A Van Cleef Arpels Ring

It’s a cold winter evening; I was huddling up in my bed, flipping through the Vogue magazine while popping up chocolate peas – my recently adopted favorite sport for this weather. That’s when I came across this Van Cleep Arpels ad: a double page spread showing a blue blue sky over a green green meadow, a clean-faced young girl with a pony tail and clear-cut fringe. She is holding up a round circle and blowing out gentle bubbles, inside each of the biggest bubbles is a Van Cleef Arpels ring, the round circle in her hand is another ring of course. Upon closer examination, she’s also wearing Van Cleep Arpels earings and bracelets that are very fine, very low-key and very reassuring.

 

It’s a beautiful advertising. The execution is excellent to the degree of beyond reproach. The consumer insight is so clear that I could almost reproduce the advertising brief: every woman, no matter of what age or income level, wishes to remain a little girl in a May day of blue blue sky and green green meadow, at least down at heart. And if she could be adorned with even a piece of Van Cleef Arpels, then let’s call her a very lucky little girl, but still, let her be a little girl on top of everything.

 

I was so inspired by this ad that I took a picture of it and shot up a twitter: Being innocent is the last luxury item in the world; you have to be really lucky to afford it. Then a second twitter: So I want to thank my parents, my boyfriend and all my friends to keep me innocent, though they didn’t give me a Van Cleep Arpels ring.

 

Indeed I’m often embarrassed when people make the comment of me being “innocent” or “naïve”, now into my late 30s. I often feel so out of place as if they’re just wrapping up the terms of “hopeless” or “useless” with a coating of civilization and tolerance. Still, I know that I’m the lucky little girl well protected that the baseness of humanity and the darkness of society but a thin layer of dust that sometimes land on my shoes and got dusted off instantly, they never came hard and sharp and close enough to bruised my skin or cut into my toes.

 

About Van Cleel & Arpels. I was in a training the day after and the instructor left enough space between the sentences that I tried to fill in the boredom with some meaning activities. I browsed my iPhone, and the application that goes fastest without a high speed wireless, surprisingly, is Taobao.com. I tried the key words “Van Cleef Arpels”, and thank the great Chinese people and the almighty production industry we have, there’re indeed quite some of them, but of course not the golden or silver or platinum type, just the colorful cheerful types with no precious metals.

 

That’s how I got a Van Cleef ring and a bracelet for my Christmas gifts!

 

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Listening to Queen again

It's very hard to blow a great opportunity, one that could bring me to the land of my dream: Europe. So I resort to my therapy music again, Show Must Go On by the Queen.

 

I thought the artists are so great since because of them, we feel we're not alone, and my tears always come down when he sings "my soul is painted like wings of butterfly, fairy tales of yesterday will grow but never die, I can fly my friend". Now,

 

Did you fly, Freddie Mercury?

About Heaven, how's everything and everybody there?

Now that you're not pretending anymore, does it make anything better?

I still like it that you wear your heart like a clown, I thought at first it's a "crown", it's perfect and it's genius either way, I wander does anyone still do that now?

One life is not enough

Just watched the new movie from Almodovar. While it fell sharply below my expectation, there's one line came across my mind and stayed there. When the blind writer described (the motive of) his writing of play, he said "one life is not enough".

 

I was listening to a beautiful French song before I fell in sleep last night, I could barely understand anything she was singing but for the title "Tous ces combats", yet the melody was leading me in and I felt there's only a single veil, thin and even transparent, between me and the things in the song. If I reach out, it would be like running my fingers on the thin, translucent veil, which even yields under the tiny pressure of my fingers with a light curve…. and the French existence of this song, could be clearly seen across the veil. I could almost touch it. It sits just opposite me, across the thin, clear veil.

 

Many people think artists are great because they make life real before you, so that you could echo with it and think "yes that's life", or "yes, that's what I feel about life", yet perhaps artists are greater coz they make other lives real before you, so that instead of living the life yourself, which you can't because of the constraint of time and space, and the limited choices or years of life you're permitted.

 

Great artists can do that, and they can do that with seemingly simple touches. They could tell a life in a movie, in a song, and even with a photo.

 

"We'd go down to the river, into the river we'd dive, oh down to the river we'd ride" When I listened to Bruce Springsteen, I felt the disappointment of a low life, it felt so real like it couldn't be realer, if I were that small town American man.  

 

And a photograph could do that much too. I went to a photo show of Wim Wenders, actually I ran into it, before that, I didn't even know Wim Wenders did such great photograph. It was a series of empty scenes without people, yet you could feel the marks of people, or the once existence of people, so strong in the air, it's even stronger than if there were actually people in the scene. I remember quite a many scenes from that series, one of them a deserted salon in a small fallen town of the once great American West: there's a pair of old leather sofa, sitting across each other, dosing in dusty silence, above them, an oil painting of a Western highway running through the desert. Gazing at the photo, I was transcended to another world, the scene became familiar and carried a specific meaning for me, as if I were an old man who once lived there, but now I have lost all of my memories because of old age, and all know is the familiar scene and the smell, the feel of faceless memories in the air.

 

For the small race of people of powerful imagination like myself, all the dead poets' melancholies are mine, all the singers' cry, all the lovers' sign, the pilgrims' prayer.

 

And I could almost make it real, take for example, the French song. It takes only a eleven-hour international flight, plus a hundred hour of French class for me to touch it. With that much, I could feel the thin warmth of sunshine at a winter dawn under the white dome of the Sacred Heart. Yes it would be relatively easy to feel the Parisian sunshine on my skin, but in order to wear a French skin, it takes a lot, and a lot more time, it would take years, and these years would be the opportunity cost of wearing a Spanish skin, a German skin, or an American skin.

 

So one life is not enough, and we've got to live our other lives in the movies, the songs, the traveling, and our dreams.

Since When the World Has Changed

I got a real blow from the American edition of Vogue recently. Yes, although we have the Chinese edition of Vogue here as well as a few dozen other fashion magazine, I'm actually buying the American edition. And that's because of a DVD.

 

Monthly ago I watched a movie called "Sept Issue" on DVD - it's a documentary about the publication of the Sept issue of Vogue magazine in year 2007, the thickest magazine ever by then. Obviously the materials were collected long time ago for some internal purpose but at the aspiration of the commercial success of Devil Wears Prada, the people involved decided to get it make into a documentary.

