Sara "I don't hate Asians, but ... " Bongiorni on CNN

[RB TexLa]

:puke:

[VLC]

1. Is this a fill-in-the-blank quiz

or are you going to tell us the rest of the sentence?

[RB TexLa]

2. She's the woman from Baton Rouge who wrote a book about how to keep Asian

or Chinese products out of your home.

[MADem]

3. No, not Asian, Chinese. "A Year Without MADE IN CHINA"

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1220/p09s01-coop.html

BATON ROUGE, LA. – Last year, two days after Christmas, we kicked China out of the house. Not the country obviously, but bits of plastic, metal, and wood stamped with the words "Made in China." We kept what we already had, but stopped bringing any more in.
The banishment was no fault of China's. It had coated our lives with a cheerful veneer of toys, gadgets, and $10 children's shoes. Sometimes I worried about jobs sent overseas or nasty reports about human rights abuses, but price trumped virtue at our house. We couldn't resist what China was selling.

But on that dark Monday last year, a creeping unease washed over me as I sat on the sofa and surveyed the gloomy wreckage of the holiday. It wasn't until then that I noticed an irrefutable fact: China was taking over the place.

It stared back at me from the empty screen of the television. I spied it in the pile of tennis shoes by the door. It glowed in the lights on the Christmas tree and watched me in the eyes of a doll splayed on the floor. I slipped off the couch and did a quick inventory, sorting gifts into two stacks: China and non-China. The count came to China, 25, the world, 14. Christmas, I realized, had become a holiday made by the Chinese. Suddenly I'd had enough. I wanted China out.

Through tricks and persuasion I got my husband on board, and on Jan. 1 we launched a yearlong household embargo on Chinese imports. The idea wasn't to punish China, which would never feel the pinprick of our protest. And we didn't fool ourselves into thinking we'd bring back a single job to unplugged company towns in Ohio and Georgia. We pushed China out of our lives because we wanted to measure how far it had pushed in. We wanted to know what it would take in time, money, and aggravation to kick our China habit....

[Fed_Up_Grammy]

4. I hate the Chinese products,most are garbage---but Asia is

a very large continent----is she nuts?

I loooove my little Corolla !!!!!!!

[MADem]

6. The OP is perpetrating a FALSEHOOD. She embargoed Chinese products simply

because they are everywhere. If she needed something that Japan made, she'd buy that. In her book, she bought Danish Legos and Italian shoes at some expense as part of her experiment.

See what happens when you only get half the story? The woman is being unfairly painted by the OP as a bigot, when all she was doing was conducting an economic experiement, for a year, vis a vis our largest trading partner.

[Fed_Up_Grammy]

7. Thanks for the clarification. n/t

[MADem]

8. I posted a link to a CS Monitor article about her book upthread.

She winds up thusly:

I don't know what we will do after Dec. 31 when our family's embargo comes to its official end. China-free living has been a hassle. I have discovered for myself that China doesn't control every aspect of our daily lives, but if you take a close look at the underside of boxes in the toy department, I promise it will give you pause.

Our son knows where he stands on the matter. In the bathtub one evening he told me how happy he was that "the China season" was coming soon.

"When we can buy China things again, let's never stop," he said.

After a year without China I can tell you this: You can still live without it, but it's getting trickier and costlier by the day. And a decade from now I may not be brave enough to try it again.

[Fed_Up_Grammy]

9. Thanks again !

[karlrschneider]

10. A while back we were preparing for some out of state visitors...spiffing up our little

camper/trailer and I thought it would be cool to get a coffee maker to put in it for their convenience. So I ran to Wally World and bought a Black & Decker model. It worked ONE time then died so I took it back and told the lady at customer service I really am not impressed with their Chinese products. She said "Oh NO...this is made in the USA, see here, it says Black & Decker, from Massachusetts!"

I turned the box over and showed her "Made in China" on the bottom. She actually seemed to be surprised. :eyes:

BTW, as much as I dislike WM, it is the only store that's convenient...the next closest place to buy stuff like this, or groceries, is 42 miles away. :mad:

[MADem]

11. I am not one of those lockstep, angry, ideologues who would ever

crap on anyone for shopping at WallyWorld. I do a little travelling for this reason or that, and there are very rural places I wind up in every so often where there's NUTHIN' but Walmart within a twenty or thirty mile radius, and sometimes even further. And if you need something, well, you need something. And the stuff is cheap, which IS a consideration to poor people--there are many families in this country living on salaries that don't crack 20K a year, and I certainly wouldn't be telling them to trot off to Whole Foods or buy that Newman's Own Organic Stuff when they're barely making the rent. People have to live in this tough, real world. They need a leg up, not a finger wag.

That said, I am at the stage in my life where I am settling into the "Get rid of shit" mode, rather than the "Acquire crap" mode. I don't need a ton of clothes, or "stuff." Consequently, I don't have a need to consume as much as the younger generations who have kids to outfit, and houses to furnish. I also get a kick out of finding old shit and fixing it, but that's just me.

This woman was just doing an experiment, an economic and trade one, really, to anecdotally measure the influence of our current trade policies on her family's existence, for a period of a year. She didn't undertake the experiment out of anger, or with a desire for revenge, she just wanted to see how far Chinese products had intruded into her family's life. She isn't a xenophobic asshole, but that's how this thread portrays her.

I think it was an interesting experiment she conducted, and a valid examination, too, given the subsequent killer dog food, the poisoned toys, the absolute SHIT they're shipping to us, like we're their Third World Dumping Ground. Her book is a few years old, but it's these incidents that have brought it back to the fore.

[karlrschneider]

12. I was in "collection" mode for years and now I'm trying to figure out how to get RID

of way more stuff than I need. As for the WalMart thing, I will make the almost 80 mile round trip a few times a year to stock up on non-perishable groceries but I'm sure not going to do it for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk.

[MADem]

5. Well, she doesn't. At least according to her book. See the link I posted below. NT