The BIG Question

A frequent topic of speculation for me during my years of drinking in Beijing bars has been... Can you can make more money off Chinese or foreign customers?

It's a question of vital importance for any bar owner or prospective bar owner.

Although there is a broad spectrum of personality types and spending patterns in both demographics, my instinct would be that you can in general make much more off foreign punters.

The key exception that might skew the analysis a bit is your Chinese high-roller type who will order premium spirits (or wines, champagne) by the bottle, just to flaunt his wealth - and perhaps not even drink it all. However, this type of punter brings his own problems. They're often quite brash and obnoxious types, who will treat staff contemptuously, and perhaps annoy other customers with their loud and boorish conversation. And if they do drink heavily, they're quite likely to get dangerously sloppy - perhaps even start a fight, or throw up in the middle of the bar. And it's distressingly common for this sort of punter to 'forget' to settle their tab, or to quibble about it. You also have to bear in mind that they're perhaps treating quite a large group. You might be initially quite excited when someone orders a bottle of Chivas - but when you realise that means you're going to have a group of six or eight Chinese patrons hogging your best table all night, and that quite possibly none of them are going to order anything else, it really isn't such good news. Especially if they end up making an ugly scene.

Most Chinese are still unfamiliar with Western bar culture, and not really all that receptive to it. They'll dabble in it because it's become a hip thing to do for students and young professionals. But most of these people have fairly little disposable income, and a negligible tolerance for alcohol. Moreover, they rarely seem to recognise any ethical constraints about being obliged to spend money in your bar. Venues like Starbucks and McDonald's have become hugely popular hangouts for the young because they usually leave you unmolested all day long, never requiring you to buy anything. This free-and-easy attitude in two of the most ubiquitous foreign franchise businesses here has perhaps encouraged young Chinese folks to believe that it is normal and acceptable to occupy space in a venue for hours at a time after making only one token purchase - or no purchase at all (and to use the bathroom without making a purchase, too!). It is quite common for one person in a couple, or only two or three people in a group, to buy a drink, and assume it is then all right for them to occupy a table indefinitely. This might not be all Chinese customers, or even the majority of them; but it is a common enough phenomenon to cause serious aggravation for a poor bar owner.

And even the good drinkers amongst the Chinese - enthusiasts of good beers, wines, or spirits; people who'll spend quite heavily, but without exceeding their physical tolerance - are rarely going to spend as much as your average Western drinker, I think. They haven't been doing it since their early teens, haven't built up such a prodigious appetite - or the capacious gut - for it.

I'd guess that quite a large proportion of Chinese punters will spend little or nothing; and while there are a few who will improve the average substantially by spending in the high hundreds, the typical Chinese spend per head is probably a lot less than 100 rmb, perhaps not much better than 50 rmb. Almost all foreigners, even the modest drinkers and teetotallers, will order at least a couple of drinks... and then leave when they feel they've had enough, not stage a sit-in for hours. Heavier drinkers may well take up residence for much of the evening, spending steadily over an extended period. I pretty regularly spend 200 rmb, even on a fairly slow night, and sometimes go through twice that much. And I'm hardly a high-roller: I don't order cocktails or top-shelf whiskies very often. I'm just your typical enthusiastic pisshead. I suspect the average spend-per-head of a foreign bar punter here is well over 100 rmb... and perhaps, in some bars, over 200 rmb.

So, it does seem there might be a powerful economic argument for favouring foreign customers over Chinese ones. I certainly think that (unless you're running a nightclub, which is a whole different ballgame) it must be very difficult to make a decent income from a wholly Chinese clientele (although exceptions prove the rule: Reef on Nanluoguxiang seems to be managing it).

But, of course, you can't very well take overt steps to exclude any particular group of punters. Fubar's English-only drinks menu appeared to be sending some such message, that Chinese punters weren't particularly welcome, and it was not something I was comfortable with. (Although I have been notoriously - and unashamedly! - lazy about learning much Chinese myself, I think it is a bit rude to your host country not to offer service in Chinese as well as English if you're running a business here.) However, the only place I ever heard of trying to actively discourage Chinese punters was the Chinese-owned No Name Bar down by Houhai (and I suspect that was an exaggerated rumour, catching fire from the spark of one or two cases of particular customers being excluded).

You can effectively target a Western or Chinese clientele by your decor (Chinese, for the most part, don't get the wooden bar vibe; Westerners, for the most part, are fairly indifferent to soft furnishings) or the facilities provided (cheesy Chinese folk-rock performers and/or a karaoke stage go down big with the local punters; as do dice and playing cards, so that they can lose themselves for hours in noisy and pointless but strangely addictive games, rather than having to make the effort to sustain a conversation). And the pricing - most young Chinese will be discouraged by higher prices (although a lot of us less affluent foreigners will be too!).

There are some bars in Beijing - long established expat favourites like The Den, Frank's Place, Eudora Station, and the Goose & Duck (or some newer places in a similar vein, like The Irish Volunteer) - where the only Chinese people you'll usually see are WAGs or staff members. I've never felt very comfortable in places like this. Then again, I can't stand most of the bars on and around Nanluoguxiang these days: bars which prove strongly alluring to Chinese patrons tend to be deeply unappealing to me (it's not the Chinese patrons I mind, it's the things Chinese patrons seem to like!).

My favourite bars over the years have been ones that somehow managed to appeal to a good mix of foreign and Chinese punters: Huxley's, Reef (in its early days; it's rather lost its foreigner appeal now), Pool Bar, Salud, and, of course, my best beloved 12 Square Metres. I'm not quite sure what the secret is. I suspect it's something to do with being more Western than Chinese in style, but having a level of pricing reasonable enough not to drive away Chinese custom... and perhaps also with being sufficiently off the beaten track that their expat constituency just isn't large enough to establish an exclusive dominion. A bar in Sanlitun or Lido can easily establish itself - not necessarily by design, but by natural evolution - as essentially an 'expat only' kind of place; in my neighbourhood, it can't - and I'm grateful for that.

Toronto locals

The other day, I was reflecting for a moment - for reasons which now escape me - on the time I spent in Toronto about 15 years ago, working as a legal intern.

