笨狼发牢骚
发发牢骚，解解闷，消消愁
正文
中国高档消费，国外产品、服务项目占了压倒性的，甚至韩国化妆品、整容，也是中产青睐的对象，中国人出国旅游，采购是一大项目。欧美名牌压倒性，据说中国土豪想买中国货，也买不到，够意思。自然，山寨豪华，土，土豪们骨子里瞧不起。举个例子，苹果（手机、电器），你要是稍有身份，非它莫属，否则掉架子。
在中国，百万富翁（millionaires）不算什么，即使美国的（华人）百万富翁，回国去，也觉得是要饭的似的，惨。对于真正的土豪，老外是如何看的呢？
为此，有一个专门的名词，叫“不领不领王朝”（Bling Dynasty）。至于这是中国人先发明的，还是老外发明的，搞不清，不过老外是这么认定了。
据说，“BlingBling百灵百丽”，是小有名声的乐队“中国娃娃”二人组”。百度对“bling”的解释是“Bling Bling在HipHop领域里可以用来泛指一切奢华的装饰品”。
Bling Dynasty，够火，即使在美国比佛利山庄（Beverly Hills），也有一家（像是华人）注册地公司Bling Dynasty, Inc.
这里说的中国土豪，跟美国土豪差不远，不是什么百万、千万富翁，不是几套房子那种。这儿说的，仆人就好几个，就凭我那几个破钱本事，给他们当仆人，不是当不上，而是连申请的机会都没有。
美国富人消遣杂志《GQ》（原名Gentlemen's Quarterly，「紳士季刊」是一本男性月刊）专门对此做了长篇介绍，还配上几个短片。原文较长，我附在下面，你未必有耐性读完，给你总结总结。
中国亿万富豪（billionaires）仅次于美国
高档品牌商店：
古驰GUCCI
中国店铺：70家，意大利店铺: 33家
路易威登LOUIS VUITTON STORES
中国店铺：51家，法国店铺: 19家
2013年全球豪华品，中国最有钱的2%，就占了33%（还不是所有“中产”）
劳斯莱斯2013年销售
中国：1016，中国以外：0
2013年中国消耗的红葡萄酒：17.5亿瓶（如果$30（美元）一瓶，那是五百亿美元了）
中国私人飞机、豪华游艇在世界不算多数，起步晚，不过说是2012年豪华游艇销售3000艘，到2017年会长到38100艘。
土豪们真行，估计言语举止，一行一抖，都全是西方上乘权贵们规矩，小的们不行。“The problem is that Chinese people have not yet learned what the world expects your lifestyle to be when you're a billionaire”，西方传教的还大有市场。“They have no idea how to spend it,” Geoffrey Ravoire, one of the people who ran the “SO! Dalian” event, told me.
负责照相和制作短片的LAUREN GREENFIELD，在西方还有名气。短片共有六集，分别为
Welcome to the Good Life of China’s Wealthiest 1 Percent
$16K Banana-eating Lessons with China’s Wealthiest 1 Percent
What’s a $1B Austrian Village Doing in China?
China’s Newest Export: Sending Rich Kids to Boarding School
How Millionaires Find True Love in China
Luxury Shopping in China When the Sky’s the Limit
六集联播：
大家知道的，估计比我多，从国内了解，自然另一个角度。无疑，现在在中国，高档仆人也是吃香的行业了，只是苦了那些穷人，跟我一般，连当仆人的机会都没有。
如何当有西方文化的仆人
老外眼底的穷人：
The Bling Dynasty
You probably know that people are getting rich in China. They lag only behind America in sheer number of billionaires. And you probably know that all of that money is new. But do you know what the hundreds of billionaires (and tens of thousands of millionaires) are going to do with their money? Well, neither do they! Lucky for them, there is an army of Western luxury-lifestyle purveyors coming to teach them how to act rich. Devin Friedman ventures to China to partake in a gaudy crash course in the centuries-old art of snobbery
BY DEVIN FRIEDMAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAUREN GREENFIELD
January 2015
This past summer, a fleet of private planes was dispatched throughout the vast north of China. At airports in the coalfields of Jilin and the industrial centers of Hebei and the other industrial centers of Liaoning and the other coalfields of Gansu, Gulfstreams and Airbus business jets touched down to collect the ultra-rich of China and their entourages before tipping wing flaps and taking off again for the industrial city of Dalian, way out there on the eastern edge of the world.
