Year of the Not-So-Golden Pig

I am always a bit behind in writing and posting ideas. This post would optimally have hit the blogsphere, sometime, say, in the months before an estimated 22 million Chinese women conceived in order to give birth to babies before the end of the year.

But alas, it's too late to stop them. However, my inability to think of other stories journalistic integrity requires that I bring forth the information I know regardless of the consequences (not like I expect any Chinese mothers to be reading this blog, for foreigners, in English).

Dear readers, the most vocal elements of the Chinese press would have you believe that this is the year of the Golden Pig, a magnificent year full of wealth and auspiciousness (hence all the babies). Now, everyone knows it's the year of the pig because it rolls around every 12 years and is thus hard to get out of order between the dog and the rat. But whence the golden in the year of the Golden Pig?

Sneaky, brainwashing capitalists, that's who. According to Wikipedia and a number of skeptics and dissenters like this site (in Chinese), we are in the year 24 of the 60-year cycle, or the year of the Fire Pig. Yes, the Fire Pig, folks. (A couple of other sites dispute that it's actually the Earth Pig year, but my calculations still yield Fire Pig.)

I don't know who first came up with this idea that this year was golden, but it's been promulgated most evidently by jewelers, who—unsurprisingly—have seen great sales in golden pig items this year. Every few weeks my local daily, the Yangtze Evening Post, features an "article" about what kind of jewelery to buy. Soft advertisements Articles like this one drop names like Orient Department Store and Millenium Star Jewelers. Another one from the same paper, which was not reproduced online, discussed which kinds of jade from TESIRO were most appropriate for Golden Piglets to wear. English language media like the Shanghai Daily and even the Economist take the bait (the Economist actually just reports on the baby boom caused by it, and doesn't question the nomenclature).

Now, it makes sense that marriages and births would be up the past two years, since the baby boomers from the early 80s are now getting married and having kids of their own. I'm not against an increase in the rate of births and sales of diapers and baby insurance, per se. What bothers me is retailers' intentional distortion of 5,000-year-old oracle bone fact and slapping of "golden" on innocent zodiac animals.

The media deserve an even bigger reprimand for corroborating the falsehood, which has actually caused people to 1) have babies because it's a "lucky" year, overflowing schools and heightening the already-intense competition on these poor kids; and 2) spend their hard-earned kuai on useless golden-piggy merchandise. There are of course articles out there refuting the Golden Pig myth (how else would I have known?), but they seem to have fallen on deaf ears for the recently married/superstitious/illiterate/gullible crowd.

For the record, the next golden pig year will actually occur in 2031, which in itself is misleading. The original meaning of the character 金, is metal, not gold. So, in 2031 women will be birthing metal pigs. I suppose that is less painful than fire pigs. But fire pigs have such magnificent personalities! From one random site in Chinese (my abbreviated translation):

2007, ding hai year: (mountain-crossing pigs) are clever and intelligent, self-supporting, peaceful do-gooders, and wealthy. Women will be fortunate and stable.

First posted on Lost Laowai on July 7 2007.

The First Honest Apartment Advertising in China

In American suburbia, like the one I grew up in, new housing developments fell into two categories: those named after the streams and hills which they drained/bulldozed to develop, and those named using esoteric Celt words that sound mysterious and intoxicatingly inviting.

The apartment buildings Chinese developers are popping up makes good ol' Plum Run and Turnbrae seem low class; what Chinese city doesn't have a Cité International or Imperial Garden By The River? I'm pretty sure Shanghai had a governmental order a few years ago (I couldn't find the article) to stop using foreign place names in their new buildings, since it so painfully wronged respectful, Shanghai-unrelated places like Santa Fe and Venice.

I know, this comes as news to no one, since I'm not the first person in the blogsphere to mention this romanticizing phenomenon, and I'm actually quite late in doing it, but I just had to bring attention to the apartment building which, I believe, is the first to be brutally honest about itself.

It is called Muma, or in English, "Trojan Horse".

Muma's advertisements cover bus stops and billboards across Nanjing's downtown. The ads feature models in gauzy, filmy wispy dresses and strappy high heels standing next to horses (the strappy heels are "Grecian", get it?). These ads convey the boutique lifestyle that Muma is selling.

Now, after being flabbergasted by the sheer capital invested into so many advertisements, I had Muma on my mind and got to thinking about the name...why Muma? In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized Muma is a great name for all the apartment buyers out there fed up with unrealistic, misleading apartment names.

Think about what a Trojan Horse is: a huge structure used to bedazzle townsmen so that they throw open their gates unarmed, resulting in being plundered and overtaken. So...follow my logic...the Trojan Horse apartment building is actually intimating to potential buyers that all of the horses and heels and lovely ladies are all just a trick, a plot to get their money! In a market where image is everything, isn't that the perfect admission?

In order to check if Muma actually had a good reason for its name before writing what would be complete slander, yesterday I visited the construction site and the sales office thereon. Unable to get a comprehensible answer from Saleswoman Yi, I was happy to score a nice brochure-cum-lifestyle magazine instead. It gave no explanation either, but did detail apartment designs.

If the ads represent the intrigue of the horse, then the apartments represent its reality as a tool of deception. Muma, my friends, is typical of a serviced apartment: 37 or 52 sq.m., "essentially furnished", with windows facing north and having your living room television backing the dining room table. Basically, a cramped apartment for 1-2 persons max. Horse and girl not included.

Cost of a Muma apartment, per sq. m.: RMB 17,900

Entertainment value of being named "Trojan Horse Apartments": priceless.

First posted at Lost Laowai.

First Post

Hello dear readers,

Welcome to my blog. I suppose it needs an introduction--a rasion d'être--so if you feel the same way, read on. I decided to start a blog as a means of expressing my thoughts, mostly for my own sanity, but also for the benefit of friends and family in the US who want to keep up with my Life on the Other Side of the World, the P.R. of C. It was hard to pick a "theme" for the blog though. I know having a theme, like "Nanjing History Blog" or "Comments on the Chinese Press", would make the blog a more interesting read for people who want consistency and go to different blogs for their individual themes. However, not wanting to be confined by a) subjects I don't know enough about (AKA all of them) or b) the same topic all the time, I have decided the theme of this blog can only, initially, be whatever inspires me to write. This is getting back to the blog as an outlet. If people do find that interesting after all, great. And if my thoughts end up drifting in a particular thematic direction, I'd be fine with that too--maybe it will be a way for me to learn a decent amount about some subject, like art or history.

Enjoy! I know I will.