by Xiaowei Wang
The pearls Kristie sells are low quality, but the oyster Kristie has in her hand is special to me. It’s a wish pearl oyster, the same dead mollusk that Zhao told me about, flown halfway around the world, trucked through a series of warehouses all the way from Shanxiahu.
As a pearl party participant, you can watch on Facebook Live, and you can also reserve an oyster by filling in an order form before the scheduled party. Reserving the oyster is around US$20, and you keep whatever pearl is inside the oyster. You get to watch as the oyster is opened for you on Facebook Live during the broadcast by the hostess. She typically calls herself a “pearl consultant” for a multilevel marketing company that distributes these oysters. As a consultant, she purchases the wish pearl oysters from the MLM company up front, and there’s pressure for her to sell as many as she can, otherwise she’s stuck with oysters that she’s unable to off-load. All oysters have a pearl in them, and sometimes two, which is known in pearl party parlance as “getting twins.” After opening the oyster and cleaning the pearl, the hostess sends the pearl back to the MLM company, which prepares the pearl in your choice of jewelry setting—a dog-shaped key chain, or a silver-plated oyster necklace, conveniently shipped to you.
Kristie is an independent Vantel Pearls consultant. Vantel, like most MLM companies, requires you to pay up front for any goods you want to sell. Whether you manage to sell what you’ve purchased is your responsibility as an entrepreneur. Add-ons like business tips and strategies can also be purchased, and part of your own operating costs includes buying lots of ads, on Facebook and other social media.
Over the past year, Kristie has been gathering up acolytes: “direct downlines” that report to her and host their own pearl parties. Other pearl party hostesses have their own empires, complete with their own direct downlines.
Kristie’s new direct downlines pay an initial flat fee to join her “Pearlfect pearl family,” a term she’s coined. There’s a long Facebook feed with all their introduction videos. Many of them hold pearl parties at times I find surprising—Wednesday at 1:00 p.m., Thursday mornings. Nearly all of the pearl party hostesses are women with southern or midwestern accents, beautifully curved drawls I start to find very soothing.
Direct downlines are a range of people: stay-at-home moms, personal accountants supplementing their income, certified nurse practitioners, or just people who see this pearly life as a way out of their current job. One direct downline is a recently divorced army veteran, trying to find a way to stay at home with her kids. Another direct downline for Kristie used to be a certified nurse practitioner but had to quit because of health issues. She’s young, at most thirty, and lives in a tiny town in the Midwest. While most of the hostesses are maniacally cheerful, she has a deep sadness on camera that turns her pearl party into an unintentionally tragic confessional. Her brown eyes are big and dark, her hair dyed purple. Her speech is very gentle and slow. “I didn’t feel good yesterday,” she says, looking into the camera, “but I thought I’d introduce myself anyways. I used to be a certified nursing assistant. And I had to stop because of back pain on the job. So now I am trying pearl parties. Thanks for watching.”
Over 70 percent of MLMers (also known as “direct sellers” in official parlance) are women. The Direct Selling Association proudly notes that “direct selling has an outstanding involvement rate with women and minority groups,” and “65% of the survey respondents say that ‘flexibility and work-life balance’ is a motivation for them.” In their introductions on Kristie’s Facebook page, the direct downlines all express a desire for more flexibility in taking care of their kids while making money. The three states with the highest percentage of direct sellers are North Dakota, Iowa, and Wyoming. You might be able to guess the next few based on voting data from the 2016 election.
By 2017, almost nineteen million Americans were engaged in direct selling. North Dakota has the most direct sellers as a percentage of the population and the highest unemployment ranking in the United States. Other states like Iowa, Wyoming, and Montana sit firmly in the overlap between high unemployment and number of direct sellers. Places like Minnesota, Montana, and Georgia all rank in the top ten states with the greatest decline in household income after the 2008 recession. Direct selling is not the cheerful respite from life it appears to be in ads, but a kind of desperate grab at survival.
