KEY POINTS:
She was a tiny thing, no bigger than a Kiwi 9-year-old. And when she spoke to me, it took me a second to realise that the voice was coming from below, rather than beside, me.
"Hello, sir. Where are you from?" she said, flashing a smile that looked no less sincere for revealing a set of stained teeth.
In practically any country in the world, this is the opening line of a hawker or confidence trickster.
Though Beijing has its share of both, the chances are the person accosting you wants nothing more than a chance to practise their English.
For a country that has reinvented itself as a global force that will dominate the 21st century, China has remarkably few English speakers outside the business elite.
The traveller's first survival tip is to get a card with the name of your hotel in Chinese characters to show the taxi driver, who won't have the faintest idea what you're talking about no matter how loudly you shout.
Likewise, ask someone at your hotel to write down your destination rather than try to explain it yourself.
But some of those trying to learn English do so with such dedication that they spend their days off accosting tourists in the hope of an hour or two of what language teachers call total immersion.
This was the mission of Penny and her friend Mary (they told me their Chinese names but after making a hash of pronouncing them, I forgot to write them down).
The deal they proposed was simple: they would take me places and all I had to do was talk.
For the traveller who is prepared to suspend suspicion (without abandoning reasonable prudence) this kind of arrangement has an upside. Beijing can be a daunting place when you don't speak Chinese.
The street signs - even in the romanised pinyin alphabet - demand careful decoding, and finding a hidden treasure as opposed to a tourist clip joint is harder than in a European country.
In a muggy morning, Penny and Mary took me to a fabulous little art gallery (where no one pressured me to buy); discussed the finer points of bone-handled calligraphy brushes with the vendor before recommending which I should buy and giving their seal of approval to the price asked; and steered me away from a restaurant specialising in peking duck down a hutong (alleyway) to a family run place where there was not a tourist in sight.
In return, I drilled them when their English erred.
"As good/big/strong as" and "better/bigger/stronger than" got some attention, as did the habit, common among English learners, of answering "yes" to the question, "Don't you like duck?" when you don't like duck.
I shouted Penny and Mary their lunch but it turned out that they didn't like duck.
I found this out when they had negotiated the whole peking duck routine (the dish, roast duck carved as skin, skin and flesh and lean flesh, is a Beijing must, although some Chinese restaurants in Auckland do it just as well). As the chef sliced the burnished bird at the table, another dish landed which I didn't remember asking for. It was sweet and sour pork with vegetables.
"How about it?" Mary asked as I tried some.
"I don't like sweet and sour," I replied. "And it's 'Do you like that?' not 'How about it?' "
"Do you like that?" Penny parroted obediently.
"Thank you."
Then: "We like this dish very much."
The pork was $4 - a small price to pay for a few hours' expert guidance.
The duck was sublime.
* Peter Calder travelled to China with the support of the Asia New Zealand Foundation and Cathay Pacific.
