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You can't be annoyed if someone tries to charge you $20. for a pineapple at the corner market. Every morning for weeks, I would hold up a pineapple at the fruitsellers makeshift sidewalk stand, and he would punch an elaborate series of numbers into his calculator, and every morning he would come up with a price equvalent of $20. I thought after a few weeks that persistence, nodding, and a fistful of modest-but-respectable yuan would win out, but no amount of bargaining was going to make that pineapple cheaper, or mine.
I switched to watermelon, which were heaped in piles on the sidewalk. Five dollars for one that I had to strap onto my back to get back to the hotel. I happily paid it, every day, until one morning an old woman came beetling over and started barking in Mandarin at the fruitseller.
She slapped the money I had just given him out of his hand, grabbed most of it, and handed the money and the melon to me. She didn't stop scolding him as I walked away, and from then on, watermelon was fifty cents. It was as though I had learned a new, recognizable phrase. The watermelon was particularly sweet that day.
There were times when I felt as though it might be possible to understand where I was, and at times I couldn't put anything in context; not as a roundeye, female , or even human being.
On a particularly wild taxi ride, (I was alone but had been in Shanghai long enough to know how much it would be and how long it would take), we blasted through the lights and, at that particular moment the odds were against us, and the taxi broadsided a cyclist. Not a glance, but a direct undeniable smash at full speed, and an old man on an old bike ricocheted off the front bumper, flew over the hood and landed in a flutter of clothing 20 feet away from his bike.
I assumed we would stop, but we didn't even slow down. When I looked back, he was lying in the road, not moving. The cab driver was screaming and shaking his fist at the rear view mirror, and when we stopped at our destination half an hour later, he got out and traced the crack in the windshield with his finger quietly, then continued shouting. The only indication it had happened was the cracked glass, and a streak of blood on the hood almost indistinguishable from the rust.