Make it all go away

The blanket of pollution suffocating Beijing this week has yet to move on its merry little way over to plague Seoul and Tokyo. Ah, second hand smoke. I honestly don't remember Beijing being this incessantly polluted for this long. No blue sky for over a week now, not to mention that visibility is under 500 m. Please tell me the sun is shining somewhere else in the world.

Waiting for rehearsal this afternoon, I wandered into the tourist trap of all tourist traps: the Silk Market, the place to go for overpriced fakes in Beijing. I saw hapless tourists get ripped off left and right. While I do feel a little sympathy for the tourists who have no idea what the going rate is for a fake Ralph Lauren shirt, I figure they usually feel happy about they price or they wouldn't pay it, so their loss if they pay 200RMB for an "adidas" cap. But a couple things really bothered me today. 1. A vendor started sputtering fight'n words (the words that have to be typed like this: $#$%@*!) after an American tourist refused to look at her wares. 2. I yelled at a vendor who, to prevent her from leaving his booth of fake hermes bags, had grabbed an elderly woman's arm. I told him he had crossed the line and he hissed at me for making him look bad. We gave each other the evil eye for a minute or two.

I got the same evil eye from the guy who tried to pickpocket me last night, because I caught him in the act, before he could get at my money. I'm pretty sure he had been scouting the ATM where I had just withdrawn money. What I don't like about Beijing--perhaps just big cities, is that people see that there's a pickpocket or you ask for help in dealing with him and they just sit there warming their hands under their a**es.

I feel a little awkward that my pickpocket was Uyghur, therein fitting the terrible Han stereotype that 'all Uyghurs are thieves'. Obviously not true, but I hear it a lot. Even after that incident, a woman watching the exchange came up to me to tell me so. My own stereotype of Hans is that they are the most racist toward Uyghurs.

I don't really care what the stereotype is ("Laowais have so much money so they deserve to be ridiculed and trash-talked for being cheapskates when they refuse to buy and for being suckers when they do." or "Uyghurs are poor and uneducated so they should be feared because they are violent and will steal from you."), both kinds of racism that stem from such misunderstandings are unacceptable, and maybe that's why I'm so grumpy today.