To Orient and Express

My daughter has been going to Chinese school most weekends since October. After a reluctant and rocky start, she now enjoys it, and according to her grandparents, who are native Mandarin speakers, her pronunciation is top notch. Today the whole school put on a performance, and my daughter's Chinese as a Second Language class sang some songs on a stage before a couple hundred people. I know she was nervous at first, but she came through with flying colors.

Tonight as she was getting ready for bed, she put on the pajama top and said, "Hey, look Mom! My pajama top was 'Made in China'!" (She notices that about everything made in China, which amounts to, well, almost everything.) Then she said, "I wonder if my pajama bottoms were made in China, too."

"I bet they were," I told her. She checked the label and confirmed, "Yes! They were!" She's still genuinely surprised and pleased when she comes across anything made in China. "But look at this, mom. Even though these were made in China, they wrote 'Old Navy' in English. How do you think they knew how to write in English?" she asked in genuine wonder. Before waiting for an answer, she concluded, "They must have gone to English writing school so that they could write 'Old Navy' on the pajamas."

I smiled at the thought. But as I always do now when the conversation turns to "things made in China," I thought of the opening sequence of a documentary I saw several months ago -- Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes. Gives new meaning to "Made in China."