SLOW Movement

WSJ: Religion for Everyone

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
FEBRUARY 18, 2012

Religion for Everyone

The decline of religion in the West has brought a decline in community spirit. Could the secular world draw useful lessons from religious life? Alain de Botton offers new ways to find shared meaning.

By ALAIN DE BOTTON

One key thing lacking in much of modern society is the sense of community provided by churches and other religious institutions. In a discussion about his new book, "Religion for Atheists," Alain de Botton talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen about how our sense of kinship and belonging might be reattained in a more-secular age.

One of the losses that modern society feels most keenly is the loss of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighborliness that has been replaced by ruthless anonymity, by the pursuit of contact with one another primarily for individualistic ends: for financial gain, social advancement or romantic love.

In attempting to understand what has eroded our sense of community, historians have assigned an important role to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century. They have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbors at around the same time that we ceased to honor our gods as a community.

This raises two questions: How did religion once enhance the spirit of community? More practically, can secular society ever recover that spirit without returning to the theological principles that were entwined with it? I, for one, believe that it is possible to reclaim our sense of community—and that we can do so, moreover, without having to build upon a religious foundation.

Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centered on the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is "What do you do?," our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned.

In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few sides of us count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards. Those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful, who will marginalize them accordingly.

Religion in Secular Life: A Proposal

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgso

A university alive to its true responsibilities would teach students about things like the tensions of married life, with books like 'Anna Karenina' and 'Madame Bovary' on the syllabus.

Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible strategy in a world that accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens for securing not just the financial means to survive physically but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.

Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

Consider Catholicism, which starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their confines there will reign values utterly unlike the ones that hold sway in the world beyond. A church gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.

The composition of the congregation also feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. We are urged to overcome our provincialism and our tendency to be judgmental—and to make a sign of peace to whomever chance has placed on either side of us. The Church asks us to leave behind all references to earthly status. Here no one asks what anyone else "does." It no longer matters who is the bond dealer and who the cleaner.

Zackary Canepari/Panos;

We all stand to learn something from the ways in which religion promotes morality, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life.

The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn't matter. In a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, it establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to it.

It is the genius of the Mass to confront these fears. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it often surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. As the congregants start to sing "Gloria in Excelsis," we are likely to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one that we encounter at the shopping mall or the bus stop. We gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling and rehearse in unison the words "Lord, come, live in your people and strengthen them by your grace." We leave thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community that imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

If the Mass has done its job and we are awake to its lessons, it should succeed by its close in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas for mending some of the more dispiriting aspects of our fractured modern world.

One of these ideas relates to the benefits of taking people into a distinct space where they can be isolated from the usual ideology of the mercantile world. The venue itself ought to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favor of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit—an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern so-called "community centers," insultingly designed structures whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

The Mass also contains a lesson about the importance of rules for directing people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a Missal—the way in which this book of instructions for celebrating a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points—speaks to an essential aspect of human nature. To foster a sense of communal intimacy and to ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than simply leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

A final lesson from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christians put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the Last Supper. They talked, prayed and renewed their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like Jews at the Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others.

Kyoko Hamada/Gallery Stock

The contemporary world is not lacking in places where we can dine well in company, but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

In honor of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings became known as agape (love, in Greek) feasts and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus's death and the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364. Complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these meals eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban agape feasts and to suggest that the faithful eat at home with their families instead—and only afterward gather for the spiritual banquet that we now know as the Eucharist.

But the Mass is hardly alone as an instructive example, and community is certainly not our only unmet need in the modern world. My premise is that even those who aren't religious can find religion sporadically useful, interesting and consoling and should consider how we might import certain religious ideas and practices into the secular realm.

Everyone stands to learn something from the ways in which religion delivers sermons, promotes morality, engenders a spirit of community, inspires travel, trains minds and encourages gratitude at the beauty of life. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both the believing and the secular variety, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.

Religions are a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts for trying to assuage some of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. They merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition and for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture—a range of interests whose scope puts to shame the achievements of even the greatest secular movements and innovators.

Masterfile

Cathedral La Seu in evening light, Palma de Majorca, Spain

It feels especially relevant to talk of meals, because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company—cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants—but what's significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

The large number of people who patronize restaurants suggests that they are refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanism for introducing patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which they segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. At a modern restaurant, the focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.

Patrons tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city (libraries, nightclubs, coffee shops), restaurants know full well how to bring people into the same space, but they lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant. Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangement, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of being in the space, guests would be signaling—as in a church—their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Though there wouldn't be religious imagery on the walls, some kind of art that displayed examples of human vulnerability, whether in relation to physical suffering, poverty, anxiety or romantic discord, would bring more of who we actually are into the public realm, lending to our connections with others a new and candid tenor.

Religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. Religions also know enough about our sensory, nonintellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that their captive audience is likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment—and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons.

Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

Temple to perspective: This structure would represent the age of the Earth, with each centimeter of height equating to 1 million years. A tiny band of gold a mere millimeter thick at the bottom of the roughly 150- foot structure would stand for mankind's time on Earth.

Before our first sip of wine, religious communities offer us a thought that can be swallowed with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar that was used by their enslaved ancestors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks reminiscent of the Haggadah (the text followed at a Passover Seder) or the Missal, laying out the rules for how to behave at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Passover meal or in the Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions that the youngest child at the table is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony ("Why is this night different from all other nights?" "Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?" and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of pride ("What do you do?" "Where do your children go to school?") and toward a more sincere revelation of themselves ("What do you regret?" "Whom can you not forgive?" "What do you fear?").

The liturgy would inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures. One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility.

Thanks to the Agape Restaurant, our fear of strangers would recede. The poor would eat with the rich, the black with the white, the orthodox with the secular, workers with managers, scientists with artists. The claustrophobic pressure to derive all of our satisfactions from our existing relationships would ease, as would our desire to climb ever higher in social status.

The notion that we could mend some of the tatters in the modern social fabric through an initiative as modest as a communal meal may seem offensive to those who trust in the power of legislative and political solutions to cure society's ills. But these restaurants would not be an alternative to traditional political methods. They would be a prior step, taken to humanize one another in our imaginations.

Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism have made significant contributions to political life, but their relevance to the problems of community are arguably never greater than when they depart from the modern political script and remind us that there is also value to be had in standing in a big hall singing a hymn or in ceremoniously washing a stranger's feet or in sitting at a table with neighbors and partaking of lamb stew and conversation. These rituals, as much as the deliberations inside parliaments and law courts, are what help to hold our fractious and fragile societies together.

—From "Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion" by Alain de Botton, to be published March 6 by Pantheon. Copyright by Alain de Botton.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Cook and Share A Pot of Curry - From Foodie's Kitchen :)

I am also participating in this event! :)

Cook and Share A Pot of Curry

Mr Brown's Curry Song - Hilarious!

The curry song by Mr Brown - Hilarious :)

A follow-up on my post of "Cook and Share A Pot of Curry on 21 Aug 2011". Nice adaptation of "Vincent". Have a good laugh! :)

Will you be cooking curry today? :) Participate in this meaningful event and spread the importance of intercultural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country!

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=254441147918239

Foodie

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Cook and Share A Pot of Curry on 21 Aug 2011

Tom Yam Curry by yours truly. This was a dish that I had prepared for my family dinner held on Singapore's National Day (9 Aug). Curry is a well-loved dish by most if not all Singaporeans and I sincerely hope that the new migrants to the little red dot will learn to adapt to our way of life.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=254441147918239

This is a Facebook Page created by a group of Singaporeans after a report came about that a mainland Chinese family (from China) told a local Indian Family not to eat curry and not to cook curry. The appointed mediator - a certain Madam Giam facilitated the case in such a way that : the Indian family could cook curry only when the mainland Chinese family is not at home. (mediation agreement).

So far, more than 60,000 around the world (mostly Singaporeans!) are joining in. Cook a pot of curry or buy a take-out from a restaurant (if you can't cook or too busy to do so). A meaningful event to spread the importance of interculural understanding between countries and also between the different races and nationalities within one country.

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Excerpt from Facebook Page:

http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC110808-0000102/Number-of-neighbour-disputes-hit-high (this is the link)

and this is the clarification to the case:
http://app2.mlaw.gov.sg/Highlights/tabid/168/Default.aspx?ItemId=568

and 16th Aug 2011 (The Law Minister's clarification)
http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20110816-294757/2.html

How we feel
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How could a appointed mediator facilitate the case in such a way that restricts the lifestyle and cooking norms of the Indian family? Or any other local family who practices a cultural lifestyle that we have all made our own? In this case, Curry has always been part of our culture since the 1800s. It can be anything else that you or I hold dear.

There is a native Malay proverb "Di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung" ("You should hold up the sky of the land where you live") - ie one should respect the country in which you choose to live in. ( ie blend/ assimilate/ understand/ tolerate / integrate into the community of your chosen choice)

What we wish for
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When the new immigrants arrive here, we wish for them to respect / embrace the cultural / lifestyle and linguistic norms of this nation. We wish for all new immigrants and citizens to understand and appreciate the various and diverse cultural aspects of the various ethnic-minority groups we have here.

This is Singapore and we are part of Malayan culture. Our hinterland previously was Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago. Our ancestors came, met and mingled and through an adventurous and open mindset, created something unique and beautiful... (thus our local culture as such- curries/ spices/ a vast melting pot of people and mixed heritages)

* A message to all new citizens: We sincerely hope you integrate into our local culture and make attempts to assimilate and embrace/ appreciate the various multi-ethnic cultures we had built up so painstakingly over the decades. Because at the same time, we are definitely open to taking the best that you have to offer, and to create new and beautiful Singaporean things.

*We Singaporeans are basically nice and tolerant people. We will accept you as new citizens and hope you blend in and integrate with us well.


Upset with CMC
-----------------------
We are mainly upset with the "Community Mediation Centre's" mediation action of actually facilitating such a mediation agreement. It is the inalienable right of the Indian family to cook curry at any time they wish to within the four walls of their home. (having said that, let us all- natives, new citizens or otherwise, embrace the multi-cultural aspects of our nation)

Every Singaporean should just cook a pot of curry and eat it (regardless of race / language / religion). We are Singaporeans and we LOVE our curries - be it chicken curry / fish curry / lamb curry / beef curry / beef rendang / lontong / mee siam/ laksa / Petai sambal belachan / ayam buah keluak etc

Thank You Very Much for supporting "Cook A Pot of Curry" Event!

- from the Admin Group

WSJ: The insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture

LIFE & CULTURE
JULY 2, 2011

The Insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture

In our age of online view counts and retweets, conformity is becoming the rule

By NEIL STRAUSS

If you happen to be reading this article online, you'll notice that right above it, there is a button labeled "like." Please stop reading and click on "like" right now.

Thank you. I feel much better. It's good to be liked.

There's a growing cultural obsession with being blogged, digged, tweeted and liked. Now add Google's +1 to the mix and it's just like being in high school all over again, says author Neil Strauss.

Don't forget to comment on, tweet, blog about and StumbleUpon this article. And be sure to "+1" it if you're on the newly launched Google+ social network. In fact, if you don't want to read the rest of this article, at least stay on the page for a few minutes before clicking elsewhere. That way, it will appear to the site analytics as if you've read the whole thing.

Once, there was something called a point of view. And, after much strife and conflict, it eventually became a commonly held idea in some parts of the world that people were entitled to their own points of view.

Unfortunately, this idea is becoming an anachronism. When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition.

But there was one other element of human nature that the Internet still needed to conquer: the need to belong. The "like" button began on the website FriendFeed in 2007, appeared on Facebook in 2009, began spreading everywhere from YouTube to Amazon to most major news sites last year, and has now been officially embraced by Google as the agreeable, supportive and more status-conscious "+1." As a result, we can now search not just for information, merchandise and kitten videos on the Internet, but for approval.

Masterfile

You 'like' me! Even rock stars agonize over their Facebook and Twitter stats.

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don't show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

Conversely, when we're looking at someone else's content—whether a video or a news story—we are able to see first how many people liked it and, often, whether our friends liked it. And so we are encouraged not to form our own opinion but to look to others for cues on how to feel.

"Like" culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just "likes" but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I've seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook "likes" and Twitter followers than they do.

Because it's so easy to medicate our need for self-worth by pandering to win followers, "likes" and view counts, social media have become the métier of choice for many people who might otherwise channel that energy into books, music or art—or even into their own Web ventures.

The same is true of the productivity of already established writers and artists. I was recently on a radio show with an author who, the interviewer said, had tweeted, on average, every 20 minutes for the past two years. Yet, despite all the time and effort spent amassing and catering to followers, as soon as a social network falls out of use, like MySpace, all that work collapses like a castle built of sand.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm presciently wrote over 60 years ago that man has "constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built…. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself."

So let's rise up against the tyranny of the "like" button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what's important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you're reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don't waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

And please, despite what I said earlier, do not +1, tweet, StumbleUpon, like or comment on this article. You'll only be making it worse.

