Foreword Magazine reviews Joe Bennett's rollicking and informative tour through China in Where Underpants Come From?
"What do we know about China, the enormous nation that will most likely dominate the next century? Already most of us are clothed by China, shod by China, supplied with hardware by China, effectively in debt to China. And yet most of us know very little about China, the author writes. With this query in mind, and a new $2.99 pair of mens underpants in hand, Joe Bennett sets out to learn about world trade by finding the origins of his made-in-China knickers . . . Often, the book's ostensible purpose-mapping the path from the manufacture to the shipping of a pair of mens shorts-is merely a vehicle for Bennetts detailed descriptions of people and places. The chaotic traffic, the chess and spitting in the park, chopstick lessons in a restaurant-Bennett brings China to the page. No detail escapes his attention or his wry humor: In the communal dining room a much older woman squats in the corner like a refugee. She is shaving vegetables over a blue plastic bucket with a cleaver that would bring gasps from a jury. As the book progresses, not one but three cultural gulfs emerge. The first is the vast lack of knowledge the average Westerner has about the Middle Kingdom and the resulting Chinese xenophobia. The second is no less sobering: the communication barriers between the average Joe and the huge corporations that dream up, order, manufacture, and transport all of our stuff. The third is the tension between the Uighurs of northwest China and the ruling Chinese.
This is a richly written book; Bennett threads his narrative through detailed description of his surroundings and concise, and at times, refreshingly frank accounts of Chinese history and political and economic development. He shows us heedless taxi drivers, giggling waitresses, and Swiss businessmen eager to make their fortunes. The history of Chinese writing, corruption, the odd gathering of expatriates, the mass migration of the Chinese out of rural provinces and into cities, and the pollution that hangs over everything-its all here. . . By turns philosophical and hilarious, Bennett keeps moving toward a hopeful conclusion about the meaning of his experience: Everything I have ever heard or read about this country stressed its difference. But a few trivial merry minutes in a middle-of-the-road restaurant on a damp Wednesday evening in Shanghai have stressed its similarity. These people are people. What's more they are easy-going people, people who like to laugh and people who dont consider a restaurant meal to be an exercise in isolation, formality or social pretension. While the Chinese have good reason to mistrust foreigners, Bennett believes that continued trade will continue to break down barriers between people. With Bennett as our guide, and with the benefit of his ability to map the humor and humanity of any situation, we are in good hands."
Alana Filipovich reviews Where Underpants Come From on Urbanatomy: "If you read only one China book this year, make it Joe Bennett’s Where Underpants Come From. Bennett does witty travelogue better than Bill Bryson, and dissects what makes countries and their economies tick better than PJ O'Rourke did in Eat the Rich. The book’s premise in ingeniously simple – it’s basically an undie hunt, a quest to track a pack of Y-fronts from Chinese cotton fields to department store in Bennett’s adopted home of New Zealand (where the Englishman is a well-known newspaper columnist). It’s witty as hell, and filled with informed insights as to what makes the New China tick. As Bennett says in the book's intro: “There are plenty of better-informed books about China, but I suspect this is the only one to begin with a pair of underpants.” Actually, Bennett is pretty well informed for someone who spent only a short time here and his insights are sager than many a so-called China expert. No surprise that the book scooped the grand prize at the seventh annual Whitcoulls Travcom Travel Book of the Year Award.
Urbanatomy caught up with Joe Bennett for this chat...
Why underpants? That is, how'd you come up with the idea of writing the book?
I bought some underpants and then started to think about them. It was genuine curiosity sparking a simple idea. And that simple idea seemed to me to expand into a lot of stuff that mattered.
How has writing the book changed your own attitude towards China? Towards underpants? Towards underpants, not one bit. Towards China, hugely. The country has gone from being a vague and mildly threatening mystery, to somewhere I have become very fond of, a place full of people who are simply people, and with both a history and a future that interest me a lot. It was an education.
Do you think following the trail of underwear around Asia gave you an accurate portrayal of culture and commerce? Would you recommend 'Underpant Travel' to other tourists? I'd recommend people to go to China, certainly, but there's no reason for them to follow pants. Whether I've gained and written a fair picture of China, well, i would like to think so, and several people who live there have written to me to say kind things, but in the end it's for readers to judge whether I've got it right. I do, of course, realise that there are vast swathes of this vast country that I haven't been anywhere near. But then again, nor have most Chinese.
What was the best moment of your trip? The worst? You seem to have handled the language barrier with good grace, but did you have any especially frustrating moments? Hard to pick out a best moment. But I do keep coming back to a night in a Shanghai restaurant early on when I suddenly realised that the Chinese were just people like me, with different customs perhaps, but with the same essential humanity. As regards the language, I was frustrated by the characters, as I explain in the book. I found them so hard to memorise. And that in turn made it hard for the spoken language to stick. I would have greatly liked to be able to converse more freely with people in bars and restaurants and public places. In the business world most people spoke enough English.
