Real Fake

Any day in which one nearly gets bamboozled a dozen times in an hour is a day worth remembering to me. I had such a day and such an hour on an outing to Shanghai last summer. It began with a walk along Nanjing Lu with a couple of American students. There, we learned how it feels to be human magnets, or else thick rolls of 100-yuan notes with heads and limbs sticking out. Every street hawker of wristwatches and wheeled shoes came our way, making the same tired pitch in one or two English words. One man stood apart in diversifying his stock, though, unfortunately for him, this approach yielded no better luck: “Wristwatch? T-Shirt? Massage? Sex?” How’s that for one-stop shopping?

Next, three young Chinese people approached—a tall young man with a warm smile and a twinkle in his eye that I recognized as ironic only in retrospect, and his two vivacious female companions.

“We are art students from Beijing University,” one of the girls said. “There is an art festival in Shanghai this week, and we have an exhibit in a gallery on this street.”

“It is our first exhibit,” said the young man. “Won’t you please have a look? We are so curious to know what people will think of our paintings.”

We had nearly an hour to kill before we needed to meet up with our group, and they were such nice and polite young people and so excited about their artistic debut. What harm could there be in having a look?

Nanjing Lu is a pedestrian street, and, on a sunny summer afternoon, it’s a great place to get a sense of just how crowded Chinese cities can be. It would have also been a great place to get lost, but our new friend was taller than almost any of the other 10,000 black-headed people walking about, and we followed him closely as he cut through the crowd. Somehow, two policemen in a golf cart managed to weave through the mass of flesh and pull up beside our friend. The two girls vanished in an instant, diving deep into the anonymity of that human sea. Both officers spoke to our companion for a moment, and then one broke away to have a word with us.

“Do you know this man?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We just met him.”

“This man is not an art student. He’s a con artist. He will take you to a gallery full of ridiculously overpriced paintings. Once you’re inside, you’ll find the door bolted and guarded by a muscle-bound man with a pair of nunchaku and a penchant for relieving nervous tension by pummeling foreigners. Your ticket out will be either to buy a painting or take a beating.”

By this point, Ian and I had turned considerably paler than we already are; Jheff had the advantage of possessing dark skin that masked his emotions. The other cop and the tall man were seated in the golf cart, talking animatedly. Our “friend” turned around to glance at us, and it was only then that I realized what I had taken for a smile was actually a sneer. On Nanjing Lu, we discovered, not only the wristwatches were fakes. The same went for friends, too.

We continued our walk, and, within thirty minutes, a half-dozen other groups of aspiring artists offered to lead us to the fate the policeman had described. Finally, we turned around and headed back toward the Bund, having had more than our fill of Nanjing Lu.

Perhaps it was our near-run escape from an art gallery beating that led Jheff to have some vindictive fun on the Bund by bargaining over a wristwatch he had no intention of buying. He talked the vendor down to a preposterous price—about $10—and then turned away.

“That can’t be real,” he said. “A Rolex for $10? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“”Not real,” the man pleaded. “Real fake. Fake real. Real fake.”

We chuckled as we departed, seeing the phrase as a humorous absurdity. However, when I returned to Suzhou and narrated the day’s events to a Chinese friend, she told me that the expression was not absurd at all but in fact communicated an important distinction. On the Chinese black market, there are real fakes and fake fakes. A real fake may not really be a Rolex, but it will tell the time. A fake fake will at best make you late to an important meeting and at worst will burn the skin on your wrist when it oozes acid. Real fake designer jeans may last about as long as their legitimate siblings, while fake fakes will dissolve into threads and strip you to your underwear on the street the first time that you wear them. A real fake person may not really want to be your friend but intends you no real harm. A fake fake, in contrast, will smile as he leads you to ruin. Thus, for the average Chinese person, learning to distinguish between real fakes and fake fakes is an essential life skill.

Among the many pirated goods in China, none are more numerous than DVDs. Most pirated discs fall somewhere in the middle on the real fake-fake fake continuum. A purely fake fake DVD won’t play at all if it doesn’t melt down your hard drive, but even the best real fakes are imperfect imitations and have something wrong. Problems occur most frequently in the packaging. Perhaps due to the language barrier, the producers of pirated English DVDs have great difficulty matching up the credits on the jacket with the actual film. Consequently, your pirated copy of Schindler’s List may display the cast of Meet the Parents and include among its catalogue of special features the promise of hilarious outtakes. The jacket of Nanking—a recent documentary about Japanese atrocities in China in the winter of 1937-1938—suggests that the disc offers a “never-before seen alternate ending.” Unfortunately, for the victims of the “Rape of Nanking,” history affords no such opportunities.

Even when the packaging happens to connect with the right film, the content choices are often questionable. The jacket for Atonement lists the proper cast but includes as a description of the film a user posting from a movie fan web site: “My brain tends to turn to mush in the presence of greatness. This makes it difficult when I want to write about something that I thought was truly great. It is so much easier to write about something that is rubbish.” Needless to say, I watched the film despite rather than because of this unhelpful blurb. But what do I have to complain about anyway? For about seventy-five cents, I viewed on DVD a fine film that had just begun to run in theaters back home.

Typically, I would not seek out pirated goods and do believe that the artists who make films deserve a fair cut of the sales. In China, however, it’s actually rather difficult to find non-pirated discs. Even Auchan—a large supermarket similar to Wal Mart—has bins stuffed with thousands of DVDs priced so low that they surely must be pirated. When Americans hear the words “black market,” they envision places that can be reached only in darkness by boat or can be entered only by people wearing trench coats with the collars turned up. That is not the case at all in Suzhou. On Shi Quan Jie, the tourist street where I live, there are more than a half-dozen well-lighted places selling pirated DVDs in plain view, with each disc priced at less than one US dollar. Apparently, the government has periodic crackdowns on such operations, but there are no real consequences. The shops stay closed for a week or two, and then it’s back to business as usual.

Most of my Chinese friends see no problem with piracy. It is a simple matter of cost to them. One friend, in fact, was genuinely perplexed by the high price of DVDs in America. I explained that the price was so high because many people take a share of the proceeds when a legal disc is sold, while the pirated discs earn money only for the copier and the store. This seemed to make an impression on her, but the impression didn’t run very deep. By the end of the conversation, she was telling me how I could avoid paying such high prices for movies when I return to America by downloading them for free on Chinese web sites. I’m sure I will not do this, but while in China, I’ve learned to do as the Chinese do. I’ve made my peace with the real fakes; it’s the fake fakes that I seek to avoid.