Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Sure enough, right in the thick of Thanksgiving vacation, e-mails domestic and international began hitting my inbox about the fine Burberry scarves I was peddling on eBay for an astounding $68.00 apiece. Fortunately for me, dealing with minor identity theft was precisely what I wanted to do during my time off, and after a flurry of activity money was duly refunded, offending listings were removed, and passwords were secured. Most things were set right again. Most. Not everything.

I made sure to note my behavior throughout the situation from the get-go, almost as if I had a black box recorder running. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but the first thing that came to mind upon reading the honest bidder inquiries about shipping prices and delivery estimates was a hunch that someone in China had hijacked–or shanghaied, if we may go there–my eBay account. Certainly probability was on my side. When a population exceeds a billion people, the Shyster Count is bound to be higher. But it wasn’t statistics so much as self-loathing and simple racism that drove my hypothesis.

Technically I’m Taiwanese, I suppose, but my ancestors hailed from across the strait. On most days, though, I consider myself white. I’ve simply never liked the food, nor the media, nor the interpersonal customs inherent in my cultural roots. Part of it may be upbringing. I remember pondering, however much a five-year-old can ponder, why my dad faithfully embargoed toys made in China. Product from Japan always got top marks, as did merchandise from the States and, for some odd reason, Macau. But never China, a word that to this day is synonymous with “shoddy” in my thesaurus.

“Poisonous” apparently would’ve been a better synonym, given the news coverage from the past year or so, which I imagine my old man regarded with a feeling of exoneration. It’s the same thing I felt when the auction listings declared these fake Burberries would “bring you and your family happy and bless!” It’s the same thing I felt when I continued to read the Engrish, so delicious in its earnestness. It’s the same thing I felt when I discovered the hijacker had used my eBay ID to give mad props to vendors from China. My hunch had been right, and in a single day an entire country had fossilized itself in my mind as a festering shithole of two parts melamine, three parts lead, and an entire warren of scuttling chiselers.

But even then, when the black box clicked to a stop and all this had been said and sentenced, a mental picture popped up. It’s not the first time this imagery has appeared. In it, I’m doing some kind of missions work in China. Where, specifically, I’m not sure, but it’s a sunny, humid afternoon. Rural. Noisy. I’ve wondered a few times whether I cribbed this panorama from a movie or something, though Hollywood’s traditionally been light on missionaries in China. Panicrama is more like it, actually, because it contains everything I want to avoid the most, and it is more than a little unsettling.