It was a grey and lifeless day yesterday in Shanghai. I could barely feel the passage of time because the sun was hidden behind clouds of gravel-coloured cotton. Although I had left Suzhou at 7am in the morning and slept all the way during the dull 2 hour journey to the Pudong section of Shanghai, I still felt as if I had just woke up.
After spending most of the morning in meetings, I was brought out for lunch at a nearby industrial area that can be best described as Sixth Avenue meets Kallang Puding Road (for those Malaysians reading this, think Bangsar meets Shah Alam industrial area). My colleague dropped me in front of the restaurant so she could park the car.
My eye immediately spotted a pushcart laden with books outside the Carrefour hypermarket next to the restaurant.
Books! A rarity in China!
I quickly walked over and skimmed through the titles with my eyes. OH MY GOD. It was laden with all kinds of good shite ranging from Harry Potter to the Harvard Business Review to Salman Rushdie.
I asked the man guarding the cart
“Duo shao yi ben xu?” (How much for a book, asshat?)
“She guai yi ben, hou de she oo” (10 renminbi, but the thicker ones are 15 renminbi)
Stunned at the price, my mouth nearly dropped. It was then that my colleague appeared from behind and whispered in my ear – these books are fakes/knockoffs/pirated.
Apparently it is true that China is the market leader in knockoffs. I bought a fake copy of Dan Brown’s latest “The Lost Symbol”. Upon close inspection, the ink is inconsistently dark and light on different pages, it lacks many things like a copyright page and the quality of paper is terrible.
But it was dirt cheap.
Hooray for pirated shite.