Anyway, it's a job well-done coz my admiration for the Vogue magazine grew to such an extent that I actually went online to buy the American edition and get it mailed to Shanghai every month. I feel quite indignant that it cost only RMB200 for a year in U.S. and there's a promotion of buy one get one free, so it's essentially RMB100 a year, but to get it mailed to China, it costs RMB460. At the same time, the Chinese edition here it costs RMB240 for a year and it's simply not as good.

 

Two months later, the first issue of my long-waited American Vogue landed in my lap and the first impression is that the Recession must be over in U.S. already, coz the Mar edition is filled all of advertisements � I can hardly find the beginning of the "contents" coz it starts only on page 198.

A much bigger, way more profound revelation came after I went page by page on the advertisements, to put it in simple English: it is cheaper to live in U.S. now than to live in Shanghai, if you live on the same fashion items in the advertisements of Vogue.

 

It has long been no secrets that to buy any Luxury brand in China is way much more expensive than to buy it in U.S. or Europe, and that is usually explained away with the import tax. And it's fine because the Luxury stuff has only to do with the rich people, in case the enlightened ordinary citizen decides she needs a LV handbag or a pair of Ferragamo shoes and is willing to hand in two or three months of salary, it's fine too because that is called exactly an Luxury Item.

 

Nevertheless, what we're having now is no more a luxury problem but a mass market problem. And the window to the problem opens from the price announcement on the advertising of American Vogue: Brahmin "Lydia" leather hobo at USD295, roughly the same price vs. any mass market handbag in any department store of Shanghai; Adrianna Papell floral print dress with rosettes, USD 138, cheaper than any clothing item you randomly pick up in Shanghai's department store, which usually lay above USD150, Calvin Klein "Dylan" boa print birdcage sandal, USD119, cheaper than any new arrival I just checked over the show department…. As hard as I find this amazing and unbelievable, it is as real as what they say "black and white" or, "printed words".

Actually I may be very late for this realization; the Chinese who immigrated to U.S. in the recent years have known it much earlier. My friend who immigrated to U.S. twelve years ago used to make bulk purchase of clothing and shoes when she came back to Shanghai on rare occasions, but a few years ago, she told me, a pair of shows in Shanghai costs the same as in London (she lived in London then). I wasn't paying attention then, but now I looked back at that moment and see it is the first sign of uninhabitality of Shanghai, that is, on top of the poor quality of air, water, processed food… And oh by the way, an average apartment in Shanghai costs more than an average apartment in NYC too.

 

So the world has really changed, I bow my head and think, but when? I'm thinking of a piece of information from a recent report by Booz-Allen or Boston Consulting, it says over 50% of American business surveyed by the Amcham reported above than average profit margin from China over its global average. So China has, before we take notice, lifts itself from the cheap supply of labor, to an unlimited land of affluent, or at least, willing, consumers; and the multinational companies have been harvesting profits from not only the market's sheer volume, but wide margin too.

 

Lamenting as deep as I am as a consumer, considering my newly gained insight (that the booming China economy also provide exceptional opportunity for earning), I decide to console myself with the prospect of retire aboard in Canada or Australia one day with my hard-earned money from China, I can have pure air and pure water one day, perhaps. And if I could be lucky in the stock market, I might upgrade my retiree vision to a Mediterranean terrace. Keep dreaming, as the American movies advise.

 

Still, if I could have a choice. I want to move to America, now. 

A Roadmap of iPhone

The first person I know who uses an iPhone is Shirley. It was year 2006 and Shirley was the marketing manager of a Fortune 500 company. She's a beautiful lady and takes pride in the fact that she could and she is willing to consume a reasonable level of self-indulgence. One day she showed us an iPhone that we have only heard of before. She had asked a friend to get it for her from Hong Kong, it was not available officially in China yet. It looked nice with the sliding view under her slender finger.

 

Only two months later, we sat in together in a meeting with a PR agency, they were three girls and two of them use an iPhone too. It was funny to watch three identical iPhones lying on the meeting room table. What's more, the two PR girls are only some junior staff in their twenties. Shirley looked dampened and almost awkward coz once she laid out her iPhone, there's no way to retrieve it and hide it.

 

To make things worse, only three months later, Shirley's own assistant also got an iPhone as a gift from the boyfriend. Shirley didn't wait for more humiliation on her iPhone, she left the company soon.

 

By the end of year 2008, iPhone has become essentially a "Street Phone" as we call it in China (a name for the most popular mobile phones coz you go to the street and everybody you see uses such a phone). Our regional sales manager, a successful woman in her 40s, sports an iPhone too. Let's call her Cindy for convenience.

 

In December, our company was having an annual meeting in Shenzhen, the major production base of the world's electronics and naturally, it also hosts the most famous markets for counterfeit mobile phones in the country. In the afternoon when we arrived in Shenzhen, Cindy went to the famous counterfeit mobile phone market with some of her team, a dozen or so sales reps in their late twenties. I also went along in a spirit of a tourist and speculator. The market is stuffy and a full of people, a feeling of temptation, chaos, entrepreneurship, salesmanship, free economy hanging in the air, everyone guarded their backpack or handbag with a high alertness. We went out after two hours and the twelve-person group bought eight counterfeit iPhones and a few others in total, the cost is around RMB800, about one fifth of the real model.

 

Cindy was not very flattered by the new acquisition of her team. She proclaimed "I can't use my iPhone anymore". Coming back from Shenzhen, she did have her phone changed into NokiaE71, another big Street Phone of 2009.  

 

Then as of last week, I also become a proud user of iPhone personally. And that's because I went to an industry conference and everybody is busy typing to their smart phones and I feel I've become obsolete without one. More so, people talked a lot about mini blogging and it's said the mini blogging of Sina has already 6 million users and some famous celebrity was making a sensation on Sina sitting in the Paris Fashion Season, sending pics to her mini blog. That sounds cool, I thought. That's how I have finally adopted into iPhone and I made sure I didn't use it until I bought a pretty cover which I think is unique enough.

