|
|
DOS & DON'TS
RELATED ARTICLES
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 
 Vice: Where are you from? Shopkeeper [on the right]: From Liuzhou, a small town in Guangxi province, China. How different is it from France? It’s much cheaper in Guangxi, but there is more stuff to buy here. Liuzhou is really too small! Do you like living here? Yes. I like the climate here. It’s cooler than in China, especially in the summer. What do you sell? Mostly fantasy jewelry. Sounds fancy. Are they real? What do you mean? We are official wholesalers working for a Chinese exporter. Of course it’s real stuff! OK, OK. Do you like the stuff you sell? Yes, I do. I want to tell you, I am only an intern here. This won’t be my job forever. I am still in school.
 Berlin’s Chinatown is confined to massive indoor markets. Vice: Where are you from? Feng: I am from a little town near Shanghai. I have been living in Germany for six years. I’m 32 now. What were you doing in China? I was a trained nurse. I would also like to work as a nurse here, but my German is too bad. So now I sell designer fashion and jewelry. Do you enjoy it? It’s kind of boring to be honest. How do you feel as a seller next to hundreds of salesmen from Asia who basically sell exactly the same stuff? Well, you can imagine that there’s a lot of competition. We fight a lot and we deal with hardcore stress on a daily basis.
 Vice: Where do you come from in China? Jin Ruihong: Zhejang, close to Shanghai. How is it different there from here? Everything is different. The culture, the people. We’ve been here for ten years now and there’s still a lot of difference, even within the Chinese community here. It’s a large community—people from all over China. Do you like it here? It’s so-so. Communication is the hardest thing. Many Chinese don’t speak Italian, and few Italians speak Chinese. And also there’s a bit of racism. Some Italians treat us nicely, but there’s still some racism. What are you selling in this shop? All things made in China. We import the goods and sell them. We have contacts with factories in China. We tell them what to make, they make it for us, then we import them and sell them in Italy. We mostly sell wool and silk scarves. Do you like the items you’re selling? Well, we use the products we sell. We wouldn’t sell them if we didn’t like them. TO BE CONTINUED: CHINA WORLD | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next>
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
o san! Besides the fact that they will end up taking over the entire world in the 21st century, becoming a global superpower the likes of which we haven’t seen since the heydays of Rome or the British Empire, the Chinese also make a really nice fake Gucci bag. And the best part is, since they are everywhere, you can get counterfeit Chinese goods in almost any city in the world. In a way, fake Chinese goods are the great unifying factor in all of human culture right now. To prove this utterly obvious point, we traversed the globe talking to Chinese immigrants and people who sell bootleg Chinese goods. Prepare yourself for the future, pangyau!
- VICE@VICELAND.COM
- PRIVACY STATEMENT
- TERMS OF USE
- © 2000-2009, VICE MAGAZINE
Development: Solid Sender
