When I first told my parents that I was very interested in studying Japanese and maybe living in Japan for a while, their first response was, "Japan? Why... Japan?" My parents had very bleak childhoods devoid of the surreal landscapes of Super Mario Brothers and the creative physics of Voltron, a large robot made of five smaller robots. Robots who were cats. That were driven by humans. With such a strong pull on the imagination, who wouldn't want to see just where those robot cats came from?
So five robot cats dragged me to Japan, where I ended up spending my mid-twenties. I spent those years like most of my contemporaries back the states, drifting through a series of odd jobs and odder girlfriends. I learned to use words like "short-term lease" and "sublet" except that, well... I only learned them in Japanese, and just had to look them up in a dictionary before I typed this. I read a few novels by Graham Greene, set in distant locales, bought flowy white cotton shirts and fancied myself as an ex-patriot of the United States.
And then suddenly my life just started to feel a little bit too... Japanese. I was working overtime five days a week at a Japanese office, sweating out a forty minute commute on trains running at 120% capacity, and my body had started to develop all sorts of nervous tics, like an obsessive dipping of my head when I smiled at someone, and an abrupt chopping motion of my right hand as I moved through crowds of people.
So then my mind started drifting to those robot cats again. Specifically those little plastic replicas of them I used to bang around, augmenting their crashes with exploding sounds I made myself, in the back of my throat. If you ran your fingers over their bellies you could just make out a series of letters, faintly raised off the plastic, spelling out those mysterious phrases:
MADE IN HONG KONG
MADE IN CHINA
What wondrous kingdoms! What possible delights awaited me in the Far East? What treasures could be found in these mysterious lands on the other side of the globe? The mighty empires who had amassed their wealth and prosperity with the ancient secrets involved in forging my Underoos and talking GI Joe dolls. I may have spent the afternoons of my childhood wandering imaginary pixel kingdoms dreamed up by Japanese programmers, but I spent every waking second wrapped in Chinese underwear.
Now that five years in Japan had helped initiate me into the secrets of the conception of those robot cats (Answer: the Japanese love robots. And cats.), I was ready to discover where they had been forged.
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Reading about China before setting off on my trip made it sound like I was planning a six week vacation to Mordor. In Beijing the air pollution has been recorded at 78% above recommended levels. There were reports of migrants in major cities abducted, killed and bisected, their organs sold to first world patients desperate for transplants. In the south they have started construction on the largest single dam project in the world, a gargantuan effort that attempts to simultaneously dam up three major rivers, harnessing the energy for the expanding cities in the south. Companies had been started where dozens of young men played online games for twelve hours a shift, selling their virtual assets to gamers in the United States,The week I decided to leave cats from across the United States started dropping dead from eating Chinese pet food. And who knows where the plastic toys I was so interested in had been made.
The more I read about China the worse it sounded, and the more I wanted to go. No country on earth could be that horrible, could it? After all, I come from just about the only other country in the world that may be getting worse international press than China.
The day before I left a young man walked into a quiet college campus in the Deep South carrying several semi-automatic weapons he had obtained legally, and proceeded to methodically kill 32 people before shooting himself. China may sound like the world's last evil empire, but I'm pretty sure it isn't the wild west.
