And once a year, he asks me if I would not like to import his rice to Germany (which I, being a chemist, consider myself perfectly unsuitable for). When he got married, the party was all in Korean wedding style, and a lottery was going on as well. Five out of 200 guests (one of them was me) got the jackpot, which was a bag with 5 kg North China rice.
ShenZhen is an El Dorado for minor entrepreneurs, whether they operate their business mobile or in rented premises.
There are thousands of hawkers offering fruit, drinks, honey, trinkets, self-carved handicrafts, clothes, laptops, mobile phones, haircuts, shoe and clothing repairs, transport and television repair services or fake tax receipts. They do business on the pavement, addressing drivers who are stuck in a traffic jam or chasing customer on their bikes (apart from hand-line readers and other charlatans who are sitting on plastic chairs for kids, making their living quite decently).
There are fixed street markets set up and there are hawking illegal markets which dissolve as soon as danger looms but a few hours later are as active as before.
There are buildings that offer markets on several floors under one roof, this can be a tea market or an electronics market, of which there are very many. The electronics markets are a typical phenomenon of Chinese entrepreneurship and flexibility. Here, the traders (mostly young people) rent a booth or “box” and offer their commercial products (mobile phones, laptops, computer accessories, GPS, digital cameras and optical equipment). If you enter such a building as a newcomer you are struck down, struck by hustle and bustle, decibels and diversity.
If you commit the mistake of not deciding immediately but trying other vendors (or even another market, next door or in a cross-road) first and then to return and buy that thing at that third booth in the first market, your attempt will fail: You won’t find the booth again. What floor it was, are we in the right building? If so, in which corridor? It is obvious that you can trail these markets only using appropriate maps or expert guides, otherwise you are lost.
In nondescript side lanes of these bustling markets you may find (with patience and risk tolerance) ingenious craftsmen, if not artists, who may fix any hardware problem in any type of laptop. They will use either original parts, provided they are in stock or can be obtained quickly from friendly dealers, or they craft something suitable. If necessary, the laptop will be completely disassembled, without plan, without any assembly instructions.
The process resembles an open-heart surgery, only the boss of the repair crew performs such operations, his staff is allowed no more than to carry out the disassembly and reassembly and easy soldering. Nothing may go wrong, for there is a 30-day warranty. When LaoWei for the first time observes such an operation at his laptop up close, he does not believe that the poor device would ever be put back together correctly and work again as intended. He is mistaken, and becomes a regular customer.
An odd kind of market is the begging. Everywhere you may be besieged by beggars, in roadside restaurants, in the car at the semaphore, as a pedestrian on the pavement. No doubt there are many horrible stories behind, you see people with disabilities, leg or arm amputees, begging for their living.
But there also young children addressing you, sent by their parents (or by organised beggar gangs?). You see young mothers carrying their babies or small children before the belly or on the back, begging every passer-by, they can rend any heart of stone.
How to distinguish who really has suffered a bad fate and does not know how to make ends meet, or who professionally operates the begging? And the latter kind is not at all infrequent. Our Saturday dinner we fellow football players usually celebrate in a roadside restaurant where there are several such restaurants lined up like a string of beads. There are (as elsewhere in other districts of the city) certain beggars marking their territory.
One of my football friends once met a beggar whom he had given a small amount in the evening late at night again, with customers in a karaoke bar (in China called “KTV”) – only that the beggar now had exchanged his “working clothes” against a suit that was proper for KTV. I myself have several times seen two beggars from another territory in a Seven Eleven store which had set up a lounge for breakfast tea, coffee and snacks, exercising their “business meeting” in the morning.
So everyone can find his place, everyone has a chance, take it or miss.