Some keen Shanghai salesmanship

I was looking at a skirt in a store in this mall under the train station in People's Square, and the woman comes up to me and says, "No, big." This led me to look more closely at the tag on the skirt that I had simply been glancing at, and I saw that it was a size small, which is, in fact, my size. So why was she telling me that this was too big for me?

She wasn't.

When I realized this I looked at her and asked, "I'm big?"

"Yes," she said. "BIIIG," and she made the fatty gesture, like the circumference of my waist is approximately equivalent to that of Jupiter's largest moon.

"I no big," I said, and then started laughing because a) I was being called a fatty by a salesgirl, and b) I had just used broken English to match her broken English.

"BIIIIIIG," she said, not understanding why I was arguing this obvious fact. Then she looked through the row of skirts and took out a Large for me. "Big," she said again, and then looked at the label. "Laaaaarge."

"No," I said. "Small."

She was very confused by this statement, apparently thinking her English vocabularly may be deceiving her. So she put her hands on my waist to see what size I truly was.

I removed them.

"No. Big." I said. "Just. Looking."

She looked confused.

"Just. Looking." I repeated. "You. Leave."

"OK, OK, you look," she said, at this point realizing she'd done something wrong but having no idea what it was.

I left, too, and have decided not to do any more shopping in China. I mean, I did put on a few pounds in Europe, but I ain't no Large-- I don't care what country I'm in.