My scholarship programme provided quite a nice apartment for me, down near the waterfront on Queen's Quay. And I had a bar in my building. One of the strangest bars I have ever encountered - the Purple Pepper, a bar chiefly notable for its name: a deeply naff but undeniably very memorable alliteration. The Pepper, alas, didn't really feel much like a bar, since it was in a mall. Well, in the middle of a rank of shops along the ground floor of this block (the dry cleaners and the 24-hour supermarket and, especially, the great little takeaway pizza joint on the corner were all very welcome facilities to have within 5 minutes of home, but the Pepper was nothing but a disappointment). And hence it was a bit of a goldfish bowl, with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows along the front. At least it was quite cosily dim inside - after nightfall - and the 'purple' motif was quaintly underscored with a purple lava lamp behind the bar (I'm a big fan of lava lamps: I could watch them for hours!).

There was also a rather beautiful Eastern European (Croatian, possibly - I forget) girl who worked behind the bar there a few evenings a week. But even this was not enough to entice me into becoming a regular. The place lacked atmosphere. Nor, indeed, did it have very much custom. It was a little expensive. And the service - from the gorgeous Croatian, and everyone else - tended to be a bit offhand and surly. [It seems the Pepper is still going after all these years, but is now promoting itself more as a café/restaurant.]

That, I found, was a more widespread problem in Canada, or certainly in Toronto. Canadians have a rather gratingly self-righteous pride about their supposed superiority to their American neighbours: they seem to believe - with overbearing earnestness - that their country is better in every way than the USA, and that they are a fundamentally nicer people than the Americans. And I'm afraid it just ain't so - not in the country's service culture, anyway. Whereas the almost ubiquitous "Have a nice day!" attitude you find in America usually seems genuine, or at least well faked, in Canada serving staff mostly seem as if they are just going through the motions. There's no perkiness, no breeziness, no friendliness. It wasn't just in the Pepper, but every bar I went in during that year in Toronto (and a fair few in other places I visited, too: Montreal, Ottawa/Hull, Quebec City, Edmonton, Vancouver). Even worse, bar staff there used to aggressively demand their tips, rather than just accepting that tipping was ultimately a matter for the customer's discretion. In America, I don't mind tipping, and tipping heavily - because bar staff give value: they're pleasant and friendly to you, they make conversation if you're on your own, they introduce you to other people at the bar; they'll quite often give you a complimentary drink every once in a while; and they almost invariably slice a big chunk off your tab at the end of the evening, if you've been a good customer. In Canada, they give you your drink, and ask for a tip. That's it. No smile, no chit-chat, nada. I soon grew to hate going to bars in Canada: it was more expensive than in the States, and not nearly as much fun.

Insofar as I did have a local in Toronto (the severe winters are a serious deterrent to going out; and I was away travelling a lot, anyway), I came to favour the Acme Bar & Grill, just around the corner. It was about a 10-minute walk away, but that's no bad thing. (A 'local' can be too local. There's not really any extra convenience in having a favourite bar only 2 minutes away rather than 5 or 10 - and 'convenience' is overrated anyway! - but the reduction in daily exercise can become significant.) Of course, it was the Wile E. Coyote reference that initially attracted me. And it did seem like a very promising venue: long, narrow, essentially windowless - nice and dark, lots of wood; almost the paradigm of the perfect (North) American bar. It had a pretty decent food menu too. Again, it was the frosty demeanour of the staff that let it down. If this place had been over the border in Michigan, I'm sure I would have enrolled it amongst my favourite bars of all time; but my experiences here were always undercut by irritation and disappointment with the service. [I learn that the Acme was relaunched as the more British-sounding Duke of Argyle in the early Noughties, and closed altogether a few years ago, when the area was redeveloped. I would like to summon up a little wistful regret, but I find myself unable to.]

Perverse and bizarre as it may seem, my 'local' during that year became the wonderful T. Hogan's - some 300 miles away in Philadelphia!

That's how much Canada's bars SUCKED.

The Rule of Custom

Last Saturday evening, I found myself (as so often lately!) on my own for dinner, and so decided to try somewhere new. And this led to me to waive one (or possibly two) of the most basic rules of venue choice: 

a bar or restaurant with no customers in it is almost certainly no bloody good.

The corollary rule is that  if there's a place you've never got around to trying in years, there's probably a good reason for that.

On Saturday, with the streets thronged by premature Halloweeners, I was driven to trying a little Muslim restaurant on Gulou Dongdajie that had no customers in it at the time, and that I don't think I'd been in before. (Given that I've lived around this part of Beijing for a decade now, there aren't many long-established restaurants that I've never tried; most I've been into at least a handful of times, and the better ones some dozens of times.)

And it was indeed stupendously awful. The spicy green beans were undercooked, and so stringy as to be almost inedible. And not very spicy. And, despite being undercooked, they were not delivered to my table until several minutes after I'd received and eaten (or tried to eat) everything else. The egg fried rice was horrendously overcooked; very thin on egg, but doused in soy sauce which made it far too salty and gave it an unappealing brown colour; and I suspected it had probably been recycled numerous times. The beer was warm. The chuanr was OK, but a small stick for 3rmb.

5 young Chinese lads entered shortly after me (perhaps enticed in by the glamorous presence of a foreigner?). They still hadn't received any of their food when I left 20 or so minutes later, and were starting to look disconsolate and impatient.

Food service had perhaps been held up by the fact that the chuanr cook out front had dragged one of the indoor kitchen staff out into the street to have a protracted screaming row with him.

Ah, China.

Cursed again - The 'Rule of Threes'

Back in town four weeks, so I was due to get ill, I suppose. Sure enough, I was woken in the early hours of Wednesday morning with the beginnings of an itchy sore throat and a raging fever.

After spending most of the day whimpering under the duvet (and catching up on at least some of the sleep I didn't get overnight), I was willing to risk crossing town to have dinner with a friend, but... just as I was leaving the apartment, my prepaid electricity meter (unexpectedly!) ran out.

Queueing at the bank to purchase some more electricity credit made me dangerously late for my dinner rendezvous. And then, just as I neared the restaurant (for which, of course, I had no address, and no good directions), my phone (unexpectedly!!) ran out of credit.

Why do bad things always happen in threes?? It is a strange Principle of Fate.

Unbelievable and terrifying as this may seem (well, it terrifies me), this was the 2,500th post here on The Barstool. Too much! Enough already!! Somebody STOP me!!!

The price of goodwill

JK, my good friend and former landlord of my favourite bar here in Beijing, could be a bit of a penny-pincher at times. This was definitely his idea of 'a promotion'.

