Is it In You? Well, It's In China

Food can be something of an issue in China. It’s not that the food here is bad. On the contrary, there are a slue of dishes that I love, even if I can hardly say their names. But eating Chinese food every day can be wearying. It’d be like going out to eat Chinese food every day of the week in the States. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do that. When you live in China, though, that’s basically what you’re doing. That’s why, just as I used to go to Chinese restaurants in America for a break from the domestic diet, I often go to restaurants that boast foreign food cuisine in China for a break from the domestic diet.

There is a pizza place in particular that has become a staple of my diet. I found it almost by accident, which, unless someone took you there, is the only way you could find it. It is located on a street that looks like any old street in Jinan. To the left of the restaurant is a karaoke bar and clothing store; to the right is an alley and a lady selling a variety of snacks and drinks out of her mobile store, which is little more than a wide, non-functioning refrigerator with wheels.

Most restaurants that boast foreign food in China are descript – that is, they are designed and marketed in such a way that you know they aren’t your run of the mill, rice-and-whatever restaurant. KFC, for instance, which is huge here in China, always boast huge cutouts of Colonel Sanders smiling invitingly at would-be customers down on the street. McDonald’s, also huge here, flaunts those golden arches at least as much as they do back home. And Pizza Hut – which price-wise is nothing less than fine dining in Jinan – has two locations here, each of which are encased by flashy walls of windows looking in, and table after table of affluent customers looking out.

Indeed, if a restaurant has foreign food on the menu, then a restaurant is something of a novelty (at least in Jinan). And if your restaurant is a novelty, then there is a good chance that you will let passersby know that your restaurant is a novelty by advertising, and advertising loudly.

But this restaurant doesn’t do that. Nope, it’s just slipped onto Any Street, with a nondescript green door acting as the gateway into an awesome (and reasonably priced) dining experience. They have pasta and French Fries and, above all, a variety of pizzas. All-veggie pizzas. All-meat pizzas. All-cheese pizza. And, my personal fave, The Hot One, which is decked with spices and peppers and all sorts of other goodness that you could expect from a legitimate pizzeria.

What makes this place all the more endearing is that the whole scene looks like a pizza joint from any college town in America. When you open the door, there is a 25-foot-long strip of the wood floor cutting down the middle of the narrow interior, leading to another door – this one with the top half cut out – that leads to the kitchen. On either side of that walkway are tables. The first six are tables with chairs; the ones closest to the kitchen are booths.

After my girlfriend and I eat our pizzas and play Scrabble for like two hours, she indulges me in a trip to a nearby basketball court. It’s 9:45 and dark, but these particular courts, which we stumbled upon last week, house basketball well into the night.

It’s a bizarre scene, unlike anything I’ve seen in America. There are maybe 20 courts, each partially lit by varying levels of light radiating from the streetlamps on the adjacent street. The courts are situated on the edge of a university campus, and the players who are shooting around tonight reflect that demographic. Guys (and one girl) from the ages about 18-20 are beating balls into the ground across a swath of land that spans about three-fourths the area of a football field. There are so many players, and so many balls, that it sounds like the basketball camps held at my old high school, where a few hundreds kids would squeeze into the high school gym and frantically run drills with the omniscient thwack of the balls resonating throughout the fieldhouse. Of course, there is no field house here. But the acoustics are such – what with the sprawl of concrete – that it is a veritable echo chamber, like a series of loudspeakers surround the area and are pumping in nonstop thwacks.

Tonight I am just snooping around, opting not to play on account of the nine-inch pizza and three beers occupying my stomach. But I do survey the scene with intrigue. It is kind of eerie, the way everything looks and sounds. You can make out where the people are, but the light is so faint on some of the courts that people are merely silhouettes, the noise of the ball revealing as much as anything you can actually see. You can tell that shots are getting lofted rimward, but with no nets, the only way to decipher between a make and a miss is to listen for the metallic clank of the rim. If there is a thud, they missed. No thud equals a make. Or an airball.

Luckily there are some things more discernable than makes and misses. Like, say, the plethora of sports drinks lining the sidelines. Unlike myself, the kids playing ball tonight have opted against beer, and are instead imbibing in bottles of Gatorade, which are sold – along with ice cream, candy and cigarettes – at a kiosk near the entrance. Seeing these bottles of Gatorade is nothing new, for Gatorade has, like adidas and the aforementioned KFC, made a concerted push into the Chinese market.

And the success of this push – and it has indeed been successful – is no doubt linked to Gatorade’s strategic marriage to basketball.

The ubiquity of Gatorade bottles now, in June of 2010, can be linked to a marketing move made back in March of 2007. It was back in ’07 that Gatorade expanded its relationship with the NBA, which itself was increasing its popularity march around the globe, in an effort to tap into Asian markets, China in particular. From the Sports Business Journal:

[Gatorade], which has been an NBA sponsor since 1984, becomes the 17th company to partner with the NBA in China….

“The NBA is growing internationally, and it makes sense to do it together,” said Gatorade’s Jeff Urban, who officially assumes his new role with the company as its senior vice president of sports marketing on April 1.

Gatorade’s expanded deal comes as the NBA targets aggressive growth in China leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The league is expected to play preseason games in China in October and is working to attract private investors to create a separate NBA China entity to further develop its international business.

Gatorade currently sells products in China but until now has never directly partnered with the NBA in those efforts.

The company is a sponsor of USA Basketball, which is marketed by the NBA. Last summer, Gatorade featured Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade on bottles of Gatorade sold in China when the men’s USA Basketball team played two exhibition games in Guangzhou leading up to the FIBA World Championships in Japan.

“We had a relationship with Gatorade in Hong Kong five years ago, but this is the first time they have partnered with us in China,” [an NBA official] said. “They were a major partner in USA Basketball and they had a ton of activation around the games in Guangzhou. That helped make their decision easy as they looked to do more with us in China.”

Gatorade also will activate on the grassroots level with the NBA in China by partnering with the league in the NBA’s Jam Van touring promotion that begins this month with visits to 24 cities in that country.

And from the Sports Business Daily:

Gatorade has expanded its NBA marketing partnership to include China for the first time as part of a multi-year renewal….

Gatorade, the official sports drink of the NBA, WNBA and NBA D-League, is also continuing to work with the NBA on a weekly basketball reality show called “NBA Zhi Zao” (“Made in the NBA”), which airs on 43 channels in China…

The move appears to have paid dividends. Not only is Gatorade the drink of choice the courts tonight, but also over at Shandong Normal, where Wang, the Refreshment Man, peddles Gatorade side-by-side with his water. And along with cigarettes, the chain-smoking dudes from that other university were indulging in bottles of Gatorade between games. (It’s unclear if Gatorade’s physiological properties can outweigh the effects of a pack of cigarettes, but that seemed to be what they were trying to figure out.)

And it’s not just basketball courts. You can find a bottle of Gatorade at any street shop (of which there are an infinite amount), and the sports drinks section at supermarkets are invariably huge. At least some of this boom is the result of Gatorade’s 2007 partnership with the NBA, a move that was in no way haphazard.

While PepsiCo, which owns Gatorade, has already invested heavily in China, and while anecdotal evidence (such as Gatorade-lined basketball courts) suggests that PepsiCo products like “G” are already going strong here, the company recently announced plans to pour even more money into the Chinese market. From the Associated Press:

PepsiCo Inc. said Friday that it plans to invest an additional $2.5 billion in China in the next three years on new plants and research facilities as the food and beverage maker builds up its presence in the growing market.

The company made the announcement in a news release Friday from Shanghai, site of the Shanghai Expo, where PepsiCo is a sponsor of the USA Pavilion. That planned spending is in addition to the $1 billion investment it announced in 2008 and plans to complete this year….

