Ebaby! Blog

America is tired of marketing. It’s hard to get people to take free things or fliers because they’re tired of all the clutter. Not so in China.

While in Beijing, we were giving away little rubber wrist bands with the company logo, and instead of being annoyed like they are in the US, people were grateful, and a crowd gathered to take them from us. When we begin to run out, people actually offered to buy them from us.

The English, baby! team went to Beijing to make videos for our site. But we inadvertently learned that China is a guerrilla marketer’s dream.

In addition to the wrist band incident, any time we began filming, a huge crowd would gather, even if we were just interviewing people with a microphone. I was constantly stopped and asked for photos just because I had a blue bike and blue t-shirt and blue eyes. The beginning of one of these clusters is documented above.

The strangest thing was that we didn’t see anyone else doing any guerrilla marketing, yet we weren’t even trying and people were being so receptive. It was and interesting surprise and very fun and refreshing. Although I admit that I had a strange feeling that I was a sham and had simply been mistaken for someone else–that someone would run up and shout, “He’s not Phelps!” and the crowd would turn on me. But that never happened. If you see a photo of me with a Chinese person on a random MySpace or hi5 page, let me know!

Well, the Olympics are over and the Ebaby! team is back in the USA. But what a trip they had! Take a look at the English, baby! Olympics page for the videos.

While he was over in China, Jason Simms sent emails about his adventures to our friends at Willamette Week, a Portland newspaper. The posts are behind the scenes and totally honest, since they’re for our hometown audience instead of our users. They make a good compliment to the official Ebaby! Olympic material. Here’s a quick breakdown of the six entries.

Opening Ceremony: “Everything is closed off for miles around the stadium. So we got as close as we could in a huge group of people up against a barricade in a park. It reminded me a scene in a zombie movie.”

Photo Ops: “I didn’t really know what was going on when the first person asked to take a photo with me—I thought vainly that I had been recognized from the website—but when a crowd gathered and we had to flee, I realized there had been a mistake.”

Ping Pong: “After being thwarted several times by the ubiquitous Olympic volunteers, we managed to reach the front row. There we discovered that we were sitting among the tennis coaching squad, who explained how the game works.”

Scalping: “He told me he’d rather just eat the ticket than give me a deal like that because it drives up the prices. He also wouldn’t let me film him. I wonder what the penalty for scalping in China is.”

Behind the Balls: “I talked to Superman of the Metal Balls and found out that he doesn’t even take tips—this is just his way of being a part of the Olympic spirit. It’s his dream to challenge an official Olympic athlete. The gold we awarded him was his first.”

Closing Thoughts: “I felt much more comfortable filming impromptu sports and interviews in Beijing than I do in Portland. Many people in the US seem to have a strange bias against cameras. They see a video camera and assume you’re doing something sinister. In Beijing, people pretty much always had a positive reaction to seeing a camera in a restaurant or on the street or in a market.”

I’ve never been at the center of the world like this before. Today is the day. The date on this post reads August 7th, but here in Bejing, it’s already August 8, the biggest day of the century for Beijing. The opening ceremony of the Olympic games begins in a few hours and two-thirds of the world will be watching.

But here in Qianmao hutong, it feels like any other day. The locals are cooking food and walking down the street. But a few miles away there are thousands of people standing on the street where the Chinese Olympic team will drive later today. They don’t know when it will come by, but they are willing to wait as long as it takes.

Captain Jeff and I have posted blogs about our arrival on the official Olympic page. Here are a few photos of our trip so far. John and Jeff enjoying the first beers of the trip:

Captain Jeff with some other Captains:

Captain Jeff cooling down:

Our Hutong:

In case you haven’t heard, English, baby! is fielding an Olympic team this year. We’re a band of rag tag underdogs that’s sure to win some hearts, if not any metals.

We’ve begun to order stuff for our trip like the special Ebaby! stop watch and sweatbands pictured to your left. I’ll be modeling shorts for you here by the end of the week.

Check out our official Olympics page or the press release about our trip. Also, each member of the Ebaby! team is keeping a profile blog about the upcoming competition. So take a look at Captain Jeff’s, John’s or mine.

Coverage of the Olympics this year seems to be divided into two categories. There’s news about the athletes, which is, of course, generally up beat. And then there’s news about the Olympics overall and China, which has been largely skeptical and often negative.

But, as we’ve been planning our trip to the Olympics, I keep thinking about the games are still an international gathering representative of a lot of what English, baby! stands for. Luckily, Mariah Summers at the Portland Tribune agrees. She wrote an article that came out today about our trip. She did a great job of capturing the spirit of the trip and the nature of the website.

