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SPEAKER_09: The story took place in their hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, and it involved one of the town's native sons.
SPEAKER_09: Lester Gabba or Gabba or Gaba, however you say his name.
SPEAKER_13: Lester Gabba, I'm going to go with Gabba, was a family friend who had grown up in Hannibal in the early 1900s and then made a name for himself in the glamorous world of New York fashion. And Jean's mother-in-law story was about this one time when Gabba came back to town. Lester was visiting Hannibal after having become famous, and he was returning with Cynthia.
SPEAKER_09: Cynthia was Lester's equally glamorous girlfriend, a socialite who hailed from Manhattan's upper crust.
SPEAKER_13: And so Jean's mother-in-law's family invited them over for an afternoon tea. Think a room full of women dressed up Hannibal's high society. And given the time and given the importance of the guest and the fact that he was from New York City, it would have been seen as an important social event.
SPEAKER_09: And her mother-in-law, who at the time was still a young girl, was given the critical task of providing the guests with snacks, which must have felt like the perfect opportunity to meet this Cynthia that everyone was talking about.
SPEAKER_13: So she carefully took a tray of cookies around the room, table to table, person to person. Well then she offered Cynthia some cookies.
SPEAKER_09: Only it turned out there was a problem.
SPEAKER_13: Cynthia was unresponsive.
SPEAKER_09: And there was a good reason for this.
SPEAKER_13: Well Cynthia, as it turns out, was a mannequin.
SPEAKER_09: Until that moment, Jean's mother-in-law had just assumed that Cynthia was a real person.
SPEAKER_13: But only because all the grown-ups had been treating Cynthia like a real person. And in fact, when they saw her surprise, the grown-ups just laughed at her reaction and then continued acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. Everyone at the party just went along with the fact that there was a mannequin present. They gave it a spot at the table. Because Cynthia wasn't just any old mannequin from New York.
SPEAKER_12: This wasn't even her first social event.
SPEAKER_13: That's reporter Mitchell Johnson.
SPEAKER_12: By the time Jean's mother-in-law met her, she had already attended balls, graced the front pages of magazines, and appeared in Hollywood movies. Cynthia was a celebrity. A celebrity at the center of one man's life.
SPEAKER_13: She was his ticket to fame, and eventually the object of his obsession.
SPEAKER_12: But she was also at the center of a larger story about department stores. Their rise, their fall, and how they forever changed the way we shop.
SPEAKER_13: Before online ads, before television, department stores had one major medium with which to display their clothes to the outside world. The window.
SPEAKER_12: The arrival of affordable plate glass in the 1800s turned storefronts into advertising spaces. And that set mannequins, which had earlier mostly been used for fitting clothes, to the front of the store. By the early 20th century, there was a new career. Window display designer. And what the display designer wants you to do is not just look, but to stop.
SPEAKER_10: That's the next stage of actually capturing your desire. That's Sarah Schneider.
SPEAKER_12: She wrote a book on mannequins and store windows called Vital Mummies. And a lot of it is about this exact moment. When you're stopped on the street, looking into a window. In the early 1900s, what you would be looking at was a kaleidoscopic collection of things for you to buy.
SPEAKER_13: People wanted variety. Very commonly, the window display was simply like this cornucopia of products being presented in the windows to show that the store really did have everything.
SPEAKER_10: And the idea was the more you could show, the more you could entice people to come in because they would see the advantage of being able to shop in one place for everything they needed. And in the early 20th century, if this worked, and you walked into one of the big department stores in New York, you'd find some of the most ornate spaces in the city.
SPEAKER_12: Merchandise everywhere. Wonderful decorations. Really kind of opulent displays.
SPEAKER_06: That's Alana Stady, a historian at the National Museum of American History.
SPEAKER_12: And she says the interiors of department stores were just like their window displays. Jam-packed with attractions. Stores featured concert halls, tea rooms, restaurants, and fashion shows replete with champagne.
SPEAKER_13: At one point to help sell a line of winter wear, Saks Fifth Avenue installed an indoor ski slope. Growing up in small town Hannibal, Missouri, young Lester Gabba dreamed of entering the luxurious world of these elite department stores.
SPEAKER_12: His father was a shopkeeper, and as a boy, he spent most of his free time concocting elaborate displays for the shop's front window, using whatever materials he had at hand. One time, he painted some old soap boxes, black and white, and put them in the window to create the appearance of checkered tiles. Anything to give the family business a touch of big city glamour. I know that he and his father had some sort of argument around, like, about display.