Money from PepsiCo's additional investment in China will be used to open 10 to 12 new manufacturing plants, create a new research and development center, open five new farms for potatoes and oats and to build its brands.

The company will research and develop new products just for the Asian market. It already offers drinks inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and Lay's potato chips in flavors tailored just to the market, including cool cucumber and crispy prawn.*

"We are building expertise and infrastructure now so that we can have a strong, sustainable manufacturing and agricultural base to serve the diverse and growing needs of consumers across China," Chief Executive Indra Nooyi said.

* I can attest that these are as nasty as they sound.

On an editorial note (do I need to specify that on a blog?), it is impressive what PepsiCo has done in China. PepsiCo not only owns Gatorade, but also some other successful enterprises in China. As I mentioned earlier, KFC and Pizza Hut are both big-time chains in China, and each is owned by PepsiCo (or, more accurately, by Yum! Brands, which was spawned by PepsiCo to handle the company’s restaurants).

It’s not at all uncommon for kids in class, when game time rolls around, to blurt out “Team KFC!” when I ask what they want their team name to be. Moreover, each of the three Jinan branches of my school have KFCs within walking distance; one of the schools has two KFCs within walking distance. And Pizza Hut is nothing less than fine dining in Jinan. I have only eaten there once, but on that one occasion I dropped more than 100 yuan for dinner. Convert it back to dollars, and it’s about the same that you’d pay back home. Anytime you convert something from yuan to dollars and it’s the same as you’d pay back home, you know that you’re spending a pretty penny for whatever it is that you happen to be buying. Tropicana juice and Doritos brand chips are also staples in Jinanese stores, and both of them are also owned by PepsiCo.

And tonight at least, PepsiCo also owns the sidelines.

This Might Be a Stretch, But...

As the warm water begins to replenish my body – much more quickly and efficiently than cold water ever could – I am reminded of a scene from the 1992 classic “White Men Can’t Jump.” Calling it a classic may seem foolish to some, but to basketball fans, especially basketball fans who, like I, saw that movie at an impressionable young age, it’s not a stretch.

The movie boasts some quality basketball scenes, plus it’s freaking funny. To boot, “White Men Can’t Jump” also deftly deals with the black-white divide in basketball, a phenomenon that’s painfully obvious but nary discussed. Whites can dig the movie because the main white character, Billy Hoyle, ultimately has his day in the basketball sun. And blacks, in part, may be drawn to it because the movie’s main black character, Sidney Dean, poignantly unleashes all of the white stereotypes. Plus he can ball.

Hoyle (and whites in general) is portrayed as naïve and, per skin color, out of place playing basketball. Plus his name is Billy Hoyle, which is such a perfect name for a white guy playing inner-city basketball (at least on par in the annals of all-time fictional hoops names with Jimmy Chitwood). Billy Hoyle must have either struck the writers in a split second, or was concocted only after hours and hours of deliberation. That is, Billy Hoyle is the product of either instantaneous genius or painstaking contemplation. It’s too good to be anything else.

Meanwhile, Dean (and blacks in general) is portrayed as needlessly flashy on the basketball court and something of a prick in real life. (“It’s hard work being this good!”…“I don’t mean to brag, but I’m the greatest!”…“Billy, you either smoke, or you get smoked. And you got smoked.”)

Hoyle articulates a sentiment that has crossed many a white minds when he delivers one of the movie’s more memorable quotes – memorable for its bluntness and resonance with basketball players, if not its poetic properties: “A black man would rather look good and lose than look bad and win.”

The goofy title, goofier clothes and unbroken stream of profanity may, to the lay basketball fan, give the movie a flippant feel, like it’s just some cuss-filled comedy starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, who between them have been in such hard-hitters as Kingpin and Passenger 57.* But White Men Can’t Jump is more than your run of the mill laugher. In fact, nearly 20 years later and thousands of miles away, here in early June, 2010, on the courts of Jinan, China, “White Men Can’t Jump” still has relevance.

* In fact, Snipes’ movie portfolio has devolved big-time last few years. He was in seven straight films from 2005 to 2008 that were straight-to-video. I guess you take the money where you can get it after you get hit with tax fraud charges and are forced to cut multi-million-dollar checks to the federal government.

Let me reset a scene from the movie. Billy stunned Sidney when the two played for money, and soon thereafter Sidney decides that they should team up for a little hustle. Sidney makes his way to a local court, where Billy is going to meet him, so the duo can dupe some people for money. They don’t have an elaborate scheme for how to work their hustle. Instead, they’re simply going to take advantage of the one thing Billy has that no one else does: white skin. After he has talked a sufficient amount of trash and ruffled a sufficient number of feathers, Sidney declares, “Five-hundred dollars! And you can pick anybody out here. Anybody!” His opponents are enticed. They can choose Sidney’s partner. It’s like they are the captains, but instead of picking the best players, they will simply pick, based on looks, the worst one they can spot.

The target of Sidney’s hustle, a guy named Raymond, scours the on-lookers, trying to find the person who looks least likely to pose a threat in a game that will result in someone pocketing $500. Raymond’s buddy then says, “Hey Raymond, look at the chump, man,” and points at Billy Hoyle, who mosied onto the sidelines while Sidney was busy laying the seeds of this game. “Give him the chump!”

Now, why is Billy such a chump? Well, there is of course the fact that he’s white and has entered an all-black court. There’s that. But there is also the fact that he’s stretching. And despite the physical rigors of basketball – and the coinciding usefulness of a good pre-game stretch – stretching in basketball, in America, isn’t as common as one may think. It is, however, exceedingly common in China, which is why I’m thinking about “White Men Can’t Jump.” (By the way, I am white and can’t jump.)

I have always been a big stretcher. I have back problems, which, along with my current addiction to massages, has prompted me to engage in some serious stretching. There is one stretch in particular, designed for the groin muscle, that is incredibly useful but totally awkward. I stumbled upon it when I was shelving videos at my library job and ended up taking home how-to DVD on yoga. (I worked at a library? Better believe it. Just part of the post-college employment fiasco that has landed me in China in the first place.)

To pull off this stretch, you plant one foot out in front of your body – say, your left foot – with toes facing forward. You bend that knee, and then plant your opposite foot, the right foot, behind you, parallel to the other foot but with the toes perpendicular to the first set of podiatric digits. So, at this point your left foot is in front of you, toes forward, and your right foot is behind you, toes running east-west, so to speak. Your body and face are of course facing the same direction as your back set of toes.

Next, you plant the coinciding hand of your front foot – in this case, the left hand – inside of the front foot, lean forward, and place that elbow against the inside front knee. You then torque your body with that front elbow, trying to swivel your hips around as much as you can. The resulting pull on one’s groin muscle – the groin of the front leg – is incredible. For added leverage, it helps to do the stretch close to a wall. Then, as you torque your body with the elbow of that planted hand, you can grasp at the wall with your other hand and yank a little bit more. It’s a killer stretch. (Describing it, however, may be beyond my literary acumen, so please don’t hurt yourself.)

As good as this stretch may be, though, it’s hopelessly awkward. Think about it. Your legs are stretched wide, and your feet are facing opposite directions. You are twisting your body with whatever force you can muster from your elbow, which is buried on the inside of your leg. And if, like me, you are looking for a little extra oomph, you are grasping at the nearest wall to corkscrew yourself even further. I used to do this stretch at the 96.5-percent-black gym I played at in the months after college, and I’d get more than a few stares. Just like people were starting at Billy Hoyle. Come to thin of it, this stretch may have been one reason that one particular player at my old gym took to calling me Billy Hoyle. I think he meant it is as an insult, but I of course took it as a compliment.

