Gucci不满——我们的产品设计不是给死人用的

Gucci不满——我们的产品设计不是给死人用的 Michael: Now, it turns out that one luxury brand is not happy with some very unusual knock-off replicas in Hong Kong. Wu You, maybe you can elaborate a little more on this rather strange case for us. WY: A recent report says the luxury company Gucci has sent a letter to six shops in Hong Kong, and it has warned them to stop selling paper products with the Gucci logo. So, what are these paper products? OK, in China, people who bought them will burn these paper products in the belief that the deceased relatives can use them in the afterlife. It seems that this time, Gucci is really hunting down the knock-offs, even to the grave. Michael: [The] theory is that your ancestors will then receive this money in the afterlife, so it seems like now people are taking this one step further, and you have paper iPhones, and paper cars, and things like that. QD: More than cash, right? Michael: You know, people today in China really want to make sure that their ancestors are materially wealthy in the afterlife. Does that seem to be the case? QD: I think it’s an extension of the good feeling of taking care of each other. I think there’s nothing wrong with that feeling or that concept, you know, basically – deceased ones, family members or ancestors, we still want to take good care of them, and then, when society is getting better off, people are looking at other creative ways of taking care of their deceased ones. For me, personally, I think that’s a bit too much for me. I think it’s better, if you want to express your filiality to your parents, we do it when they are alive [WY: That’s a very good point] and try our best to take good care of them. Michael: [There is also] the Qingming Festival, or the Tomb-sweeping festival, and Wu You, maybe you can tell us more about this. WY: So, in China, in early April, you can see that there is a Qingming Festival, or Tomb-sweeping festival. Just literally speaking, the tomb-sweeping festival means you will sweep the tombs. Chinese people will go back to their hometowns, the family members will be united, and they will have the ancestral worship ceremonies. As for these ceremonies, you can see that it is a time for the older generations to tell the family history to the younger generation. Michael: Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen some very strange cases here. You can buy and sell just about anything on Taobao, and I’ve seen adverts that you can actually hire people to sweep the tomb. It seems like it’s incremental; the more you pay, the more reverential this person is. Maybe if you pay 100 kuai, they’ll just sweep the tomb; if you pay 500, they’ll sweep and they’ll cry very loudly; if you pay 1,000, maybe they’ll kowtow in front of the tomb. QD: Right, it’s been commercialized, it’s not exactly a positive trend in terms of marking this special festival, and I understand, you know, for some people, they are working in the big cities and they are far away from their hometowns, from their ancestral tombs. They would love to be there personally and express their love to their ancestors, but the thing is, they can’t do that, so they hire somebody to do that. The thing, for me, is it seems very fake. Too fake, you know? Michael: I know in Beijing and Shanghai and some other places in China, real estate is becoming very, very expensive indeed, and some people actually say it’s too expensive to die. QD: That’s true, and I think not only in China. Basically, I’m just back from Australia a few weeks ago. I was in a lecture [where] a guide was talking about the public cemetery in Melbourne, then people shifted the topic to another issue – that is, [wanting] to buy a plot for when you die, but then the problem is that it’s getting more and more expensive for a lot of people – you have to go to a suburban area far away from the city centre. WY: They can’t afford to live in the city centre when they’re alive, and they can’t afford to sleep in the city centre when they die. Michael: Indeed, it’s a bit of a problem. In the UK, a lot of people tend to have their ashes scattered at sea, but from what I understand, in the Chinese culture, that’s not really the done thing. QD: But that’s also a practice encouraged by the government, to save some land.