—Mr. Strauss is the author of seven best-selling books. His latest book is "Everyone Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys Into Fame and Madness."

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Economist: Nupital economics

Food for thought for couples planning for their weddings.

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Nuptial economics

Unbridled

Wedding jollity—more or less

Apr 28th 2011 | from the print edition

WHEN Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 millions of Britons partied in public. Far fewer were expected at street parties for Prince William’s wedding on April 29th, not least because of the red tape that now snags public gatherings. David Cameron vainly told local authorities to “let people get on and have fun.”

Few prime ministers need to implore their people to party. More often governments are trying to stop them: the Afghan authorities have been considering a proposal to limit the boom in weddings, sombre affairs under the Taliban. The suggested limit is 300 guests and a few dollars per head.

Other countries have similar worries. Wedding laws in Tajikistan now maintain that only one course may be served. India’s legendary nuptial shindigs risk emptying not just the country’s wallets, but its bellies too. In February the food minister estimated that close to 15% of all grains and vegetables in the country are wasted through “extravagant and luxurious social functions”, such as lavish wedding banquets. Days later, diners at a society wedding pecked at a 100-dish menu. Party-poopers want India’s food security laws to curb such profligacy.

Some rich governments choose to subsidise expensive weddings. In the United Arab Emirates many males (a third of Dubai men, for example) wed foreigners, at a quarter of the price of marrying a local girl. The government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.

Surveys in America price the average wedding at close to $30,000 (though the mean is inflated by high-cost dos; the median is lower). Costs peaked in 2008; economic gloom has since dampened them. Yet over 20 years the price has almost doubled, while America’s marriage rate is down by nearly a third.

Last year the canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Giles Fraser, argued that outsize celebrations were a threat to marriage itself. He said modern British nuptials were an “overblown vanity project” seen out in “an atmosphere of narcissism and self-promotion”. Most clergy, he argued, now prefer taking funerals. Perhaps. But Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, likely to reach more than a billion viewers worldwide, is unlikely to assist the noble cause of nuptial austerity.

FT: Case study - Trung Nguyen coffee

Case study: Trung Nguyên coffee

By Morgen Witzel

Published: April 27 2011 23:08 | Last updated: April 27 2011 23:08

Mr Vu positioned his brand as part of a Vietnamese tradition

The story. Coffee cultivation in Vietnam began under French colonial rule in the 19th century and soon became a staple industry. By the mid-1990s, the country had become one of the three biggest coffee producers in the world.

Much of it, however, was low quality and sold at cut prices overseas. Vietnamese-American entrepreneur Dang Le Nguyen Vu believed high-quality Vietnamese gourmet coffees could be produced and sold profitably. So, in the mid-1990s, he launched Trung Nguyên, a coffee manufacturer and café chain.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

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Case study: Axa’s rebranding - Mar-09

The challenge. Vietnam is an emerging market. In 1995, per capita income was only $250 (the 2010 figure was $1,200). This was one reason why Mr Vu chose to develop a luxury brand that would appeal to both domestic and export markets.

To do so, he would have to persuade the home market that his expensive product offered value, and convince overseas customers that Vietnam could produce gourmet coffee.

The home market. As the owner of a coffee-processing business, Mr Vu could improve the quality but there was no efficient distribution network. The answer was to set up a chain of coffee shops, modelled in part on Starbucks, that would also sell coffee beans for home consumption.

The branding of Trung Nguyên was carefully planned. To counter competition from big multinationals, whether coffee shops or brands such as Nescafé, Mr Vu positioned it as part of a Vietnamese tradition. A Trung Nguyên museum tells the history of coffee-making in the country.

One of Trung Nguyên’s best-known products is kopi luwak or “weasel coffee”, made from coffee berries that have passed through the digestive tract of a civet cat. Marketing this expensive delicacy, which is harvested only in south-east Asia, helps identify Trung Nguyên with Vietnam’s coffee culture.

Combining heritage and modernity is at the heart of the brand, whether in the packaging or the styling of the coffee shops. Straplines such as “Bringing creativity into coffee” suggest innovation.

By pricing the coffee high, Mr Vu appealed to the aspirations of Vietnamese people. An emerging middle class took to the brand and the coffee shops became important social centres. The first Trung Nguyên coffee shop opened in Ho Chi Minh City in 1998, and by 2010 there were more than 1,000 across Vietnam.

Trung Nguyên has also diversified into decaffeinated and instant coffee and tea production.

The overseas market. Export was part of the strategy from the start. Trung Nguyên now markets its coffee in more than 40 countries, including the US and the UK.

Most of the brand’s appeal is to niche markets, to consumers interested in exotic coffees and, especially in the US, to visitors to Vietnam who have seen the brand there. Most of the coffee is sold online through franchisees. Sales volumes are very small compared with those in Vietnam.

Attempts to replicate the domestic coffee shop branding strategy and set up Trung Nguyên outlets overseas have met with mixed success. There are now two stores in Singapore and a few elsewhere in the world. But, generally, in spite of its success in Vietnam, the Trung Nguyên brand is not well-known elsewhere.

Current challenges. Trung Nguyên must expand its export market if the company is to continue to grow. Although rising prosperity in Vietnam means there are opportunities for domestic growth, Trung Nguyên is under pressure from competitors.

Key lessons. Creating a luxury brand in an emerging market might seem contradictory. But the Trung Nguyên case shows how it can be done. By appealing to national culture and values, and creating an aspirational brand with which rising middle classes could identify, it transformed the coffee market in Vietnam.

However, Trung Nguyên has also learnt that extending the brand overseas will take longer, and require more finessing.

The author is honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter Business School

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

NY Times: The Japanese Could Teach Us a Thing or Two

 

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March 19, 2011

The Japanese Could Teach Us a Thing or Two

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When America is under stress, as is happening right now with debates about where to pare the budget, we sometimes trample the least powerful and most vulnerable among us.

So maybe we can learn something from Japan, where the earthquake, tsunami and radiation leaks haven’t caused society to come apart at the seams but to be knit together more tightly than ever. The selflessness, stoicism and discipline in Japan these days are epitomized by those workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, uncomplainingly and anonymously risking dangerous doses of radiation as they struggle to prevent a complete meltdown that would endanger their fellow citizens.

The most famous statue in Japan is arguably one of a dog, Hachiko, who exemplified loyalty, perseverance and duty. Hachiko met his owner at the train station when he returned from work each day, but the owner died at work one day in 1925 and never returned. Until he died about 10 years later, Hachiko faithfully went to the station each afternoon just in case his master returned.

I hope that some day Japan will erect another symbol of loyalty and dedication to duty: a statue of those nuclear plant workers.

I lived in Japan for five years as the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, and I was sometimes perceived as hostile to the country because I was often critical of the Japanese government’s incompetence and duplicity. But the truth is that I came to cherish Japan’s civility and selflessness. There’s a kind of national honor code, exemplified by the way even cheap restaurants will lend you an umbrella if you’re caught in a downpour; you’re simply expected to return it in a day or two. If you lose your wallet in the subway, you expect to get it back.

The earthquake has put that dichotomy on display. The Japanese government has been hapless. And the Japanese people have been magnificent, enduring impossible hardships with dignity and grace.

As I recalled recently on my blog, I covered the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people, and I looked everywhere for an example of people looting merchandise from one of the many shops with shattered windows. I did find a homeowner who was missing two bicycles, but as I did more reporting, it seemed as if they might have been taken for rescue efforts.

Finally, I came across a minimart owner who had seen three young men grab food from his shop and run away. I asked the shop owner if he was surprised that his fellow Japanese would stoop so low.

“No, you misunderstand,” the shop owner told me. “These looters weren’t Japanese. They were foreigners.”

Granted, Japan’s ethic of uncomplaining perseverance — gaman, in Japanese — may also explain why the country settles for third-rate leaders. Moreover, Japan’s tight-knit social fabric can lead to discrimination against those who don’t fit in. Bullying is a problem from elementary school to the corporate suite. Ethnic Koreans and an underclass known as burakumin are stigmatized. Indeed, after the terrible 1923 earthquake, Japanese rampaged against ethnic Koreans (who were accused of setting fires or even somehow causing the quake) and slaughtered an estimated 6,000 of them.

So Japan’s communitarianism has its downside, but we Americans could usefully move a step or two in that direction. Gaps between rich and poor are more modest in Japan, and Japan’s corporate tycoons would be embarrassed by the flamboyant pay packages that are common in America. Even in poor areas — including ethnic Korean or burakumin neighborhoods — schools are excellent.

My wife and I saw the collective ethos drummed into children when we sent our kids to Japanese schools. When the teacher was sick, there was no substitute teacher. The children were in charge. When our son Gregory came home from a school athletic meet, we were impressed that he had won first place in all his events, until we realized that every child had won first place.

For Gregory’s birthday, we invited his classmates over and taught them to play musical chairs. Disaster! The children, especially the girls, were traumatized by having to push aside others to gain a seat for themselves. What unfolded may have been the most polite, most apologetic, and least competitive game of musical chairs in the history of the world.

Look, we’re pushy Americans. We sometimes treat life, and budget negotiations, as a contest in which the weakest (such as children) are to be gleefully pushed aside when the music stops. But I wish we might learn a bit from the Japanese who right now are selflessly subsuming their own interests for the common good. We should sympathize with Japanese, yes, but we can also learn from them.

NY Times: Don't Call Me, I Won't Call You

 

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March 18, 2011

Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You

By PAMELA PAUL

NOBODY calls me anymore — and that’s just fine. With the exception of immediate family members, who mostly phone to discuss medical symptoms and arrange child care, and the Roundabout Theater fund-raising team, which takes a diabolical delight in phoning me every few weeks at precisely the moment I am tucking in my children, people just don’t call.

It’s at the point where when the phone does ring — and it’s not my mom, dad, husband or baby sitter — my first thought is: “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” My second thought is: “Isn’t it weird to just call like that? Out of the blue? With no e-mailed warning?”

I don’t think it’s just me. Sure, teenagers gave up the phone call eons ago. But I’m a long way away from my teenage years, back when the key rite of passage was getting a phone in your bedroom or (cue Molly Ringwald gasp) a line of your own.

In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all. According to Nielsen Media, even on cellphones, voice spending has been trending downward, with text spending expected to surpass it within three years.

“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.”

“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’ ” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’ ”

Phone calls are rude. Intrusive. Awkward. “Thank you for noticing something that millions of people have failed to notice since the invention of the telephone until just now,” Judith Martin, a k a Miss Manners, said by way of opening our phone conversation. “I’ve been hammering away at this for decades. The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people.”

Though the beast has been somewhat tamed by voice mail and caller ID, the phone caller still insists, Ms. Martin explained, “that we should drop whatever we’re doing and listen to me.”

Even at work, where people once managed to look busy by wearing a headset or constantly parrying calls back and forth via a harried assistant, the offices are silent. The reasons are multifold. Nobody has assistants anymore to handle telecommunications. And in today’s nearly door-free workplaces, unless everyone is on the phone, calls are disruptive and, in a tight warren of cubicles, distressingly public. Does anyone want to hear me detail to the dentist the havoc six-year molars have wreaked on my daughter?

“When I walk around the office, nobody is on the phone,” said Jonathan Burnham, senior vice president and publisher at HarperCollins. The nature of the rare business call has also changed. “Phone calls used to be everything: serious, light, heavy, funny,” Mr. Burnham said. “But now they tend to be things that are very focused. And almost everyone e-mails first and asks, ‘Is it O.K. if I call?’ ”

Even in fields where workers of various stripes (publicists, agents, salespeople) traditionally conducted much of their business by phone, hoping to catch a coveted decision-maker off-guard or in a down moment, the phone stays on the hook. When Matthew Ballast, an executive director for publicity at Grand Central Publishing, began working in book publicity 12 years ago, he would go down his list of people to cold call, then follow up two or three times, also by phone. “I remember five years ago, I had a pad with a list of calls I had to return,” he said. Now, he talks by phone two or three times a day.

“You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail,” he said.

Phone call appointments have become common in the workplace. Without them, there’s no guarantee your call will be returned. “Only people I’ve ruthlessly hounded call me back,” said Mary Roach, author of “Packing for Mars.” Writers and others who work alone can find the silence isolating. “But if I called my editor and agent every time I wanted to chat, I think they’d say, ‘Oh no, Mary Roach is calling again.’ So I’ve pulled back, just like everyone else.”

Whereas people once received and made calls with friends on a regular basis, we now coordinate such events via e-mail or text. When college roommates used to call (at least two reunions ago), I would welcome their vaguely familiar voices. Now, were one of them to call on a Tuesday evening, my first reaction would be alarm. Phone calls from anyone other than immediate family tend to signal bad news.

