Consumers and workers: victims on both sides

There’s a series of articles in the Salt Lake Tribune on the terrible health impacts on workers in China who make the cheap things we buy.

For all the hullabaloo on American consumers’ concerns with the safety of lead in toys, anti-freeze in toothpaste, etc, at least we can choose not to buy it. For workers without knowledge of what they’re getting into, no OSHA-type safeguards, no legal protection or enforcement of standards, there’s perhaps no choices.

Consumer or workers, we’re losers in the transaction. The winners are the players in the supply chain betweeen the two ultimately ends: owners of the small workshops, larger factories, middleman brokers/contractors, China’s bureaucrats, and the multi-national corporations that don’t really sell anything except the marketing and branding of their increasingly tarnished reputations.

And this is not unique to China, which is the poster-child scape goat. This is a scenario seen in any other country that has cheap labor to manufacture goods for export to first-world consumers.

Cheap as we may think the price of something we pick up at big box retailer, it’s still inflated over the actual price of the raw material and labor to cover the cost of advertising, shipping and the layers of transactions.

Football :(

It was a sh*tty game today. It wasn’t so much that UCLA won, but that Cal lost. On the heels of last week’s OSU debacle . . . well the best thing to do is to look forward to next week’s game . . . against USC.

Charitable Consumption

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. You’ll see a lot of products for sale that are pink or incorporate a pink ribbon, touting something like “$5 of the price of each of these gizmos purchased will be donated to Some Breast Cancer Cause.”

Last Sunday in the Mercury News, a columnist wrote about this issue: about how sometimes these companies were rather disingenuous in tugging at consumers’ sympathies to market their product, more for profit, with only token amounts donated to breast cancer charity. Oftentimes, the company will cap the total donation at a certain amount, and it’s only mentioned in the fine print. 10% OF THE PURCHASE PRICE WILL BE DONATED TO THE KORMEN FOUNDATION . . . up to $1,000. So if they sell 200 of these items at $100 each: 10% would be $2,000, but they’re only donating $1,000. The second 100 people who bought the item thinking they were contributing something to a good cause are merely contributing to the company’s bottom line.

As a rule, I don’t buy these things that tout “part of the price goes to a good cause,” unless it’s something I’d want to buy even if it weren’t contributing to a good cause, like a T-shirt of a stupendous design. If I wanted to contribute to a good cause, I’d rather write a check directly to the good cause, so that that institution gets all the use of my money. Otherwise if I bought something, some of what I pay goes to the middleman and manufacturer, and less goes to the charity.

I’ve become more aware of this as I’m approached by kids (well, their parents) who are fundraising for various activities, i.e. school, music band, etc. The fundraising has become so sophisticated compared to what I knew of when I was growing up. There are companies that will provide the glossy catalogues and manufacture the goods like you’d see at Target or chain stores to these schools and kids’ activities groups that the parents circulate around at work. (How many of you have to contend with multiple parents at work all asking you to buy their daughter’s Girl Scout cookies. And how do you decide, or how do you avoid hurting someone’s feelings?)
No more Mom baking cookies from scratch for a bake-sale, and fewer kids walking around the neighbourhood knocking on neighbours’ doors asking to collect newspaper and cans. Now I can buy cans of nuts, gift-wrapping paper, tubs of cookie dough, where a portion of my payment goes to Junior’s soccer team.

In such cases, I decline to buy anything, but offer to write a check directly to the ‘cause.’ I’m also starting to request the parents have their kids write me a thank you note. After all it seems like these kids don’t have to do any of the work to raise funds (Their parents do it all for them.) As a preachy auntie, I’d like the kids to realize and appreciate that it takes work and effort to raise money, so they should do something for the effort. The least they could do is send a thank you note. (Which is good training for other things later in life)

Did I see ‘Shopping for Fangs’ with you?

I’d revisited ‘Shopping for Fangs’, renting it from Netflix. I’d first seen it when it was at the Asian-American Filmfest back in 1997. I don’t have a good memory, but the intriguing characters have always stayed with me: the blonde waitress with sunglasses and the contrasting subservient mousy wife. It featured John Cho (I noticed him in this movie, and now he’s famous!) The film was also an early work by Quentin Lee and Justin Lin, who is now famous for ‘Better Luck Tomorrow,’, a ‘Fast and the Furious’ movie, and now ‘Finishing the Game.’ It does crib a scene or two from ‘Chungking Express’ and John Woo. But still it’s a nifty little movie.

