And the winner is…

I have to make a public apology. I made a last-second purchase at Carrefour yesterday, the selfsame Carrefour as is currently under boycott by more fervently nationalistic Chinese; although the staff, products, and represented industries in the ubiquitous supermarket are all from China, it is owned by a French corporation and, well, we all know how well-received the torch relay was in Paris. Boycott!! A protest of enormous proportions is planned for May Day, and Peace Corps volunteers have been banned by their U.S. handlers from setting foot anywhere near the grounds for fear of reactionary violence. This is China’s “freedom fries.”

In any event, I am not apologizing for shopping at Carrefour. They have fabulous dried soup mixes and printer ink and reasonable facsimiles of Western bread, (not an easy thing to come by in this land of sweetened fluff with sneaky pork floss filling). The only reason I avoid it is because it is usually crammed to the gills with people much smaller than I and with poor senses of navigation. Two-storey shopping centers wear me out on the best of days, and when the experience involves getting my toes run over repeatedly with wayward shopping cart wheels and my thighs jabbed by the elbows of a people with no appreciation for an orderly queue, it’s often just a little more than I’m prepared to deal with in order to score a few rare grocery finds. However, now that there is a boycott in place, it’s a dream. No jostling crowds clustering at every sales table on the lower floor, no four-cart pile-ups in the produce section, no half-hour waits in the checkout “lines.” And, since Carrefour is desperate to get customers back in to their previous cacophonous levels, more or less everything is on sale. I thought it was the perfect time to go, and it was.

So, after cramming my cart with a variety of necessities and Western delights (tampons, yeay!) I made my way to the checkout. This is always an interesting process, as old women are particularly curious about what a she-giant like me might feed her family, and they have no shyness whatsoever about stomping right up and peering over the edge of the basket, poking around in my vegetables to see what the hell we’re eating that makes us so damn big. I tell them I’m a vegetarian, and then they usually storm off in a huff, having decided I’m not only far too big, but a liar to boot.

At the checkout, I remembered that I had meant to buy a new toothbrush – once every month or so and all that. Conveniently, among the breathmints, batteries, chocolate bars and condoms that crowd the impulse-purchase racks that funnel you to the cashier, I found a dozen or so toothbrushes dangling in typically plasticized packaging. My choices were: toxic orange, lady pink, vomit green, or purple. Purple – no contest. And with that, I bought my stuff, crammed it into my chintzy but life-saving panniers, hauled myself down to my bicycle and pedaled on home.

As I was unloading my groceries a half an hour later, I took a moment to have a closer look at this toothbrush I had bought. I noticed that the printing on the cardboard backing seemed normal enough, but that there was a weird little logo down near the bottom: it appeared to be a dandified Western man in a top hat and bow tie. It was rendered with a kind of chiaroscuro contrast that made the features a little unclear, but it was clear that both his hat and his teeth were very, very shiny.

And then I looked at the name. Unfortunately, I was able to read the characters at the bottom: Hei Ren brand toothbrush. Oh. I set it down on the counter and covered my eyes with a weary palm. For a second, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to burst out laughing at the absurdity of it, or fly into a self-righteous rage. See, “Hei Ren” means “Black Man,” and the weird little logo was not a dandy at all, but some kind of D. W. Griffith-era Blackface character, complete with big lips and a white starched collar. I had officially purchased the most racist toothbrush imaginable. It wasn’t just offensive, it was somehow horrifying, falling in line with other uncomfortably discriminatory elements we’ve seen: the grotesque “jazzman” statue outside a local coffeeshop, the comments of my students about fearing “the ugly blacks,” and now this awful toothbrush, with its implicit message of “Get yo’ teeth as white as a nigga’s!”

All of these things were most unexpected. I guess I had assumed that a culture with a different relationship to the African slave trade in the past would have less interest in cultivating color lines and stereotypes of this magnitude. But then, I guess there’s a lot to be said, unfortunately, for ignorance, as well. There just aren’t many people of African ancestry in China – but why adopt another culture’s racial mistakes from eras past? Blackface imagery isn’t exactly the cultural export I hope my country is best known for. Then again, I’m not that proud of Britney Spears, either, and she’s practically a god around here. Can’t we share something beneficial with the world for once? Something besides the Internet?

Anyhow, I just had to share that. Hi, my name is Lara, and I bought the world’s most racist toothbrush at a French-owned Chinese supermarket. And I’m sorry.

~ by knifemaker on April 25, 2008.