Receiving calls on the cellphone can be a particular annoyance. First, there’s the assumption that you’re carrying the thing at all times. For those in homes with stairs, the cellphone siren can send a person scrambling up and down flights of steps in desperate pursuit. Having the cellphone in hand doesn’t necessarily lessen the burden. After all, someone might actually be using the phone: someone who is in the middle of scrolling through a Facebook photo album. Someone who is playing Cut the Rope. Someone who is in the process of painstakingly touch-tapping an important e-mail.

For the most part, assiduous commenting on a friend’s Facebook updates and periodically e-mailing promises to “catch up by phone soon” substitute for actual conversation. With friends who merit face time, arrangements are carried out via electronic transmission. “We do everything by text and e-mail,” said Laurie David, a Hollywood producer and author. “It would be strange at this point to try figuring all that out by phone.”

Of course, immediate family members still phone occasionally. “It’s useful for catching up on parenting issues with your ex-husband,” said Ms. David, who used to be married to Larry David, the star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “Sometimes when you don’t want to type it all, it’s just easier to talk.”

But even sons, husbands and daughters don’t always want to chat. In our text-heavy world, mothers report yearning for the sound of their teenage and adult children’s voices. “I’m sort of missing the phone,” said Lisa Birnbach, author of “True Prep” and mother of three teenagers. “It’s warmer and more honest.”

That said, her landline “has become a kind of vestigial part of my house like the intercom buttons once used in my prewar building to contact the ‘servants quarters.’ ” When the phone rings, 9 times out of 10, it’s her mother.

There are holdouts. Radhika Jones, an assistant managing editor at Time magazine, still has a core group of friends she talks to by phone. “I’ve always been a big phone hound,” she said. “My parents can tell you about the days before call waiting.” Yet even she has slipped into new habits: Voice mails from her husband may not get listened to until end of day. Phone messages are returned by e-mail. “At least you’re responding!”

But heaven forbid you actually have to listen — especially to voice mail. The standard “let the audience know this person is a loser” scene in movies where the forlorn heroine returns from a night of cat-sitting to an answering machine that bleats “you have no messages” would cause confusion with contemporary viewers. Who doesn’t heave a huge sigh of relief to find there’s no voice mail? Is it worth punching in a protracted series of codes and passwords to listen to some three-hour-old voice say, “call me” when you could glance at caller ID and return the call — or better yet, e-mail back instead?

Many people don’t even know how their voice mail works. “I’ve lost that skill,” Ms. Birnbach said.

“I have no idea how to check it,” Ms. David admitted. “I can stay in a hotel for three days with that little red light blinking and never listen. I figure, if someone needs to reach me, they’ll e-mail.”

“I don’t check these messages often,” intoned a discouraging recorded voice, urging callers to try e-mail. And this is the voice-mail recording of Claude S. Fischer, author of a book on the history of the telephone and more recently, “Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970.”

“When the telephone first appeared, there were all kinds of etiquette issues over whom to call and who should answer and how,” Dr. Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me when finally reached by phone. Among the upper classes, for example, it was thought that the butler should answer calls. For a long time, inviting a person to dinner by telephone was beyond the pale; later, the rules softened and it was O.K. to call to ask someone to lunch.

Telephones were first sold exclusively for business purposes and only later as a kind of practical device for the home. Husbands could phone wives when traveling on business, and wives could order their groceries delivered. Almost immediately, however, people began using the telephone for social interactions. “The phone companies tried to stop that for about 30 years because it was considered improper usage,” Dr. Fischer said.

We may be returning to the phone’s original intentions — and impact. “I can tell you exactly the last time someone picked up the phone when I called,” Mary Roach said. “It was two months ago and I said: ‘Whoa! You answered your phone!’ It was a P.R. person. She said, ‘Yeah, I like to answer the phone.’ ” Both were startled to be voice-to-voice with another unknown, unseen human being.

WSJ: Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

 

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?

By AMY CHUA

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.

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All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.

Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job." Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.

From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!'

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S.

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007.

Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.

Read More

• In China, Not All Practice Tough Love
• The Juggle: Are U.S. Parents Too Soft?

Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."

"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."

"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.

Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.

"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."

Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

—Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua.

ST: an hour @ the museum (playgrounds in Singapore)

Life!

Home > Life! > Life Events > Story

Jan 7, 2011

an hour @ the museum

 

In this weekly column, we visit museums and art spaces and highlight what you must see if you have only an hour to spare.

School Of Hard Knocks by The Little Drom Store is a photography exhibition of playgrounds of the past by graphic designer Stanley Tan and his wife Antoinette Wong. The couple started taking pictures of these playgrounds about four years ago.

The works capture and celebrate the nostalgia associated with these playgrounds which are vanishing all too soon.

The exhibition is part of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival.

Where: Esplanade Tunnel, 1 Esplanade Drive MRT: City Hall, Esplanade When: Till Jan 23, 5.45am - 12.15am Admission: Free Tel: 6440-8115 Info: www.singaporefringe.com

Deepika Shetty

1 THE PELICAN

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Dover Road

The couple wanted to look at playgrounds which once sparked children's imaginations. Decorated with colourful mosaic tiles and unpadded, these playgrounds saw many children suffering injuries and knocks.

2 THE ELEPHANT

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Pasir Ris Park

Playgrounds today lack a theme but in the past, animal-centric playgrounds helped parents educate their children while the little ones played. Children enjoyed simple activities such as sliding down the elephant's trunk at this playground in Pasir Ris.

3 THE SEAL

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Dakota Crescent

This playground with a seal design featured a colourful suspension bridge that appealed to more adventurous kids, who could slide down or climb up a pole.

4 THE DRAGON

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Toa Payoh

This playground with a dragon motif had a colourful suspension bridge as the dragon's body. Sand helped cushion the fall from the slide.

5 THE WATERMELON (SMALL)

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Tampines

Other themes which inspired playgrounds built in Housing Board estates in the 1970s were fruit such as watermelons, which were used as motifs to promote healthy living as well as to represent tropical fruit familiar to Singaporeans.

6 THE CLOCK

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Bishan

The design of the playgrounds in later years was influenced by nursery rhymes for children such as Hickory Dickory Dock, and became more sophisticated and Westernised.

7 THE TRISHAW

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Eunos

The trishaw was a reflection of Singapore's past mode of transport as well as an easily identifiable element of Asian culture.

Fortune: Can P&G make money in places where people earn $2 a day?

 

Can P&G make money in places where people earn $2 a day?

As Western companies duke it out for a piece of the developing-market pie, Procter & Gamble is going deeper  -- courting not just the newly rich but also the very poor. The company's vaunted R&D operation is turning up surprises.

By Jennifer Reingold, senior editor

Wei Xiao Yan, a 29-year-old farmer in China, washes her hair in the doorway of her kitchen. P&G researchers spent a day with her at home.

We are a long, long way from Cincinnati. Getting here required a 15-hour flight to Beijing, followed by a nearly three-hour flight to Lanzhou, an industrial city on the Yellow River in China's midsection, and, finally, a bumpy, two-hour drive deep into treeless hills the color of dried clay. Our destination, in a pinprick of a town called Shahe, is a small cinder-block house framed by Szechuan pepper trees, its primary decoration a poster of Chairman Mao. Eight of us -- a reporter, a photographer, two local "fixers," a translator, and three executives from Procter & Gamble -- have come here so that we can watch a 29-year-old corn and potato farmer named Wei Xiao Yan wash her hair.

And she washes it with gusto, especially considering that she is doing it in front of a crowd while standing in the doorway of her kitchen, using a small metal basin with no more than three cups of water. Water scarcity is the rule here; the family stores rainwater in a well and must pay a private company for anything more. After trying to work up some lather with a tiny bit of Rejoice -- P&G's cheapest local offering, which costs about 10 renminbi ($1.50) a bottle -- Wei Xiao Yan does a cursory rinse, then forces the family comb through her tangles. "The shampoo puts nutrients in my hair," she says, noting that it is her first bottle of real shampoo after a lifetime of using laundry soap flakes, which made her hair oily. I make the error of asking her if it might not be more practical to cut her nearly waist-length hair. She looks at me with disdain. "As a woman, you should have long hair," she snaps. "And my husband likes it."

Cindy Graulty, principal R&D scientist for P&G, and Melisa Liu, principal R&D researcher, give each other knowing looks. My blunder led to the kind of insight that P&G is seeking as it tries to learn how best to make products for the underserved -- what the company calls the "$2 a day" consumer, based on average income. Wei Xiao Yan's tart response explodes the assumption by some marketers that what poor consumers look for is the most practical, cheapest solution. Wei may live on 900 renminbi a year ($135) and have so little water that her washing machine -- a wedding gift -- is rusting in the courtyard. But that does not mean she won't make the effort to look pretty for her husband. "It's a myth to say poor people only want function," says Graulty, who has headed P&G's $2-a-day initiative since October 2009. "They care about beauty. Just like us."

Obvious, right? Yet despite the growing belief that the billions of poor -- what the late management thinker C.K. Prahalad termed the "bottom of the pyramid" -- can actually make up a viable economic market, most attempts to harness it have failed. Procter & Gamble (PG),  a $79 billion (in sales) company better known for its middle- and upper-middle-class brands than for its low-end offerings, thinks there's another way to reach those consumers. So it has quietly launched a skunkworks, populated mostly by technical folks rather than market researchers, to approach the $2-a-day consumer from a new perspective. Rather than try to invent products first or rely on market research alone, the group spends days or weeks in the field, visiting homes in Brazil, China, India, and elsewhere. It's the same approach the company uses in developed markets but requires much more effort, without the obvious potential payoff from consumers with disposable income. "Our innovation strategy is not just diluting the top-tier product for the lower-end consumer," says Robert McDonald, P&G's CEO and chairman. "You have to discretely innovate for every one of those consumers on that economic curve, and if you don't do that, you'll fail."

P&G researcher Melisa Liu (left) is shown around a farm near Lanzhou by Gu Wen Juan. Liu is part of the company's "$2 a day" project, which focuses on consumers with that amount of income.

Some wonder why P&G bothers. The holy grail for companies in developing markets has always been the emerging middle class, and P&G is no exception. "Knowing how [Wei] shampoos is great," says Bill Schmitz, a managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities who covers P&G. "But she probably won't be a profitable consumer for a decade." Indeed, the company, present in 180 countries, remains committed to "mass prestige" -- delivering high-quality brands such as Olay, Crest, Tide, and Pampers to the middle and upper classes at a premium price. Even as P&G has focused more on developing markets, with sales there rising to 34% from 20% in 2000, its target customer is still the Shanghai bank manager we also visited. She lives in a new high-rise, dines out, and favors P&G's SK-II skin-care products, which retail for up to $374.

It is this woman, not Wei, who is the focus of the old saying "If every one of the 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians just bought one [Coke or package of Pampers or bar of Dove soap or insert product here] a [day, week, month], we would [double, triple, quadruple] our sales." Yet P&G, realizing that its future success lies in the developing world, has concluded that it must compete at the lower end of the spectrum as aggressively as it does at the higher one. For too long, says P&G director Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, the company ceded ground. "There was debate at the board level," he says. "It pushed them to stop being only premium and not to give competitors a safe harbor."

For P&G the stakes are high, in part because of some harsh new realities. Start with the fact that the global recession put a dent in P&G's up-the-curve strategy. Then there is the simple paradox of growth: For a giant company to grow at the levels it has in the past -- and satisfy its investors, as its stock is about where it was five years ago -- P&G must expand aggressively, even if it means moving away from its core strength. P&G says developing markets are growing at 6% to 8% annually, compared with 1% to 2% in the developed world. The market for the poor remains largely untapped.

"We're late to those markets," says McDonald, who spent much of his career overseas, including in Japan and the Philippines. "As a result, we've got to do things smarter." He's not exaggerating. In Brazil, which many think is poised to exhibit China-type growth, Colgate-Palmolive (CL) has a 71% market share in toothpaste; P&G wasn't even in the category until 18 months ago. Unilever (UL), with its Anglo-Dutch colonial heritage, already gets more than 50% of its sales from developing markets. "P&G is still very U.S.-centric," says Paul Polman, Unilever's CEO (and until 2006 a P&G exec). "What Bob is doing is not wrong, but it will take some time. Emerging markets are in the DNA of our company."

Consumer disparities: A sampling of markets shows big differences in spending on P&G products.

Throwing down the gauntlet, McDonald has set a hugely ambitious goal of 800 million new customers by 2015 and says he is shifting the company's emphasis from the West to Asia and Africa. Even in China, a notable success story for P&G since it entered a joint venture with Hutchison Whampoa in 1988, per capita spending on P&G products is just $3 a year, vs. nearly $100 in the U.S.? McDonald wants to raise the average expenditure globally from $11.50 in the next few years. "The move of the center of gravity is critical," he says.

To communicate that approach, he has changed the strategy of the company to "Touching and improving more lives, in more parts of the world, more completely." What he calls "purpose-inspired growth" is meant to help his employees believe that they are not merely pushers of deodorant and dryer sheets, but instead helping improve people's daily existence. "It's more than a noble idea," McDonald proclaimed at the company's Dec. 16 analyst meeting. "It's a game-changing growth strategy and a powerful source of competitive advantage." Certainly when aimed at the $2-a-day customer, the idea of improving lives allows people like Graulty to feel that her project has meaning. "It's almost like you don't even have to pay us to do this," she says. "Don't tell our managers that."