These people were not merely wealthy. We are not talking about individuals who just go ahead and order the premium cable channels without even trying to play DirecTV against Comcast. We're talking dislocating, alien, dehumanizing amounts of money—the kind of stratospheric wealth that seems inevitably to propel people into a kind of post-geographic realm. At this level of wealth, you're not really a citizen of Baku or Hamburg or Pacific Palisades or whatever the location of your birth; the only people you have anything meaningful in common with are other people who are also that wealthy, people you meet at the private airports and luxury boutiques and resorts and the better yacht clubs of the world, citizens of a kind of nationless, concierged realm we can call Yachtland. By this logic, China is sending more people to Yachtland than any other nation in the world.
The problem with China, though, is that there exists almost zero in the way of native Yachtland infrastructure. There are precious few private airports, no James Bond-style Monte Carlo casinos, no Portofino-esque towns populated only by people who smell of Acqua di Parma, and there is literally only a single yacht club at which a Russian oligarch or an Italian real estate magnate would feel at all comfortable. I even visited the most exclusive public riding stable in Beijing in search of Yachtland but found only a walled compound out near the airport called the Equuleus International Riding Club that I would have taken to be some kind of cucumber farm/orthodontia-manufacture center, were it not for the stadium-size Bentley ads that were festooned all over the place. (It should be noted that the Bentley ads featured cobblestone streets and castle-y places that called to mind an image of Yachtland, only further highlighting the fact that Yachtland was nowhere near here.)
While more than a dozen billionaires and hundreds of millionaires were en route to Dalian, a micro-class of expat Europeans had converged on the city and were already here, putting the finishing touches on a little outpost of Yachtland they'd built out on a vast new municipal marina. It looked not unlike a United Nations tent city, except that at the center of it was a "beach polo" pitch and dozens of yachts, plus some Aston Martins and Ferraris and stuff. It had been constructed for an event held over a long weekend this summer called "SO! Dalian," which you can think of as a kind of orgiastic ultra-luxury pop-up shop. Many of these European expats were here to sell yachts of the mega-, ultra-, and holy-shit variety, and on the first morning of the event they were already gathering in the main tent, which had been chilled to the temperature of a package of grocery-store chicken thighs. Little Frenchmen in tiny fitted blazers and driving mocs, mustachioed Germans in pink pants, macho beaming Italians named Giordano. A tanned little tribe that had pulled up stakes in the Old World in order to dedicate themselves to selling super-extra-perversely-expensive vessels to people on the other side of the globe who have a reputation of being kind of scared of the ocean and have no idea what these yacht salesmen are talking about half the time.
A lot of these yacht salesmen—Paul Blanc, here for the tall-masted-French-sailboat company Beneteau; Michael Breman, representing Lürssen, a German company that builds $600 million yachts with custom-made motorcycle elevators for people like Paul Allen and Roman Abramovich—seemed to approach their jobs with a kind of knowing, world-weary bemusement, like private investigators in noir novels. But not Traugott Kaminski, yacht salesman for Sanlorenzo. Traugott's vibe was a little different. I think monomaniacal is the right word. Traugott: native of Hannover and resident of Hong Kong, a man who calls himself the Godfather of Yachts. He stood that first morning at the boat slip and barked orders at his crew—his white shirt pressed, his complicated "architectural" eyeglasses polished, his hair cinched back into a limp fusilli of ponytail—looking like a man who could burn ants on the sidewalk with only his eyes. It was a look that said: Today I'm going to sell a mother-fucker an $80 million boat with leather flooring and a Jacuzzi on the flybridge, whether they want it or not.
