A China Moment

Today as I was getting out of the swampy shower I was reaching for my towel and thinking to myself - I am so glad I bought these nice brand new towels before we left to bring here to China. They are big,(Mark was told by our orientation person - no tall man towels in China - you might want to bring your own) they are soft, they are white (right now but after a few washes in this water they will not be) and they smell pretty nice. At home I would not spend this much time admiring new towels, but here where everything is very cheap and dirty I really value the things I have from home. So I start thinking - why don't they sell nice things in China? or where are they all hiding? If these towels were for sale here - would no one buy them? Does the government not want people to have nice things? Yesterday I went over to my neighbor's house to meet a friend of her Ayi's who is interested in becoming my Ayi. So we chat for awhile about what her skills are and if she has any children and how she feels about 3 crazy boys. What hours she is interested in working and then she asks about pay. She wants 15 RMB per hour- what? If you read my last post you know to get American dollars you divide by 6.76, so $2.22 per hour. So she wants to come clean my bathrooms, scrub my floors, iron our clothes, cook us dinner, watch the children, make beds (I could go on forever) all for $2.22? Are you kidding? We pay Nicholas $2 a week allowance to do nothing really. It just doesn't seem right. Cheap labor - cheap goods. Are we in America just greedy and lazy or too demanding? Is China producing all these goods and shipping them to the US thinking they are the suckers who will buy this stuff - even though it cost very little to produce. After all this thinking, I hang up my wonderful new towel on the plastic hook on the back of the door and out pops the tag that says in big letters MADE IN CHINA.