For example, when a womanfrom a nea

For example, when a woman
from a nearby city came to buy a coat for her father, Big Sister Zhao
recruited an appropriately sized male shopper to serve as a model. ‘Sir, sir,
_________
would you come over here for a minute and help us out?’ Zhao called out
to the tall man. ‘We’d like to use you as a model. We spotted you from
quite a ways away.’ He was happy to help, the coat fit, and the woman
made the purchase. As our model departed, Zhao thanked him and said,
‘Sorry for holding you up!’
Passing customers would frequently stop to observe happenings on the
sales floor, and customers would freely insert themselves into ongoing inter-
actions between sales clerks and other shoppers. Sometimes this could
provide a seemingly objective, third-party opinion that would smooth a
purchase. For instance, as an elderly couple considered a men’s coat, the
woman noticed the slit in the back of the coat and remarked loudly, ‘Cold!
Won’t it be cold this way?’ To my surprise, a passing customer, an older man,
intervened. He stopped and explained earnestly, ‘It won’t be cold, the slit
only opens when you sit down, it’s there to protect the zipper. These things
have their logic.’ This explanation seemed to satisfy the woman. The passing
customer began to admire the coat. ‘It’s really not expensive!’, he exclaimed,
adding, ‘And the workmanship is quite good. It’s really a nice coat!’
In short, Harbin No. X was a public space in which strangers, customers,
and workers alike regularly engaged in friendly, if brief, interactions.
These interactions were partly what identified the store as ‘massified’
(
dazhonghua
, a term that evokes the socialist, revolutionary ‘masses’), as
one manager pointed out to me. In addition, unlike many new department
stores in China, management at the state-owned retailer was lax, and so
workers were
reqing
with customers when they felt so disposed – and a bit
rude when they did not. The sociability that
reqing
represented was meant
to be reciprocal between customer and clerk, and failure by a customer to
respond to
reqing
could be viewed as a breach of etiquette. For instance, a
skeptical customer read the tags on a coat (which listed the filling as 90
percent down and 10 percent feathers) and asked, ‘What if they just write
anything they want on these tags (
suibian xie
)?’ Big Sister Zhao’s reply was
in the form of a clever pun: ‘A young lady might wear a
suibian
[braid],
but the information on the coat tags is not
suibian
[casually (written)]!’ The
customer, however, remained surly and skeptical, and after he left Zhao
remarked that he ‘wasn’t a thing (
wanyir
)’. I was confused, so Zhao smiled
slyly and explained, ‘He wasn’t a thing (
dongxi
) [an insult in Chinese], after
we treated him so well he didn’t buy anything!’
Conclusion
The Harbin No. X Department Store perched precariously at the cusp of
two eras of retailing. Changes to the business of buying and selling
consumer goods in urban China has resulted in the rapid expansion of
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choice for consumers – in terms of both the kinds of goods available and
the places in which to purchase them – and has been accompanied, at the
retail sector’s lower echelons, by uncertainties about price, quality, and the
authenticity of goods. At Harbin No. X, the consequence was a crisis of
trust, as shoppers carried their anxieties and distrust of the marketplace
into the state-owned store. An institution that had once commanded
customer patronage by virtue of scarce competition and enjoyed high status
as one of the premier state-run retail outlets in the city, the department store
could no longer elicit trust by virtue of its place in the shortage-plagued
Chinese state socialist universe.
As Harbin No. X tracked a descending trajectory in the city’s retail field,
the dynamics of buying and selling had begun to dramatically change for
store workers. The counter-strategies workers developed in order to cope
with this crisis of trust were, of course, strategies to sell merchandise in a
newly competitive context. But borrowing from the theories of Pierre
Bourdieu, I have also suggested that sales clerk practices can be seen as a
form of ‘distinction work’ that sought to re-establish the sharp symbolic
and moral boundaries that once set Harbin No. X apart, and above, the
expanding private retail sector.
I have also argued, again drawing from Bourdieu’s conceptual tools, that
the strategies sales clerks relied upon to counter customer suspicion and
distrust simultaneously traced the downward trajectory of China’s urban
working class. At the same time they distinguished Harbin No. X from its
new competitors, sales clerks also engaged in a nostalgic strategy of
representation that portrayed Harbin No. X as still endowed with the
symbolic capital of state socialism. Sales clerks endeavored to create a space,
on the sales floor, characterized by a set of earthy, sociable interactions that
recollected an imagined, pre-marketized golden era of genuine warmth and
feeling among strangers – among, really, the urban working class. Here we
find, much as Michele Lamont’s work (1992, 2000) would lead us to expect,
that moral boundaries are laden with class-coded meanings and cultural
practices (see also Lamont and Molnár, 2002). We find, however, that moral
boundaries are shaped by the social trajectories of the groups they define.
In a context of downward mobility, workers deployed the reconstructed
symbolic capitals of both a state-owned enterprise and traditional working-
class social relations.
At the same time, it is important to note that these
reqing
performances
at Harbin No. X were not full-fledged, explicit examples of nostalgia or
resistance like those described by Rofel (1999), O’Brien and Li (1999), Yang
(2003), and others. Workers did not produce the kind of articulated critical
consciousness that Ching Kwan Lee (2000, 2002) identified in restive
portions of China’s laid-off state industrial workers. Rather, sales clerks at
Harbin No. X engaged in a more subtle counter-strategy of remembering
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that traced a trajectory of social change and the rise of new patterns of class
stratification in urban China. Indeed, it was only within a broader social
context of postsocialist socio-economic change and the general disenchant-
ment of the urban working class that
reqing
could actually take on the
significance of a practice of class distinction.
Bourdieu noted that ‘to exist within a social space . . . is to differ, to be
different’ (1998: 9). As Pun Ngai has noted of contemporary China, ‘The
play of difference is highly political’ (1999: 11). Bourdieu took very
seriously the ways in which symbolic power and struggles over legitimate
representations of the social world are critical to the reproduction of
inequality (e.g. Bourdieu, 1990). Symbolic boundaries are important in
large part because they can translate into social boundaries (Lamont and
Molnár, 2002); powerful groups rely on ‘their legitimate culture’ not only
to mark difference but also to maintain and reproduce group membership
and its privileges as they convert ‘symbolic distinction into [social] closure’
(p. 172).
In the context of China’s economic reforms and the shift to a market
economy, working-class efforts to conserve socialist era symbolic capital
can ironically speed up its devaluation. Increasingly, people and settings that
maintain a perceived continuity with China’s socialist past are marked, and
mark themselves, as belonging to the past. Like the ‘straightforward’ Polish
workers associated with socialism in Elizabeth Dunn’s research (1999),
Harbin residents frequently described the sales clerks at Harbin No. X as
‘honest’ and ‘frank’ (
laoshi
), characteristics that also marked them as
belonging to the simpler, less sophisticated socialist era. In an increasingly
marketized society, being
laoshi
also differentiated these working-class
clerks from more ‘modern’ and prosperous groups. As Lida Junghans
(2001) argues, the terms ‘plan’ and ‘market’ are special temporal distinc-
tions in China that have come to settle upon different Chinese bodies,
positioning them in an imagined timeframe that also maps their locations
– some advantaged, some disadvantaged – in contemporary Chinese society.
At Harbin No. X, the strategies sales clerk engaged in to assert their value
and moral worth in the here and now may reflect a cruel irony about the
inconvertibility of socialist ‘capital’.