Rosie, Supermodel

Yesterday was J's first modelling job here. It was in Hang Zhou, which is a city south west of Shanghai. B, J's agent, told me it was a lovely place with a beautiful lake, and many people from Shanghai go there for a day or a weekend. I began to imagine it as a sort of Chinese Windermere, and as it turned out it was - it took 3 hours to get there and most of the 3 hours was spent sitting in a traffic jam. We sat in the back of the people carrier we had hired for the day and whiled away the 3 hours alternatively watching the real life Wacky Races going on around us (motorway driving is even worse than Shanghai city driving - it is mostly two lanes with a hard shoulder, but when it gets busy everyone just drives along the hard shoulder and also squeezes down the middle of the official two lanes, thereby forming four lanes of traffic with quite literally 5 cm between the cars) and watching the gauge above the driver's mirror that told us the temperature outside. It was on 70 degrees Fahrenheit when we left at 7.30am, and by the time we reached Hang Zhou it had reached 99 degrees.

We got to the studio finally at 10.30am, not knowing what to expect at all. As it turned out, it was exactly like a nice studio in the UK. There were 3 other children - 1 American boy and 2 English boys. They were taking photos for a catalogue, summer clothes, and J thoroughly enjoyed herself, probably relieved to find it was just the same here as she was used to. "Your daughter's a natural, she's so pretty, she could model anywhere," said the American mom to me at one point, "but here they are so keen on Western children, it doesn't matter if they have what it takes or not." This seemed to be borne out later when I happened to look round, and Rosie was sitting on the mock sand, next to some neatly folded t-shirts, with the photographer snapping away. Rosie is J's teddy.