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 ZT：中国的 Martha Stewart |
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wanderer
[博客]
[个人文集]
头衔: 海归准将
声望: 学员
加入时间: 2004/02/20
文章: 1232
海归分: 168152
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作者：wanderer 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
BEIJING — When she started out in television three years ago, stuffing a Thanksgiving turkey as she stood behind a kitchen counter on a simple set, Zhou Zhu remembers painfully, she had difficulty smiling while struggling to remember her lines. Her first self-produced pilot for a program offering tips on a Western-style middle-class lifestyle was rejected out of hand, in part because of her awkwardness. "Those first shows were excruciating," said Ms. Zhou, 36, dressed in a bright fuchsia blouse and wearing her hair tied atop her head in an artful knot. "I had no experience before the camera, and had to repeat one line 40 times. I even had to learn how to smile."
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These days, smiles come easily to the woman often called China's Martha Stewart. As she worked her way through the taping of a recent show in which she coached her audience in the finer points of Greek cuisine, her face remained positively abloom throughout. The only interruptions came as she struggled with words like feta, as unfamiliar in the Chinese lexicon as they are in the cuisine.
The set for the show, Jojo Good Living, which recently became available nationwide on cable television, looks smarter now, neatly arrayed as it is with products that Ms. Zhou has negotiated through tie-ins with everything from a Chinese home renovation superstore to Korean refrigerators, German pots and pans and American spices. Bedsheets, towels and other items are soon to follow.
Driving to the taping at a luxurious gated community at the city's edge, over unpaved roads, passing neighborhoods where people live in smoky, cramped houses, much as they have for generations, there is no avoiding one question. Is China, a country where 87 percent of urban women work, average per capita income still hovers at around $1,000 a year and 850 million people remain poor, really in need of a television show that glamorizes the life of the Western suburban housewife?
For Ms. Zhou, the answer is self-evident. Like herself, China, she says, is in a hurry. Already the comforts of apartment and villa life in the grander sections of Beijing or Shanghai bear comparison with those in the better urban digs of America. And for this woman armed with a fund of self-confidence, there is great merit in being a front-runner - and perhaps great fortune, too.
She writes regular lifestyle columns in several Chinese magazines, like Mama Bao Bao, or mother and baby. Her show's success has quickly spurred many imitators.
"When we started up, there were concerns that we were a little premature," she said during a break. "Our first show was about barbecue, and people wondered where does one find a grill, and how many people even have a backyard. Now, barbecue is a big fashion in Beijing. Three years ago, our market wasn't that big, but now the growth rate is booming.
"Five years ago, very few people had high-end apartments, but already it's become quite common, and naturally, people want to know how to decorate them tastefully."
There is little doubt, in fact, that, poor as most of its people remain, China is in the midst of a consumer revolution, and Ms. Zhou has perched herself at the vanguard. Today's middle class comprises only 100 million people out of a total population of 1.3 billion. But some Western economists estimate that as many as 40 percent of Chinese could reach something approaching middle-class status by 2012.
Fancy beauty products and other brand-name goods are flying off the shelves. The popularity of Starbucks and Haagen-Dazs attests to fast-changing eating habits. In the last three years, Christmas has taken root here for the first time in the Communist era, not as religious rite but as a commercial frenzy, and expensive Western-style weddings are all the rage.
Finally, housing sales are booming in the three most prosperous cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, increasing by 40 percent annually. Nowhere is the froth more evident than at the high end, where luxury developments with names like Berlin Spring, Milan New Gardens and Yosemite are meant to suggest Western sophistication or endless space.
Ms. Zhou's vision, then, is a variation of the China Dream: the idea, perhaps as old as Marco Polo, and updated with each spike of global fascination with this country, that, as the saying famously goes, "If we could only persuade every person in China to lengthen his shirttail by a foot, we could keep the mills of Manchester working around the clock."
But Ms. Zhou's dream is classical in every way except one: she is not a foreigner from the distant West, lusting after China's enormous, if often elusive, commercial promise. Rather, she is a Chinese woman, selling exotic offerings from abroad.
"We have tie-ins with McCormick spices, with the Fissler pots and pans you see, Fanini cabinets, a German floor-maker, with Starbucks, and even with Toto toilets," she said, applying enamel to her fingernails as her crew set up. "We try to work products into the show, and don't do too much on-screen advertising, though, because that might ruin our credibility."
Ms. Zhou has anything but the typical housewife's background, never mind the typical Chinese housewife. She is a daughter of Chinese diplomats who attended elite schools, including Bowdoin and Columbia University, where she obtained a master's degree in international relations. She has worked at the United Nations in New York, and is married to a Brazilian of Japanese extraction, who practices dentistry in Westchester and in Beijing.
"I used to watch Martha Stewart and wonder when I was living in the States, who in the world has time for this kind of thing?" Ms. Zhou said. "I was taking care of my son when he was born, watching a lot of TV, doing some home decorating, and other women's things, and then this idea came to me."
With one quick trip to Beijing, she was able to find a network willing to work with her, and quickly moved back home, where a second child was recently born. Her husband, however, still spends much of his time in New York.
"China's situation is really chaotic right now, sort of like America during the gold rush," she said, answering her own question about who would have time to work at being the perfect homemaker. "People are in such a hurry that they don't know how to enjoy life. It's cheaper to buy a sweater, but I want people to understand the pleasure of knitting one.
"When you love your husband and your children and you put your love and heart into something, like wrapping your cookies individually, it gives everyone a wonderful feeling."
Asked about the hundreds of millions of Chinese women who work because they must, or who cherish their careers, Ms. Zhou said her show worked just as well on the level of fantasy as on the level of practical advice.
"We are creating a dream for Chinese women who want comfort and elegance in their lifestyle," she said. "For many viewers, this is already a familiar world, while others may never reach it. For them, there is no harm in dreaming."
作者：wanderer 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 ZT：中国的 Martha Stewart -- wanderer - (7093 Byte) 2004-4-13 周二, 10:55 (884 reads)
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