"Tell me about your viaje a Shanghai," writes my friend and the father of my daughter-in-law, Julio M. Rodriguez, from his native Dominican Republic. "I was there in 2006. The food was horrible."
Don Julio is a remarkable man. Tall, slender, and aristocratic, he exudes the subtle magnetism of a benign godfather. At seventy-six years of age his energy is undiminished as he continues to practice pediatrics at the Santo Domingo hospital where he was formerly Chief of the Medical Staff and a professor. He is a scholar, journalist, and historian who has written extensively on the Trujillo era and whose columns have appeared in the local press. Not only does he speak English fluently, he also speed reads it, which apparently is why he has never complained about the length of "my occasional pieces." If he's rarely met a topic about which he lacked an opinion, it's always proffered with aplomb and backed by an impressive grasp of the facts.
Considering his roots, it's not surprising that his third passion, after his family and his profession, is baseball, which he gets to indulge in during a recent visit to Washington, D.C., ostensibly to meet his one-month-old granddaughter. Sparing no expense, he treats himself and four guests -- his wife Josefina, his son David, who drives down from Youngstown, Ohio, my son Matthew, and me -- to Diamond Lounge all-inclusive food and beverages and lower-level home-plate box seats at the Nationals-Cubs game, although both are poor substitutes for his favorite team, the Cardinals. He's been a rabid Redbird ever since his St. Louis residency days back in the early sixties when his countryman, second baseman Julian Javier, comped him tickets to the old Busch Stadium.
With typical frankness Don Julio is eager to expand upon his perfunctory indictment of JSG's and my latest international destination. "We went there anticipating a better, or at least equivalent, version of the Chinese food we were accustomed to at home, and instead were introduced to something entirely different. Thank goodness for the breakfast buffets, which included good old American (or Dominican) eggs, omelets, waffles, bacon, sausage, fruit, and pastries."
While "horrible" may be a little harsh, let's just put it this way: our best meals are the ones served to us at 38,000 feet: shrimp the size of popsicles; filet of salmon with steamed rice and green beans; beef tenderloin in peppercorn sauce with gnocchi and vegetable medley; choice of dinner rolls or garlic bread; ice cream sundaes drenched in caramel, butterscotch, and hot fudge; and bottomless glasses of champagne, wine, and Bloody Marys. Yes, after five overseas journeys crammed in coach with the hoi polloi, we're finally salivating in business class.
Although our host is picking up this and all of our other expenses, even for jetsetters like JSG and me the amenity is a necessary inducement -- if not our prime motivation -- to sacrifice forty-eight hours of our life in the air in return for ninety on the ground in a place that has always been relegated to the bottom quartile of my bucket list.
The junket is the grand opening of a new showroom in Shanghai by one of Schewel Furniture Company's major suppliers, Lifestyle Enterprises, from whom it purchases about thirty per cent of its bedroom and dining sets and two sectional seating groups. It's difficult for me to fathom why Lifestyle would spend a minimum of $3 million (about one per cent of its total revenues) to transport, house, feed, and entertain the three hundred or so dealers who are deplaning along with us -- other than to guarantee a captive audience for its ribbon-cutting. As a gesture of appreciation for past patronage, it's rather excessive; as a down payment on compensatory future returns, it's problematic in an arena where loyalties are as fickle as those of basketball free agents; and as an enticement to lay down on-site orders, it's irrelevant since most buyers tend to make their decisions at the larger multi-vendor expositions of High Point or Las Vegas.
While a few larger retailers may engage directly with Asian producers and save the fifteen to twenty per cent middleman fee, most are like Schewel and prefer to work through companies similar to Lifestyle which maintain U. S. offices and sales organizations, originate designs based on market trends, contract with factories (some may be owned outright) for fabrication or assembly according to their specifications, and assume responsibility for quality control. Finished goods are shipped in forty-foot high-cube containers from Far East ports through the Panama Canal to Norfolk, and then hauled by truck to Schewel's Distribution Center in Lynchburg, at total charges of about $4800 each.
Dividing this amount by an average capacity of twenty-four bedroom suites (dresser, mirror, chest, queen bed, and night stand) and one-hundred-twenty five-piece dining sets (table and four chairs flat-packed) per container equates to $200 freight on each bedroom suite (or forty percent if its fob, or free on board, cost is $500) and $40 on each dining set (or twenty per cent of an fob cost of $200).