What Kristie and many others are offering has nothing to do with the product being sold. As I watch more of her videos, I am entranced by the level of thoughtfulness she puts into each oyster opening and the kindness of the community. Comments from viewers flash on the right side of the stream, people sharing stories from their everyday life, cracking jokes with each other. Kristie responds, sometimes with a “God bless” or “You’ll be in my prayers.” The routine of these videos verges on boring, and in that boredom emerges a repetitive structure. Over the course of a few weeks, the repetitive structure becomes an especially soothing balm for me after hectic days at work.
At a pearl party, the hostess announces your name to the livestream audience, noting where you are from and details about you. As you watch, you can leave comments for the hostess, joining in the conversation, hearing her reply to you in real time. This form of care and attention is moving. As a viewer, you pay for emotional labor. Hostesses make the person whose oyster is about to be opened feel so, so special. And in a time when you rarely get to feel special, doesn’t it feel so good to hear that someone cares about you?
The model of multilevel marketing, with its emphasis on personal relationships and cultivating entrepreneurship, is not new. It’s been around since the 1950s, with Avon makeup and Tupperware. But MLMs really began to gain traction in the 1970s, under a branch of New Age thought called the human potential movement. MLMs thrived in this movement’s combination of spiritualism and self-improvement tied to personal wealth attainment. People like the minister and author Norman Vincent Peale sold the power of positive thinking and a “gospel” of prosperity, while entrepreneurs like William Penn Patrick pioneered the MLM tactic of charging sellers in his multilevel marketing company, Holiday Magic, for courses on “mind dynamics.” This blend of mysticism and capitalism paved the way for the 1980s, when multilevel marketing morphed into its current form, becoming predatory and insidiously corporate. This form is far more exploitative, wooing people with the illusion of flexible hours and “being your own boss,” only to push them deep into debt by getting them to purchase up front thousands of dollars’ worth of often unsellable, low-quality merchandise.
During the first dot-com boom of the 1990s, MLM participation soared in response to rising economic inequality. The 1997 book False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes by Robert Fitzpatrick and Joyce Reynolds documents this first wave of large, corporate MLMs. Despite their predatory nature, these MLMs were further strengthened by the same fiscal deregulation that led to the 2008 recession. Consumers became less shielded by the Federal Trade Commission against MLM practices.
Fitzpatrick and Reynolds saw the rise of MLMs as a response to contemporary social conditions, satisfying the spiritual and socioeconomic needs of a broad swath of Americans. With the American Dream failing, typical social support structures and communities buckled under unregulated capitalism. More people are lured into MLM schemes, becoming sellers. They do so under companies’ false promises that they can attain the American Dream. Despite widespread evidence that it’s a scam, sellers and buyers alike become seduced by the community and personal connections they experience.
At the end of their book, Fitzpatrick and Reynolds give a portentous warning: Without economic regulation from the government, people would struggle further to attain middle-class stability. Spirituality and community would decrease in their daily lives, under the hustle of materialism. If the government did not try to make the American Dream possible, try to revive community and some kind of shared purpose, citizens would seek another form to manifest their frustratio
ns, becoming enticed into something far worse than MLMs.
The proliferation of MLMs can be easily blamed on social media and technology, just like the spread of misinformation, bizarre health advice, or selfie culture. Yet the reality is more complicated. Social media and online community certainly play a part in accelerating information, as well as in decreasing the barrier of accessing content. But these online interactions are a manifestation of broader socioeconomic conditions. With one of the worst, most error-prone health-care systems in the developed world, why wouldn’t you seek out online health advice or alternative explanations for illness in the United States? With deepening job insecurity and the elusiveness of the American Dream, why wouldn’t you at least try joining an MLM to sell online?
In that light, the post-2016-election pleas for all of us to log off and just talk to each other in real life are naive. We haven’t been talking to one another in real life for a long time. Unless, apparently, we’re trying to sell each other something.
