Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

I just happened to read the book this week. I am impressed by Yang's power of telling a story using her graphic talent. 

When Belle Yang was forced to take refuge in her parents’ home after an abusive boyfriend began stalking her, her father entertained her with stories of old China. The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.

In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.

Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

Not Loving It

Salon magazine asked this month whether McDonald’s has developed a “self-hating complex” in China. The reason for its question was the local translation of its slogan – “I’m lovin’ it”.

The Chinese version is Wo jiu xihuan which, as Salon points out, can have pretty negative connotations because the second character in the phrase is used to contradict something emphatically. “The natural implication is that the speaker is responding to someone who has just insulted McDonald’s food,” writes Salon. “While there is no perfect translation for the phrase, it has the same essential spirit as ‘I like it no matter what you say!’”

Hence you might use the phrase in a defensive retort when someone asks: “Why do you eat that garbage?” Salon went to the experts to confirm its analysis and Professor Liu Lening, head of Columbia University’s Chinese language programme, said the publication’s interpretation was correct. He advised that a better translation of ‘I’m lovin’ it’ would have been Wo hen xihua and also suggested Wo hao xihuan, which means “I really like it”.

Disney’s Cinderella Tale Woos China’s Grown-up Audience

Charles Perrault’s folk tale about Cinderella was written around the seventeenth century. But a Chinese legend bearing a striking resemblance to its plot seems to have appeared in the Tang Dynasty, almost a millennium earlier.

It is the story of a very bright girl named Ye Xian. Not only is she beautiful she also has a very kind heart. But her father dies so she is forced to live with her stepmother. One day when drawing water Ye catches a fish with red fins and golden eyes. She takes the fish home and places it in the pond, taking every scrap of food she can find to feed the fish.
Unfortunately her stepmother snatches and kills (then eats) the fish while Ye is out running errands.

When Ye discovers her fish is gone she becomes terribly upset. A little old man (the fairy god father?) magically appears and instructs her to retrieve the fish bones, put them in a bowl in her room and it will grant any wish she wants.

One day, during the annual festival for young maidens to meet potential husbands, her stepmother and stepsister set off for the dating fair. Ye wants to go too and prays to her fish bones. Suddenly Ye finds herself clad in the most beautiful green silk robe with jade and other fine jewellery adorning her. More importantly, she is also given a pair of gold embroidered slippers.

In her new outfit, Ye rushes to join the celebrations. She is so beautiful that men and women – including her stepmother and stepsister – start wondering who she is. Worried that her identity could be compromised, Ye runs back home but leaves one of her slippers. The Emperor later finds the slipper and becomes determined to find its owner… (Presumably, you can predict the ending.)
That helps explain why many Chinese are familiar with the Cinderella story – even if they didn’t grow up watching the famed Disney cartoon. And last week, Disney’s live-action film Cinderella became the biggest box office winner, taking in over Rmb200 million ($32 million) during its opening weekend. >>

A Map of Betrayal, An Ambivalent Double Agent, Torn Between Two Countries

When the Chinese writer Ha Jin came to the U.S. in 1985, he was only planning to stay long enough to finish his graduate degree. After that, he thought, he'd return home and teach English.

But a series of events shocked him into staying permanently, starting with the capture and trial of a Chinese spy named Larry Chin. Chin spent decades infiltrating the CIA, but swore at his trial that he was trying to improve the relations between the two countries.

Larry Chin "claimed that he was basically serving both countries. He used the metaphor 'mother and father' ... really, he was torn by the two countries," Ha Jin tells NPR's Arun Rath.

In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. Ha Jin soon decided to settle permanently in America.

In the decades years since, his novels and stories have won him international acclaim and a National Book Award.

His newest novel, A Map Of Betrayal, describes the life of a spy who is deeply ambivalent about spying on America, a country he loves as much as China. There are unmistakable echoes of Larry Chin — and, Ha Jin tells Rath, of the novelist's own experiences.

Please read/listen the interview highlights with Hajin at NPR.

Chicken-and-Pepsi Chips in China

PepsiCo is taking its global Power of One program to jointly promote beverages and snacks a step further in China, with the marriage of two Pepsi brands in a single product: Pepsi-Cola chicken-flavor Lay's potato chips.

Cola chicken is a common recipe in China, with chicken wings tossed into a wok and caramelized in soy sauce, spices and cola. In potato-chip form, the flavor is vaguely similar to barbecue with a sugary aftertaste. If there's any hint of Pepsi, it's fleeting and lacks fizz.

Richard Lee, PepsiCo's chief marketing officer in China, said the idea came from a brainstorming session involving teams from marketing and R&D, as well as Pepsi ad agency BBDO, Shanghai. Lay's launches a new flavor every year, and this time the goal was fusion.

"We thought it would be really cool to have a cola combined with chicken. ... It's a very popular dish in China," said Mr. Lee, who in 2010 became the first person to be put in charge of marketing and portfolio management for both food and beverage brands in China. "Also it would be very cool to involve one of our most-iconic soft drinks," he added.