It was only very reluctantly that he finally introduced a ‘happy hour’ at our bar – and that only because he knew it wouldn’t “cost” him anything, since he had very little early evening trade (pretty hard to change that: we’re just too far away from the major centres of office working). Moreover, he limited the initiative to a rather modest discount on two items only – the house wine and draught beer – that are not really the top sellers.

I always feel that ‘happy hours’ that aren’t really all that happy tend to have a negative effect. If you can’t offer a decent discount on (nearly) everything, why bother?

A well-judged ‘happy hour’ pays for itself.

Something for the weekend!

I don't think this can be a candidate for my 'Great Love Songs' strand, because, frankly, I have no idea what it's about; the lyrics are too dark and weird for me to decipher. It's not quite a 'Great Drinking Song' either (although it was first introduced to me by Best-Barman-In-The-World-Ever, Big Nige, last year, and has been a popular fixture in our 12 Square Metres playlist ever since). It has an incantatory aspect to it that's very powerful; but it's just not singalong stuff. Well, apart from that groaning na-na-na-nah-naah chorus, maybe. But no, it doesn't have that rollicking, get-you-in-the-mood-for-another-round quality about it. Yet it is a great song.

I love this band, one of my favourite discoveries of the past year or so. I believe they provide potent support for my theory that great bands tend to have great band names (and vice versa). Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is surely one of the coolest band names ever (it's the name of Marlon Brando's biker gang in The Wild One), and on first hearing of them, I feared that they would struggle to live up to it. But they've got a stripped-down, grungy blues-rock sound that's right up my street, and they've come up with a number of hauntingly memorable songs.

Plus, of course, their drummer is dead sexy.

And they're playing in Beijing this weekend, headlining the Intercity Music Festival in Chaoyang Park on Sunday. Wild horses couldn't keep me away (although I suppose really bad weather or a dose of the laduzi might).

Here, then, is probably their best-known song, our 12 Square Metres favourite, Beat The Devil's Tattoo. The sound's not great in this version, but it is a very cool b&w performance video.

Here's another good version, performed for Santa Monica's KCRW.

[Another great performance from a show in Seattle last year here (but the video's not very good), an interesting acoustic session recorded for Paste magazine here, and the original video (which is a bit of a non-event) here.]

What is it about Norwegians?

The Swedes are popularly supposed to produce the world's most beautiful women, but I think the Norwegians have them beat.

There's an all too plausible theory that this uncanny surfeit of female pulchritude stems from the Viking era - that the raping & pillaging policy, a few hundred years of stealing all the prettiest women from the rest of Europe, has done wonders to refine their gene pool.

Whatever it is,... WOW! And they seem to be all over the place at the moment. These are testing times for the Asexualist Movement.

Wisdom of the Froog

"I don't understand how anyone can still have a hangover at 6.30pm. Why have you not yet had another drink?"

Leather Britches was whingeing on Sunday evening about feeling unable to drink because of the supposed excesses of his Saturday. A drink is, of course, exactly what he needed to set him right. Nothing soothes the physical discomfort (and the remorse) that we think of as a 'hangover' quite like another nip of alcohol. And while I can understand that some people may be reluctant to try this remedy when their physical symptoms - or, more likely, their remorse: the 'moral hangover', the misguided (but ephemeral) commitment to abstinence that so often follows a heavy session - are still raging strongly, or may have more general qualms against drinking during the day, well, by 6pm there's really no excuse any more; the physical unease must have begun to abate somewhat twelve hours or more after you finished drinking, and it's perfectly respectable to venture into a bar once the sun is below the yard-arm. Just shut up and have a drink, goddammit.

I well remember Jonathan Miller in his influential BBC1 series on medicine and anatomy The Body In Question saying that we take a decision to be 'ill' - that the exact same symptoms may be perceived and dealt with very differently, perhaps scarcely perceived at all, if we choose not to pay attention to them and not to categorise them as 'illness' - or 'hangover'. If you dwell upon your symptoms and give them the dread name 'hangover'.... then you have a hangover. I don't do that; thus, I never get hangovers.

It's not much of a 'trick', really.  You should try it for yourselves.

Brain the size of a planet

It's official:  I am unbeatable at quizzes.

It's a curse, really.

I'm thinking I may have to retire from the monthly Individual Quiz at 12 Square Metres because it's getting to be a bit of a bore - for me and everyone else - that I win it every time.

Footnote 1:  The Theory of Optimum Team Size - I think that large teams are actually a disadvantage rather than an advantage: they generate too much distraction and disputation.  My experience suggests that - for me, at any rate - one team mate is usually worth, at best, only 3 or 4 more points than I would have got on my own.  And that's only the first team mate; a second team mate rarely contributes more than 1 or 2 points on top of that.  A third team mate is often completely superfluous.  Playing with more than four people in a team is usually counter-productive (unless you have a carefully chosen 'super team' with exceptionally strong but largely non-overlapping fields of specialist knowledge).

Footnote 2:  The Mekon, the huge-craniumed, super-intelligent alien above was the recurring adversary of British comic book hero Dan Dare.  It was also the favoured slang term of disparagement for academic over-achievers at my school (the school, that is, where I taught some 20 years ago; not the one I attended myself nearly 30 years ago).

Constituencies

Reflecting further on the bizarre choices among the winners and nominees in this month's The Beijinger Bar and Club Awards, I realise that as the expat population has grown larger in the years I've been here, so too it has become more differentiated, more fragmented.

Back at the dawn of the Noughties, the number of laowai in Beijing was probably only in the few tens of thousands (well, at least if you exclude the very large - uncountable - numbers of Koreans, Japanese, and Asiatic Russians, many of whom seem to have become permanent residents, and who 'blend in' to the local population much better than other varieties of foreigner), and the number of anglophones perhaps only in the few thousands. And because of that compact size, we had a shared sense of identity, of common purpose - perhaps a slight feeling of being beleaguered in the midst of a very strange and occasionally hostile city, and needing to club together for support. Of course, the city itself was far smaller then (with the 5th Ringroad just beginning construction, and very little development out beyond the 4th). And the 'bar scene' was tiny. Well, there were the old stagers: The Den, The Goose & Duck, Frank's Place, the John Bull Pub, The Mexican Wave, Maggie's. There was Poacher's and Jazz Ya just off Sanlitun. And there was the good old Sanlitun South bar street. And that was about it. Houhai didn't start to take off as a bar area until 2003; Nanluoguxiang not until 2007. Even the student enclave around Wudaokou was pretty rudimentary in those days (when did Lush open? '03??). Ditto Shunyi: it was already being promoted as a 'luxury villa' community removed from the hubbub of the city, but all those fancy malls and restaurants and coffee shops that make it such a comfortable home-away-from-home for expat families have sprung up just within the last half dozen years or so.