SPEAKER_06: And he, you know, very dramatically said, well, I gathered my things and I left.
SPEAKER_13: After the fight with his father, Lester Gabba left Hannibal for good, determined to become a window display designer. But when Gabba finally arrived in New York in the early 30s, he found the department store's window displays lacking. Especially the mannequins.
SPEAKER_12: At the time, there were two main styles of mannequins. One was a holdover from the 19th century. You would still certainly have these uncannily realistic looking figures that looked, I would say, kind of like a bit dowdy.
SPEAKER_13: They were carved out of wax and made to be extremely lifelike, often with real human hair and eyelashes. On the hottest days, they would sometimes melt in the store window.
SPEAKER_12: The other main style of mannequin at the time was a more recent invention from the 20s. These were art deco, abstract. Think human figures turned into modernist, Picasso-like shapes. When Lester arrived, they would still have been considered very sophisticated and avant-garde.
SPEAKER_06: But, um, they didn't necessarily have, like, personality? Gabba was part of a new generation of window designers who thought there must be a way to do better.
SPEAKER_06: His aesthetic opinions were that windows needed a facelift, and the windows in themselves needed personality, along with the women who inhabited those windows, the mannequins.
SPEAKER_13: So in 1932, Gabba wrote into a trade publication calling for a revolution in mannequin design. In the article, he argued that mannequins should embody an ideal. Gabba wrote, put Joan Crawford in a store case, and even husbands will want to go window shopping.
SPEAKER_12: So he's trying to find that balance between how do you make the mannequin look realistic enough to be relatable,
SPEAKER_10: and how do you make her an embodiment of the figure that women wish they were to make her desirable.
SPEAKER_12: So when Gabba was commissioned by Saks Fifth Avenue to create a new line of window displays, he saw it as an opportunity to make his perfect mannequin. And because he wanted it to embody this kind of plausible ideal, he decided to model his mannequins off a group of people who were idolized in real life. New York society women. Socialites. Gabba began to seek out these socialites, imagine the daughter of a steel magnate, then perhaps a banking heiress,
SPEAKER_13: and have them pose for him in his studio. One by one, they sat for Gabba, and by hand he sculpted a life-size version of each woman out of clay.
SPEAKER_12: He would then use the clay figure to make a mold, and then use the mold to make a mannequin.
SPEAKER_13: When he was finished, he called his new line of mannequins Gabba Girls.
SPEAKER_12: Gabba Girls didn't quite look like mannequins do today. They were made out of a heavy plaster material instead of plastic, and they still had distinct facial features, including eyes and lips that were painted on.
SPEAKER_13: But they were no longer the hyper-realistic wax figures that had come before. Instead, they had just enough detail to give each one its own personality.
SPEAKER_06: One or two had some freckles, one had a beauty mark, so there were ways in which the inanimate woman would communicate part of her own self.
SPEAKER_12: But out of all the Gabba Girls, Lester began to fixate on one in particular. A mannequin who he would come to believe was different from the others. A mannequin he simply called Cynthia.
SPEAKER_12: We know virtually nothing about the real-life person Gabba used as a model for Cynthia, except possibly a name, Cynthia Wells. We don't even know how she came to model for him, or which of her actual features were used for the final mold and which he just invented.
SPEAKER_10: But once Gabba saw the result, he was just totally astounded.
SPEAKER_13: Right away, Lester could see that Cynthia the mannequin had a very particular look. She was quite slender, very light colored peach skin, blonde hair in a wig, very faint angular jawline, very small pointed slightly upturned nose.
SPEAKER_06: But it was more than just her physical features. It was how they all added up into a certain kind of attitude.
SPEAKER_12: It was this wonderful combination of New York snobbery and total quiet humility that made her appear very inviting and very sweet.
SPEAKER_06: But also, she had a lot of secrets. I can't describe it beyond that. But the gaze could kind of cut through you.
SPEAKER_12: Cynthia's persona was perched ever so delicately between warm intimacy and cool distance. She was the embodiment of Gabba's long sought-after ideal. And that's when Lester Gabba came up with an even more ambitious plan.
SPEAKER_13: It would be a marketing scheme involving Cynthia to help promote his new line, one that would require him to turn his own life into a kind of never-ending display.
SPEAKER_06: He decided to get a Cynthia built for himself, for his home, and for his own life. Lester Gabba began living with Cynthia the mannequin full-time. And by living with Cynthia, I mean living with Cynthia.
