During previous visits here to the Jinjiang area, it was already possible to get a private dining room at some of the larger restaurants, but that’s all it was: A room. With plain white walls. With a table and chairs inside. With a door. Nothing fancy. Nothing to really set you apart from the people out in the main dining area. Except that you were in a room apart from people in the main dining area. WooHoo.

But now, in Qingyang, Anhai and other cities and towns in this region, getting a private dining room has become quite the gilded experience. Fancy tables and chairs, a private bathroom, large RTV and KTV setups, in-room karaoke, fancy, comfortable seating, waitstaff that stay in the room to refill your glasses as soon as they are empty, and so on. This is in contrast to “the good old days” when they would just show up, take the order, bring the food, and then bid you a perfunctory Hasta la Vista, Baby!

Many of the fancy private dining rooms are in hotels, and in more than one case, we found ourselves in private dining rooms that used to be hotel rooms. (That would explain why one of the private dining room bathrooms we encountered still has, uh, a bathtub and shower in it. Quite convenient. “Oh dear, I’ve spilled gravy on my tie. No matter. I’ll just go shower off…”.)

Anyway, without further ado, here are some photos from one of our dining out ventures in Qingyang, which included my Wife’s entire family, kids, my Mother-in-Law’s Younger Brother and his Wife, (deep breath) my Wife’s Younger Sister’s Husband’s Parents, and, and…Oh Yeah. The Waitresses.

As you look at these pictures, remember that the “cultural lesson” here is that just five years ago, getting a private dining room at a restaurant would more likely have meant a plain room with plain walls and so on.)

(Oh, and way down below, I’m also trying out that “YouTube” video service you see popping up everywhere these days….)

Our private dining room:

A close-up of the wallpaper behind the TV:

No, my Wife isn’t slapping her Older Sister; she’s just a very “animated” talker:

A waitress refills the kids’ glasses:

My Wife modeling the hand-carved “lounge” furniture at the back of the room:

My Wife’s Younger Sister finalizes our order with the head waitress:

A video view around the table from my chair:

It’s no secret that “foreigners” often get “overcharged” when souvenier-shopping in China, but how to know how much one is getting overcharged?

Well, thanks to my (native Chinese) Wife’s astute undercover reporting recent shopping spree in Beijing, I have some some anecdotes and numbers to report.

The first small snippet: while bargaining with one seller for an even lower price on an item, the seller used the following statement as part of her bargaining technique: “You apparently don’t trust me. I’m offering you a great price already. Why should I go lower when I could sell this same thing to the next foreigner who comes in here for ten times what I’m asking from you.”

Whoa. We might guess that “ten times” could be an exaggeration, part of her haggling technique, but still. Whoa.

But then during another leg of this shopping spree, my Wife and her Younger Sister visited what we’ll call a “Jade Emporium.” It includes a sales showroom, an artisan workshop, and a “training center” to train other Chinese in the art of jade carving. I have names and addresses, but they’re really not important to this story, since what I’m about to describe isn’t an isolated phenomenon. It’s just the best of several examples I have….

Here, as told to me by my Wife, is her experience at this “Emporium.”

This Jade Emporium is included as a stop on a number of tour group itineraries. Visitors get off their buses, check out the showroom, maybe see a demonstration of some sort if they’re lucky, and–the whole point of being taken there in the first place–buy lots of jade stuff (if the tour operators are lucky, that is, since they get a commission on all purchases).

My Wife and her Younger Sister were asked by one of the shop girls where they were from, and they replied “Fujian Province,” and the girl said, “Oh, our general manager is from Fujian Province. Let me go get him…”.

A bit later, said general manager arrived, dressed in his best spiffies, and greeted his fellow Fujianese in a way that didn’t exactly make them feel he was their long lost cousin–too much stereotypical “used car salesman” stuff.

Anyway, to the point–and if you plan on shopping in Beijing (or anywhere in China) around the 2008 Olympics, pay attention. This post’s for you–they got around to talking prices with this fellow on a piece that had a price tag for 6000 RMB attached to it. My wife said she was interested in the piece, but 6000 RMB seemed high.

