Over Christmas, I was asked an interesting question:  What’s the single biggest change that you’ve seen in China since you’ve been there? I like these sorts of questions because they ask for a pithy response outright.  My answer:  “It’s more civilized.”  I reckon I have to stick to that answer.  Shenzhen has changed a ton since I’ve been here.  It’s certainly more civilized:  The middle class is rising and they’re behaving more and more like typical middle class citizens in other countries:  from dress to activities to manners.  Even the wild shopping places have been tamed a bit:  there are barriers along crowded hallways to direct traffic and policemen now patrol around.  It’s still wild, but it doesn’t seem to be as much of a madhouse as it was two years ago.  Now, don’t be misled; China is still the craziest, most nutty place that I’ve been to in Asia, and for that matter, the rest of the world.  So, you can still come here and enjoy some wild adventure.

I reckon this increase in civilized behavior is a good thing overall.  However, with it comes things like inflation and big new fancy shopping malls.  There are so many shopping malls here now – high end ones at that.  There’s a new one underneath a brand new tower in Luohu, the heart of Shenzhen.  This tower appears to be taller than the Di Wang building, formerly the 8th tallest building in the world.  It’s known as “KK100″.  No idea what the KK stands for.  Underneath and beside it is another of these five-storied luxurious malls.  On top of that, around a huge glass dome are situated several new apartment towers, all part of the KK complex.  I wonder how much a studio runs in that place.  For sure, a foolish price.  I keep wondering, “Who is buying all this stuff at these malls?”  I guess it’s those who are living in the apartment buildings.

I happened to meet the owner of a pretty big set of English schools the other day.  Nice guy and, from living in Singapore ten years and California for ten years, spoke near native American English.  He happened to mention that his wife was a pastor and that there was a church in the east tower of the Coastal City complex, which is just 5 minutes from me; I go by there all the time.  So, I figured I might as well go there and check it out.

Of course, the service was very very different from anything that I’ve seen in the US.  Actually, it reminded me more of what I’ve seen or heard of churches with mostly black congregations.  There was lots of singing and clapping and tons of “Amen!”s to go around.

Well, to start with, the service was held in a large conference room on the 16th floor of the office building.  It was packed with tiny plastic seats.  I think the smallest chair in the US might be a lawn chair, but here in China, you have to quickly get used to these tiny plastic stools that more resemble doll furniture than seats for people.  Well, these weren’t the little plastic stools, but were just one step up.  Tiny little folding chairs pushed together as tightly as possible.  It turned out to be needed – every single chair was taken; every last one.

The service started with singing; the song words were projected up onto a small screen.  From my years at Alpine camp, I recognized the melody of the song and the words, except of course they were in Chinese.  A group of four singers plus one guitarist (accompanied by an instrumental track) led everyone in the song.  They encouraged clapping and loud singing.  What surprised me the most was how long we sang.  The song was repeated numerous times – ten repetitions, maybe fifteen.  But, it just kept going and going.  Then we started another song and repeated it numerous times, then again.  By the time we’d finished, about twenty five minutes had passed.  All standing up, clapping, and so on.

There was one old woman in the front who particularly impressed me.  She was in the front row and thus had lots of space to move about.  She skipped in place, threw her hands up, and sang joyously.  It was really entertaining to watch her.  I was the only foreigner in the room and when she turned and saw me, reached over and clasped my hand with a big smile.

After the singing came communion, which surprised me.  The guy seated to my right, who spoke fine English, asked me if I was reborn.  In fact, I think at least three people asked me if I was a Christian.  I guess I just take that for granted coming from the US.  As a  side note, all the folks around me (except the old woman), spoke very good English.  I was surprised; it’s rare to have that many good English speakers in one place.  That’s certainly not the case at the meditations.