In those days (7 or 8 or 9 years ago), everyone hung out on Sanlitun South - regardless of disparities in age or income, regardless of place of residence. 'Year abroad' students from Wudaokou would rub shoulders with big-hitting executives from Shunyi in places like Nashville and Jam House and Tanewha and Hidden Tree. Even lowly language teachers would be welcomed to the party, so long as they didn't talk shop (although they might prefer to hang with the teenage expat brats in ultra-cheap dives like Black Sun or Pure Girl). Oh yes, the old 'Bar Street' was a great leveller. But then it got levelled.

I think it would have lost that unique 'melting pot' character anyway by now, even if it had somehow survived Beijing's merciless obsession with 'progress'. I'd guess that the expat population is now 10 times what it was back then (certainly the number of language students has gone up by rather more than that); average levels of affluence are rather higher (even poor old English teachers are getting paid ever so slightly more these days); and the number and diversity of bar and restaurant offerings has seen a corresponding boom.

It's hardly surprising, then, that there should be less coherence in the community now, and less coincidence of tastes on the nightlife scene. The people who voted for Xiu in those recent awards are unlikely to have much if any overlap with the people who voted for Paddy O'Shea's. And the people who would have voted for Salud (if it had been nominated) would not have overlapped very much with either grouping.



I'd say the main 'constituencies' these days (among Beijing's native English-speaker population) are as follows:


The Embassy Crowd
These are the 'aristocracy' of the expat community, too high and mighty to socialise much with us ordinary mortals. The nature of their job generates a sense of superiority, or at any rate of 'separateness' - and they seem to do 90% of their socializing with staff from other Embassies. (It was different in the olden times, when they might have only a few hundreds or a few dozens of their citizens residing here, and so felt at liberty to invite them all to the Embassy bar for a social evening once a month. [The New Zealand Embassy still used to do this until about 5 years ago; not sure if the tradition continues today.] Now, with thousands of us here - constantly getting into 'trouble' with lost passports, traffic accidents, violent altercations with landlords or employers, etc. - they have to set up professional barriers to discourage us from bothering them. And that on-the-job aloofness too often carries over into their private lives as well.)

The Shunyi-ites
"The rich are different." (Fitzgerald) "Yes, they have more money than us." (Hemingway) "And they live in Shunyi." (Froog)
I have nothing much against Shunyi, really (nothing that a small thermonuclear warhead wouldn't put right, anyway). Nothing, that is, except its isolation and its unreality. It is not Beijing. It is nearly 20 miles outside of Beijing, and it is a completely different world.

The Hipster Rich

Some of the mega-wealthy entrepreneurs and senior executives choose to live within the city proper, rather than Shunyi - largely to prove that they can afford to do so (in huge, renovated siheyuan properties, or luxury serviced apartments). Also, they tend to be without children, and are thus unconcerned about the supposedly fresher air (ha!) and proximity to the major international schools which Shunyi boasts.

People With 'Real' Jobs

The average Shunyi-ite or Hipster Rich type tends to be rather off-putting. They're not necessarily arrogant, but they often are, a bit. And you do get fed up of the smug/cagey way that people won't tell you any more than that they're "involved in import-export". And there just isn't anything very interesting to say about being a manager in an engineering company. However, once in a while you'll meet a TV producer for CNN, or an architect, or a CleanTech consultant, or a lawyer, or an airline pilot - and they are often fascinating, and very nice (if usually hellishly overworked) people.

The Expat Brats

The children of long-term, well-to-do foreign residents mostly have far too much pocket money and parents with a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to letting them go out on the town. There are parts of Sanlitun on a Friday or a Saturday (or a Wednesday or a Thursday?!) night where the average age seems to be below 16.

International School Teachers

A privileged niche class - much better paid than those of us on 'local salaries', but paupers compared to most of the MNC execs. They usually qualify as honorary Shunyi-ites. I fell in love with one a little while back, but it was obviously a doomed prospect; she only came into the city three or four times a year.

EFL Teachers

A derided underclass. Probably the most numerous single category in this analysis, but lacking any sense of group solidarity; indeed, usually lacking even the pride to identify themselves. Most of them hang out in Paddy's or The Den, pretending to have more money than they do; or in the Wudaokou student bars, pretending to be younger than they are. Sad.

The Mandarin Students

There are at least three sub-varieties: the fairly 'serious' ones who are attending a full-year programme as part of their undergraduate language degree; the mostly rather less serious ones who are on a 'study trip' here (usually of considerably less than one year; many of them seem to realise quite early on that this isn't really going to get them anywhere, and just give up on their studies and party); and the mid-life crisis types - on the run from debts, failed marriages, derailed careers - who have convinced themselves that learning Mandarin may be a panacea for all their ills (in this stressful modern world, it seems, such crises can hit any time from the mid-twenties onwards). I despise all three types more or less equally. They tend to be very loud and very brash. And very tiresome in constantly trying to show off the tiny amounts of Mandarin they've managed to learn.

The Planet-Savers

In recent years, more and more of the Mandarin Students have stayed on to find work with worthy NGOs, bijou environmental consultancies, and so on. Indeed, some come here pursuing such opportunities without wasting the time on a Mandarin course first. There are now large numbers of young professionals here in such interesting and laudable (but mostly not very well-paid) jobs. Most of them are in their mid to late twenties or early thirties, and many of them are women. This ought to be my prime girlfriend-hunting milieu. Unfortunately, the aura of worthiness surrounding them can be quite suffocating.

Local Hires

Most Mandarin Students, however, don't get interesting and worthy jobs for NGOs and the like; they just find regular entry-level positions in Western companies (or sometimes, god help them, in Chinese companies). Many young people today - driven by curiosity about the largest, oldest, blah-blah-blah nation on earth, or by naive idealism about China being the 'new economic frontier', or simply by the dearth of job prospects back home - come out here without even much, or anything, in the way of Mandarin skills, and hope to find a job anyway. Most of these people - however good, bad, or non-existent their Mandarin - eventually find something, because there are so many jobs around in Beijing. And most of them are happy to have taken that first step on a career path, to have found a way to stay here. They try not to be too resentful of the fact that 'local hires' only get paid, at best, 20% or 30% of what they'd make for a comparable job in their own country (and this despite the fact that some international 'cost of living' indices rate Beijing alongside New York as one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live!).

