIM card, although he didn't set up the messaging service. Perhaps he didn't think I deserved that luxury. Unfortunately, he didn't tell me where to pay the monthly bill, which took some doing. But I had a phone.　

I was reminded of how important my phone is this weekend, when I went to a market to buy a new screen protector. Like many places dependent on tourist dollars, it was bustling with foreigners, all eagerly snapping up bargains in pearls, electronic goods, Chinese tea, dolls, cashmere, embroidered goods - in short, all of the lovely touristy things that scream "I went to China!" without us having to say a word. I saw a tourist hand a vendor a bunch of colored papers and I realized with shock it was Chinese money-cash- and my mouth dropped open. The vendor looked at me and said, "Now that we have tourists again, we need to carry cash." He seemed a bit sad.