And again, if you think you might be inclinced to pay sticker price on some nice looking thing just because “You like it,” or because “Well, it’s worth that to me,” then perk up!

He just gave a little smile, picked up the piece, and whispered to them, “Follow me.”

He took them away to an area where the rest of the tour group–other travelers from all over China–couldn’t hear them talk, and told them something like this:

“Look, of course 6000 RMB is too high for this, that’s just fishing for big dumb fish with a small worm. We get a lot of tourists here from Japan and Korea, and we’ll let them haggle the price down 50% on this sort of piece, to 3000 RMB. They think they’re getting a great half-price deal, but even that is ‘killing them down to the last drop of blood’. How much do you think this piece costs me? No idea? Would you pay 2000RMB for it? Would you feel that’s a good deal? Look, because we’re from the same province, I’m going to level with you. You can take it at just over my cost. For 350 RMB, it’s yours. But I want you to do three things for me: First, live a good life. Second, don’t hesitate to share this jade piece with others [Note: He had also explained the "curative powers of jade" to them.]; and third, tell anyone back in Fujian Province that if they’re looking to learn the jade craft to come up here. We can give them the training they need.”

He also explained that this sort of pricing–for example, putting a sticker price equal to $750 US for a piece that cost the seller less than $40.00–is going to be the norm for sellers around Beijing during the 2008 Olympic period, and many sellers are already warming up with tour groups, which are typically more “captive” buyers.

Phenomenal.

And me, I feel torn between (1) trying to warn tourists going to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics and (2) opening a shop in Beijing to sell Chinese arts and crafts to tourists coming to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

I went back not long ago with my Mother-In-Law and two daughters, and this time we walked further down the bridge than I’ve ever gone before–perhaps 3/4 of the length and back. This time I learned a bit more about the bridge from my Mother-In-Law, such as:

• Half the bridge is in the jurisdiction (and under the care of) Jinjiang County (i.e. the Anhai side), the other half by another county, Nan’an County. The structure of these two halves is different. The Jinjiang/Anhai side has six stones across the breadth of the bridge. The other half has seven.
• The supports on the Nan’an side are boat-shaped, as seen in this picture. On the Jinjiang side, they’re square.
• In the 50’s and 60’s, water around the bridge was clean enough to swim in. Now it looks like it could melt steel.
• Last year, people stole a pair of statues (pictures below) from the mid-point temple during the night, with several people required to carry each one away to a waiting boat, with the ultimate plan of smuggling them to a buyer outside the country. The “kidnappers” were captured before making the shipment out of the country, though, and the statues returned, however. (This wasn’t the first kidnap attempt, just the first time they actually got them away from the temple. On an attempt some years back, the thieves dislodged the statues, but apparently didn’t bring enough helpers to carry them. Darned heavy mo-fo’s, I’ll wager.)

Some photos from our outing:

My Mother-In-Law and 4-Year-Old Daughter in front of the Anhai-side bridge gate:

My two daughters in front of the mid-bridge temple altar:

The mid-bridge temple ceiling:

Detail of a stone inscription on the mid-bridge temple wall:

Stone inscription at the mid-bridge temple:

The view out the front door of the mid-bridge temple
(Those are the stolen-but-rescued statues dressed in red):

Halfway between the mid-bridge temple and the Nan’an end of the bridge, you’ll find this small kiosk-sized temple. The old man inside is telling one girl’s fortune while her friend waits to the right.

During our recent visit to Xiamen, I had in the back of my mind the notion to write a post about how people seem, as compared to my previous visits to China, to be shouting “Lao Wai” and staring at foreigners much less and so on. And generally, in Xiamen and Quanzhou and Jinjiang and Anhai, I’ve found this to be true. It happens, but far less than before (“before” = 1993-94, 1996, 1997, 2000).

I was even thinking of a punch line for a post of, “I guess all those ‘Please Do Not Stare at the Foreigner’ t-shirts are starting to pay off.”

But then we visited Gulang Island, just a short ferry ride away from Xiamen, and it was like a step back in time to when entire traffic flows would grind to a halt to stare at a foreigner.

