Shanghai Adventures

So finally I have arrived in Beijing after a tiring last month of work and business. I now have the time and will to update this regularly with all the stories/events that I have acquired through my travels. This post, I will explain exactly what my job was in Shanghai, with the following post explaining what happened while I was in Suzhou, visiting my father's friend who works at a factory near Suzhou/Wuxi.

So in Shanghai, I worked for a company called XPT Shanghai (Although their official name in Chinese is Lufeng Cultural Expansion Company Ltd. or something to that effect). The company is an entertainment group that supplies events/parties for brand promotion, clubs, holiday events, and more.

I worked a one month internship with this company, and basically had two duties.

One: I would work in the office from about 12 in the afternoon until 8 in the evening, and I would do small duties, as well as correcting their English translations (the only native English speaker there was the boss who was very strapped for time, so I would make sure that the other workers' English translations were correct).

Two: In the evenings, I would help provide entertainment at the parties. During my tenure with the company, the majority of the events were located at clubs, who would hire us out for two hour shows, differing in size and theme.

The company has about twenty different theme parties, ranging from some called Broadway, Fire & Ice, Future, to Hollywood. Each one contains different costumes and decorations that will be set up in the clubs. At the party, the company supplies a team of people to work the club that night, with different clubs wanting different amounts of people. Some nights it would be seven people, other nights three. At the parties, there are three different positions a person can fill:

DJ: They DJ. Obviously.

Dancers: These are more professional dancers, who spend the majority of the party on stage dancing, and whose costumes are more intricate than the others.

Animations: These are people who as well as dance on stage, they will also go out within the crowd, dance with the people, interact with them, drink with them, smoke with them, and generally make sure that the club's clientele all have a good time. They also dress up in costumes, but are more lightweight and smaller, allowing for easy movement around the club.

So at night, I would work as an animation. The costume getups they had for me to dress up in were pretty crazy, but the club's clientele just loved us.

This is the basis of what I did for a month in Shanghai and in cities around Shanghai that we traveled to. In my next post, I will detail many things I learned about operating a foreign business in China and between the interaction between the foreigners and Chinese, both within the company and with clients.

Finally I Am Back

So after a long haitus, I will finally update my blog again. For now I am in Shanghai, living with 7 other people in an apartment in Pudong, but for now I will continue to discuss what happened in Yiwu.

So I mentioned before, in Yiwu I met with a factory owner, a trading agent and many proprietors of the shops in Yiwu. Both the trading agents and the shops directly interact with the customers, but the factories more rarely will see who is buying their goods.

First off, it seemed that most of the buyers of goods were either from the Middle East, Europe, other Asian countries and Africa, because I rarely saw anyone buying from America. Apparently, though, this is because they rarely go the market themselves, they will just have the trading agent do all the work for them. And if they are a constant costumer, they sometimes won't even go to Yiwu at all to make the trades.

One thing I was interested in was the difficulties that the traders run in to, particularly when it came to specific nationalities or gender. One of the store owners, a 23 year old woman, said she had problems working with women that came to her shop because they would just constantly try and bargain but didn't actually know the absolute highest they were willing to pay. She told me that the men that came there had calculated everything out already and knew exactly what they would pay, and the transaction would go by much more quickly.

Most store owners also said, though, that women don't usually come to the stores and that it's mostly men that are buying goods. This was particularly true at a Muslim religious shop that dealt mostly with the Middle East. The one exception to this is that the buyers from South Africa are nearly all women, but none of the store owners seemed to know why.

When it came to nationalities, the two that most store owners seemed to have the most trouble with was the Koreans and the Russians. The Russians because they have a perception of trying to cheat the store owners and the Koreans because they are looked upon as being cheap. One store owner told me the Koreans and the Japanese would want everything down to perfect detail, with the best materia available but wouldn't be willing to even come close to paying full price.

Another store owner told me about a regular customer he had, in Russia, who had bought three boxes of goods before. Then, on their next order which they hadn't payed for yet because they were considered a good customer, they just never picked up the box of goods from customs. After sitting at customs for a few months, the customer then went and bought the goods back at auction for much cheaper than they would've payed the Chinese wholesaler.

This is part of what I did and learned in Yiwu. For now I'm in Shanghai, working for the entertainment company XPT (http://www.xptshanghai.com). I work weekdays correcting English in the office, and at nights at bars/clubs, where my job is to dance with the people and drink with them to make sure they enjoy the party. I'll start updating my blog more regularly, so check back soon.