You write about how a few Chinese people strove to befriend you, even joining you for dinner uninvited. In the book, the locals seem to be either exceedingly friendly or largely indifferent. Please give us your take on Chinese people. Did you face any adverse reactions at all? Yes, some were friendly, some indifferent. In general, as I've said, I don't think one can generalise. I've travelled a fair bit and pretty well everywhere I've been I've met a similar mix of friendliness and indifference. It's human make-up rather than any racial or national characteristic. And offhand I can remember no active aggression from anyone, apart from from the street vendor in urumqi and I think she'd got hold of the wrong idea about me. I felt sorry for her.
Finally, what kind of underpants do you wear?
I wear, am wearing now, exactly the sort of ordinary cheap briefs I describe in the book. Always have.
Joe Bennett's new travelogue, Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy, is reviewed by Nicolette Westfall in Feminist Review: "It's absolutely astonishing to realize how much junk people in North America consume only to throw away. Most of it is from China. When I started to read Where Underpants Come From, I picked up various objects in my office--from the mechanical pencil I write with to my iPod--and I discovered that yes, everything had been made in China. Author Joe Bennett, who is based in New Zealand, does a fantastic job of describing his experience of traveling to that far off land to discover the process of how his cheap underpants were manufactured. The idea is absurd, but he runs with it anyway. China is the cheapest bidder on manufacturing most of the convenient items we consume at an exhausting rate. It comes as no surprise that the giant nation is, as a result, driving its peasant labor force for meager wages and polluting the air, land, and water at an even faster rate. Statistics aren't necessary; just take a look at the dirty grey-brown clouds of smog that hover over Chinese cities. Bennett does more than observe the grainy air; he physically visits various places in China to see for himself what the industrial giant has created in order to keep the Western materialist appetite satisfied. It isn't pretty, but his encounters are often humorous. As other journalists (such as Anderson Cooper, in the Planet in Peril series) have pointed out, China's bid to create the cheapest industrial production of everything from underpants to machinery is creating environmental destruction on an astronomical level. Chinese citizens are also just as disposable. When I was a little girl (in Canada) during Mao's time, I became interested in not only American Vietnam War veterans, but in the Vietnamese and Chinese soldiers who--as the National Geographic displayed them--were left rotting in dilapidated vet hospitals. Bennett's descriptions of countless health and safety hazards and substandard machinery show that while Mao may have died in 1976, the view that Chinese workers are easily replaceable has not. Bennett's account gets past the stats and much-repeated talk of China as an economic giant. He offers readers glimpses into people's lives. He goes where the Chinese won't--places like Urumqi south, where Muslim populations exist--and tries to communicate with the locals. His angle lends compassion and a sincere urge to understand all sides. He admits to his own prejudices against China and its peoples before he actually arrives and notes that people are people everywhere. As I sit here and type my review on my 'Made In China' laptop, the darkness is lit by my 'Made In China' lamp, and I drink Chrysanthemum tea (grown and harvested in China) from my 'Made in China' glass, I hope that people will take the time to read Bennett's work. Despite the pollution and slack labor laws and high rate of labor deaths, Bennett finds the people he encounters to be generally happy. Yes, they are driven, but they take time to live for the sake of living and family takes care of family. We Westerners monetarily benefit from the fruits of their hard work, but materialism has only left us miserably wealthy, fat, and insecure."
Coming this summer, and not to be confused with Sima's Undergarments for Women, is Joe Bennett's Where Underpants Come From: From Cotton Fields to Checkout Counters--Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy. Funny, wise and insightful, this new volume has just been reviewed by Publishers Weekly: "British travel writer Bennett informs and endears in his quixotic quest to trace the provenance of his underpants in order to learn something about the “commercial and industrial processes on which [his] easy existence depends.” Despite his publisher’s misgivings, the author travels to the outskirts of Shanghai, posing as an underwear buyer and scheming his way into factories and showrooms to piece together the (increasingly) mysterious origins of his underpants. He heads toward the cotton factories, where few Westerners venture and the population is ethnically closer to Afghan than Chinese, and sober accounts vie with marvelously silly escapades around Bangkok and rural Thailand in search of rubber trees (or more specifically, the origins of his elastic waistband). Bennett’s education in the world of global commerce sparkles with humor and sharp observations on modern China’s competing strains of enduring Confucianism, vestigial communism and the government’s ruthless economic ambitions."
Foreword Magazine reviews Joe Bennett's rollicking and informative tour through China in Where Underpants Come From?
