A girl's best friend
It is difficult to imagine elegant, doe-eyed Zhou Zhu with her sleeves rolled up, scrubbing a toilet. But not only does she clean the toilet bowl, she teaches China's growing middle class how to do it too. Whether it's fighting household stains, baking a gingerbread house or laying the table for dinner for 12, the 36-year-old mother and Gong Li lookalike is blazing a trail in China's lifestyle television market with her show Jojo Good Living, which aims to introduce a fast-growing section of the population to the joys of home improvement. The American-educated Beijing native, who worked for the United Nations Development Programme in New York from 1995 to 1999, helping to set up the UN's first intranet system, has the ambition to match the size of her potential audience: she wants to be nothing less than the Martha Stewart of the mainland.
'I came back to China with no show, nothing, just an idea that I wanted to become China's Stewart,' says Zhou, settling into a sofa on the second floor of her office at 27, Purple Jade Villas, an expensive, suburban housing complex that is also home to her TV company, Huijia Media. That was two years ago. Accompanying Zhou were her dentist husband Dr Marco Oshiro and two-year-old son Antonio, and a CV that also included a master's degree from New York's Columbia University and experience in marketing and the media. Her husband, an ethnic Japanese, third-generation Brazilian, had a thriving practice in New York City. Zhou persuaded him to give it all up and move to China.
'My husband sacrificed a lot for me. Even though he looks Asian, his lifestyle is all Latin American. He had no idea about China. So if I'm not successful, I won't be able to look at him!' she admits. Yet if ambition and a sense of purpose are what it takes to succeed, Zhou's husband can relax. Zhou, whose stage name is Jojo, which is a play on her Chinese name, may look sweet and pliable in her Peter Pan-collar pregnancy dress - she is expecting her second baby - but she has the vision to back her talents. 'When people hear '27, Purple Jade', I want them to think: 'That's Jojo Good Living!' My biggest hope is that we go public. If we do it, we want to go big. Stewart went public but she took 30 years.'
The main vehicle for Zhou's ambition is that half-hour TV show, Jojo Good Living, broadcast on Beijing's BTV-7 channel on Saturdays and Sundays and on TSTV, a nationwide, travel TV channel. Recent surveys by Nielsen Media Research placed Jojo Good Living, first broadcast two years ago, in the Top 10 most popular shows on BTV-7, which reaches 10 million urban viewers. It is also near the top of the ratings for TSTV, which broadcasts to major cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Shenyang, and which has about 200 million viewers.
Product development is next. 'The big idea is that people will watch our show and that will lead to a whole chain of business centred around our product lines. That's our main focus for the next year,' says Zhou. Cooking is a main part of the show so an apron will probably be the first product sold, although Zhou also likes the idea of selling a line in baby shoes.
There are several lifestyle and cookery programmes on Chinese TV, but Zhou's stands out thanks to its sophistication and successful blending of Chinese and Western traditions. It's a style that comes naturally to Zhou, the cosmopolitan daughter of diplomat parents. While the show's mottos are something straight out of the help-yourself, middle-class West, 'do it yourself' and 'quality lifestyle', Zhou adjusts the content to suit local tastes. 'For example, in one of the first shows we made cocktails. But instead of using gin I used erguo tou [a strong, clear liquor]. 'It tasted really good!' Zhou says with a laugh. In another show, she added chilli pepper to a cheese fondue to make the cheese, not a traditional Chinese foodstuff, more palatable to her audience.