So I wasn’t as impressed by Guolichen as my friends and colleagues at the Fengtai Softball Field, but I was quite impressed by the many uses and meanings of this bottled orange soda that extended beyond simply “a drink”. It helped me better understand the guanxi system (connections culture).
I drew this on the flight back from Illinois, and it came rather easily, because I’d drawn a proto version of this comic on a dining table paper back in October, 2008. You can see that it still has many similar elements:
The power band is in reference to the 5 Olympics-colored power bands that we had to wear on each wrist that were specific to Olympics volunteers. People soon started trading them for other items. This comic is, I think, the first with the Olympics. My 2008 volunteer experience was very educational for me, and so there may be a few more coming down the line.
You may have noticed that these last few comics have small narrative bits. I feel like I’ve gotten to a degree of comfort in portraying my China experiences that I can start doing that. I hope you don’t find it too disconcerting as I move away from “telling” and towards “showing”.
By the way, Minute Maid is 美汁源 in Chinese (“Beautiful Juice Source”). Here’s a picture of Guolichen:
I like that you’re supposed to get one bottle per day, and yet everyone was grabbing them to drink or trade.
I don’t quite get the 果粒橙 love. It tastes too much like carbonated Tang to me.
A the joys of volunteer work. Aparently even the Olympics are not immune to the grabby people.
I think a big difference in Shanghai compared to US is the meeting at board game houses. Always seems like a large group of people (in a circle table) play random board games or card games. I like it because its fun, but in US a group of strangers playinga board game is kind of geeky, which is a shame. And Chinese are much less competitive at these games, in the US people would be very serious, Chinese often say “its just for fun”. I remember getting excited because I won a Chinese card game for the first time, and everyone looked at me strange.