. Yang (2003) catalogues the more r

. Yang (2003) catalogues the more recent
‘
zhiqing
nostalgia’ of the 1990s among the urban Cultural Revolution
generation.
7
In both cases, socialist nostalgia challenges the marginalization

of certain groups (e.g. older women workers, the Cultural Revolution
generation) in the reform era by ‘creating a certain distance’ between
dominant representations and group identities (Rofel, 1999: 137; Yang,
2003).
8
Reqing
service at Harbin No. X similarly performed a kind of socialist,
working-class nostalgia by evoking a setting and a set of social relations
that hearkened back to a time when urban workers enjoyed greater status
and security. But, as Rofel notes, even if it may recall seemingly more
innocent times, nostalgia itself ‘is not an innocent sentiment’ (1999: 135).
In this case,
reqing
operated as part of a strategy of representation that
invoked not an authentic past but an imagined one (Dai, 1997) in order to
stake a claim on the present. To be sure, people’s actual memories of service
prior to and in the early years of economic reforms are not ones of
reqing
fuwu
, and stories of bad service experiences and abusive sales clerks
abound. Ellen Hertz (2001: 281) points out that the cold and impersonal
interactions people had with shop assistants were a central aspect of an
uncomfortable urban anonymity found in both Maoist and post-Maoist
China, and in the mid-1980s the state targeted ‘civilization and politeness’
(
wenming limao
) campaigns at state-sector service workers. Discussions of
civility and courtesy in China today tend to portray state-sector service
workers as suffering from an acute ‘lack’ (Anagnost, 1997) of these
attributes.
On the sales floor at Harbin No. X, however, the concept of
reqing
coun-
tered such portrayals. In the hands of working-class sales clerks dealing
with their largely blue-collar customers,
reqing
conveyed levels of care and
concern for the customer that workers felt set Harbin No. X apart from
newer, more profit-driven retail settings. By appealing to a shared cultural
identity, expressions of
reqing
were as much a working-class strategy of
cultural representation as they were counter-strategies of a distrustful
marketplace. The following scene was exemplary of the sentiment labeled
reqing
.
An elderly coupled arrived at the counter. The man was energetic and
excited, gesturing at the coat he wanted ‘for an old lady (
lao taitai
) to wear’.
When Big Sister Zhao walked up, the old man exclaimed, ‘Ah! There you
are!’ and it became clear that this was not his first visit to our counter. Zhao
attended to the couple, patiently outfitting both the man and woman with
down coats. After they left, Big Sister Zhao explained to me that the man
had been by the other day and had spent a considerable length of time
talking with her. Afterwards, someone scolded Zhao for wasting so much
time with a customer who did not make a purchase, and Zhao told me that
management had explicitly discouraged sales clerks from ‘chatting’ with
customers. ‘But I know that this is how old people make their purchases,
first they come and take a thorough look around before coming out a
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second or third time to buy.’ The old man even told Zhao that he had visited
a new, up-scale department store and failed to find anything he liked. ‘It’s
still best to shop at Harbin No. X’, Zhao agreed.
Certainly, this kind of
reqing
was not a formal store policy – and as this
incident illustrates, expressions of
reqing
could be interpreted by manage-
ment as chattiness or socializing. In addition, not all workers used
reqing
as a strategy to create rapport with customers, believing it a waste of time
and energy. But on my sales counter as well as the surrounding ones, I
repeatedly saw instances where workers went to considerable lengths to
create a feeling of concern and intimacy between themselves and their
customers. These practices stood in stark contrast to the other retail settings
I studied (both up-scale and
geti
), where sellers and buyers tended not to
identify with one another. At Harbin No. X, by contrast,
reqing
built upon
a sense of shared place in the world and a mutual understanding of needs
and desires. And as the example above suggests,
reqing
distinguished
Harbin No. X as a suitable – and comfortable – space for the city’s elderly
and working-class shoppers.
