Having friends to stay can be exhausting. Planning an appealing itinerary is just the start, the difficult part is keeping it flexible to ensure that they get the most out of their visit.
Never had I anticipated that it would be so difficult when my friends and their father came to stay during one Spring Festival.
As usual, I did my homework: a mixture of activities to showcase the best of this island country, and, since the father was the CEO of a top property developing company in a second-tier city in China, some fine examples in his line of business, such as cleverly designed communal spaces.
During their stay, they surprised me not just by their insatiable appetite for shopping and their apparently limitless credit, but their dogmatic loyalty to certain exclusive brand names.
The father, who had just turned sixty, would start his day by informing me of the three-digit price tag on his shirt. Following a couple of hours’ stroll in a park on their first morning, my guests became excited when they caught sight of an exclusive Canadian brand name located outside a casino. Slightly unusual among the Chinese, the father showed not the least curiosity in the casino: it soon turned out that he was addicted to the luxury brand. After two hours during which he tried out nearly everything on display, it became a kind of mission for us during the rest of their four-day stay to visit all of the brand’s retail outlets.
I do not in the least mind window-shopping, but what I was not prepared for was that a man of his age and achievements could be so obsessed by a single brand and spend the best part of his overseas holiday looking for it.
Thinking that he could do with broadening his perspective on quality clothing, I took him to a store known for its choice fabrics and comfortable design, but with a much smaller price tag. He walked out after glancing at the display, informing me that since its brand had not yet entered China and its design looked ‘too ethnic’, his business contacts might think that it was merely made in China. It then occurred to me that quality and design were the least of his concerns: what he wished to buy was a product that his business community would regard as a status symbol. To achieve that goal, he had to resort to a product that his colleagues would recognise; and it just so happened that in his home city, that Canadian brand, which was one of the first introduced to China, did the trick.
Before their departure, the father left me with a bottle of Maotai, the most expensive home-made spirit from China, and a whole pack of Triple-Five cigarettes, one of the most expensive Chinese brands. It was no secret that since I am a non-smoker the cigarettes would be wasted on me. But by then I had already learnt that by leaving such expensive gifts behind, he was performing an act of generosity.
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