The launch, in August, was much bigger than for any previous Lay's flavor in China, which include such unusual flavors as lemon tea (subtle), cucumber (cloying) and hot-and-sour fish soup (fishy).

The TV ad campaign played a joke on viewers, starting out like a Pepsi ad, with a guy rushing out to buy cola for his girlfriend -- not to drink, it turned out, but to use to cook chicken.

The product's name is a sophisticated word play. String Pepsi's and Lay's Chinese brand names together, and you get a double meaning: "Anything can be happy" as well as "Pepsi can become Lay's."

Lay's overall brand message in China is about enjoying the small things in life, a theme that resonates in a market where people can be dogged about earning more money and getting ahead.

"We want to celebrate a philosophy [that says] you can find happiness all around you,'" Mr. Lee said.

PepsiCo, like Coca-Cola Co., is making big investments in China. In Shanghai in November, it opened its largest R&D center outside North America, part of a 2010 plan to invest $2.5 billion over three years. Coca-Cola's soft-drink brands outsell PepsiCo's, according to Euromonitor International, but PepsiCo's snack portfolio is an extra asset.

"Coke and Pepsi have both stalled out in terms of growth potential in China," said Ben Cavender, associate principal at the China Market Research Group. "It's important for them to be developing new products and driving into these growth categories. I think Pepsi is probably better-positioned with the packaged food that it has to really make some gains there."  |Adage.com

The Simpsons Now In Mandarin

“Woo hoo! Now we can reveal Springfield is actually in Guangdong.” That was how The Simpsons’ executive producer greeted news that the hit US show will air for the first time in China. The long-running hit starring the doughnut and beer obsessed Homer Simpson and his irreverent son Bart will be streamed online in China by Sohu Video, reports Variety. The latest season (there are 26 in total, in case you wondered) will be shown with subtitles in Mandarin, in a deal done with the show’s maker Fox.

“The introduction of The Simpsons, a household name in the US, will further enrich our users’ choice of the best American content when they come to our platform. This deal once again demonstrated our commitment in bringing the best experience to our users and tireless efforts to enhance our competitive edge in the industry,” said Charles Zhang, Sohu’s boss. The timing of the deal will strike some as noteworthy, given Beijing has recently banned some US shows from airing on online video streaming platforms . (Week in China)

Fairy Tale Ending

A case of taking the mickey? Or just a prudent attempt to remain anonymous? Anyway the winner of Shandong’s lottery turned up at a press conference in a Mickey Mouse mask, to collect his cheque for Rmb497 million ($80 million) – the third largest win in Chinese lottery history. All that is known of the winner is that he owns a shoe shop, and post-tax will have Rmb398 million to spend. Or to be more exact Rmb378 million. In what Apple Daily punned was a “Disney ending” the individual in question donated Rmb20 million of his haul to a charity fund to help people in the community. Shandong’s Sports Lottery described the act as voluntary and said it showed he had “a good heart”.

At the press event – where the winner spoke through a voice-changing device – he told media he’d been buying lottery tickets for five years and purchased his winning ticket on August 11, the same day the result was announced. The biggest ever lottery win previously occurred in the capital Beijing, where an individual won Rmb570 million last year according to Sina Finance.

Read more from Week in China.

Driven to success

The idea for Airbnb, the home rental start-up, originated in San Francisco when Brian Chesky and his friend Joe Gebbia decided to rent out their house to delegates at a conference. All the hotel rooms on the conference website were sold out. Since the two friends needed some extra cash, they accordingly decided to offer bed-and-breakfast to attendees.

The problem, Chesky told the New York Times, was that they had no beds at home, only air-pumped mattresses. “So we inflated them and called ourselves ‘Airbed and Breakfast,’” he reminisces.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. What started out as a way to make a few dollars on the side, was recently valued at $10 billion. More importantly Airbnb established a new trend: the “sharing economy”.

The concept is inspiring copycats around the world, China included. There, four graduate students had something different in mind to finding a room for the night. In 2012 they founded PPzuche, which operates a business model similar to Airbnb but for car rental.

The company was founded in Singapore, where the four friends were studying at a graduate school in the city and decided to launch a mobile app dedicated to car rental services under the name iCarsClub (the name was later changed to PPzuche after investors complained that iCarsClub sounds like a club for car fanatics).

The founders then returned to China to make their fortunes. “The peer-to-peer car rental market in Singapore is very small because with the licencing issues some vehicles are only allowed to be driven on weekends and some only on weekdays. So we decided to move back home,” Zhang Binjun, one of the company’s four founders, told CBN.

PPzuche began operating in Beijing last October. According to an internal survey, the market potential for private car rental in China is huge – the estimate is that nearly 17% of private car owners in Beijing and Shanghai are willing to rent out their vehicles (the figure for Singapore is 19%). At the moment PPzuche has 50,000 cars available for rental (with 1,400 in Singapore), although it expects many more after adding Shanghai and Guangzhou to its business operations.
PPzuche, which means ‘peer-to-peer car rental’ in Chinese, secured $10 million in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital and Crystal Stream Capital in May.