   

2010: How do women live in Shanghai

My colleague Alice was eating audibly from her panel, without turning around, I knew that she's having her breakfast which her father prepares for her and makes her take to the office every day: a bottle of milk or yogurt, a small cake or two pieces of bread (different type everyday), two hard-boiled egg, an apple or a banana. It's a big and rich breakfast and Alice will eat it in a playful way, a few bites in the morning, a few bites before lunch and a few bites in the afternoon and she often have a big portion of it left on her desk by the end of day which she wonders whether to take back home or throw in the garbage bin.

Alice also likes wearing white pants, white shirts and white wool coat and I often marvel: Gee, you bought another white pant, how are you going to maintain it? But of course I know that her mother is the one who wash all her clothes, so she's not worried.

Alice is 34 years old and because she's not married, she still lives with her parents, like most Shanghai girls do before they're married, sooner or later, eventually or hopefully.   

 

Feeling quite indignant, out of envy of course, I turn around to Jane, who's married and a mother of a 6-year old son. "Jane, who wash your cloths?" Jane was not prepared for this attack and replied honestly "My mother or my mother in-law --- Ah, but I wash my own underwear of course".  

Jane, her husband and her son live with her parents so that the parents could help take care of the household. Her in-laws live not far away too. Jane's father did all the cooking and he's reportedly a big fan of cooking, every day he would make eight dishes and a soup for dinner and he always seeks new recipes. Jane earns more than her husband and therefore she does no cooking or washing back at home. However, she also has a soft spot. One day her son asked "mother, why you never cook? I want you to cook this weekend", she hence complied and did one dinner (part of it) on the weekend. The next weekend, she pleaded to her son, "son, I'm rather tired this weekend, can I not cook?" and her son agreed with a condition "OK, then you cook more next weekend".    

 

The other day I talked briefly with an American lady who's a senior executive at a major advertising firm who just did a big research on the condition of Chinese women from where she learned that many young working mothers in Shanghai have to send their child back home in some other cities to be taken care of by the grand parents. "It's so hard" the American lady had commented. Yet my instinct is not "what a difficult thing it is for a mother" � as the traditional value calls for, my instinct on the contrary, according to my experience with the women around me is "what a release".

 

I don't know if I'm in a circle with strange, selfish women. But my gut feeling is not. There's this ex-colleague who's name I already forget, let's call her Daisy coz she is as delicate as a daisy. Daisy looks exactly like a Barbie doll in the window but she also has a young daughter, who lives with her parents some one thousand miles away. And it was said that Daisy didn't want to hold her daughter out of fear that the baby will mess up with her cloths. Now this does not sound nice. I guess it's always the bad, extreme, or scandalous things that people talk about and remember.

 

Yet Daisy is not alone. Here's Jessica. Jessica works for a famous cosmetics company and she married a very successful young man who had been the coveted target of many women indeed. Jessica always complains that her husband only decided to get married because he wanted to have a child. So she gave him a child very soon. And two weeks after delivery of the big mission, she went on a vacation around the world with other girl friends. Now coz the couple work very late and none of their parents live in Shanghai, the baby was sent to live with the grand-parents in another city.

 

Now this is how some women live in Shanghai, the ultimate Chinese city penetrated with thriving, throbbing female desires that you could almost hear, you could almost feel. We ask for too much, and we give too little, and we're always chasing after a moving target. So we're never really happy, not yet. 

 

 

Heard on the Conference

I was at a regional advertising and marketing conference last week and learned a few things about the newest developed in the world in the industry. And here are the few things I remembered from it:

1. Neural scan on the head in order to actually "see" consumer behavior with real, hard, visible, colorful scientific evidence, looks really cool and finally provided evidence of the importance of brand, e.g. when tasting a can of Coke unbranded, certain part of the brain lighted up and when tasting a can of Coke branded, different part of the brain lighted up! This is cool stuff, but how to make apply it in practical marketing remains to be seen.

2. "Fear and Guilt" are the big words to touch consumer phyche in economic recession. It is said that one brand of hand sanitizer increased its sales by more than 100% by playing to the "fear" factor with an advertising tagline "It takes 15 second to catch a deadly virus" as well as the "guilt" factor with another line "Do you dare to let your children leave home without it?" This is particularly amusing to me as I look around and decide that here and now in China, people have very little fear and absolutely no guilt.

3. A lot of talk on ROI and marketing effectiveness. Some ten years back, when I was working in advertising, it's all about "Big ideas". Now with the crunch of recession, the cutting of budget and the increasing scrutiny of the marketing spender, even the most flamboyant advertising people are now humbled and even invited their long-fighting foe on the table: the corporate procurement people who always try to cut the agency fee.

4. Do people really hate China now? This is my personal question which they didn't really discuss on the stage. I just got this impression reading the recent Wall Street Journal and Economist and it seems there is a growing negative sentiment on the part of the West, towards China. So I raised this question at the lunch table to a senior executive at a major advertising firm, a British one by the way. And he's been based in Beijing in the past four years. So the informal Q&A went as this:

Q: Is there indeed a growing negative sentiment against China now?

A: I think it's just in the media

Q: Then where did the media pick this up?

A: I think it's just the American… I'm a huge fan of China and I have lived here only four years… it's the Americans who never travel… and the Americans are blaming China for currency manipulation, if they would just save more and spend less…

Q: Yeah, actually I won't be surprised if the Western companies are sometimes unhappy about our government, but still you need to make your money here. We are unhappy all the time too! Still we need to make our living and try to make a better life out from here…

Who wants to buy a house in Shanghai?

Witnessing first-handedly the Shanghai real-estate price taking a ten-year long rocketing trajectory, I have developed an obsession of price-comparison between the housing price in Shanghai and what's like in the desirable places across the developed world.

I was at this tiny Swiss town Ascona on the shore of Lake Maggiore in September 2006, just had a most lovely stroll along the Lake and a very enjoyable dinner in a courtyard with Palm trees and I was waiting for the bus to go back to my hotel at Locarno. By the bus stop, there was a real estate agency whose windows adored with housing advertisement. I was at leisure and thus made a good study of those advertisements and to my biggest surprise and deepest dismay, I came to the realization that to buy a house or an apartment in this region cost roughly the same as to buy a house or an apartment in Shanghai.

