I had always suffered from a ugly signature. Where other people would sign their name in a fancy, pleasing to the eye squiggle, I would simply write mine down in my usual, bland handwriting. Later on, in a conscious effort, I managed to make my signature slightly different than my regular writing style, but did not get very far. Your signature is, after all, an expression of your personal style - and it appears that my personal style did not leave much room to maneuver.

The Chinese, it appears, challenge this notion by introducing the concept of “signature artists”. These so-called artists are usually street peddlers who, for a modest fee, will help you get the signature you always wanted. You give them some money (typically two yuan - equivalent to 1 shekel or 25 cents) and they sign your name for you several times, in several different “styles”. You can then pick the signature most pleasing to the eye, and start forging it - i.e. using it from now on as your own signature.

A few days ago, walking down the street, I saw people crowding. I joined the crowd to see what’s up, and saw that they were crowding around a signature artist. This artist had dropped her price to one yuan and was drawing in lots of customers. She worked as if on a production line, with a stack of papers in front of her. Every paper had a name written on top, and underneath it six empty boxes - she would fill those six empty boxes with six signatures (in six different styles). The the page’s “owner” would collect his page, give her one yuan, and she would proceed to the next page on the stack. Meanwhile other people would take blank pages from another pile, write their name on top and submit the pages to the bottom of her pile. She was extremely quick - completing an entire page took her 20-30 seconds - and new submissions were streaming in so quickly that she never ran out of papers in her queue. Even charging one yuan per signature set, she seemed to have made a decent amount of money that day:

I decided to have a go, and gave her my Chinese name (欧亮). This is the result:

A common practice among beggars in China is writing text in front of them. Often this is their life story, written on a sheet of paper or cardboard. An example can be seen in the following picture (synopsis: supermarket cashier, got pregnant, had baby, got fired, baby got sick, all money spent on medicine). In other cases, the text is scrawled on the pavement, using chalk. In some cases the text written is an elaborate story, while in others it can be a very simple “need 6 yuan to buy a bus ticket home”. And occasionally, the text is part of a street show in its own right - such as a beggar without hands using his foot to write it, in a pretty calligraphy script.