For years U. S. furniture manufacturers assumed that such an exorbitant freight factor -- a function of the bulkiness of their product -- inoculated them from the overseas palgue that had decimated their textile and footwear peers. Arrogant, myopic, and complacent, many remained oblivious to the looming threat, or found themselves so saddled with leveraged-buyout debt that even the prescient lacked the capital to upgrade their plants and equipment and maximize efficiencies. Meanwhile Asian entrepreneurs were building state-of-the-art facilities that combined low-cost labor with advanced technology to churn out merchandise that, regardless of price point -- low, medium, or high -- so far surpassed their stateside competitors in style, quality, and value (including freight) that the latter expired faster than an oxygen-deprived candle.
The attack was launched initially in Taiwan in the late 1980's, and then migrated progressively to mainland China, Malaysia, and Vietnam in reaction to higher tariffs and increasing wages.
This blitzkrieg was not limited to wooden case goods. Even a seemingly prohibitive shipping cost of $150 could be absorbed when applied to the deeply-discounted $250 for which a reclining or genuine leather sofa could be manufactured in China. For promotional upholstery continuing to be made in the States, costs could be further contained by importing fabric patterns that were cut and sewn overseas -- the most labor-intensive component of the process -- and then attaching them to frame and spring units.
It amuses me when disinterested observers and journalistic gadflies lament this precipitous exodus, clinging to a bogus nostalgia and professing a self-righteous affection for their idealistic notions of American craftsmanship. While I sympathize with the thousands thrown out of work by this turn of fate -- especially in our region where an entire community like Altavista, Virginia, can be devastated by the shuttering of a Lane Company -- why should home furnishings become the whipping boy for a fundamental axiom of economics simply because it was the last commodity to weigh anchor, following the embarkation of clothing, shoes, and electronics?
And in the fierce war for the disposable dollar, why should furniture retailers be handicapped by paying a premium for "Made in America" products when such labels are rare sightings in the aisles of mass merchants, department stores, and specialty shops? These are my true adversaries, and in order to generate profitable sales and maintain market share, I need to offer the same values to my customers that they do.
Milton Friedman articulated the rationale for free trade thirty-five years ago in his seminal work Free to Choose. Lower prices on Chinese imports, for example, translate into a higher standard of living for the Americans who buy them, as they have more money to spend on a multitude of goods and services. Counteracting the negative effects of globalization on domestic manufacturing is the assumption that the sector possesses the flexibility and ingenuity to reinvent itself, to create the next new object of universal desire. Meanwhile, a rising tide in China is spawning a vast marketplace for investment and consumerism.
Critics will rightfully argue that the Asian playing field is rife with pitfalls and potholes: minimal legal and moral recognition of intellectual property; sporadic regulation of environmental and resource contamination; child labor abuse and exploitation; state subsidization of selected industries; and manipulation of currencies to maximize pricing advantages. But does anyone doubt that most of his fellow citizens would rather turn a blind eye toward these inequities than be deprived of their twenty-dollar shirts, forty-dollar sandals, and four-hundred-dollar big screens?
Now, thanks to Lifestyle Enterprises, I'll get to witness the "Chinese Miracle" in person, albeit through a telescopic and pre-focused lens.
This is the first country I've been to which requires a visa, and since I was skeptical about the trip to start with, I'm almost willing to let that inconvenience give me an excuse to bow out. JSG and I fill out our online applications twice, fearful of having made an error the first time. I'm ready to submit them electronically to the Chinese Embassy with the $120 fee when I learn I must use a third party, which collects an additional $280 to expedite them. When I grumble about this boondoggle to a friend who travels overseas frequently, he placates my ire by informing me that obtaining a visa for entrance into the United States is more difficult and expensive than for any other place in the world.
Since JSG is already in San Francisco visiting her son after a four-day college reunion of sorts at Lake Tahoe (a long way from her alma mater, Williams), we've asked Lifestyle to route us through that city. That's no problem until I look at my itinerary. Although I've flown a hundred thousand miles in the past four years and am convinced air travel is safer than driving to the airport, I'm surprised that our equipment is a four-engine Boeing 747-400, which I thought had been rendered obsolete by the more modern dual-engine 777's and Airbus A330's.
