Moby-Duck (32 page)

But wasn't that what was so frightening to consumers—that toymakers had failed to meet product-safety standards despite those tough regulations? If the companies themselves couldn't police their Chinese manufacturers, I asked Sidman, then who could? The Chinese government?

“I don't see that that's where the responsibility lies,” he said, sitting in a leather armchair, stroking the enormous head of his slobbery black Labrador. Behind him a picture window looked out over Cape Cod's deciduous hills.

Sidman thought the responsibility lay with the manufacturers themselves. He wasn't sure which Chinese manufacturer had made those plastic animals lost at sea, but he gave me the name of his old trading partner in Hong Kong, Henry Tong, vice president of the Wong Hau Plastic Works & Trading Company Ltd. If anyone still knew who'd made those toys it would be Henry, Sidman thought.

Yes, sure, he knew, Tong told me when I called his office in Hong Kong. They were made at the Po Sing plastics factory in Dongguan. I asked if it might be possible to arrange a tour. Yes, probably, Tong said. The general manager there was an old friend of his, he said. He'd just need a few weeks' notice to set everything up.

Dongguan, I learned, is an industrial town in the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, an alluvial maze of factories and shipping routes radiating outward into Guangdong Province from Hong Kong. The Pearl River Delta is mainly what people have in mind when they talk about China's “economic miracle.” Newspapers often refer to it as “the workshop of the world,” a phrase, first applied to England in the nineteenth century, that has in the twenty-first century drifted east. The iPod is manufactured in the Pearl River Delta, and so is Chicken Dance Elmo. So are most of the cheap, ubiquitous goods labeled MADE IN CHINA that we Americans buy.

Although, reading the newspaper, I tended to imagine the Pearl River Delta as a polluted wasteland where workers toiled miserably away in dark Satanic mills, not all my Pearl River dreams were bad ones. In
The Oracle Bones
, his exquisitely reported book about life in China at the turn of the millennium, Peter Hessler quotes a song sung in commemoration of the country's thirty-year experiment with capitalism, an experiment that began when Deng Xiaoping established the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone. “In the spring of 1979,” one verse of this song goes,

For much of the past two decades, the Delta's economy has been the fastest-growing in the world. The millions of itinerant laborers from China's rural interior who moved there seeking work on the assembly lines ended up participating in what is often called the largest migration in human history. In Shenzhen, known as the Overnight City because of the speed with which it sprouted up, mushroomlike, out of the rice paddies and fishing towns that preceded it, the annual growth rate in some years surpassed 30 percent. Despite recent competition from Beijing and Shanghai, the Pearl River Delta remains China's most productive region. Home to just 3 percent of the country's population, it nonetheless accounts for more than 25 percent of China's foreign trade.

The late Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong once described the Pearl River Delta as “a store at the front and a factory in the back.” Hong Kong is the store; Guangdong Province is the factory. Journeying from the one to the other, I imagined, would be like traveling upstream toward the headwaters of my material universe. The Toys & Games Fair, where buyers from Western toy companies come to find Chinese suppliers, seemed like a good place to start.

 

 

At another booth an olive-skinned man—Mediterranean, perhaps, or Middle Eastern—sat across the table from a Chinese woman, catalogs and laptops open before them, colorful plastic creatures gazing down from modular walls. “Now I can give you the recording, right?” the man was saying. “Yes,” the woman said, “you give me the sound, I put it in the toy.”

Another booth, two men in suits, both with laptop cases slung over their shoulders. “Dude, check this out,” one said to the other. On a shelf were a row of plush animals, below each animal, a button. The first man pressed a button below a cat; the cat mewed. He kept pressing the button:
mew, mew, mew, mew
. His colleague joined in on a cow. They stood there mewing and mooing.