(It’s been my experience that stretching is a little more common among whites – and not just Billy Hoyle. My intramural basketball team used to get our stretch on before every game, even indulging one another in some partner stretches. Our favorite was one where two people sit down with their legs stretched in front of them, toes pointing toward the sky. You then press your feet against one another’s, and reach out and grab the other guy’s hands. One person then yanks the other forward – wait, maybe yank isn’t the best word to use when describing this…how about pulls. That’s a little better. Anyway, one person pulls the other, and then the visa-versa. I’ve never seen anyone doing this besides my old IM team, but the point is that whites, in my estimation, are a little less abashed about stretching than blacks.)

But whites are nothing compared to the Chinese, for the Chinese possess a zest for stretching that I had never seen before. This is, after all, a country that is known for massages, and it’s the nation which spawned Tai Chi, so the harmony and sanctity of one’s skeletal structure is treated with more reverence here – at least historically – than in pretty much any country in the world. (That is to say nothing of how they treat their lungs.)

You can see this affinity for stretching everywhere. Often times people will wave and flap their arms while they walk down the street, treating the sidewalk like a hitter may treat an on-deck circle. It’s also common to see Chinese people plop a foot upon a railing or wall and use it as a sort of stretching device. And then there are the ubiquitous exercise stations that line sidewalks all over this city and others throughout China.

Not surprinisngly, this stretching frenzy manifests on basketball courts, which serve as yet another venue in which the Chinese get their stretch on. On this day, there are any number of stretches going on at Shandong Normal U. There is the old standard where you stand with your legs spreads wide and lean forward to touch the ground. There are the arm flaps that are so wildly popular here. And there is one that my friend from America, who had chronic knee problems, used to do where you place your fingertips on your kneecap and gently move it around, almost swirling it, like your ACL is a rubber band that you’re are trying to give a few extra centimeters of elasticity.

As is the case with the warm water, I have wholeheartedly embraced this facet of Chinese culture. Like I said earlier, I have back problems, and I have for years been doing the types of quick, quirky stretches that people do here – the exaggerated shoulder shrugs, touching my toes, lunging and twisting and rubbing. I don’t know if this means I have a kindled spirit here, but maybe some kindled skeletons.

ALSO: I appreciate comments on this blog, but one of the many annoyances of publishing a blog from China is that I am apparently unable to leave comments. I do not know what is up with that; I do not know, for instance, why I can (sometimes) sign in and publish a post but cannot leave a comment. I have tried multiple proxies, and none allow me to comment. I do not want to seem like an ingrate by not responding, or like I do not care, or have not noticed; I am not, I do, and I have. I just have not yet figured out how to leave comments. I am glad that you have, though, so please continue to!

Some Like It Hot -- Water, That Is

The first thing I see when I get to Shandong Normal University is a troop of students wearing black caps and gowns. They are snapping photos of one another with those glowing, We Just Graduated! smiles. It reminds me of my own graduation a couple years back. I reckon it’s a commonly held sentiment, but the weeks right before and right after graduation are unforgettable for all the right reasons. These students (or ex-students) are smack-dab in the middle of that two-week stretch, and it’s fun to see.

I roar past them on my embarrassingly loud bike, leaving a trail of pungent, almost sour white smoke in my stead. I would love to see the carbon footprint of my motor bike, which is as loud as a racecar but as weak as the 240 yuan piece of junk it is. It burns oil and gas like a Chevy Suburban, and I fear that I will eventually be treated to a dastardly karmic payback – retribution for the oodles of crap I pumped into the air during my year in China. At the very least, I am doing a number on my respiratory system, as well as the lungs of any poor sap who happens to be behind me on the road. 

The bike doesn’t have a key, so when I park it next to the courts, I don’t turn it off so much as it just kind of winds down, groans and eventually goes to sleep. It’s like a computer that hasn’t been used for a few minutes, seemingly programmed to recognize when its work it over and react accordingly. Miraculously, it usually starts again when its rest is over. 

I traverse the ten feet to the gate, surveying the sparse action on the courts. It’s dead. There is one four-on-four game going, one three-on-three contest and then a few people just sitting around. I make a note of this desolateness and approach a guy who is sitting by himself at the base of a goal. He is resting in the shade with his legs stretched out and his back parked against the green metal pole that loops from the backboard into the ground.

I ask him if I can use his ball by saying, “Keyi bu keyi?” which literally means, “Can no can?” I don’t know if this is proper way to make the inquiry, but he seems to understand and lofts the ball into my waiting hands. I shoot plant-footed 8-footers for a few minutes and then lace up my kicks to take some earnest jump shots. It’s annoying, but I can’t help but think about Kobe Bryant as I’m shooting. The jump-shooting display he put on in the Lakers’ Western Conference-clinching win in Phoenix the other day was otherworldly, stuck in my mind like a great line may get planted in a poet’s mind. I hate Kobe, but when it comes to shooters jumpers, he is probably the best person on the planet to emulate. He is the Hemingway of jump shots: Hemingway was a drunk and by all accounts not a very nice person; Kobe is a pompous, lecherous prick. But my god, they are both good.

Sneakers snugly tightened, I do my best Kobe impersonation, shooting awkward, twisting jump shots just like he does. It strikes me that I’m 24 years-old and still fantasizing that I am a real basketball player, but I keep on going. I shoot by myself for a while before a few other guys who are about 20 years-old join me. We shoot lazily, and I notice that I am instinctively giving them their change when they hit a shot. As I’ve written in the past, the concept of giving someone their change is lost on Chinese players, but, just like it’s ingrained in me to pretend that I’m a famous player when I shoot around, it’s ingrained in me to give dudes their change.

After a few minutes, Wang, the Refreshment Man, hits the scene. He rolls up in what can best be described as a flatbed bike. There is one wheel out in front, like a normal bike, and not one, but two wheels in back, supporting a four-by-four deck. You see these flatbed bikes all over China. Sometimes people load them with recyclable trash; sometimes they’re rolling around with mini-kegs being delivered to a restaurant; sometimes there are people chilling back there. Befitting of his title of Refreshment Man, Wang is hauling a few hundred water bottles, packaged up in cases of 24.

Since we’re not playing a game, and are instead still just shooting around, I grab a buck and waltz over. He spots me as he’s unloading the cases and says, “OK!” Wang is about 50, probably 5-foot-6, and appears to be kind of doughy, like you wouldn’t get much resistance if you gave him a little poke. He is generally wearing a smile, as he is today. I respond with an OK! of my own and ask him for a water. He snares a bottle from his limitless bounty and hands it to me. I thank him in Chinese, to which he replies, “OK!” I turn back to the court and take a hardy gulp, and into my mouth rushes a quenching dose of crisp, clean, hot water.

Back home I would have scoffed at the idea of drinking warm water, especially while playing ball. At the gym that my friends and I most frequented in Kansas City, we used to have a specific water fountain that we’d head to between games. We passed three different fountains on the way to this magic fountain because its supply of H2O seemed to be about 15 degrees cooler than everywhere else. It was one of two fountains set into a wall down the hall from the courts, and there were times when my friends and I would patiently wait in line for this fountain while its twin fountain four inches away sat unused. But again, the colder the better. (I have a theory that, when there are two water fountains side by side, the one that is lower is always colder. Just drink for thought…)

Here, though, there aren’t water fountains. Nor, for that matter, is there cold water. It is one of the things that struck me as odd when I first arrived. But the Chinese are convinced that it’s good for health to drink warm water, and I’ve wholeheartedly bought in. (The Chinese are convinced of other things, as well, that I don’t subscribe to, like that walking backwards is good for your brain. It’s not unusual to see people walking backwards on sidewalks in the early morning. The Chinese are also huge fans of open windows. Even in the dead of winter, I would often walk into my classrooms only to see that my students had thrown the window wide open. As it was explained to me, Chinese people think it’s really bad to have the air in a room stagnate, so they open windows to get things circulating – even if it’s like 25 degrees outside. It’s unclear to me whether or not they think it’s unhealthy to sit in a freezing room. I haven’t, and won’t, buy into that one, nor will you ever find me walking backward.)