For some reason, the “locals” over on Gulang Island (gulang yu) haven’t caught up with their Xiamen neighbors in becoming disinterested in staring and shouting “Hello!” at foreigners and all that, but even more so, the tourists coming from other parts of China to visit Gulang Island are still stuck in that “earlier phase of social development.”

This is my revenge post.

We were walking along the “boardwalk” after getting off the ferry to Gulang Island, and this old woman, who we could tell by dress and mannerisms wasn’t from “around here,” sauntered up to us, as we stopped for my Wife to tie one of my daughters’ shoelaces, inserted herself without a word right into our midst, and stared at our girls like she was disapprovingly examining some sort of abnormal fleshy growth.

In the first of the revenge photos that follow, you see her doing the close-range staring thing, while her husband, some distance away in the background, has spotted the situation. In the second photo, he’s at her side after telling her, “Let’s go; the foreigner is taking your picture.”

Even as he lead her away, she looked back to stare at our girls with that same Bill Murray/Steve Martin/Saturday Night Live sketch “What the hell IS that thing?” expression on her face.

We’ve gotten used to people “spotting” us and “looking” at us, but most who approach us have drummed up some conversation, maybe said our daughters are pretty, or asked if they speak Chinese, or something.

But not this woman–she spoke not a word, but went straight to her work–it was quite a throwback to the days of feeling like “Foreigner = Circus Freak.”

OK, enough venting. Here she is:

I’ve heard tell of a few of them in the nearly 12 years since then–and in case you’re reading this, “Julia,” the student who wrote last year through my site’s Contact page about her new life in Germany, please write again: you forgot to include your e-mail address!–but during my recent week-long visit to the city of Xiamen, I was able to get together with about 10 former “4th year” students who live there for dinner and learn what they are doing now.

Of the two fellows who live in Xiamen and were able to make it to a gathering, one is now a policeman in Xiamen and the other a “sales executive” (he travels a lot) for a high-end Chinese jewelery manufacturer (and got married just a month ago–congrats!).

Of the gals, one describes herself as a “stay-at-home Mom”; a few work for trading or shipping companies; one is the manager of a particular department in a travel agency, overseeing “outbound” travel packages (rather than in-city Xiamen tours and arrangements, that means); one now works for the Chinese tax bureau in Quanzhou.

Another gal is the owner of her own trading company, and doing quite well–she drove us back in her stylish new Honda sedan to the apartment we were staying in after dinner that evening. (This is the student “Helen” who jumped in to help me negotiate commerce with sellers in a vegetable market back in 1993. I guess she had that go-getter spirit even back then.)

Another of my former female students and her husband have opened and are running three import-export companies. I’m not clear on why they have two in China, but the third is registered in Hong Kong, mainly for what I’ll describe as “tax shelter” purposes.

Here are a few photos from one of the “reunions”:

Chao An’s is an interesting story. Or stories, I should say, for I found some variation between what the locals told me and what I read summarized in a Xiamen area guide book.

First, here’s what the locals told me:

During the Song Dynasty–no, earlier than that, someone said; no, definitely later, countered another–a man who became Emperor belonged to what the locals whom I was with know only as the “Mo Ni” Buddhist sect. But for some reason, rather than, say, appointing other members of this Mo Ni sect to Imperial Posts, he decided that the sect had become too powerful and needed to be stamped out, and so it became open season wherever this sect was centered–maybe near Xi’An?, someone suggested–on members of the Mo Ni sect.

They were nearly successful, but a small remnant mangaged to escape, and they came to take refuge at this Chao An Temple near Anhai in Fujian Province. And now, it turns out, this particular temple is the last in the world associated with the Mo Ni sect.

