Shopping for (not so) crappy swag

I made the obligatory trip to a massive knock-off mall tonight. First thing to know: the most popular items by far are bags. I don't even know what brands they're knocking off (presumably Prada, Coach, LZ) because I'm not in the market. But the bags are everywhere. And they look _good_. Unlike Thailand, where everything was complete crap, a lot of the stuff here is made with real leather, etc. Even the cheapo DVDs are the real thing -- complete with menus, special features, cases, the works. All for $2 each, at rip-off white dude prices.

Second thing to know: haggling is a lot more fun when people don't look like they're starving. This is what made everything so high stakes in Africa: the guilt of trying to negotiate somebody down. China's poor, but people are well-dressed and don't look like they're on the brink. Plus, I always find myself in the classic westerner position of feeling like I've ripped the poor sellers off. I'm sure they feel the same way, although I don't doubt they feel a bit more celebratory about it.

Third thing to know: the underground stuff is the most fun. In what I'm sure is a very token gesture to the MPAA, the DVDs are no longer on display. But 20-something guys roam around, looking for people who look exactly like me. They tap on the shoulder, ask if you're after DVDs, and then usher you to a computer, where they have scanned copies of thousands of DVD covers. You scroll through, tell them which ones you want, and then wait. A few minutes later, another 20-something emerges from who-knows-where with a mitt-full of DVDs in his hand. Same thing with North Face stuff. You have to ask the clothing vendors whether they have any. The ones that do have it hidden. Once you ask, they literally pull back one of the shelves of clothes to reveal a hidden area jammed with "Gore-Tex." The beauty of fakes that aspire to be non-fakes is the bargaining power they give to vendors. They set a sky-high price, then make the argument that "well, it's Gore-Tex. Of course it's expensive." Only, in all likelihood it's not. Sure, some of the factories around here do the third-shift thing and sell the same goods for crazy low prices. But something tells me the makers of Gore-Tex aren't that way. That being said, without the real thing to compare to the fakes are amazingly convincing. They've got everything from the font on the tags to the rubberized zippers down to a refined art. Kudos to China's clone artists.

Travel update: I'm in Guangzhou tonight, heading back to Beijing tomorrow. I'll be there for the next few days, getting a few interviews out of the way and also trying to get my visa sorted out. I've got two fairly solid stories already mostly reported, and I'm hoping to get things done on a third one, and hopefully a fourth, in Beijing.