When I visited Hong Kong in last August, I stayed at the Marco Polo Hotel in the Harbor City on Canton Road, Kowloon. This stretch of Canton Road is flourishing with all the world class branded boutiques like Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Lanvin, Hugo Boss, Givenchy, Bottega Veneta, etc. etc...just name it, you'd find it! Almost every dressy shoppers, women or men, were carrying either LV or Gucci bags. It really made me feel like a natural jungle boy with a The North Face backpack clinging to my shoulder.
I am never a shopping craze, but being surrounded by all those fancily decorated world class boutiques, I couldn't help myself to snoop around. World class boutiques indeed have world class price tags on all their products. Amazingly, most of the customers in those boutiques especially LV and Gucci were Chinese speaking with very distinctive Mandarin accents from different parts of mainland China. The shopping scenes demonstrated LV and Gucci are very very popular in mainland China too.
In the 45-minute brunch at a typical Tawau coffee shop in late morning today, to my surprise, I saw about 10 Chinese women carrying LV or Gucci bags. Tawau, like most Malaysian towns, the economy is agriculturally dependent; but like Hong Kong, many women carry either LV or Gucci bags. Among these women, many of them carry the bags just because they want to have "face" to show in their social peers not because they are rich in cash.
For the working class women in Tawau, a LV or Gucci bag may be 3 to 10 times of their monthly salary. Lord, why do these women made such unwise decision just for a hand bag??
A typical Hong Kong street.
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