In his book Amoy Magic, however, Dr. Bill Brown, who has been living and teaching at Xiamen University since 1988, offers this account of the “Anhai Manichaean Temple,” one of the “last bastions of Manichaeism, ‘The Religion of Light’–an esoteric combination of Gnositicism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity”. In Dr. Brown’s version of the tale:

Emperor Taizu, who ruled from 1368-1398, banned the Religion of Light because “ming” ( ), the Chinese word for “light,” also happened to be the name of the Ming Dynasty, and…the emperor decreed that only he could use the name. Thus was the world’s very last stronghold of Mani’s light extinguished, though locals continue even today to worship the Manichaeist deity in the Cao’an ‘Thatched Nunnery’ (which some take to be the popular Goddess of Mercy). This temple also boasts the last Manichaeist carving in China–of two angels holding lotus flowers and a cross (a combination of Greek, Persian and Chinese mythology).

It appears that the Persian’s followers made their way into China in the late seventh century, at the same time as their arch rivals, the Moslems and the Nestorian Christians. The Manichaean Temple was built in 1339, after villagers had spent 26 years carving statues of Mani all over the cliffs of Huabiao mountain…. [T]he statues are unlike any others in China.

In any case, there have been some changes here since my Wife’s childhood. She remembers the land surrounding the temple grounds being a “forest” where you could wander through the trees, but now the forest has been razed to create more farmland, and to make some space for parking and a line of tables selling trinkets and snacks along part of the path up to the temple buildings.

Some additional temple buildings have also been going up; it’s not longer just the small temple half carved into a rock where you can burn your incense and koutou to the Buddha.

But it was in this small temple building where my Wife decided to have a go at the “prayer sticks.” You pray, and then toss these sticks to the ground three times seeking an answer to your question. Each stick has a “top” and a “bottom” side–heads or tails, we’ll call it.

If you get a “heads-heads” response, the Buddha is laughing at your for your silly mortal request. If you get a “tails-tails” answer, it’s an emphatic “no.” If you get a “heads-tails” combination response, it means yes, and that’s of course what everyone is hoping for. But you have to pray and toss the sticks three times per request–and the Buddha’s answer is essentially based on a “best out of three” approach–meaning that you have to get the “heads-tails” combination on at least two of your attempts. And if you go three-for-three on a “Yes” answer, well, there’s no question of the Buddha’s intent.

My Wife asked two prayer questions this way at the temple.

The first was whether she should “step out” now from being just a stay-at-home Mom, which she’s done since we were first expecting our first child, and return to work, perhaps in our own self-employed venture.

The Buddha answered “Yes” three times.

I’m not sure why on earth the next question occured to her, but she asked the Buddha whether our oldest daughter should attend kindergarten whole days in the fall (as opposed to half days).

Again, the Buddha gave a three-for-three “Yes” response.

The odds of getting two three-for-three “Yes” answers in a row is, well, you figure it out.

She was on quite a roll, and I kicked myself later for not thinking to ask her if I should bet a seven-point spread favoring the Steelers in the Super Bowl the next day.

The cover photos–alluring forbidden women in bedroom attire mixed with police detentions, guns, and SWAT team photos–and the main stories in the rag are sort of “True Crime…with Chinese Characteristics.”

The typical story: a public official or businessman has a mistress on the side, and in order to keep her sufficiently in fur and diamonds (or risk losing her to a bigger fish, one assumes), he turns to a life of crime–bribery, embezzlement, graft, theft, overcharging foreigners for airlines tickets, or whatever. In some cases, he turns to kidnapping or murder to cover his trail. But in the end, he is caught and sentenced to jail or death.

Some of the stories are actually as “boring” as a shipment of DVDs arriving in Xiamen and–gasp!!–its procurers trying to sneak it through customs without paying the appropriate taxes. But even these ho-hum type stories are accompanied by photos of models in lingerie or the like with “come hither” expressions on their faces, and it’s obvious that most of these have been lifted from Japanese magazines or advertisements–in one, you can even see that they didn’t completely crop the advertising copy for some line of cosmetics.

A few of the police pictures look brutal–some of the folks being arrested look a bit roughed up–but I’m not sure that some of these weren’t also lifted from movies or the like. A police officer in one of the pictures looks suspiciously like a minor character actor I’ve seen in some Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige films.

