It’s an acquired taste, and today (August 9) is World Baijiu Day, so there’s really no better time to acquaint yourself with this most ancient of hooches. The holiday was invented three years ago by Jim Boyce, a longtime observer and indulger on the Beijing food and drink scene, who’s taken it as his crusade to remove the negative stigma attached to this mighty booze:
World Baijiu Day aims to give further exposure to this spirit, which is typically drunk lukewarm as shots to the toast “ganbei” (“dry glass”), a tough introduction for most people. Given this, the informal theme is “beyond ganbei” and participating venues in over 20 cities have embraced it by offering everything from cocktails, infusions and liqueuers to baijiu-inspired pizzas, beer and ice cream to flights and food pairings.
If you happen to be in Beijing, you can toast the made-up holiday with some highly palatable baijiu cocktails, such as this cute lil tiki guy:
In only three years of life, World Baijiu Day has already set root in the US. This year’s edition includes events in DC, LA, Boston, Portland, Oregon and Waikoloa, Hawaii, so head to one of those if you’re in the area and want a taste.
If not, maybe try to track down a bottle of Vinn, one of the only US-produced baijiu brands, and empty a cup or two to traditions old and new.
“Prostitution touches on all those hot-button issues — migration, the income gap, corruption, sex, morals, you name it” — Lijia Zhang, Lotus
Sex work. The very phrase conjures up controversy: mixed emotions, morals, and social mores.
It is this illicit world of sex work in contemporary China that former rocket factory worker turned writer Lijia Zhang’s debut novel Lotus seeks to bring to light. In China, sex work is technically illegal — the Party decrees it a sign of so-called capitalist influence — but there are still around 20 million ji, as female sex workers are known in Chinese, working across the country.
Lotus is one part sociological study of sex workers and one part rom-com about a woman confronting her destiny. In the vein of the classic Julia Roberts film Pretty Woman, many men fall in love (or intense lust) with a “working girl” named Lotus. These men come from all swaths of society and seek to bring her out of present circumstances, servicing men in the back of a massage parlor.
The beautiful and brave Lotus left her home in a small village in Sichuan as a teenager to pursue work in the glittering city of Shenzhen. Designated as a Special Economic Zone, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the 1980s and 1990s created a city bursting with wealth, where sex workers are used to seal corporate deals or butter up prospective clients.
The novel moves through the point of view of Lotus and the photo-journalist Hu Binbing, who has chosen to live in the slums and document the lives of these women. Although written in English, the dialogue and metaphors used throughout have distinctly Chinese characteristics, often translated directly from Chinese to make for unusual metaphors in English.
All in all, the novel is much more heart-warming than expected. Ultimately, it’s a tale of survival, not victimization. If you’re looking for a nitty-gritty portrayal of the “horrors of sex work,” you’d best move along. But if you’re looking for a modern-day fairy tale filled with love triangles and a woman coming of age, this might just be the book for you.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Lijia Zhang a few questions about Lotus. Here’s what she had to say about taking on this serious subject in a controlled society such as modern China:
RADII: I have to admit, when I read that this book was about sex workers in Shenzhen, I expected it to be a lot more bleak and heavy. Instead, it was an often humorous and redemptive story of love and personal growth. Could you talk about what made you want to tell this story in this way?
Lijia Zhang: The novel was inspired by the story of my grandma, who was a prostitute. I discovered this long kept family history in front of her deathbed. So I wanted to tell a story of a survivor, not a victim.
One of the main characters, Hu Binbing, lives in the red light district and uses his art (in his case, photography) to document and shed light on sex work in contemporary China. What are the ways in which your own work is similar to and differs from Bing’s work telling the stories of these working girls?
Sure, there are some similarities. We both want to give voice to this group of marginalized women who don’t have a voice. But I think my motivation is simpler, while he also wants to use his work to achieve success, to regain lost ground with his ex-wife and to fulfill his own sexual fantasy. Now perhaps I said too much!
What role did religion play in your understanding of the characters and the narrative of the book?
Like the lead character Lotus, my grandma was a Buddhist prostitute. I found it fascinating that [a] high percentage [of] working girls have faiths of some sort. I believe religion plays a role of ritualized cleansing, something to make themselves feel cleaner and better. It is driven by survival. Religion plays a different role in Bing’s life. He starts to take an interest in religion as he is going through his first existential crisis. In other words, he is looking for the meaning of life. [They have] different levels of needs.