In a 2017 interview with The Atlantic, Robert Fitzpatrick says MLMs are stronger than ever. The number of people signing up to become direct sellers is increasing. MLMs continue to scam people because “it’s a beautiful story, a self-indulgent story, a miraculous story—that in 2017, with all its job insecurity, there is, in America, an alternative, and that alternative is not run by Wall Street or the government. It’s a kind of mass hoax. It’s a psychological sale first, then an economical sale, and the two work together.”
In all of Kristie’s videos, she exudes a ridiculous, oblivious privilege as she discusses current events, an uneasy performance of whiteness encoded into her banter. Her audience is mainly white women, turning pearl parties into a kind of mirrored stage play. As I click through her followers and their posts, I find a repetitive conspiratorial tone. Some are clearly evangelical Christians, and others post videos about the deep state. In a time of precariousness, belief in alternative narratives seems to be surging. If previous decades in the United States were defined by feelings of progress, ours is defined by a feeling of conspiracy, the last refuge of personal agency.
And what about Fitzpatrick and Reynolds’s warning in their 1997 book, about people finding something worse than an MLM? In the mid-2000s, Donald Trump was the well-known spokesperson and promoter of the Trump Network and ACN, two large MLMs that no longer exist because of a number of lawsuits and fraud cases. ACN sold telecom equipment, including videophones and internet service. The Trump Network sold a series of vitamins. Trump explicitly viewed the Trump Network as a “rescue” program for those suffering from the 2008 recession. It was during Trump’s stint that sales in both companies soared. After all, he possessed an uncanny ability to enrapture audiences and create community in a universe of alternative facts.
5.
On my mobile screen, a pale, ghostly woman is gyrating awkwardly in a pair of hot pants. Judging by her geographic location and the accent of her Mandarin, she’s Han Chinese, with black hair and brown eyes, but she has put colored contacts in, which turn her eyes a strange tinge of blue. Her hair is dyed light brown. The lighting and video effects allow her to make her face look skinnier, the fashionable “snake-shaped face” (shejinglian, 蛇精脸) that turns her into an apparition. When she sits down to talk, her voice is high-pitched, each word ending in an evocative, cooing sigh, like she might pass out at any moment. Zhao points to her. “People like her. People think she’s cool. That’s the type of KOL [key opinion leader] we want wearing our pearls. Also Peng Liyuan, Xi Jinping’s wife. We want her.”
KOLs have been sprouting up all over China’s internet in the past few years. While KOLs have long-standing “expertise” in some kind of subject matter, like lipstick or cars, a related category of online personas, wanghong (网红), has also appeared, as more generic influencers. KOLs and wanghong are everywhere on China’s widely used video apps. In urban areas, KOLs are glossy Chinese equivalents of Instagram celebrities and influencers. Minimalist coffee shops, Prada purses, boho clothing, and red lipstick abound on Xiao Hong Shu (Little Red Book, 小红书), an app filled with shopping and lifestyle images. Between Guangzhou and San Francisco, there’s an emerging global aesthetic of what it means to live a luxe life these days.
In rural China, KOLs and online influencers can be a peasant-style middle finger to the rest of urban China. Upper-middle-class urban China proclaims itself to be a society of high suzhi (素质), or civility, filled with soft-spoken white-collar workers who scroll through videos of people wearing real Zara blouses and their real Miu Miu heels to work. The rural livestreaming world is filled with shanzhai brands, people gyrating wildly to pounding electronic dance music, brothers debating the taste of bamboo rats, and welders nicknamed Baoding Edison creating inventions like a meat cleaver turned comb.
Lisa, Zhao’s director of marketing, is a shy twenty-seven-year-old who is also from Zhao’s home village. She left the village for college but ultimately came back, after her sister got into the rural e-commerce business and heard about Zhao. She says she learned most of her English from Friends and that she likes Lisa Kudrow a lot. She has large, dark-rimmed glasses that are constantly slipping down her nose and long bangs that cover her forehead. Her nails are coated with impeccable glossy gel that looks classy when she’s holding a pearl bracelet. I learn from her how selling on rural livestreaming, which has become a conduit for getting rich, works.
