Seth's Blog

Jane Jacobs said that one measure of a healthy economy is the choice it provides. A healthy economy provides abundantly at affordable prices; an unhealthy economy does not. Another sign of economic health, she said, is innovation: A healthy economy includes a constant stream of new products — nothing lasts forever. People in Norway are far richer than people in China right now, but what will Norwegians do when the oil runs out?

In contrast, my Beijing shopping revealed that Chinese entrepreneurs have been able to develop products that the rest of the world will want to buy.

1. Electric bikes. They’re everywhere in Beijing. They cost $200-$400 and a few cents per mile, far cheaper than gas. I would have brought one back to Berkeley but inability to fix it stopped me.

2. Keyboard covers for laptops. Transparent silicone plastic. Easy to clean. How did I live without one? These are a new product in Beijing, actually, but they are very cheap, about $1. I can find them for sale on the internet for about $15.

3. Cordless floor sweepers. They use a rotating brush to clean the floor instead of a air pump, as a vacuum cleaner does. That they are cordless makes them very easy to use. In Beijing they are obvious and attractive; I bought two and brought one back to Berkeley. In America I’d never seen them for sale but after I knew they existed I managed to find an unattractive one in Berkeley hidden deep in a hardware store. The price (about $50) was roughly the same in Beijing and Berkeley, except the Beijing models are much nicer.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three products are “environmental” broadly conceived. Beijing air is dirtier than Berkeley air; my keyboard cover and my floors get dirty a lot faster in Beijing than in Berkeley. I think they are a sign of hugely-important things to come — China inventing and selling the products we need for a cleaner world. It’s been called the next industrial revolution; a better name would be the second half of the industrial revolution in which we clean up the mess left by the first half. As Jane Jacobs often said, the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work.

A Beijing friend of mine prefers to shop in Hong Kong, where clothes are cheaper than in Beijing. If you must shop for clothes in Beijing, she said, go to the Beijing Zoo. She meant a cluster of stores near the zoo.

When the movie Titanic came out, and I knew it cost a lot to make, I thought I’d lose money if I didn’t buy a ticket to see it. For the first time since Titanic I had a similar feeling: At the Beijing Zoo prices were so low it felt like losing money if I didn’t buy something.

On seven floors there were hundreds of shops, each crammed with some clothing item: dresses, scarves, shoes, jackets, pants, shirts, and so on. More shoes than anything else. (Few socks.) I wanted to buy shirts but the shirt selection was poor, consistent with the fact that the shirts I already have are from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. But because I could buy a $6 shirt that would cost $80 in America, I bought a few anyway. I was happier with the shoes I bought ($10 here, $100 in America).

I love shopping (but alas dislike owning) and especially love Chinese shopping because the sticker price is often just a starting point. It is like adding spices to food. At the first shoe vendor, the quoted price for shoes I liked was $40. I got up to leave. What’s your lowest price? I asked. $30. I started to leave. What’s your price? she asked. What’s your lowest price? I repeated. As I left, the price went down to $20. That’s your lowest price? I asked. Yes, she said, what’s your price? That was helpful. With other vendors, I started at $7 and gradually increased my offers to $10, at which point they were accepted — but only if I was leaving. Sometimes the sticker price was the actual price. For a jacket advertised at about $14 I paid about $14, even though another stall a few feet away had the same thing. I went back and forth between the vendors and $14  was the best I could do.

I hoped to buy a winter jacket but to my astonishment couldn’t find one I liked. The student store at Tsinghua has about five winter jackets for sale and I would happily buy one of them ($50). Among hundreds and hundreds of men’s winter jackets at Beijing Zoo I didn’t see a single one I liked. Good excuse to return . . .

To get a light meter (to measure the intensity of morning sunlight) I went to Beijing Camera Equipment City (official website). On the ground floor were 50-odd small shops. They sold the stuff in any camera store, except far more various: cameras, lenses, cases, tripods, flashes, and so on. Some specialized by brand (e.g., Canon), some by product (e.g., tripods). About 10 stores sold the light meter I wanted (Sekonic L-308S). One didn’t have it in stock, but they could get it. How long would it take? Five minutes. That is, they would buy it from another vendor and resell it to me. The sequence of prices (in yuan) I was quoted was 1450 ($212), 1300 (same vendor as 1450), 980, 950, 940, 930, 920 ($135). One vendor wouldn’t sell it at 920, so perhaps that was a good price. Online I would have paid about $170.

One store had a discontinued model. The meter in the box (Gossen) didn’t match the box (Sekonic)! I would have gladly bought a Gossen but the manual in the box was for a Sekonic.

The second floor was . . . software. Fancy dresses (often wedding dresses), fancy dresses for children, costume jewelry, frames, colorful textiles, displays of the work of professional photographers. The smallest shop sold bags to carry home a fancy dress. All the photography-related stuff that ordinary photo shops don’t carry.

As I noted earlier, Beijing has a museum devoted to tap water — apparently the only one in the world. Another translation of its name is the Beijing Water Supply Museum. It was incredibly hard to find. None of a dozen people in the neighborhood knew where it was. It is on the grounds of the government company that supplies tap water. While I was there, there was only one other visitor, an American. Like me, he’d noticed it on Google Maps.

I loved it. One of the exhibits was called “10-Day Imperial Approval”. Permission to start the water company (around 1910) was requested from the Emperor. Approval came in a lightning-fast ten days from the Emperor’s mother on yellow paper. Only the Emperor, his father, and his mother were allowed to use yellow in decorative ways. The penalty for breaking this rule was death. In the early days of the water company, slips of paper gave you permission to collect your water in a bucket. A photo of an early president of the company (thin, young, shaved head, high-collar traditional shirt) made him look more like a dashing criminal than a captain of industry.

