Exploration Archive: Flat Pack Suburbia

Here we have a copy of my latest article for the North America section of the fabulous fledgeling online travel magazine Exploration Online. If you haven't heard about Exploration before and are interested in travel advice and anecdotes, fun facts or becoming a regular contributor yourself check it out! http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/exploration/article.php?id=243

A few years ago I went to visit some of my increasingly vast collection of American cousins. All that I really knew about them was that they lived in a suburb of Chicago so, naturally, I was expecting it to be like London suburbs: connected to the main part of the city by a vast urban sprawl, narrow streets, narrow houses, a fair bit of traffic and lots of hurried looking people catching buses. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My first experience of Orland Park was a slightly surreal one. Far from the stereotypical English suburbs I was greeted by a picture book American one: huge houses, wide streets, kids playing in the road, neighbours waving to each other and nothing that resembled a city in sight (turns out Chicago itself is a good 40 kilometres and a 45 minute train journey away). It was adorable.

After talking to my aunt and uncle about it I discovered that, for them, it was truly a dream home. They are in the late seventies; my aunt met my uncle when he was a GI stationed in England during the war. They fell in love and moved to America. Years later, after long careers and raising five children, they bought a plot of land in Orland Park, picked what elements they wanted in their house out of a catalogue, watched it being built and settled in. Their grown-up children were also impressed; so impressed that most of them bought their own flat-pack dream homes in the area and now live within a twenty minute drive of each other. They spend much of their time working, going to church, hanging out with the neighbours and having extended family bowling nights. They love it. Their kids however, aren’t so impressed.

The majority of my younger cousins are around my age, and most of them can’t wait to get out of Orland Park. It’s boring. There’s nothing fun to do within walking distance and all their neighbours know both them and at least one or two of their relatives so there’s little chance of getting away with any misdemeanours. What is a safe little slice of American paradise to their middle aged and elderly relatives is just dull and frustrating to most people under the age of 30. And I kind of saw what they meant; my time in America was spent being handed from cousin to cousin of various generations to be shown stuff, taken to things and constantly entertained, whilst also having a random selection of their friends and neighbours drop by to meet ‘the English girl’. It was sweet and really well meaning, but a little stifling. Yet living close to way too many of your relatives who know almost every detail of your day-to-day life must be even worse for my cousins.

Despite all this, Orland Park does look like an amazing place to grow up. It’s safe, secure and all your friends live near-by. Having spent my childhood split between a small countryside village, Rugby town, Oxford and (more briefly) London, and having few close relatives beyond my immediate family, I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything quite like it in the UK. And I’m sure, once my cousins have kids of their own, they’ll look back at Orland Park and its flat-pack monotony with a lot more fondness.

Exploration Article Archive: Gendercide

Here's the latest article I've written for Exploration Online Magazine (as you can probably tell I've got women's right's issues on the brain at the mo!). For those who have stumbled across this page looking up the International Women's Week project 'All Girls Allowed' is one of the charities I'm going to propose fundraising for.

Please also bear in mind that I've tried to keep this article as short as possible and I haven't touched on other issues such as the fact that suicide is now the most common form of death amongst women aged 15-34 in rural China. Many studies link this to their inability to cope with knowing their daughters have been aborted or murdered. So err as you can see it's a lot more serious then my previous Exploration Asia offerings but, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's an incredibly serious issue.

In this article I’m not going to write about an amusing travelling anecdote, review a travel book or recommend a youth hostel. Instead I am going to talk about a disturbing cultural trend that is visible throughout much of China, India, Korea and Singapore as well as parts of Eastern Europe. The dramatic rise in the number of baby boys compared to girls as a result of the selective destruction of female foetuses and the shocking commonality of the murder or new born baby girls. This trend is more commonly known as ‘gendercide’.

As most of us are probably aware, it is a fair bit tougher being a woman in much of Asia than it is in the UK. I first heard of the ‘gendercide’ and the associated issues a couple of years ago from a South Korean lady called Wisteria.

Wisteria never wanted to get married. In South Korea women are still, generally speaking, expected to fulfil all of the stereotypical gender roles that we in the UK associate more with the first half of the 20^th century then the second decade of the 21^st. She wanted a career. And combining that with the over 40 hours of cooking, cleaning, tidying, caring for family members and attending to her husband and children’s needs the average Korean wife is expected to do a week would be impossible.