So how does PPzuche make money? It takes a commission from each vehicle rental, a business model similar to Airbnb’s. By charging as much as 30% less than its more conventional competitors, it aspires to overtake the market’s largest traditional player, China Auto Rental (which is part-owned by Hertz. “I believe that in one year’s time we will surpass China Auto Rental in total transactions,” says Wang Jiaming, another of the four founders.

Peer-to-peer services like PPzuche challenge their more traditional competitors from much lower cost bases. They don’t need to invest in car fleets of their own. Plus the customer service overhead is also contained because bookings on PPzuche are completed via its mobile app. Drivers locate nearby cars that are available and then use the app for key-less entry. Each vehicle is fitted with what the company calls a ‘smart box’, a hardware device that provides GPS tracking, as well as clocking the distance for owners that want to charge by mileage instead of the number of days. Everything is digitised, from renting a car to returning it. Payment is straightforward too as PPzuche stores credit card details and charges rental fees automatically. And like Airbnb, drivers get ratings after rentals, meaning that customers who damage vehicles or drive recklessly have their membership revoked due to bad behaviour.

Please go to Week in China to read the rest of the story.

The Big Bang Theory Was Banned on the Interent of China

Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

China’s top broadcast regulator is tightening oversight of Internet TV, in what analysts see as the latest step for greater control of online media.

The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television has instructed Internet TV providers to remove any foreign television shows, “microfilms” and online-only programming they are not authorized to broadcast, The Beijing News reported on Wednesday. The state regulator has given Internet TV providers until Monday to comply or face having their licenses revoked, the news magazine Caixin reported on Thursday. Internet TV providers must hold two licenses issued by the regulator in order to operate: an integrated broadcasting license and a content service license.

Officials for the state regulator have held two meetings with representatives of the country’s seven major Internet TV providers over the past two weeks to discuss the instructions, Zhang Yanxiang, chief executive of the Internet TV information website LMTW.com, said in an interview.

Mr. Zhang said that this means that Internet TV providers will not be able to pass on content from the popular streaming websites Sohu TV and Youku, because those websites do not have a license to broadcast their programs on television screens. It also means that people who purchased set-top boxes in order to watch Sohu TV exclusives such as the American series “House of Cards” on their televisions would be out of luck.

For Chinese consumers, the growth of the online video industry in recent years has made available a far wider selection of domestic and foreign programming. American shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and British shows like “Sherlock”  have gained avid followings among Chinese viewers, attracted both by their content and on-demand nature.

LeTV, a popular Chinese online video streaming website, introduced its first set-top box in 2010 and gives subscribers access to all of the website’s licensed content, which includes foreign television series like “Homeland” and “Community.” The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which is preparing for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, has its own Internet television set-top box and recently announced a deal with Lions Gate Entertainment to stream popular shows like “Mad Men.”

One concern of government regulators is “information security,” Mr. Zhang said. Connecting televisions to the Internet, he said, can allow unsanctioned material to be seen on television screens and provide new opportunities for hackers to communicate their messages directly to viewers.

Read the whole story, please go to The New York Time.

Charles Tuttle, Publishing Books to Span the East and West

Charles E. Tuttle and his wife, Reiko Tuttle.

Charles Egbert Tuttle, Jr. (April 5, 1915 – June 9, 1993) was an American publisher and book dealer who was internationally recognized for his contributions to understanding between the English- and Japanese-speaking worlds. Belonging to a family long associated with publishing, he travelled to Japan in a military role at the end of World War II, and established a publishing company there. Tuttle was the founder and eponym of the Charles E. Tuttle Company, now named Tuttle Publishing. Many of his company's books on Asian martial arts, particularly those on Japanese martial arts, were the first widely read publications on these subjects in the English language.

Tuttle was born on April 5, 1915, in Rutland, Vermont, United States of America. His family had long been involved in printing books and stationery, dating from the mid-19th century in the US, and tracing their history back to Richard Tottel in the late 16th century in London. His father, Charles E. Tuttle, Sr., published African-American literature and dealt in rare books, and also worked closely with the Vermont Historical Society.Tuttle attended local schools, the Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University for his education. At university, he studied American history and literature. After graduating in 1937, he worked in the library of Columbia University for a year, then joined the family business.

In 1943, Tuttle's father died and, with World War II in progress, he enlisted in the
United States Army. He completed officer training and, when the war ended, was selected as part of the Allied forces occupying Japan.He arrived in Tokyo in October 1945, expecting to take charge of the library of the Diet of Japan (as he had been ordered), only to find that General Douglas MacArthur's staff had changed his assignment. He spent the next two years helping the Japanese newspaper industry. In 1947, Tuttle met Reiko Chiba, who belonged to a wealthy Japanese family from Hokkaidō; the two were married in 1951.