For anti-terrorist reasons, there was nothing about how the water was processed.

Museums are usually devoted to the rare, beautiful, and intricate, which why a museum of tap water sounds like a joke. When Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker‘s architecture critic, devotes his best-buildings-of-the-year list to nine show-off buildings and an art exhibit — none of them advancing the art of making the houses and workplaces where we spend most of our lives — I am glad to see agreement that something is missing.

The other visitor was in Beijing to visit his sister, a high school exchange student, living with a family that speaks no English, who had checked the wrong box on her visa application and was unable to come home for Christmas. She was having a great time and now wanted to apply to a college with a Flagship Program — you go to the American school for two years and then a Chinese school for the last two years. What a sea change! Americans treat another country as equal. Americans grasp that someone else might have something to teach us. At Berkeley a few years ago, the psychology department had a day-long get-together to discuss various issues. About a meeting about one of them, I suggested that we look at how other departments had handled it; maybe we could learn from them. Bad idea, I was told, they’re supposed to copy us.

In the elevator in my apartment building I realized the student holding hot food had just had it delivered. She gave me the menu. The restaurant, I learned, is called Kyoto. it serves mainly Korean and Japanese food. Free delivery. The surprising part: There’s no address. And it never closes, even on holidays.

An example of the general truth that there are many more kinds of restaurants (food-serving businesses) in Beijing than in America. Today I bought sugar-coated banana on a stick from a street vendor.

I’m enjoying The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer, one of a few fun books I brought to China. (The others are Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt and The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu.) It’s about living in a downtown hutong. What pleases me most is how good his Chinese must be (I want reassurance I can learn it) but I also like strange stuff like this:

[Watching TV in a friend's apartment, Spring Festival 2006.] The annual variety show paused from its singing and acrobatic performances to announce that China would send a pair of pandas to Taiwan as a measure of friendship. The program’s five hundred million viewers could pick the animals’ names by choosing from a list and sending a text message via cell phone.

“Who says we can’t vote?” [his friend] laughed. . .

We ate and watched television until Unity and Wholeness were announced as winners of the name-the-panda election. (Taiwan’s government would initially refuse the animals.)

What were the other candidate names, I wonder.

Beijing has a Museum of Tap Water, I learned from Google Maps. And I thought Seoul’s Kimchi Museum was unusual. It isn’t the usual museum topic, of course, but as I blogged earlier, tap water is a kind of miracle.

The Tsinghua campus is really big so everyone has a bike but bikes are very prevalent elsewhere as well. In several ways the surroundings have been shaped by this:

• Bike mechanics scattered around campus. There are about seven of them. Fix your bike instantly. Also sell spare parts — locks, seats, baskets, and so on.
• Huge bike lanes. On the road from the subway to where I live, the three lane road is divided into one shoulder lane, one lane for bikes, and one lane for cars. The appearance is that the bike lane is twice as wide as the car lane. The effect of these huge bike lanes isn’t trivial: I feel safe.
• Bikes parked everywhere. At big stores, parking attendants charge 5 cents/bike. Payable when you leave.
• Discarded bikes. Near the subway station is a pile of 20-odd bikes. About once a year discarded bikes are removed from the Tsinghua campus.

Several buildings are being built on the Tsinghua campus. At least one woman makes a living as a prostitute among the construction workers. She is known as Qikuaiban, which means seven and half yuan (about $1). The name came about when she offered her services to a worker, he said, “All I have is seven and a half yuan,” and she accepted that payment.

Happiness in China: Who wants to be a construction worker?

1. Chinesepod.com.  Podcasts for learning Chinese.
2. Popup Chinese. More podcasts
3. Pinyin.info. “Most of what most people think they know about Chinese — especially when it comes to Chinese characters — is wrong.”
4. Laowai Chinese. “I’ve been busy not losing my job (teaching) and not ignoring my publisher.  What I mean is: I’ve been working on the editing and layout of my book Chinese 24/7. I’m glad to announce there are now over ten people outside my family who have expressed interest in my book.”
5. Sinosplice. “There are some seriously rank odors out there on the street. Rotting organic matter, urine, feces, stinky tofu…. But don’t worry, soon you’ll be gleefully playing “name that odor” with your Chinese friends!”
6. Imagethief. “Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in “Memoirs of Geisha”, alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.”
7. Beijing Sounds. A linguist blogs. “The final indignity comes when you utter a phrase that incites peals of laughter. Ignoring your request for explication, your [Chinese] spouse goes over to tell the in-laws (did I mention you’re living with them?) and the lesson comes to an ignominious close with the stern father-in-law, who rarely chuckles, doubled up on the couch, tears rolling down his cheeks.”
8. Danwei “Today’s New Culture View reports that the People’s Supreme Court approved the death sentence of Yang Jia, the man who murdered six policemen and wounded three others and a security guard on July 1 this year.”
9. Scientific and academic fraud in China. One popular post printed a letter from a Yale professor teaching at Beijing University upset about plagiarism among his Chinese students: “When plagiarism is detected in America, it can end the career of the person doing it,” he writes. Such as Harvard professors Laurence Tribe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, and Alan Dershowitz?

Happy Thanksgiving! A Chinese friend texted me this. I replied I was surprised she was aware of it. “The majority of Chinese know this day,” she replied, “and say thanks to their friends and families.”