In practical terms,
reqing
involved hands-on involvement with customers
and close but unaffected personal attention to their needs – like one might
expect from a friend or, in some cases, a slightly bossy aunt. Big Sister Zhao
was the most forthright about performing – and then declaring – friendly
service. On one occasion, as Zhao pulled out coat after coat for a pair of
shoppers, she exclaimed, ‘See how
reqing
we are with you, pulling out all
these different coats for you to try on!’ When the couple joked with Zhao
about her commission, she responded that she had been working as a sales
clerk for 20 years and really did enjoy the work. ‘You don’t get to meet so
many people if you hang around at home’, she said. ‘It’s really interesting
[at the store]!’ On one occasion Zhao even declared to a set of customers
that serving them was a kind of ‘spiritual enjoyment’ (
jingshen xiangshou
).
At other times, both Big Sister Lin and Little Xiao also went to great lengths
to accommodate customers. In one case, Little Xiao devoted so much time
to a woman customer that she felt awkward about leaving without a
purchase. As Big Sister Lin explained to me, the customer was embarrassed
not to buy a coat ‘after Little Xiao had been so
reqing
’.
Indeed, performances of
reqing
often resulted in a sense of mutuality
between workers and their customers. Given that
reqing
was most defi-
nitely part of a sales strategy, there were times when sales clerk perform-
ances of
reqing
were portrayed as a personal connection with customers
that verged on an obligation to make a purchase. On one occasion, Big
Sister Zhao joked with a customer whom Big Sister Lin had handled with
great patience (but who had not made a purchase), saying ‘We’re so
reqing
, and still you don’t buy!’ To my surprise, even customers could
present this point of view. For example, after a male customer failed to
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find a coat that met all his specifications, he apologized to Big Sister Lin
and me for not buying a coat, adding, ‘And we got along so well (
chu de
hen hao
)!’
On another occasion, Big Sister Lin carefully tended to a pair of women
– both wearing heavy work clothing – teasing as she wrote out the sales
slip and packaged up the coat, ‘How good we are to you!’ One of the
women asked, ‘Is it at all possible that the coat is a fake?’ No, Lin replied,
‘We are not
chengbao
(contracted rental space)’, and she went on to explain
that since we were not a
geti
operation we did not have fake goods. Lin
then asked, ‘Where are you from?’ The two women explained that they sold
vegetables in a local wholesale market, to which Lin jokingly replied, ‘Well
then, you’ll have to give me a discount!’ In this case, Big Sister Lin’s
reqing
interaction included a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘
geti
’ merchants (though
ironically the sale was being made to a pair of
geti
merchants!). At the same
time she established a sense of empathy and common interest with the pair
of women shoppers.
For while clerks engaged in
reqing
treatment of customers in order to
sell merchandise, they produced an atmosphere of sociability in which both
clerks and customers would participate. This mutuality could be seen in the
ways in which all sorts of personal information would be solicited or shared
between my co-workers and their customers, and sales clerks felt entitled
to question customers about their occupations, the relations among people
shopping together, and above all customers’ appearances. Big Sister Zhao
(whose own daughter was considered obese by Chinese standards) offered
weight-loss advice to the parents of a fat girl. Big Sister Lin made informed
recommendations regarding coat sizes for growing children. My co-workers
would regularly instruct customers on what color clothing was appropri-
ate for their age and skin-tone, and Zhao once instructed a customer who
wanted a smaller-sized coat that if the woman wore a size smaller her
bottom would be hanging out and it would be ‘unattractive’. The customer
relented and purchased the recommended size.
At times the sales floor would break out into jovial repartees between
clerks and customers, as shoppers participated in the production of
reqing
.
Big Sister Lin tended a gaggle of young soldiers, one of whom tried on coat
after coat while one of his mates pulled out a camera and began shooting
photos. On another occasion, a pair of men looking over a down coat
jokingly asked Xu Li-mei, at the neighboring counter, for a knife. ‘A knife?’,
she asked, nonplussed. ‘Why?’ ‘Because’, one of the men said, a twinkle in
his eye, ‘We want to cut this open and see the inside!’
Workers would regularly enlist the help of passing shoppers in order to
aid customers (and, of course, to make a sale).