Shopping for Irony

I'm sure those of you who know me, and how hyper organized I am, expect that we began prepping for this adoption trip a year ago.  Surely we started with a cloth-bound, multi-page color-coded Gaant chart with a week-by-week breakdown of tasks to accomplish, items to acquire, meditations to perform, and things to pack.  We then proceeded with characteristically military precision, rewarding ourselves for accomplishing tasks on time and punishing ourselves severely for lagging behind even by a few hours.  As such, we are now completely prepared for our trip, and need only be ready to drive ourselves to the airport next Wednesday.  Like Swiss clockwork. 

Yeah. 

It's a mad, random scramble punctuated by periodic failure and moments of abject panic.  We'll be lucky if we show up at the airport with our pants on frontward, let alone fully prepared. 

So today it was off to Wal-Mart to shop for a bunch of last-minute essentials.  I live in the kind of place where Wal-Marts are not that easy to find, actually, and where people are liable to mob you with pitchforks for patronizing one.  We don't go often.  [Full Disclosure:  Wal-Mart contributes financial support to one of the projects I work on in China -- I've never found the folks I interact with at Wal-Mart corporate to be anything other than competent, generous of their time, and genuinely interested in efforts to make their company more sustainable]. 

So there we were, buying swim diapers and clothes and sippy cups and what have you, and of course you can guess where everything we bought was made, right?  I'll give you a hint.  It's five letters and starts with a "C."  And it's not Chile. 

The province of China I work in most often, and where our son is from, is Guangdong, which has been tagged with the slogan "China's Factory to the World."  A significant portion of China's annual GDP is generated by Guangdong, which was the first Chinese province permitted to experiment with capitalism.  It's worked out well for them.  With a geographic area the size of Texas, Guangdong province alone has more manufacturing jobs than the entire United States.  Almost everything manufactured there is slated for export. 

The U.S. imports a ridiculous amount of stuff from China every year.  Ten percent of everything that the U.S. imports from China, is imported by Wal-Mart. 

So there we were today, buying clothes made in China and imported to the U.S. by Wal-Mart, so that we can pack them in our suitcases and bring them back to... China, for our new son to wear.....wait for it..... on his way back to live in the the United States.  I think we may be singlehandedly quadrupling the already substantial carbon footprint of a size 3T t-shirt.

We also bought a couple of outfits to give to the caregiver who will bring Lei XinXing to us in Guangzhou, so s/he can take them back to the orphanage.  The idea, the agency rep explained to us yesterday, is that we'll of course want to keep the clothes Lei XinXing is wearing at the time we meet him, as important keepsakes.  It's only fair, therefore, that we give the orphanage back an outfit or two for the trouble.

You'd think the orphanage would be able to set aside some small part of the several thousand dollars in "orphanage fee" we paid the adoption agency, for the purpose of buying a couple of toddler-sized jumpsuits.  But I guess it makes more sense for us to buy a couple of outfits here in the U.S. at ten bucks a pop, and transport them back to China, than it does for the orphanage to buy them direct from the apparel factory just down the street from them, that probably made those same outfits for ten cents a piece less than a year ago.

Global commerce at its finest.

I don't in any way begrudge the orphanage the clothes, of course.  They've taken good care of our son from all that we can see, and may blessings and good fortune be heaped upon them for it.  We'll gladly bring them formula and toys and medicine and anything else that will make the lives of Lei XinXing's foster brothers and sisters a little brighter.  I'm just bemused that some of the things we bought today will be many times better traveled than my own children by the end of our trip, despite the fact that my children will just have traveled two-thirds of the way around the world.

Definitely time to hit the farmer's market tomorrow for some local lettuce and snap peas.