5 posts tagged with "Economy"

Lao Ma felt this place was a bit like a huge, cold cement box. He hadn't thought that way when they first bought it. Back then, the sales lady's words were sweet as honey. Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, shining on the exquisite little model houses on the sand table, bright and full of hope. One million one hundred ninety thousand yuan. It emptied half a lifetime's savings and saddled them with a thirty-year mortgage, but Lao Ma and his wife, Ma Sao, felt it was worth it! For their son's future schooling, for a stable nest for their old age, for putting down roots in this big city – this cement box was their "home," their tangible, heavy future.

The autumn wind in Beiping was chilly, carrying a hint of heartlessness. Dusk had just fallen. The streetlights were beginning to flicker on, not yet fully lit, casting sparse halos of light onto the damp, glistening flagstone path. Old Li's braised delicacies stall stood right there at the mouth of the hutong. A single, dim, yellow incandescent bulb barely illuminated his small patch of the world. Beneath the bulb was his face, etched with deep lines like ravines, and a pot of old braising liquid bubbling away.

Old Ma first heard the word "tariff" from the old radio in the street corner. A hoarse male voice, like sandpaper, scraped against the dull afternoon air, speaking words he didn't quite understand: barriers, countermeasures, lists... To him, these terms were far less real than the grain of the century-old elm wood in his hands. Old Ma was a carpenter, a craftsman nearly forgotten by this era. His world was this small, street-facing shop, filled with the fresh scent of wood shavings and the atmosphere of bygone days.

Old Li felt like he was going crazy.

David felt as though his lungs were about to be deformed by the air that had been circulating in the cabin for eighteen hours, tinged with the smell of disinfectant and a faint weariness. He wasn't a tourist. His suit jacket lay wrinkled on his lap, tie loosened, his eyes a mixture of almost absurd determination and unconcealed anxiety. He, David, who had once owned a small gift-wrapping shop in Massachusetts, USA, was flying across the Pacific, destination: that Eastern country rumored to be able to "make anything." His mission, sounding a bit ridiculous yet starkly real: sourcing. Not buying the latest electronics for his neighbors, but for his own long-failed business, searching for a tiny spark... perhaps the last one.

His shop closed three years ago. It started with small goods – the exquisite ribbons used to adorn gifts, tiny metal clasps, oddly shaped wrapping paper. He had once taken pride in finding "Made in USA" suppliers, even if the price was a bit higher. But soon, customers began complaining about the prices, showing him pictures from some Chinese e-commerce platform on their phone screens, looking at him with eyes that basically asked, "Why don't you just rob me?" Then, he tried to pivot to higher-end wedding accessories, like custom lace gloves and veil decorations. He discovered that forget finding American workers willing to do such delicate work (the news talked about training seamstresses, which seemed like a fairy tale), even the suitable raw materials, the incredibly fine mesh netting and beads, originated from across the ocean. Ultimately, even the designs he thought were "unique" appeared on wholesale websites within weeks, priced at a third of his cost.