But the warm water? I’m hooked, as are the other 1.3 billion people who live here. And whether or not you think they’re legitimate, there are reasons behind the warm water obsession. As a blogger for the Global Times put it:

The abundance of hot water in China is also connected to Chinese medicine. It is better, according to Eastern wisdom, to drink hot water for the sake of digestion, and overall health. Water with ice in it can take longer for the stomach to digest since the body first has to expend energy to heat the water up to body temperature.

Others take it even further:

Some evidence suggests that by drinking hot water, we remove built up deposits in our nervous system. These deposits are responsible for creating negative thoughts and emotions. By removing these build ups, we can help to purify our thoughts and put us in a better emotional state. Drinking hot water can also actually purify the toxins out of your body….

And others take it even further:

Cold water can also in extreme circumstances lead to heart attacks. As we have our meals enzymes and acid secretions start and this process sort of warms up the body. Drinking cold water is like attacking the body with an exactly opposite temperature. Not only does the whole procedure of digestion gets interrupted or slows down, the body can also react in the form of a heart attack. It does not always come after a pain in the right arm or pain in the chest…

That’s not all…

Drinking hot water after meals reduces cancer risk. Let me explain how. Drinking cold water will solidify the oil part of the food we have eaten. This will slow down the digestion process. And when this sludge reacts with the digestive enzymes and acids, it will break down and will start getting absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. This lines the intestine. The consequence is that this will turn into fats and lead to cancer. Therefore it is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

Hot water has even been used as a legal alibi. A suspected thief died in February while being detained by authorities. The family was suspicious of the cause of death, but the police officers insisted that he “died suddenly while drinking hot water.”

I don’t necessarily buy in to these more far-flung reasons for drinking warm water – that it can reduce stress and help thwart cancer. But I do think there is credence to the suggestion that cold water is harder for your body to process because your body must warm it up in order to “use” it. It’s admittedly odd, but even on a day like today, the first day of June with the sun blaring, I don’t want cold water. If Wang had had a bucket filled with ice, and slipped bottles of water in there to make them cold, I would have grabbed one of the non-iced bottle that – like the one he gave me – had been baked by the sun. I’m done with cold water.

Kicking It at a Soccer Game

I have made no bones about how easy my job is. In fact, the disparaging remarks I’ve made about the shameful ease of my professional life could warrant its own label on the right side of this blog. The tag could be, “My job: the void in my soul,” or maybe, “Idiot’s guide to playing games with six-year-olds.”

Nonetheless, Sundays kick my ass. I teach from 8:00 to 5:15 each Saturday, and then turn around and clock an 8:00-to-7:00 shift on Sunday. Even if you’re just dicking around with kiddos and concocting variations of basketball and bowling that can be played in the confines of a hot, cramped classroom, working 11 straight hours will drain you. Sure, it’s not the same fatigue that a physicist has after a long day of crunching numbers, or the fatigue that a college student has after churning out a trio of final exams in one week. But still, Sundays are brutal.

But somehow, I summon the energy at the end of day today, Sunday, to join some co-workers for a professional soccer match here in Jinan. Jinan is home to Shandong’s team in the Chinese Super League, which is China’s (bastardized) equivalent to the English Premiership or the German Bundesliga. Founded in 2004, the CSL has 16 teams. Shandong won the whole thing in 2008 and 2006, and last season the squad finished fourth. So we have a decent side to support.

I get off work at 7:00, hop on my bike and take a 10 minute jaunt over to Shandong Provincial Stadium, which I’ve driven past but never been inside. With the setting sun as the backdrop, I can see the stadium from at least a half-mile away. I can’t tell if it is an abomination or an interesting bit of architecture. It is shaped like an oval and dwarfed by four massive banks of lights jutting inward, like they used to stand upright but have since been slanted by a microburst. Built in 1988, it has some vague, fleeting sense of communism. Every inch of it is gray, and the flashing neon lights that dot the upper perimeter don’t hide the fact that the structure itself is utterly devoid of color – and life. It’s like they went out of their to build it in such a way that no one could possibly have any opinion about it, good or bad.

I don’t know if they’re going to sell beer inside, so I stop and buy four cans of Tsingtao at a nearby supermarket. (Interestingly, Tsingtao cans have more alcohol than the bottles – 4.3 percent to 3.1 percent.) I park my ride at a nearby intersection, which has turned into a quasi-parking lot, and pay the overseer one yuan for her trouble. She is probably 65 years-old and walks with a noticeable limp. As I’m locking up my bike, she keeps on pointing to my basket, which holds an old, falling-apart pair of shoes (which act as my brakes). I reckon that she is telling me that she’s not responsible if the shoes get stolen, but if someone steals those things, they probably need them more than I do.

I weave my way through the throngs of people hocking tickets. It’s not entirely clear whether they are sanctioned ticket vendors or scalpers, and I don’t have the linguistic chops to figure that out. One of these vendors/scalpers is literally standing at the window for the actual ticket office when I get there. He points to a map of the stadium as he tries to coax me into paying 200 yuan for a ticket that is apparently worth 300 yuan. But I have no intention of paying even 200, especially when my objective is to simply get in and find my friends who are already inside (they don’t have to work until 7, like I). I pay 30 yuan for a ticket and walk over to the line to get in.

In an exchange that is 40 percent speaking and 60 percent pointing, I ask a security guard if it’s cool for me to take some beers into the venue. I have little doubt that it’s allowed because, after all, you can take beer almost anywhere in China (or at least Jinan). You can B.Y.O.B. at restaurants, and no one will think twice if you are walking down the street with a brew or even if you hop on a bus toting some suds. Not that it’s common to see people traipsing around with beer, but it’s certainly not a huge deal. This phenomenon of unmitigated drinking prompted one of my co-workers’ friends to opine, after a visit to China, that people in China are freer than people in America. In the case of alcohol, it’s probably true. (In the case of the media, Internet and a semblance of a democratic legal process, it’s probably not true.).

Alas, the security guard delivers the bad news that you can’t bring your own beer, and I am left with a slight conundrum: should I down these four beers as quickly as I can and miss the first several minutes of the game (which has just begun), or should I part with the booze in exchange for catching all the action. That’s when I remember that it’s soccer, not basketball, and as such there IS no action. (Mandatory dis on soccer for being boring, check). I trade 12 minutes of game time for the four beers, then I go in.

Once in, I set out to find my buddy Toby. Working against me are the facts that I have no idea where he is, that this is a 40,000-seat stadium and that I’m slightly buzzed. Working in my favor is the fact that Toby is a 6-5 black dude, and in China, 6-5 black dudes are about as common as teetotalers at Mardi Gras. It takes me all of three or four minutes to spot Toby, who is sitting just about parallel with the end line on the west side of the stadium. I join him and his Chinese girlfriend for the remainder of the first half, which thoroughly dispels my notion about soccer being devoid of action. In the 30 minutes that I catch, there are three goals (two by Jinan), and two more shots clank off the crossbar. In addition, there are a pair of sizeable scuffles – big enough to prompt guys to enter the fray from the bench and for the ref to give guys yellow cards. It’s actually pretty exciting.

