TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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MISSY
Jessica
Von Wendel
“Here
missy, you buy handbag, watches, missy, missy, you buy!”
My arm is being grabbed and I begin to
panic. Every third step another sales
person saying the same chant tries to bring me into their tiny shop at
the
shopping plaza in Shenzhen,
China. How did I even get here? A
Chinese man named Eddie said it was a great
place to shop and offered to show us where it was.
He took us directly up to the fifth floor and
into his own corner stall. When we said
we weren’t interested, a guilt trip followed in a high pitched whine. He had brought us the whole way, and we
weren’t going to buy anything? I
probably would have, but I had very little money. The
woman working there physically wouldn’t
let me leave. I had to push myself out. To them a white woman in a shopping center
just had to have cash to spend. Why else
would she be there?
This was my
experience all over China
and even in some markets in Hong Kong. I was looking forward to going to these
markets, but I had no idea that I would be bombarded in this way. Every stall looks the same.
People sell the same mimic goods which
results in a high degree of competition. The
sales people fight for every person walking the aisles
and try their
hardest to make you buy. As an
anthropology major I wanted to keep my eyes open, talk to people, and
get a feel
for the place. But any eye contact I
made, was an invitation for the sales people to grab hold and repeat
the only
English they knew, “Missy, missy, you buy!” It
was deafening how loud they would call. I
found my anthropological view narrow and
close-in. I could only observe a little
from behind a wall I put up around myself while ignoring their chants. At the time I couldn’t think beyond how rude
I found these people, and how they were actually deterring me from
buying
anything. It was only after I was away
from the chaos that I came to realize how desperate the competition
must be,
and how they probably hate calling for customers all day even more than
I didn’t
like being called at.
These hawkers are becoming
the new entrepreneurs
of China’s
tourist trade, but any possible connection with the customer is
undermined due
to their ulterior, singularly minded seller mentality that they must
adopt for
survival. Tiantian Zheng discusses in
his article “Consumption, Body Image, and Rural-Urban Apartheid in
Contemporary
China” how waitresses involved in the sex industry struggle to maintain
their
own identity while conforming to the perceived wants of potential
customers. The sellers in The Shenzhen
shopping plaza
are similarly playing to what they assume are the customers wants,
usually of a
cheap Gucci bag or sunglasses, but they are unknowingly ignoring the
customer's
desire to shop without being bombarded and overwhelmed.
China
has only recently opened up to a capitalist style economy resulting in
the
explosion of market competition that is very different from the
socialistic goals
of China’s
past. Combined with the largest
population in the world, and a market flooded with the same goods, is
the
Chinese entrepreneur made to become mechanistic and overtly forceful?
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