I've Got School Spirit

Down in Gongbei, there's a massive underground mall called "Port Plaza." It's filled with stall after stall of cheap goods for sale (food, clothes, wallets, electronics, shoes, you name it). Expats and Chinese alike love it for its low-cost counterfeit designer goods -- handbags, t-shirts, clothes, etc. People from nearby cities take bus trips just to shop there.

D and I don't venture into Port Plaza often, and D never without me as a guide. Once you get underground, it's almost impossible to find your way back out again. The place is laid out like a wagon wheel; there's a center shopping area and then many halls that branch off the center like spokes. It has about 8 or 10 exits, each of which takes you aboveground to a different location in Gongbei. If you get lost, you can just walk around the outside of the wheel, but since the place is so big, that takes forever. And like most shopping around here, there really isn't much worth buying. Fake handbags. Low-quality clothing. Cheap shoes. Ugly jade. Underwear and bras (10 sizes too small -- the average Chinese woman doesn't even need a bra, but you'd never know it from the sheer quantity of bra stores all over Zhuhai). Still, it is good for people-watching and playing "spot the expat" game (spot the expat [usually not hard] and guess the person's country of origin).

A couple weeks ago we were just taking a day off and decided to brave "the underground." We weren't in any hurry, so it didn't matter if we got lost. As we were browsing through one of the hallways when I spotted a t-shirt on a mannequin that I just had to have:



This shirt epitomizes for me some of the half-assed counterfeiting that goes on here (it's the inattention to detail that is mind-boggling). The name is misspelled. The color scheme is all wrong (SU's colors are blue and orange; this is mustard yellow with black lettering). The insignia is so-so.

When you look at the back, it's even better:


As far as I know, SU doesn't even have a sailing team. There is a sailing club (one of my students in WRT 307 designed a web site for the club for one of his projects in the class). But still.

The original asking price for this masterpiece was 120 Yuan. I ended up paying 40 Yuan for it -- still too much, but good bartering on my part, no? It cracks me up to think someone took the time to design and make this t-shirt, that the stall's workers put it on a mannequin to lure people to the stall, and that throughout the country there might be people wearing shirts like this.