How does the concept of freedom influence your writing, especially in contemporary China?
Art/literature and freedom are synonymous. I think one of the many reasons that the Chinese literary scene is not as vibrant as it should be is due to censorship, as well as writers’ self-censorship. I suffered from this censorship. Some twenty years ago, upon the invitation of a Chinese publisher, I wrote a book about the Western image of Chairman Mao while I was living in the UK. But the book failed to pass censorship. So I made the decision to write in English, so that I can freely express myself. By writing in English, I also gained unexpected literary freedom: without the inhibition of writing in my mother tongue, I can take an adventure in my adopted language. Besides, writing is the space where a writer can feel most free.
“Without the inhibition of writing in my mother tongue, I can take an adventure in my adopted language” — novelist Lijia Zhang
In your book, you show that a lot of these women actually chose to go into the profession where I think a lot of us think sex workers are “raped, dumped by husbands, or tricked by human traffickers.” The other available professions to these migrant workers, like working in a factory or a restaurant, are grueling and low-paid. Why did you decide to show that a lot of these women actually chose to get into sex work as opposed to the traditional narrative that it’s more forced on vulnerable women?
My extensive research shows that the vast majority of sex workers enter the trade on their free will, but are often obliged by some unfortunate circumstances: having been abandoned by their husbands, having lost their jobs; having some family members seriously ill; or falling for the wrong men. Yes, there’s the temptation of money. Generally, to turn tricks is one of the few or only option they have. I hope the stories I described reflected the reality. By the way, for upper-class prostitutes, it is often a question of lifestyle choice.
Could you talk about your decision to incorporate Chinese idioms and sayings into the text?
I borrowed a lot of Chinese sayings in the hopes of providing an authentic setting and spicing up the language.
Awesome! Last question: What do you hope people will take away from reading your novel? What’s your bigger message?
I come from a journalism background. I was hoping to use prostitution as an interesting window to observe the social tensions brought along by the reforms. It shows the crude reality of the market economy with Chinese characteristics, and the resilience of women struggling in the bottom of the society.
Lotus was published in 2017 by Henry Holt & Company, and can be found on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
Oh man, Mashable with the mother of all scoops today: GM’s “Chinese Baojun brand just launched its first mass-market electric car, the E100, for only about $5,300 USD after estimated local and national subsidies.” And it looks like this:
Fly and affordable, and good for the earth to boot! Just look at it. Leaving all those other tiny electric vehicles IN THE DUST.
This bad boy, the Baojun E100, was actually released in late July, and is GM China’s first fully electric vehicle. Given its small size, its limited range (gets about 100 miles on a charge), and its maximum speed clocking in at a humble 62mph, this lil devil is tailor-made for the Chinese urban commuter, and won’t be popping up in other countries. Unless, I don’t know, you pick one up on your next China trip and check it on your flight home. Just a thought.
I used to proofread press releases and news clippings from the Chinese auto industry to make some extra cash, and without revealing anything specific, I can tell you that Chinese companies (and global automakers waging turf wars in the China market) are racing to churn out decent-quality electric vehicles (EVs) at scale over here. Many of the same are also trying to beat Google/Tesla to getting mass-produced fleets of self-driving cars on the road (as is Baidu), and China’s regulatory environment tends to be a bit more forgiving of such technological leaps. Stay tuned to Radii, we’ll be watching the space.
Another week, another semi-futuristic retail scenario pioneered in China and tested out by the intrepid journalist-shoppers at TechNode. This time they took a spin through one of Alibaba’s mobile-powered Hema convenience stores. Hema (盒马) translates to “box horse,” but the same pronunciation yields the Chinese word for hippo, which is the store’s mascot:
Shoppers download a Hema app and link it with Alibaba’s mobile pay app Alipay and/or its e-commerce app Taobao. Using in-store Wifi, they scan items to get info and facilitate the checkout process.
The most unexpected takeaway from TechNode’s recent visit to a newly opened Beijing Hema store? Excellent seafood:
Aside from regular fresh produce, shoppers can hand-pick their own crabs, shellfish, lobsters, or clams, and have them cooked right away for take-out, delivered to their home, or eat in at the store’s dining area.
