Star Wars on DVD
I Saw it Here First

A week ago, it began. First it was Yoda and Darth Vader on my bottle of tea, and then there was the Sir Alec Guinness voice of Obi-Wan Kenobe playing on a loop at the movie theater down the road loud enough for pedestrians to hear. The only reason I stop there is to buy long-distance IP phone cards from a good natured chain smoking gentleman who always tips his hat to me on my way to and from the subway station.

I broke down and saw the thing. Alone. It was one of those cultural things I had to do. I was going to see it in that small theater down the road, where I did not expect the price to be much lower, but maybe the profits to stay local.

At US $3, the tickets were cheaper than other places, but the movie was dubbed, so I said, "not ok," and went home. The next day I told a classmate that it was strange to find such cheap prices for a movie with stringent demands to milk the public with unnegotiable ticket prices.

"You forget we're in China," my classmate said. "Of course they can negotiate. They just copy."

Tonight the hawkers' suitcases were smattered with Star Wars DVDs. I overheard more than one confused foreigner trying to figure it all out. They said things like, "But this just came out four days ago. Is this the same movie that's in theaters?"

Though the sellers couldn't answer anything more than "eight yuan" (a single greenback), of course it was the same movie, except presumably there fashionable hairdos a-plenty caught on video from the camera in the back of the theater.