Tuttle founded his publishing company in Tokyo in 1948, with the mission to publish "books to span the East and West." His company was the 31st corporation approved by the occupying administration. In its first year of operation, it imported and distributed US paperback publications to the occupying forces, and the next year, it released its first publication. In 1951, the company began an intensive publishing program, producing English translations of contemporary Japanese literature, dictionaries of Japanese and other Asian languages, books on Japanese art and culture, and books on Japanese martial arts. Notably, many of its books on Asian martial arts were the first widely read publications on these subjects in the English language.

In 1971, the Association of American Publishers named Tuttle as its Publisher of the Year. In June 1978, he and his nephew, Tom Mori, founded the Tuttle-Mori Agency. In 1983, the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 3rd Class (Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon), for his contributions to the advancement of Japanese–American understanding. Through the late 1980s, Tuttle focused on the rare book business.

Following a brief illness, Tuttle died in his sleep on June 9, 1993, in his home town of Rutland, and was survived by his wife. Reiko Tuttle continued to run Tuttle Antiquarian Books until 2001, when she sold the business to two long-serving Tuttle company employees. She died on April 14, 2006, in Tokyo. Reflecting on the couple's contribution to Vermont, J. Kevin Graffagnino, Executive Director of the Vermont Historical Society, wrote: "Charles and Reiko Tuttle epitomized Vermont’s tradition of making a difference without fanfare or self-congratulation."

Read more at Wiki, and Tuttle Publishing.

The Odyssey of Shen Congwen

Odyssey discusses Shen Congwen（沈从文，1902-1988）in terms of several pertinent questions in modern Chinese history and literature.

Shen is already well known to many readers in these fields as the young solider from West Hunan warlord armies who escaped what might literally have been a dead end in that career to become a celebrated writer, editor, and educator, until he turned to a third career as an antiquarian in the late 1940s.

The scope of Odyssey as a biography is inclusive in presenting all this in an authoritative account, scrupulously compiled fro a host of documents and interviews, many of the latter with Shen himself. The results should stand as a valuable reference on many facts and a judicious presentation of speculation on them.

Shen Congwen and his wife

As Kinkley states in the Introduction, he is after facts more than explanations, and the levels of detail which emerges gives the reader plenty of room to test speculation about the author against what can be documented.

As a dispassionate biographer Kinkley often summarizes relevant facts in an admirably cogent form, as when exploring Shen's situation on the eve of his suicide attempt in 1949. At other times, in doing justice to, for example, a myriad of possible motives Shen had for leaving West Hunan and going to Beijing, Odyssey demands more patience from the reader. Unprecedented as this study is in its scope and detail, it is not altogether fair to call it a pioneer biography, given the available biographical work done by earlier scholars.

The Odyssey of Shen Congwen, by Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Stanford University Press, 464 pages

The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream

Arnold Palmer realised how little the locals knew about golf when he agreed to design the first course in China for two generations.

After years of golfing purdah, the sport was gibberish to the Chinese, something that the American golfing legend soon grasped on arriving at the proposed course in the southern province of Guangdong in 1984.

“[I] gave this man a golf ball I had in my pocket. He stared at it for a few moments and then tried to take a bite out of the cover,” Palmer recalls in his memoirs.

“‘No’, I said. ‘You don’t eat it’.”

Dan Washburn relates this tale in The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream. But Washburn’s own contribution to the story of golf in China turns this sense of cultural confusion on its head, arguing that the development of the game actually offers new ways of understanding some of the social and economic changes shaping the country.

Golf’s progress hints at greater social mobility and highlights China’s expanding wealth, for instance. But the boom also points to darker truths, Washburn says, like corruption, environmental neglect, land disputes and the widening gulf between rich and poor.

The idea of the sport as a parable for modern China is an ambitious one. In golfing terms, Washburn risks swinging too hard and spraying 10 different balls in 10 different directions. But he carries it off as the central theme of his book, avoiding most of the traps by telling the stories of three protagonists: a course builder from America; a migrant worker from Guizhou who ends up joining the domestic golf tour; and a farmer from Hainan whose life changes forever when local land is leased to a golf developer.

These lives are the real focus of the book and they provide the glue for the wider account of the game’s emergence in China.

As Arnold Palmer’s story suggests, when golf first reappeared in China in the mid-1980s the game was at ground zero. Mao had denounced it as a “sport for millionaires” and the few courses that had previously existed had long been ploughed over. The game’s bourgeois origins mean that this sense of taboo lives on today. There are no photos of China’s current leaders enjoying a round, for instance.

Zhou Xunshu, the peasant who turns pro, was equally ignorant of the game when he first encountered it. “What’s that?” he asks, on being told that he will be working on a course as a construction worker. But later Zhou is promoted to course security guard and golf becomes his obsession, primarily for the life that it seems to promise. “We all knew golf as a noble sport – a game for rich men,” he explains. “We all felt that just by being in that environment, we had already raised our social standing.”