He was super keen on showing me how he'd kitted out his spec boat—a ninety-six-foot gleaming wedge of white fiberglass and smoked glass bobbing before us—to suit his clientele. The industrial laundry machines, the champagne-glass-chilling shelves, the showers specially made for men to bathe with their mistresses, the shrunk-down cabins because Chinese don't like to spend the night on their boats. Traugott told me he goes the extra mile. On board, he introduced me to a cast of extras he'd hired to give his craft that Yachtland feel: I met a Ukrainian woman named Yulia—she had to have been six feet tall and never took off her sunglasses, day or night—who would dispense gold-flecked champagne and caviar to prospective buyers; I met a Chinese man named Kenny from Shanghai who would provide a selection of "vintage" cigars.
"SO! Dalian" was a rare and valuable event because the hyper-rich of China are hardly ever in the same place at the same time. These men (they are almost entirely male) are figures of intense fascination if you happen to sell yachts, or anything expensive, or want to fund a company. You could argue they're the most important figures in our contemporary global economy. And since many of them had never been even to a simulation of Yachtland, this weekend they would begin to be educated about the world they might someday inhabit. I figured Traugott, renowned for his networking, might be able to introduce me to some of these guys, and so I asked him.
He gave me a cursory look that made me feel as if I were being reduced to cold data. He would allow only that there were several clients he was excited to see. I asked him what they did, and he said, "Business." I asked him where they lived, and he said, "Northern China." He did get excited when he talked about one potential customer, a whale. The Whale of Whales, as Traugott made it sound. This guy was ready to pull the trigger on a boat this very weekend. What's his name? I asked. Would he like to be interviewed?
Traugott almost laughed. "I cannot tell you my potential customers. I have to hide them. I must sell first the boat." And that was all he would say, turning away to inspect the karaoke room in the main cabin.
In 2004, there were three billionaires on the Hurun list of Chinese billionaires. (The Hurun and Forbes lists are the gold standards when it comes to counting rich Chinese people.) Today there are 354 Chinese billionaires on that list—388 if you include the billionaires in Hong Kong. There are also 60,000 Chinese people worth at least $200 million—another line of demarcation between being wealthy and being a photon cannon of currency.
Now, America is still number one in billionaires with 492. Fuck yeah, America, etc. But Rupert Hoogewerf, the Luxembourg-born man behind the Hurun list, estimated for GQ that even given their relative economic slowdown, the Chinese would overtake us in billionaires in two years. He also said that for every billionaire Hurun knows about in China, they suspect there's another one they don't. "Some of them we don't know about because their wealth is new or they live somewhere remote, and some of them are secretive because they're government officials or what have you," Rupert said. But in a world of profound income stagnation (the median income in America is essentially the same as it was fifteen years ago), in a world where more and more money is being concentrated in the hands of the hyper-rich and where most of the hyper-rich have already established their spending patterns and taste preferences—not to mention parked their capital in the banks and companies of their choice—you could argue that the new and soon-to-be billionaires of China are the most important market in the world. If you want to sell things like, say, mega-yachts, China represents close to 100 percent of your potential growth market.
The problem is that Chinese people have not yet learned what the world expects your lifestyle to be when you're a billionaire.
"They don't like the sun," one of the many European yacht salesmen I met in Dalian said. "They wear ridiculous bathing costumes. They are afraid of the water. If you go to a Chinese beach, during the day, the beach is empty. You can have it all to yourself. They come out only at sunset to take photos of each other. These are the stereotypes."
At this point, people who buy yachts here aren't buying them because, for instance, they enjoy them. Consider that the largest yacht in China was bought in 2012 at another of the "SO!" events, this one down on the resort island of Hainan in the south. It was 146 feet long, and it was purchased on the spot for an estimated $45 million. Rumor has it that the owner has never taken the boat out once since he bought it. "He doesn't leave the marina," another yacht executive, this one French, told me. "He comes to the boat, sits in a chair, and fishes off the side. Then he goes back and sleeps in his villa."
But let's review one fact here: Ten years ago, there were three billionaires in China. And now there are at least 350—350 billionaires and 60,000 200-million-aires in a nation where twenty years ago there was essentially nothing fancy to buy!