Since then, I have got this obsession of housing price comparison across continent: wherever I travel, along the Mediterranean coast of France, Italy or Spain, or in the major cities of Paris, Rome or Vienna, if I spot a real-estate agency along my way, I would stop to have a good look and once again console myself that not-buying an apartment in Shanghai is the right thing to do: if I could buy an apartment on the Mediterranean coast or in Paris, why do I buy an apartment in Shanghai?

How about America? At the beginning of the recent recession, there was a topic among the media that we Chinese could do better with our money buying a house in America where the price for a house in most cities roughly the same as the cost of an apartment in Shanghai. Of course it remains a talk coz it's inconvenient and impractical.

Then I was reading this novel "Lipstick Jungle", written by Candace Bushnell the author of "Sexy and City" somewhere after 911 and before the Credit Crisis. In this novel, one of the most successful women in New York, the chief of the magazine division of a big media conglomerate � this widely successful woman at 45 had a 4-story house in Upper Town New York which cost her 2.5 million USD and she occasionally felt the pressure of housing loan even with her big salary (the novel didn't specify, but with other reference, the guess is around one million). And here in Shanghai, any acceptable apartment costs 2.5 million RMB and everybody who's earning a good 250,000 RMB is bravely buying up and taking up a loan up to 2 million for 20 years.

Finally, we come to the top real-estate in the world in the newest novel from Candace Bushnell: One Fifth Avenue. This fictionary landmark building is the showcase of premium downtown N.Y. real-estate. The counting of the residents including a Pulitzer winner, a movie star, a socialite and column writer for the New York Times and above everything and everybody, the top three levels was an amazing apartment owned by a legendary old lady who head the N.Y. elite sociality for more than half a century. At the end of the novel, the old lady had died at 100 years old and the apartment became the property of the wife of a young hedge fund manager hence completed the transition of an era from the old money to the new money.

Anyway, this historically important, culturally mystified, most desirable apartment in the entire New York cost the hedge fund manager some 122 Million USD, which is precisely the same price for a 10-year old luxury penthouse apartment overlooking the Huangpo River at downtown Shanghai.

I think the point is pretty clear here. Who want to buy an apartment in Shanghai, if you could buy it at any "Rich and Famous" place around the world?

Interpreting God

You may call our time a postmodern era, but a Chinese, even one speaks English and works on a Sony Vaio, still can not resist the temptation of peering into a Fortune Book to get some foresight into the ups and downs in a year and on some day to day level, still tries to interpret the will of the God.

By the "God", however, I do not mean Jesus, or even the Budda. Strangely enough, we Chinese are actually the world's largest population without a religion. While having no religion, however, we do have enough of "Dao"s to direct our thoughts and acts in the world, and many of us believe in a general, unknown God in an unspecified way. And when we're faced with some big choices or questions, we still try to interpret the will of the God.

Before this March, my God have always granted my way and I have always been able to get whatever I wanted, or wanted to do. Nevertheless, I have always come to regret all my decisions and thought the other choice could lead me closer to the destination as I later defined.

I went to the university of my first choice and I later regretted and thought I should choose another university in another city; I got the job I dreamed of after college and I later regretted that I should work in a different function in the same industry; I got a full scholarship for a graduate study and I later regretted and thought I should choose another school on another continent. I got the best job I could dream of after graduate school and I later regretted and thought another job I could lead me closer to the kind of work and life I now aspired to.

There was this time when I left an interview, it started to snow in a sunny Winter day in Shanghai, which is quite rare, and I took it for a good sign coz there's a Chinese saying "a good snow is a good sign for a good year". However, that job turned out to be a mis-step and it took more two more years to get back to a position I should be on without that mishap.

So the sign from the God is actually a far more complicated art than what one sees on the surface. And last year, there were a lot of signs pointing to totally different directions and I was quite puzzled. By the end of the day, I come to an realization that perhaps there's nothing like the will of the God, or the way of your destiny, the seeming signs are actually questions instead of answers. And you're the one to make your answer and then your fate is an interaction between the questions and your answers. Moreover, instead of getting the answers right, one perhaps need to get the questions right in the first place. Like Gertrude Stein, a legendary American woman who hosted the most inspiring dinner parties for the likes of Hemingway and Picasso in the 20s' and 30s' Paris � when asked before her death, "what is the answer?", she was reported to reply "what is the question?"

 

Anyway, now that my God has for the very first time stopped me to do something I really wanted to do, perhaps this time I will be finally doing the right thing and I won't come back to regret it, for the first time in my life?

Can I be a Citizen of the World by just sitting square in my living room in Shanghai?

 I always have this thing about being a Citizen of the World. It all came to me at seven or eight reading a book on the history of the World. On the second page printed a fine line from some Ancient Greek Philosopher "Be a Citizen of the World". And it was like that, ever since then, being a Citizen of the World become the highest aspiration of my life.

When I grew up, I realized there's nothing like Citizen of the World, coz you have to have one specific and definite passport. While there's no World passport, an American passport, or for that matter, an Canadian or Australian passport, could be a proxy, in terms of geographical mobility. 

However, I was never sure I like to be living in U.S., or Canada, or Australia. America is OK, but not really exciting, Canada is too cold and Australia too much sunlight for my skin. So I settled to be living in Shanghai, where I could watch Sexy and City almost simutaniously as it went on show in U.S., I bought books from Amazon, travel to Mediterranean Europe for vacation, play Dianna Krall and Leonard Cohen on my iPhone, read Wall Street Journal and Economist online and catch up with a few overseas friends on facebook. This would be my proxy of being a Citizen of the World I thought.

This worked for me until some time last year, I was suddenly ceased by a frenzie for a wild plan: immigration to Europe, where I find life's best of nature, arts, great cities and small towns. When it didn't work out, however, I began to see the folly of my plan, especially, how it goes against the global economic trend.

Accordingly to what I have been hearing allover, all the Western world is still recovering from the Credit Crisis, they are expecting zero or meagre growth in the foreseable future. And for Europe more specifically, they're right now trying to handle the Greece problem and may have more problem from Spain and Italy. Therefore, even if my plan had worked, the job perspective won't look necessarily pretty over the lovely continent. What surprised me most however, is that I came to realize the salary I could expect if my plan had worked, might not be significantly more than what I could earn in China. So all the advantages I would have, would be really only about purer air, purer water and less traffic.  

