When I was a kid, everything my family bought was made in the USA. It wasn’t because we were super patriotic. Foreign products were just out of our price range. I really don’t remember seeing “Made in America” or “Made in the U.S.A.” signs or labels. The first TV’s were RCA, G.E., or Zenith. Cars were Fords, Chevy’s and Plymouth’s. Coke, 7-Up, and Pepsi cost a dime in a pop machine, and if you needed some extra coin, you’d ride around on your bike picking up bottles and sell them back to Safeway’s for 2 cents a bottle. People would have called you crazy if you had told them that in 20 years, they would be spending two dollars for a small bottle of plain water from France.
The change was probably gradual but it seemed like it happened over night. Records morphed into cassette tapes and then into CD’s. VW bugs snuck into the American car market and were barely noticed, but Toyotas and Hondas became game changers. Japan started making the best cameras, TV’s, and stereos and the US manufacturers were rapidly getting priced out of the US market. American blue collar workers were scrambling to hold onto their jobs, their benefits, and, in some cases, their retirements.
As so often happens, the finger of blame was pointed at others. Instead of blaming greedy Americans for relocating their factories overseas to take advantage of lower wages and less expensive working conditions, Americans blamed the Chinese and Japanese for flooding our markets. Of course these countries wanted a piece of the American market. Who wouldn’t? America was a consumer’s paradise. And American retailers like Walmart and Target were making out like bandits. Like the illegal slave trade and the ongoing illicit drug trade, there have to be buyers for what “they” are selling and in America everyone seemed to want more.
In 1982, the backlash against Asians took a deadly turn when Hong Kong born American, Vincent Chin, was beaten to death with a baseball bat outside a Detroit bar by Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz because they mistakenly thought that Vincent Chin was a Japanese car maker. Initially given 25 years on a second degree murder conviction, on appeal, that was later turned into a manslaughter three years probation. Ebens and Nitz never served a day.
Chinese Odyssey 23
America needed
a way to awaken —
something to stir us.
How could we be shaken?
It happened when shopping
in Wal-Mart one day.
Not one item said
“Made in US of A.”
The Panda in the Room PD 