Children of the twenty-first century evidently do not like silence. Close your eyes and you could hear, along with the barnyard ruckus of onomatopoeia, a fantasia of whirring gears, the disturbingly convincing simulated gunfire of disturbingly realistic plastic assault weapons, the clicking feet of motorized puppets, the soothing voices of promotional videos (“by keeping a close eye on market trends and by acting simultaneously, Eastcolight launches products in a timely fashion”), and fading in and out as you passed through the Educational Toys and Games Section, a synthesized measure of Mozart or Chopin.

Wandering through this animatronic funhouse, I kept thinking of two-year-old Bruno, of how terrified—or even terrorized—he would have felt if he'd accompanied me here. For him this festival of commerce would have been a giant shop of horrors. The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machinegun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.

I sought refuge in the exhibit of The Toy Company, whose simple name reflected its simple wares. The Toy Company had created a lilliputian world out of wood. How tranquil this wooden world was, how unlike the other exhibits, how quiet. I gazed down giantlike at a farm where a little wooden farmer drove his little wooden tractor past a little wooden cow over a meadow of green felt. Ah, the pastoral. While I was admiring her samples, Xenia Kuzelka, the German-born managing director of The Toy Company, mistook me for a buyer. That's what most of my fellow visitors were: buyers from toy companies. I explained apologetically that I was in fact a writer conducting amateurish research into childhood. Did she, I asked while I had her ear, ever think about children? What they are? What they want? What goes on inside their little inscrutable brains?

“Yes, of course,” she said, glancing awkwardly around, as if for a hidden camera. “I am myself a mother, so I think about that.” She told me wood was better than plastic because it's warmer to the touch—an opinion shared by none other than Roland Barthes, who wrote, “Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.” I resisted the temptation to quote Roland Barthes to Kuzelka, now directing my attention to a wooden jumbo jet, explaining that this was the sort of toy that a whole troupe of children could play with. She removed its roof and let me peek inside at all the little wooden people in their little wooden seats. “Everyone says the future is in electronic toys,” she said, “but I prefer toys that encourage children to interact.”

Among her wares I found something I'd hoped to find, a wooden duck. I hoped to find it because I'd arranged to return from the Far East via container ship, and upon approaching the site of the 1992 container spill, I hoped to commemorate the moment by chucking a duck overboard, but knowing what I knew about plastic pollution I felt that I could not, in good conscience, contribute to the Garbage Patch. I told Kuzelka to name her price. She told me that unfortunately these toys were for display only. It was against trade show policy to make sales. Opening my wallet, I offered to pay twice the wooden duck's retail value. No. Thrice? No. She was a woman of principle or at least of prudence. Kuzelka's toys were beautiful in a quaint sort of way, but I wondered whether her anonymous, anachronistic figurines stood much of a chance against Bob the Builder or Elmo or a PVC duck molded in the likeness of Ernie's, or any of those other celebrities of the nursery.

 

 

Down in the basement of the convention center there was a lowceilinged room called Expo Drive Hall, and upon entering I sensed that all was not well. Upstairs in the premium exhibition spaces, the exhibitors hailed mainly from Europe, America, and Hong Kong, but down here they were all from the Chinese mainland. Up on the mezzanine, while enjoying fried rice or an espresso at one of several concession stands, you could gaze through the building's glass shell at the picturesque junks and antique ferryboats out on Victoria Harbor and at the neon-bedecked towers of Kowloon, Hong Kong's peninsular borough, rising up behind them. Down in windowless Expo Drive Hall, the only food was popcorn peddled from a pushcart whose glass case gave off a lurid, buttery glow.

Upstairs the English-speaking sales reps trusted their toys and their spectacular displays and their promotional videos and their fancy adjectives—“creative,” “educational,” “interactive”—to reel the buyers in, but down here the sales reps far outnumbered the buyers, and as you passed their displays of gizmos and trinkets, they would glide out of the dark like buskers. “Here, here!” “Take, take!” And into your hand they would thrust a business card and a promotional brochure containing such language poetry as “Our main products include gift, rainbow ring, Tinsel Pom Poms, Eva warhead gun, water bomb balloons, hand-knitted of beads, beauty set etc.”