Similar to Ren Qinsheng’s costume business in Dinglou, Lisa uses Alibaba.com to sell bulk orders to overseas customers. Having just a few of these orders can yield a good profit, and establish a long-term business relationship.
To cater to the domestic Chinese consumer market, Lisa has a number of strategies. Livestreaming is one of them. Platforms and apps like Kuaishou (literally translated as “Fast Hands”) feature people hawking all kinds of goods: oranges, glass beads, visits to a countryside home, and perfume, just to name a few.
There’s also a whole contingent of livestream stars who make money as online idols. They perform, they sing, they have their own talk shows. Fans buy stickers (little icons that appear in the livestream window) for these livestream stars, worth a variety of amounts—anywhere from RMB 1 to RMB 10,000. These stickers come as roses or Ferraris, and fans gift the stickers to the stars in real time. Hosts can cash in the stickers they receive.
For people who make a living off livestream, the pressure to look a certain way is high. Some livestream stars get multiple plastic surgeries a year, and many aspiring stars will undertake drastic measures to achieve the much-desired snake-shaped face—large eyes and a pointy chin. The livestream industry is heavily gendered—women make up 70 percent of the industry as performers. Success is ultimately limited for the livestreamer, though, as livestream platforms can take up to 50 percent of a streamer’s profits, and the emphasis on appearance favors younger stars.3
Livestream continues to be central across a range of new business models. Shopping sites like Taobao.com now incorporate livestream directly onto the platform. Other platforms like Kuaishou now have built-in stores. A far more personalized, addictive version of the home-shopping network, livestream blurs the line between selling a product and selling a feeling. A good seller builds an energetic rapport with the viewer, just like Kristie with her Krazy Kultured pearls.
The popularity of livestream is deeply tied to your income bracket. Few elite urbanites, whose lives are dictated by the rhythms of white-collar work, consistently watch livestream, although most will use the Douyin (TikTok) app to watch short, recorded videos.
Kuaishou’s meteoric rise as one of the most popular apps in China is due precisely to its stronghold in rural areas. A large-scale study on Kuai by the anthropologist Chris Tan shows that Kuaishou’s users are typically under twenty-five, without a college degree, living in rural or low-tier cities. They are usually unemployed or hold low-paying jobs, earning less than RMB 3,000 a month, as rural migrants or farmers.4
The popular Chinese press likes to fan t
he flames of Kuaishou’s impact on rural society. For example: Zheng Tao, a rural youth who left his village for factory work in a city.5 A loser on the margins of urban life, he moved back home and became a livestream celebrity, making money from adoring fans. Other similar success stories have encouraged millions of youth to search for money and fame online. Chinese livestream’s popularity echoes the same desires of American livestream, whether it’s groups behind pearl parties or niche YouTube stars. The desire for community, for companionship, and, mostly, for monetizing emotions has never been stronger.
6.
Most of us know Peppa Pig as a British television cartoon pig for children, a little bit sassy but very cute. The Peppa Pig I’m looking at on my phone screen is smoking a cartoon cigarette and wearing sunglasses, being a bad, bad pig. On the official British cartoon, Peppa Pig would never smoke. She might occasionally be petty, but she’s just a naive little pig learning how to be in shehui, in society.
Peppa Pig lives a double life in China. She’s on cups and T-shirts, promoting delicious cookies for children and teaching kids how to be nice. On the internet, Peppa Pig is a rallying cry for disenfranchised youth. She is a meme, an online symbol for a growing group of people who believe the dominant system of society not only has no place for them, but also that, deep down, the system is rigged. Behind the memes of Peppa is not only a defeated irony but an anarchic embrace of “antisocial” behavior.