Zhou learns by watching others, fashioning his own clubs from discarded or broken equipment, and sneaking onto courses to play when everyone else is asleep.

Years later his perseverance pays off when he joins the blue-collar crew of sushi chefs, motorcycle acrobats and hotel managers that made up China’s first domestic tour.

His story – similar in spirit to the struggle of millions of migrant workers to improve their lives – is the most uplifting part of the book. Yet Washburn keeps his sense of perspective, accepting that Zhou’s experience is wholly unusual, and acknowledging that talk of “golf fever” in China is exaggerated.

Even today the game is played by “zero percent of the population” in statistical terms, simply because very few Chinese can afford it.

Learn more, please go to Week in China.

Three Lessons of LinkedIn's Approach to China

Just last week, LinkedIn announced the availability of its site in Traditional Chinese. This follows the much-publicized February release of its China-specific site in Simplified Chines, Lingying.com — making the professional networking platform available in 23 languages in total, 8 of which are Asian.

LinkedIn clearly believes the investment in translation/localization is money well spent to secure global market share in the race to own social media's professional users. What lessons can we learn from LinkedIn's focus on China?

Place your money on multilingual.
The NSA-rocked U.S. is not the only country struggling with the dual impacts of privacy and censorship in the social media space. China's policies have long shut out giants like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, a factor that has been a boon to domestic players like Sina Weibo and Baidu. China's microblogging giant Sina Weibo has more than 500 million registered users; search engine Baidu is also number one in the market. Market exclusivity has assured their explosive growth, but it has come at a considerable price: namely, a largely monocultural and monolingual user base.

LinkedIn's multicultural and multilingual approach has already proven itself. As reported by TechNode, since its formal launch in February LinkedIn has reportedly drawn in 1 million additional users, raising the in-country total to over 5 million. Many of them are managers (42 percent), living in China's first tier cities (60 percent), and, significantly, working in international businesses (34 percent).

That select profile is not lost on investors. While the company's 5 million users is dwarfed by those of major domestically grown competitor Zhaopin (77 million), LinkedIn China is enjoying the buzz that it is a premiere portal for Chinese nationals who are multilingual and experienced in multinational workforces. According to Ad Age, a research note from BMO Capital Markets "which predicted a 'formal launch' in China in 2014, caused LinkedIn's share price to jump a few percentage points."

Localize your approach.
Facing the China-based incumbents, LinkedIn has adopted a smart approach that combines the best of its global leverage with China-specific strategies. Compare, for instance, the Simplified Chinese home page (still in Beta):

It contains China-specific imagery, rather than the international images used in other locales. LinkedIn has also implemented APIs that allow for working with local providers. In this case, notice the integration with Weibo and QQ, allowing users to share content and invite friends to LinkedIn. At the moment, advertisers can target their campaigns (ads and sponsored updates) for China, but not yet in the Chinese language.

Read more, please go to Libor Safar 's blog post at Moravia.

A Yankee Inventor Takes On Beijing Smog

On days when Beijing’s heavy air pollution is especially pungent, you can smell and taste the acridity—whether you’re outside on the street or inside most buildings. Air pollution doesn’t stay outdoors but seeps inside through open doors and window sealings. On most days, levels of dangerous pollutants, such as PM 2.5, are somewhat lower outside than inside, but not much lower.

This unhappy fact has fueled a growing market for pricey indoor air filters in China, made by such companies as Chicago’s BlueAir and Switzerland’s IQAir. A basic model will set you back at least $800. And ideally, you should have one for each room in your home, school, restaurant, or office. In other words, these filters don’t come cheap.

But what if there’s a simple but less costly way to achieve roughly the same effect? Now there might be.

During the Beijing “Airpocalypse” of January 2013, Thomas Talhelm, a Fulbright scholar spending a year in China, began to research how air filters worked. Soon Talhelm realized that the essential components—a HEPA filter, a fan, and a velcro strap to hold them together—could be purchased on Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce site, for less than $35. So he rigged up his own air filter and invested in a scientific particle monitor to see how well it worked. (The DC1100 Pro Air Quality Monitor, which measures levels of PM 0.5 and PM 2.5, was more of a splurge, at $260.)

Using a HEPA filter strapped to a simple flat-surfaced fan, he found that the device reduced indoor levels of PM 0.5 by 84 percent and indoor levels of PM 2.5 by 92 percent. When he tested a more powerful rotating fan, the results were even better. His DIY device lowered indoor levels of PM 0.5 by 97 percent, and indoor levels of PM 2.5 by 96 percent. (The expensive premade air purifiers he tested had similar results.)

Read more at Bloomberg Businessweek.

International Magazines Riding China's Ad Wave

Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

BEIJING — Zena Hao, a 24-year-old publicist, avid follower of fashion trends and proud owner of four Prada handbags, has a new passion: fashion magazines. She carries home hefty copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and studies the pictures for inspiration.

