Of dyed bears and WAHAHA

I have to confess, I've always perversely enjoyed reading about the newest line of fake shit being sold somewhere in the Motherland. I'm just a schadenfreude type. The melamine-tainted milk, however, was flat out evil enough that I haven't been so har har about fake stuff since (especially because I and people I was responsible for consumed plenty of dairy products in summer '08--fortunately all of us were big and strong enough to not get sick from it).

But this post from the Taipei Times made me gasp. What? The "diplomatic gift" pandas from the Mainland to Taiwan in late 2008 turned out to be random forest bears painted with the right colors?! Surely not? Not the bears whose names, when joined together, actually means "reunion"?

Then I followed the post to Paul Midler's site, and whew, it was all an April Fool's hoax. As he rightly points out, though, the fact that the TP Times put up this story signifies a vast gulf between the Mainland (who is probably pulling an Unhappy China about this, if anyone even got wind of it over the Great Firewall) and Taiwan. It's called being able to laugh at oneself. Sure, in this case it's more like Taiwanese reporters laughing at the people across the strait, but what it really takes is the capacity to look at oneself and burst out laughing. I mean, if the bears had actually turned out to be fake, it's not like anyone reading on Taiwan would likely forget that the Mainland really could get away with such jabs--because they can, because the island is not unlike Seoul, balanced not so many miles away from a host of frightening possibilities. So even while the article's making fun of Chinese fakes, it's also a kind of cheerfully cynical snicker at Taiwan's own position in the world.

But now for a real fakes story: the WAHAHA. This was a fate luckily dodged in '08, but according to my bosses, in summer '07, during the scheduled excursion to a "wild" (unrestored) section of the Great Wall four hours north of Beijing, everyone bought extra bottles of Wahaha [literally, "Kids' Ha-ha"] drinking water. They drank the suckers, because the hike is long and very hot, and then everyone puked for the next week. From then on, the brand became an evil totem, its name read as an evil laugh. Wa. Ha. Ha.

In summer '06, I actually partook (fortunately without incident) of some sketchy Wahaha. The little store in the "downtown" bit of the village we were living in carried 24-packs of water, and, too spoiled to drink the excessively mineral-rich hand-pump water boiled in an ancient, disgustingly crusted kettle, we opted to buy these. Anyway, the one time we sprang for a good deal on some Wahaha it turned out to be a suspicious imitator--same red and white label, but all the graphics seemed a little...pixellated. And the name was very similar-looking, but not quite there. We tried it anyway. It tasted like old flour. We trashed them. I still kind of wonder what the hell was in that stuff--surely not real flour? How is that a better profit margin than just selling boiled tap water, anyway?...