Chinese Singles Day

Limited-time Sale! Buy a luxury dining set and get a melancholy dream for free! | Fiction | Fresh Soup

My name is Etgar Keret and I’m a saleophobic. The truth is, I’m not just afraid of sales but of having to buy things at all. There’s something about interacting with a person who isn’t a friend and is supposed to give me an item I need in return for my money, that somehow makes me feel lonely. Every slice of pizza I buy reminds me that there’s no family dinner waiting for me at home, every alienating cab ride to the airport clarifies that I don’t have a friend with a car who wants to go on an adventure with me, and every chair massage at the mall sends my brain the sad message that since my wife is busy working on a new film, it’ll be next to impossible to find someone willing to touch me for free.

But if shopping in general stresses me out, sales plunge me into a depression. I can’t be the only one who feels this way, otherwise surely they’d come up with more uplifting names for sales. “Black Friday” sounds like a terrorist organization, or at least a day best skipped. And the Chinese mega-sales event known as Singles Day does not give off a particularly happy vibe. I’d like to believe that all singles—not only the Chinese among them—are single by choice. But even if that’s true, their special day seems lonely and sad enough to write a short-short story about.

Illustration by Beenee Sarid

A few weeks ago, my wife finds an online store selling the dining table set she’s been talking about for months, at $180 less than it costs in Israel. The regular price at this store is much higher, but they’re having a Singles Day sale, and so not only is it 30% off, they’re also throwing in a free baby seat. To me the whole thing doesn’t sound kosher. Why would a Chinese single want a baby seat? My wife says I don’t know the first thing about marketing: the sale is in honor of Singles Day—it’s not a sale for singles. I still think it’s fishy. Kind of like giving out free hamburgers on World Vegan Day. “It’s not the same thing at all,” my wife insists, “vegans are against killing animals, but singles have nothing against babies.” “Okay,” I concede, “forget the Chinese for a second. What exactly are we supposed to do with a baby seat? We don’t have kids.” “You never know,” my wife replies, “and besides, even if we throw it in the trash, we’re still saving $180.”

For the two weeks while the dining set is being shipped, we don’t fight even once and we also do not find a baby under a toadstool. When the set arrives, we invite some friends over for a fancy dinner. These friends are a couple we’re not all that close with, but they have a baby. The baby’s name is Netzach, which means eternity, because his parents are very ambitious and they like to think big. Netzach cries and screams all evening. After dinner, I tell the friends about how we got the baby seat as a freebie with the dining set, and I ask if they’d like it. The woman hesitates: “Are you sure? What if you need it?” My wife reassures her that there’s no chance of that happening because I’m sterile. Backing her up, I let the couple in on how my wife refuses to adopt a baby because she’s afraid it’ll grow up dumb or ugly. The friends still seem tentative, but eventually they take the baby seat, and the baby, who hasn’t stopped whining and drooling for a second.

That night, I dream that we order a baby on the internet and the delivery guy drops her off at our doorstep, swaddled in bubble-wrap. The baby in my dream is very cute, and when she looks at me she keeps murmuring a word I can’t understand, like a mantra. My wife thinks she’s trying to say “Daddy,” but when I look it up on Google Translate I discover that what our baby is saying is the Chinese word for “customer.” “She looks just like you,” I tell my wife in the dream. She doesn’t: she’s Chinese. I’m just trying to be nice.

Translated by Jessica Cohen