I’ll add a picture of the Crocs ad when I get one.

In the last entry, I explained my voyage into the world of getting paid for letting people take my picture. This odyssey continued last Friday and Saturday, and became more and more strange, as everyone decided that I knew how to speak perfect Chinese. While this was a great opportunity to practice, at most times it resembled the photography scene from Lost in Translation, an inevitable comparison that was playing through my head all the while. I was photographed with a hip-hop dancer from Shanghai, a 19-year-old Crocs salesman, the beautiful trophy wife of an English businessman, and a Canadian dude-bro who couldn’t stop hitting on the hip-hop dancer.

The Canadian was interesting. He had spent four summers in China interning at various offices and is now studying Mandarin and looking for work, trying to break into the circle of foreigners that work in the Beijing offices of various foreign companies. His Chinese was alright, but not good enough to get anywhere with the hip-hop dancer. When he wasn’t ogling her, he was either nonchalantly telling me about his hilariously dull experiences in the Beijing club circuit or doing a strange dance that I have come to recognize as the foreigner networking jig. The jig has a few basic steps, which include ostentatious displays of ritzy cell phones, loud discussions of future job prospects, and taking down numbers. Beyond the basic steps, there are more advanced ones, such as taking pictures of your contacts in order to remember them or explaining how you first got a job in Beijing (perhaps the best story I have heard was, “I called them and told them I spoke some Chinese and had buying. . . I mean purchasing experience,” Which I think means that this person took some Chinese in college and had seen their future employer’s product on the shelf.) I had thought that this sort of social networking was a real-life version of the friend-collection that is currently taking place on myspace.com and facebook.com, but then I asked my boss to explain. Apparently, the foreigner labor market in China, though much more stable than ten years ago, is still very unpredictable, and a stray contact on your cell phone could land a job, as Western-trained minds are still a hot commodity despite the growing savvy of less expensive Chinese labor.

I'm done with school here in two weeks. My plans after that are still to be determined, but now it looks like I'm going to go to India for three weeks and then Malaysia for two weeks after that. I'll then return to China and tour around until the 1st of July. I want to be in the Twin Cities on the 4th.