**My Wife’s Younger Brother**

Besides being hounded by everyone to hurry up and get married, my 29-year-old Brother-in-Law works in nearby Qingyang in a Provincial Typhoon Monitoring and Response Agency. In particular, if typhoons are headed toward Fujian Province or have struck, part of his job is to direct which resources (mostly military) are directed to which areas. I’m not clear on the particulars of how he does this, though he says his job is really just “to sit in front of a computer” waiting for something to happen.

He does have great IT skills, though, and so has become mostly responsible for his office’s Local Area Network setup as well.

Typhoons do strike around here, but only during a small part of the year.

This means he has some extra time on his hands at work, which he has used to start a small business selling clothing–we’ll call it factory overruns–on taobao.com, an eBay-like site where anyone in China with something to sell in small quantities seems to be heading.

The other interesting aspect of his job: employees gain access to and exit their work facility through fingerprint recognition. Gattica-like, they have to place their hand on a monitor which opens the door for them, but–more importantly, he confides–to monitor whether anyone is late to work or takes off before quitting time.

**My Wife’s Younger Sister**

My Wife’s Younger Sister and her Husband work for the Chinese Postal Service by day, but, being the gung-ho entrepreneurs that they are, also operate a small business on the side selling cellular phones and phone cards, which they do pretty well with. They originally started off running a private Internet cafe when broadband access came to Jinjiang a few years ago, with my Wife’s Younger Brother using his computer and IT skills to get it running, but when the government tightened the restrictions on running these, they decided to leave that business.

They currently live with his parents in an apartment in Qingyang, but in a couple years will be moving into a “villa” on the grounds of a large development complex going up in Qingyang.

It seems that her husband’s father invested in some land some years back for 200,000 RMB. Last year, the government came along and let him know that (1) his land was part of a larger plot that had been approved for this complex to go up, and (2) that he would be paid 800,000 RMB for it, “whether he liked it or not.” (This was, of course, actually a tremendous appreciation.)

They in turn decided to put this money back into property in the same complex, along with some other funds they’d all four saved, and so they’ll live in a large four-story “villa” in this modern complex _and_ own a storefront in a prime spot in the complex’s shopping district.

His parents hope that they can all leave their government jobs then, primarily so that as private business people, my Wife’s Younger Sister and her Husband can have another child. A son. Or two.

**My Wife’s Elder Sister**

My Wife’s Elder Sister, as I’ve mentioned before here, recently divorced. The fellow she was married to, my Mother-In-Law objected to him in the first place for reasons I’ll not get into, but the folks said that ultimately the choice was hers (the Elder Sister’s).

This fellow had a small factory that produced “parts” on contract for a shoe manufacturer, but as the shoe manufacturing processes matured, it became less and less necessary for the large factories to outsource these small parts, and his contracts dried up.

He worked hard for awhile trying to find a new niche, but grew frustrated, and eventually was spending all his time at bars and massage parlors. Finally, Elder Sister had enough and showed him the door.

And it was her door to show him, as she has a solid government job as a statistician at the local hospital, and the apartment was hers–purchased with a “government employee discount” when the building went up.

Her apartment is on the other side of town from the family home, and some relatives have begun suggesting to her that she move back to the family home, since my Mother-In-Law is now widowed, one daughter has moved to Qingyang and the other to Seattle, and the Younger Brother often stays in Qingyang for a few days at a time in a government dorm rather than commute back and forth every day, leaving Mother-In-Law here sometimes alone in a 3.5 story house. Plus, when he’s not in school, Elder Sister’s seven-year-old son stays here with my Mother-In-Law while she works, sometimes overnight.

She’s reticent to move back, though I can see pro’s and con’s on both sides of the issue. On the one side, family members might feel less lonely if they lived under the same roof instead of different homes across town. On the other hand, moving back home (though she would keep ownership of her apartment) might feel _too_ much like a step backward, and she’s always had a fierce independent streak.

Independent divorced working professional mothers.

I daresay this is the first generation in China that has seen much of this as a cultural phenomenon.

L to R, My Wife’s Elder Sister, My Wife, My Wife’s Younger Sister, My Wife’s Younger Brother