“I haven’t seen this before,” Joe said.
“You forgot? You’re usually better at remembering . . . ”
At some length into the movie. . . “Nope, I’ve never seen it.”
“You must have seen it with me. Who else would I have seen it with?” OK, that’s a little rhetorical. I used to see movies by myself, but I think this was one I did go see it with someone. This is bugging me a little, so if that person happens to read this, please identify yourself. Thank you!

This weekend I also went to see the Joffrey Ballet in Berkeley with my cousin. (It’s part of an homage series to Twyla Tharp)
I have to confess, I fell asleep during the Beach Boys medley numbers. Which was surprising; you’d think that since the music was familiar and upbeat, it would hold my interest. But then I figured out, the numbers in the beginning and the end had more dancers in it. The numbers in the middle only had a handful of dancers: so the stage was relatively too big. The energy dissipated into the wide empty space. I did like the striking colour-sccheme of the costumes though, women in orange dresses, men with red pants and floral-print shirts.

The subsequent number from ‘Billboards’, with music specifically composed and performed by Prince was riveting. The whole ensemble was on-stage and the energy was electric, more like a Broadway show than a ‘muted’ dance performance. And then I also realised something else: there was quite a variety of body types amongst these Joffrey dancers. Some were shorter, some were even heavier than the typical dancer. Most dance companies select their dancers not only based on talent, but their body build, height, lines, etc, aiming for a uniform look. But like models, dancers’ bodies represent a stylized extreme, not a ‘normal’ human body.

With the Joffrey troupe, it’s nice that they’re more inclusive and have a plurality of physiques. After all, if music is defined by the silences between notes, dance is defined by episodes of suspension in air between the tugs of gravity. Here dancers each deal with gravity differently; it was almost too hard for me to decide or track which dancer was the most interesting to watch!

Schinken and sausages

[I’ve blogged separately about judging origins by appearance, languages, my cousin Susan and dogs. Recently. Here’s something that ties them all up together.]

The family was spending the weekend in Cha-Am. A bustling pack of cousins, aunts, uncles escaping from Bangkok. A resort on a beach, sunny skies, warm sand, and lapping waves. A coffee shop, where there was a buffet of breakfast foods on a leisurely Sunday morning.

Susan and I were up early and went down to breakfast together. Her brothers were still in bed. We grabbed plates and piled on the eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes and tucked in at the table. Two tables over were snowbirds, corpulent burghers clad in shorts, escaping the cold winters of Europe. They too were having sausage, toast and eggs for breakfast. Some of them were smoking. Probably complaining about the coffee too. “Vat is this Moccona shit?”

“Hey,” Susan said conspiratorily. “Help me get some more meats, so I can take it out to feed the stray dogs on the beach. Gum hoh leen ” She pulled a mournful face.
“Uh, ok.”

I wasn’t particularly crazy about the dogs, but I was a grade-schooler, and she was a high-schooler. Age seniority ruled here. Susan had a very soft spot for dogs, even the mangy stray dogs endemic to Thai beaches. Thai beach hoteliers are efficacious in preventing postcard and T-shirt vendors from soliciting hotel guests lounging on the hotel’s stretch of beachfront, but it’s a losing battle trying to keep the dogs away.

The other thing I should mention about Susan is that her mom is Swiss. Which was handy, because Swiss people are polyglots, right? Auntie Christiane’s family was originally from the French-speaking part, but somehow they moved to the German-speaking part. When Auntie Christiane married my uncle, she easily picked up the family dialects of Chinese and Thai. Her kids, my cousins, went to English schools in Bangkok like me, but spent their vacations in Switzerland. They’d bring back ‘Dick und Doof ‘comics, which I couldn’t read, because they were in German. (I just found out on wikipedia that they were Laurel and Hardy!)

So us two skinny Chinese girls started to make trips back and forth between our table and the buffet spread. Lots of trips. We’d take a few sausages and ham slices on the plates, and then dump the contents into our napkins, which we later would sneak out to feed the beach dogs. We thought we were being discreet.

But apparently we didn’t escape the notice of the Europeans, who now had something else to discuss other than bad coffee.

“Hey” said Susan again. “Those Gerrmans are saying ‘how can two small Thai girls eat so much?’” she translated sotto voce to me, in Cantonese.
“Oh.”

There was more running commentary from the gwei-lohs; but I didn’t understand any of it course, and Susan didn’t translate any more. We were still busy ferrying meat.

Susan’s younger brothers soon came down to breakfast. We were chatting away in English. But then Susan started to talk to her brothers in German. I don’t know what she said. Maybe she pretended to berate them for getting up so late, so she could raise her voice, scold them loud. Loud enough for the Germans at the table over to hear. That she could ‘sprechen sie deutsche.’

