Made In China

This past Saturday a few classmates and I (Adriana, CJ, Melinda, Dominic and Kevin) traveled to Shenzhen - just over the Chinese mainland border, approximately one hour from Hong Kong by train.

It was a comedy of errors getting there. It took only a mere hour – and several heated conversations with bank tellers – to exchange our Hong Kong dollars into Chinese yuan. Then it took only about two more hours hopping from train platform to train platform, switching cars and tracks in random New Territory towns, as we had departed HK on the non-efficient train to Shenzhen. One Hong Kong border, fourteen health declaration forms, three checkpoints, one Chinese border, and one final health checkpoint later, we had arrived. As soon as we set foot in Shenzhen, we were promptly greeted by no less than a dozen hawkers bidding to be our tour guides for the day. We put on our poker faces (although it was beyond obvious that we were bluffing) and got into bunker-survival-mode, clutching our bags closely to our chests, ignoring hawkers from all angles, swiftly wandering around as if we had a direction or purpose in mind, and yelling at the general public “We don’t need help! We can do it ourselves!”

You see, although it is often comical and almost always harmless to be the uninformed or awkward foreigner in Hong Kong, Shenzhen is not the place to be the clueless American. In Shenzhen, you want to have your wits about you and your wallet close to you. To be American is to be duped.

Shenzhen is the manufacturing capital of the world – and being there to experience it gives whole new meaning to the Made-in-China label. It is a consumer theme park, with shopping as the main attraction, except the park operators are not entirely friendly and try to charge you as much as possible for a ride, even a ride as crappy as the tea cups.

Analogies aside, Shenzhen is an epic shopping mecca, and the city’s best shopping is oh-so-conveniently located adjacent to the border terminal. As such, my classmates and I can boast that we spent an entire day in Shenzhen, and never ventured further than 100-feet away from the train station. The shopping center has five floors and each is crammed with hundreds of tiny shops and stalls selling everything from designer handbags, clothing, shoes, jewelry, watches and sunglasses to electronics and DVDs to unique handicrafts and artwork. The shops carry products of every brand you could ever dream of (and 90% of the brand products are real, the other 10% are described as “grade-A fakes”) and if you don’t see it in on the shelf, the shopkeeper will pull out the brand or designer’s catalogue, while a “runner” gets ready to go retrieve whatever you point to on whatever page. Best yet, everything is at an unbelievable discount from what it would sell for in the US or Europe, and of course, bargaining is the name of the game.

As exciting and invigorating as this premise was, it was also a bit terrifying and extraordinarily overwhelming. Shopkeepers know that Americans come to Shenzhen for the thrill of shopping, and they also know that Americans are terrible at bargaining, have a tendency to agree to pay way too much, and are gullible for shoddy goods. We were fresh meat and the merchants of Shenzhen were starving. Every cramped and winding hallway we walked down and every stall and storefront we passed by, hundreds of salespeople jumped up from their perches yelling “Missy! Looking! Missy! Look here!” They grabbed at our arms, shoved their products under our noses, whispered about certain contraband in our ears, and some even went for the personal-oriented sale: “I have big size, for you, American!” (I did not respond well to that last one)

We made the wise decision to stick together for the day, helping each other identify the good buys over the bad buys, and advising each other on price negotiations. We met some real characters and had a lot of fun, at times we feared for our lives and in the end we rejoiced in sweet consumption. After five hours of shopping, we ended our trip with massages – a very popular, “must” in Shenzhen. Our half-hour massages cost only $3 USD…but let’s just say you get what you pay for. My “masseur” was chatting on his cell phone the entire time and was totally disinterested in the one-handed treatment he was giving me. Dominic’s “masseur” was using his shoulders as a head-rest for most of the half hour and at times whispered potentially-suggestive sweet nothings in his ear. Although, I will give them credit for hospitality: we were offered ears of corn as a snack during our spa treatments. We delightfully declined.

Exhausted and victorious, we re-entered Hong Kong with arms full, wallets lighter, and smiles all around...and I cannot give any more details than that. (I also couldn’t take any photos in the shopping center, for fear of gang prosecution for intent to counterfeit.) All in all, it was a great experience that we won’t forget for a long time and that, I predict, we will miss in years to come as we comfortably browse the racks of mundane American department stores. We may go back to Shenzhen a second time, with better bargaining skills and a better sense of what exact products we want to buy. That - and our own toilet paper. At the end of the day, it’s all one big learning experience.