Friday, September 19, 2014

The Customer Isn't King in Girlland




Tomorrow will be a busy day.  A dozen ten-year-old girls from two different schools will descend on our house.   I did something uncharacteristically intelligent on this trip to Shanghai.  I asked a friend, a foreigner, with two daughters of his own where the best place near our campus was to go and shop for little girls. He hipped me to a joint on Fuzhou Lu that was amazing. 

But first, I had to walk around in the rain today.  I walked up to the corner determined to explore the park, which I’d seen below my apartment.  Mind you, it was pouring.  I had no business exploring a civic park.  But I’m glad I did.  It struck me as an aspirational Chinese effort create a park space like New York, or, say, Brussels.  The Chinese had refined the garden, the park to an art form when most of Western Europe had yet to move beyond hovels.  But you wont see much evidence of it in the lifeless unappealing parks of Beijing. This little Shanghai park felt like a tremendous step towards the normalcy of cities in my mind. Perhaps you can just have better trees, with more water. 



Wet and inspired, I began to feel the weight of the timepiece in my pocket.  Move swiftly if you intend to be a successful daddy shopper and find the Apple store and hit up girl-land.  According to Google Maps, the flagship Apple store is on the corner of Zhejiang Lu and Tianjin Lu, which quickly proved to be ludicrous.  I did a loop around and realized I’d been suckered once again into dashing off for a place located on Google Maps that was fictitious. 

I had thought I’d get a fancy pair of earphones for my daughter at the Apple store.  Arriving at girl-land, on Fuzhou Lu, setting my umbrella off in the corner I quickly surmised I needn’t look any further.  I grabbed a basked and started filling it with DIY bracelets and reflective shades, Japanese schoolgirl hats and yes! they even have over-the-top pink headphones that cost much less than the Dr. Dre models I would have paid a fortune for, had I actually found the Apple store. 

Arriving at the check out with half the store stock, I was not greeted with a “customer is king” disposition.  Rather the young lady looked annoyed as were all the girls behind me in line, buying one or two items.  “Do you want a bag.”  “Uh, yeah.  What did you think I was going to do, put this in my pockets?”   This went further down hill when I insisted they help to gift-wrap things and they didn’t take foreign credit cards, etc. 轻口薄舌[1] she and her colleague at the other register seemed in competition as to who could be the least helpful. It really did strike me, standing there, being endured, that all of these kids were spoiled, hated their work and cared not in the least for serving anyone.  Is this concept of service a noble thing or is it simply our hegemonic insistence that everyone in the world serve one another well, during a shopping experience?  Of course its preferred, but is it, objectively right?  Is it such an evolutionary breakthrough if these ladies were to smile, curtsey think of my every need, rather than being self-centered?  Probably.


Now it is today.  The house is strewn with streamers.  Balloons are being blown, the porch is being hosed down, and we are all waiting for the storm to begin.  Looks like the majority of Scotts want to stay part of the U.K.  Anti climatic perhaps but at least the folks up north had their say and presumably there it will lie for a while.  Party rulers here in Beijing presumably breathed a sigh of relief, that all had passed uneventfully.  China had largely kept quiet on the matter but clearly worried that secessionist fever might spread with a successful “Yes” vote.  This blog post from the Times has a few interesting snippets from the Chinese micro-blog world as well as some stray comments from citizens in Beijing which reinforce the basic tension between the idea that these are freedoms which everyone should enjoy and the fact that “their system is different from ours.”



John Tchicai was born in Copenhagen in 1936 to a Danish mother and a Congolese father and by the late fifties he was traveling around Europe as an alto sax player.  He moved to NYC in the sixties, played in Archie Schepp’s band, with Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, and later with John and Yoko on the “Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions” sessions.  (which I’ve never heard and ought to.) Mr. Tchicai accompanied me on my rainy day in Shanghai yesterday and he’s back on again today.  Perhaps predictably, I have on the cut “Mao” taken from his an eponymous album on Storyville Records, recorded a year or so after the Great Helmsman’s demise.  I'm not sure if Mao would have appreciated this screeching erhu demise that sounds like someone on their death bed.  His system was different from ours as well.  John Tchicai died in France in 2012 at the age of 76. 







[1] qīngkǒubóshé: lit. light mouth, thin tongue (idiom); hasty and rude / caustic and sharp-tongued

No comments:

Post a Comment