I guess it's a common sense across cultures that if you go with the current, you'll get the go and if you go against it, you may well stuck. Therefore, the right HR now is from the developed countries to the BRIC countries, just like all the big MNCs are doing dispatching their people allover (upon which, the dispatched all can't wait to jump). While my plan of a reserse flow from China to Europe is stalled for good reason.

Last month, there was a corporate Mass Mailer from our U.S. Headquarter that there would be no salary increase this year. An hour later, China HR send out an email saying that actually for China, we still will have our increase because of the importance of this market and the growth we're targeting at. Bear this in mind, I am suddenly more tolerant of the construction site along the way coz I realized no matter how ugly the construction site looks and how noise it is, in the economics, it comes alongside with my 8.5% merit salary increase. And when there's absolute peace in the city as the Europeans have in their city, the merit increase will go too.

And who knows, with all the funny talks of "G2", with the expection of China economy become second largest in the world soon, perhaps I would, in some way, become a Citizen of the World just by sitting squre in my living room in Shanghai.  

I'm proud of my city because of the street vendors selling...

When I want to read books in English, what do I do in Shanghai?

I could go to the Internet and go to Amazon, have fun browsing through and then order a few books, the only fallback is the transportation fee of the books often out run the cost of the books so you often end up paying double for the books.

I could also go to the official Shanghai Foreign Language Bookstore. Nowadays it’s pretty good at storing quite a collection of current popular titles. If you’re looking for a book you heard in the media, there’s a good chance you could find it there. The price of the book will be roughly the list price in U.S. dollar translated into the local currency, so not bad either.

Or, I could stop at a street vendor, peer into the bookcase he lays on the sidewalk to see if there’s something catches my attention. My neighborhood is by no means a high-end neighborhood and I don’t see too many foreigners hanging around, but there’s one street vendor carrying English books, often stationed himself just outside the supermarket. He must have more than one station spot, coz he does not come everyday, if I assume he works everyday. But what amazes me is the array of books that he carries. He has only two case of book, so in total perhaps only two dozen or so titles. One of the cases contains mainly pop culture/business non-fictions ranging from the classic “Men from Mars, Women from Venice”, to “How to speak to everyone”, or “How to Get Yes”, to Jack Welch's autobiography. Another case devotes to fictions, sporting from the classic “Gone with the Wind”, “God Father” to the current “Twilight” series.

The price of these books are benchmarked to the normal price of a book in Chinese, about 20 to 30 in RMB, or a fraction of the list price of its original in the official foreign language book store or Amazon. And the printing quality is so good I almost couldn’t decide if it is a “real” copy or not. The only slight weakness that betrays its counterfeit root is the paper, it’s often rawer than the real ones. But to me what really matters is the quality of the print, and when I finish a whole book, spotting none or only one minor typo, I would give it a pass and decide to trust this vendor in the future.

Now what I bought in the past year from him include: “Charlotte’s Web” (a children’s story), “The Little Prince”, “Outlier” (a new book from the author of “The Tipping Point”), “Lipstick Jungle” and “One Fifth Avenue” (by the author of “Sex and City”), and finally, a booklet by Jung that I didn’t finish and already lost. The last time I stopped by him I was surprised to find several copies of George Orwell’s “1984”. Of course I have heard of this author and this book, but if I didn’t see it with my neighborhood vendor (and so cheap), I don’t think I’ll ever read it in my lifetime.

And there’re books I SHOULD have bought from my neighborhood vendor but I have unfortunately bought months earlier from Page One on my trip to Hong Kong: “Twilight” series, “Brideshead Revisited”, “Sex and City”, “Devil Wears Prada” and “The Kite Runner”.

The other day I was at the Foreign Language Bookstore and I almost bought a copy of “Chasing Harry Winston”, on the cover of the book there’s a trademark high-heel, as on the cover of “Devil Wears Prada”, but this time, the high-heel is sharp green, not bloody red like “Prada”, then I remembered I might have seen it with my neighborhood vendor, so I put the copy back.

A few days later I met the street vendor again and I searched in his cases but was disappointed when I didn’t find “Chasing Harry Winston” and I meant to ask the guy. I suddenly got stuck because I’m sure he couldn’t read English and wouldn’t know if I ask him about “Chasing Harry Winston”. Catching a glimpse of inspiration, I asked him, “Do you have the book with the green high-heel on the cover?” “I did before, now I only have the red one”, “Could you get me a green one me next time?”, “Sure”. See, very easy communication.

So I’m almost proud of my city because of the street vendors selling English books, until I saw another vendor. The other day I was shopping on South Shanxi Road, the most bustling shopping street at the very heart of downtown Shanghai. And amidst a troop of street vendors taking the sidewalks selling everything from stockings to counterfeit VCDs, I spotted a vendor with one case on the bike, selling English books, one quick glance gave me a big surprise: he has a whole case of nothing but…Harvard Business Review.

Now I’m officially proud of my city because of street vendors selling English books. How many cities in this world have street vendors selling Harvard Business Review on their bikes!

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Old China Therapy

Most of us living in the Urban China nowadays do not go for Traditional Chinese Medicine anymore. When one get sick, one go to the hospital to get things fixed as quickly as possible. We only think about the old China therapy when we need a massage or acupuncture for our chronicle neck and back problem or when winter set in, we will be awakened for our needs to take various kind of tonic supplement.

And this winter, I found myself picking up the old China therapy. Things started fairly simple. I have been trying to grow my hair long, but it grew really slow and I thought I should take some Gou Ji. I remember at one time my father was losing hair fast due to his age and he took Gou Ji in Chinese rise wine and he actually grew back a lot of black hair! I don't drink Chinese rise wine so I adopted a common practice in the office: throw in a couple of the orange colored small dried fruits in the hot water and drink it for the day. I have finished a whole bottle of Gou Ji but my hair is not growing any faster. Anyway, Gou Ji should be good for my kidney at least.