“Before university, I didn’t read them that much because the photographs weren’t that good,” Ms. Hao said. “But now in the last three to four years, they’ve gotten so much better.”

Ms. Hao’s enthusiasm for fashion magazines thick with advertisements for Louis Vuitton handbags and Chanel lipsticks are a welcome source of revenue for magazine publishers based in New York. While fashion labels are spending more on magazine advertising in the United States, they’re pouring even more money into magazines across mainland China.

Publishers willing to contend with censorship, relationships with local business partners and low-level corruption common in many Chinese businesses are being rewarded so far.

Late last year, Cosmopolitan editors in China started splitting its monthly issue into two magazines because it was too thick to print. Elle now publishes twice a month because issues had grown to 700 pages. Vogue added four more issues each year to keep up with advertising demand. Hearst is even designing plastic and cloth bags for women to easily carry these heavy magazines home.

“We never take anything for granted. But so far this year, we look like we’re having a pretty good year of growth,” said Duncan Edwards, president and chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, which has agreements to have 22 magazines, including Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, published here. “There is an enormous hunger for information about luxury, and there aren’t many other places you can get that information than in fashion magazines.”

Many Chinese women will spend far more of their income than their Western counterparts on these magazines and the products featured inside them. According to a 2011 study conducted by Bain & Company, mainland China ranked sixth in the world for spending on luxury goods ranked by country. In 2010, it was a $17.7 billion market. Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci remain the most desired luxury brands.

In recent years, Chinese people have been buying up luxury goods around the world.

 

For example, both Vogue and Cosmopolitan cost about $3.15, which is significant when the average monthly individual income in Beijing is about $733. Mr. Edwards added that it was fairly common to find Chinese women who earn $15,000 a year spending $2,000 on one luxury item.

“We’re going through this wonderful period where huge numbers of women are coming out of poverty into the middle class and beyond,” Mr. Edwards said. “Many of these women are choosing to spend on luxury goods.”

Lena Yang, general manager of Hearst Magazines China, who oversees nine publications including Elle and Marie Claire, says that the typical reader of Hearst Magazines in China is a 29.5-year-old woman who is more likely to be single than married. She has an average income of about $1,431 a month and spends $938 a season on luxury watches, $982 on handbags and shoes and $1,066 on clothes.

Ms. Yang says these women often live at home and turn to their parents and grandparents to pay for them. The study also showed that many readers in their 20s saved little.

Read more at The New York Times.

Ladies From Shanghai

Spanning fifty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement is a tale of three women, connected by personal rebellion, betrayal, and a mysterious painting called "The Valley of Amazement."  As with all of Tan's novels, we are swept into the pivotal moments of Shanghai's history and the emotional turmoil of mothers and daughters, heritage and individuality, race and culture, ​and the damaging residue of secrets that lead to misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, from one generation to the next.  Lulu, Violet, and Flora, each of a different racial mix and status, must question what is fated from birth, where they belong, and what they can still change.

 The story opens in 1905, in a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai, Hidden Jade Path, run by Lulu Minturn, an American woman with Yankee ingenuity and an unknown past. Her daughter, Violet, is unaware of the identity of her father, until she is left behind in Shanghai during the exodus of Americans when the Qing Dynasty falls. Sold into a courtesan house of low repute, fourteen-year-old Violet is groomed as the "virgin courtesan," a fate she resists, until she meets an older courtesan, Magic Gourd, who counsels her on the stupidity of clinging to American pride. She teaches her errant student how to be a popular courtesan who flourishes with business cunning and a practical assortment of tricks of the trade.  In the world of flowers, Violet matches illusions to each man's romantic sense of himself, while avoiding the greatest peril a courtesan faces: believing that the illusion of love she has created is real.

Amy Tan by Rick Smolan

For the next two decades, Violet takes us on a careening journey steered by self-will, reckless desires, and clear-eyed resolve. That pursuit takes us into the boudoirs of courtesan houses and the homes of Western sojourners and opportunists, who have made the International Settlement in Shanghai their fiefdom during the boom years of foreign trade.  An older, more resigned Violet leaves Shanghai to become a poet’s wife in a murky hamlet that lies in the shadows of five impassable ​mountains.  Across an ocean, in San Francisco, Lulu reflects on impetuous decisions that led to tragedy.  She recalls her lonely girlhood, the shocking behavior of her father, and the moment she first saw the painting of "The Valley of Amazement"--as well as its beguiling painter​.  A long-awaited letter, passed from hand to hand, finally reaches Lulu and she goes to the bucolic Hudson River Valley, the inspiration for the painting, and also where lies and truth can finally be unearthed.
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   Ultimately, this is a story of the many hard facets of love that underlie fragile hope and the near impossibility of forgiveness--territory that Tan hones with characteristic humor, insight, and poignant truth. Read more at Amy Tan's website.

China in My Mind -Why I Write River of Dust?