Homesickness

I just finished reading Craig Thompson’s “Carnet de Voyage”, his travelogue through Europe (with a detour to Morocco) in sketches, graphic novel format. In it he mentions how homesick he gets. In that vulnerable state of mind, and in being a solo traveler, it’s very easy to form intense intimate yet temporary attachments with people you meet along the way. When both parties know its temporary, you don’t have to waste time with the b-s preliminaries of feeling each other out for companionship. And when you hook up with friends you already know, it’s even sweeter. It reminded me of how I felt when I was traipsing through Europe one winter (with a north African detour also: Egypt). I had left Prague and was headed for Barcelona by train, almost at the other end of Europe. I was enjoying it, but I was also getting worn out by the solitude of my own company for a month.
I had to transfer trains in somewhere in Switzerland that wasn’t Zurich. Maybe it had been Bern. Walking through the station, I spied some phonebooks. “I wonder if I can look up Susan’s phone number?” Switzerland is a famously compact country, with a small population. The phonebooks in the station turned out to have national listings, and still smaller than a full set of Bay Area phone books. I found a listing for her in the Lausanne white pages, and rung up.

“Hi Susan. I’m on my way to Barcelona, but homesick. Can I come visit you for a couple of days?” was how I invited myself.

I really hadn’t seen much of Susan in the past ten years, maybe twice, at family weddings. We had both spent our childhood in Bangkok, but from there she moved west and I moved east. She had a very soft spot for dogs (I’ll have to write up a very funny anecdote about that sometime.)

Susan to her great credit welcomed with cousinly warmth. She even made fried rice, the first Chinese food I’d had in a month. Now that she was settled as a cozy hausfrau with a husband and daughter and their dog Mui-Mui, it was nice to have a wandering cousin bring a bit of the outside world to her doorstep. I think she enjoyed reminiscing and practice her rusting English. Plus I could update her on what had been happening with the rest of our kin, and it relieved my homesickness that I could talk to someone without having to explain the background context of things that I would have to for a stranger.

Average Americans

Is truth stranger than fiction? Or are dreams more real than life?

I couldn’t make this up even if I tried. I had a dream the other night in which I was at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ house. My cousin T was there too. They asked us what it was like growing up as average Americans, as if they were trying to figure out how they could raise their daughter in an average American environment.
I said, “I don’t know, I grew up in Thailand!”
It was a strange question. Perhaps since they were such famous celebrities, they could no longer relate or remember what it was like to be anonymously-just-like-anyone-else.

And then I needed to take a shower (Apparently I was sweaty from running or some such exercise before arriving at their house.)

Their bathroom was rather odd. It consisted of a furo-sized bathtub and a shower both in the middle of their bedroom. In order to wash-up in privacy, one drew a white curtain with brown/green/orange stripes all the way enclosing the bathtub and shower, rather like those curtains in hospital wards that separate beds in shared rooms. Perhaps the Scientologist in Tom didn’t want his wife to have any absolute privacy from him.

Odd-set-up aside, it was a very sumptuously furnished bathroom. Except I couldn’t find any regular-sized soap or bottles of shampoo. All they had were sample-sized toiletries from various hotels they’d stayed at in their travels while filming abroad. In that sense, TomKat are average Americans. In my dreams, they take the hotel shampoos and lotions, just like the rest of us!

I finally found a regular-sized bottle of Chinese shampoo, but it was small even by American standards. “How did they end up with Chinese shampoo?” I wondered. “Oh yeah, Tom Cruise filmed MI3 in Shanghai a couple of years ago.”

In my waking life, I haven’t seen a Tom Cruise movie since the MI2, and I don’t remember when I last saw a Katie Holmes flick. I think they popped up in my dream because the day before, I had been catching up browsing several months’ worth of People magazines my sister-in-law brings to me when we visit Joe’s parents.

Branding by country

This is a topic I’ve been meaning to blog on for so long, that it’s almost evolved itself out of my excuse to rant about it. Almost.

I receive several catalogues from retailers by mail; having ended up on their mailing list by default when I shopped at their stores. These are usually for clothing or housewares, aimed at a mid-to-upscale market. I’d skim through them; as part of the description of each item, they’d say: “Imported” or “Made in the USA” . . . Fair enough: the 80’s weren’t that long ago, when there was a campaign to ‘Buy American’, a backlash against the skyrocketing sales of Japanese cars (and manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas.) Among the transit agencies where I’ve worked, the federal subsidies for buying new buses is usually geared towards buying American-made vehicles. Fair enough (Only AC Transit made the leap to buying Belgian-made Van Hools.)