Scavengers

An unfortunate sub-set of the Local Hires (well, many of them, I think, are not hired locally, but their pay is usually similarly miserly, unless they do really well for themselves on commissions): people with foreigner-targeted sales jobs - in things like real estate, relocation services, healthcare, and, oh god, "financial advice". It is a potentially lucrative (though, mostly, probably not) but somewhat stigmatized line of work.

The Frat Boys

A mysterious and very annoying sub-set. I don't know where the fuck these people come from. They could, I suppose, be part of any one of the groups above - although I would guess that the majority of them are Mandarin Students, or young professionals who've only recently finished their spell of being a Mandarin Student and are still behaving in much the same way on their nights off. They are mostly male, nearly all American (they are The Borg: they will occasionally 'assimilate' innocent bystanders into their 'culture'), and fall within the 18-30 age bracket, probably mostly in the mid-twenties. They are very raucous. They drink shooters. They are very raucous. They like hip-hop music. They are very raucous. The word 'like' accounts for almost 30% of their discourse. And they are very, very, VERY raucous. They are the reason why I found The Rickshaw (now mercifully demised) intolerable in the past, and why I continue to avoid most of the places around Sanlitun.

The Small-Time Entrepreneurs

More and more people in the last few years seem to have been bravely taking the plunge in trying to set up a small business of their own. You don't even need to have a Chinese wife in order to do this any more (although I think it still helps). I admit I am envious of these folks. (I just don't have quite enough money to strike out on my own; and the search for a trustworthy partner seems neverending....) However, for every bar or restaurant or t-shirt shop that makes a reasonable return for its owners, there must be 10 that are ignominious failures. And the few that succeed usually get torpedoed within a few years by rent-gouging landlords or treacherous business partners or the dreaded redevelopment notice ('chai'). Oh gosh, yes, it takes a lot of bravery to undertake something like this. Bravery, and a kind of optimism that borders on delusional religious fervour. I don't think I have it.

The Bohemians

A strange and nebulous class. Most, but not all, are still relatively young. Most, but not all, have acquired extremely good Mandarin (not by taking courses in it, but by having Chinese friends or Chinese lovers, and by taking jobs that required them to use Mandarin on a daily basis). Most - well, just about all - live in the city centre, mainly within the 2nd Ringroad (though some have moved out to the distant suburbs in search of more affordable housing). Very nearly all of them are involved in one of the more creative professions: art, music, photography, journalism, translation, graphic design, fashion, writing, academic research. The majority, I think, regard themselves as 'lifers', people who are settling down here for the long-haul, probably for most or all of their working life - and perhaps even beyond.

And where do I fit into all of this? Well, I don't. I am UNIQUE, unclassifiable. I used to be an EFL Teacher, but I have escaped from that miserable life. I've been a Local Hire a few times, and would not like to go back there either. I aspire to be a Small-Time Entrepreneur, but haven't made it yet. Most of my friends are Bohemians, but I fear I don't quite qualify myself. Well, no analysis of this sort can expect to be comprehensive....

How not to throw a party...

Ah, well, the housewarming party has come and gone. People came, people had fun - so I suppose I shouldn't fret about it too much.

It's just that.... well, it was - by some margin - the most disappointing party I've thrown.

Amongst the reasons....



1) A much smaller apartment
(The old Froog Towers was Party Central because it was f***ing huge. I could accommodate 50 or 60 people in the living room, without spilling over into any of the three bedrooms! The new place definitely feels a bit cramped by comparison.)

2) The proximity of the Spring Festival holiday
(A lot of people have left town already. Others discovered [only in the last day or two - ah, last-minute China!] that they were expected to work this weekend, to lessen the impact of the upcoming long holiday on the nation's productivity.)

3) The curse of Marley Day
(It SNOWED! Snow is a further major discouragement to people coming out. The last time I had a Marley Day party [three years ago], it also snowed [though at least not until midnight; during the day it merely pissed with rain] - even though I was having it four weeks late, at the beginning of March. I think God hates me. Or He hates Bob Marley. God has no taste.)

4) An early start
(People don't deal well with 'early starts' in this town, apparently. I thought the logic was sound: enjoy drinking while it's still daylight; clear out early, so as not to annoy the neighbours too much; leave people room to go on to something else - dinner, gigs, other parties, whatever - in the mid-evening. But no-one wanted to show up until 7pm. And a lot of people were threatening to come at 9.30 or 10pm - long after we were supposed to have finished.)

5) The most unreliable friends in the world
(I think I may have elaborated before [though I can't now find the post] on my 60% Rule: only two-thirds of people you invite to a party reply at all, two thirds of those reply in the affirmative, and two thirds of the affirmatives actually show up - which means you can budget for about a third of your total invitation list. I think that ratio would be higher - at least 70%, maybe even 80% - in most other environments; but in expat Beijing you're lucky if you hit 65%. You just have to accept it and deal with it. However, I think yesterday my percentage was even lower than that. And that was particularly galling since, because of the limited space in my new flat, I'd largely restricted the invitations to good friends - rather than inviting everyone I've ever met, as I'd typically done in the past at Froog Towers. Of my closest friends..... one showed up 4 or 5 hours late, half a dozen more suddenly had "something better to do", and.... well, several others just vanished without trace. Heartbreaking.)

On the plus side, though, one guy came all the way from Shanghai especially for this!

Also, it was quite a "United Nations" kind of affair: in addition to the inevitable British, Americans and Chinese.... Australia, New Zealand, France, Ireland and the Phillipines were represented (Germany, Greece, Canada, Taiwan, Holland and Mexico amongst the no-shows!).

And the food - if I do say so myself - was AWESOME!

And I have enough beer (and RUM) left over to keep me wrecked throughout Spring Festival!!