Some fast internet research not only allays my concerns; it sparks an appreciation for this iconic pioneer of long-distance travel.
The 400 variant of the 747 debuted in 1989, and incorporated significant improvements over its twenty-year-old forbear: a glass cockpit that eliminated the need for a third pilot, redesigned wings with reduced drag, and new engines with lower fuel consumption and greater thrust. Six hundred ninety-four were sold until production ceased in 2005 as airlines began phasing in their 777's and A330's, which have less passenger capacity (and are thus easier to fill) and are more efficient. Many operators, including our United, will continue to fly their 747s to the end of their useful lives rather than spending $300 million each to replace them. (Boeing has actually developed and put in service a third generation 747, the -8, but its future may be limited as it is likely to be eclipsed by the 787 Dreamliner.)
The only luxury lacking on board our humpbacked "Queen of the Skies" (as it was nicknamed back in the eighties) is an elevator to lift us to our upper-deck business class cabin. In this insulated stratosphere, takeoff is as quiet as my Hyundai Genesis, landing as graceful as a ballerina, and cruising as smooth as downhill skiing. Even the turbulence we encounter along the northern Chinese coast is no more annoying than a few scattered moguls.
Each of the twenty seats arranged in pairs along both sides of the fuselage borders either the aisle or a window; under the window is a storage bin big enough to accommodate the orthopedic boot I'm wearing to protect the fibula I fractured when I twisted my ankle a few weeks ago. A control panel electronically adjusts the head and foot rests to multiple positions, including a full lay-out for bed-simulated sleeping comfort. There are no pajamas, such as are provided on Emirates Air, according to our frequent-flier friends FGD and JFD, but a large pillow, a soft duvet cover, and an accessory kit containing toothbrush, toothpaste, earplugs, and eyeshades are frills aplenty for a person accustomed to the constraints of coach.
In fact, I'm so stimulated by my new toys that wakefulness sticks to me like a damp tee shirt; JSG of course shuts down faster than the dimming lights. A click of my remote fires up the fifteen-inch screen planted three feet in front of me (but toward the rear of the plane, which is strange at first but quickly forgotten once we're in the air), and unveils an entertainment bonanza: tv shows, movies, news, games, music, and the irresistible up-to-the-minute report on our location, speed, altitude, distance (traveled and remaining), time since departure and to destination, wind effect, and outside temperature (it's cold).
But none of it is sufficiently appealing to distract me for long from my latest volume of escapist fiction (The Burning Shore by Wilbur Smith) until, surfing the game channel, I stumble upon a former avocation and a mesmerizing way to make the hours fly by: bridge, which I haven't touched in twenty-five years but which I still enjoy vicariously by reading the daily newspaper column. Nothing much has changed, other than the stony silence with which my mute partner rebuffs my accusations of his inscrutable bidding and incompetent play. And just when we seem to be establishing a proper rapport, our game is interrupted by a piercing blast of verbiage over the intercom system, which is interminable, redundant, and exasperating enough when delivered in English; in translation it's like being condemned to a Chinese torture chamber.
It's a minor irritant, but validates my reputation as an inveterate cynic; as JSG says, I'm not happy unless I'm complaining. But that's about the only fault line. The lavatory is six paces away. Our flight attendant is pleasant, charming, chatty, and professional -- mindful of our needs but never obtrusive. When she deduces that I'm hooked on seltzer water, she keeps me replenished. When she finds out I'm in the business, she's ready to refurnish her whole house. (Too bad she lives in California.)
Hostessing business class is obviously a perk for senior citizens, which puts her squarely in my demographic sweet spot. With a sly grin she acknowledges my "I'll have what she's having" dinner order as the famous remark from the film When Harry Met Sally addressed to a waiter by a woman in a restaurant who overhears Meg Ryan at an adjacent table faking an orgasm for Billy Crystal; I only remember it because I have just read Crystal's memoir, Still Foolin' 'Em, in which he describes director Rob Reiner's embarrassment at demonstrating the proper technique in front of his mother Estelle, who played the part of the envious eavesdropper.
