A major part of the curriculum involved how to lie your way through job interviews into an office position. This ultra-pragmatism is pervasive in Chinese society today; people are less concerned with abstract notions of right and wrong than with getting things done. In economic terms, this fosters a business climate in which companies copy each others’ products, steal employees and business plans, and compete ruthlessly over tiny profit margins. But with little trust or sense of long-term planning and investment, they find it hard to grow and develop their businesses.
This system also takes an emotional toll on individuals. Everyone I knew in Dongguan had stories of being cheated and robbed and lied to, and over and over people told me, “You can only rely on yourself.” But even though this is a world marked by corruption and deceit, it is at the same time highly functional. It just functions by its own set of rules.
My promotion this time let me see the hundred varieties of human experience. Some people cheer me, some envy me, some congratulate me, some wish me luck, some are jealous of me, and some cannot accept it … As to those who envy me … I will only treat them as an obstacle on the road to progress, kicking them aside and walking on. In the future there will be even more to envy!
Now I will talk about copying. I think copying is very important. Everyone always talks about how innovation is important. But you need to invest a lot of time to innovate and the risk is high. Why not take things that have already been proven to work in other places? That is copying.
A woman called a mami came in to tally which customers wanted sex and which just wanted to sing.
The girls entered. There were seven of them, wearing shiny gold evening gowns with spaghetti straps that made them look like high-school girls on prom night. … Each girl had a plastic tag clipped at her waste with a four-digit number. … If a man liked a girl, he would tell the mami her number …
If a girl went out with a customer for sex, the club charged 800 yuan for a single encounter; that was called kuaican, fast food. … Some of the girls didn’t like to go with men very often. The ones who did could make 20,000 yuan a month — $2,500, an astronomical sum in the migrant world. … [The karaoke girls] lived a casual and disorderly existence. In a city where most lives were ruled by the factory clock, they slept as late as they pleased and worked fewer hours than anyone I had met.
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