Lesson 24

g.
     "Now I am looking forward to setting up a private fashion company to design fashions for foreign people staying in Guangzhou," she said."I'm working hard on it."

                  4.Jewellery Shining Once Again in China

       Strolling through nearly every city, you can find jewellery shops and women wearing necklaces, earrings, rings and bracelets.
      "Things have changed dramatically," said a middle-aged woman who had just bought a diamond ring at a jewellery exhibition held by a small arts and crafts store in Beijing's Chaoyang District.

       "I'm the kind of woman who loves dressing up more than anything else, " she said. "But to my great regret, during the 'cultural revolution,' when I was a young woman,        I couldn't make myself beautiful. by wearing fashionable clothes and beautiful jewellery. Now I am happy to have a chance to wear jewellery again now that it is becoming popular in China."
       People, both young and old, women and men, have begun showing new interest in jewellery, especially since 1982, when the government reopened its domesitc gold market after it was shut down for 21 years. But different people think of jewellery in different ways.

                                                                                             Recompense

      Fu Cong, 60, a retired man in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, spent 700 yuan he had saved up for a couple of years to buy his wife a gold wedding ring for her 58th birthday.
      "I consider it a recompense," he said. "When we were married 30 years ago, I had neither the money nor the idea to buy her a wedding ring since in the 1950s, a gift like this would have been considered wasteful and bourgeois."
      Overjoyed at wearing the precious gift her husband gave her, his wife said that she has taken the ring as a good sustenance and hopes that their marriage will last forever.

    "Wearing rings, earrings, necklaces and other ornamental jewels was very popular when I was a child," she said. "My ears were pierced a few days after I was born as were most little girls' at that time, and I began wearing a pair of earrings when I was a child."
       She said that she never had a necklace or a ring because wearing jewellery was no longer done when she grew up, and people were criticized for wearing jewels.
Wang Weilan, another woman in Hohhot, has another view toward jewellery.
      A few months ago, she spent several thousand yuan on a gold ring and a pair of earrings.

      "I would rather rely on gold and jewels than on paper currency for protection against price increases," she said. "Although I've put some of my money in a bank, I'm still afraid of devaluation."
    
                                                                                  Wealth

    For many elderly people, jewellery is no longer an ornament to enhance beauty but a symbol of wealth or a memento. So they pay less attention to the external design and care much more about intrinsic value.

    But most who wear jewellery thess days do so for beauty's sake.
    "Even a few years ago, I considered jewellery a luxury. Ipreferred durable consumer goods, like colour televisions, refrigerators and highgrade furniture. Now that I have these things I think of jewellery as a necessity, " said He Ming, a 24-year-old Beijing woman.

    Cheap, imitation gold and ivory rings and necklaces were very popular a couple of years ago and had a special appeal to young women wit

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