Whoops

I went shopping this morning. Impulse buy: new brand of fruit yoghurt drink - in a twin-pack, special price, with the free gift of a nice-looking little glass bowl.

Chinese packaging is.... strange. Shoddy. Bizarre.

I had incautiously assumed that the glass bowl was actually attached to the yoghurt cartons by tape or something. No - it was just loose, inside the extremely flimsy plastic bag surrounding the three items. As soon as I unpacked my shopping at home, said plastic bag revealed its remarkable flimsiness by spontaneously shredding into three pieces, allowing the nice glass bowl-et to fall to the floor.

I very nearly caught it in flight. I think I would have caught it first bounce - if there had been a first bounce. You know that thing about how glass doesn't shatter until the third impact? There's supposed to be some physical law at work, to do with the properties of crystalline structures: the first impact merely sets off potentially damaging resonances, the second 'fixes' them into permanent micro-fissures; only further impacts will cause these fissures to break. Chinese glass, I infer, is manufactured with the fissures already in place: the instant this bowl touched the floor for the first time it exploded into about 30 or 40 fragments.

Oh dear. Not an auspicious sign for the rest of my day. It might easily have made me angry. Or depressed. Instead, I just shrugged, and got on with unpacking the rest of the shopping. (The fruit yoghurt is actually rather good. Undoubtedly the brand will disappear without trace again in a month or two.) "Uh, it's China." Within seconds I had dismissed the incident from my mind.

I have become much more tolerant of these petty irritations over the last few years. I am even able to enjoy them with a sly humour most of the time.

I remember an incident while I was staying with my friend Coral down in The Other Place (Shanghai, that is) a year or so ago. Returning to her apartment to freshen up after a day out and about, I was shocked, momentarily mystified to find that my sponge bag had been completely emptied of its contents by her ayi ("auntie" = domestic help). Confused by the appearance of such a strange, male accessory in a single woman's bathroom, she had assumed that it was some sort of trash bag, and thrown away all the (expensive, foreign, new, barely used) toothpaste, shaving foam, razors, deodorant, etc. inside it, though not the bag itself??? This was a not insignificant financial blow to me (I'm a poor boy, and I don't like to write off 200 or 300 kuai's worth of nice foreign toiletries just like that), and it was darned inconvenient, potentially embarrassing that I would be spending my last night in swish, cosmopolitan Shanghai (and then going back to work again in Beijing the next day) unshaven. However, the incident was just so bizarre, so ludicrous that I responded to the discovery with a peal of laughter.

My laugh drew Coral's attention, obviously. When she discovered her ayi's aberration, she was livid. I had thought she was more mellow about the weirdnesses of China than me, but she does have a rather obsessive-compulsive streak. She said to me: "If you can just laugh off something like that, maybe you've been in China too long."

No, I don't think so. But I don't extend people the same latitude for fucking up in creative ways when I'm back in the UK or the US; here, on the other hand, it seems to be essential to maintaining one's inner calm.