The Beer Spread Index

I offer this further little appendix to last week's introduction to the Beer Equivalence Index, which endeavours to provide a useful guide to the comparative cost of living in different countries by calculating the price of everything in terms of how much that would buy you of the cheapest available beer. You can also, I suggest, draw some interesting inferences about a country's state of socio-economic development by charting the difference between the highest and lowest prices charged for a beer, the Beer Spread Index - a kind of corollary of the better known Gini coefficient. As I described in last week's addendum on Beer Equivalence, when I first came to Beijing seven years ago, a big bottle (700ml, sometimes a little more) of the local Yanjing brew could be got for a little over 1 rmb (if you were getting your deposit back on the bottle afterwards); less than 1 rmb if you were able to buy wholesale; but generally for 2 rmb from mom & pop stores and grotty kerbside restaurants. That base price has now sneaked up to 3 rmb, but that's still agreeably inexpensive. In those far-off 'good old days', there were a few places where you could get the cursed Tsingtao (usually the only budget beer on offer in most bars, and not usually very nice) for a mere 5 rmb, and quite a lot that only asked 10 rmb. Now, it's 15 rmb as a minimum almost everywhere. It's quite instructive, actually, to consider the Beer Spread of Tsingtao alone: it only costs 2.50 or 3 rmb in supermarkets, so presumably isn't much more than 1 or 1.50 rmb wholesale. It's usually 15 or 20 rmb in regular bars. In fancy-pants, up-themselves bars, it can be as much as 35 or 40 rmb. That's a heck of a broad range. The spread gets even more dramatic if you include imported or 'premium' brews. Even bog-standard foreign lagers like Heineken or Corona usually cost at least 25 rmb for a 330ml bottle, and sometimes 30-40 rmb. More exotic beers like Hoegaarden or Sam Adams can cost even more. And then, if you want a decent foreign beer on draught, you're typically looking at more like 50 rmb or so (55 or 60 rmb, for the fiendishly expensive Guinness). I've never attempted to order a pint of draught at one of those very upmarket places like Lan or Ruby Khi, but I imagine (if they deign to carry something as plebeian as draught beers at all) they might well be charging 70 or 80 rmb or more for that kind of thing. The preposterous German theme pub, Drei Kronen 1308, charges, I think, nearly 70 rmb for a glass of its home-brewed beer. Local draught beer, on the other hand, is rarely more than 20 rmb for a pint even in foreigner-oriented bars, and can often be got for 10 rmb or even 5 rmb in restaurants (I believe it's currently 8 rmb per pint in alcoholic-friendly Russian joint, Traktirr Pushkin). In fact, there have been a few places in the past that gave the stuff away free - but I'm afraid we have to ignore such instances of unihibited largesse in calculating our Beer Spread. No, our range seems to be 3 rmb (big bottle of Yanjing in a standard Chinese restaurant) to 70-80 rmb + (posh beer in an upscale bar/nightclub) - giving a BSI of at least 25. This is indicative of massive inequalities of income distribution, and one fears that the social fabric of the country may start to tear itself apart.... [If anyone's organising a pitchfork-toting mob to besiege Lan - or Drei Kronen, or Paddy O'Shea's - to demand more affordable beer, you can put my name down.]

Round-the-world 'Beer Equivalence'

A supplement to Tuesday's post on my Beer Equivalence Index:     As well as being a useful way of monitoring - and restraining - your regular spending, the concept of 'beer equivalence' can also be applied to comparing the relative cost of living in different countries (just as with the better known 'Big Mac Index').     When I first arrived in Beijing in 2002, the usual cost of a beer in a cheap restaurant or a neighbourhood xiaomaibu store was 2 kuai (a few restaurants would charge 3 kuai, but could usually be haggled down if most of the competitors on their street were only asking 2; only places that were a little bit up themselves would dream of of trying to ask 4 or 5 kuai).  Moreover, most stores would give you (a rather generous!) 5 mao deposit back on your bottles.  There were even a few places that would charge only 1.50 or 1.60 kuai for a beer, but only give you a rather more miserly 3 or 4 mao back.  And I did hear tell of the odd restaurant that would only ask 1.50, effectively giving you the bottle deposit back - although I never encountered such a haven of generosity myself.  I gathered that the typical price for a crate of 24 beers back then was only about 30 kuai, of which 6 or 8 kuai was deposit on the plastic crate itself, and another 12 kuai, seemingly, the bottle deposits (and then a few fen more for the bottle caps!), meaning that the wholesale cost of a big 700ml bottle was only about 5 mao.  However, for the purposes of the BEI, I took 2 kuai per beer as my benchmark, because that was what I usually had to pay.   These days, I suppose, I might have to say 4 kuai is the baseline.  I don't think you can get a beer for 2 kuai anywhere now.  Even very cheap restaurants and xiaomaibu now charge at least 3 kuai.  Most of the places I drink seem to charge 4 kuai.  That's some fairly hefty inflation in only 7 years.  But never mind - this has still got to be one of the cheapest places in the world to drink - particularly given the abundant employment opportunities for foreigners.     In my first impecunious year here, my basic salary was a little over 2,000 beers per month; but I was usually able to double that with moonlighting.  Now, despite the cost of a basic beer almost doubling, I am usually able to make 4,000 to 5,000 beers per month, sometimes rather more.  (Of course, it would take me a few years at least to drink that much!  Hmm, I wonder if there's some value in a related index on how long it takes to earn a year's consumption of beer?)     I don't get out of China often enough to have a very clear sense of how much it costs to drink in the USA or the UK any more.  It seems a pint these days in Britain is usually something over £3 - although I'm mostly drinking in Oxford, London, or Edinburgh, which are all unusually expensive; and drinking premium brews at that.  A countrywide average for a decent draught beer might be something more like £2.50, perhaps.  Can I envisage earning £150,000 a year in Britain?  After tax?  Unfortunately not.   In America, I am likewise drinking on the east coast, mostly in super-expensive New York or DC.  You don't seem to be able to get a domestic draft for much less than 5 bucks anywhere now, not even in the sort of divey places I am drawn to.  Often, it's rather more.  And then you have to tip your bar staff.  What could I do to earn $360,000 dollars a year in the States?   That's why I'm in China.   But I am starting to feel that it's a kind of economic gravity well that's got me trapped here.  If I could find another country where the beer is cheap and the employment prospects are as varied, I would certainly consider a move.  I am conducting research.....

The Beer Equivalence Index

I was reminded by a news item today of the tongue-in-cheek 'Big Mac Index' started by The Economist a dozen or so years ago as a means of comparing the PPP (Purchasing Power Parity - the relative cost of a consumer item or basket of items, exchange-rate adjusted, against the benchmark of the USA). 