"They have no idea how to spend it," Geoffrey Ravoire, one of the people who ran the "SO! Dalian" event, told me. That's where the "SO!" people come in, as they see it: They don't just put rich people and yacht companies together; they provide a kind of public service—instructions on lifestyle—for the super-rich. Delphine Lignières, the founder of the event, put it this way as we sat in the VVIP tent and drank rum drinks: "We try to give the message to stop and enjoy," she said. "We try to teach them to have experiences."
Okay, so this is something I really didn't want to find funny: four Chinese women in cocktail dresses trying to pronounce foie gras. Because really, that's a tough thing for anyone to pronounce. But still, you listen to people shouting "frah grah" and see if you don't have to take some time to do a little personal reckoning. This was the week before the Dalian event, when I spent time at an etiquette school in Beijing called Institute Sarita. Here women receive instruction in such courses as "Introduction to the Noble Sports," "Pronunciation of Luxury Brands," "British Afternoon Tea," "Lingerie Lesson," and, naturally, "Introduction to French Cuisine," where we might learn how to pronounce things like foie gras. The course lasts for twelve days, costs about $15,000, and books up months in advance. The school meets in an apartment in the tony Sanlitun Diplomatic Residence Compound that the school's owner and chief instructor, Sara Jane Ho, rents for this purpose.
Sara Jane is from Hong Kong and attended Exeter, Georgetown, Harvard Business School, and a finishing school in Switzerland upon which the institute is modeled. She is 29 years old and drives a murdered-out little Audi coupe and often wears her hair in a halo of braids. She begins each morning with either a brisk swim at a luxury hotel or horse jumping at a friend's private stable. She looks like a woman who James Bond sleeps with even though she has a death ray in her mountaintop midcentury-modern home that she has aimed at civilization. I think she's aware of this: She has framed on her wall a page from Chinese Cosmopolitan magazine in which she is wearing a short red dress and holding a red leather riding crop. It's impossible to be in her company for more than seventeen seconds without apprehending that she comes from superior breeding. It registers instantly in her posture as she sits on the edge of her French sofa ("All of my furniture is custom-ordered from Paris"), in the way her knees are pressed together and ratcheted a few degrees away from center, in the distant, immutable pleasantness of her facial expression. I've never met a more pleasant person. There's also something irresistibly horrifying about the total control she has over herself at every moment. Like, one amazing thing I saw Sara Jane Ho do was slowly peel and eat a banana using only a knife and fork, an exercise in flatware surgery her students were meant to try their hand at afterward. We watched her sit erectly in her French dining chair as first she wounded the thing with English cutlery, severing it down its length and unzipping a flap to reveal the fruit, which she consumed with extraordinary forbearance, replacing the flap over the deflated thing, the pleasant smile never leaving her face. None of us could do it like she did, with that unbearable restraint. I believe there are people on the Internet who would pay to watch Sara Jane Ho do what she did to that banana.
On the morning I attended, there were four students: three hostesses—Lucy, Lucy, and Laura, all in their forties or fifties—and Doris, a string bean of a 16-year-old who'd been flown in from Shenzhen by her parents and put up at a five-star hotel to take the course. I watched them take a class in flower arrangement and another on setting the table. For the table-setting lesson, the three hostesses and Doris donned white cotton gloves like attendants at a fine-jewelry store and measured the distance between forks with a ruler. In the afternoon, a makeup artist came to show them how to apply their makeup tastefully.
"In China," Sara Jane said when I asked why it was necessary to train Chinese women in the application of makeup, "especially among the nouveau riche, people put on a lot of makeup. I don't know if you've noticed. People go out for dinner to a simple hot-pot place and their hair is like bam, and they're wearing a crazy Chanel suit, red lips like vroom. It's almost kind of scary."
