Friday, February 6, 2009

Chinese People and American Candy

My birthday is next weekend, so my mom sent me a Valentines Day/Birthday package. In it were some shirts my Aunt sent me for Christmas and some snacks. Specifically, a bag of root beer flavored hard candies. For those of you not from America, root beer is a type of  soda that origionally got it's flavor from the root of the sassafras tree. It is quite possibly the best soda ever created by man. And my mom sent me a whole bag of root beer flavored candy.

I had to spread the love.

I've given away about three times more than I've eaten myself. This is usually what happens when I get a snack food that people here haven't had. The same thing happened with Pop Tarts. Everyone seems to like them though, so I'm happy. 

The funny thing though is how special the candy is to them. Because it's made in America it's automatically ten times better than the candy they can buy in a store. If you give a Chinese person anything that isn't food, they'll often check to see if it was made in China. If it is, it's not as special. They don't seem to put to much importance on their own goods. But if it's made in ANY non-Asian country, it becomes the coolest thing since sliced bread. Especially if it's a food or candy.

2 comments:

Mark's Blog said...

These days, everything can be made in China.

When I first came to NZ 3 years ago, I had difficulty in finding some satisfactory gifts for my cousin back home. Because he is expecting toys originated in NZ! The result was that I did not bring any gifts to him, except for wines and sheep skin (there are more sheep than people in NZ).

Anyway, maybe I should be proud of this after all. Having difficulty in finding things not made in China around the world is much better than having difficulty in finding things made in China, which was just the case 30 years ago.

Anonymous said...

Everyone loves exotic gifts!

tl;dr