When I first came to China, I was very favourably impressed by the low cost of the local beer (at least in neighbourhood stores and restaurants; in bars, other than the very diviest bargain dumps, prices are close to parity with the UK or the US, and getting higher every year).  And I found it consoling, since I wasn't earning very much money back then, to calculate my salary in terms of how many beers I could buy with it. 

This simple exercise certainly gave a boost to the spirits: I was earning over 2,000 beers a month!  (They were usually only 2 kuai for a big bottle in those days, mind you.) I fear that this is the moment at which I became 'trapped' in China.  I realised it was pretty much inconceivable that I could earn enough to support such a good lifestyle - well, such an alcoholic lifestyle! - in the UK, or almost anywhere else in the world. 

Of course, one has to keep in mind that beer is unusually, unnaturally cheap here.  In fact, it is - bafflingly - more or less the same price by volume as the cheapest bottled water, and significantly cheaper than any kind of soft drink.  Hence the tendency to drink it all the time.... purely for rehydration.... 

Food in grotty street-corner restaurants is also astoundingly cheap (rather cheaper than cooking for yourself at home, I find), but the more upmarket places, and especially the Westerner-targeted places are closer to the level of prices we're used to back home.  Food in supermarkets is mostly pretty cheap, but has got a lot more expensive in recent years; and any imported luxuries - or domestically-made Westerner favourites like processed ham or potato crisps - are likely to be as much or more than they would be back home.  You need to be very careful in in your spending, with such an uneven spectrum of pricing. 

So, doing regular BEI (Beer Equivalence Index) comparisons in your head should work in two ways:

when you're feeling down, you can focus on the overall value of your income in beers, to give yourself a lift; 

but most of the time, you should be using it as a brake on your spending, by reminding yourself how many beers you could buy instead of something else you're about to purchase. 

Trust me - this is a very useful technique.  I'm surprised it hasn't been more widely exploited by academic economists yet. 

[I have also elaborated two expansions on this analytical method: the Beer Spread Index, which gives an indication of socio-economic inequalities in a country by measuring the gap between the highest and lowest prices commonly charged for a beer, and the Country-to-Country Comparison, which, like the more famous 'Big Mac Index', enables you to gauge the relative cost of living in different places.]

Rounds

A week or so ago, I was briefly rather incensed when a female companion of mine demanded that I bought her a drink - on the grounds that it was allegedly my round.

Yes - ladies, alas, seem to be particularly bad at appreciating the subtle etiquette of round-buying. And this lady, I fear, does have something of a penchant for mooching drinks off people (well, off me, anyway!), albeit subconsciously. So, I was disinclined to cut her any slack on the issue on this occasion.


Well, [deep breaths]..... it was rather worse even than that. She didn't just ask me to buy her a drink, or suggest that it was my round. No, she ordered a drink without consulting me; avoided paying for it (not sure how she managed that, since the waiters in that bar are usually quite punctilious about extracting the cash from you as soon as they deliver a drink); waited for me to order another drink for myself (which was several minutes later, since I was by then on pints of draught to her G & T's, and we had got significantly out of sync); and then, when the waiter brought my drink, she just told him that I'd pay for hers as well - again, without addressing a word to me.

I'm afraid I fairly hit the roof! I think that kind of presumption is downright RUDE, in just about any circumstance. It certainly goes against what I understand to be the etiquette of mutual round-buying.


But that etiquette is rather subtle, and perhaps not universally accepted. I was brought up in a distant time and place, when concepts of social obligation ran rather deeper than they seem to today.

So, I will try to lay down what I see as being the essence of the round-buying culture.

And it is simply this: there is no entitlement.

It doesn't matter how long you've been buying rounds for each other, or how many rounds you think you are 'ahead' of someone else. Their choice to buy or not buy a drink for you (or anyone else in the group) is entirely up to them. Hopefully, generosity, the spirit of reciprocal good-feeling engendered by round-buying, and a sense of decency/obligation (if they really are 'behind', if they really do 'owe' you one, or more) will induce them to do so. But you cannot ask (well, not unless they are really egregiously mooching off other people). And you certainly cannot assume that they should pay for drinks you have ordered without reference to them.

Every time someone buys you a drink, you should be grateful (even if it was their 'turn' - and then some). Every time someone fails to buy you a drink (even though it is pretty clearly their 'turn'), you should try to forgive and forget (though if you notice that this is something they do regularly, you probably shouldn't be friends with them).

Things get messy after a while. People are buying different drinks. Prices vary in different bars. Some drinks may have been 'outside' of the 'round' system (someone 'treating' everyone to a shot, for example). Some people may have shelled out for things like taxis, a shared pack of cigarettes, or some food (in Beijing, it's quite common during a late-night bar session to send out for rou chuanr, the mini lamb kebabs which are the ubiquitous street snack; but that's usually regarded as a minor 'treat', since you really have to eat a heck of a lot of chuanr to rack up even the cost of a Tsingtao). It's just impossible to keep an exact account of who's paid what, and who might 'owe' the next round.

And that's the whole point. You don't try. The beauty of the round-buying culture is that it is founded on the twin principles of generosity and decency.

You don't mind if you end up spending a bit more than other people, because you enjoy buying things for your friends.

You do feel bad if you spend much less than other people, because you know it is very bad to be a mooch.

That's it - the thing has to be self-policing. As soon as you start trying to keep minute track of who's paid what, and who's owed what, and who ought to be buying the next drink, it just becomes an accounting exercise, and all the good feeling is dispelled.

Now, as I mentioned above, it may on occasion be possible to discuss the question of who should buy the next drinks, without completely destroying the mood. But that's the key thing - discussion. You must never, never, NEVER order a drink on someone else's tab without running it by them first.

That ought not to be rocket science. But, ah, young people today! I despair of them sometimes....

Everything happens for a reason

She said.

And it was the first thing she'd said all week that came close to irritating me. It seemed such shallow 'new age' mumbo-jumbo. It also seemed a little tactless, since it must have been obvious what emotional torment I was going through in trying to make sense of why this had happened.

But I found it impossible to be irritated with her.

And so I pondered the phrase further, sought out the redeeming value in it.

We shouldn't take it as a serious expression of fatalism (I'm pretty sure she doesn't).... although I think we all at times succumb to that superstitious impulse to suppose that coincidences are being marshalled against us (or for us) by some unseen directing intelligence; there's some comfort in this, since even when this force appears to be working to our detriment, the conceit still confers meaning and importance to our lives, and that gives us consolation even in the midst of our misery. But I don't think that's what she meant.