Touchdown at 7:00 in the evening is a foreshadowing of our next three days: we feel the tarmac almost before we see it, so dense is the low-hanging smog, fog, haze, or mist -- the term varies depending upon the weatherman -- although our pilot assures me that the runway lights here are as bright as a Bat-signal. In response to my inquiries, a number of natives did attest that the sun was known to shine on Shanghai, although I suspect they may be either referring to revolutionary hero Sun Yat-sen or merely touting the Communist Party line.
Along with about twenty other junketers JSG and I are shepherded aboard a van for another harbinger of things to come: a ninety-minute ride past miles of towering apartment buildings until we reach the central area, where we are brought to a dead stop by the clogged roads. A lot of people live here, over fourteen million, making it the largest city in the world, and they drive a lot of cars, about two million. The government is trying to contain the propagation of both creatures, restricting couples to one child and charging $10,000 for a license plate.
Our five-star Grand Hyatt Hotel is a stunner. The spacious room features Art Deco king bed, lounge chair, and work desk; oversized double-sided closet with storage drawers; marble bath with glass sink, separate tub, and scintillating three-headed shower tower; remote-controlled curtains and lighting which are beyond my level of sophistication; and corner floor-to-ceiling windows that, from our 84th floor, offer expansive views of the suffocating cloud cover. I don't like heights anyway, so the wide open atrium dropping all the way to the ground satisfies my lust for thrills.
The next morning, Tuesday, in a scenario that will recur four times in the next two days, our wagon train of half a dozen packed buses creeps out of the parking lot and lumbers toward a selected landmark. Leading off, of course, is our raison d'etre, Lifestyle's new showroom, which is located in the JSWB Global Home Furnishings Center, four million square feet of exhibition halls housing over two hundred manufacturers. It's open to the public, but I can't imagine that many retail sales are made, considering the outrageous prices posted on the samples (for which the freight expense is negligible), unless they are merely inflated starting points for the Chinese custom of haggling for discounts of up to seventy per cent.
But we're not here to shop -- as much as our hosts might like to think so -- just to put on a game face for the grand opening extravaganza along with three hundred other imported dealers and a handful of dignitaries, reporters, and company officials. The master of ceremonies is industry legend and U. S. Lifestyle president, JCR, whose repeated references to owner William Hsieh as the "magician" who has fathered this worldwide assemblage are equally appropriate for his own illustrious tripartite career: first as a six-million-dollar pitch man who could (and still can) transform the cheap-and-ugly into a glorious work of art with a politician's fluency; then as the merchandise manager for former chain-store giant Heilig-Meyers, a one-hundred-eighty degree flip from salesman to buyer which he performed with the grace and good humor of one who never forgot his roots; and last as an international marketer through a timely resurrection.
Granted that JCR's southern gentlemanly blue blazer, khaki slacks, and penny loafers are no match for the sartorial splendor of Hsieh's delicately-embroidered tangzhuang suit and Gucci tennis shoes, all in yellow, the traditional color of the Qing dynasty; at least he's intelligible, which is more than can be said for the Mandarin speechifying which inundates us in his wake. And, as JCR protege and Lifestyle representative JMM wittily observes, "There are no subtitles." It's like attending Yom Kippur services in an Orthodox synagogue -- ninety per cent Hebrew to me. Thankfully we can snack afterward on very much appreciated non-Chinese and non-kosher pepperoni pizza and pork barbecue.
There's no disputing Hsieh's a showman. A festive troupe of dancing girls cavorts across the stage accompanied by mini-Las Vegas sound and light theatrics and some pre-Fourth of July fireworks. The impresario unfurls a velvetine ribbon longer than Rapunzel's tresses which the various actors in this melodrama snip away in suspenseful slow cuts.
Once we're inside it's deja vu "Forbidden City" (the name adorning Lifestyle's palace replica in High Point), three floors of -- how do I say this tactfully -- very familiar furniture, although I don't know why I would have expected anything different. I've always regarded Lifestyle as primarily a case goods resource, but here two-thirds of the space is devoted to upholstery, mainly reclining sofas in brown, beige, and tan, with a few black or white sectionals and some stationary pieces in red or blue interspersed for variety. A new bedroom suite we've ordered but not yet received looks even better the second time around. We enjoy mingling with other guests, including one woman intent on expanding into the credit business until I discourage her by offering to sell her all of my accounts. Before long we've seen enough, and wander outside to explore the complex.
