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  With almost every Russian female I spoke to, I came face to face with the duality between a woman’s red lips and the “male” behavior the culture enforced on all its natives. Physically and in conversation, Russian women were practical, determined and no-nonsense. With their husbands working in labor-intensive jobs like mining, oil and forestry, clearly they kept their families and homes together, with one of their primary goals being to make sure their husbands didn’t fall prey to alcoholism. More evidence that Russian women ruled the roost kept showing up: in every bathroom I went into, the women had placed their toothbrush in a shared glass with the bristles facing upward. In contrast, men’s toothbrushes were placed with the bristles facing down, as if to signal that their heads were buried in the sand.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about one Russian woman, whom I called the Orange Lady, for the simple reason that the color orange dominated her tiny apartment. Her tablecloth, the wristband she wore, her socks, the magnets on her fridge, even the fish in a tiny, glass-bowl aquarium were all the brightest possible orange. The clue that helped me connect orange with something bigger was a painting I saw hanging on her living room wall. It showed a little girl standing on a drab gray street, dressed head-to-foot in orange. It was, I realized, the woman standing in front of me, but as a young girl.

  Realizing this, I asked her about her childhood. She grew up, she told me, in Yakutsk, and never left. When she was a child, she’d pined for a dollhouse but her parents couldn’t afford to get her one. When she asked for a doll, she got the same answer. Both the dollhouse and the doll she’d had her heart set on were orange. Orange, then, was the color of the two things she’d wanted most in her life but couldn’t get.

  Like all the women I spoke to, the Orange Lady seemed starved to express her girlish or feminine side. In Russia, as a rule, creativity is suppressed. Schoolchildren are taught that the answer to almost any question is found in a formula. In a rote, rational society more or less hostile to creativity and emotionality, stepping outside the approved gray palate and into a universe of color and imagination means flirting with the possibility of being “gay”—a huge stigma in Russia. The only exception is ballet, so it’s little wonder that the Bolshoi is as popular as it is.

  Color. Imagination. Thick doors. Red lips. No mirrors. What role did these things play in Russian culture? But it turned out that the biggest piece of small data of all was staring right at me: the enormous number of magnets on every refrigerator door.

  It took me a few visits to notice them. Fridge magnets have a way of mixing in with their surroundings, and then one day it struck me: every refrigerator seemed to have an extravagantly large collection of magnets. They weren’t at eye level, either. Most were at waist level, or a little higher. But why? Most people, I know, have at least a couple of magnets on their fridges. A lot of them are goofy, or sentimental, or both—“Life is Too Short to Drink Cheap Wine,” “Nothing Says ‘I Love You’ Like Bacon,” and so forth. Others clasp children’s drawings, or grocery and to-do lists. Hipsters display sashimi magnets, or bass guitars, or retro cartoon characters like Casper the Friendly Ghost or Bart Simpson. But on the fridges of the Russian Far East, there weren’t just a couple of fridge magnets, there were twenty, thirty, even forty or more. Like a metallic mural, they saturated every fridge door in every kitchen I visited where there were children.

  From that point forward, I made it a point to ask the family who had put which magnet where. The answer was always the same: The mother placed the first fridge magnet in the center of the fridge. The father was responsible for the next magnet, and he generally placed it to the right of his wife’s. Then it was the child’s turn to place his or her magnet directly underneath the parents’.

  The magnets made a circle around the mother. She was the nexus of the home. It was further confirmation, if I needed any, that at the heart of Russian culture was a woman. From a symbolic standpoint, the magnets I saw were devoted to freedom, to escape, to foreign travel, to exotic foreign cities. They gazed back out at children’s eye level. They seemed to say, “There’s a future ahead of you. You can do anything.”