Going local on R&D

Beautiful Chinese women wearing red cheongsams are striking drums that seem to be made of water. A dragon with smoldering eyes undulates on the stage as P&G CEO McDonald and CTO Bruce Brown nod to various local dignitaries, including China's vice minister of commerce. You've seen this movie before; it's yet another ribbon cutting for a Western company expanding in China -- this time for P&G's Beijing Innovation Center (BJIC), a sparkling $70 million home for the company's regional R&D efforts. Already the company has invested more than $1 billion in China, and McDonald says it will spend another $1 billion in the next five years.

Yet leaving all the hoopla aside, the center is particularly important when it comes to P&G's shifting priorities. Though the company has 25 R&D centers all over the world, BJIC is an attempt to research, source, and develop products for China and the rest of Asia without having to rely on the company's headquarters in Cincinnati.

One of the most important reasons for that is the masses of high-caliber talent coming out of Chinese universities. The hope is that all that brainpower will lead to innovations that will also work in the developed world. P&G is, amazingly, one of the top three choices among Chinese university graduates looking for jobs. And the place is pulsing with the energy of young people who want to make it big; as a raucous karaoke party shows, they seem to have both right- and left-brain abilities. The campus feels a bit like being at a Silicon Valley startup -- except that it's a unit of a 173-year-old company.

For most of its history P&G, which puts a whopping $2 billion annually into R&D, succeeded by inventing technically superior products at home, then pushing them out to the market in a command-and-control fashion. Only over the past decade, as former CEO A.G. Lafley pried open the company to ideas from the outside, did things change. The Swiffer and the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser -- both hits for P&G -- came about through partnerships with outside product developers.

James Kaw, Director of P&G BJIC; Maurizio Marchesini, Manager of P&G Asia R&D; Bruce Brown,P&G's CTO; and CEO McDonald (from left) at the opening of the company's Beijing Innovation Center in August

BJIC is the only tech center in the developing world that operates across all the company's global business units, or GBUs, as P&Gers, acronym lovers all, tag it. Similar to the company's baby playrooms and fake supermarkets in Ohio, here a simulated hutong (a typical Chinese home) lets researchers observe consumers as they brush their teeth or change a diaper, then make immediate changes to prototypes. "Now we can do end-to-end product innovation," says Brown.

Even before the new center opened last August, several new products came out of China. They included Tide Naturals, a skin-sensitive detergent for women who wash clothing by hand, and Crest Pro Health toothpaste, a premium brand whose main researcher, Wang Xiaoli, cracked a 50-year chemistry problem by finding a way for stannous fluoride -- a stronger form of fluoride -- to stabilize in water. Wang, who won a companywide innovation award, says she came to P&G because "I didn't want what I learned to be published in 100 years."

The key, says McDonald, is making sure that technical development and testing are done locally. That's something P&G's Gillette unit learned the hard way before P&G bought it in 2005, when it developed a razor specifically for Indian men. Since many of them shave only a couple of times a week, often using a basin, they have longer facial hair than most Western men. Rather than testing in India, Boston-based Gillette decided to try out the razor on Indian men who were studying at MIT. They loved it, so the company went ahead with a launch in India. It flopped -- because the MIT students, unlike much of the Indian market, had access to running water. Lesson learned, P&G retrenched, tested locally, and last October launched Gillette Guard, a razor that is easier to rinse.

New uses for old ideas

The most valuable consumer insights for P&G's $2-a-day explorers are transnational ones. That's why Liu, a young Chinese woman who has worked in the research division of P&G for six years, has spent much of the past one trekking through the jungles of Brazil, the slums of India, and farming villages in rural China. She is bringing what she learns back to Beijing -- and hoping that the knowledge will lead to wins elsewhere. Back at Wei's home, she pulls out a plastic bag full of products -- some new prototypes, some off the shelf -- for her to sample. Wei relies on a washcloth and a scrap of soap to clean her body, and she never undresses completely -- not because of water concerns, but because of privacy issues. There is no bathroom, her father-in-law lives in the home, and she feels she has no place to go.

Out of the bag comes an unmarked bottle with a body cleanser formulated to clean without much water. It's kind of like Purell -- except that it generates foam, which can be easily wiped away, instead of lather. The technology comes from an existing hair-color product, which means that it's a potential win-win for P&G, a new use for an old idea. "We just have so much stuff," says Graulty. "Our job is finding the right match." Liu pulls out a bottle of Febreze -- an air freshener for relatively affluent customers -- and shows Wei its use as a spray to improve the smell of clothing that can't be washed often.

She likes it, but not as much as the leave-in conditioner they try next; the look on her face when she touches her hair is one of deep desire. I can't help but wonder whether this experience is touching and improving her life, or tantalizing her by introducing her to something she can't have. The item Wei likes most, though, is one that P&G doesn't even make: an off-the-shelf camping shower, basically a large plastic bag that hangs on a line or a tree and lets you shower with sun-heated water. For her it is a breakthrough product -- she can wash in private.

Does that mean, I ask, that P&G should go into the camping-shower business? No, says Graulty; certainly the company might try partnering with a producer to sell, say, cleanser with one, but the real insight is privacy. Graulty's project has uncovered other misconceptions about poor consumers, including the notion that they always want the simplest product (they don't), and that they are not as aspirational as the more well-to-do (they are). They need more skin-care products because they spend so much more time outside. And though P&G never contemplated selling hair dye to poor customers, Graulty has learned that in those parts of the world, dye is very much in demand. "It's a paradigm shift," she says. "We say, 'Why would they buy that? It's not like food, clothing, and shelter.' But to get a good job, to be presentable, they have to have beauty." The R&D folks are now working on a colorant that uses little water -- and is priced appropriately for a $2-a-day customer.

To be sure, it will be a while before any of this research helps P&G make real headway. In the meantime, the company is relying on classic tactics like price cuts and advertising to gain share. "Promotions win quarters," McDonald told the analysts. "Innovation takes decades." His message may be working. After a few years of skepticism, P&G is gaining fans like Goldman Sachs's Andrew Sawyer, who upgraded the stock in December largely on the company's emerging-market strategy.

Though no product has been launched yet from the $2-a-day project, Brown says several are in the works, including a hair-care product beginning formal testing in India. Last fall the group of about 100 met for the first-ever $2-a-day confab. (Ironically, the meeting took place not in Africa or Asia, but in Cincinnati -- "The logistics were better," Brown says, apologetically.) One move McDonald has not made so far is to form a formal business unit. That's the type of thing the company might have done immediately in the past -- but management now believes would be better handled locally, across silos. "If there were a $2-a-day division," director Cook says, "everyone else would wash their hands of it."

Now, if everyone else would simply begin to wash his hands with P&G products, the company might get somewhere.

Ghost town, Inner Mongolia: Inside China's empty cities

Economist: Chinese tourists - a new Grand tour

Chinese tourists - a new Grand Tour

Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

IN THE grounds of King’s College, Cambridge, grows perhaps the most famous willow tree in China. It was immortalised by Xu Zhimo, a 20th-century poet with all the attributes required for lasting celebrity: talent, a rackety love life and a dramatic early death (plane crash at 34). With each passing year, growing crowds of Chinese tourists visit the tree and a nearby marble boulder inscribed with lines from Xu’s poem, “On leaving Cambridge”.

Locals and tourists from elsewhere pass the tree without a second glance. But for educated Chinese, who learned Xu’s poem in school, this tranquil spot, watched over by handsome white cows and an arched stone bridge, is a shrine to lost youth. Many are visibly moved, even as the cameras click and flash. Xu’s verses help explain the great prestige Cambridge University enjoys in China, nudging it a notch or two ahead of Oxford. They also explain why many educated Chinese have heard of punting.

Xu’s willow is just one stop on an emerging grand tour of Europe, the continent that routinely tops polls of dream Chinese destinations. China’s newly mobile middle classes like to visit established spots like the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Venice’s Grand Canal. But the visitors have also marked out a grand tour all of their own, shaped by China’s fast-developing consumer culture and by distinctive quirks of culture, history and politics. The result is jaw-dropping fame, back in China, for a list of places that some Europeans would struggle to pinpoint on a map: places like Trier, Metzingen, Verona, Luxembourg, Lucerne and the Swiss Alp known as Mount Titlis.

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For decades Asian economic might has gone hand in hand with government programmes to encourage newly affluent citizens to take holidays abroad. In Japan the Ministry of Tourism launched a “Ten Million Programme” to double outbound tourist departures from 5m to 10m between 1986 and 1991. Tourism from South Korea exploded a decade later. Officials in these countries hoped that despatching tourists around the globe would signal their new wealth. It also offered a tangible reward to citizens toiling in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of an economic boom. In China foreign travel is part of a slightly different compact between the state and the new middle classes: unprecedented freedom and fun in exchange for the maintenance of one-party rule at home.

In search of Bordeaux and Hugo Boss

When the bamboo curtain lifted a generation ago, the first contact many Chinese had with the outside world was in the form of imported goods, whose foreign fame was viewed as intrinsic proof of quality. Even today, seen from a Chinese tour bus, the continent of Europe resembles not so much an ancient collection of cities and nations as a glittering emporium stocked with brands. Those brands are not always commercial products: the grand tour takes in the birthplaces of world-famous people, the seats of globally renowned institutions and—as in Cambridge—sites linked to well-known literary works.

A sketch map of the Chinese grand tour must begin in France, the country seen as offering all the essential European virtues: history, romance, luxury and quality. Paris shops such as Louis Vuitton are essential stops: witness their Mandarin-speaking staff. In 2009 Chinese tourists passed Russians as the highest-spending non-European visitors to France, according to a survey of duty-free shops. The south of the country is also popular, thanks in part to widely available translations of Peter Mayle’s book “A Year in Provence” and in part to a slushy Chinese television mini-series, “Dreams Link”, which was filmed amid the lavender fields and walled citadels of the Midi.

China’s freshly minted millionaires and billionaires are particularly obsessed with the wine country of Bordeaux, as red wine has taken over from expensive brandy as the business lubricant of choice. At the very pinnacle of desire is a visit to (or just a glimpse of) Château Lafite Rothschild, home of the claret which has become a favoured show-off brand for Chinese plutocrats. Visits to Château Lafite itself are reserved for invited guests, but China’s would-be tycoons are not put off. Jean-François Zhou of Ansel Travel, a Paris-based firm that brings 15,000 Chinese visitors to Europe each year, recently sent a group down to Bordeaux by bus. After an express tour, one of the coach party snapped up two cases of wine at €600 ($790) a bottle.

From France, Chinese groups typically travel south towards Italy via the casinos in Nice or Monaco (gambling is discouraged in China, but wildly popular). Venice and Rome are stops for every nation’s tourists, but the Chinese grand tour also demands a visit to Verona. One site draws them: a 13th-century mansion linked, a bit spuriously, to “Romeo and Juliet”. That play is doubly admired in China. It was one of the first of Shakespeare’s works to be translated into Mandarin, and its storyline is hailed as matching that of a popular Chinese folk tale, the “Butterfly Lovers”. Chinese tourists have their pictures taken below an ancient balcony said to be Juliet’s, and next to a bronze statue of the tragic heroine. Then it is back on the bus, and northward.

In Germany cities such as Bonn and Trier are as important as more obvious sites like Cologne and Frankfurt (a hub for lots of China flights). Bonn means Beethoven: his birthplace there is a coveted stop for educated Chinese, who are avid fans of classical music. In Trier it is not the city or its Roman ruins that attracts the tourists. They come to see the Karl-Marx-Haus, birthplace of the revolutionary. The Marx museum estimates that 13,000 Chinese tramp around the house each year. Mandarin inscriptions fill the museum’s guest books. In the early morning and evening, large crowds of Chinese have their pictures taken outside the house before heading to their next destination.

A stop in Metzingen involves a tribute to another German, the suitmaker Hugo Boss. A short drive from Frankfurt, Metzingen is home to several factory outlets, where Chinese shoppers vie with Russians and Indians as the biggest spenders. It is a standing joke among Chinese travellers that many products snapped up abroad bear “Made in China” labels. But there is some sense to this seeming madness. Thanks to hefty taxes and customs duties, European brands are routinely 40% more expensive back home. In China they are also quite likely to be fakes.

As France means wine and handbags, Brussels means chocolate. Chen Yongjie, a Suzhou native, works in the Pelicaen chocolate shop of Brussels, next to the Mannekin Pis (a small statue of a boy peeing that is unaccountably popular with tourists of all nationalities). Most Chinese think Belgian chocolate too sweet, Miss Chen reports. This does not stop them buying large quantities for friends and colleagues back home.

