William Chow's Personal Web Page

The year is 2006.

China Round 2

Saturday, May 27, 2006

We waited at home today and Alexanderia took the bus home today. She arrived in time for lunch.

We went to the Fu Market to buy her a white top shirt for sing (I am going to assume she means choir).

Now I am by no means any expert at fashion and probably even worse at women's fashion. Alexanderia pulls out a pair of the most god awful looking hippie, poor man's jeans I have ever seen. It looks like someone took a used pair of jeans to patch of hole or a defect on a newer pair of jeans. The jeans underneath must have been defective at the knees so they cut the jeans off at the knees and they sewed on the extremely worn set of jeans backwards on the newer set. Now I know she is my daughter and all, but I would have to say those pants makes her look like she is some poor penniless countryside girl who needs a handout because she can't afford new clothes. Anyway, she tells me that this is "the" style right now and that she paid 400 yuan for it. WHAT? considering that a new undamaged pair of jeans here is only 50-70 yuan, I am thinking she got totally ripped off by it.

Note the used pair of pants sewn backwards on the front of the newer pair. Note the newer pockets sewn on with the frayed edge for easy destruction and the previously worn area under the bum.

My issue doesn't end there. My wife, decides she wants to wear a cloth overcoat to the market. Ok, it is like 20C outside, if she feels cold that she needs an overcoat that is her choice. No, she decides to wear nothing underneath (well aside from panties and a bra). Now, I tell her THAT looks really bad. It makes her look like one of those "bad" women. Well, she got the coat from Alexanderia and she saids it is the "fashion". OK. What do I know about fashion? nothing. So I let it be... However I got to thinking. If it is "fashionable" then it goes to reason other people would be wearing it too. So, today on the way to a big shopping place, I decided to count the number of people wearing the so called "fashionable" clothes.

Well, so for Alexanderia, I will look at how many people (men or women) wearing intentionally (or unintentionally) distressed jeans. So I will not count women wearing faded jeans that have designs embroidered on them nor have beads or jewelery like things sewen on. Well, up to point we were paying for the purchases at Fu Market, I counted 16 men and 2 women wearing notably distressed jeans on. Most of the men looked like countryside people who go around with their bikes looking for card board and bottles. There were a couple of men in the Fu market who had more tide and dye and bleach type of jeans. And there were a few men who just were workers who had notable rips in their knees and pockets from tools and wear. These are probably where the jeans that made Alexanderia's 400 yuan pants came from... The two women were very very clean by comparison to the expensive rags my daughter was wearing. Woman one was standing at the cosmetic desk. Her jeans only had a small rip in her back hip pocket roughlly where a logo would have gone. Instead it had been patched back together using a thread weave. The second woman was a janitor in the Fu market, she had a rip in her jeans right at her knee. Most likely work related damage. Conclusion, yes, Alexanderia's 400 yuan pair of fashionable jeans are indeed fashionable, for men, and the lower working class, and country side people. I suppose if you want to portray that image, then what the hey. It is the same reason I wear an anime T-shirt, to let people know that I am an Otaku.

As for my wife, I found nobody (man or woman) wearing overcoats. Well, at 20C would you? Even if you were flasher with nothing underneath? Well, maybe if you didn't care about B.O. factor like a few people I know like Rene or Jude, then I rest my case. At least, they still wore clothes underneath their overcoats. So here, I have pulled some pictures of women wearing overcoats from the internet. Can you identify which ones are wearing clothes underneath? and which ones have clothes underneath?

Well, the fact that you are even looking these bookmarks trying to figure out YES or NO, is enough to illustrate my point. I don't particularily enjoy my wife getting THAT kinda attention. I think there are many things in her wardrobe that would look great on her and would still turn eyes, in a good way. But as you can see, she wore it anyway (I am sure you can guess which picture it is). And judging by the fact that she was totally drained by a short 15 minute walk in +20C weather in the sun, I am gonna guess that she wasn't exactly comfortable wearing that THING either. So my conclusion, yes it maybe "fashionable" but I think logic, practicality, and maybe even common sense should have prevailed here. But hey, what do I know about women's fashion?

The Experimental Chinese Food Of The Day is:
Doong, Zhong, Sticky Rice

This weekend is a special day for China. Not enough to make it a holiday but enough that people will make special food for their dinner and to give to friends and family. The thing is known in Cantonese as Doong, Manderin as Zhong, we sometimes eat something wrapped in green leaves called sticky rice.

It is basically, rice put into a green leaf mixed with some other foods like nuts, meat, sausages, peas, eggs and etc. Then they are dunked in water and boiled or steamed for a long time. These ones pictured here were ones we bought at Carrefour. It is 5 yuan for 500g of the stuff and they are the size of an egg as shown in my picture. Now my complaint is that I specifically bought the one labelled "meat", because I don't like things like egg or peas or corn in mine. Well, when I microwaved it up to temperature and opened it up, I found only one piece of meat in mine and it was a small strip of ham about half the size of my little finger and probably just about as thin too. What a gyp, it basically made the thing almost entirely rice if you remove that little piece of ham. Ok, so I figure maybe I got an unlucky one. So I try a second one. The second one had more pieces of ham. It had 4, but they were little chunks. I bet if I added up the 4 pieces they would add up to the 1 piece I got in the other one. Sheesh, what a bunch of cheapstakes.