observing-writing-doing

I enter H&M observing myself. I observe that my right eye, is observing  the other customers, and my left eye is observing the cloths and goodies in the store just like any other customer. There is a continuous touching and letting go. Hands touching cloths and then letting go, touch & let go, touch & let go, and so on. There is a continuous sound of metal clicking on metal as the women and girls pull cloth hangers out of racks and then place them back. What is touched most are all things red. I take the stairs, very deliberately searching for the baby department. I observe in my mind that there are things that my eyes want to see and very deliberately seek out. They want to see very certain things and I observe that when they see them, I feel a certain satisfaction. A shop attendant comes over to me asking what I am doing? I am writing and that made her suspicious. I explain the exercise. She’s o.k. with what I am doing. She’s a bit curious even, but for me it’s hard to be observing myself and writing and talking and explaining what I am doing and looking at cloths and people at the same time. I come from an almost well to do family in Indonesia. 30 years ago there was a trend of women wearing fake jewelry and trying to get them to pass as real diamonds or whatever. Sometimes they had copies made of their real jewelry and would wear the fake ones on parties, while the real ones were kept safe in a safe; this was a trend related to the first trend, …but significantly different in nature. But in both the jewelry functioned like chamber, antechamber and the outside. What I see happening in H&M and outside of H&M, lets say the Albert Hein, is completely different: women and girls wearing rocks of glass as though they wear 10 carat diamonds. Now, this fake jewelry is in no way meant to deceive people in thinking that they are real. A cashier in Albert Hein flashing her bling in front of my eyes does not convince me of  her social power, nor has she that particular ambition, but she does take pleasure out of her bling, and that is what it is about for her. Maybe she is aware that play and pretend are much more fun than having to really live the highly political lives of the bearers of real giant diamonds and rubies. In the 1990’s I lived in China for 1 year and it seemed to me that in the whole of China there was not a single mirror to be found (of course there were a few, I am exaggerating here). I lived in Guangzhou, which is 3 hours away from Hongkong, and once you crossed the border to Hongkong there were mirrors everywhere. The women in China felt miserable. I am not trying to say that the lack of mirrors caused this unhappiness, or I am not quite trying to say that. All I know is that a teacher who lived through the cultural revolution once said to me that she so desperately longed to put on lipstick, that she and some other girls would gladly risk a death sentence in order to feel pretty just once.