Many of the Chinese tourists in the Benelux countries are members of daibiaotuan, official or business delegations with a reputation as boondoggles. As a result of this bureaucratic orientation, the grand tour’s Belgian leg includes stops outside the Berlaymont, as the headquarters of the European Commission is known. Resplendent in the unofficial uniform of the daibiaotuan—dark trousers, dark polo shirt, dark blouson jacket and leather manbag—officials on tour queue up to have their pictures taken in front of the Berlaymont’s nameplate, the nearest thing to a scenic spot in the glass and concrete canyons of the “European Quarter”. The same delegations enjoy less success at NATO’s headquaters which is off limits to tourists. The pluckiest daibiaotuan are not deterred. They can be seen parked on the roadside opposite NATO, taking pictures of its flagpoles across six lanes of traffic.

Taking pictures is a serious business for members of a daibiaotuan. Goofy poses are not encouraged. The Chinese word “qiezi”—pronounced chee-eh-dze and meaning “aubergine”—fulfils the same function as “cheese” in the English-speaking world, generating what is held to be a restrained yet photogenic smile. Childish pleasure can be derived from murmuring “qiezi” when walking past a delegation busy taking pictures: it reliably generates surprised cries of “did that foreigner just say aubergine?”

In Luxembourg the Chinese tourists pause just long enough to photograph the palace of its reigning grand duke. This pocket-sized country, with a population 3,000 times smaller than China’s, is admired for its national wealth per person (the highest in the world by some measures). It also allows Chinese tour groups to knock off another country with minimal effort, allowing for extra boasting back home.

Chinese tourists reserve more than a third of their holiday budgets for shopping

France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg all lie within the Schengen Area, a border-free zone that can be visited on a single visa. This appeals to Chinese tourists, who must submit reams of papers and face a long list of intrusive questions about their finances, employment and personal circumstances to obtain visas for Europe. In 2008 Switzerland joined the Schengen club and Chinese visitor numbers instantly soared.

In Switzerland the essential stop is the canton of Lucerne. With a lake, an historic city and mountains all in a compact area, it amounts to a “mini-Switzerland”, saving time. The Lucerne brand includes Mount Titlis, easily reached by bus and cable car. The mountain is topped by a glacier, offering visitors the chance to visit an ice cave and mess about on sledges even in summer (high season for Chinese tourism). There are Chinese-speaking staff on the peak, and a Chinese restaurant. In perhaps Europe’s oddest claim to Chinese fame, a Chengdu-born gymnast, Li Donghua, claims to have seen a vision of Buddha while visiting Mount Titlis. This he took as a sign that he would triumph at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He duly won a gold medal. His tale is recorded on a mountain-top plaque.

Surprisingly few tourists visit Britain. In August 2010 David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, noted with some bemusement that Germany is poised to enter the leading ten foreign destinations for Chinese tourists, while Britain languishes in 22nd place.

Mr Cameron called for promoting Britain’s heritage—a departure from his Labour predecessors with their focus on modernity and “cool Britannia”. Mr Zhou says his Chinese clients are fascinated that such a titchy island once ran such a large empire and dared start the Opium wars. In reality, as the leader of a Eurosceptic political party, Mr Cameron is unlikely to take the transformative step of joining the Schengen Area. If Britain followed Switzerland into the border-free zone, “half the Chinese tourists on the continent would head to London on the Eurostar,” says Mr Zhou.

Enjoyment isn’t the point

Chinese tourists know they are more coveted for their money than loved in Europe. In surveys of Chinese travel agents, the continent is most frequently described as “beautiful” and “historic”—but rarely as friendly. Europeans are described as both “civilised” and “cold”. Even before they leave China, the travellers are nagged to mind their manners and told to act as “ambassadors” for their country. Several times in the past few years the Spiritual Civilisation Steering Committee of the country’s Communist Party has issued chivvying circulars calling on Chinese tourists to avoid queue-jumping, loudness or haggling in shops with fixed prices.

The European travel industry uses the sniffy phrase “sleep cheap, shop expensive” to describe Chinese visitors. Chinese tour operators are notorious for bargaining down travel and hotel costs. A 2008 study by the European Travel Commission, an industry group, estimates that Chinese tourists reserve more than a third of their holiday budgets for shopping. It is “very difficult”, the study laconically concludes, for established European tour operators to compete with rivals whose transport strategy may involve a “Chinese-speaking waiter driving a minibus”. Even Mr Zhou admits that Chinese travellers are “hard work”, not like the “disciplined” Japanese.

Tourism is certainly not about discovering new food. A 2006 survey of Chinese coach travellers found that 46% had eaten “European” food only once, and 10% not at all, during holidays on the continent. Clients at Ansel Travel are typically offered foreign food once in each country: seafood in Paris, ham knuckle in Germany, pasta in Italy and so on. After that, “it’s Chinese all the way.” Many stay in suburban hotels and eat noodles.

This is because excitement and acquisition are prized over pleasant, relaxing experiences. The Chinese are keen on European luxury, says Andy Xie, a Shanghai-based economist—they just aren’t so interested in luxurious hotels and lavish meals. Coming from a newly affluent, increasingly unequal society, they have a strong preference for the accumulation of material goods. After all, a Swiss watch lasts a lifetime, whereas “if you want a good bed, you can have that at home.”

And Western goods may not be valued for the same reasons they are in the West. Château Lafite’s astonishing fame in China is a story about the country’s political economy, not about the enjoyment of wine, says Mr Xie. Too often at banquets in China he has watched first-growth claret being downed in joyless, glass-draining toasts, well into the small hours. “Château Lafite is for serving to high political officials in the hope of high returns. Government officials want to drink it because it is expensive. And people buy it because it is expensive. It becomes self-fulfilling.”

A new vision of Europe

Europeans may sneer at Chinese tourists who pursue Beethoven, Bordeaux and Hugo Boss with the same undiscriminating avidity. But Europeans used to tour their own continent in a similar way. The original Grand Tour was also a display of relative economic power, as the gilded youth of northern, industrialising Europe headed to France, Switzerland and Italy to pick up a veneer of continental “polish” and crateloads of antique souvenirs (many of them fake). Those tourists, too, had less fun than they let on: they grumbled about the food, their rapacious guides and the discomforts of travel.

The face of Chinese tourism is also rapidly changing. The heyday of the daibiaotuan has passed. A decade ago, an official fancying a holiday more or less had to land a spot on one of these delegations, paid for from state or company funds or by joint-venture partners from the West. Today, such delegations are under much more scrutiny, and tourist visas are easier to obtain. Many travellers are now on their second or third visit to Europe: group tours are duly slowing down and stopping to savour local culture. Individual tourism is tipped as the next big thing. Yet individual visitors may create itineraries no more conventional than those dictated by tour groups.

In China, Xu Zhimo is loved not just as a romantic poet: his plain, passionate verse shook up a country grown exhausted and old. Xu is already a secular icon for Chinese students at Cambridge, whose diligence puts local undergraduates to shame. He would make a fine patron for the next waves of Chinese grand tourists—private travellers with the confidence to draw their own map of an old continent. Their list of important sights and experiences does not resemble the genteel image that Europeans have of their own homeland—it includes more duty-free shopping, for a start. But it is a fresh vision. With their economic power and hunger for new experiences, China’s restless middle classes have conjured a new Europe into life.

Economist: Age and happiness

Age and happiness

Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

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These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years’ worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can’t please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).

from PRINT EDITION | Christmas Specials

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010. All rights reserved.

FT: Brands get up close and personal

Brands get up close and personal

By Louise Lucas

Published: October 13 2010 20:49 | Last updated: October 13 2010 20:49

A Chinese woman squats on a low plastic stool, reaches for the shampoo and begins massaging it into her head, fingers working deep into her scalp in a kind of ritual. She is not the only Chinese woman to use conditioner like this – as testified by hundreds of hours of videotape, all filmed in Chinese bathrooms.

Perverse? Pornography? Neither: this is the Holy Grail of fast-moving consumer goods companies seeking to make products that consumers want. To that end, FMCG groups are earnestly studying human behaviour through focus groups, surveys and, more frequently in recent years, ways that are distinctly up close and personal.

The business of consumer research is intensifying on virtually every level. FMCG companies, which typically spend 2-3 per cent of sales on research and development, are going further afield geographically and conducting ever deeper research. New media are being harnessed, be it through social networks or blogs.

“Traditional research concentrated on the ‘what’. Now we are trying to establish the ‘why’,” says Simon Stewart, marketing director at Britvic, the beverages company. “We are not asking what they think about products and ideas but focusing on what makes them tick.”

The spread of digital social networks is one reason for the more sophisticated approach. But changing market dynamics are also behind the new focus. Competition and a weak economy make it ever more important to win customers, particularly in emerging markets. Indeed, so lucrative is the business of understanding what makes the Asian consumer tick that Singapore, never a place to miss a business opportunity, plans next year to set up a government-funded Institute for Asia Consumer Insights.

The same dynamics inform L’Oréal’s experimentation in bathroom photography. In similar experiments conducted in other markets, the French cosmetics group discovered that Korean women apply more potions and cosmetics to their faces than anyone else – a total of more than 25 creams and cosmetics at any one time, compared with 20-25 in Japan and more than double the amount used by American or European women. Japanese women may apply more than 50 coatings of mascara at one time, making European women – five to 10 coatings – look mere amateurs.

New ways to generate feedback

Fast-moving consumer goods companies are devoting more resources to digital media. The increasing spread of social media gives them the perfect tool to understand consumers. Starbucks has nearly 15m fans on Facebook, more than Barack Obama or South Park; Coca-Cola has 13.5m fans and Oreo cookies 11m.

In addition to sheer numbers of consumers, the social networks can provide quick feedback. Britvic, for instance, points out that teenage boys are both big Tango drinkers and heavy internet users, providing a constant source of information and feedback.

These companies are also replacing old-style surveys and focus groups with field work. Experts from a range of disciplines – historians, anthropologists, semioticians – are increasingly called on to study consumers at close hand in order to analyse trends and build databases.

“It all starts with observation,” says Patricia Pineau, who oversees L’Oréal’s consumer insights team, talking about the company’s “evaluation centres”, which involve “labs” decked out as bathrooms as well as cameras in people’s homes.

“Observing is necessary to decode exactly what [women] are trying to get and what they are attracted to. Sometimes it is the gesture that will reveal something that they really want to gain,” says Ms Pineau.

And what gestures. Japanese women spend a full minute massaging in lotions, patting their faces and eyelids. In Brazil, women change their nail polish every day to match their dress – and are wanton with the brush, painting their fingers along with their nails and relying on a cotton bud to mop up afterwards.

Back in the labs, scientists respond in turn. Thus Lancôme’s Génifique Youth Activating Concentrate has a stickier consistency in Japan than in Europe or the US, the better to pat in. Lip gloss is lighter in Japan, the better to allow the constant reapplication beloved of Japanese women.

Sometimes, however, gestures are not enough. Hence Nestlé’s strategy of embedding researchers in family homes, taking tea with a multigenerational Indian family or sitting cross-legged on the floor pounding pulses with a group of scarved women and their jeans-wearing daughters in Syria.

Chandan Mukherji is a veteran of embedding. The New Delhi-based head of consumer insights at Nestlé India has in recent years watched the lifestyle of the middle classes in towns and cities seep out to the villages and countryside. Seated at the family table, he saw housewives were turning to instant noodles but that they still supplemented them with extra vegetables and garnishes. Nestlé responded by supplementing its own instant noodles with vegetables.

“It really is an eye-opener for most of the teams, because they get a real life understanding,” says Mr Mukherji.

Also, after witnessing at first hand India’s small kitchens and vulnerability to rodent infestations, the Swiss group reduced pack sizes.

Drinks companies take a similarly up close and broad remit – looking not just at what people like to drink but where and how. Take SABMiller, the brewer. In the important market of Latin America, the urge to go out to where its drinks were actually drunk – and especially to mix that favourite cocktail of beer and football – was strong but the availability of venues less so.

Rob Priday, managing director of SABMiller’s Peruvian operations, says: “There’s a dearth of pubs in the country. In the terrorist years, people did not go out and now it is over, there are not enough pubs for on-premises drinking.”

Research showed that consumers want­ed more choice of places to drink and the results can be seen on the streets of Colombia and Peru. The company worked with local businesses and entrepreneurs to open café-style joints attached to soccer fields, where fathers can down a glass while their children play – or even have a kick-about themselves before sinking a glass or two. There are also bars where customers can play simulated golf or a few rounds of cards.

When Nestlé in Peru was debating which new flavour to introduce for its popular Besos de Moza – a marshmallow and cookie confection – it asked sweet-toothed consumers themselves to choose between the lucuma, a local fruit, or strawberry. “The feedback was amazing,” recalls Carlos Velasco, who heads the Peruvian operation. They chose lucuma, and Nestlé went on to sell 56m lucuma-flavoured units in 2009.

Asking consumers directly is valuable but FMCG companies also call on a range of experts: historians for historical context (say, the caste system in India), psychologists, anthropologists and ethnologists and even semioticians.

