jeff yen

3/31 : Nanjing – Suzhou

This is part of a series of posts that... etc etc, I'm already getting bored with this. This post and, if I get around to writing them, the last one or two in this series are/will be pretty awful. I advise against reading them. Some of the pictures might be okay, though.

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UPDATE: Oops, among all the pretentious negativity I almost forgot the coolest part of the day (and possibly all the features of the tour):

At one of the great bridges spanning the Yangtze in Nanjing, we had yet another sales bonanza sprung on us.

Something of a "Hey, what's this? A world-famous artist? And he's selling his art? Why, we'd be fools not to take a closer look!" kind of thing. Painfully transparent, especially since I saw the tour guide collaborating with the floor walkers, guiding them to the prime buyers. But the art was actually kind of cool. And even if the artist was kind of a dick, I suppose I can understand; it would be hard to focus when you have endless tours shuffling in every day snapping photos of you.

I actually thought about buying one; a tiny jar, with an entire poem painted on the inside with a single-horsehair brush.

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After a good night's sleep – I have discovered that going to bed early is key during these trips, where the normal wake-up call is 6am – I am back in a more suitable frame of mind, amused instead of irritated at the slightly preposterous notion that this is a tour.

From my perspective, it is most like a Florida timeshare deal, where you might get a free weekend in Orlando in exchange for sitting through an interminable series of sales pitches. The benefit for the salesman is obvious; their pitch is delivered to a captive audience and thinly disguised as entertainment. The benefit for the tourist, is… well… shit, you got a free weekend in Florida, what do you have to bitch about?

It was fairly clear to me at the outset what this "tour" actually was, and yet most of our fellow travelers seem thoroughly oblivious. I have yet to decide whether this is evidence of a fundamental disconnect between wealth and critical thinking, or this is actually the kind of experience these people are looking for. While an unpleasant thought, I am increasingly convinced that the latter is not an impossibility.

In all honesty, I can see how this kind of thing would appeal to a certain mindset. There is a fairly large set of people out there who are disinterested in or unable to experience China on a local level. They simply lack the necessary time, energy, empathy, or – sadly – skin color to relate to the local population on their own wavelength.

That last factor is not one that can normally be controlled, but I readily admit its significance here. Foreigners ( wai guo ren / 外国人 ) are simply unable to connect beyond a certain level with the locals ( ben di ren / 本地人 ). Even I, who have genetic and linguistic advantages in this respect, am only now starting to regularly pass as Chinese.

However, when it comes to the other factors, it doesn't take long before you can reliably identify those who have little actual interest in their surroundings or the people occupying them for more than a week at a time. Rather, their primary motivation is being able to say they've been there, ideally while having tangible evidence on display to back it up.

In the simplest possible terms, they're the suckers.

It doesn't matter what's for sale, or how inflated the prices are. They cruise the globe, trailing a wake of credit card receipts, fluorescing sales commissions and dopaminergic smiles.

Their shopping experience has been thoroughly sterilised. There are no inappropriately curious mongrels nosing at your crotch, or whiffs of rancid shit or stinky tofu ( chou dou fu / 臭豆腐 ）(it can be surprisingly difficult to tell one from the other) wafting in from the neighbours. Instead, there are simply rows upon rows of near-identical products, between a battery of buzzing lights and gleaming marble tile.

Even the sales people seem to have been sanitised for their protection; sleek young men and women sporting identical uniforms glide back and forth across the sales floor, flat black gazes mirrored in their polished buttons, following your movements around the room.

The only thing missing is a paper sash to tear off them before buying something.

Contrast this with the experience shopping on the street, where one's salesperson is just as likely to be a high schooler with Eastwood eyes smoking a cigarette,  or an old woman – I hesitate to use the word "crone" however much the situation might call for it – with a decided lack of teeth, washing underwear in a dark corner and gumming a betel nut with grim determination.

These shopping expeditions – up to three hours at a stretch – are punctuated with bus rides to and from venues. Sandwiched between are short bursts of culture, sometimes as abbreviated as standing in a parking lot near a famous lake for ten minutes before boarding for the next stop. We are inevitably accompanied by our singularly unappealing female tour guide, who flirts crudely with the unmarried men of the group – this is one of the very few industries in China where tipping has become institutionalized. The tastelessness continues unabated as our venue draws into sight; she seamlessly switches to a sales pitch, softening up the crowd for the coming mob of salespeople.

I use the word "mob," but this is actually a meticulously organized sort of assault. There are entire industries built upon the steel-belted radials of these tour buses, sprung up virtually overnight especially to siphon money from overseas bank accounts into Chinese coffers.

Enormous outlets that specialize in one product – jade, silk, pearl, clay teapots, and Chinese medicine are just a few we've seen on this trip – are surrounded by parking lots painted solely with bus-sized parking spaces. Outside are hung signs that follow a similar pattern, and are all the more interesting for their frank honesty: [City name] Shopping Center for International Tourists.

In truth, I envy these people. Much like insurance companies, they have struck upon a near-perfect business model.

They have a captive audience that is mandated by law, as the local governments require any tour group of this type to stop at one shopping destination per day.

Their ventures are subsidized with taxpayer money. To put this into perspective, our week-long tour cost 99 US Dollars. One night at any one of the hotels we've stayed at would normally cost anywhere between $150 and $300. Our group numbered well above 300 members, and there are nonstop trips throughout the tourist season. Even with massive group rate discounts, you can imagine the government outlay.

There must be similar operations everywhere – if the U.S. has none, then we are irretrievably silly – but it is yet another example of how personal relationships ( guan xi / 关系 ）can make nearly anything possible. Apparently, if you are friends with the right people (or grease the right wheels), your government will pay through the nose to bring wealthy, uninformed customers to your door and trap them for hours in the same room as your top salespeople.

It is, in the barest terms, an enormous hoax. The same products sold in these outlets can be bought on the street, sometimes just next door, for a quarter of the price. But traveling in these tours, you never see the street – for much of the customer base, that's kind of the whole point.

And that's why I've four more days with people who read books with titles like "The Power of Passion: Achieve Your Own Everests".