| 15 June 2003 | 2003 6 15
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| 15 June 2003 | 2003615
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Not content with just a bike and a guitar, yesterday I went shopping again to buy some leather shoes (the pair I brought to China have somehow vanished) and summer clothes. There are some (presumably up-market) boutiques lining New Bridge Road, but most people go to the chinese version of a department store, which is really a three-dimensional maze of small independently run stalls in one huge building. Downtown Dalian even has a multi-level shopping complex underground. The one time I visited it, I surfaced in a completely unfamiliar street, and had to go back down and try to retrace my steps back to where I came in (a challenge in itself) in order to regain my bearings.
The clothing floor is the most disorienting of all, because the plyboard walls of each stall, hung with the latest fashions, reach to the ceiling, and you can never see more than 10 or 15 metres down the narrow alleyways. Although there's a lot of variety, it's mainly within the narrow constraints of prevailing trends, so shopping there is like walking through a hall of mirrors. I did see a few specialty stalls though, such as one with only black frocks, apparently catering for anorexic goths. On other floors of the store, you often hear people say mai shenme, literally "buy what?" but basically equivalent to "May I help you?" from an Australian shop assistant. Some sellers on the clothing floor are even more forward, saying "Come and look at this," etc. Locals and foreigners alike receive this bombardment. I just ignore it all, pretending not to understand. Sometimes somebody will shout out "hello" in English, which I likewise ignore. After that I might hear giggles, and comments like "He didn't understand you!" Other times I will hear people talking among themselves, saying things like "A xiao laowai is coming!" This is almost funny, since laowai is a colloquial word for foreigner that literally means "old outsider", but xiao means young.
Most of the stalls have a mirror, but they don't have a changing room. This is not too much of a problem if you're a boy buying a shirt, but for other articles the seller will hold a curtain up for you to change behind.
After buying one nice shirt, I decided I wanted a T-shirt too. But how to choose one among hundreds? I struck upon an idea: I would buy a shirt with chinese characters printed on it. Well, that turned out to be no easy task. When I couldn't spot any such shirts, I started enquiring. Often the stall owner would say "Yes," only to discover after searching that they had nothing suitable after all (or maybe that's just Salesmanship 101, I don't know). After going to another department store down the road, I finally found one design. For the record, this stall also had a t-shirt with Japanese katakana on the front. Anyway, the chinese characters were written in grass script, a beautiful calligraphy style which is hard for even natives to read—and that's after they've been told what it says. Luckily, the saleswoman identified the characters as qingshu (love letter). And just to raise the bar, it was back-to-front, in other words you need a mirror to read it. And it was accompanied by a stylised skull-and-crossbones. In hindsight, maybe a good bargaining chip would have been "this shirt is so weird that no other sucker in their right mind is going to buy it". I bought it on a whim, after haggling them down to Y35 (the marked price was Y85). The shirt was made in Hong Kong under the brand name Viennois, so it might not even be a chinese design.
Lots of T-shirts and jumpers have messages or logos, but they're mainly written in English. Why don't Chinese wear chinese? Part of the reason might be that some of the designs on sale are manufactured for export (probably including the T-shirt I bought, ironically), but this can't be the whole reason, since I saw some T-shirts with logos written in pinyin, the chinese phonetic spelling which uses the same alphabet as English. Many people, especially at a cursory glance, probably can't tell the difference between English and pinyin. And if it's English, most people can't read it. The important thing is not the meaning, the important thing is that it looks like English. At English Corner tonight, one English major had a jumper which said "RCDSDFUG"! She didn't buy it herself, but until I asked her about it she had never given the text much thought. Most people I've asked say that they like wearing English because it looks exotic and mysterious, beyond the comprehension of mortals, like dao! I think the other factor is that China just doesn't have a tradition of putting messages on clothing, which is fine and good because it's actually a strange thing to do when you think about it. But on the other hand, Chinese seem to put messages on everything else, such as chopsticks, windows, and the "no signal" screen of TV sets (which typically say something like fu, "blessings"). I've heard there are some shirts in downtown Dalian with messages in chinese including "Long live Chairman Mao", and "Learn from Lei Feng" (a saintly revolutionary martyr). No matter how much they love their country, you won't see those messages on any fashionable chests!
And fashionable these days seems synonymous with Western, although you can can find one or two stalls selling qipao (a style of traditional chinese dress). T-shirts with chinese characters must have some souvenir value at least. No doubt if I was in a touristy place (which the Dalian Economic and Technical Development Zone is not), every clothing stall would have a token "I've been to China" T-shirt to thrust at me.
There's that running joke about a tourist buying a T-shirt in China, or worse yet getting a tattoo, without knowing the meaning. But in fact, the reverse is more common. I almost laughed out loud when I saw a boy wearing a jumper that said "I'm a cute bunny". Apparently, the government even stepped in to tighten up controls when it realised that some clothing manufactured for export actually has quite rude messages. Oh well, shit happens.
| hi, here's elva. i read ur diary accidentally. very funny.... I think the situation which people like their T-shirt written by other langauge is commen all over the world. when i was in Germany, i saw many young boys like to wear T-shirt with chinese characters which says" qing nian"(means young man). but the word "qing" written in Chinese means "please"..... Also many t-shirts in Dalian are written in English. but i find i really don't understand what does those words mean, they are not written in correct. anyway, very happy to know this website and hope to read more interesting stories. have a nice evening, elva |
| elva [] [homepage] 17.06.2003 , 19:55 |
| Hiya Todd....on the same strain, there is a site called engrish.com which follows the idea....it's worth a look, it's mainly Japanese Engrish (the term is explained there) but there are some other examples. |
| lisa 18.06.2003 , 19:58 |
| More t-shirt stories! I remember when I left for China wearing Chinese t shirts were really the new thing in America, at least where I lived on the east coast. I remember quite a few people asked me what they meant but I always just stared at them blankly and said, "I can't even make out the strokes." How about providing a link to my site, eh? |
| Adam Morris [] [homepage] 28.06.2003 , 10:01 |
| please i need some t shirt and jeans for my costumers |
| christian onwudi [] 21.06.2004 , 10:18 |
| I will to make enqiury about how you sell jeans and shirt and all type of cloth so that you can export to my country where I live now is Nigeria.i will like to pay you in money if the price is right.Please I will like you to reply me as soon as possible. Thank you. |
| Bello Samusideen Olalekan [] 02.02.2006 , 20:41 |
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