Greg Rowland, a semiotician based in London, advises FMCG companies on the messages they need to send to woo customers through their packaging and placing on supermarket shelves.

Supermarkets, Mr Rowland says, are a battleground between puritan and hedonistic pleasures – plain fruit and veg stalls as customers first walk in, with the indulgent pleasures of alcohol and chocolate waiting to assail them further down the aisles.

We instinctively want to stay on the sober side, says Mr Rowland, so packaging of indulgent items is classily low-key. Hence the naive smiley face on Innocent’s drink cartons or the use of white space on packaging for top-notch biscuits. Or take the heraldic devices on bottles of lager, designed to establish the brewer’s authority in the minds of drinkers. This is serious stuff, the emblems say, none of your “hooch”.

For all the time, money and expert investigation FMCG companies throw into understanding consumers, mistakes are made. During research into Japanese skincare, a L’Oréal team was surprised to see a woman supplementing her beauty routine with a tiny razor.

She slid it around her nose, below her eyebrows and on the nape of her neck. The reason: she was removing almost imperceptible hairs to get a better effect when powder was applied. As a non-daily ritual, and one that required the woman to bring her own razors (which were not on offer in L’Oréal’s labs), it had until then completely bypassed the ranks of researchers.

Delivery can miss a step too: SABMiller, identifying a desire for a sweeter drink for women in Peru, produced the cider-like Red – which turned out to be extremely popular with the men.

But for consumers, the question is surely whether they are just victims of clever advertising.

As Mr Rowland says: “You may think you are buying and eating this tin of biscuits. But really, the tin of biscuits is buying and eating you.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: China boxes clever on mooncakes

China boxes clever on mooncakes

By Mina Hanbury-Tenison

Published: September 16 2010 23:29 | Last updated: September 16 2010 23:29

At a branch of Xing Hua Lou, a famous traditional bakery chain in Shanghai, the evidence of the upcoming Autumn Moon Festival is visible. Thousands of boxes of mooncakes are stacked high inside the store and the staff can barely move.

Outside the store, meanwhile, touts try to entice customers in with laminated pamphlets offering up to 25 per cent off the listed price.

The Autumn Moon Festival – which this year falls on September 22 – is a traditional Chinese holiday. It is feted by the consumption of mooncakes, the roundness of the sweet pastry symbolising the union of family members.

According to the Shanghai Confectionery Industry Association, 21,000 tonnes of mooncakes were sold in the city in 2009 – worth Rmb1.85bn ($275m). Sales for the whole of China were estimated at Rmb11bn according to China Reports Hall, a market research firm based in Xiamen.

“It’s the time of the year for businesses to show gratitude to their business partners, to the government officials and to their own employees,” says Shaun Rein, the managing director of China Market Research (CMR) Group in Shanghai. “It’s a vital way of building relationships.”

However, in recent years the gifting of mooncakes has taken on a new significance in China, where a show of purchasing power and price-indexed gratitude has become more important. “As people get richer, they need more expensive gifts,” says Mr Rein.

Food retailers have cashed in on this opportunity with zeal. At Xing Hua Lou, single mooncakes, which typically cost about Rmb5 each, are repackaged in gift tins. The lowest price for a basic boxed set of eight goes for Rmb78, while for those seeking luxury there is a Rmb780 version filled with abalone fins.

Western retailers such as Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs have also embraced the seasonal retail opportunity. Häagen-Dazs, whose mooncake vouchers are one of the most circulated in China, offers boxed sets that range in price from Rmb268 to Rmb988 – a steep price tag for many Chinese workers.

Kris Kaminsky, the food and beverage manager at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, says the hotel expects to sell about 20,000 of its boxes this year. The value is often not in the mooncakes, he says, but in the presentation. “We’ve created a very nice red box that looks like a jewellery box. It’s a box to be kept after the mooncakes are eaten.”

Mooncakes are also the most re-gifted item in China. “Many people give their mooncakes to someone else,” says Shen Hongfei, a well-known food writer. “Not because people don’t want to eat them but because some receive so many gift boxes that they want to offer them as presents. It’s a sign of respect and gives face.”

Byron Kan, the general manager of the Shanghai Centre, which houses the Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel, has chosen to give Häagen-Dazs gift certificates this year to his corporate clients.

“[Mooncakes] are indeed vital, must-do corporate gifts,” he says. “But when companies started giving more and more extravagant mooncake gifts, to the point that the packaging and the gifts inside cost more than the mooncakes [themselves], the government decided to step in a few years ago and put a limit on the price.”

Now you can no longer buy a mooncake box with a watch as a gift inside or with solid-gold packaging.”

Many vouchers are returned for cash, allowing touts and middlemen to make a healthy profit margin. But as with any paper asset with an expiration date, the window for such buy and sell activity is limited. “The value of these mooncake vouchers go up and down according to how close one gets to the final date,” says Mr Rein of CMR.

Paul Smith, the president of Costa Coffee China, which expects to sell 8,000 boxes from its 70 outlets this year, offers his own solution. “We honour the vouchers for up to one year after the date,” he says.

“So if they don’t get to collect for this year, they can do it next year.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Anchor of family dinners

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Reflect > Story

Sep 12, 2010

Anchor of family dinners

By Lee Siew Hua

On my mum's dinner table last Sunday was a pot of hot Chinese seaweed soup with a generous proportion of kid-pleasing meatballs, shallots and swirls of egg.

That comforting pot was a request from my nephew, when my parents picked him up after school earlier that week.

A couple of days later, he reminded her to steam white rice - not that any grandma needs a reminder - as he loves his rice immersed in soup.

That Sunday morning, his sister was already relishing the thought of the good, light soup when she woke up.

Like many children in food-fixated Singapore, the two kids have explored global tastes. It may be Himalayan salt on the dinner table, octopus balls from a Japanese street stall on a snowy day, a tiny, experimental sip from a parent's wine glass or a new restaurant.

It's a pleasant revelation that my niece and nephew also plump for dishes from grandma's kitchen.

Our family meal is really a slice of culinary continuity. The children taste dishes that my sisters and I liked while growing up, though some spices have been toned down for the kids, and mum is now more sparing with the salt and oil.

Hainanese pork chop in ketchup gravy, Nonya chap chye with satisfying pops of lily buds, divine spring rolls, spicy tempeh, curry crab, chicken rice paired with chilli freshly pounded in the mortar, bee hoon stir-fried, sometimes, with greasy, canned pork belly - all have appeared in front of the family through the years and continue to do so.

Favourite dishes are one enticing element of the three-generation family meal.

Conversation and stories shape the living bonds too.

However, my parents seldom volunteer anecdotes or transmit wisdom from their early life, unless I remember to ask.

We know the pioneer generation is modest. They think their lives are unremarkable and do not talk incessantly about themselves compared to younger people.

The good news is that there's more of a national push now to gather their stories of enterprise and survival before it's too late. Singapore, like some countries, also has an Eat With Your Family Day which has been themed 'a ritual of the heart'.

I know I can connect the dots of the Singapore story at the family level, if some of our dinner conversation returns intentionally to the lives and thoughts of the elders.

I have to say, though, that the family dinner has been a hit-or-miss occasion for me for a very long time.

Since the late teens, my life had been lived independently and outside the home. First, it was the exciting spectrum of school activities, and I loved being active. Later, it was the unpredictable hours of work. I'd also have dinner with friends after work.

Then I spent long years overseas, missing not only weekend family dinners but also holiday gatherings, birthdays and reunions.

Now, we are more conscious about sharing a meal. The happy contradiction is that even when life gets more hectic with the arrival of a third generation, we feel the pull of family more.

There's an aura about the shared meal - even if family circumstances are complicated - that brings people together.

The regular, reliable dinner anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has some place else they'd rather be, as a Time commentator wrote.

Last week, an American friend who's a young mother posted this on Facebook: 'Tuesday is our regular family night with bubble baths, taco salad and silly silliness.'

Some form of play like that is great in the family too.

After our Sunday dinner, my mum sat in front of the TV. My sister arrived late and started her dinner. Some of us sat around her, with my other sister planning a trip on her laptop and my brother-in-law flipping on the entertainment on his iPad.

One child was reading, the other was playing games on the iPhone. My dad moved around.

It's like the parallel play that very young children get involved in. In the same room, absorbed in different delights, yet connected.

At the family dinner too, we may be on opposite trajectories, not always listening to each other or in the best of moods.

But we still make it to the table.

siewhua@sph.com.sg

ST: Hand-made

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

Sep 5, 2010

Hand-Made

It is tedious work, but some hawkers still make their food from scratch as they do not want to compromise on quality

By Rebecca Lynne Tan

PHOTO: ST

Retiree Rose Chee, 73, and her housewife daughter, Geraldine Lim, 40, have had many meals over 30 years of eating at the hawker stalls in Ghim Moh market.

And while they enjoy a variety of food, they almost always order a serving of chwee kueh from the Ghim Moh Chwee Kueh stall about once each week.

Mrs Lim, who was tucking into the tasty steamed rice cakes with her mother and toddler son last Friday morning, says: 'The chwee kueh here is just right and does not have too much of that garlicky flavour that most other places do.'

She adds that hand-made chwee kueh is one of the dishes that has become 'increasing rare' and wants to eat it while it is still available.

'I much prefer coming here than going to a food court, where everything is from a factory.'

In Singapore, where stall owners can easily buy perfectly manufactured food items from factory suppliers, there are still some operators who go the extra mile, taking pride in making food items from scratch.

LifeStyle went in search of some of these stalls (see stories on this page and the facing page).

Their fishballs and beefballs are spherical but not perfectly so. Popiah skins are a little jagged at the edges.

Baos have feather-light skins, and chendol - those distinctive green, worm-like dumplings - are soft and flavourful. They are not a radioactive green from colouring, either.

Although the work is tedious and labourintensive, food operators say they continue to make things by hand because they want to maintain standards and continue their traditions and heritage.

Furthermore, they say it just does not taste the same if they do not make it themselves, and customers will know it.

When you make it yourself, you have more control over the taste, hawkers say.

Madam Yvonne Lee, 42, who owns rice roll stall Freshly Made Chee Cheong Fun at Old Airport Road Food Centre, says: 'It just tastes different, the texture is also different. When we make fresh chee cheong fun, we can control the taste and texture, which is smoother and softer.'

The founder of the Makansutra food guide, Mr K.F. Seetoh, 48, agrees.

He says: 'It is a world of difference. It is not rocket science, it is just hard work.'

Yet, customers do not have to pay a lot for all this hard work. A hand-made bao costs 50 cents.

Perhaps hawkers who hand-make their food items should consider increasing their prices to justify their hard work and long hours, some people in the food industry suggest.

Food consultant Violet Oon, 61, says: 'Food from scratch tastes wonderful. It is very difficult and takes a lot of work - the prices people are paying do not justify the effort.'

She adds: 'And because it takes so much time and effort, these operators end up making less. And in my opinion, if you want to eat something that has been made from scratch, maybe you should pay three times its current price - time is much more expensive than food costs.'

Indeed, the cost of making food by hand has gone up over the years.

But the competitive nature of the food industry serves to keep food costs down, foodies say. Charge more and people will head to your competitor two stalls away.

Some hawkers also say they are not in it for the money. They know the work is hard, but they would not have it any other way - they would still rather make their food from scratch than order items from a factory.

Ms Jeanette Lee, 30, a business administration graduate who currently works in the insurance business, plans to take over her parents' chwee kueh stall at Ghim Moh market when the time comes.

She says: 'You can't just throw tradition away. For me, it is part of family roots. My grandmother started the stall 51 years ago and I want to see this through another generation.'

rltan@sph.com.sg

With additional reporting by Huang Lijie

Would you pay more for hand-made food? Write to suntimes@sph.com.sg

Teochew Hand-made Pau

ST PHOTOS: BENJAMIN NG, AZIZ HUSSIN, AIDAH RAUF, MARYANNE TAN

Where: Block 127 Toa Payoh Lorong 1, 02-02, tel: 6254-2053

Open: 6am to 2pm, Tuesdays to Fridays, 6am to 1pm, weekends. Closed Mondays and alternate Tuesdays

His father sold mee chiang kueh, thick springy pancakes filled with peanuts and sugar, but Mr Yeoh Eu Tiew was not interested in following in his footsteps.

Instead, he has carved out a niche selling steamed buns or bao, after learning how to make them from scratch from eight people.

And it is with much pride that the 59-year-old says that his son, who is 38, will take over his 18-year-old business.

Father and son have invested about $80,000 to lease a factory space in Senoko about the size of two hawker stalls.

When it is ready, they will make their bao by hand there.

Currently, the stall in Toa Payoh is cramped, Mr Yeoh says. He rents another shop space opposite his main stall to store the steamers.

He wakes up at 4am to begin the day's work at the stall, which involves making the dough for the buns - a mixture of flour, water, sugar and yeast.