In this modern era of readily available ultra-sound scans these strongly held gender stereotypes have had some quite brutally shocking and unexpected consequences on the composition of many Asian communities, particularly with regard to male to female ratios.

The Asian country with the male to female children ratio most above what is statistically natural is China. To many this at first appears to be an unprecedented side effect of the one child policy – it is more profitable for couples to have a boy than a girl. Inheritance is passed through the male line and far more traditional approaches to gender roles see men being culturally valued and considered more lucrative to their families than women.

Where couples can only have one child, as in many provinces in China, those who can afford it will often take gender tests to try and ensure that child is male by aborting female foetuses. In poorer regions of rural China where gender tests aren’t so readily available or affordable there are many truly horrendous reports about just how wide spread the murder of new born baby girls, and the blind eye the authorities turn to it, is.

To put into perspective how wide spread this phenomena is recent estimates show that over the next decade there will be an estimated 30-40 million more men aged 19 or below than women in China. These men, unable to find brides and see the increase in social standing that being well married affords them are known as ‘bare branches’.

Rather than simply being an unwanted side effect of the one child policy ‘bare branches’ are an increasing feature in other countries with similar cultural views on women that don’t operate a one child policy. In India, for instance, women are generally expected to leave their parents family upon marriage and join their husbands. Parents wanting to increase the family wealth and be taken care of in their old age want sons.

As a result ‘gendercide’ is a feature there just as it is in China. In recent surveys one Bombay clinic reported that out of the last 8000 abortions they had performed 7999 where on female foetuses.

The ‘bare branches’, the unmarried young men this cultural preference produces bear hazards of their own. Over the past 20 years the crime rate in China has doubled. In all affected countries tales of bride abduction, trafficking women and widespread rape are common place. Many studies state that a correlation between this and the unnatural male to female ratio are most likely linked. It’s a serious situation.

Based on the unnatural male to female ration in these parts of the world as many as a staggering 163million baby girls have been aborted, murdered, left to die or are simply ‘missing’. Charities such as Save the Children and UNICEF are doing some work to put a stop to this devastating practice, but specific programmes are few, far between and hard to locate. One which is doing some amazing work in the area is the relatively unknown ‘All Girls Allowed’ (check out http://www.allgirlsallowed.org/ending-gendercide to find out more).

This is not to say that Asia isn’t an amazing, incredible and beautiful place to visit. In fact you are probably wondering why I am writing about such a serious matter on a light-hearted travel website. I think that if you are going to travel to a region and you really want to get to know it, its culture and history, it is important to know what issues exist below the surface. It is easy to be a tourist and just focus on the nice, attractive holiday hotspots but it is only through seeing what is really going on beneath the gloss, the negative as well as the good, that you can truly say you have experienced Asia.

If you are at all interested in finding out more about the ‘gendercide’, its causes and consequences or the Eastern European side of the story take a look at a now old but still incredible informative article from the Economist last year http://www.economist.com/node/15636231?story_id=15636231 and the many articles the same magazine has run on the subject since.

Or Chinese journalist Xinran’s book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother which features a compilation of real life stories from those who have given up, aborted or abandoned their daughters.

H.B.

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Exploration Article Archive: Spiders and Locusts and Bugs (Oh My!)

My second article on the phenomena of viewing deep fried tarantulas as a delicious delicacy in Cambodia:

Deep fried bugs. To most Westerners this is the stuff of a food hygiene nightmare but in many far Eastern countries they are something of a delicacy. I first encountered them whilst traveling around Cambodia in 2009 and I was horrified. Of course I had heard that deep fried insects were perfectly normal out there but it hadn’t quite prepared me for the sight of large groups of locals hanging out on street corners, casually chomping on locusts.

Most of us have probably seen that HSBC advert where the Cambodian farmer catches the flying insects to keep them off his crops, then cooks them and sells them (as you do), but the bugs that Cambodia is actually most famous for are its edible spiders. About 47 miles North of Cambodia’s capital city Phnom Penh lies the market town Skuon or, as it’s more commonly known by tourists, Spiderville. As I was told it, in this part of Cambodia locals have long used huge tarantulas in traditional medicine but during the horrors of Pol Pot’s regime they were forced to eat them in order to avoid starvation. Out of this many locals discovered a new found love of this curious snack and they are now considered a regional delicacy.

