The ThunderBlogs

Crystal Mall, despite competition from a towering mall just across the street, Metropolis at Metrotown, survives going out of business, as locals easily spend $200 on a single shirt.

A Chinese sales associate, Suzie Xiao, explains that the culture clash in Asia actually proved conducive to business.  Most of her clients where she works, Sophia’s Boutique, a fashion retail store which caters to women in their 20s to 30s, are Japanese, Chinese and Korean, who all like to splurge on clothes and shoes.

According to China International Business, the highest spending market are the affluent young, urban professionals have no dependents, and fair an average of 20 years younger than the wealthiest consumers in U.S. and Japan.  But Xiao explains it differently: inflation rates for housing are so high in China, that young women are making up for the not being able to afford luxurious homes by wearing high fashion.

The rich smell of Chinese herbs and ginseng float through the air in the lower level market of Crystal Mall.  Mothers and seniors swarm around, squeezing firm taro roots and workers wearing dirty aprons rigorously cut Chinese winter melons behind the counter.

On the upper level, young women with perfectly straight doll bangs and studded tops walk elegantly into purple-walled boutiques lined with zebra carpets.  As Love As, a boutique that sells brand name Japanese clothes and shoes, recently sold over $5000 worth of products to just two Chinese international students.

Xiao handed me a $24 magazine whose front cover featured three Japanese women with chestnut wavy hair in over-the-shoulder sweaters and underwear, explaining that Asian women like to emulate their fashion.  One of their knitted tops hung near the front of As Love As, with a sales tag dangling from it marked $238.

Both Xiao and the store owner of As Love As said that they do not need to do advertising, as word-of-mouth marketing works well within the tight-knit Asian community.  Most of their clients are also international students, who do not have any siblings due to the one-child policy in place in China, so parents can afford spoiling their them.

On the other corner of Sophia’s, closing sale signs are taped onto the windows on Nancy Szeto’s retail store, I.N. Club.  Having compared her business to the successful younger stores nearby, she simply said, “things are different.”

With the elders sticking to the tried and proven products of Chinese herbal medicine and dried fruit, and the younger women selling luxury items, Crystal Mall is a microcosm of the intergenerational gap of Asia’s plain living back in the day and its competitive Westernized lifestyle of today.  But nowhere else in Metrotown can one find bubble tea for $2.75, not even in China.