Before lunch was when they did French cuisine. I'm not going to tell you I didn't have a kind of out-of-body experience watching Laura yell frah grah, frah grah, frah grah! I am not going to say that I didn't turn to an imaginary camera and give the imaginary (American) audience a kind of jaw-drop look. People love it when a stereotype is fulfilled. There may not be a happier moment for a traveler than when French people act like super-haughty French people or when an Italian swears at you with his hands while riding a motor scooter with his mom on the back—you think, Wow, now I'm really in Italy!
Later, I asked Sara Jane what kinds of people come to take her class.
"It's only for people who have a high-end social need," she said. "It sounds snobbish. And look, everyone should have manners. But I can't be everything to everyone. I want to train ladies."
I was also interested in the concept of "noble sports." Namely, which noble sports are trendy in China right now?
"The first wave of rich sports was golf," she said. "And it's old now. Everybody and their mother plays golf now. To say, Oh, I'm learning golf, it's not exciting. Equestrian is really where it is. It's the next thing, and you're just starting to see the wave now."
I asked her why, given that China was designed by Mao to be a kind of post-class society, her clients think it's so important to learn the skills she teaches.
"Chinese are rich now," she says. "But I tell my students all the time, being a world leader doesn't just depend on your bank account. It's about social and cultural leadership, and that's why my clients are coming." So it's not about joining a kind of society?
"China doesn't have a 'society,''' " she said. "It's not like New York or London or even Hong Kong, where you know one rich person and you know them all. China, you have all this random wealth from random cities. Some random person has three factories in the south, and he buys a Rolls-Royce. But there's no society. The only reason they know each other is because private banks have events and they meet each other that way."
If you had to go to the bathroom at "SO! Dalian," you had to leave the tented city of Yachtland and hit the porta-potties out by the seawall. It was a jarring transition. In front of you, across the marina, was a half-built replica of Venice, complete with deep canals lined by ornate stone buildings, that was itself set before an even more bizarre tableau: a massive swath of totally graded-out dirt. Like a God-size blind spot backing straight up to the mountains. Dalian is a city of 6 million on the Korea Bay known for its warm-water port and for being one of many large Chinese cities Americans have never heard of. It boasts a standard downtown with a skyline of generic glass skyscrapers and streets teeming with traffic. But "SO! Dalian" wasn't held there; it was held here, where an entire second downtown, with, like, fifty skyscrapers and hundreds of smaller buildings, was going to be built all at once. It made the event, if you happened to wander outside the tented luxury village, feel as if it were taking place in the future. Even the name "SO! Dalian" sounded futuristic. It's like a post-English patois imported from a not-too-distant future when English is mostly used to make something sound fancier.
Over the four days of the "SO! Dalian" event, there was lots to see and learn. The company Vladi Private Islands gave a tutorial on how to buy your own private island. (Best to go through Vladi Private Islands, turns out.) Some other attendees claimed they'd heard a talk about how to get an American passport simply by parking half a million dollars in a U.S. bank. You could watch the stunning women of Kazakhstan take on the stunning women of Palm Beach in the "beach polo championships" while approximately three people watched, none of whom seemed to realize that there isn't really any such thing as "beach polo championships." There was some good people-watching, too. No one seemed certain what the dress code for something like this was. One man—identified later as worth several hundred million dollars—had on a kind of orange nylon Louis Vuitton mock turtleneck and what might have been welding glasses. I saw a woman wearing a pink ruffled human-sized beer cozy making a dream-vacation wish at the dream-vacation booth sponsored by a local bank. I saw beautiful women with silk umbrellas, and a grandmother sucking on a fried fish like it was a lollipop. I watched as a yacht-company official forcibly removed an old man from a boat before it took a cruise because he was merely a "guest" and not even a "VIP";he watched that boat disappear into the fish-colored murk with his fists clenched, crying hot tears of humiliation. On another day, at the Gaggenau VIP tent, I saw a man with a faux-hawk, a tailored suit, and a porkpie hat and wondered what his story was—maybe he was a billionaire? Later that day, I opened the door to a porta-potty out near the seawall, and staring back at me was the same man, his feet on the toilet seat, his fine suit pants around his ankles, and a cigarette clenched between his teeth. He was swiping at a Samsung phablet. There was not the slightest embarrassment in his eyes when he asked if I wouldn't mind shutting the door, or at least that is what I think he said, because I don't speak the language. We never saw each other again.