The stall sells small bao filled with ingredients such as char siew (barbecued pork), lotus paste, red bean and kong bak (stewed pork in dark soya sauce).

Prices are between 50 cents and $1.

He says in Mandarin: 'It smells more fragrant and tastes better when you make bao by hand.

'It is a tiring business and I feel that I never get enough sleep, but one must have the stamina and perseverance to be in this trade.'

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Freshly Made Chee Cheong fun

Where: Old Airport Road Food Centre, 01-155, 51 Old Airport Road

Open: 7am to 9pm daily

The Lee sisters - Yvonne, 42, and Ivy, 38 - learnt how to make fresh chee cheong fun (rice noodle rolls) from their mother when they were teenagers.

They learnt the craft at a stall in Lorong Ah Soo that their mother, Madam Goh Ah Moi, ran 25 years ago. The sisters moved their stall to Old Airport Road Food Centre 10 years ago.

They also own two other stalls, in Marsiling Crescent and Chong Pang Yishun, run by another sister, Sally.

The chee cheong fun at their stalls are made to order. Fillings include prawn, char siew, mushrooms and scallops, and prices start from $2 a plate.

The rice rolls are made from a mixture of rice flour and water that is poured on a square sheet of cloth. It is placed on a steamer for less than a minute.

The sisters quickly remove the delicate rice sheet from the cloth, placing it on a marble top where it is then rolled.

The result is a smooth, soft and thin chee cheong fun, which is very different from factory-made rice rolls, which are thicker and more chewy, says Yvonne.

The quality of the flour is important, she adds. But the key to perfect chee cheong fun is that sheet of cloth.

Even the type of cotton used is vital. Some turn out chee cheong fun that is too soft or sticky.

The sisters say they have not thought about succession yet, as their children are still young.

But they hope that in time, the kids might want to learn a thing or two about how to make the perfect chee cheong fun.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

93 Wu Xiang Xia Bing

Where: Block 93 Lorong 4 Toa Payoh, 01-33

Open: Noon to 9pm, closed Thursdays

Mr Seow Kim Yam is mildly amused when you ask why he chooses to make his five-spice meat rolls and other tasty fried treats from scratch.

To him, the question is curiously existential and almost banal.

The 58-year-old hawker says in Mandarin: 'I am a hawker. I have to make these things to sell.'

Indeed, he takes great pride in the tradition of selling hand-made food. He says: 'If I get items from a factory, I cannot be sure of the freshness and quality. Also, the variety would be limited.'

His stall sells more than 20 types of savoury fritters such as five-spiced meat rolls, prawn fritters and sausages.

His wife, Madam Yip Kwai Fong, makes unusual concoctions such as chicken rolls stuffed with water chestnut and wood ear fungus, and taupok (fried beancurd puff) filled with tofu, egg and crabstick.

He also makes the sweet sauce and chilli sauce for dipping the fritters into.

He says: 'I have no choice. The sauces have to taste a certain way to go with my fritters so I cannot simply use ready-made versions.'

The couple wake up as early as 4.30am to prepare the ingredients and begin frying the items by 8am to open in time for lunch.

He became a hawker after the beer distribution company where he worked as a salesman folded.

Growing up, he had learnt to cook by helping out at his parents' kway chap (pig's offal and rice sheets) hawker stall. He chose to sell savoury fritters to avoid conflict with his younger brother, who is now running their parents' business.

He says he is mostly self-taught and he came up with the recipes with his wife by using their imagination.

He hopes to pass on his skills to his three daughters, who are in their 30s and hold 'office jobs'.

He says: 'We have not mentioned it to our daughters yet, but when we are ready to retire, we hope they will want to carry on the business.'

Huang Lijie

Deli Maslina

Where: Block 151 Bedok Reservoir Road, 01-1743, tel: 6743-7414

Open: 8am to 7pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8am to 1pm, Sundays. Closed Mondays

Deli Maslina, a traditional Malay kueh and cake shop, started with a stall near Bedok Stadium in 1980.

It moved to a bigger shop space at the ground level of Block 151 Bedok Reservoir Road in 1988, where it is still located today.

The shop sells more than 30 types of kueh and snacks, all of which are made from scratch the traditional way.

Items include corn hoon kueh, a jelly- like dessert made with mung bean flour; ondeh ondeh, a sweet potato ball with a centre of liquid palm sugar and rolled in freshly grated coconut; badak berendam, a kueh similar to ondeh ondeh but served in coconut milk; kuih kawsi, made with flour and palm sugar and topped with grated coconut; and kueh jongkong, wrapped in banana leaves and served with coconut milk and gula melaka, which is popular during Ramadan.

The shop also sells epok epok, or curry puffs, made from scratch. The stall is run by Mr Ahmad Don, 62, and his wife, Madam Mas Kiah Mohamed Shariff, 58.

Madam Mas and her helpers make all the items sold in the cake shop, nothing there is supplied by a factory.

She says there is no short cut to making Malay kueh - the ingredients and mixture used for one type of kueh cannot be used for another.

And she makes the items from scratch to keep tradition alive.

For the epok epok, a spoonful of the potato curry mixture is placed in the centre of a piece of pastry. The pastry is folded into a semi-circular half and the edges are delicately pinched together.

Mr Ahmad's daughter, Adibah, 26, will be taking over the business in time to come.

She has a full-time job in the marketing communications industry, but helps her mother whenever she can.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Siraj Waterloo Street Indian Rojak

Where: Block 270 Queen Street, 01-120

Open: 9.30am to 8.30pm daily

Dough balls, vegetable balls, coconut flour balls and prawn fritters are freshly fried each morning at this corner stall in Albert Centre market.

Indian rojak, which was made popular by Indian immigrants from Thuckalay in the state of Tamil Nadu, is a mix of battered items along with beancurd, sausages and squid cut into bite-sized pieces.

Customers pick what they want, the stallholder fries the items again to warm them up and serves the platter with a reddish dipping sauce that is mildly spicy, sweet, sour and salty.

This Indian rojak stall has been in operation since 1978, and was first called Sabeena, after the daughter of the shop's owner, Mr Mohamed Yusof Shahul Hameed.

The stall is now run by his son, Mr Sabeek Mohamed Yusof, 39, who renamed the stall Siraj, after his mother. He also runs another stall, Sajis, in Waterloo Street, named after his other sister.

He took over the business in 1994 when his father died. Prior to this, he was working in airline catering.

The crispy balls are made from scratch but items such as beancurd, fishcake and sausages come from suppliers.

It is tedious work because the batter for each dough ball and fritter is different - a coconut ball with onions and beansprouts requires a different mixture from a prawn fritter.

The batter is made from a mixture of flour, water and various spices.

Mr Sabeek says he makes his own to keep the dish true to its Thuckalay roots. Some fritters, such as the coconut flour ball, are popular street food in India.

The sauce is also made in-house, from sweet potato, dried chilli powder, sugar, salt and peanuts. The secret is in its proportion and consistency.

He has two children, seven and 12, and hopes they will be interested. 'But they are still young,' he adds.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Kway Guan Huat

Where: 95 Joo Chiat Road, tel: 6344-2875

Open: 8am to 7pm daily, for purchase of popiah skins. Noon to 5pm on weekends, for dine-in popiah. Home packs with skins and filling can be ordered two days in advance

Kway Guan Huat is one of a small handful of old shops in Singapore where you can still get hand-made popiah skins done the traditional way.

The skins are thin, yet soft and resilient enough to hold the myriad fillings of this do-it-yourself dish.

This particular shop in Joo Chiat Road has been in the business since 1938. It was founded by Mr Quek Tren Wen, who brought the trade to Singapore from Fujian province in China.

It is now run by five of his 16 children, including his eldest son, Mr Ker Cheng Lye, 63, who learnt to make the skins from his father.

His two brothers, Mr Quek Chin Heng, 50, and Mr Quek Kiat Siong, 47, also know how to make the skins and help run the family business.

The skins are made from a dough mixture of flour and water.

Mr Ker takes a large handful of the dough, which is a bit viscous, and swirls it in the palm of his right hand. Then, it goes onto hot cast-iron pans, which are more than 30 years old. He then skilfully manoeuvres his wrist in a singular circular motion to form a thin round popiah skin, about 20cm in diameter.

The skins are ready in a matter of seconds. It is tediously hard work but he says he is used to it.

When he was growing up, he would burn himself, and his arm would ache from holding and swirling dough in his hand all day.

Making the filling is also a labour- intensive job. The turnips and carrots in the stewed filling have to be chopped by hand into long strips. Grating is out of the question as the turnip will exude too much juice.

Asked why he bothers to make things from scratch, he says: 'There is something about handmade food that makes people crave it. You can smell and taste it. You do not get that same craving when it is factory-made.'

He says the shop will continue to make the skins the traditional way, on hot iron pans, by hand.

While the men in the family are skilled in making the skins, it is the women who are experts at making the filling and preparing the other condiments that go into a popiah. This includes chilli paste, minced garlic, prawns, egg, beansprouts, coriander and lettuce.

And during busy periods, such as over a long weekend or on festive occasions, all the siblings and even their children help out.

The family has not mapped out a succession plan yet - many of the third- generation Queks are professionals in the pharmaceutical, IT and accounting industries, and Mr Ker feels that this 'hard work' may not be one that they would want to undertake.

His sister, Ms Zita Quek, 47, says: 'This stall is part of our family's history. We do not know what will happen with the next generation. We are taking each day as it comes.'

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Shiek Najib Nasi Lemak

Where: 18 Rowell Road, tel: 6245-7134

Open: 11 to 5.30am during the Muslim fasting month, till Friday, otherwise 7.30 to 3.30am daily

Mr Najib Ali was provoked into making his own nasi lemak.

For years, he distributed nasi lemak from manufacturers to hawkers. But vendors often complained to him about the inconsistent quality and the manufacturers refused to listen to the feedback.

Frustrated, he decided to make his own nasi lemak and sell it. It was only after he moved into a shophouse in Little India five years ago that he started selling his fragrant coconut rice.

The 47-year-old says: 'We were unheard of for many years because people who sold our nasi lemak would not say they got it from us. But our neighbours could smell it from our kitchen and they asked to buy it.'

Demand was so encouraging that he decided to convert the front of the shophouse into a small food stall.

Through word of mouth, the shop has since won itself a loyal following, including a late night supper crowd that keeps it in business till 3.30am every day.

A regular customer, sales manager Marcus Tan, 48, says: 'The taste of its rice and chilli sauce brings back memories of the nasi lemak I used to eat as a child.'

Mr Najib says: 'Anyone can make nasi lemak. But making it on a large scale requires skill.'

He arrived at his recipe with the help of his wife, Fahizah Diab, after repeated tries.

Everything, from the rice and fried anchovies to the omelette and chilli sauce, is prepared from scratch.

Because of the volume of his business, he and his wife have hired eight assistants to help them and the kitchen runs around the clock.

The couple have four children aged between eight and 20, and while they have not helped out in the business yet, he hopes they will one day.

He says: 'We want them to carry on the business but they have to be interested.'

Huang Lijie

Thye Hong Fish Ball Mee

Where: Block 20 Ghim Moh Road, 01-51

Open: 6.30am till when fishballs sell out, daily

Mr Wee Pong Sai, 60, has been running his hand-made fishball noodle stall in Ghim Moh market since 1977.

Others might order their fishballs and fishcakes from factories, but he has been making his own from scratch since the stall opened and has no plans to stop doing so any time soon.

He says he learnt to make fishballs from scratch from another stallowner back in the 1970s.

The fishballs here are round but are not perfectly so, while the fishcake is also unevenly shaped.

Customers say they like the fishballs because they are soft yet springy, unlike those that are factory made.

Mr Wee starts making the fishballs at about 5am. Fresh fish is minced and then mixed with some flour in a large electric mixer, before being hand-moulded into round balls.

A bowl of noodles costs $2.50 and even though the fishballs are handmade, he says he does not want to increase prices as he does not see the need to.

The fishballs might be handmade, he says, but people should not have to pay more to have quality food.

And what about succession plans?

He is not worried about not being able to pass on the trade to future generations - the tradition will not get lost in time, he insists.

'Perhaps my nieces, nephews or my children might want to learn how to do it in the future, but I just don't have an answer right now,' he says.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Tan Beng Otah Delights

Where: Old Airport Road Food Centre, 51 Old Airport Road, 01-174

Open: 10am to 9pm daily

The stall sells several types of otah, including the usual fish otah, and those flavoured with prawn and squid.

These sticks of spicy seafood paste are often eaten with nasi lemak (coconut rice) and is a favourite at Singapore-style barbecues.

Madam Tee Ai Geok, who is in her 50s, makes hundreds of them a day, painstakingly spooning the mixture into 15cm-long coconut leaves, which are sealed at each end with a toothpick. Prices are 40 cents and above.

Her otah mixture is made from a combination of fish paste, belacan (shrimp paste) and coconut milk.

After the paste is made, her husband, Mr Tan Beng, grills each otah to perfection over a charcoal fire.