When the weather got colder and one's appetite for afternoon snack picked up, I decide to take some sesame and walnut: in the food store around the corner, they sell bottles of crunched sesame and walnut mix and it's a popular winter snack for your health. Sesame is widely known for the blackness of your hair and walnut is good for your brain (some say because of its shape!) I bought a bottle without sugar coz I don't want to gain weight but then it isn't very taste without sugar. So the winter is almost gone and I still have half a bottle sitting on my office desk.

The third remedy I tried on was dates. One of the colleagues started to take dates regularly and she gave us some too. Dates in the Chinese medicine term, is good for the production of blood, so especially good for women. And this is no ordinary dates, it's been emerged in the glue from donkey's skin, another classic remedy for woman. The dates actually tasted good. But I have too many remedies going on so I often forget about it and now I still have two more packs somewhere in my office drawer…

Around the time of Dong Zhi (literally "the arrival of winter", the official winter starts at this Chinese solar term), advertisement banners starts flapping above all the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy as well as TCM hospitals, announcing the arrival of the ultimate tonic supplement weapon: traditional Chinese herb paste! This is the only time during a year that TCM doctors will be busy prescribing for herb paste and the TCM pharmacy busying making them, because winter is best time of the year to take in supplement and it's best to start at Dong Zhi. And if you take it right, you'll be much healthier the next year.

Long Hua hospital is one of the most famous TCM hospitals in town and some of my colleagues decided to go to a renowned doctor there. Our sales manager sent a junior rep to get "appointment number" for us and on the big day, three colleagues plus the whole family of our sales manager gathered to wait for the call of the number at Long Hua hospital. The wife of our sales manager went in first and she came back to tell us: I have been seeing this doctor for five years now, I don't understand why I'm growing older every year and the doctor is not! Well, the doctor must be really good, at least, at maintaining youth for himself… The process is the same for everyone, you go in there, the doctor checks your pulse with his index and middle fingers on your wrist, he watches your complexion and asks you to show him your tongue. Then he asks a few questions and then he started writing the prescription. I enjoyed his writing a lot. Although he's using a pen, but he wrote from above to the bottom, from right to the left, the way of traditional Chinese calligraphy, and his writing is beautiful, it's almost a grass-root, everyday life artwork of traditional Chinese calligraphy. After a brief statement of the problem which employs the phrases such as "insufficient liver and kidney", "Chong and Ren imbalance", he would write the names of two dozen or so herbs and the weight of the herb prescribed at the foot of each name. I liked the square characters in the calligraphy writing, Bai Shu, Fu Lin, He Huan, Tian Ma… you could almost smell the subtle scent of the herb from the white paper. In all formal ritual, the doctor would press his personal chop in red ink at the end of the writing.

Now you take the prescription to the pharmacy in the hospital, or other famous TCM pharmacy in town, they calculate how much your prescription cost (and it's not cheap, mine this year cost RMB1200/Euro120 plus RMB500 for the pharmacy to make it into a paste, and btw the doctor's prescription fee is RMB250, the most expensive I've ever paid in any hospital in Shanghai, Western or Chinese). In a week or so, you went back to the pharmacy and got your magic herb paste in a big bowl. It looks almost black, but smells of a nice, almost sophisticated scent. You take one spoon each morning, dissolve it in hot water and drink it for two or three months and … you'll be several degrees healthier in the new year!

 

 

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Avatar: A dream of re-born

I waited long enough for the crowds to subside before I venture into a movie theater for Avatar - you know we have already too many crowds on any normal day at any normal place that to dart into a crowd by the Chinese standard - like go to a blockbuster movie in its first two weeks is not recommended for those with weak nerves. But still we didn't go to IMAX, we heard you still have too wait long queue and the "second-hand" ticket - an option available at higher cost to those value convenience has roared to RMB600 (or USD88) for a ticket worth RMB160 (or USD24). So we just watched it at a "normal" 3-D theater at RMB120 (or USD18).

Then I asked my friends: "what do you think after watching Avatar?" Friend A said "I hope to go to Avatar too, this world is too complicated, I don't like it, I feel I'm an alien here". Friend B said "I think the future belongs to the high-tech companies, I should really watch for it when I'm working on my stock-investment".

To me, Avatar is a dream of re-born.

But Jack's re-born is a little too convenient. (BTW, why do every muscle-guy from Hollywood who has the potential to save the world calls "Jack"? From 24 Hour to Lost, even the little guy in Titanic?) For an ex-soldier with two broken legs whose brother just died of the vice of this world, he seems to have very little reason to love this unworthy planet. While the option of Pandora offers a brand-new, "healthier" life, a whole, stronger body and a great "natural" love/lover, anyone in Jack's shoes wouldn't give it another thought before he takes the leap, I wouldn't give it another thought.

Really, to think about that. Everyone would like a chance of re-born.

A director wants to be re-born with a new blockbuster movie; a poor Mexican wants to be re-born by crossing the northern border with America; a poor kid living in the country-side of some in-land province of China wants to be re-born by going to a university in some big city; the 40-year old middle-class Parisian Paul Gauguin wanted to be re-born into a free artist life and he did it by taking off to Tahiti (meanwhile deserting his wife and five kids, a little not so convenient, but he had art as his excuse or cause of sacrifice).

If I had a chance of re-born, what would I like? I would like a place of fresh air, pure water, plenty of green, fewer traffic, little noise, no pollution - now it sounds like Pandora, or Switzerland? I would also like less work, more time, more travelling around the world - now it sounds like wining a lottery. And I would also like to be re-born into a stronger, healthier body that looks like Natalia Vodianova or Olivia Wilde - now it sounds like, I know, a dream.

