Moby-Duck (33 page)

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.

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.

But then I think of Joshua the Mouse. One day at the school where I used to teach I stopped to admire a bulletin board decorated with construction paper mice that a class of first graders had made. Above one mouse there appeared the following caption: “My mouse's name is Joshua. He is 20 years old. He is afraid of everything.” I love this caption. I love how those first two humdrum sentences do nothing to prepare us for the emotional revelation of the third. And then there's the age: twenty years old. What occult significance could that number possess for Joshua's creator? When you are six, even eight-year-olds look colossal. A twenty-year-old must be unfathomable as a god. Contemplating poor, omniphobic, twenty-year-old Joshua, I was convinced that children might impersonate adults, but they would never become them. I doubt that childhood has ever been the safe, sunlit harbor adults in moments of forgetfulness dream about. I suspect that it will always be a wilderness. When you are a child, almost nothing makes sense—not the expressions on your father's face or the intonations in your mother's voice, not the cruelties and affections of your classmates, certainly not prime-time television or the evening news.

“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land,” Ishmael philosophizes midway through his whale hunt, “so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!” We canst never return, but oh how we try, how we try.

Postman does not only argue that television produced “adultified children”; paradoxically, it also produced “childified adults”—“kidults,” Richard Wong would say. As evidence, Postman points to the absence on television of characters who possess an “adult's appetite for serious music” or “book-learning” or “even the faintest signs of a contemplative habit of mind.” One wonders what he makes of the popular culture of centuries past—the pornographic peepshow boxes, the slapstick vaudeville acts, the violent and salacious Punch and Judy shows, the bearbaitings and cockfights, the dime novels and penny dreadfuls. The great difference to me seems not one of quality but of quantity: entertainment has become so cheap and ubiquitous that it is inescapable. Even the material world has become a “Sargasso of the imagination.” Despite my “book-learning,” I still feel bewildered, even in adulthood. The world still makes little sense, no matter how much I study it. Life is still half known. I have brought with me on every leg of my accidental odyssey a portable library. I have read about the science of hydrography and the chemistry of plastics and the history of childhood. I have learned the Beaufort Scale of Winds and the chemical structure of polyethylene and the medieval ages of man. And the more I read, the more lost I feel.

Listening to Richard Wong's prophecies, I find myself thinking that those who complain about the commercialization of childhood have it wrong. The real problem isn't that childhood has been commercialized but that our economy has been infantilized.

My third morning in Hong Kong, Ron Sidman's old trading partner, Henry Tong, meets me in the lobby of my hotel. Richard Wong and Red Magic may represent the future of the toy business, but Tong and the Wong Hau Plastic Works & Trading Company are far more typical of its recent past. America's toy industry emerged at the end of the Civil War, when factory owners, faced with excess production capacity, started milling merchandise of little inherent worth—tin trinkets stamped from scraps, paper dolls, windup bears. Like their counterparts today on the Chinese mainland, few early American toymakers bothered to innovate, preferring instead to make cheap knockoffs of handcrafted European classics. After World War II, when the marketplace was suddenly awash in surplus plastic resin and molding machines, the toy industry pioneered globalization. It was then, in the 1950s, that Mattel outsourced production of the first Barbie doll to a factory in Japan, and it was then that Henry Tong's grandfather started the family toy business that Tong and his brothers operate today.

A paunchy, bespectacled, double-chinned man in khakis, black sneakers, and a checked Oxford, pen poking from his breast pocket, Tong, thirty-nine, has a courteous, self-conscious manner—avoiding eye contact, punctuating his sentences with a little close-lipped smile, asking me politely whether my hotel has been to my liking. Like most of Hong Kong's business class, he would seem at home in corporate America, whose offices he occasionally visits. He speaks English with an accent but well. At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he earned a bachelor's degree, he enrolled in the university's ambitious yearlong survey of Western literature and thought. His favorite book he read that year, he tells me as we speed north through the suburban outskirts of Hong Kong in the backseat of a minivan chauffeured by a company driver, was the
Odyssey.
He preferred the
Odyssey
to the
Iliad
because it has a happier ending, and because it has monsters. The only book of Dante's trilogy that he liked was
Inferno
. “Paradise and Purgatory were boring,” he said. “But Hell is a fun place.” He doesn't read much anymore, he admits. Instead he likes to watch American television shows, especially
Lost.

Tong's driver drops us off at the train station at Lo Wu, where we are to pass through Chinese customs separately, reuniting on the other side. The Pearl River Delta is so densely developed that some demographers regard it as a single, uninterrupted megalopolis, a Delaware-size economic organism with two nuclei: Hong Kong in the south and, in the north, Guangzhou, the city formerly known to Westerners as Canton. But the political unification remains less complete than the economic one. Unlike residents of China, residents of Hong Kong still enjoy most of the civil liberties guaranteed by British common law (freedom of speech, freedom of religion), and there is a plan to start holding local elections there by 2017. An American needs no visa to visit Hong Kong, as he does to visit China, and the half million or so locals who regularly commute across the Chinese border have to pass through one of six checkpoints, an arrangement reminiscent of that found along the border between Mexico and California.

Here, as there, the border security serves mainly to control the tide of illegal immigrants seeking better wages, though in the Pearl River Delta that tide flows south instead of north. Here, as there, many of those immigrants speak a foreign language—Mandarin or a provincial dialect, not Cantonese—and if they make it across the border, they, too, can expect to be treated as second-class citizens in their new home. There is one striking difference between the two borders, however: to enter China by car you need a special permit, and such permits are hard to come by, even for a successful businessman like Henry Tong. We will cross the border by train, he explains. Another driver awaits us on the other side.