Looks like this:
We’ll download Hema and get up to one of these new Beijing stores soon for our own report. In the mean time read TechNode’s savvy breakdown of what this means in the context of Alibaba’s holistic “new retail strategy” here.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival last year, my cousin and her coworkers took me on a day-trip to Gubei Water Town on the outskirts of Beijing, a tourist hotspot that is a near-perfect copy of the types of “water towns” — small hamlets veined with rivers or canals — more common in the southern regions around Suzhou and Shanghai. The northern capital, in all its sprawl, strangely seems to have everything — even simulacra of ancient southern settlements.
As if from a fable, Gubei Water Town springs out of nowhere, just off the G45 Expressway. It makes sense in a dryly objective way: here were mountains and water, part and parcel of any good Chinese landscape, and even the majestic Simatai section of the Great Wall, so of course the area would be developed into a tourist site.
But we don’t often think too much about what makes sense on holiday trips, so much as just try to sense what’s around us, and like the fisherman in the fable The Peach Blossom Spring, I felt like I’d stumbled upon some otherworldly place.
From the parking lot to the ticket office was a short stretch of road, flanked by traditional buildings. Upon closer inspection, they were eerily empty on the inside, just dust and darkness. If I had to guess why, it would probably be because renovations were still underway, and businesses hadn’t been able to move in yet.
This was a new kind of ghost town, where no one had ever lived and where no one ever will, unless you count the tourists that shack up for a few nights at the Great Wall Hotel and roam around with selfie sticks in hand
The stretch of road seemed like a ghost town, and yet it wasn’t any regular old ghost town, because ghost towns are usually initially inhabited and later abandoned. Ghosts don’t haunt a place for no reason. This was a new kind of ghost town, where no one had ever lived and where no one ever will, unless you count the tourists that shack up for a few nights at the Great Wall Hotel and roam around with selfie sticks in hand.
The oddest thing about Gubei Water Town is that it’s an ancient town without a history. I thought of a pair of worn cloth shoes I’d seen at the National Museum of China. If those shoes hadn’t belonged to Chairman Mao, would anyone care about them? Would they have ended up in that glass box?
Tourists flock to a reconstructed grass hut in Chengdu because famed poet Du Fu apparently wrote 240 poems there. Ancient water towns supposedly crystallize a traditional southern culture that has been passed down for thousands of years. Cultural tourism capitalizes on authenticity and historicity, and I’d always thought reconstruction — or at least obvious reconstruction — would hurt that precious authenticity.
It recalls a trend in early twentieth century Chinese fiction where abbreviated place names refer to real ones, but here, what is real?
Maybe it does, but it doesn’t matter very much in a place like Gubei Water Town, which feels far away not just from the commotion of the city but also from its own spacetime. It may be in Beijing, but no one cares that it’s in Beijing, nor about whether or not Beijing has historically had water towns, and no one really wants to care, which is fine. In every direction are charmingly quaint traditional buildings where shopkeepers sell neat cloisonné trinkets and music boxes that play “Edelweiss” and Van Gogh postcards. Wooden boats float on the deep green water that threads through the town, and it all looks very idyllic and very southern in the pictures.
The official English name of this place is Beijing W Town, printed neatly in corners of polished brochures. It recalls a trend in early twentieth century Chinese fiction where abbreviated place names refer to real ones, but here, what is real?
Wooden boats float on the deep green water that threads through the town, and it all looks very idyllic and very southern in the pictures
In a sense, W Town models itself on a Water Town, a kind of Platonic ideal that floats out in the abstracted heavens. The Water Town itself takes up no space, has no history; it is brought to life in different manifestations of reality. Here, it’s not so much about cultural tourism as it is tourism for the sake of tourism. I think it’s almost better that way. Gubei Water Town is an undead fiction that we can freely and safely inhabit, without worrying too much about spoiling any previously held notion of authenticity.
Later that day, we climbed the Simatai Great Wall, which is connected to the town. We passed a part that hadn’t been reconstructed yet, crumbling and closed off to visitors. I heard another tourist call it “野长城” (ye Changcheng, “wild Great Wall”) — as though in this strange place, the Great Wall wasn’t a historical relic but rather some species of thing we stumbled upon in the wild, and that would be the same wherever it’s encountered. Like a southern water town in the north.
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