SPEAKER_12: Visitors to Lester's apartment would arrive to discover Cynthia sitting on a couch, perhaps deeply engaged in a book or listening to a record, like a real person. So he lived with Cynthia for a while, and when he had friends over, friends would remark about Cynthia.
SPEAKER_10: And it somehow came to him to start to take Cynthia out with him socially and to treat her as his date at social occasions.
SPEAKER_13: Lester Gabba began to be seen out on the town with Cynthia. When he arrived at a location, he would set up her torso and limbs into various believable poses, just like a window display, only not in a window.
SPEAKER_06: Sitting at bars, sitting in theaters, pretending that she had some sort of opinion that she wanted to share. And so he would simply explain, you know, that the reason she's not saying anything is that she has laryngitis.
SPEAKER_12: But that's not even the strangest part. Because in every place Lester appeared with her, Cynthia was a hit.
SPEAKER_06: People just wanted to be around her.
SPEAKER_12: Increasingly, both friends and strangers started playing along, talking to Cynthia, telling her the latest gossip, laughing at an imaginary joke. And soon, word began to spread.
SPEAKER_06: You know, this is Lester Gabba. He has a new partner in town and she is inanimate, but she is beautiful.
SPEAKER_12: Cynthia started getting invited to all the most exclusive parties and showing up in the society papers. City tabloids began reporting on her every move. And it wasn't long before other people in the fashion world capitalized on her growing fame.
SPEAKER_06: It was a really great way to communicate fashion trends. So lots of designers and lots of display directors really thought, if I could get Cynthia in the latest Lily Dashay suit and smart little hat, I will get better sales. Various businesses began sending Cynthia free things.
SPEAKER_13: She received free dresses from Saks, diamonds from Tiffany's, tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. And when she showed up in tabloids, she was wearing designer clothes.
SPEAKER_12: By the end of the 30s, Cynthia had become wildly famous. In 1938, at her peak, she was featured in a Hollywood movie called Artists and Models Abroad. It's a musical starring Jack Benny. In one of the numbers, all the characters are dancing in a department store. And there, in the background, is Cynthia.
SPEAKER_13: Lester Gabba's harebrained scheme had worked. Gabba girl mannequins could now be found in all the big department stores. And Cynthia was a household name.
SPEAKER_12: Although, there was one appearance by Cynthia which pulled back the curtain on Lester's act just a little bit. It's in a Life magazine article from 1937. The article is full of images of Cynthia's busy day, sitting next to Lester, reading her fan mail, writing on top of a double-decker tour bus in Manhattan. But then, toward the end of the piece, there's this one photo.
SPEAKER_06: And it's quite arresting. It's a picture of a series of black body bags. And we're told in the caption that it contains parts of Cynthia, and it's where she goes to sleep at night. So it's like, you know, there's this morbid aspect to this, that when it's time for her to perform again out in public, Lester, her puppet master, can just take all of her parts out and reassemble her, and she's ready to perform again. Even as the public went along with the gag, Gabba's contemporaries always wondered whether his dedication to his puppet
SPEAKER_13: hinted at motivations beyond publicity.
SPEAKER_12: For starters, it was clear that Lester loved the status that came with Cynthia. He could often be seen about town with Broadway stars, clothing designers, and jewelers like Harry Winston. It was also around this time that he became best friends with the famous stage and film director Vincent Minnelli, later the father of Liza Minnelli and the husband of Judy Garland.
SPEAKER_13: Gabba didn't need to play around with a window display anymore to imagine living like a socialite. He was a socialite now, as long as he kept Cynthia on his arm.
SPEAKER_12: But people also wondered if Cynthia was Lester's way of hiding another part of his life in plain sight, especially when they began to suspect that Gabba's friendship with Vincent Minnelli had developed into something more. There was mention that they would show up at parties together.
SPEAKER_06: There was also rumors that they both showed up at a party wearing a bit of rouge.
SPEAKER_12: Minnelli's family has denied the rumors, but several Minnelli biographers insist they were true, that Lester and Vincent were lovers. And many people saw Cynthia as Lester's way of diverting attention from the relationship. Like, Cynthia was basically the epitome of a beard, a distraction.
SPEAKER_13: But when put in a larger context, it becomes clear Cynthia was never just a beard, or even just a way for Gabba to live out a fantasy. By reflecting a new ideal, she also helped lead a fundamental change in the way clothes were about to be marketed. Because in the middle decades of the 20th century, it wasn't just the mannequins that were changing.