No, I think what she had in mind was more of a positive-thinking mantra. If we cultivate the attitude that there is some 'reason' or 'purpose' behind everything that happens to us, we can direct our minds not to the unknowable force contriving those events (which we know, really, is nothing more than coincidence) but to the possible result of each of these events - what new opportunities does it give us? If we seek out the best possible interpretation of 'why' anything might have happened to us, in terms of what new chances it presents..... well, it may inspire us to consider options we might not otherwise have thought of, it may empower us to make changes in our lives that might have seemed beyond us.

Or so I hope.

Is that just 'new age' mumbo-jumbo?

I think there's something in this. I must ponder further.

And I must ponder very carefully the question of why this happened, why she happened.

Chinese bar fights

Or restaurant fights, as it more often is.

Last night I went to dinner with a friend, quite late, after catching a film show. Well, quite 'late' for China. While there are plenty of restaurants that will stay open till the wee small hours of the morning (especially the grotty-but-cheap ones that I tend to prefer), a lot of restaurants try to start closing up around 9pm. My companion and I arrived nearer to 10 than 9, but there were still a few tables occupied with Chinese diners, so they were being forced to stay open a little later than they'd like. The table in the centre of the restaurant, nearest the door, held two young Chinese couples. They'd finished eating, but the two lads were now getting into a serious beer session.

This spelled TROUBLE. Well, potentially. I assessed the situation: they didn't seem to be too far gone as yet, and we would be able to sit quite a way away from them. I judged it was safe to sit down. However, if they carried on drinking like this, things were likely to get ugly. We would have to be watchful.

Sure enough, ugly they soon got. The tables in this restaurant were topped by thick plates of glass - a rather pointless piece of design, it seems to me, and one that is inviting disaster. The lads were beginning to rap their glasses or their beer bottles louder and louder on these glass table-tops as they toasted each other ('toasting' in China is actually more about goading someone to take another chug, rather than truly expressing noble sentiments and good wishes). And it was making such an unholy racket, it just didn't seem possible that the table-top hadn't broken yet. The staff assembled in a semicircle, watching anxiously but unwilling to intervene. I began to wonder if the table was made of safety glass; I became curious about it, began gingerly rapping on my own table-top to see how it resonated.

And then.... of course, inevitably, the CRASH. Now, unfortunately I had my back to the scene at this point; and my companion had also failed to notice exactly what transpired.

What we found when we turned to look was that these two buffoons had somehow managed to break the table next door to them (which, mercifully, had been deserted). The culprit had beer all over his face, and a big cut just above his left eye. The base of a large Tsingtao beer bottle was lying amid the remains of the adjacent table. Other shards of emerald-green glass from the shattered bottle were distributed all over the restaurant floor - including one piece under our table, which was a good 15ft away. The passivity of the rest of this idiot's group seemed to argue against the possibility that his friend had flung a beer bottle at him (oh, believe me, I've seen it happen). My first thought was that he must have just tossed an empty, or nearly empty bottle over his shoulder after drinking. Ah, the bleeding forehead? Well, perhaps he'd tried to chuck the bottle over his shoulder and acccidentally got in the way (oh, believe me, I've seen it happen). Ah, but then how had he managed to spill so much beer, most of it over his head? I eventually concluded that the likeliest answer was that he had (whether on a sudden wild impulse to show off or goaded into it by his friends) broken a full, and perhaps unopened, beer bottle over his temple.

Unbelievable.

But this sort of lunacy happens around here all the time.

In China, I rarely see the sort of 'ugliness' which is rife in the UK on a Friday or a Saturday night, with drunken thugs, singly or in groups, staggering around city centres looking to pick fights with people (as a tall person, I need to be particularly wary about this, since belligerent short-arses often deem me a suitable opportunity to try to disprove their inadequacies). But there are huge numbers of smaller-scale fights here, which often turn very ugly indeed - and can sometimes embroil, and injure, innocent bystanders, if only by accident (last night's flying bottle fragments being a salutary warning).

There seem to be a number of interlinked factors behind this phenomenon. First, most Chinese are lightweights at drinking; many of them lack, or are seriously impaired in, their ability to metabolise alcohol (it's a common genetic deficit in much of East Asia, I gather), so they get drunk very quickly. In fact, they get ill very quickly. But this physiological weakness does not seem to deter most of them. On the contrary, it only seems to make them drink even more stupidly. I theorise that Chinese drinking culture (which is based on rapid toasting and counter-toasting, the dreaded battlecry of gan bei being a challenge to empty your glass in one) is conditioned by the desperate imperative to get drunk before you throw up. As with almost every other culture in the world, getting drunk is seen as a sign of manly toughness; but the Chinese - mostly - find it very hard to get drunk, because alcohol makes them sick so damn quickly; and so they have no choice but to drink very, very fast.

You put this very rapid drinking (and comparative inexperience with being drunk, because no-one is able to get drunk very often, or to savour the experience for very long) together with the rather competitive/aggressive streak in the Chinese character, and with their over-developed sensitivity to social status and 'face', and you get..... fights between friends. Quite often over the bill (Chinese culture being that the person who pays the bill has the most 'face', and thus paying can be a fiercely contested-for 'honour'). Honestly, I've hardly ever seen a fight between strangers in China; it's almost always between people who were sitting down eating or drinking together as the best of buddies.

There's also a deep well of anger in many Chinese people. That's a complicated and perhaps contentious point. I wouldn't like to speculate too much on where it comes from - although various sources of high stress are easy enough to identify (low incomes, high levels of environmental pollution, traditional values which are still very restrictive, bewilderingly rapid social change, enormous pressures to 'succeed' in an increasingly materialistic culture, etc. - and perhaps, at least amongst those older than 35 or so, the lingering psychological impact of traumas suffered in their childhoods under Mao). And that's an aggression that exists within the context of a culture that generally emphasises extreme restraint, the avoidance of strong outward displays of emotion. The result seems to be that modern-day Chinese have just about no gradation of response. They are like VOLCANOES: seemingly dormant and harmless, yet apt to explode at a moment's notice. Really - they can go from mildly pissed off to bat-shit crazy in a matter of seconds.

And you really have to watch out for it, because when they start throwing bottles and chairs around..... they're not that accurate.