At any one time, he is watching and flipping close to 30 pieces of otah.

Madam Tee has been helping out at the stall for more than 10 years, but he has been in the business for over 20 years, she says.

On why they choose not to order otah from a supplier, she says: 'This is our business, we can't have other people doing it for us. Of course, we have to do it ourselves.'

The couple have three sons but she says she does not want them to take over. 'I do not want them to suffer. It is a very tiring and difficult business and it is just not worth it for them.'

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Cendol Geylang Serai

Where: Geylang Serai Food Centre, 02-107, 1 Geylang Serai

Open: 10am to 6pm, daily. Noon to 1am, during Ramadan only

Few shops these days will bother to put in the time and effort to make chendol, or green worm-like strips, from scratch.

But this stall, Cendol Geylang Serai, is famous for doing so.

Whereas factory- made chendol is often a deep emerald green in colour, its version is a pale green and the 'worms' themselves are slightly fatter and softer in texture.

Chendol is a sweet dessert- drink made with coconut milk, gula melaka (palm sugar) and chendol strips.

The chendol here is made from a mixture of rice flour and water, while its green colouring and flavour comes from pandan leaves.

And, of course, it contains a 'secret ingredient', which its co-owner, Ms Intan Eunos, 27, keeps mum about.

Even what the stall uses to form the shape of each strip is a closely guarded secret.

After all, the recipe was passed down from her grandfather to her mother and then to her and her brothers. And they plan to keep the recipe in the family.

Ms Intan runs the shop with her three older brothers, aged 30, 31 and 32.

It takes about three to four hours to make the chendol each morning.

They make about four knee-high tubs each day, and up to eight tubs on weekends.

She says: 'We cannot break our family tradition.'

And although she does not have any children yet, she is confident the trade will stay in the family - when she has children in future, she plans to teach them how to make it, secret ingredient included.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

The Beef House

Where: 217 Syed Alwi Road, Gar Lok Eating House, tel: 9821-5463

Open: 9am to 4pm. Closed Fridays

The Beef House not only makes its own Hakka beefballs, but also hand-makes its yong tau foo and Hakka soon kueh.

The shop is run by Mr Chia Teck Kwang, 47, and his two brothers, Yik Chee, 43, and Yin Chee, 40.

They learnt the craft from their grandfather and father, who sold Hakka beefball beehoon soup in Hock Lam Street in the 1960s, before moving to the present location in 1980.

The trio run three other stalls in Joo Chiat Road, Fengshan Market and Food Centre in Bedok North, as well as an outlet at the canteen in Nanyang Technological University.

They began offering other items in the 1980s to supplement their main dish of Hakka beefball noodle soup.

The soon kueh, a large turnip-filled dumpling in a yam and rice-flour skin, is freshly made each morning, as is the yong tau foo, which is stuffed with a mixture of fresh fish paste and stock.

The preparation starts at about 4am and the brothers make about 30kg of beefballs each day, for distribution among the four outlets.

The springy beefballs are the size of ping-pong balls and are made from pure lean beef, says the youngest Mr Chia.

He says factory-made beefballs may contain more flour, so he and his brothers make theirs from scratch to maintain standards and keep customers happy.

A bowl of handmade beefballs costs $3 and above.

They have no plans to increase prices; making a living and being satisfied with it, is all they are looking for, he adds.

The brothers have four young children among them.

They have not discussed the future but hope the next generation will take the business to the next level - perhaps supplying beefballs to other stores or supermarkets.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

Ghim Moh Chwee Kueh

Where: Block 20 Ghim Moh Road, 01-31

Open: 6.15am to 7pm daily. Rest days not fixed

Mr and Mrs Lee Sah Bah wake up at 5am every morning and it takes just two minutes to get to work, at their chwee kueh stall in Ghim Moh market.

Mr Lee, 60, has been making chwee kueh since he was a child - his mother sold the steamed rice cakes topped with preserved radish from a pushcart business 51 years ago in Strathmore Avenue in the Queenstown area.

When he was young, he would push the cart around and help grind the rice flour by hand with a large stone mill.

He opened his Ghim Moh stall in 1976 and continued to grind his own rice flour until 1980. But that became too tedious as the shop space was small and cramped.

These days, he uses rice flour from Thailand to make his chwee kueh. The couple make 1,500 to 2,000 chwee kueh a day.

The mixture for the cakes - which consists of rice flour, water, salt and a 'secret powder' - is stirred in a large thigh-high drum, the diameter of a car tyre.

And using a small steel container with a spout, he fills 20 tiers of about 60 small steel moulds with the liquid, before steaming them for about 25 minutes.

At his stall, where his wife and younger sister Lee Lak Muay (left) help out, he also prepares the preserved radish topping, which needs to simmer and be stirred intermittently for two hours.

He says: 'The radish is cooked with onion, garlic and lard - the traditional way, and that is why it is tasty.

'I would never sell factory-made chwee kueh. It just does not taste the same.'

Four pieces of chwee kueh cost $1.20 and he thinks they are probably one of the most expensive in town.

He says his prices are higher because everything is hand-made, but he does not want to increase them any further.

He has two daughters - Jeanette, 30 and Sock Yong, 19 - and does not want them to take over the business.

But Jeanette, who is a graduate, says she wants to stay true to her roots and plans to run the business in the future.

She currently works as an insurance agent because it gives her more flexibility to help out at the stall when her parents need her.

She learnt to make chwee kueh from her father in 2007, and does not want to see her grandmother's business disappear.

Mr Lee says his younger daughter is not as keen and will be pursuing a degree in music. But he is not pushy about wanting to pass on his trade to his daughters.

He wants them to work in other industries and if he has to close his shop because no one wants to take over it, he will.

Rebecca Lynne Tan

WSJ: Lost in Translation

LIFE & STYLE

JULY 24, 2010

Lost in Translation

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish

By LERA BORODITSKY

The Gallery Collection/Corbis

The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

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In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.

The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to have a second soul." But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

Use Your Words

Some findings on how language can affect thinking.

• Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
• Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
• The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
• In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.

In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (a wonderful nonagentive coinage introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." Even though everyone watched the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language mattered. Not only did people who read "ripped the costume" blame Justin Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities. For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we've found the transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the influence go the other way, or both?

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.

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“ That language embodies different ways of knowing the world seems intuitive, given the number of times we reach for a word or phrase in another language that communicates that certain je ne sais quoi we can't find on our own. ”

—Steve Kallaugher

One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away people's ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.)

All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

—Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Navigating cultural differences

Navigating cultural differences

By Emma Jacobs

Published: July 19 2010 23:07 | Last updated: July 19 2010 23:07

HSBC is backing a show (above) by Brazil’s Ernest Neto to highlight its local knowledge

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Success on the mommy track - Jul-06

Where organic food is new and ancient - Jun-03

More than just an investor - May-10

Idiosyncratic master of the revels - May-04

A high-speed empire builder - Apr-27

Fresh waters for entrepreneurs - Apr-25

Walking through a labyrinthine tunnel apparently made of purple, lime and yellow-coloured ights may not be an obvious route to boosting a bank’s profits. But HSBC hopes its sponsorship of an exhibition by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in London may help to do just that.

The bank, known for its “world’s local bank” slogan, has backed this summer’s Festival Brazil, a programme of cultural activities at London’s South Bank Centre celebrating the country that is predicted to be the world’s fifth-largest economy by 2025. Marah Winn-Moon, HSBC’s global head of cultural sponsorship, says such events are integral to a strategy that posits understanding different cultures as key to developing successful business relations. “Individual consumers might see Brazil from a different perspective and break down stereotypes about Brazil, not just being about carnival. They might work for an SME and HSBC might provide an entry point for operating in Brazil,” she says.

David Kotheimer, deputy chief executive of HSBC Brazil , an American who worked in London before moving to São Paolo last year, believes the festival helps business. “Understanding the creativity in the culture, you get a sense of the country and that helps spot opportunities to expand the bank’s business,” he says.

Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, a UK body that encourages private investment in the arts, sees this as “cultural diplomacy”, which he describes as “extending the company’s brand into a foreign market”. Such marketing strategies are only effective, he says, if the companies are prepared to work at “getting people, including foreign journalists and trade emissaries, to engage with these events”.

HSBC, for example, is also involved in a parallel programme of business seminars and conferences about operating in Brazil, including a research project with The Economist, conferences with the Financial Times and a publication with Time Out magazine.

Celebration of a country’s difference runs counter to the notion that the world is becoming culturally homogenised through the spread of the internet, the internationalisation of business and the development of a cadre of high-flying MBAs that appear to speak the same business language.

Such a belief can fool managers into believing cultural differences do not matter, according to Paul Bennett, chief creative officer and managing partner at Ideo, a global innovation and design consultancy. In fact, he says, global companies must understand different cultures and turn that to business advantage: “It’s the understanding of the subtleties that are important.”

As Maarten Nijhoff Asser, consultant at Trompenaars Hampden-Turner, which advises companies on cross-cultural challenges, says: “If your strategy is just growth without thinking about adapting to local markets, then you are just the Royal Bank of Scotland and you will falter. Too many companies don’t listen. It can be long-winded, but it is ultimately more successful.”

All companies, says Andrew Kakab­adse, professor of international management development at Cranfield School of Management, have done localisation “badly at some point”. The key to making it work is “clarity of strategy”, which is formed “when a company interrogates itself about what it’s really good at”, he says.

One global brand that has adapted to local tastes is fast-food chain McDonald’s. From the beginning of its development in the US, to its spread in Europe and, more recently, India and China, the company has targeted a variety of products at consumers in different markets.

Catering to local taste

Starbucks, the coffeeshop chain born in Seattle that has become one of the world’s most ubiquitous brands, has had to grapple with the challenge of projecting a core identity while also adapting to local markets.

At first, the chain traded on its all-American image. Outlets and food offerings were fundamentally the same, whether in Singapore or San Francisco. Now, however, the company is tweaking this strategy. It has decided that it must subtly tailor its offerings to local tastes.

In the UK, for example, it now sells the “flat white”, a strong espresso-based coffee drink that originated in Australia and New Zealand and only arrived in Britain about a decade ago.

Similarly, some of its cafés are being tailored to their local environment. A branch in Knightsbridge includes one-off art pieces, as befits one of London’s more affluent areas and a royal borough.

The company hopes the strategy will help it reconnect with local communities after a period during which, it now says, it expanded too quickly and suffered reputational damage.

The trick, however, will be to do so while also retaining its strong American image.

Key to its successful localisation have been research and investment in products adapted to local tastes.

Big Macs were never going to succeed in India, where 80 per cent of people do not eat beef. But the company did not treat the country as a single market, and conducted in-depth analysis in several states. So, when McDonald’s opened a restaurant in Gujarat, where most citizens are vegetarian, it offered vegetarian burgers and other Indian dishes, such as samosas. In New Delhi, however, McDonald’s introduced meat burgers for non-beef eaters – such as the Maharaja Mac with lamb or chicken.

The company has also made an effort to recruit local managers, for example establishing joint ventures with two local entrepreneurs in New Delhi who were selected to manage the fast-food restaurant. According to a 2007 article in the Journal of Business Case Studies by Bahaudin Mujtaba and Bina Patel, of Nova Southeastern University, this strategic move helped the company negotiate Indian bureaucracy.

Not all overseas managers need to be local recruits. But Mr Bennett says that when staff are sent overseas they need to become immersed in the local culture. He cites the example of one employee who moved to Shanghai and cycled to work instead of having a driver. “Relocation can be like dropping people from the sky so that they lead from above rather than becoming part of the community you need them to sell to,” he says.

Increasingly, this process is also taking place in reverse, with companies from the growing Bric economies expanding overseas. “It used to be that it was western companies growing in new markets – now it is the likes of Tata, Lenovo and Mahindra that are expanding overseas,” says Mr Nijhoff Asser.

The reasons why many companies expand overseas are changing. He adds that there was a time when “companies went overseas for costs [of production]” or to reach new markets, “but now they are going there to find innovation in the local market”.

Last year, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business co-authored an article with Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, in Harvard Business Review on “reverse innovation”, a process whereby goods developed as inexpensive models to meet the needs of emerging markets are repackaged as low-cost products for western consumers.

Prof Kakabadse says this is a reversal of the old strategy of “think global, act local”. Now, it is “think local, then act global”. So, rather than companies customising products to a local market, the focus should be to start with the local products and then try to leverage them globally.

But not all global companies need to adapt to different cultures. Apple sells the same iPad in Tokyo as in Toronto. Rather than localisation, it competes on pace of innovation, says Mr Nijhoff Asser. “HSBC, Ryanair and Apple’s top teams have asked themselves what makes their companies better than anyone else. HSBC looked at its 19th-century origins when it was operating in Hong Kong and Shanghai and serviced the local needs,” he says.

But, he adds, Ryanair does not worry about adapting its product to local markets. Its competitiveness lies in price: “Whether you decide to differentiate your market is entirely dependent on your product.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.