After a while I noticed something. Sometimes the item would be described as “Imported”, and occasionally, it would say “Made in Italy”, “Made in France,” etc. But in the US, something made in Italy or France is just as ‘imported’ as something made in China or Mexico, no?

It seemed to me as if there was some selective marketing snobbery afoot. That items made in Western European countries had a higher cachet: implied perhaps that they were better made, better designed, made with higher quality materials, turned out by dedicated, professionally trained craftsmen . . . who might even be middle-class, reassuringly just like you or me, the customer of the good. (Such a phenomenon is becoming extinct: read Andi Watson’s graphic novel “Breakfast After Noon” about an out-of-worker pottery worker in England.)

“Imported” seems to be a mask where the pedigree of manufacture was to be downplayed, like made in China, India, etc, because it wasn’t as ‘high-class’. To actually label it as ‘Made in China’ or ‘Made in India’ would give customers the impression that it had simply been churned out in some crowded factory in some under-developed country by workers who barely had a 6th-grade education who were forced to work 10 hours days with only a 30 minute break for lunch, where the daily wage was half the retail cost of the item . . . (OK, I’m getting carried away by my exaggerated imagination here, but don’t you ever wonder how things can be marked down to 75% and still the retailer is able to eek out a profit margin on that item?) Such a connotation would be at odds with the carefully styled presentation of the item in the catalogue or store. The retail brand is selling a dream realm where inhabitants are happy, beautiful and carefree.

[In Thailand, this type of difference is recognized. There’s the ‘garment’ industry, where workers in factories assemble clothes for export to foreign retailers, based on client specifications. The identical T-shirt can be found in every Wal-Mart for $7.99. Then there’s the ‘cottage’ industry where rural housewives weave tie-dye silk or cotton scarves in traditional mudmee designs on looms at home, etc, all painstaking created by hand based on patterns handed down through generations. Each piece is unique. These items are valued higher in Thailand, because of the fee-meu (handicraft skill) involved. Although perhaps both the garment worker and the rural housewife had no more than a 6th grade education.]

In light of the recent safety concerns of goods that are “Made in China,” country of origin labeling will become more significant. It’s not just about sweat-shop guilt-trips vs. ‘Fair-Trade’ feel-good factors influencing consumer purchases. Consumers are becoming educated in reading labels for countries of manufacture, the same way they learnt to read nutrition labels for trans-fatty acids. Soon, simply labeling items as ‘imported’ in the catalogue may not cut it anymore.

Maybe it’s just me thinking too much. Maybe consumers don’t really think about or care about where something is made, i.e. they just buy things based on function or attractive appearance; how many people bother to read copy in catalogues anyway?

Having a bit of time on my hands, I went into Crate and Barrel the other week, to check to see what the countries of origin of items that were listed as “imported” were, since they are listed on the physical items. (I’m not picking on Crate and Barrel; I think most retailers practice the same policy in their copy-writing: that ‘cool’ countries are listed by name, and ‘uncool’ countries are listed under the ‘Imported’ blind in catalogues. This just happened to be the most convenient for me.) I checked a range of items to check (this was by no means as scientific/statistically valid survey: I don’t have that much time!)

Catalog Label: “Imported”
– Rugs: Most of these were described as “100% New Zealand wool”, but were made in India. (So the raw material for these rugs was shipped from New Zealand to be made in India, where carpet-making labor is cheaper.)
– Pillows and cushions: India. “100% silk”, “100% cotton”, “100% linen”
– Dish towels: India

Catalog Label: [Made in] “Europe”
– Wineglasses: Czech Republic
– Compote and hurricane: Poland “Hand blown glass . . . handpainted copper . . .”
– Other glass items
(Those poor former Soviet-bloc countries: they’re on the right continent, but individually they don’t have enough cachet to merit the listing of their own name!)

Catalog Label: [Made in] “Portugal”
– Cotton blankets and sheets
– Earthenware bowls and plates
(A couple of years ago, I think something made in Portugal would have been masked as “Made in Europe.” Portugal is gaining enough cachet to merit labeling under its own name now.)

