Buying a Shouji

Todays\' Chinese word of the day is: shouji. It literally means \'hand\' and \'machine\' and put together that translates to \'cellphone\'. Cellphones are a way of life here, probably used more than Americans use theirs. In addition to staying in constant touch for locating one another or gossiping, young Chinese are constantly using their txt messaging to write short little notes. My roommate uses his a lot to keep in touch with his girlfriend, maybe writing her as many as a dozen txt messages a day, and once I even saw him in the morning, sleeping with his phone in hand. I couldn\'t tell if he had fallen asleep while using it or if he was just keeping it close at hand in case he recieved a txt while he slept. Many Chinese even have two cellphones. A cellphone that can call all of China, or even America if you\'re willing to pay the rate, is probably a little more common, but lots of people also have a local phone. It\'s a seperate phone that has a seperate calling plan and is extremely cheap to make or recive calls from the same city but can\'t be used to make or recive any from outside.

With all the hype, I decided to buy a shouji to see if txt-ing was really as addicting as it seems. My roommate, Yaorui and I went to the nearest large department store, walkinig past the long rows of airconditioners, hot plates, TVs and cameras till we got to the long, shiny display cases full of cell phones. Because here you buy the phone seperate from the plan, there\'s a huge market to cell every brand and every model of phone. There were literally hundreds of choices, and the fuwuyuan (service person) immediately wanted to show me the best phone there, costing about $400, it was very slim, had a mp3 player, zoom camera, huge color screen, everything you could ever want in a phone, and of course it was very shuai (handsome/cool). I of course told him I was only here for two months and wanted something on the cheaper end.

After about half an hour of intense discussion between me, Yaorui and the very anxious fuwuyuan, examining about a dozen different models, I finally decided on....you guessed it, the cheapest one. Motorolo C118, for those interested. It cost 400 RMB, or about $50, has a black and white screen and is the most basic cell phone I\'ve ever seen, which is perfect. Next came the hard part, buying a cell phone plan. It is possible to buy plans (SIM card, phone number, and minutes) at most street stalls, but the school has an office that sells them too. As we walked up to the counter the girl behind it gave us a lazy look. Lazy doesn\'t really describe it, it was more of a how-dare-you-disturb-my-lazy-afternoon kind of look. As an employee of basically the government (government - state run university - university run cell phone service desk), she was in sharp contrast to the fuwuyuan of the department store.

I picked out a phone number, (13703607956) based on how many 3s, 6s and 9s it had in it (lucky numbers here), and then came the hard part. As someone who\'s obviously not Chinese, she was surprised that I had a student ID from this university. We had to photo copy that for her, and then she needed an govt. issued ID. Obviously this would have been my passport, but for somereason she and her boss needed a citizen ID. I had to explain to them that we don\'t have that in America, which left no impression on them as evidenced by their blank stares. We ended up getting the phone plan under Yaorui\'s name, using his student ID and citizen ID. I feel this was a ton of identification just for a cell phone plan that is entirely prepaid, but who am I to say.

So now I have a shouji, which i\'ve been using a lot to txt in Chinese, mostly with Yaorui, about mostly logistics. But I think the process is another little step to go through to become that much more at home here and that much more fluent in the cultural as well as obviously the language pecularities of university students in China.