Shanghai World Expo 2010: history's most ... logo/mascot

I was on the plane the other day and watched a clip of promotion video of Shanghai World Expo 2010 from the in-flight TV and was once again "thunder-bolted" by the bluesome mascot, dubbed lovingly as "Haibao", meaning "treasure of the ocean", coz "ocean" in Chinese pronounces as "Hai" which is the second part of the name Shanghai.
Shanghai government is said to have spent over 100 billion RMB, or 10 billion Euro / 15 billion USD on this event which is to Shanghai what Olympic 2008 is to Beijing. Yet I have hated the logo and the mascot since the first time I saw them.
Let's start with the logo. The three greenish thick splashes with arms link together (the arms also extend out from both sides) looks somehow like the word "World" in Chinese writing, and I assume it means an union of people under this event. Yet the color and the way the word slumps reminds me of something particular. When I was a kid, once I put a frog into a small bottle filled with water and closed the cap. A few days later, I opened the bottle and poured out the contents: the frog was dead and flew out with the water - the effect was exactly - the World Expo 2010 logo.
So how about Haibao? It looks innocent enough. It looks pure and clean and reminds me really of a bar of jelly tooth-paste. The first time I saw it, and whenever I saw it afterwards, I think Colgate must be very happy with it. Actually, my biggest problem with Haibao is its painfully lack of imagination, if anything could bore anyone to death, Haitao bores me to death. I assume the creative rationale goes like this: let's take a drop of ocean water, which links to Shanghai by the "ocean" pronunciation as well as the geographic fact that Shanghai is a coastal city - and let's make the drop into a happy creature by adding two big eyes and a smiling mouth - and don't forget two little hands with one thumb up, perhaps with pointed-hair too!
Why can't we people make some creative mascot? Why can't we people make huge cartoon figures like the Japanese?
I tend to draw the conclusion that creative industry is the ultimate climax of economic development, and we're just not there yet. We're still at a time seeking and accumulating material wealth and we have a long way to go. But actually, it also hit me, when I'm stuck here, that beauty has not been a collective pursuit of our people, ever. There has not been any individual artist who attained the status like Da Vinci or Milelangelo in the West. Artistic pursuit, even affordable by the upper class, had been viewed as a self indulgence and even a kind of dissipation, almost negatively viewed with the moral mainstream. In fact, one of the emperor from the Song Dynasty, he himself a highly acclaimed painter of his time as well as centuries to come, was a big failure in his role as emperor and lost half of China to the Jin people from north. Bad example. If Confucius had been a preacher of beauty instead of a preacher of moral, we might have a better mascot now.

My personality splits in languages

I had a major fight with my boss the other day and I found myself involuntarily switching into English although she's a Chinese as much as I am. (But she's also a foreign company trained senior employee, or manager, more than I am).

In the MNCs circle of Shanghai, people do speak a lot of English even when there's no foreigner present. Mostly because there're many professional terms that are better expressed in English and mutually understood in office or even out of office communication. E.g. in marketing we talk a lot about "positioning", "consumer insight", "consumer communication" - all these terms sounds quite lame when translated into Chinese, while other terms such as "value proposition" just defy any attempt for translation.

To me, the most ingenious expression of a concept come from its original language, and translations into other languages often seem inadequate, esp. if these languages are not linguistically related.

Hence, all the business language - esp. MNCs terms are better expressed in English.

And not only business contents, culture contents too. Many of us would rather watch "Sex and City", or "Boston Legal" with English subtitles instead of Chinese.

And it's not just that. A few years ago, I found myself doing inner dialog more and more in English and I started to realize that this is perhaps a psychological topic, this is about identity, coz language is such an essential, almost fundamental element of identity. When you choose an identity, you need to identify a language. Like Rap is the language of what, I don't know, youth rebellion?

I grew up in an out-flung province in the southwest of China and I grew up speaking the local dialect. My home country is most known in the past for its tobacco industry, its minority people and wild landscapes (it is known today for tourism), even though the city I grew up is a city like any other city, when I went to university in a central province, I often got asked "do you have elephants and peacock walking on the streets?" I was invariably furious whenever I was asked so. (It didn't hit me until many years later that perhaps the boys were just trying to strike up a conversation, trying to be fun, or even trying to flirt!). So when I went to university, I switched myself into Mandarin. And even when I went back to my hometown nowadays, I prefer to stick to Mandarin instead of re-adapting my old dialect because speaking my old dialect makes me feeling retracing the years of growing up and went back into my old self - the shy, clumsy child and teenager I once was. So I shed my local dialect like an old cocoon and I'm now my Mandarin speaking self, university-educated, self-awared, confident big girl - until I became Fortune 500-tint, English speaking marketing professional, highly educated, well paid, well exposed and almost worldly.

My colleagues have observed that I actually do presentation better in English than in Chinese, technically it's because when I speak Chinese, I speak too fast that sometimes I could stumble over myself. While in English, I have better control of pace. Also, while I'm perpetually mild and pleasant in Chinese, I'm more passionate talking about creative ideas in English, more decisive phrasing out my strategy. In the social context, I'm still shy in Chinese, but could be a lot more open in English. In sum, English is the building material I use to create my desired self. And when it comes to negative content, like fighting, like cursing, English could provide a buffer too. At one point during our fight, my boss said "we were always like this (push our agencies to the edge) when we were at XX company", and I found myself blunting out "in XX company, you had tons of money, you can fuck your Agency bad". See, I can not say "fuck" in Chinese, but I don't seem to have a problem saying it in English.

So, I'm good with my English, I feel quite at home with it now. And now I'm learning German, I wonder would it bring me another identity? Perhaps more split of personality than I already am?

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New KPI for Shanghai Gov.?

I'm not a person who read the local newspapers. I trust the city retains its hyper pace and tremendous volume of reality when I wake up every morning. It sure will catch up the gear to continue from where it's left at the end of yesterday - surer than my own wake-up.

But this headline caught my eyes "Playdown GDP, Set New Measures for Economic Development" on today's paper.

With the little economic knowledge I have, I always have a mistrust on the city or the country's GDP figures, and since most of technology and industrial development is out sight of my everyday life which confines within a small zone in downtown Shanghai where the only economic activity to be seen is shopping, since all I see on the spending of infrastructure is the continuous digging up of the old streets, brushing up on the same old walls of the same old buildings in this zone, I naturally grow a bias believing much of our GDP comes from such 0-value activity.

Hence I take the down-play of the GDP as good news.

What's more amusing is that while the beginning of the year is usually a time for us who work in corporates to "set objectives" and put down the measurements, it never occurred to me that the government also need to set their own "objectives" and look at the measurement. Sure, it's a good thing they do.