Sited on the estuary of the Yangtze River, Shanghai germinated as a commercial mecca, but its growth since the Nixon-Kissinger initiative has been meteoric and is gaudily on display on our evening cruise along the city's bisecting river, the Huangpu. We pass one skyscraper after another, each one more architecturally opulent than the last, each one a living Christmas tree decorated in a glittering neon rainbow of intricately-patterned strobe lighting. Somewhere out there is the Bund financial district, the Peace Hotel's blazing green pyramid roof, and the Customs House Clock Tower, but frankly it's been an almost sleepless forty-eight hours; nestled in a lower-deck cubicle sipping champagne, I'm too weary to take it all in, while JSG, camera in hand, darts fore and aft, port to starboard, loath to forgo a single opportunity.
"What's that tv show? The keyboardist and singer sound mighty good," I say to JMM sitting beside me as I point to a big screen at the front of the cabin. "They should," he replies. "They're upstairs, right above our heads." It's time for me to crawl into bed.
Perched on a tripod of slanting stanchions and ascending above the skyline like an alien spacecraft is the Oriental Pearl communications tower, so named for the three large and eight small steel spheres strung vertically from a height of 1500 feet, which made it the tallest structure in the country from 1994 until 2007, when it was surpassed by the Shanghai World Financial Center. We could have walked there in ten minutes, discovers JSG on Saturday; but this morning, Thursday, we're back on the bus, and the ride takes thirty.
A high-speed elevator rockets us a quarter-mile to the large upper sphere in about sixty seconds, barely enough time for the red-and-white robed and robotic attendant to brief us in two languages. We skirt the shops and restaurants as the main attraction here is the glass-encased outer platform which offers spectacular views not only outward in all directions but also straight down through the translucent flooring -- on a clear day, that is, which this one predictably is not. That's just as well for me; clouds or not, I feel like I'm in an Alfred Hitchcock movie -- Vertigo -- and beat a hasty retreat indoors and to an instantaneous plummet to the basement, where I land in my comfort zone.
It's the Shanghai Municipal History Museum, and I'm lured into an exhibit that whets my appetite for more: rickshaws and pedicabs, ancient trolley cars, 1920's sedans, a primitive jeep, and later editions of a Buick and a Volkswagon. I've been wondering why those two brands dominate the roadways, and now I know: they were the first Western automobile factories built in China.
For the next ninety minutes the great city's past, with an emphasis on the colonial period from 1860 to 1949, comes alive in a Disneyland display: waxwork mannequins engaged in jade carving, furniture making, calligraphy, painting, cloth spinning, and arts and crafts; vintage scenes of subsistence farming, fishermen, tailors, wine and coffee bars, a medicine stall, an opium den, the stock exchange, and a courtroom; dioramas of the Bund featuring streetcar sounds, of the Dangui Teahouse with an opera soundtrack, and of Nanking Road with window lighting; scale models of historic buildings and famous residences; and a stark expose of the unpleasant aspects of the foreign concessions, during which natives were treated as second-class citizens.
Intermittent showers are a fitting backdrop to our deeper cultural immersion after lunch: an excursion to the ancient Zhouzhuang water village. En route our chipper guide Marco (or Lin in Chinese) saturates us with a flood of juicy tidbits, punctuating every sentence with a bubbly double chuckle ("ha-ha"): most young adults are highly educated, and not marrying till later in life (as if there's a connection); their impatient parents will go to public parks to arrange dates for them; the poverty level in the country has fallen drastically in recent years, to about 15%; if a husband and wife are both only children, they may have two offspring; since the Chinese are predominately non-religious, weddings are civil ceremonies; and Mandarin has six thousand characters, half of which are in common usage.
Marco is wise enough to bring along a carton of plastic slickers, soft pink for the females, pale blue for the males, which he distributes as we exit the bus and trek down to the ferry.