The fans also add to the entertainment. Now, the place is still empty – there are probably 12,00 people. But the fans who are in attendance are doing a hell of a job making it feel lively. Part of that zest manifests in timely, knowledgeable cheering. And part of it comes in the form of venomous chants directed at the other team’s fans. That venom may be due to the fact that the opponent was from Hunan, and according to Toby’s girlfriend, Hunan doesn’t have the best reputation in China. I don’t have any proof of Hunan’s shady underbelly – and neither does she. But when it comes to vilifying and discriminating against people for nothing more than their place of birth, you can argue that rumors and perception are (at least) as important as the facts. With disdain in her voice, Toby’s girl says that Hunan is known for criminals, and that it is the epicenter or China’s vast fake clothing market. Again, I don’t know if this girl was spitting facts or B.S., but she took them to be fact, and that’s what’s pertinent here. The hatred being spewed toward the Hunan fans backed up the idea that Hunan is indeed loathed, at least by people from Shandong.

The Hunan cheering section, which is off to the left as I look at the field, is small. There are probably 200 people wearing Hunan jerseys, waving Hunan flags, and chanting Hunan chants in a sectioned-off nook of the stadium behind the north goal. There are nearly as many security guards sitting in that section as there were fans, to either prevent or protect. The Shandong fans are shouting and pointing quite a bit during the first half, especially when the little scuffles broke out, but that disdain only intensifies after the break. Hunan quickly knots the score at two apiece, and this seems to galvanize their supporters. They are boisterous as ever, and when Shandong makes a few substitutions, the Hunan fans start up a chant that, according to Toby’s girlfriend, was something to the effect of, “You switch one c*^t for another c*^t!” There are all sorts of other things being chanted and yelled, but Toby’s girlfriend can’t quite make it out. Suffice it to say that they aren’t well-wishes.

As for the actual soccer, it’s not that great. Even I can tell that there are a lot of flubbed chances. There is one play in particular where the Hunan defender falls flat on his ass, allowing a Shandong player to race unabated up the sideline with the ball. Somehow, despite being handed a golden opportunity, the team doesn’t so much as get off a shot. And then there is another play by Hunan where they have a free kick from about 25 yards out. One player taps the ball to his right, directly in the path of a streaking teammate who is all geared up to smash the ball goalward. Well, he smashes it all right – about 20 feet over the crossbar. He was roundly applauded and mocked by the crowd, but truth be told, he is no worse than any of Shandong’s players.*

* Quick note: as is the case with professional basketball in China, professional soccer teams are allowed only a few foreigners. Shandong’s foreigners are Fred Benson (Netherlands), Siniša Radanović (Serbia) and Carlos Santos de Jesus (from Brazil, by way of Croatia), and Roda Antar (born in Freetown, Sierra Leone). None of them appear to be any good.

After the game, I say goodbye to my friends and walk along the sidewalk toward the intersection housing my bike. As I walk, I notice a throng of Shandong fans conglomerating on the north side of the stadium. They are yelling with great hostility, but when I look at the stadium to see who they are yelling at, I see no one. The crowd and the yelling swell, and the tangible sense of hostility intrigues me to the point where leaving is out of the question. I join the throng, unable to deduce what’s going but hopelessly curious nonetheless.

Eventually people in the crowd take to throwing water bottles at the stadium. The stadium has two tiers, and they are launching them at the upper tier. I immediately feel bad for whatever poor sucker(s) is standing on the concourse up there, but upon inspection, there is no one standing there. It’s just an empty concourse and a 10-foot-wide entryway into the a section of seats. Yet the Shandong fans keep chucking, bottle after bottle. A roar goes up when one of the bottles finds its way into the entryway; that’s where they are aiming. More and more bottles are launched at that entryway. At this point it becomes like that scene from Independence Day where all of the planes take aim at the alien spacecraft – that entryway is the spacecraft, the people are the planes, the bottles the missiles. I still can’t tell what’s going on though, but the bottles keep flying.

Finally, I conjure up an image of the stadium in my head and realize that this entryway – which is labeled with a giant “7” – must be just about where the Hunan fans’ section was. Yeah, that’s about right: I was sitting along the end line, to the west, and then I exited and walked around the north end of the stadium, which is where I am now. The Hunan section was to my left as I watched the game – to the north, that is – and now there are hundreds of people standing around the northern concourse, more than a few of them hurling water bottles at the entrance into the section of seating that must have been at least close to the Hunan sheering section.

The cops eventually break up the bottle-throwing party and I gladly head home. It would have been fun to see what transpired had the Shandong fans been allowed to persist, but at the same time I’m pretty tired. It is, after all, Sunday.

Should anyone have read this and expected it would at some point turn to basketball, I promise we’ll get back to hoops soon…

No South Paws in the Far East

There are any number of things that induce giggle-fits from the young’uns I teach. For instance, they invariably get a kick out of it when I stroll into class with coffee, which is a relatively recent addition to China’s beverage market (but a long-standing staple of my diet). And there is a virtual riot whenever we play a game and one of the teams’ point totals lands on 250, or “er bai wu.” In China, er bai wu is akin to an insult, derived (apparently) from ancient China when strings of currency were always lumped 500 at a time. Therefore, if you are er bai wu, you are essentially half a person. It’d be like calling someone an idiot.

Another teacher, who happens to be left-handed, told me that her left-handedness is nothing less than a point of amazement in her classrooms. When she wrote her name on the board on the first day of the term, the kids in each of her classes flipped. At first she didn’t understand what was so funny. Was it her handwriting? Was there something stuck to the back of her pants? But when she asked, she was told that it was simply the fact that she’s left-handed. Because in China, there aren’t lefties.

Well, that’s only partially true. Genetically speaking, there are indeed lefties. Roughly 11 percent of human beings are left-handed, whether they’re born in China or America or Cambodia or wherever. Thus, there are roughly 130 million people here who are technically left-handed. But if a child has a physical preference toward being left-handed, then they are trained from a young age to spurn that tendency and use their right hand, which, in China, is the right hand to use.

The blogger Ben Ross rehashed a conversation that he had with a Chinese-born gentleman who had moved to America.

…When the conversation turned to culture shock, I asked him what he thought was the strangest thing he saw when he first came to the US.

“Left handed people,” he replied without any hesitation.

“You don’t have left-handed people in China?” I inquired, making sure I hadn’t mistranslated his words.

“Nope, I had never seen anybody write with their left hand until I came to the US” he said.

“How is that possible?” I asked, “Isn’t that genetic?”

“Maybe so, but in China kids are all taught to write with their right hands. If they pick up a pencil with their left hand, the teacher will put it in their right. It’s really just a matter of practicality. In the US, you have left-handed desks, left-handed guitars, and all sorts of other left-handed devices, but in China we have none of the sort. It works out better that way I think, no need to manufacture two different kinds of something when only one is necessary.”

His story is corroborated by Wikipedia:

In ancient China, the left has been the “bad” side. The adjective "left" (Chinese character: 左, Mandarin: zuǒ) means “improper” or “out of accord”. For instance, the phrase “left path” (左道, Mandarin: zuǒdao) stands for illegal or immoral means. The character for “left”, 左 depicts a left hand attending to work. In contrast, the character for “right”, 右 (Mandarin: yòu) depicts a right hand in relation to the mouth, suggesting the act of eating.

One more anecdote, from the China Economics Blog:

One game that some colleagues and I play when undertaking 3 hour exam invigilations in the UK is to count the number of left handed students. When there are 100 students you usually end up with around 10%. This has been fairly consistent over the years.

Imagine my surprise therefore to hear that there are no left handed people in China.

