4 posts tagged “china”

Who’d have thought the soccer scene would be so healthy in Shanghai?  I
joined an expat league here, and racial clustering being what it is, the
league is unofficially segregated by race.  The American contingency here,
sucking on baseball bats and growing third chins in left field, failed to
field a team, so I find myself with a bunch o’ Brits.  They’re a great bunch
of guys.  I’ll shank the ball twenty feet above the goal and they’ll just
say “Unlucky!” and pat me on the back.  Then we all hit the pub after
practice and order pot pies.

I’ve been playing with the locals too.  Chinese soccer is a little
different.  For starters, there’s a lot of smoking.  Players smoke on the
sidelines.  Our goalie was smoking on the field, casual as you please.  On
the other team’s attack, he’d wedge his cancer stick between piggies number
2 and 3 and put up his hands, ready for the block.  He deflects the ball
back to the midfield, loosens up, and then he’s back to sucking on his adult
pacifier.

Many of the local players are pansies.  They play tricksy soccer, dancing
like sprites on the ball in a charming game of one-on-one keep away, even
deep in their own backfield.  They’re deft, no doubt, but when push comes to
shove, they fall over too easily.  They cry foul and massage the spot where
I barely stepped on their foot (by accident) and glare at me, the
perpetrator who dared to interrupt his little leprechaun jig.  Sorry pixie
man.  Try passing the ball next time.

A few locals on my team played in university, so they know the drill.
They’re fighting hard for possession and drawing even colder stares than I
am.

“It’s just a friendly match!” says a pixie man, tendering his calf.
“What game are you playing?  In real soccer there is pushing,” retorts my
teammate.  It’s your own fault for not being stronger, and you’re blaming
me?”

Our team is on the sideline for a round, so I drink in my surroundings.  The
field we’re on is a real people-fest, four simultaneous games on a standard
pitch.  Too many bodies, not enough space.  Bats flap about the nighttime
sky, attracted to the stadium lighting.  They’re cute little guys, small
enough to pass for sparrows if you don’t look carefully.

One player catches my attention, a shirtless guy with a sizable belly.
There’s something monumental about him.  It’s the defiant grimace painted on
his face in angry strokes.  It’s his posture, legs planted firmly a yard
apart, ready to tackle a bull.  It’s the sweat dripping down the smooth
surface of his turgid burger baby.  He’s a living monolith.  The star
player, a skinny guy in his early 20s, does a few loopy-loops and spins
right into fatty’s stomach, falling over.  Fatty just watches him fall and
doesn’t budge an inch, doesn’t bother paying attention to the ball.
Laughter ripples through the body of onlookers.  The fazed star player looks
like he ran into a wall.  Which, by all means, he did.

It’s still the beautiful game out here, but for different reasons.

Ah work.  What have I to say about thee.  Here are three things I hate about the retail industry:

1: Meeting with simpering baboons.  A few days ago we held audience with a gutless, kowtowing American who was all form and no function. His ridiculous opening statement about "bridging oceans" and “cherishing our synergy” had me projectile vomiting against the walls of my closed mouth.  Fortune cookie say: Exporting headphones to China does not make you a modern Marco Polo.

2: Trying to motivate people who have no fiscal incentive to do anything but stew in their own gastric pudding.  We met with a store manager whose boss ordered him to reduce in-store theft of certain items.  His solution was to take those items off the rack and mark them out-of-stock.

3: Company cheers.  Sorry FroggyMart.  Max doesn’t do hand-clapping.  He is not going to recite your mantras about low price and great service.  It’s not that I’m above it; I can see our high powered MBA execs are diving right into it.  It’s just that I’d rather equip a fat guy with cleats and let him play Dance Dance Revolution on my unfurled penis than partake of your unholy ritual.

Three things to love about the retail industry:
 
1: Seeing how the world ticks.  Retail gives you the skinny on all kinds of industries.  Thanks to a vendor meeting this morning, I could now talk your ear off about the past, present, and future of olive oil.

2: Promotions are a fun time for all.  Think your grandmother makes a mean deviled egg?  Cook up a demo batch in the store and see if it catches on with the customers.  Is the makeup district a little confined?  Put up some mirrors and screw with people’s heads.  I get to be a runway model in a fashion show at our flagship department store next week.  That never really happened when I was a programmer.

3: Freebies galore.  We get to “appraise” new food items all the time.  Even goods that are already in our stores get “inspected”; it is not uncommon to see bakers and deli chefs running around our HQ with “product samples”.

Any TexMex manufacturers reading this?  Come hither.  You have a market in Shanghai of at least one freeloader.
 

The Chinese calendar is based on the moon, but a lunar month stands at 29.5 days, slightly shorter than a month of the solar variety.  Does this slightest of discrepancies gum up the clockwork over time?  You bet.

So, they slip in an extra month every so often to make up for lost time.  Sly dogs.  And to think that you Western leap years only have an extra day!  You guys are puny.  Chinese leap years probably whirlied you in high school.

This year is one of those years that will have TWO Chinese new years.  The next one won’t have any.  The kicker is that Chinese people are so superstitious, they are rushing to get hitched this year for double the karmic donuts.  The next, pastry-less year is absolutely to be avoided.  So powerful is this dogma that it forces stores everywhere to strategize around it.

You might have heard that the Chinese market is tricky to newcomers.  This here’s a prime example.  How easy would it be for an unwitting bridal shop to enter the market next year and flop ?

Oh Shanghai.  Thou art fully modern.  When the hell are you going to popularize personal checking.

I put down a deposit on my apartment today, equivalent to two-months of rent, IN CASH.  The highest paper denomination here is the equivalent of a twelve-dollar bill.

So there I was, withdrawing money five times from two different ATMs over the course of two days, nervously stuffing wads of redback into my laptop bag while people in line eyeballed me suspiciously.

Do you have any idea what it feels like, going down the street with that much loot on you?  Do you have any idea how many times I glanced nervously at my bag during soccer practice last night?

And here I am now, at a private, pre-arranged location, opening a briefcase with close to 150 Chinese Benjamins for you, my landlord, to count one by one.  How illicit does this feel?  I don’t know whether to expect your signature on the lease or a gunnysack of cocaine, fished out of your pajama pants.