Catalog Label: [Made in] “Spain”
– Glass cruets

Catalog: [Made in] “Japan”
– Kitchen knives: “ . . . created in Seki-City, Japan’s 700-year old center for samurai swords.”
– Dinnerware: “ . . . dimpling draws inspiration from traditional Japanese Tetsubin teapots . . .” (cast iron teapots)

Crate & Barrel does sell actual cast iron teapots: “This authentic teapot combines the tradition of Japanese tetsubin teaware with modern convenience . . .” Country was unlisted in the catalog; it’s made in China. On the same page is dinnerware of ‘traditional Japanese shapes.” Country was unlisted in the catalog; also made in China. It’ll be the day when Crate and Barrel or Williams Sonoma carries “Man-Sao-Mow-Gerng” traditional Chinese dinnerware (usually red background with four Chinese characters.)

Catalog: [Made in] “Great Britain”
– Dinnerware.
(God forbid, maybe it’s made in industrial Scotland)

Catalog: [Made in] “England”
– Throw

Catalog: [Made in] “France”
– Dinnerware

Catalog Label: [Made in] USA”
– Quite a bit of furniture: sofas, nightstands, dressers: this is reassuring that there’s still quite a bit furniture made domestically.
– A walnut wood cheeseboard
– Panels: “Japanese-inspired four-panel . . . depicts flowering cherry blossom” I was surprised this wasn’t made in China, but in the US!

Catalog Label: [Made in] “Italy”
– Dinnerware (in the catalog photo also were matching brown chargers, for which no country of manufacture was listed. However, they are described as “handweave of rattan and buri . . . hapao pattern”, so they are probably made in the Philippines. See more below)
– Glass bowls
– Chair/bench: “ . . handicrafted by Italian artisans . . .”
– Leaf-shaped platters: “ . . created by Italian artisans . . .” (On the same page, a glass dome on a wood tray for serving cheese, with a “hammered bronze-finish handle”, no country of origin listed. I looked; it was made in India. I bet Indian artisans hand-hammered those handles.)
– Copper charger/platter “Each unique piece is hand-finished by Italian artisans . . .”

Not labeled in Catalog (neither listed as ‘Imported’ nor ‘Made in X’)

– Two-tier rattan server: “ . . . basket is tightly handwoven of solid buri and rattan by skilled artisans using a “hapao” technique . . .” The Philippines. Why can’t credit be given where it’s due: “. . . basket is tightly handwoven of solid buri and rattan by skilled Filipino artisans using a “hapao” technique . . .”
I don’t think Filipino artisans can be any less skilled than Italian artisans.
(Hapao is in the Ifugao province in the Philippines, and is notable for the rice terraces. And its handicrafts?)

– Glass vase and votive: “ . . . amber glass take shape with deep hand-cut vertical channels . . .” India

– Wooden vases: “handcarved . . . eco-friendly mango wood . . .” Thailand.

– Olivewood bowls: “Mediterranean olivewood reveals its distinctive character . . .” Germany! What a surprise! I would have imagined Germany as a country that had enough cachet to merit mention by name “Made in Germany”. Then again, most people associate olives with the Mediterranean. So olive tree logs shipped to Germany to be carved into bowls. But why? Labor costs in Germany are pretty high.

– Tasting set (4 porcelain dishes resting on a wood tray): Dishes from China. Tray from Thailand.

Most stores carry a lot more than what’s featured in their catalogs. There was a nice dinnerware set with a Japanese motif in the store (but not the catalog). It was made in Thailand!

On the whole for today’s retailers: I think relatively few items are made in the top tier: Italy, France, Japan. The bulk are made in China, India, Philippines, Thailand, etc.

I mentioned at the top of the article, that this labeling trend has evolved: I received a small Banana Republic mailer recently. There were eleven items of clothing featured, and every single one listed the exact country of origin:
China – seven items
USA – two items
Turkey – two items.
(Bravo!)

I think what would help countries to improve their ‘cachet’ is to have a lifestyle book or two written by expatriates for countries like China or India; along the lines of Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence” or Frances Mayes’ “Bella Tuscany” plugging France and Italy respectively. (Not that those two countries lacked cachet before those books came out.) But how about “A Year in Yunnan” or “Cosy Kerala”?

With globalization, there’s a lot of mixing and matching going on (1) Items manufactured in different countries can be bundled and sold together (Thai tray with Chinese plates). (2) Raw materials from one country (New Zealand wool) are shipped to another country for assembly (Indian carpet-weaving) and then shipped to a third country to sell (USA). (3) Design and branding of items are done in one country and manufactured in another. Items are then shipped back for sale in the country of design. With telecommunications today, this is the norm, not the exception.

I have a friend whose brother was a designer in New York. Items he developed are sold at Crate and Barrel. He currently lives in Shanghai, to be closer to the manufacturing/ production. So you pick up the item: it’s Made in China physically, but designed by an American.

“Where’s it from?” may soon become a pointless phrase.