A lot of the action seemed to be located in the Gulfstream tent. The private-plane market is way more advanced than the yacht market. One afternoon, I met a fellow named Yan Zhenhua exiting the tent. Mr. Yan hailed from Fujian Province and, that day, was in head-to-toe Burberry—plaid golf shirt with plaid-accented chinos. I asked him why he'd come to the event, and he told me he'd just ordered a G280, which can be had for between $20 million and $30 million.
"Gulfstream sent a plane to where I live," he said. "The plane was just for me and my friends. Six of us came."
Where did you come by your fortune? I asked.
"I have many gas stations," Mr. Yan said. "I started with my own money, so I come from zero."
And why do you want a plane? I asked.
"Because I like it. My friends have one, so I tried it and I love it. Once you have a plane, you will have more friends. And people will see I'm successful, and it will be good for business."
I asked him if he'd ever heard the term tuhao, which is colloquial Mandarin for "nouveau riche." It translates roughly to "money from the country."
"Yes," he said, smiling at me. "I am tuhao. Who isn't tuhao? There was no money in China twenty years ago!"
When we parted ways, I went over to hang out at the little Airbus chill lounge. It was mostly empty, as it usually was; the Airbus guy said that the Chinese were followers—everyone bought Gulfstreams because their friends had them. No one wanted to be the first guy to buy a different kind of plane. Plus, not many people can afford an Airbus. "I don't want to talk to anyone unless they have a billion dollars," he said. "Otherwise they can't afford it. I will maybe talk to two good potential customers over four days."
It was the Airbus guy who, on the second-to-last night of the event, invited me to sit at his table at the "SO! Dalian" gala dinner held at the Shangri-La hotel downtown. It was an invitation I'd been angling for, because another guest at this table would be the scion of a manufacturing magnate worth nearly a billion dollars. The son was here to go yacht shopping as a proxy for his father. I'd trailed him at a distance over the past few days as he listened to sales pitches aboard vessels owned by Sanlorenzo, Ferretti, and Lürssen. I had as yet, however, been unable to speak with him, but I wanted to. I wanted to know what he thought, not just about the effort designed to crowbar him from his millions, but what it felt like to be a part of a grander, unintentional crypto-re-education effort. Did he believe that this event wasn't just about yacht appreciation, but that it was designed to work the same kind of behavior-modification tricks that Sara Jane Ho was providing for four ladies at a time up in Beijing? All these little Frenchmen with their cropped suits and sockless dress shoes sent as emissaries for old-world lifestyles; Traugott and the other men selling the yacht lifestyle; Torrey, a guy I'd met who was recruiting members for a new yacht club in China—weren't all these people trying to create a Chinese "society" in their own, European image?
The Airbus guests stood around our table, mingling. Me, a couple of Chinese nationals who were specialists in whale networking for Airbus, two rich people who weren't really rich enough to count (dolphins?), a lady in a short skirt whom I took to be a seat-filler. The Son-of-Whale wasn't here yet. The Airbus guy and I chewed the fat for a minute. This is going to be funny, he told me in his French-accented English, because Chinese people don't go to shit like this; they don't do cocktail hours where people stand around talking to strangers. At restaurants, wealthy Chinese people eat in private rooms, at big round tables, and dislike having to talk to people they don't know. Then he said: Watch what happens after the first course; that's when things will start to get a little nutty. Just then the chandeliers went dim in the ballroom, and a beam of light as cold and blue as a diamond lit up the stage. A woman with a Spanish accent, dressed in a gown, got up and sang "Fly Me to the Moon," which kicked off a raft of jazz standards. She didn't get all the words right, but none of the people who were listening to her were native English speakers, anyway.