Virginia Pye

When I tell people that

I have recently published a novel set in China, one of the first questions they ask is whether I’ve been there. My response seems to be a letdown. The expectant look on their faces shifts as they wonder why I chose to write about a place I’ve never visited. Sometimes I sense incredulity. What makes me think I can write about China?

My grandfather, Watts O. Pye, was one of the early missionaries to return to China after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In Shanxi Province, he oversaw the building of a hospital, schools, a library and roads that brought famine relief. The Reverend Pye died young, but my father, Lucian W. Pye, remained in Shanxi with my grandmother, living in the mission compound under Japanese occupation. He finally left China for college, returned with the Marines at the end of World War II, and went on to become a renowned Sinologist and the author of over 20 books on Asia, and China in particular.

 
My grandfather and father’s accomplishments, though, don’t make me an expert by inheritance. And yet, I’ve always a felt strong tie to China. I grew up in a house crowded with Chinese paintings, ceramics and furniture. My best childhood friend and I invented rituals with a tiny white Ming cup that we thought possessed special powers. I spent countless hours lying on a deep blue Oriental carpet covered with cherry blossoms, staring up into a painted scroll along whose ribbons of clouds I imagined traveling into the distant, shrouded mountains.

When the time came for my parents to move to a retirement home, I sat on that same rug and went through boxes of onionskin pages with faded blue type on which my grandfather had recorded his impressions of the eerie beauty of Shanxi. His journals captured my imagination in the same way the Chinese objects had when I was a girl, but now there was the specificity and poetry of a Victorian-era gentleman’s language to further embellish my sense of that distant land. Although I had always felt pride about my grandfather’s humanitarian work in China, I was ashamed of his religious zealotry and colonial perspective. Now, the arabesques of his prose conveyed his love of those rugged plains and rolling foothills covered with loess, a yellow dust that blew in from the Gobi Desert, as well as his respect for the Chinese people — thus deepening my grasp of his contradictory position there.

Book written by Pye

But impressions from childhood confirmed years later as an adult still don’t make me an expert. My father, on the other hand, was a recognized one. His colleagues at M.I.T. and at the John K. Fairbank Center at Harvard were called “China watchers.” For decades, in fact, that’s all they could do since China was closed to American visitors.

When he did finally visit in 1972, he brought back trinkets and clothing — cheap red and gold Mao buttons, quilted jackets in workman’s blue, olive green caps and the most ubiquitous souvenir of the time, Mao’s Little Red Book. My father spread his loot in our living room amid the Chinese antiques, stark reminders of Communism’s rejection of the delicate, evocative artistry of the past. I sensed from him that these strange new items now served as reminders that China, while suddenly open to Westerners, remained beyond the grasp of our understanding. Being permitted finally to see it firsthand had not brought outsiders closer to true understanding.

My first writing mentor, Annie Dillard, once told our college class that if you ever have the choice between visiting a far-flung place or reading a book about it, choose the book. She had just returned from a trip to Alaska and said that the only thing she hadn’t known about already from her reading was the sunflowers. Apparently, in midsummer, as they work to follow the sun circling tightly overhead, their stalks twist until their bright, oversize heads break right off their slender necks. She offered a quirky, maniacal smile and said that a book containing that tidbit would be worth reading.

This is how I feel about the China in my mind. My favorite books have always been those of far-off lands. The Middle East shimmered in Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” and while I didn’t necessarily understand Egypt any more precisely after reading all four volumes, that exotic landscape imprinted itself upon my teenage mind. Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Maugham’s “Painted Veil” and Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River,” each revealed colonialism’s inherent flaws through the trials of unforgettable characters. These books gave me a first glimpse that there were countries resistant to Western understanding and that any presumption otherwise was an act of supreme hubris inevitably ending in the white man’s deserved downfall. More at New York Times

The Seventh Daughter: A Culinary Journey

A pioneer in the food world, Cecilia Chiang (江孙芸)introduced Americans to authentic northern Chinese cuisine at her San Francisco restaurant, the Mandarin, in 1961, earning the adoration of generations of diners, including local luminaries such as Marion Cunningham, Ruth Reichl, and Chuck Williams.

In The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco, Chiang presents a classic collection of recipes framed by her gripping life's story. Beginning with her account of a privileged childhood in 1920s and 1930s Beijing, Chiang chronicles a 1,000-mile trek on foot in the wake of the Japanese occupation, her arrival in San Francisco, and her transformation from accidental restaurateur to culinary pioneer. The book's recipes feature cherished childhood dishes and definitive Mandarin classics, while showcasing Cecilia's purist approach to authentic Chinese home cooking.

Cecilia Chiang, the San Francisco-based chef who made refined, regional Chinese food part of America's restaurant scene, is to receive the 2013 James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Chiang, 93, is to Chinese cuisine what Julia Child was to French food.

Born and raised in China, Chiang never planned to become a restaurateur. But during a visit to San Francisco, she happened to get stuck with a restaurant lease that some friends had reneged on.