I thought the service would be finished soon.  But, it seemed that the minister wasn’t going to let up and the next time I looked at my watch, an hour and a half had passed.  The minister remained up in front of the congregation, speaking loudly and emphatically describing the story of Jesus feeding the masses with just five loaves of bread and some fish.  I probably grasped about 25-30% of what he was saying.  Being a native Chinese speaker (and a man), he wasn’t as easy to follow as the Buddhist monk from Hong Kong (a native Cantonese speaker), who spoke much more slowly and calmly.  Actually, having attended several recent meditations, it was interesting observing the stark differences between the two.  While the meditations are a calm, quiet, and soft study, this service was definitely a loud and in-your-face affair.

The service ended two hours later by reprising some songs.  After that, most folks stayed in their seats and listened to another half hour of announcements.  I spoke with the wife of the man who’d invited me, who also spoke excellent English.  She expressed discontent at the lack of character upbringing of the youngsters here in China and divulged a desire to somehow integrate character training into their English schools.  I can definitely understand that, but would like to learn more.  She also told me the background of the church:  Started three years ago in a neighbor’s apartment, it rapidly grew to a few hundred people.  Now, the group has two large services every Sunday and is looking to expand to a third.  They have classes for kids during services as well as a two-hour mens group on Thursday evenings.  All-in-all, impressive growth and organization, not to mention how devoted they are.

Coming out of my apartment one morning, I noticed the nearby small school performing some sort of ceremony for the upcoming national holiday celebrating the 61st anniversary of the current government’s founding.  The ceremony was under the supervision of the teachers and administrators, but completely performed by the kids.  I walked up as they were in the middle of hoisting up the flag.  But, just before that, I noticed the kids marching up to the stage.  The funny thing, I thought, was that all the guys (1st – 3rd graders, I’m guessing) were dressed in fatigues and were carrying plastic machine guns.  Just imagine – say 4-6 little boys dressed in camouflage, marching up to the stage, carrying plastic machine guns, all under the smiling faces of the teachers.

Flag Ceremonies

This is post covers and old, old event occurring sometime back in July or so.  I wanted to write about it ’cause it showed an interesting look into a side of the entertainment industry in China.  Basically, through a odd source of contacts, I was able to go to the 18th (I think) reunion party of a high end spa chain in Shenzhen.  This is the kind of place where you go for manicures, haircuts, massages and the like for absurdly stupid prices.  It’s basically a place where the rich folks in Shenzhen can unload their money fast and feel proud at doing so.

Davide knew the CEO, who even proposed at one point that we perform at the event for a stupidly high amount of money.  Of course, we were into the idea, but it never happened (no surprises here).  Anyway, we were given tickets were very curious to attend to see the various folks who were indeed going to be performing there:  some big names in China and Asia.  The biggest name was a singer from Korea named “Rain”; that’s the only English name on the whole list.  We weren’t sure what to expect, but were hoping for some good publicity should we be fortunate enough to meet and have the opportunity to take photos with these folks.

Well, to give you the quick synopsis now, it was amazing how badly this whole event was organized and how weakly it was executed.  Really shocking.  It started off strong enough; a grand entry way in the large exhibition center in Shenzhen.  The space actually felt too big for a party, even one of this size (it quickly became apparent that there’d be no meeting opportunities).

We made our way into the huge banquet hall which was lit up with three massive video screens on the far end and a matching impressive sound system.  Other large LCDs were mounted on the left and right halls.  We had someone take us to our seat which was quite close to the main stage.

We were looking forward to a nice meal.  Everything up to this point indicated that that was exactly what we were going to get.  Amidst the well-dressed (for the most part) folks and the nice dinner ware, were plastic bottles of cheap orange juice and Pepsi.  This is usually no cause for alarm; you’ll see this odd display all the time.  Red wine…and Pepsi!  Served in the same glasses to boot.

Now, in China, everyone doesn’t get their own plate of food.  Instead, you have a small plate and bowl with chopsticks and tea cup and all of the food is served in the middle of the table (alongside the Pepsi) and you serve yourself from there in small quantities.  Well, these dishes came out so infrequently.  Like one every fifteen minutes.  It was punishingly slow.  First a dish of celery in a nice sauce with peanuts would come out and it would be devoured right away, then we’d wait and wait, as they played the same ole videos over and over on the walls.  Then another dish would come out and repeat.  Perhaps after an hour or so, we had more than one dish of food on the table.