  By now, I was starting to Small Mine the observations I’d gathered in the hope they would take me someplace worthwhile. Desire, I knew, was embedded somehow in those fridge magnets, but I couldn’t say how, and even if I could, there was no real proof. How were these fridge magnets different from Pinterest, the website that allows users to post photos and designs and artwork? I knew that in a study of emoticon use across the world by the British technology firm SwiftKey, Russians were revealed as the biggest romantics, “using three times as much romance-themed emoji than the average,” especially hearts and flowers, a compensation, as I saw it, for the absence of smiling people, the gray buildings and the overall lack of color.2 But what did this say about them offline? Humans all need a channel of expression, or what I like to call an oasis. An oasis isn’t a point of departure, exactly, but more an exit ramp where we allow ourselves to relax and float away. For Russian men, the oasis centered around fishing with their friends in the summer in boats weighted down with vodka, Russian cognac and beer. Alcoholism, or any kind of addiction, is at its heart a search for transformation and transcendence. It’s an escape from both identity and place. Transcendence isn’t possible for humans, but we keep at it until we die, go crazy or give up searching.

  By showing off the softer, more artistic, more visually expressive, more “feminine” side of their characters, fridge magnets—at least it seemed to me—had become a repository for these women’s hopes, fantasies and aspirations. They weren’t just the expression of a desire to escape the hardness and maleness of Russian life. They also symbolized the dreams Russian mothers had, that their children might someday live lives less constrained and more refined than theirs. It took a short stroll around the local courtyards the next day to confirm this observation.

  Russian playgrounds are as colorless as the apartment buildings nearby. In every Siberian playground I’d visited, the parents sat on benches on one side, talking among themselves as the children played on the other side. One afternoon, in between interviews when there was no one else around, I sat on one of the swings and rocked there for a while. A few minutes later my fingers picked up something: the wear and tear on the swing ropes. Closer to the swing itself, the rope was smooth, but higher up, where the swing fastened to the bar, the rope was discolored and worn. Up high but not below, the rope had seen a lot of use, which told me something: It was the parents, and not the children, who used the swings, which didn’t surprise me, as I had noticed that across Siberia the children I’d met didn’t seem to be all that active. Even during the short summers, they tended to play indoors. The older kids hung out with their friends or went in a group to bars. No, it was the parents who’d taken a childhood totem—the playground swing—and turned it into their own. If nothing else, this confirmed to me what Russian parents, in particular the mothers, were lacking in their own lives. Freedom. Release. Irresponsibility. Time. In short, many of the qualities we generally ascribe to children.

  The flame of Russian culture, which at the same time communicated what the culture lacked, was inside those fridge magnets, and from there I had the beginnings of a concept—one that would have never come to me if, two years earlier, I hadn’t traveled to Saudi Arabia to help design a new shopping center.

  Saudi Arabia is a new and booming market, and given the success of its oil-based economy—with 16 percent of the world’s proved oil reserves, the kingdom is the world’s largest oil exporter—life there is seldom lived un-extravagantly. In a country that teems with Ferraris and Lamborghinis, where consumption is proud and relentless, a new mall would have to stand out in some way.

  But from a clue-gathering perspective, Saudi Arabia is an extremely complex culture, since some of its protocols can be hard for outsiders to come to terms with. As I’m sure you know, Saudi Arabia is a hugely repressiv
e society for women. In 2014 the kingdom was ranked by the World Economic Forum as 130th out of 142 countries for gender equality.3 It’s the only country in the world where women aren’t permitted to drive cars. Nor can women travel, work, attend school or submit to certain medical procedures without first getting permission from their male guardians, typically a husband, a father, a brother or a son. In a society like that, it can be hard for a Westerner to determine what’s rational and what’s not. Still, the mall developers who hired me knew that women are families’ chief acquisitors and decision makers, and that any retail innovations had to take their needs into account—a challenge considering that the majority of the people working on the mall project were men.

  In a nation dominated by Sharia law, what did Saudi women actually want, versus what they were told they should want by the nation’s century-old Mutaween, or “morality police”? The Mutaween, otherwise known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, is made up of men who patrol cities and small towns, restaurants and cafés, stores and malls to report back on and redress any and all breaches of morality. They enforce dress codes and make sure that all stores close for half an hour during noon, afternoon, dusk and nighttime prayers. In such an environment, it’s nearly impossible to coax a woman to speak honestly about her needs. “I love surprises as long as I know what the surprises are beforehand,” one Saudi woman said to me, which struck me as the essence of the Saudi Arabian mentality.