They were delivering the first course—raw shrimp—when the manufacturing magnate's son showed up and took his seat next to me. He was in his late twenties and had a collegey, untucked vibe, with a stylish mop of curly hair swung to one side and handsome horn-rimmed glasses. We shook hands, and he told me a little bit about himself. C (he asked me not to use his name) told me his father didn't identify as rich: He still slept at the factory, still drove a Toyota, served ramen noodles on his private plane. So yes, he owned an Airbus business jet valued at more than a hundred million dollars, but that was recent. C hadn't himself realized his father was one of the richest men in China until someone showed him the Forbes list when he was a freshman in college in Canada. I started to lay out my thesis for him, namely that all these advance men were here to condition the rich people in China to act like they're supposed to. He agreed that buying a yacht in China had very little to do with enjoying yachts.
"The Chinese yachting lifestyle is about impressing your friends or bringing your little third [a colloquial term for "mistress"]; it's about face," he said, sucking the head out of a shrimp. Face is an important Chinese concept, which pertains to looking important in the world. "They will never bring their family or their own wife on the boat. Having family time and adventures and bonding—this isn't important in China, in general."
Waiters came to collect our first-course plates. Suddenly people left our table and other people arrived. A woman in a business suit sat down next to us and wanted to toast. The Airbus guy nudged me: Watch, everyone's going to start switching tables now. As we talked, more people came and went, each asking to toast us. The Airbus guy explained that in China it's seen as super weird if you drink by yourself, so every time you want to take a swig of beer, you have to get someone to do it with you.
"We are learning the consumption life," C said later. "Nobody knows what to do when they become rich, so they just buy things mindlessly." I asked what motivated them, and he told me about guys who try to show off by buying Ferraris. "Oh man, Chinese people like showing off so bad! Okay, here's a story. Ferrari: How it works is, when you buy a Ferrari, you pay part of it up front, and they go and build you the car, and then, when they deliver it, you have to pay for the rest of it. My friend works for Ferrari. He said they make a car that's undeliverable every month. Someone orders a Ferrari to show off and can't pay for it every month!"
We ate for a while. Then C laughed to himself. "The problem," he said, "isn't the billionaires. It's the millionaires." That was kind of an awesome thing to say: Dude, you know who's ruining it for everyone with their crass bullshit? Those low-rent millionaires.
Already the germs of class are beginning to appear in a country in which all wealth is new. It's what Sara Jane Ho was talking about when she drew a distinction about the women who take her classes: "My clients are not the overnight-mushroom millionaires. They are not the people you see misbehaving abroad. People who just came into money are still trying to buy the Hermès bag. My clients were buying the Hermès bag ten years ago."
During dessert, another woman in a ball gown appeared in a beam of light on the stage at the Shangri-La. She led the crowd in a game: A slide would appear on a screen showing a beautiful beach from somewhere in the world, and we would have to guess where it was. Portofino! Cannes! Deauville! It was as if we were being shown flash cards to help us memorize the various territories of Yachtland. C watched for a while and then turned to me.
"If what you're asking is, Is this a tutorial about how to be a rich person?" C said as the woman showed a beach in Sardinia, "then, yes. These events are about the Chinese learning how to form an elite class."
The whale of whales was one of the last to arrive at Traugott's event-ending party for Sanlorenzo, on the next and final night of "SO! Dalian." And he arrived at just the right time: The party was reaching its simulation crescendo. Traugott had set some velvet ropes around the Sanlorenzo booth, his ninety-six-foot spec yacht bobbing next to us like a prize poodle with its tongue wagging. The lights were up; there was a small crowded dance floor. He'd thought of everything. Yulia served dollops of caviar off the fillet of white flesh between thumb and forefinger. Kenny was smoking a big fat "vintage" cigar and stuffing more cigars into the wet mouths of other VIPs. There were some models who hailed from a province in the north where, I was told, all tall Chinese people come from. The owner of the French restaurant I'd met the night before at a dinner with the beach-polo team, the one with the front rattail, she was dry-humping a little shipping magnate, who was throwing down some '40s-style ballroom-dancing moves on her in return. They were a funny couple, but they were going full Chinese-French Dirty Dancing out there.
