Same Sky Magazine

Underpants in China and Cultural Insights

My favourite kind of travel narrative is one that follows a journey with an unusual kind of goal: for example, visiting every city in the world whose name starts with “Z” or retracing the footsteps of some famous traveller. So when i read the blurb for Joe Bennett’s new book Where Underpants Come From I had a good feeling.

As you might be able to guess from the title, Bennett follows a trail through various parts of China to find where all the constituent parts of his newly-purchased underpants came from. In fact, he also has a side trip into Thailand looking for the rubber trees that produced the elastic for the waistband of his underpants, but he’s not so successful there. The Chinese journey, however, is really fascinating, because he gets to see a bit of “real” China - in the factories on the east coast which are all staffed by cheap labour from the poorer western regions, and then out to the cotton fields of the vast west of China itself. His journey is funny, interesting and honest, and it makes the book a good read.

Insights into “Culture” in Bennett’s Underpants Story

Yeah, it’s not just underpants. Joe Bennett made a few observations about culture that were insightful enough for me to find extra bookmarks to stick into various pages so I could check back with these insights again later. The first is quite simply a really nice definition of what on earth “culture” actually is:

… [It's] not culture in the sense of unreadable Arts-Council-sponsored poetry, but culture in the true sense of the word, meaning what people do because it’s what people do, stuff that they do unconsciously.

My italics. So true that some people want to turn the word “culture” into something arty-farty, but really it’s just what normal people do every day, and cultural differences are just simple things about how we run our lives differently from our neighbours.

Bennett also talks about languages, and the problems encountered by travellers who can’t speak the language of their destination. It can be frustrating at times, but he’s quick to point out that we should be grateful for anyone who tries to speak our language, and never berate them for not doing it well (although this is a scary fault you’ll find all too often amongst English-speaking tourists …). As Bennett puts it:

I am in no position to complain that the Chinese haven’t learned my language. I haven’t learned theirs. I can reliably say only hello, goodbye, thank you, banana, postcard, how much, most of the numbers from one to ten, a few interrogative adverbs, and toilet.

He goes on to reiterate that body language and gestures can go an awful long way though - even if his demonstrations of toilet (when he has trouble with the pronunciation of its Chinese version) have a really suspicious-looking mime. It reminds me of my father’s attempts to demonstrate “toilet paper” when we wanted to buy some in a supermarket in France.

The Universal Problem of Racism, According to Bennett

Finally, Bennett gives a totally accurate account of what racism is - in its original benign sense, arising out of a self-preservation instinct to be suspicious of strangers. Out in the western provinces of China, he encountered Chinese people who had nothing at all good to say about the native Uighur people of the region, even though they’d lived amongst them their whole lives. This experience inspired him to say this:

Racism sits near the top of our catalogue of sins. It is the indefensible position and I am not about to defend it. All I will say is that I, too, am racist. Before I came here I harboured a distrust of the Chinese. They looked different, they spoke a strange language,and they used chopsticks. Iknew nothing of them, so the oldest part of my brain sounded an alert … A couple of months in China and the bleep is silenced. Of course. People are people. That’s all.

Couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say here at Same Sky. People are people. That’s all.