  In some key respects, the populations of Russia and Saudi Arabia are very similar. Russia’s cold weather can be paralyzing, and in some regions Russians wall themselves off inside their homes for half the year. In Saudi Arabia, the extreme desert heat prompts similar behavior. During my Subtext Research, Russians and Saudis both expressed frustration with the leadership of their countries, and as many Saudis as Russians told me they would happily move someplace else. The difference between the two cultures lay in the fridge magnets. In Saudi Arabia, most displayed obvious international icons: the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, Rome’s Coliseum, Big Ben, London Bridge. What, then, was the connection between Russian and Saudi Arabian fridge magnets? The need for escape. For imaginative travel of some kind. Except in the Middle East, that need for escape kept reappearing in the guise of familiar talismans like the Eiffel Tower.

  When I began interviewing Saudi Arabian women in their homes, it was the first time any marketer had visited, or interviewed, native women where they lived. I hadn’t asked for, or gotten, permission, and what I did was, in theory, against the law. The country’s unspoken rules decree that no male is allowed to be alone in a room with a female unless her husband or father is there, even if he is in the next room. Obviously, I needed to tread carefully.

  For instance, in every Saudi apartment I visited, thick curtains were drawn across the windows. No one could see in or out. As was the case in Russia, the heavy fabric served as weatherproofing against the extreme outside temperature, but I also wondered whether, along with the Saudi Arabian dress code, the curtains provided an additional layer of subjugation. In Arabic, hijab can literally be translated as “screen” or “curtain.” The Qur’an, I knew, directs that male Muslims should address the wives of the Prophet Muhammad behind a curtain. Did the curtains have some unconscious religious significance? When I interviewed local religious leaders, I got conflicting answers. I found out that the Mutaween was known for handing out tickets to homeowners whose bare windows overlooked the street; yet when I asked the Saudi men present at my interviews whether the curtains were religiously prescribed, they told me that closing the curtains was a general courtesy. The curtains, it seemed, were nothing more than tradition, a self-invented rule enforced by the morality police.

  The next piece of small data I stumbled on had nothing to do with gender.

  As I wrote earlier, you can typically identify the first clue about any consumer’s identity on his or her walls. It took me three or four visits to notice that the paintings in Saudi homes all had as their subject matter one theme: water. Streams. Lakes. Waterfalls. Oceans. (It’s worth noting that Arabic speakers are four times more likely than other speakers to use flower and plant emoticons.)4 I took note of this as a curiosity, nothing more. After all, lots of paintings have water as their theme, and no doubt the blue pastels were calming, especially in a sandy, landlocked country where there are no rivers, lakes, ponds, streams or much rainfall, only aquifers that process and desalinize the nation’s drinking water from the surrounding oceans.

  From consulting work I’d done years before with Colgate, I know that around 40 percent of all toothbrushes sold around the world have red handles. But Saudi toothbrushes were anything but that; the figure, in fact, was 2 percent. There were no oranges, either, and barely any yellows. This wasn’t normal. What could the absence of red, yellow and orange toothbrushes imply?

  Over the next week, I also began noticing how juice glasses were arranged on trays. They were positioned beside one another, instead of stacked, and the same went for the drinking glasses inside nine out of ten Saudi cupboards. Nothing could fall or topple, break or shatter. Control is generally a sign and a consequence of fear, and for the first time, I recognized that fear—but fear of what?—permeated these Saudi households.

  I jotted down other small data, too. The clocks in practically every home, as well as most of the watches on women’s wrists, were five minutes ahead of time. In Arabic culture, there is no “good luck” number, but there are five pillars of Islam, suggesting to me that Saudi natives were compensating for some as-yet-undefined terror by creating a halo effect in their homes—a way of warding off bad luck or misfortune.

  At the same time, what could account for so many Eiffel Tower fridge magnets? They were literally everywhere. They sat on windowsills. They served as paperweights and desk ornaments. The reason I didn’t pick up on them at first was because the Eiffel Tower is iconic to the point of corniness. But aside from some Saudis visiting France and bringing home souvenirs, why were there so many of them?