Surrounded by lakes and crisscrossed by rivers, canals, and fourteen stone bridges that present elegant watery views, this "Venice of the East" is a bleached, quieter version of its namesake. Over half the houses date back seven hundred years to the Ming Dynasty. A gaggle of gawkers is gathered around the signature site where the round-arched Shide Bridge intersects with the square-arched Yongan Bridge; captured on canvas by Chen Yifei as "Memories of My Hometown" and purchased by Armand Hammer for his private gallery, it garnered widespread acclaim for the artist and sparked an international tourist firestorm. Hammer later donated the painting to Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping.
After introducing us to a plump, contented Buddha, Marco leaves us to explore the environs on our own. My main concern is not to slip on the wet cobblestones, which are made more treacherous by the clumsy boot I'm wearing. If we are anywhere in the vicinity of either of the town's two largest estates, belonging to Shen and Zhang, each 20,000 square feet with multiple courtyards and ornate stonework, stumbling upon them absent a guide, manual, or map will be blind luck. Instead, wandering along streets and alleys flaunting a cornucopia of souvenirs and crafts, we get the impression that commercialization has superseded authenticity in most neighborhoods.
Of particular interest are the epidemic of pork knuckles (a local specialty which I thought were chicken legs until corrected), necklaces and bracelets strung with freshwater clam pearls, and calligraphers stroking away on silk and paper, eager to make me a personal seal in Chinese characters. Peeking into one stall, I'm tempted to don a military uniform and have my picture taken with Chairman Mao in the background, but fear I will be detained by Homeland Security as a subversive.
The rain abates in time for the day's grand finale -- an evening outdoor production, "Four Seasons in Zhouzhuang," straight from Broadway by way of Chinatown. The prosperous Shen Wansan falls in love with fetching Lu Liniang, thwarts the blandishments of another suitor, and weds her in a sumptuous ceremony. Their romance is infused with song, dance, lights, acrobatics, music, and humor, while along the narrow river that encircles the stage are depicted the folk customs of a fishing village: greeting the God of Wealth, setting straw on fire, drinking granny tea. It's like an opera to me: one intuits he's supposed to be awed, yet much is lost in non-translation.
Our last day, Friday, is a roller coaster from the sublime to the ridiculous. Epitomizing the former, in conception as well as design, is the Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai's Old City. If "honor thy mother and father" is the primary Chinese commandment, surely sixteenth century mandarin Pan Yunduan more than fulfilled his filial responsibilities when he decided to build this elaborate retreat for his parents to enjoy in their declining years. But before he could break ground, he was dispatched by the emperor to Sichuan on an administrative assignment that lasted twenty years. Undaunted, he returned home in 1577 to complete the project, by which time not only was he almost bankrupt, the intended beneficiaries were near death.
After centuries of neglect, the five-acre tract was rehabilitated and opened to the public in the early 1960's. Tranquility, however, has been trampled by the masses whose trip advisors have convinced them that this is Shanghai's answer to the Great Wall.
Marco does yeoman's work navigating us through the congestion and illuminating the highlights: the zigzag bridge leading to the entrance, so constructed to confuse pursuing evil spirits; a menacing sculptured dragon's head perched atop a wall, its body and tail fleshed out in trailing gray tiles; graceful vase-shaped passageways carved into whitewashed masonry; another crooked bridge, this one covered, overlooking a small stream teeming with schools of carp and goldfish; the Grand Rockery, a forty-six foot high twisted sculpture of fused yellow stones evoking mountainous peaks, cave, and ridges; the Exquisite Jade Rock, a honeycombed slab prized for the porousness which allows water to flow downward and incense to swirl upward through its numerous openings; and Dianchun Hall, headquarters of the Small Sword Society which plotted to overthrow the Qing Dynasty in 1853 and a repository for a collection of the rebels' coins, weapons, and publications. Twenty-nine other lacquered pavilions offer contemplative perspectives on the classical landscaping.
We emerge from the labyrinth like enervated lambs being led to slaughter. We're in the midst of a large square swarming with all nationalities and bordered by a shopping mall. Within seconds we are accosted by street vendors thrusting Michael Kors watches and Longchamp bags (at least that's what the tags say) in our faces and unleashing monlogues that put the inimitable JCR to shame, in spite of their limited vocabulary. This is the strangest bargaining I've ever encountered. One merely stands like a mime, shakes his head in denial, or mouths a silent "no," and the price steadily drops, until before he can say, "I don't yuan any," one hundred dollars have shrunk to twenty. They think we're rejecting the number, not the item, and are harder to shake than mosquitoes in the tropics.