Most of the toys down here were cheap knockoffs of the ones upstairs, and the names of many of the companies sounded like cheap knockoffs too: Baoda Baby Necessities Manufacture Factory, Believefly Toys, Combuy Toys. It was hard not to admire the unvarnished directness of that last moniker. This, after all, was the subtextual refrain that could be heard throughout the convention center, no matter how good or bad the salesman's English. “No more PVC,” they said. “For smart kids only,” they said. “Warm to the touch,” they said. But what they really meant was “Come buy! Come buy!”

Although the desperation was louder in Expo Drive Hall, if you eavesdropped upstairs, you could hear it there, too:

“We depend on Christmas, and it was an awful Christmas.”

“Before I put more money out, I need more coming in, see what I'm saying?”

“Oil's up, dollar's down. It's a fucking mess.”

Depressed by cheap oil, cheap Chinese labor, and the bargaining power of retailers like Toys “R” Us and Wal-Mart, toy prices in the United States had declined by 30 percent since 1996. According to an industry veteran interviewed by Eric Clark, author of
The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America's Youngest Consumers
, the toy business by the end of the twentieth century had become “the game of trying to put the least amount of plastic in a toy so you can keep the price low, of trying to get first in line when Holly wood comes out with a blockbuster, of squeezing the last half cent out of something.” Luckily for toymakers, even as margins kept slimming, volume kept ballooning, inflated by the helium of American desire. In 2006, Americans spent $31 billion on toys and video games, almost as much as the rest of the world's countries combined.

Then came 2007, the year of Thomas the Lead Paint Delivery System and the Polly Pocket Magnetic Intestinal Obstruction and the Date Rape Arts-and-Crafts Beads. The year that an American candidate for president, the eventual Democratic nominee, the eventual president of the United States, campaigned on the promise “to stop the import of all toys from China”—80 percent of the toys Americans buy, roughly 60 percent of the toys the Chinese export. The year the stock of the world's largest toy company, Mattel, lost 19 percent of its value in a single month. The helium in the toy balloon seemed to be leaking away, replaced by some less buoyant vapor—the exhaust fumes of malaise, the off-gas of dread.

At an information desk on the mezzanine, a video about product safety looped endlessly, but for whose benefit I couldn't tell. No one else stopped to watch. “Only toys that do not fit inside the gauge are not considered small parts,” the British-accented voice-over said, while on the screen a disembodied hand unsuccessfully attempted to insert a plastic strawberry into a steel cylinder. On the first day of the toy fair there had been a special seminar on “Risk Management and Brand Development in International Trade of Toys Industry.” Tomorrow there would be yet another seminar, this one titled “Latest Product Safety Directives of Toys Industry & Good Practice in Achieving Safety Standard.” New monitoring and safety protocols had already driven production costs up 10 percent, a spokesman for the Hong Kong Toys Council reported. Small margins were growing smaller still.

TOYS TO TRUST/MADE BY HONG KONG, billboards outside the convention center declared—not, the publicists meant to imply, MADE IN CHINA. But their prepositional sleight of hand couldn't change the fact that comparatively little is made in Hong Kong anymore besides money. Ambiguity is now Hong Kong's major asset; translation, its major industry. Hong Kong translates Chinese labor into Western goods, Asian exports into American imports. It is a semipermeable membrane as well as a semiautonomous region. In 2007, more than sixty thousand factories in the Pearl River Delta belonged to Hong Kong interests. Those factories are the primary source of both the city's prodigious wealth and its equally prodigious smog, a sulfurous whiff of which, up in Expo Hall 7, had penetrated the air-conditioning.

 

 

A carpeted room on the convention center's third floor. Gray stackable chairs arrayed into three rows. At the front of the room rise three projection screens and in their midst a lectern, yet to be approached. I have rented a translation device, a black box with headphones, and through this battery-powered medium I will soon receive divinations from an oracle by the name of Richard Wong, founder, CEO, and chief designer of Red Magic Holdings Ltd., who any moment now is to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on the future of toys. The room fills. Ushers fetch more chairs.