Most commonly found fried whole in garlic and sold by street vendors these spiders look ferocious. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what they taste like from personal experience. During a rest stop in Skuon I did have the opportunity to try some spider, or ‘a-ping’ as the locals call it, but I chickened out…mostly because the giggling Cambodian man behind me in the queue told my friend and I that ‘yeah they taste nice, but sometimes you get a bad poisonous one and ooo you don’t want to know happens’. I’m 99% sure he was having a laugh but that, combined with the sight of kids eating hairy spider legs, was enough to put me off. However one of our group was brave enough to give it a try and he summed up the taste of the surprisingly meaty on the inside arachnid as ‘kind of bland’ with a texture ‘somewhere between that of chicken and fish’. I think I’ll stick to chicken and fish, but in the spirit of this month’s focus on East Asian food if you would like to try this at home check out this delicious sounding recipe:

Ingredients:

Whole A-Ping Spiders (Haplopelma albostriatum)

Garlic (Crushed)

A Heap of Salt

A Heap of Sugar

Vegetable Oil

Preparation Method:

1. Dribble some oil over the spiders and toss them in the salt and sugar

2. Fry the garlic in the remaining oil until fragrant

3. Fry the spiders in the oil until the legs are completely stiff

4. Enjoy!

Exploration Article Archive: Made in...UK?!

To keep all of my writing together in one easily accessible online archive I've decided to post my Exploration articles here too :) Here is my first one on the subject of the Aromatherapy industry and how it's reversing the trend of Chinese production-UK consumption in unexpected ways...

Everyone knows that China exports to the world. They make everything. From cheap to top of the range electrical goods, clothes and even food, ‘Made in China’ products feature prominently on our shop shelves, homes and everywhere in between.  Everyone also knows that the UK is in economic trouble, partly due to how much we import and how little we produce and export. So it seems unlikely that China would be importing en-masse from the UK, right? Wrong. Well, in the aromatherapy market that is.

Case Study:

Shirley Price Aromatherapy Ltd seems an unlikely candidate for exporting mass produced goods to China. It’s a tiny firm consisting of five employees based in an old warehouse in Hinckley (hardly a town with a reputation for being at the forefront of British innovation). Yet this small business exports tens of thousands of its products to China and the Far East every year, and demand is growing.

Why then, if these products would be much cheaper to produce and purchase in the Far East, do Chinese consumers turn to UK produced goods? Especially in a market (complementary medicine) that they themselves have an international reputation for? According the Shirley Price’s Managing Director (and, as it happens, my Dad) Ian Brealey it’s all about quality control.

When it comes to domestic production and sales the Chinese cosmetics industry has distinctly lax regulations. When dealing with natural chemicals like essential oils, wealthier Chinese consumers don’t want to risk potentially harming themselves by applying domestically produced products to their skin and would rather turn to far more rigorously regulated foreign imports. As Mr Brealey says of Shirley Price Aromatherapy’s best selling Organic Camomile Eye-Drops ‘if you are going to put something in your eyes, you want to know it’s 100% safe!’.

Another key factor in Shirley Price Aromatherapy’s success in China is the well recognised brand name. The company has been around since the 1970’s and has a wide variety of well regarded publications and how-to guides associated with it. However, one of the results of this is that they sometimes encounter Chinese retailers selling fake Shirley Price products. Knowing the miniscule size of the company as I do it is almost amusing to think that someone somewhere in the Far East thinks it’s as worth while creating knock-off versions of S.P. Aromatherapy  products as fake Versace jeans. However for residents fake cosmetic and complementary medicinal products can be a genuine issue.

This phenomenon isn’t just associated with Shirley Price Aromatherapy; savvy aromatherapy and cosmetics retailers across the UK are cashing in on the Far Eastern demand for quality assured products. It’s a dramatically expanding market and one that British retailers are beginning to take advantage of in expanding numbers.

By the way, for those who I’ve now put off buying ‘Made in China’ cosmetic products sold in the UK, don’t worry, Chinese exports are thoroughly tested, it’s only those made and sold in the Far East that can be a little bit dodgy.

H.B.
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Something worth exploring

This is Exploration: http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/exploration/profile.php?profile=3
It's an online travel magazine featuring some witty, interesting, fantastically well written articles about people's experiences of travelling around the world, thoughts and feelings on international topics and various other interesting anecdotes and facts. I think it's brilliant...although the fact that I happen to be a regular contributor to the Asia section might make me a little bit biased of course :p

H.B.

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