Of course, there is nary a better manifestation of one’s preferred hand than the jump shot. After all, the jump shot – or at least the act of shooting, be it a free throw or set shot – is basketball’s intrinsic act. There is nothing like it in any other sport, and you can only do it with your strong hand. There are a lot of things in sports that you can do with either hand. In football, you can (and should) tote the ball with both hands, and on defense, tackling is a full-body endeavor. In baseball, many players can switch hit. And save moments when players wind up for slap shots, I can’t tell what’s going in hockey. Sure, you can do things with both hands in basketball, like dribbling and passing. But you can’t shoot a jumper with both hands. 

Like most of the Chinese, I play with my right hand. Unlike the Chinese, I sport Zack Greinke T-shirt jerseys and Florida State basketball shorts.

I’m thinking about handedness while I watch Game 4 of the Western Conference semis between the Lakers and Suns. Of the 10 starters, there is one lefty, Lakers point guard Derek Fisher, who has a ceiling-scraping jump shot that flies so high out of his left hand that it seems there is no way it could possibly find the net. (All too often, it does.) Thus, the starting lineups are reflective of the general population – exactly 10 percent are left-handed.

The percentage is exceeded, however, when the backups spell the starters. Off the Lakers bench comes Lamar Odom, a lefty, and the Suns send left-handed Yugoslavian Goran Dragic in for Steve Nash. All told, 19 players play in Game 4, and three of them – or about 16 percent – are left-handed. 

Nineteen is a pretty small sample size, though, so let’s look at the Eastern Conference Finals as well. In Game 4 of the dud series between Orlando and Boston, not one of the 20 players who took the court was left-handed – or, none of them played left-handed. One of them, though, Dwight Howard, was actually born left-handed. From his Web site:

A lot of people don’t know it, but when I was growing up I was totally left-handed. I wrote left-handed, held a fork left-handed and shot the ball left-handed.

But when I was in the eighth grade I tried to dunk on a guy and he undercut me and I landed on my left hand and broke my left wrist. After that, I taught myself to write with my right hand, eat right-handed and shoot the basketball with my right hand.

(Unfortunately for Orlando, he never figured out how to shoot a free throw with his right hand; he’s a 59.9 percent career free throw shooter. He missed five free throws in each of the first two games of the Boston series, and the Magic lost by three in each game.)

If you include Howard as a lefty, then four of the 39 players who played in each series’ respective Game 4s were left-handed. That’s 10.25 percent, or almost exactly the same percentage as the general population. I reckon that this percentage holds up on courts all over America. I can’t say for sure because I was never scrapping for things to blog about in America (and therefore never studying which hand people were using to loft shots at the goal). But I think one out of 10 seems about right. I know my intramural team in college had one lefty. I know that the gym I used to frequent in Kansas City boasted the occasional lefty, and I know that the Kansas Jayhawks had one lefty last season (Xavier Henry). I never kept tabs on this back in States, but I would say that, as is the case in the NBA playoffs, about 10 percent of U.S. ballers I played with were left-handed. 

This kid in Beijing shot right-handed, even if he shot on monkey bars and not a basket.

I want to keep tabs this afternoon, however, so I set out for a little anthropological study. I dart over to Shandong Normal at about 4:30, fighting rush hour traffic on my crummy little motor bike all the while. It takes little more than a single taxi ride in China to realize that drivers here are crazy, at least crazy in sense that they operate with inches the way drivers in the States operate with feet. If you planted an American driver behind the wheel in a Chinese city (myself included), they’d get in a wreck within minutes. Conversely, if you put a Chinese driver in American suburb, they might go crazy because there isn’t enough traffic. I knew that traffic here was bonkers the moment I left the Beijing airport. But until I got my motor bike, I didn’t realize exactly how crazy it was; now it is up-close. And because my bike doesn’t really have breaks – I keep an old pair of shoes in the basket and an angel on my shoulder – it’s all the more precarious. If this blog ever suddenly ceases, Chinese traffic may be the culprit.

The girls play right-handed, too.

Anyway, I make it to Shandong Normal easily enough. There is a huge gaggle of people watching a women’s basketball game being held on one of the courts nearest the front gate. I have never seen women play full-court games in China, let alone witnessed an all-girl duel with spectators lining the sidelines making all sorts of noise, so this is unusual. (There will likely be a post devoted to women’s basketball at a future date…) But I’m not worried about the sex of the players, just the hand they’re using to shoot. And which one was it? Right, right, right. There are a few of them who are savvy with their left-handed dribble, but no one is shooting left-handed.

I then move on to the other courts, occupied by guys, to take in some half-court four-on-four games. I mosey around for about 25 minutes – not trying to get into a game, not seeking out English speakers, just watching for those hands. Over the course of my nearly half-hour of watching jump shots, I see one guy shoot left-handed. One. I don’t know exactly many people I saw shoot, but I know that, between the ladies and the guys, I saw at least 50 or 60 people heave shots, and one was left-handed. Definitely not 10 or 11 percent. 

The one lefty!

After I do my highly unscientific research at Shandong Normal, I ride back home to play with a friend who recently got back from a jaunt to Qingdao. We walk to the courts that we share with our annoying co-habitants from the boarding school, passing a pair of four-on-four games. (There are no lefties.)

Within moments, a hoard of kids comes over and asks us to play. We begrudgingly comply, and proceed to play our own four-on-four games. This adds eight more people to the sample size, and no one is left-handed. That makes it close to 60 or 70 different people who I have seen launch shots today, and only one is left-handed. There must be more left-handed people than this one guy.

I’ll keep an eye out for more lefties in the future, but the early returns are that there aren’t a lot of lefties. But hey, that’s all right.

Up Fake: China’s Booming Fake NBA Market

Today I wake up at 6:45, drink some coffee that makes me yearn for Starbucks, write for a different Web site and sit down to watch the Suns and the Lakers play Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals.

The Suns fended off L.A. behind 17 points and 15 assists from Steve Nash, making the series 2-1 and, with Boston already up 3-0 on Orlando, sparing the NBA the ominous possibility of dual sweeps in the Eastern and Western Conference Finals (on the heels, no less, of sweeps in three of the four conference semis).

After that, I text Li Ball and ask if he and the gang are going to play any ball today. Five o’clock, he texts back. I write until five and bike over to the courts.

We shoot around for a bit and I hop in the first game. No one is keeping score, but after about 20 minutes the hoard of players waiting to play goes from zero to six, and scorekeeping is invoked to regulate playing time. There are a variety of players waiting – a young guy who couldn’t have been older than 20, a few old guys built like houses, a 30-something who, from the smell of things, had been drinking prior to his arrival. 

And then there was one dude wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves jersey. He caught my eye for a few reasons. First, you don’t often see Minnesota Timberwolves jerseys here. Cleveland and Boston and definitely the Lakers, but not Minnesota. They don’t have any transcendent stars (sorry, Kevin Love), it isn’t a major city (just ask Ricky Rubio), and they were horrible last season (15-67 horrible, lost-their-last-seven-games horrible).

The other reason I notice this guy’s Timberwolves jersey is because it doesn’t say Timberwolves. It says “Tim erwolves,” with a gap where the B should have been. That there is either a typo or the thing is falling apart suggests one thing: the jersey is, in Chinese parlance, jiade. Fake.

Jiade clothes in China are everywhere. At the end of my shopping expedition today I was toting a “Ralph Lauren” shirt and a pair of “adidas” soccer jerseys. Those quotation marks are necessary, because while the tag says one thing, you are no doubt buying another. The Polo shirt, for instance, ran me a total of 39 yuan (less than $6). You can’t buy Ralph Lauren shirts for $6. The jerseys were a steal too. Here is one of the ones I bought, the Spanish national team road kit.