When she was interviewing John, she mentioned trying to find other Portland-based companies sending people to Beijing. I wonder how many American companies that aren’t traditional media outlets are going to the games. I’m sure our team would love to compare notes with them.

The more time I spend interacting with the English, baby! community, the more I feel like a global citizen instead of American. I had a lot of fun on the 4th of July this year, but maybe someday there will be a holiday to celebrate global patriotism.

I took a few minutes to think about that idea–global patriotism–when I filled out a questionnaire for this feature on OPB.

Q: What does Patriotism mean to you?
A: When you have the sense that a complete stranger is your brother, that’s patriotism. When you take pride in the place that you live and want to make it better, that’s patriotism. As the word itself suggests, it’s the sense that those around are of the same paternity or fatherland.

But when I think of a fatherland, I don’t think of my country. I think of my planet. I guess you could say I’m a global patriot. I’m proud to be a citizen of the world and when I travel and meet other pilgrims, I feel a kinship with them. I also see pride for a global community emanating from every country in the work I do on English, baby! (englishbaby.com) a website where nearly a million people of all nationalities are learning English.

Q: Tell us about a time when you’ve felt patriotic, and why.
A: Last fall a Turkish man and Ukrainian woman who met on English, baby! got married in Istanbul and I got to make a video about the wedding.

Traveling with the bride and groom’s family members, many of whom don’t speak a common language, there was a sense that beyond culture, there are things that bind us: dancing, love, humor. It struck me that just as an interracial marriage is an American story, an homage to our melting pot and act of American patriotism, an international marriage between people who met online while learning English is a global story, a step towards forgetting borders and an act of global patriotism.

Q: Tell us about when you’ve felt LEAST patriotic, and why.
A: I think that the Iraq war is an example of provincialism and flies in the face of global patriotism. The decision to fight was made unilaterally by the US government without regard for the opinions of the world. If a state in the United States were to act so recklessly and illegally, it would be treason.

A similar example is the failure of the US to ratify the Kyoto protocol. As a state on this Earth, it’s our duty to keep it clean and assume responsibility for our use of recourses. That would be the patriotic thing to do, anyway. And on a global community like English, baby! it’s not uncommon to hear complaints when a nation fails to pull its own weight or justify its actions to the world.

Q: If you have lived in another country, how has this affected your ideas of patriotism and national identity.
A: As a student, I spent a semester studying in Spain in 2003. I met a lot of other young travelers from all over the world and felt that I had more in common with them than a lot of people in my own country. Our shared respect for other cultures and search for hunger to know about them was my first experience with global patriotism. As the Internet exploded in the years since then, I’ve seen this sort of community replicated online, sometimes on a massive scale as in the case of English, baby! They didn’t end up using any of my material, but it was fun to think all that stuff out, since global patriotism has been a concept in the back of my mind throughout my entire life. Apparently I’m not the only one with it on the brain, either. A man interviewed for this similar NPR story said, “I think we have to think more in terms of being earthlings than from one country or another.”

And if you make it all the way to the end of the OPB piece (which I recommend if you have time), there’s a little discussion about the Olympics, which was of great interest to me since we’re heading there in a month. A couple of sources on the program say they feel particularly patriotic at sporting events. But this episode’s co-host, history professor and author Matthew Dennis, replies, “I’m more fascinated with the internationalism of [the games] than the nationalism.” Hopefully Beijing will be a fine moment for global patriotism.

Although there’s been some press about how inhospitable to tourists Beijing will be during the Olympics, this video, in complete saccharine madness, argues otherwise.

Since we’re taking a trip to Beijing in about a month, it was cool to see all the sites in this video (Apparently all the singers are famous people too. Did you see Jackie Chan?). But I also laughed at several parts, just because the song is so long and there are so many huge smiles in it and there are, like, several beautiful women telling me their doors are always open…it just got kind of silly.

But when I looked at the comments, everyone was taking the video totally seriously!

When I pointed out what I thought was one of the funniest quotes to Jewel, our resident Mandarin speaker, she was able to explain why I thought the video was funny even though it’s not supposed to be. Here’s the line:

The flowing enchantment and charms are filled with youthful spirit and vitality.

Apparently, that’s relatively normal speech in China. While in recent decades the English style has become as concise as possible, Chinese writers (and weird promotional video makers) embrace flowery language.

This gives me even more reason to learn Mandarin. When I first started writing I was drawn to the flowery style. Now I like being economical with words, but it took some getting used to. Maybe I find my way back to the sinuous delights of language wrought with sonorous hues, or something like that.

But anyway, I suppose the tendency to be over the top with language might help explain this highly exuberant video. I can’t wait to get over there and see the enthusiasm first hand. I want to learn the “Beijing welcomes you” part and sing it to people when they ask how I like the city.