Oh yeah, at one point, another woman showed up at our table and sat down in the chair that was occupied by another man who had stepped away for a bit.  When he returned, she refused to get up and just turned her back to him.  The guy, naturally, complained and called a waiter to do something about it.  It seemed like a long time until someone had the bright idea of bringing another chair.

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(above) Audio during the chair incident

In the midst of all this the show began.  The CEO got up and talked a bit about the business, the staff, and so on, and there were various musical acts in between.  Somewhere near the very beginning of the show, the right-hand audio channel went out.  And it never came back.  Nice.  Then the various stars started showing up.  They were mostly singing acts.  All of the solo singers sang against a backup track.  Some were pretty good, most were so-so, one was downright awful – looked like he had never been on stage before.  He walked out nervously, gave a weak wave, and then mumbled his way through a song, all the barely moving – just staying put and looking down.

Another famous Chinese singer sung a rather nice song.  She had a nice voice, but you could tell the song was unrehearsed.  You could see her looking to the back waiting for the signal when she was supposed to start singing during various parts of the song.  This wasn’t something subtle that I was catching.  This was beyond obvious.

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(above) Audio during the nice tune…where are we again?

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(above) A song called “Wu Suo Wei”, roughly translated as “Whatever”.  Listen to Davide mock the song right at the very beginning, quite funny.

Somewhere towards the end of the show, we heard that the main act, this “Rain” guy wasn’t going to perform.  Someone had said that he’d been denied a visa by the Chinese government.  Huh?  Who knows if that was true.  That left the last act to be some famous Korean beauty actress.  What a waste it was to wait on her.

Well, I can’t remember how late she was now.  An hour, forty-five minutes for sure.  At this time, I wasn’t even aware that she was an actress and not a singer.  There was some sort of ruckus going on in the middle of the hall.  A mass of people was moving towards the stage with flashing cameras all around.  I thought this must be some big shot, but the crowd mysteriously died out and we waited another thirty minutes for this person to show up.  Eventually, she did, though we didn’t realize it until someone told us.

They were using her to draw the names of the final lucky winners of the various drawings.  Oh gosh, that’s something that I forgot to mention.  The various door prizes were absurd:  100k RMB, 250K RMB (oh, around 15k and 40K US), and a few high end Mercedes.  I never got the opportunity to submit my number for the drawing.  And somehow, it seemed like we kept seeing the same phone numbers appear on the big screens.  Maybe it was just the fact that the numbers all consisted of 6′s and 8′s, lucky numbers for wealth in China.

Anyway, this actress didn’t do anything.  She just stood there and pressed buttons on a computer to randomly select more door prize winners.  It was fairly late in the middle of this whole part of the show that we realized that this was the final act and this was the big star.  Then the evening just kinda quietly ended and everyone left.

All in all, a pitiful waste of an obvious huge amount of money that this company spent.  The bizarre thing was that I told this story to various Chinese people and they all came to the same conclusion:  The company’s boss was probably happy with the evening because he was able to get all those big stars and show everyone what a big shot he was.  So what about the terrible execution?  Eh, that doesn’t matter so much.  Then, of course, I had to ask about the pitiful performances of the talent and the fact that the final star was so late and forced all the guests to sit through the same loop of 3-4 songs over and over.  Their responses, again, were generally the same:  Well, the stars know that this is not being broadcasted and that it’s only a private gig.  They couldn’t care less if there performances stunk.  They got paid and that’s all that mattered.

To be fair, one dude put quite a bit of effort into singing his song:  I’d actually heard this song before and it certainly isn’t an easy one to sing – a lot of high-pitched yelling involved!

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(above) At least this guy put an effort into singing his son (one of the few). He starts to belt it out after 45 seconds or so.  Actually, it’s a bit too much.