  My first thought was that the Eiffel Tower is a symbol of desire. “Desire is full of endless distances,” the American poet Robert Haas once wrote,5 and I couldn’t help but think again of the theme of water in the paintings on the walls of every Saudi household. There was no difference between what an Eiffel Tower represented and what water symbolized, or was there? Someone once said that blue is the color of longing for the distances that we as humans can never reach. We can get rid of desire by surrendering to it, or we can resist and deny it. But desire can’t help but show up somewhere in our lives—whether it’s in a drink, or a drug, or the music we listen to that takes us back to the time when we first heard it; and if desire is frustrated, it will burst through somewhere else, in a curio souvenir bought in a Paris airport, or in a painting of a stream, or a creek, or a waterfall.

  Throughout my visit I’d also made it a point to watch Saudi children playing. Their behavior, I noticed, was controlled and careful. Instead of playing hide-and-go-seek-type games, their games seemed to center instead around themes of protection and caretaking. Most of the kids’ books I pulled down from the shelves reflected these same themes, indicating that whatever fear I was picking up on had been passed down from Saudi mothers to their children. It’s always instructive to leaf through a nation’s children’s books, since they create our earliest expectations, and the Saudi mothers I met were raised on these same books. What surprised me most were their settings and locales. Few took place in any Bedouin kingdom, and if they did, the children’s-book version of Saudi Arabia bore no resemblance to the actual country. Instead of vast expanses of heat and sand, the books showed green fields, farms, creeks, water mills, weeping willows, patches of snow visible on the peaks of nearby mountains. Small exotic animals roamed around. It was a storybook Swiss fantasy combined with a dream world of water, purity and innocence.

  But the toys favored by Saudi children challenged t
hat innocence. Nearly eight out of ten of them were fire trucks, ambulances or police and safety vehicles. Having visited the bedrooms of hundreds of children in my work for LEGO, this struck me as anything but normal. Was the emphasis on police cars and fire trucks a result of the television shows or movies kids watched? When I took a closer look at Arabic and international programming as well as national toy sales, the answer was yes, to some degree—but not enough to explain why there were so many rescue vehicles. Digging further, I discovered that sales of kids’ emergency toys were 49 percent higher in Saudi Arabia than anyplace else in the world.

  It goes without saying that the Middle East has a lot of sand (and dirt), and when I visited a nearby store with a Saudi Arabian woman and her driver, at first I thought nothing about the fact the car seats were wrapped in plastic. As my visit went on, I noticed that the television remote controls in most homes were also enclosed in plastic. So were many chairs and the newly bought clothes I found in bedroom drawers. A similar phenomenon is common in Chinese homes, where the fear of bacteria and infection links back to horrific amounts of urban smog, but Saudi Arabia had no obvious pollution problem. Did the plastic wrap have anything to do with the absence of freedom between Saudi men and women? Was it a symbol for the hijab? Did it connect somehow to the thick curtains or even the lack of brightly colored toothbrushes in Saudi bathrooms?

  By now, I was convinced that the combination of toy fire trucks, ambulances and safety vehicles mixed with the plastic wrap covering up so many everyday objects was driven by a desire for protection against some unnamed cultural terror. From the first years of a child’s life, fear was rooted in Saudi culture, but I didn’t know why, and I had no idea what that fear was, either.

  When I asked myself what water meant, in conjunction with the safety vehicles in children’s bedrooms, the answer was obvious: water put out fires. But what kinds of fires could break out in a desert climate? Still, I knew I was onto something, and when I brought up the subject of fires with Saudi women over the next few days it seemed I’d struck a nerve. No one could tell me why exactly, but they were morbidly afraid of fire, they told me—of flames, of burning to death. Mostly, they were afraid of burning buildings. Burning hotels. Burning skyscrapers. Shopping centers on fire. No mall has ever caught fire in Saudi Arabia, but they were convinced it happened regularly. Maybe it had something to do with a dread of being suffocated, since the hijab Saudi women wore was, at least to Western eyes, claustrophobic, even strangling.