We escape to the interior, where JSG continues her search for the perfect mementos for herself and her daughter, grazing the aisles of a mini-department store chock full of toys, silks, embroidery, dry goods, packaged food, and more pearl jewelry, while I'm fascinated by a row of booths where masters are demonstrating their skills at miniature crafts: assembling tiny ships in bottles; painting or writing on postage-stamp fragments; carving on slivers of bone or jade. It's but a prelude to our final afternoon activity: the Fake Market.
Yes, the Chinese have been considerate enough to consolidate over one hundred purveyors of faux-branded merchandise in one convenient (an hour by bus from our hotel) four-story building. Oakley sunglasses, Beats bluetooth speakers, Samsonite backpacks, Burberry trenchcoats, North Face windbreakers, Louboton high heels, Diesel leather belts, Montblanc wallets, Uggs high-button boots, Abercrombie and Fitch boxers, Jimmy Choo handbags -- they're all there, although some exclusive labels, like Rolex, Gucci, and Prada, which are illegal to copy, according to a sign posted at the entrance, are hidden in back rooms and available only upon request.
The actual warning should read "Enter at your own risk" or "Beware of the sharks." Should one peer over a threshold to examine their wares, the beguiling clerks -- who look like adolescent ingenues -- attack with the ferocity and tenaciousness of hungry predators. Shopping here is a matter of trying to make one's selection while fending off these carnivores, then having to negotiate with them. But we've been down this road before, so we know to start with an embarrassingly low offer and raise it in small increments, always willing to walk away from a deal we don't like.
I'm one of the few people in the world who still travels with an over-the-shoulder soft duffel bag (it fits in any overhead compartment) rather than a rollaboard. Purchased in Hong Kong in 1989, it's finally showing the wear-and-tear of more mileage than a United 747: zippers broken off to the nub; the inner lining crumbled away; the outer stitching fraying badly. For pure sentimentality, what better time and place than here and now to swap it for a similar model that if it lasts as long as its predecessor did -- twenty-five years -- will certainly outlive me? I'm ready to pull the trigger on the closest look-alike I can find when JSG swoops in to advise me I can do better at Target. Meanwhile, she's toting two takeaways guaranteed to delight her fashionable daughter: a Longchamp handbag and a pair of Ray-Bans.
There's one more gift we're looking to bring home: a brand new Chinese red Tesla sports sedan which will be awarded by lottery this evening to some lucky Lifestyle customer. JCR once again assumes center stage, repeats his remarks of two days ago, and promptly deflates the audience by reminding everyone that winning the car will cost about $50,000 in income taxes. "We'll worry about that later," I whisper to JSG as we watch the ticket being drawn and wait with bated breath for JCR's tantalizing pronouncement of the name thereon inscribed. An instant of euphoria -- "It's Mark . . . " -- succumbs to the reality of the odds against us when he concludes with "Stewart," whom ironically we just had dinner with. In accepting his keys, the other "Mark" appends the perfect epigram to this week-long junket: "I was wondering how I was going to get to the airport tomorrow."
Recalling Don Julio's verdict on Shanghai cuisine, I wouldn't say that I agree with it entirely, although another comment I heard proved to be more than a harmless quip: "Whenever I see a large lazy susan, I get worried." To which I might add, "not just about the food, but also about the hygiene." Just what is the proper etiquette when we're sitting at a revolving buffet with foreign utensils? To transfer servings via spoon onto our own plates from the various bowls, or to eat directly from them with chopsticks, which is no easy task for an uncoordinated Westerner. (Apparently the latter; spoons are for soup only.)
As for the dishes themselves, they're neither describable nor memorable: plenty of rice, noodles, and dumplings; meat, fish, and tofu cut into small pieces and flavored with dried chili, wild pepper, anise, cinnamon, and water chestnut powder; lots of vegetables (some unidentifiable), particularly tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, but no broccoli; and two specialties, duck blood vermicelli soup and tomato egg dish, although frankly I can't say whether we ever have the pleasure.
It's been interesting. Kudos to Lifestyle for precise planning, and thanks for the royal treatment. Now I can't wait to get home and enjoy some good old King's Island American Chinese food.