It came equipped with adidas tags, and it has that bright yellow adidas emblem right below the neck. Heck, it even says “climacool” on it, signifying that it is part of adidas’ high-priced climacool line of technologically advanced sports gear. It looks and feels real. Trust me, though, it’s not adidas; it’s jiade. Proof? It cost me 60 yuan. In the real world, it costs $70 USD, or roughly eight times what I bought it for.

China’s fake-clothing (and fake-everything) industry has been reported ad nauseum. Reuters wrote this article about counterfeit items – including DVDs that hit the shelves before movies hit the theatres – well over a year ago. The Seattle Times wrote this two-parter in 2006, as George W. Bush was preparing to land in China to deliver a “stern message to Chinese officials about the need to crack down on knockoffs of U.S. products” and pound home the assertion that “90 percent of all intellectual property in China is pirated.” This photo gallery was posted in 2007, showing how a traveler to China can find authentic “Paradi” clothing, “PenesamiG” batteries, and even “Sccoby” shirts (if you like the timeless comic strip Peanuts). And one of my favorites: someone posted this query on Yahoo! Answers, asking, “Where can I find fake clothes in Shanghai?” One of the respondents simply answered, “everywhere”.

(On a personal note…a while back I bought every single episode of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, South Park and The West Wing from a jiade DVD market. The total cost ran me about 50 yuan, or less than $8. That bounty would have cost me close to a few thousand dollars in America. Just think: at the time, The Simpsons had 17 seasons, and if you went to Best Buy or some other outlet, it’d be $40 per season. The Simpsons alone, therefore, would have cost me right about $700. South Park had at least a dozen seasons; that’d be $450 worth of discs. Seinfeld had nine seasons, or about $350, and the West Wing had seven season, or about $300. Add it up, and we’re talking about a lot of money. And still I got it all for eight bucks. Sure, the Chinese versions of these DVDs don’t have director commentaries, and they aren’t as sharp visually. But we’re not talking about watching Avatar or the Super Bowl. We’re talking about The Simpsons and Seinfeld. Hi-def isn’t important. Plus the jiade discs come complete with funny attempts at English like PALY AL instead of PLAY ALL, or DIC NE instead of DISC ONE.)

So yeah, China’s counterfeit industries – from clothing to DVDs to electronic goods – is and has been booming. And that boom has been chronicled for years.

But the one sub-sect of the jiade industry that is especially interesting to me (and pertinent to this blog) is the NBA basketball merchandise: shoes, jerseys and T-shirts, not to mention the NBA itself and its most prized commodity, the players. You can find all sorts of basketball stuff in China that is egregiously counterfeit. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

This is a Kobe Bryant shirt that I saw in Yangshuo. It looks normal enough, right? Well, there’s one problem. Bryant and adidas, which supposedly produced the shirt, parted ways in 2002. This shirt, therefore, is an infringement on Kobe’s current contract with Nike. Or it would be an infringement if it were the least bit real. (The NBA logo is thrown in just to make sure the maximum number of entities are being had.)

Like that Bryant shirt, these socks look pretty legit. The packaging is adorned by the NBA’s best young player, LeBron James, and those Nike and adidas logos look pretty darn real. Therein lies the problem: Nike and adidas…sharing identical packaging…and sharing the same player. Not likely. As with Bryant, LeBron inked a bajillion dollar deal with Nike, a deal which prohibits his likeness from being used by adidas to sell products. Of course, this isn’t adidas’ doing. (Quick note on LeBron’s contract with Nike. It was a seven-year deal completed in May of 2003 when LeBron was 18 years-old, and it was worth $90 million. Not only was LeBron 18, but he was more than a month away from even being drafted. I still find that unthinkable. All of it. Especially the fact he was 18.)

Notice anything wrong here? Nike packaging for a pair of socks that aren’t Nike. The logo resembles that of Saucony, but I really can’t be sure. Whatever it is, it isn’t Nike.

Here’s Kobe Bryant’s mug being used to sell some unlicensed merchandise.

The NBA is getting ripped off in all of these pictures because both its logo and players are being strewn about products that aren’t legitimate. But this one is especially egregious. Notice that there are three different companies, side by side, whoring out the NBA logo. Jerry West would be ticked.

Not only does this guy bear a striking resemblance to Frederick Sykes, but he is wearing some jiade clothing as well. If you go here, you’ll see that all L.A. Lakers gear is manufactured by adidas, even lame T-shirts that say stuff like “Where The Black Mamba Strikes.” I say we put Dr. Richard Kimble on the case.

I just can’t believe that the NBA or the Chicago Bulls would sanction this abomination: a quasi-cowboy hat with a huge Bull on it. Everyone who won all those Bulls championships – Jordan and Pippen and Jackson and the crew – is still alive. But when one of them dies, he will roll over in his grave because of this.

Finally, the Mother Lode. An entire wall lined with fake jerseys. Here we have, from left to right, LeBron, Carmelo, KG, Kobe, Derrick Rose and, cut off because the cameraman is a hack, an old Allen Iverson 76ers jersey. Unlike that previous pic of the Lakers jersey that had no brand logo, these jiade jersey are adorned by adidas’ three stripes. 

Alas, they’re all fake. They sell for 150 yuan, or about $22. Online, adidas sells these for $79.99. And it’s not like adidas is philanthropic in China and simply hooks up the citizenry. I’ve bought two pairs of adidas shoes here – real shoes, from a real adidas outlet store – and the conversion is exactly one-to-one. For instance, the Derrick Rose basketball kicks I bought last November were about 700 yuan, or a hair over $100. That’s precisely what they would be back home.

I’m not interested in philosophizing about the morality of counterfeit NBA gear (or counterfeit anything). You can argue (quite successfully) whatever point you want. On the one hand, sure, it’s ripping people off. It’s screwing Kobe and LeBron and the NBA out of royalties that, legally, should be theirs. In that sense, it is immoral. But at the same time, it’s hard to feel too sorry for these multimillionaires missing out on a slice of their jersey sales, jerseys that are priced through the roof because these guys likely wouldn’t have signed their respective deals for anything less than the GDP-sized sums they did. 

Plus, these products are good for the Chinese economy. People have jobs making this bogus merchandise, and regular Chinese citizens – most of whom aren’t rich enough to pay $80 USD for a shirt – can rock their favorite gear. From that Seattle Times article:

Counterfeiting has become deeply entrenched in China's economy as a source of income for both small-time hawkers and powerful local tycoons. With millions of jobs dependent on the counterfeit trade, many in China think cracking down would mainly benefit foreign companies.

I’m in no position to pass judgment; I’m not an innocent bystander. Indeed, I own my own slice of China’s vast fake basketball clothing market: a Larry Bird 1992 All-Star Game jersey that my brother bought me two years ago. With a huge star adorning the chest and a hefty dose of early-90s font, it is the epitome of Old School, and I love it. 

I used to get such a kick out of seeing the look of dudes’ faces when I strolled into an all-black gym wearing this Larry Bird jersey. I’m not imposing physically (at all), so the perception was far more “dorky” than “savvy.” I usually played pretty well in it though, channeling my inner Bird and deriving the magical residue that was surely imbued into that jersey, even if it was jiade.

He's on Fire! Smoking and Basketball in China

For the most part, you can bet that someone will grab one of three things when one game ends in America: a phone, a drink or a ball. Here, people light up, sucking down cigarettes instead of gulping down water.

I receive a text today at about noon from my buddy Brince. Brince and I met through a mutual friend, and not once have we done anything besides playing basketball. Sure, we’ve been in taxis together on the way to the courts, and we’ve gotten something to eat after we played, but basketball has been the catalyst for each and every interaction that we’ve ever had. That’s not to say that all of our conversations are mundane rants about the NBA. Come to think of it, we’ve actually talked about some pretty heady stuff considering that basketball is the crux of our friendship. But the fact remains, basketball is the crux of our friendship.

