Coming soon.. sooner than everywhere else!

I walked by our streetside DVD vendor two days ago and saw a new X-men movie for sale. Strange, I thought, I hadn’t heard about a new Wolverine movie having been released. Liking the X-Men series, I brought a copy home.

Taking a closer look at the cover description, it stated the movie was to be released in UK and Australia April 28th and 29th, and in USA May 1st. Wow, I thought- my first chance at a movie pre-screening.

The DVD was excellent quality; this wasn’t a movie theater recording on a camcorder. In fact, this must have been leaked directly from the movie studio, because the product was still unfinished! Some scenes were simple computer-graphics silhouettes which were obviously intended to be replaced with fancier special effects, like airplane flights and complicated fight sequences. And we chuckled at the wires still visibly pulling the actors through the air, giving us a glimpse at how some of the effects were staged.

It still amazes me that this kind of pirating continues so openly here. Selling this kind of a DVD in America would probably land you in jail. But laws regulating copyright in the US simply are ignored here, despite some talk in official circles about cracking down on the practice more heavily.

In case you’re wondering about the movie, I thought it was a good one despite the poor official reviews. It’s entertaining, which is about all one could ask for from a comic book movie. But the stakes for my screening were much lower: $0.75 to own a new release is a lot less of a gamble than forking over $18 for two movie theater tickets!

Asian Americans Need Not Apply

Racial profiling is alive and well in some parts of this world.

Teaching English in China has been a surefire source of income for those on temporary stay here from many different parts of the world. Americans, Brits, Aussies and Canadians, but also French, Russian, African, and Middle Eastern foreign students with English ability are all quickly hired at a good salary to teach Chinese students the English language.

Yesterday JM chatted with a fellow American student who comes from Las Vegas. He complained about failing to find any teaching leads that panned out with actual work offers. He said:

“I’ve tried like seven different places, but they all won’t take me.”

“Why not? Your English is perfectly fluent!”

“It’s because I’m Chinese, dude. It’s the parents- they don’t want someone teaching their kid who doesn’t ‘look’ like a foreigner.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Sh*t rolls down, man. Sh*t rolls.”

Wow- imagine being a member of the majority ethnic group in a country, but still end up being treated like a minority. For us of Euro descent, at least we get our discrimination head-on. We can’t imagine what it’s like to face this kind of discrimination by one’s own ethnicity.

More on the Tainted Milk

The number of sick children has risen to over 53,000 here in China, as a result of melamine added to milk (amongst other things – animal skin and urine being common additives to boost the protein content). The New York Times has reported that there have been massive dairy recalls all over China. Yet, when Liz went to the supermarket today, she saw aisles full of dairy products marked down for sale. Friends have reported seeing similar sales on dairy products at other supermarkets. Remarkably Liz saw plenty of people, including a mother with an 18 month old, eagerly buying the unusually underpriced products. We are not yet able to read the newspapers in Chinese, but it makes us wonder how publicized the tainted milk scandal has been and if people are taking it seriously! People also drink plenty of boiled tap water here without a thought, when the levels of toxic substances – like mercury and lead, which can not be removed by boiling – are unacceptably high.

Our Ayi has told us that mothers stop nursing their babies here by “at least 8 months old, because otherwise that’s all they ever want.” This is not surprising, since women typically only have one child and most women work in environments that we can’t imagine would be friendly to a mother who needs time to pump breastmilk! If a woman is going to have a second child (which can be done for a sum of money paid to the local authorities), she can be legally fired from her job on that basis alone. So it’s not a surprise, in the midst of this environment, that few women breastfeed beyond a certain age. Unfortunately, the alternative – feeding their babies Chinese formula – can have deadly consequences.

Money and money-making, as anywhere else in the world, are very very important here. Sometimes, it seems more important to make money than to worry about many thousands of children becoming very sick. We are hopeful that the government does more than sack a few higher-ups to make positive change in the dairy industry and in all their manufacturing sectors. Before we left for China, we read a statistic that 15% of products on any given grocery-store shelf in China are contaminated in some way. We don’t have a hard time believing this, and we consume with a great deal of care.

We hope that some kind of justice is done here for the many children and families suffering as a consequence of the tainted milk.

Lesson of the day

Today’s lesson learned:

Don’t threaten to go over a middle man’s head when the middle man has already paid off the man over his head.

And on a side note:

Don’t allow a middle man to negotiate for you if he earns more based on how little he negotiates for you.

We’ll be sure to keep these points in mind for all of our future business arrangements. Right now, however, we’re chalking it all up to a ‘learning experience.’ Chinese business has some distinct differences from how we’re used to things. Enough said!

Eat out or stay home.. or both?

Every day we walk by the shops selling flowers, cigarettes, snack foods, and all manner of household items. They are small sidewalk stores sitting at the base of larger apartment buildings, usually no larger than 100 square feet, just enough room for one shopkeeper and a few counters and shelves holding merchandise.

After passing hundreds of these little shops over the past few months, we started noticing that the shopkeepers were always the same people, all day long. We started to notice that in addition to the small storefront, there was usually a back room where the workers also lived, just enough room for a small bed and some personal items. Talk about no separation between work and home! This appears to be a very common living arrangement in China- even if it’s a larger business like a restaurant, the employees tend to board at the business after hours as well.

One of the small store owners around the corner from us has a wife and small 1 year old son. The parents basically take turns playing with the baby out on the sidewalk in front of their cigarette stall, trying to dodge pedestrian traffic all day long. Their living room is a folding chair set out near the curb, and their kitchen is a few pieces of cardboard surrounding their portable wok skillet, serving as a backsplash as they stir-fry vegetables. An outdoor faucet on the side of the building is where they get water and do laundry in a bucket. We marvel at their forgoence of any conveniences we take for granted, like having a bathroom. The space of our living room alone could house two families of this size. All of a sudden our 7th story apartment feels luxurious.

As we walk by these families, they are always cheerful and greet us. There has to be a different equation to happiness besides the size of one’s home.

Down in front!

We decided to spend an evening watching a DVD.  I went to a curbside dealer whose discs usually work in our computer, unlike other sellers whose movies turn out to be duds.  I picked an action flick that looked like it would be good, remembering that it had gotten some good reviews recently.

Liz and I turned it on, took off the Chinese subtitles (standard on every movie here), and watched the opening sequence.  The visual quality seemed a little off, but fair enough for a 75-cent movie. The sound quality was very good.

About 3 minutes into the movie, some people-like silhouettes encroached across the bottom of the screen.  Strange cinematic effects, I thought.  They didn’t seem to have any relation to the action on screen.

That’s because they turned out to be real people that inadvertently walked into the movie screening late as somebody was videotaping the film in the movie theater!  This turned out to be a genuine pirated DVD of ‘Iron Man,’ which has been released in theaters for less than a month.  We marvel at the production line associated with the piracy industry- they get slick official looking movie jackets printed up to sell the DVD’s in, and equip them with a full array of Asian language subtitles.  They seem to turn up just a few weeks after the official release in the US.  As time goes on, they get their hands on better quality DVD’s, and replace the clumsy movie-theater tapes with higher quality digital versions.  The price then sometimes goes up to $1.50.

Our friend expressed he has no reserves about buying pirated discs.  "Why should I have to pay $12 to see any movie in the theater regardless of how much it cost to produce?  Some cost $100 million, some just a half million.  Where did the free market go?  Obviously the studios take plenty of profit from the box offices, so I’m fine saving my money this way."