by Donovan Hohn
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 cand
idate 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.
I am expecting our speaker to resemble one of the Chinese businessmen seated around me, sporting a necktie and a Bluetooth earpiece and an ID card on a lanyard and an air of fastidious professionalism. Instead, five minutes late, a baby-faced character in ripped jeans and sunglasses swaggers to the front of the room. He has a blazer over his T-shirt, the shaved head of a Tibetan monk, and around his neck a thin gold chain. In Cantonese he asks an assistant to cue his first slide. Behind him, in unison, the three projection screens flash fire-engine red, and above the words “Red Magic” (the “i” dotted with a star) appear a pair of white bunny ears, the right one rakishly lopped as if waving “Hello.”
The translation device proves unnecessary. Wong prefers broken English. “Okay, what is kidult?” he asks, slouching over the lectern. “Anyone know?”
“Is it a combination of a kid and an adult?” an American in the second row suggests.
“Right,” Wong replies, visibly annoyed. He’d meant the question to be rhetorical. “Okay, probably he is just like me.” By his own admission, Wong has the body of a thirty-five-year-old man and the mind of a five-year-old boy. “I like video games, toys, model, comics book, everything. This is kidult,” he says. To “mix the imagination world and the real world—this is kidult.” Wong is hungover, he confesses, which explains the sunglasses. To give a PowerPoint presentation at a trade show while wearing sunglasses and recovering from a hangover, this also is kidult. By day, Wong is a CEO, but at night he likes to imagine he’s Batman. This is kidult. Growing up in Hong Kong, Wong was forever pining after toys. “For example, when I was ten years old,” he says, “I saw a toy. It’s a robot, but my mom she never buy it for me. At that moment the toy was 150 Hong Kong dollars. Now it’s 5,300, forty times as much. I still buy it. Why is it forty times expensive? Because of the kidult market.” A kidult is not to be confused with an otaku, a Japanese term Wong recently learned. “Otaku, it’s like a freak,” Wong says. “They imagine they are the character of the comics book all the time. The kidult is different. At least they are working at the daytime.”
What Wong’s company mostly does by day is design and market collectible figurines—little plastic creatures that look like the mutant love children of Hello Kitty and Pikachu. Flipping through PowerPoint slides, he gives us a quick tour of this menagerie. Red Magic isn’t really in the toy business, he explains; it’s in the character business, the trend business. “Red Magic is happiness,” he says, sounding a bit like Chairman Mao. “Red Magic is style.”
Instead of merchandising licensed characters from movies and television shows, as most toymakers do, Wong decided to invent characters of his own. Red Magic’s dolls are like merchandise for movies and television shows and comic books that do not exist. Each one has a name and a psychological profile. There is, for instance, Hiro, a thumb-size brown fellow with the big head and stumpy limbs of a fetus, who “pretends to be brave but is really fragile” and “hates losing face.” Po, a little plastic teddy bear with nipples, “loves fish biscuits, cooking,” and a pink plastic rabbit named Bo. Deri, a thumb-size gray fellow who also resembles a fetus, “savors the destruction process and loves watching others suffer.”
Red Magic claims to have sold more than twenty million of these toys in twenty different countries, mostly to boys and men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, by deploying a marketing technique that McDonald’s pioneered thirty years ago, when, in an effort to boost declining sales, it introduced the Happy Meal, luring children and therefore their parents to restaurants with the promise of cheap toys. It could be argued that the Happy Meal, and similar gimmicks, went some way toward saving the fast-food business. Red Magic uses the same marketing technique on teenagers and adults. And it works. For a while in Hong Kong, when you bought eight bottles of San Miguel beer, you got one of fifteen different limited-edition Red Magic collectible dolls, but you couldn’t choose which one. This “gambling element” kept customers “drinking and drinking and drinking and paying,” Wong explained. “When I go to see the customer—they buy and buy and buy, and they can’t get the one they want—I feel very happy inside.”
For several years, toy-industry insiders have fretted over a trend known by the acronym KGOY, kids getting older younger. At ever earlier ages, market research shows, children are putting away their childish things in favor of adolescent and adult varieties of entertainment—cell phones, movies, social-networking websites. The kidult, Wong believes, could be the industry’s deliverance.
JOSHUA THE MOUSE
What is childhood? Ever since I learned I was to become a father, this question has been on my mind. Developmental psychologists like T. Berry Brazelton will tell you that infancy and toddlerhood and childhood and adolescence are neurologically determined states of mind—developmental stages through which all of us progress. Sociologists and historians, meanwhile, tell us that childhood is an idea, distinct from biological immaturity, the meaning of which changes over time. In his seminal 1962 study of the subject, the French historian Philippe Ariès argued that childhood as we know it is a modern invention, largely a by-product of schooling. In the Middle Ages, when almost no one went to school, children were treated as miniature adults. At work and at play, there was little age-based segregation. “Everything was permitted in their presence,” according to one of Ariès’s sources, even “coarse language, scabrous actions, and situations; they had heard everything and seen everything.” Power not
age determined whether a person was treated as a child. Until the eighteenth century, the European idea of childhood “was bound up with the idea of dependence: the words ‘sons,’ ‘varlets,’ and ‘boys,’ were also words in the vocabulary of feudal subordination. One could leave childhood only by leaving the state of dependence, or at least the lower degrees of dependence.” Our notion of childhood as a sheltered period of innocence begins to emerge with the modern education system, Ariès argues. As the period of economic dependence lengthened among the educated classes, so too did childhood. These days education and the puerility it entails often lasts well into one’s twenties, or longer.
Twenty years after Ariès published his book, the media critic Neil Postman announced in The Disappearance of Childhood that modern childhood as Ariès described it had gone extinct, killed off by the mass media, which gave all children, educated or otherwise, premature access to the violent, sexually illicit world of adults. Children still existed, of course, but they’d become, in Postman’s word, “adultified.” I was ten years old when Postman published his book, and in many respects my biography aligns with his unflattering generational portrait. In Postman’s opinion the rising divorce rate indicated a “precipitous falling off in the commitment of adults to the nurturing of children.” My parents divorced just as the American divorce rate reached its historical peak. After my mother moved out for good, my brother and I came home from school to an empty house where we spent hours watching the sorts of television shows Postman complains about (Three’s Company, The Dukes of Hazzard). Reading Postman’s diagnosis, I begin to wonder if he’s right. Maybe my childhood went missing.