Now the paper says the gov stresses on the "change of structure" of the economy, the gov will no longer encourage the various districts to compete on GDP growth figure, but set some new measures such as "service industry development", "innovative industry development", "green economy development" - while the details are not clear here, the concepts sounds good, and I guess that's the first step.

A few colleagues were having a chat over lunch as usual, and talked about the issue of corruption, and one of us said brilliantly "a bureaucratic structure must have some corruption as a lubricant, it's fine as long as they're also doing some real work". He also cited that the Ming Dynasty, being famous on the ruthless crack-down on corruption (the emperor got the convict corrupted gov officials skinned - and made scarecrow out of the skins to warn the rest of gov officials), was also the Dynasty of most corruption… well, my history knowledge failed me here…

Well, I guess what I'm saying here is that I think it's a progressive sign that the city gov are setting new KPIs, I guess we coming so far indicated some people are really working and even learning.

Hope to look at their year-end report on these new measures!

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Short China, I don't think so

In this age of media, we average consumers frequently turn into our own opinion leaders in many a topics, including world economy, American politics and with more involvement as well as self-assurance, local economy. So I read from a popular Chinese magazine some recent discussion in the global media, if there is such a thing, about new debates of China economy.

James Chanos said short China, eh, but I don’t think so. Could an economist, or, a hedge-fund manager, in this case, really be able to read, understand and even predict an economy without going into the field? Jim Rogers is known for pro-China economy, but he really fly in here and he really wait in a bank to find out if it’s worth investing. I remember watching the news clip of this incident and was highly amused – the famous investor was just another short, balding, mid-aged man, lining up in a queue, frustrated with the slow-moving line and baffled by the complicated requirements on the part of the customer for a simple request. He couldn’t get his requested service on that day in that bank branch, in fact, in that city – an experience all too familiar for the millions of customers of China’s powerful stated-owned (and now stock market-listed) banks.

Jim Rogers thumps down on the Chinese banks, but not the China economy, at least, not yet. In fact, if you have been to Hong Kong over the Christmas holiday and seen the lines outside LV and Gucci stores; if you have recently tried to book a 5-star hotel room in Sanya for the coming Chinese New Year holiday, you wouldn’t think China economy is going to a flake, anytime soon.

My friend stayed in Shenzhen for two months and took a lot of taxis. He likes to chat with taxi-drivers, asking them where are they from, how’re their folks doing back in the inland towns and villages, what’s their plan for the kids. Then he said China economy is going to be fine for the foreseeable future. All the taxi drivers are hopeful and feeling generally good about their lives, there has been many changes back at home, a lot of development, and they’re all going to send their kids to university.

Back in Shanghai, there has been some highly-publicized over-the-new-year promotion in many competing department stores. It drew hundreds of thousands of shoppers over the New Year ’s Eve and one of the stores scored over one hundred million USD turn-over within 48 hours. While it’s a game requires too much physical and psychological stamina that beyond my own approach, I do find two of my colleagues, not surprisingly, two sales girls (who will never pass any opportunity of a price-off) had bravely participated in that big event and one of them bought one flat-panel TV and one new air-con as well as a bar of gold, the other was the real killer, however, she actually bought eight flat-panel TVs and ten air-cons for the three new homes of her own, her mother’s and her aunt’s!

Bravo my beloved Chinese consumer. With your hard work and high aspiration about life, let the huge ship of China economy keep steaming on, hopefully nobody would be smart or stupid enough, to screw us up.

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Walling up the city, waking up the residents

The drilling started from the edge of unconsciousness and with the first dim thought I knew the construction workers have begun their day. Why do they need the drilling for the mere task of dusting up the building? Later I found out it’s for the installing of new cases for the air-con every house has hanging out of their window – so if we don’t have World Expo, are we going to have all the air-cons flying and falling over the heads of pedestrians?

As nice as it is to know my air-con is not going to fly away, I don’t like to have my building walled up with rusty iron pipes and roofed with bamboo-woven boards and I don’t like to have construction workers dangling out of my window on their thick ropes. And I certainly don’t like to be woken up on a weekend morning at seven.

In name of the World Expo 2010, the city of Shanghai has entered into a frenzy of universal construction, as if it’s not already one huge construction site. Literally every building, as long as it can be seen from the streets, has to be dusted up and painted anew to show our best to the world. The standard coup is to wall up the building with the pre-historic type of scaffolding, namely rusty iron pipes screwed into each other to give the structure and dirty bamboo-woven boards as floors for workers to walk upon. From where they would engage themselves endlessly in the mysterious scrubbing and scraping which is supposed to leave the building cleaner and prettier; sometimes dirty waters would be streaming down from the bamboo roofs so you know they are bathing the walls. The sheer amount of noise, dirt, traffic inconvenience they created in the process so overwhelms the comically hopeful good results that the locals already changed the slogan of Expo 2010 from the official “Better City, Better Life” to the more appropriate “Messier City, Worse Life”.

The sheer scale of such work, with building-cleaning only a little part and the most visible one, makes one wonder how much of our lovely GDP figure arrives in this fashion of waste of economic and social resource and how much of our tax money is laundried into back-pocket through it. Thanks God we’re indeed such a huge economy that we could even afford such a level of inefficiency.

I don’t find my building much prettier now so far, but of course they have not taken away the scaffoldings, when they eventually do, as reluctantly as they might feel, I hope they would take away the garbage too. There is one shining point, I mean, literally – you know the kind of short iron bars everyone has out of their window as an old fashioned way of laundry-drying - you might already forget about it because most people are not using them anymore nowadays anyway – they have painted them silver and they’re actually shining in the good weather!

Now that’s something to be said for the Shanghai government, the most progressive one among their league as some contend, they really respect our rights and the old fashioned-way of laundry drying – because my Guangzhou colleague told me, after hearing my complaint about the mess in Shanghai that, the city of Guangzhou, in a separate frenzy in preparation for the Asia Game 2010, has not only the same amount of mess going on, but they have taken away the residents’ old-fashioned laundry-drying iron-bar when they’re not at home!

And if you ask when are all these craziness going away for this round? I just checked out the “Construction Notice” board out of my building, under the apology for the “inconvenience our restoration work cause you”, it stated civilly that the project is projected to be finished on Apr 31st, a good effort to make for the official grand opening of World Expo on May 1st, 2010.