Then the Whale was there, at the velvet ropes. When Traugott spotted him, he got this look in his eye: It's happening. In an instant, he'd ushered the Whale in. A Russian singer was really pouring her heart out on a rendition of "Bad Romance." What a pure voice, what presence; she might as well have been playing for Madison Square Garden instead of two dozen people on the edge of a random city in China. For some reason, I got an advertising catchphrase in my head: All for this one moment. I couldn't place it at the time, but I looked it up later, and it turned out to be the tagline for a campaign to market Lufthansa's first-class service. It was the perfect tagline for this event, in that it doesn't totally make sense (all for what moment? The moment of flying somewhere on a plane? That's not a moment)—the old English-deployed-as-luxury-nonsense trick, the argot of Yachtland.
I'd first spotted the Whale earlier that day, at this Ferrari (cars) slash Ferretti (boats) party they were throwing at the very end of the last dock. He'd shown up just as the putrid pink sunset reached its fullest volume, casting the factories across the bay in shadow. They'd set up a little white tent from which they dispensed canapés and poured champagne for the guests. There weren't many of us. Maybe it was where we were, but it felt like this small group of us had been left behind on an abandoned planet and then told we were in a nightclub. The Whale of Whales had an assistant half a step in front of him and a beautiful woman half his age (a little third, I guessed) a step behind. He looked north of 60. There was none of that shiny Louis Vuitton workout-shirt stuff, no tuhao full-Burberry head to toe—he had a tan linen jacket and a black polo shirt like a resident of Yachtland should. On his head there was a little white golf cap that looked as if it had been placed there by a doting mother. As he walked, he created his own force field about nine feet in diameter; those of us who were standing in line for a chance to rev the engine on a marine blue Ferrari just kind of parted as he walked past. For some reason I thought the Whale of Whales could provide some key to understanding this whole thing, though what it is I wanted to know from him I couldn't say. But before I could approach him, a small team of Ferretti salesmen in white golf shirts closed in, and in no time he was ensconced on the bridge of an Italian-made walnut-inlaid Ferretti pleasure craft that could have come from the same shipyard as Traugott's.
Now, that night at Sanlorenzo, the Whale of Whales and his companion stood to the side, watching the dance floor. Up close, he had a placid look on a face that, with his large fleshy mouth, was reminiscent of a fish that survived by vacuuming decomposed organic matter from the bottom of the ocean. His companion flipped through Sanlorenzo sales literature. This was my chance to buttonhole him, I thought. My translator told me that she should be carrying my briefcase when we approached; in the realm of face, a man of his stature would never take seriously someone who carried his own bag. Then she asked him: Would you like to be interviewed about boats by GQ magazine? "I'm sorry," he said, "I don't speak English." It was explained to me that in China, people don't say no, they say things like I don't speak English, even though it's clear you have a translator. Never once, the whole time I saw him, did he take his hands from behind his back. It seemed almost like a philosophy; he was someone who had other people who engaged with the world for him. I tried to imagine him using his hands to make a sandwich, and I couldn't.
I went back to talking to the three henchmen of another whale, a shipping magnate from Dalian. Meanwhile, Traugott was moving through the crowd toward the Whale of Whales, whipping the party into an even more frenzied frenzy as he approached. He needed to show the Whale just the kind of (frenzied) world that yachts can create if you only let them. He was exhorting the singer for an encore, tugging Yulia and her caviar along, barking instructions to all of us. We were all his props. Everything, in fact, was a prop—the beach polo, the VIP tent, the nonsensical speeches in second languages delivered to no one, the female brand ambassadors with the gold parasols. It was all mood lighting to induce the Whale to fiscally mount the comely white yacht when it came time. All for this one moment.
"Come on," Traugott said Germanically, placing his bony little hand at the small of my back and pushing me with unexpected force out onto the dance floor, a pair of champagne flutes in his hand that he'd bring to the Whale. "You dance now. You dance now. We are making the party now. THIS IS DOING BUSINESS IN CHINA."
领教了。
数字是原文的，估计有增加效应之意。