was not well. Upstairs in the premium exhibition spaces, the exhibitors hailed mainly from Europe, America, and Hong Kong, but down here they were all from the Chinese mainland. Up on the mezzanine, while enjoying fried rice or an espresso at one of several concession stands, you could gaze through the building’s glass shell at the picturesque junks and antique ferryboats out on Victoria Harbor and at the neon-bedecked towers of Kowloon, Hong Kong’s peninsular borough, rising up behind them. Down in windowless Expo Drive Hall, the only food was popcorn peddled from a pushcart whose glass case gave off a lurid, buttery glow.
Upstairs the English-speaking sales reps trusted their toys and their spectacular displays and their promotional videos and their fancy adjectives—“creative,” “educational,” “interactive”—to reel the buyers in, but down here the sales reps far outnumbered the buyers, and as you passed their displays of gizmos and trinkets, they would glide out of the dark like buskers. “Here, here!” “Take, take!” And into your hand they would thrust a business card and a promotional brochure containing such language poetry as “Our main products include gift, rainbow ring, Tinsel Pom Poms, Eva warhead gun, water bomb balloons, hand-knitted of beads, beauty set etc.”
Most of the toys down here were cheap knockoffs of the ones upstairs, and the names of many of the companies sounded like cheap knockoffs too: Baoda Baby Necessities Manufacture Factory, Believefly Toys, Combuy Toys. It was hard not to admire the unvarnished directness of that last moniker. This, after all, was the subtextual refrain that could be heard throughout the convention center, no matter how good or bad the salesman’s English. “No more PVC,” they said. “For smart kids only,” they said. “Warm to the touch,” they said. But what they really meant was “Come buy! Come buy!”
Although the desperation was louder in Expo Drive Hall, if you eavesdropped upstairs, you could hear it there, too:
“We depend on Christmas, and it was an awful Christmas.”
“Before I put more money out, I need more coming in, see what I’m saying?”
“Oil’s up, dollar’s down. It’s a fucking mess.”
Depressed by cheap oil, cheap Chinese labor, and the bargaining power of retailers like Toys “R” Us and Wal-Mart, toy prices in the United States had declined by 30 percent since 1996. According to an industry veteran interviewed by Eric Clark, author of The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America’s Youngest Consumers, the toy business by the end of the twentieth century had become “the game of trying to put the least amount of plastic in a toy so you can keep the price low, of trying to get first in line when Holly wood comes out with a blockbuster, of squeezing the last half cent out of something.” Luckily for toymakers, even as margins kept slimming, volume kept ballooning, inflated by the helium of American desire. In 2006, Americans spent $31 billion on toys and video games, almost as much as the rest of the world’s countries combined.
Then came 2007, the year of Thomas the Lead Paint Delivery System and the Polly Pocket Magnetic Intestinal Obstruction and the Date Rape Arts-and-Crafts Beads. The year that an American candidate for president, the eventual Democratic nominee, the eventual president of the United States, campaigned on the promise “to stop the import of all toys from China”—80 percent of the toys Americans buy, roughly 60 percent of the toys the Chinese export. The year the stock of the world’s largest toy company, Mattel, lost 19 percent of its value in a single month. The helium in the toy balloon seemed to be leaking away, replaced by some less buoyant vapor—the exhaust fumes of malaise, the off-gas of dread.
At an information desk on the mezzanine, a video about product safety looped endlessly, but for whose benefit I couldn’t tell. No one else stopped to watch. “Only toys that do not fit inside the gauge are not considered small parts,” the British-accented voice-over said, while on the screen a disembodied hand unsuccessfully attempted to insert a plastic strawberry into a steel cylinder. On the first day of the toy fair there had been a special seminar on “Risk Management and Brand Development in International Trade of Toys Industry.” Tomorrow there would be yet another seminar, this one titled “Latest Product Safety Directives of Toys Industry & Good Practice in Achieving Safety Standard.” New monitoring and safety protocols had already driven production costs up 10 percent, a spokesman for the Hong Kong Toys Council