Chiang decided to plunge into the business and offer "real Chinese food" rather than the chop-suey and egg-foo-yung fare typical of Chinese eateries then. In 1961, she opened the Mandarin, an upscale restaurant serving cuisine from Shanghai, Sichuan and Beijing, all places where she'd lived. James Beard, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Wolfgang Puck were among the regulars. Food luminaries like Beard, Julia Child, Alice Waters and Marion Cunningham took cooking classes that Chiang taught.

Chiang sold the Mandarin in 1991, and it closed in 2006. Her son, Philip, is a co-founder of the restaurant chain P.F. Chang's. 

Janson Wu and his fashion design world

Photo credit: Wikipedia

When Michelle Obama wore a white, one-shoulder gown by Jason Wu to the Inaugural Ball in 2009, the then 26-year-old designer was, as the New York Times described him, “barely known outside the fashion beltway.”

Four years later, Wu, whom the First Lady wore again to the Inaugural Ball Monday evening, has reached mass recognition, having launched a diffusion line with Target in early 2012. The young designer has also partnered with St. Regis hotels on a luggage line and with faucet company Brizo on a bathroom collection, in addition to dressing celebrities such as Diane Kruger, Zoe Saldana and Michelle Williams for red carpet appearances.

The red, chiffon and velvet dress he designed for Obama on Monday night will only raise Wu’s growing profile. The sleeveless gown showed off Obama’s famously toned arms, and she accessorized it with a handmade diamond embellished ring by jewelry designer Kimberly McDonald, and shoes by Jimmy Choo.

Wu and Vogue's editor in Chief Wintour, alexisbittar.com

Jason Wu (吳季剛) was born in Taipei in 1982, then moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at age nine. He learned how to sew by designing and sewing for dolls, and went on to study sculpture in Tokyo. Wu continued this career path at age sixteen by learning to create freelance doll clothing designs for toy company Integrity Toys under the lines "Jason Wu dolls" and later "Fashion Royalty". The following year, he was named creative director of Integrity Toys. He decided to become a fashion designer while spending his senior year of high school in Rennes, France before graduating from the Loomis Chaffee School in 2001, and studied at the Parsons The New School for Design, a division of The New School in New York. Now, he is a fashion designer based in New York City.

Read more about him at Time Style.

This Man Wants to Clothe the Planet

TADASHI YANAI, FOUNDER OF THE GLOBAL clothing retailer Uniqlo, is on the other end of a videoconference screen. From his Tokyo office, Yanai-san speaks enthusiastically about Uniqlo's innovative fabrics. "Americans believe cotton is best," he says, "but we've invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle." First, Yanai marvels over Heattech, a proprietary warmth-generating Uniqlo cloth developed in partnership with the Japanese company that provides carbon-fiber for Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Next, he boasts that Airism, Uniqlo's cooling fabric, is "so light you don't even know you're wearing it. It is the number-one must-buy product for summer."

I ask if he wears it on steamy Tokyo workdays. He smiles broadly and, at that moment, the richest man in Japan unbuttons his shirt to show me his Uniqlo underwear.

Yanai is refreshingly open about his goals these days: making Uniqlo the number-one apparel retailer in the world. His target—$50 billion in yearly revenue by 2020—will require whiplash gains above Uniqlo's current revenue of $12 billion, driving the company ahead of front-runners Inditex (which owns Zara), H&M and Gap. This swaggering ambition might ring hollow if Yanai hadn't already turned heads among apparel-industry cognoscenti. He established a beachhead in the American market, opening three attention-getting stores in New York City—including a gargantuan flagship on Fifth Avenue, the second-biggest store in the Uniqlo empire. He lured designer Jil Sander out of retirement for a wildly successful multi-season collaboration. And then there's the retail environment: Yanai's scripted sales techniques and sleek spaces are studied by Uniqlo managers in Japan before being spread to markets around the globe.

Uniqlo will open two new U.S. stores this fall—in San Francisco and New Jersey—while also launching an e-commerce site. The company hopes to add "hundreds and hundreds" of stores here, from coast to coast, at a rate of 20 to 30 a year. In short, Uniqlo is vowing to beat Gap at its own game, clothing all of America in basics at affordable prices. Can a brand rooted in Japan—one employing a distinctly minimalist aesthetic—become a mainstream U.S. retail force, invading malls in the Midwest and in Sunbelt suburbs?

Yanai thinks it can, largely because he sees zero difference between shoppers in Manhattan and in Milwaukee. In this sense, he draws inspiration from a noted American minimalist: Steve Jobs, another retail entrepreneur who had boundless confidence and a knack for turning simplicity into chic. It's become almost cliché to compare successful emerging brands to Apple, or to equate an iconoclastic business leader to Jobs. But this is precisely how Yanai views his mission and himself. To him, Uniqlo is less like other clothing companies and more like Jobs's high-tech corporate temple: on a constant quest for innovation, guided by a holistic vision that aims to do much more than simply move merchandise. Read the whole story at WSJ