Would you like to hear about how they crack down on illegal immigration in Guangzhou?  These stories comes from my Italian bud and music partner who performs in Guangzhou each weekend.  Apparently, they are much more strict in Guangzhou about immigration than Shenzhen because of the upcoming Asia games, which Guangzhou is hosting.  So, when visiting Guangzhou, you should have your passport on you at all times.  Some true stories:

• A foreigner comes out of a Starbucks.  Cops are outside and ask him to produce his passport.  He’s simply left it at home.  But instead of accompanying him home to get it, he’s hauled to the police station and has to have someone go fetch it for him.
• Two nights in a row at a dance club:  Thirty police come in, turn on all the lights, and separate the male and female foreigners and require everyone to produce passports.  Fortunately, most of these are Guangzhou locals and know the routine.  However, two new arrivals are unaware of this requirement and get hauled off to the police station.  Nice welcome for them.

They’re also super strict about having your passport when checking into a hotel.  No passport and you’re not sleeping.  It wasn’t nearly this strict when I first came here.  Even if you stayed the week or day before and are checking in again, you’re not getting a room without your passport and legal visa.

You likely heard of the recent mudslide in China which killed, I think, well over one thousand people.  Yesterday, was a Memorial Day for the victims.  I only learned about this late last night.  So, what did this entail?  Shutting down all entertainment businesses like theaters, dance clubs, and Karaoke bars.  All TV within China just showed a blue screen, reminiscent of Windows, with some text informing the viewer that today was a memorial day for the victims of the Gansu mudslide.

I was in the LuoHu part of Shenzhen (in DongMen specifically), a place that’s notorious for fake goods, counterfeit, and thieves.  All around a pretty interesting place to just observe.  I happened to see one of these little kid thieves in action for the first time.  I’ve been robbed once in China, back in 2007, also in Luohu, when a thief somehow managed to open my small pocket on my backpack and extract my iPod.  A pretty amazing feat – that zipper was tough to open, yet this thief did without any awareness from me.

I wasn’t the victim this time, but, as I was crossing on top of one of the pedestrian bridges, I noticed a kid tip-toeing back down the stairs, almost in Bugs Bunny cartoon fashion.  Seriously, the only thing that was missing was the pizzicato violins to punctuate the tip toes.  He had his back arched, both arms extending up with wrists pointed down.  Classic caricature thief pose.  The target was a Chinese man, talking on his mobile phone, with a pouch slung over his shoulder – think of it as a man purse.  These things are popular out here.

Out of curiosity, I turned around and walked to the top of the stairs and watched the thief in pursuit.  I was waiting for the opportunity to yell out.  It almost seemed like the target had some sort of premonition, he moved his right hand on the bag and scooted it in front of him, all the while still on the phone.  At the same time, an skinny ugly man came from behind me and stood right next to me on the top of the stairs.  I looked left at him and notice he was just staring at me, almost a glare.  I didn’t realize what was going on at first and just stared back thinking, “another starer…”.  After a couple or three seconds (a long time in terms of stairs), he went down the stairs to the kid who had given up on the target.  I turned away, looking back to see them both staring back at me.  It slowly sunk in that this was a thieving team.  I’d heard of this before.  The kids do the work and there’s an adult nearby to watch and monitor them, and get them out of trouble when something goes wrong.  Should the thief be caught, the adult can jump in really quick and make up some sort of nonsense like, “Stop harassing my son!  What’s wrong with you!” and make lots of noise as to embarrass the victim into just moving on.

When it comes to these thieves, I’ve been told that most people will not say or do anything to warn or help anyone.  That all goes back to the, “best to keep your mouth shut” culture in China.  When you hear of all this nonsense like the Cultural Revolution and so on, you begin to understand why the culture unfortunately developed this way.  I’m hoping there are no nonsensical Good Samaritan laws on the books though.  I didn’t think these were real, but just looked it up on Wikipedia.  How’s that for a change of topic?