March 23 2007 Mattel Factory and Macao

Last weekend we met Jean and Phil Thompson in Macao. We tried to get a hotel room there for Saturday night, but we were unsuccessful so we just went for a day trip. A day trip was really no problem. It takes an hour on the fast ferry to get from Hong Kong to Macao, you don’t need a visa, and they take Hong Kong dollars.

It was a great trip. We got there around 11, but we managed to arrive at immigration with about a thousand other people. Ten ferries must have landed there at the same time! We thought it would take forever to get through, but really it only took about twenty minutes.

Once through immigration we hopped in a taxi and met Jean and Phil at the Ruins of Saint Paul Cathedral. The Cathedral is on top of a hill and is a really easy landmark to find. Macao was first settled by the Portuguese in the 1600’s so it is way older than Hong Kong, which was just a fishing village until the British arrived in 1841. It seems to have a heavy Catholic influence (which makes sense if you think about it). It has lots of beautiful old churches. It’s different from Hong Kong, but it still has a strong Chinese flavor. It’s just a Chinese/Portuguese flavor instead of Chinese/British, with gambling thrown in.

I thought Macao would be like Las Vegas, but the casinos are in one area and the rest of Macao is like a little European village. The historic buildings are very well preserved. It even has some cobblestone streets! My German and French friends here love it; they feel like they’ve almost gone home! The streets could be somewhere in Italy – narrow with high stone walls. But the food is an odd mixture of Chinese and Portuguese. We had Portuguese for lunch, and Japanese at a casino for dinner! Ha.

We spent most of the day wandering around the tourist sites. Later on we went to Phil and Jean’s hotel, which was a converted fort and just darling, if it hadn’t been under renovation. We had cocktails out on a terrace, and then headed for the casinos for dinner. The casinos DID look like the Las Vegas strip, but smaller. After dinner we wandered through the games for awhile, but in general we were disappointed. The slots we mysterious, we couldn’t find any video poker and most of the tables were baccarat, a game than none of us knew how to play! We finally found one table with black jack, but it used an auto-shuffling device so Lee was like “what fun is that? You can’t count the cards!” I think that was the point.

It was great to see Phil and Jean. Honestly the best part of the day for me was visiting with them. We really were just getting to know them in Austin before it was time for us to leave. They are adjusting to Shanghai, but Shanghai is not easy. Jean told this story of a western lady she found sobbing in the grocery store one day because she couldn’t read the containers in order to tell if anything was sour cream. She says where they live is really nice; they could be in a suburb of Dallas or something. But they are on a compound, and when you step outside the walls, you are in the third world. It’s strange because Shanghai has this reputation as a cosmopolitan city (Paris of the East, blah blah blah) but 60 years of communist rule have taken their toll I guess. I’m SO GLAD we live in Hong Kong!!!

On that note, we come to part two of this entry. Last Friday I went on an AWA tour of the Mattel Factory in Guangzhou, China. It was a fascinating experience. It gave me a small taste of where Lee has been going for the past year. We took the train from Hung Hom in Kowloon up to Guangzhou. That in itself was interesting because you don’t have to change trains at the border. You go through Hong Kong immigration before you get on the train and China immigration when you get off in Guangzhou. A bus from Mattel met us at the train station and took us to lunch at a very fancy resort called the Fontainebleau. It was a Chinese lunch of course; it was pretty good. At least they had Coke Light!

Then the bus took us to the factory. We got to see Barbies been made! Little bitty clothes, arms and legs being molded, machines that sewed on the hair. It looked like a very labor-intensive operation. Our guide said that the labor market in southern China has been getting pretty competitive. They no longer have hundreds of people waiting outside their gate looking for employment every day. Their business is pretty seasonal too, so workers are hired on at the peak times and then I guess they are let go. Lee said that Dongguan still has lines at their factory, but he thinks 3M might be a very desirable place to work; good salaries and benefits, even in China.

We were taken on a tour of their facilities. We saw the dorms where they sleep, their cafeteria, the fitness center, the CD room. They even have a Karaoke Bar (but no alcohol oh no)! Their living situation looked pretty nice, even with twelve girls to a room and no air conditioning.

The girls didn’t look very cheerful while they were working. They work ten hour days, five days a week. Our guide said that they have quotas, so I guess there is a lot of pressure to produce. Mattel runs two shifts, but closes on weekends and for Chinese holidays. Lee says Dongguan runs 24/7, and the workers work 6 days a week. Different kind of business, I guess.

I thought the pollution up there was terrible. By the end of the day I could feel it. My eyes burned, my chest hurt; but maybe it was just the power of suggestion. And it was uniformly grim and ugly. It wasn’t just the poverty. Actually it didn’t look that impoverished. The whole area just looked very industrial, with that endless white sky that pollution brings, and building after building with that manufacturing look. I’ve had people say that Guangzhou is nice, but I think I missed that part!

At the end of the tour they gave each of us a Barbie doll! I got Weekend Barbie, with her little dog and her Britney Spears-like outfit. There will be another Mattel tour in the fall; this time to the Hot Wheels factory. I may need to go just so I can get Daniel some Hot Wheels…the Barbie is MINE though; I’m not giving her to anyone!