reported. Small margins were growing smaller still.
TOYS TO TRUST/MADE BY HONG KONG, billboards outside the convention center declared—not, the publicists meant to imply, MADE IN CHINA. But their prepositional sleight of hand couldn’t change the fact that comparatively little is made in Hong Kong anymore besides money. Ambiguity is now Hong Kong’s major asset; translation, its major industry. Hong Kong translates Chinese labor into Western goods, Asian exports into American imports. It is a semipermeable membrane as well as a semiautonomous region. In 2007, more than sixty thousand factories in the Pearl River Delta belonged to Hong Kong interests. Those factories are the primary source of both the city’s prodigious wealth and its equally prodigious smog, a sulfurous whiff of which, up in Expo Hall 7, had penetrated the air-conditioning.
A carpeted room on the convention center’s third floor. Gray stackable chairs arrayed into three rows. At the front of the room rise three projection screens and in their midst a lectern, yet to be approached. I have rented a translation device, a black box with headphones, and through this battery-powered medium I will soon receive divinations from an oracle by the name of Richard Wong, founder, CEO, and chief designer of Red Magic Holdings Ltd., who any moment now is to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on the future of toys. The room fills. Ushers fetch more chairs.
I am expecting our speaker to resemble one of the Chinese businessmen seated around me, sporting a necktie and a Bluetooth earpiece and an ID card on a lanyard and an air of fastidious professionalism. Instead, five minutes late, a baby-faced character in ripped jeans and sunglasses swaggers to the front of the room. He has a blazer over his T-shirt, the shaved head of a Tibetan monk, and around his neck a thin gold chain. In Cantonese he asks an assistant to cue his first slide. Behind him, in unison, the three projection screens flash fire-engine red, and above the words “Red Magic” (the “i” dotted with a star) appear a pair of white bunny ears, the right one rakishly lopped as if waving “Hello.”
The translation device proves unnecessary. Wong prefers broken English. “Okay, what is kidult?” he asks, slouching over the lectern. “Anyone know?”
“Is it a combination of a kid and an adult?” an American in the second row suggests.
“Right,” Wong replies, visibly annoyed. He’d meant the question to be rhetorical. “Okay, probably he is just like me.” By his own admission, Wong has the body of a thirty-five-year-old man and the mind of a five-year-old boy. “I like video games, toys, model, comics book, everything. This is kidult,” he says. To “mix the imagination world and the real world—this is kidult.” Wong is hungover, he confesses, which explains the sunglasses. To give a PowerPoint presentation at a trade show while wearing sunglasses and recovering from a hangover, this also is kidult. By day, Wong is a CEO, but at night he likes to imagine he’s Batman. This is kidult. Growing up in Hong Kong, Wong was forever pining after toys. “For example, when I was ten years old,” he says, “I saw a toy. It’s a robot, but my mom she never buy it for me. At that moment the toy was 150 Hong Kong dollars. Now it’s 5,300, forty times as much. I still buy it. Why is it forty times expensive? Because of the kidult market.” A kidult is not to be confused with an otaku, a Japanese term Wong recently learned. “Otaku, it’s like a freak,” Wong says. “They imagine they are the character of the comics book all the time. The kidult is different. At least they are working at the daytime.”
What Wong’s company mostly does by day is design and market collectible figurines—little plastic creatures that look like the mutant love children of Hello Kitty and Pikachu. Flipping through PowerPoint slides, he gives us a quick tour of this menagerie. Red Magic isn’t really in the toy business, he explains; it’s in the character business, the trend business. “Red Magic is happiness,” he says, sounding a bit like Chairman Mao. “Red Magic is style.”
Instead of merchandising licensed characters from movies and television shows, as most toymakers do, Wong decided to invent characters of his own. Red Magic’s dolls are like merchandise for movies and television shows and comic books that do not exist. Each one has a name and a psychological profile. There is, for instance, Hiro, a thumb-size brown fellow with the big head and