Brince is 27 years-old. He came to Jinan on a six-month teaching contract. That was about four years ago now. When his contract expired and it came time to ask himself what he wanted to do next, he simply couldn’t spurn the lifestyle that he was living. It was an easy decision to rationalize. He works at a university – not a private school like myself – and logs about 12 hours a week, and during the summers he works at a basketball camp that his buddy started. So he has his summers off (save playing some basketball) and he makes a nice salary by working 12 hours a week. More than a few people would have trouble opting out of that for a 9-5.

His text asks if I want to play basketball. It’s one of those days were it’d be hard not to play basketball. The weather is ideal, there’s little breeze, and hell, even the pollution is complying: it’s the first day in a long while where you’d actually have to use your hand as a visor if you were to look skyward. There is generally a smoggy tint between Jinan and the sun that knocks its intensity down about five shades. But not today. Today it’s blue skies. Plus, with the NBA playoffs in full tilt, I simply have basketball on my mind. There is other stuff that I could be doing, like figuring out my life in light of the Northwestern debacle; reconciling the fact that I want to get into journalism even though there are no journalism jobs; deliberating my next move when it comes to re-signing with my current employer or figure out something else to do with my life. Practical considerations abound, stuff that I really need to figure out, but I still can’t help but think it would be a sin not to play.

I eagerly text Brince back that I do indeed want to play, and that I could probably coax my buddy Jonathan into playing as well. Brince calls about an hour later to make sure that we still want to play (we do), and we arrange a place to meet. I suggest Shandong Normal University, where I’ve played with Brince before. “Nah, man,” he says. “I want some competition!” Apparently there is better competition at a different university, and that’s where we’ll play. I couldn’t care less what the venue is.

We get to the university and the competition seems about the same. There is one guy who is exceptionally athletic but can’t hit a shot to save his life. Brince knows him from previous encounters, and says to Jonathan and I, “He’s a tennis player. That’s his love.” I can easily see him darting from side to side on a tennis court, sending balls back whence they came with a ferocity and grace that only a freak athlete like this guy would have. Luckily for us, he’s not that good at basketball.

Brince, Jonathan and I add a Chinese player to our team and begin to play. We lose our first game, sit for about 10 minutes, and then reel off a string of four straight wins. The party doesn’t last forever – the tennis player eventually dooms us – and we retreat to a nearby kiosk to buy some water. Upon our return, I see something that I have become almost immune to: The guys waiting to play in the next game – who have just lost but, because there are four teams cycling through, will have to wait for a few minutes – are smoking cigarettes. They’re getting ready to take the court by sucking down cancer sticks. Nuts.

Between games in the States, people check their phones for missed calls or texts. They scurry off to the water fountain to steal a drink. They shoot around or stretch or sit down and chat. These rituals pervade courts the country over. There are surely variations on these rituals. Maybe people in North Dakota run inside to down some hot chocolate instead of ice water. In L.A., maybe people check for emails on the BlackBerries instead of texts on their phones. But for the most part, you can bet that someone will grab one of three things when one game ends and the next one has yet to begin: a phone, a drink or a ball.

Here, people light up, sucking down cigarettes instead of gulping down water. It’s crazy by American standards, but if you remember this is China, then 18- to 30-year-old men smoking cigarettes isn’t a stunner.

China, after all, has an estimated* 300-350 million smokers. There are more smokers here than there are people in the United States. Moreover, it’s somewhat uncommon to see women smoke. Some do, sure, but there is still a seemingly hardened taboo about women smoking, especially in public. You just don’t see it. Thus, the vast majority of those 300-350 million smokers are men.

* Quick note about that link, from the Telegraph in London. I used it because it had the 350 million smokers stat, but the article itself is about a province in China where citizens were forced to smoke local cigarettes in an effort to bolster the province’s tobacco market. “Three ‘non-compliant’ cigarette butts were discovered by the ‘cigarette marketing consolidate team’ which informed the teacher he had violated the related civil servants ‘cigarette usage rule’ After some negotiation the school was spared a fine, but subjected to ‘public criticism” for ‘undisciplined practices’.” That the government was forcing its citizens to smoke a certain variety of cigarette suggest that there isn’t a great deal of anti-tobacco rhetoric coming from Beijing.

As the numbers suggest, smoking culture is just different in China than in the U.S. For the past few years, from about 2006 to 2009, there was a seismic shift in smoking laws and regulations in the States. During my tenure in college – 2004 to 2008 – the numbers of places you could smoke shrunk and shrunk. During those years I was going to school in Colorado and spending my summer and winter breaks in Kansas City, and I know everything changed in Colorado, Kansas and Missouri during my college years. As a non-smoker myself, I watched the evolution of smoking laws with glee. First restaurants banned smoking. Then bars in Kansas. Then bars in Colorado. Then bars in Missouri, which my smoking friends had viewed as a refuge from the oppressive non-smoking types lording over the other side of the Kansas-Missouri state line. In a way, it still seems bizarre that you can’t smoke in bars. Philosophically, I’m opposed to that: since when are bars designated as healthy venues? Practically, though, I’m all for it. I’d just as soon not be surrounded by smoke.

Well, it’s different here. You can smoke pretty much anywhere. You can smoke in restaurants; parents and teachers alike light up every day in the stairwells at my school; you can buy cigarettes at newsstands, restaurants, anywhere. It’s a little different in Beijing, where the 2008 Summer Olympics prompted the city to take some anti-smoking strides that resulted in smoking being outlawed in some restaurants and common areas like train stations. Still, though, it’s nothing like the States. Smoking is allowed and accepted almost anywhere – including basketball courts.

People smoke here like it’s not bad for you, which, according to my parents, is how people used to smoke in the States in the ’50s and ’60s. But just because people are unabashed about smoking doesn’t make it healthy. Oxford University and Cornell University conducted a corroborative study, discussed here by the BBC, looking at smoking and smoking deaths in China. The hypothesis of the study: smoking may eventually kill one-third of all young Chinese males if the trends continue unabated. According to the study, China has the largest number of smoking-related fatalities in the world. That may seem like a no-brainer considering the population numbers, but the study says that China’s smoking issues transcend the population numbers: “Surveys showed two-thirds of Chinese people think smoking does little or no harm, 60% think it does not cause lung cancer and 96% do not know that it causes heart disease,” the BBC reported said, adding, “Because of a sharp increase in cigarette sales in the last 30 years, around 2,000 people a day are currently dying of smoking in China. By 2050, the researchers expect this number could rise to 8,000 a day – some three million people a year.”

And just as men dominate the basketball demographic, so, too, do they dominate the smoking demographic. According to themedguru.com, “Out of every 100 men, 67 smoke, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the world apart from Yemen and Djibouti.”

There are also an estimated 300 million basketball players in China, and I can tell you first-hand, there is overlap between the smokers and ballers. At first I was shocked by the marriage of smoking and basketball. Basketball courts, after all, are a refuge of running around and sweating and cardiovascular exercise. It is, basically, antithetical to smoking. Just like a smoking ban at a bar – which is a refuge for alcohol and chance encounters with the opposite sex – is a haven for habits that don’t fly in the outside world.

Brince, Jonathan and I end up playing for a few hours. We outlast at least four different Chinese dudes who were acting as our fourth man – maybe because we weren’t smoking – and by the time we call it a day we’re satiated. My life is still in disorder on several practical fronts, but there was simply no way that I was getting through the day without playing basketball. On the bright side, at least I don’t smoke cigarettes.