These days almost everything you buy is made in China and it seems it is impossible to live without the things with labels “Made in China”.
In Christmas 2004 Sara Bongiorni while sorting her gift items realized that almost everything in the heap of gifts she received came from China. Then she decided to experiment with an idea to boycott everything made in China for a year.
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.
… 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. (Sara Bongiorni wrote in 2005)
It is funny how she explains her son’s happiness on the last days of the crazy “No China” experiment.
In the bathtub one evening he told me how happy he was that “the China season” was coming soon.
Well, if you ask me, I don’t dare to do such experiment. I simply can’t afford it!