SPEAKER_12: It was the window displays themselves. Here's Sarah again.
SPEAKER_10: The display was moving from products being all kind of globbed in together to a more artistic and selective kind of presentation. And so all of that was changing in Gabba's time, too. In the early window displays from the 1800s, it was still all about the products.
SPEAKER_12: But then store displays started becoming less about selling specific things. Instead, what you're selling is the aura around the product.
SPEAKER_12: By the 1960s, Sarah says, this kind of marketing had fully taken over. But you can see the beginnings of it in the 30s, when Lester Gabba and his contemporaries were working. They used stage lighting, elaborate props and decorations. It was an art, all aimed at creating this aura of desirability around the store and its products. And mannequins played a key part.
SPEAKER_13: A mannequin like Cynthia, both relatable and idealized, in other words, a character, was perfectly suited to this new storytelling task, particularly in the depths of the Great Depression.
SPEAKER_10: She represents a chance to live a life that is free of want. She doesn't have to be anything but beautiful. She has a man doting on her, and she's able to wear the finest garments. And in a way, she's quite aspirational for women of the 30s who were in many cases living lives that were nothing like this.
SPEAKER_12: With Cynthia, Lester was able to tell a story so big that it left the store entirely and entered real life. The whole world had become his window, allowing him to live inside a fantasy of wealth, of celebrity, of access, over which he had total control.
SPEAKER_13: But then, at the height of Cynthia's fame, the U.S. entered World War II. Lester was conscripted, and he had to leave Cynthia behind.
SPEAKER_12: No one is entirely sure what happened next, but the story goes that Lester shipped her back to Hannibal to stay with his mother, where he left strict instructions that she continue to be treated like a real person, which apparently were followed, because one day in 1942, she was relaxing at the local beauty salon. And she slipped from a beauty salon chair and shattered.
SPEAKER_12: And this is where the story gets a little darker.
SPEAKER_03: It just quickly goes from being funny to odd to, wait a second.
SPEAKER_12: Sherry Magid is a playwright and a professor at NYU who wrote a play about Lester and Cynthia called The Gabba Girl, and we're coming across the Life magazine profile. And she became particularly interested in Cynthia's afterlife, all the things that happened after she fell from the chair.
SPEAKER_13: When he came home from the war, Lester Gabba apparently believed that everything could go on as before. He had another Cynthia made. But post-war America, with its turn towards middle-class consumerism and suburban living, just wasn't interested in this new Cynthia. The press ignored her and Lester. It definitely seemed more personally important to him than it did to everyone else.
SPEAKER_03: I think at a certain point it just becomes a parlor trick or a footnote. And for him, it was, I don't know, he got invitations that he would have never received. And then they stopped.
SPEAKER_12: But Alana Stady says Lester refused to believe it was over. Sometimes it's really difficult for an individual, when they get so much affirmation about something,
SPEAKER_06: to separate themselves from the project or to know when to quit.
SPEAKER_13: It doesn't appear that Lester ever went so far as to believe Cynthia was an actual person, but it was as if he was no longer in on the joke. He just couldn't believe that Cynthia had been a fad. Even as late as the 1950s, he was still trying to get her back into the limelight, this time with a new plan. To have her wired so that she could move and that her mouth could move because he wanted to create a television show for her.
SPEAKER_03: The idea was to rig Cynthia with an electronic speaker system so that it would seem like she was talking.
SPEAKER_12: If he could get her to talk, Gaba thought he could get her a talk show. Gaba spent $10,000 trying and trying to make Cynthia into a talking automaton,
SPEAKER_13: as if all he needed to do was to make her a little more real, then everything would go back to the way it was.
SPEAKER_12: But the new and improved Cynthia didn't make any sense. All the words sounded garbled. The networks lost interest and the television show never went anywhere.
SPEAKER_13: By then, most people had forgotten all about the original Gaba girls, and Vincent Minnelli, Gaba's rumored lover, had moved to Hollywood, leaving Lester alone in New York. So those facts combined just suggested a loss of touch with reality.
SPEAKER_14: He had no touch with reality. He created his own reality.
SPEAKER_12: This is Morton Miles. He met Lester in New York after the whole Cynthia affair in the 60s. And they hit it off.
SPEAKER_14: Oh yes, he was a lot of fun. He was the most creative person anybody ever knew. Totally, totally self-interested. But you would take it from him because he had a lot to offer. They met on Fire Island. At that point at least, Lester's sexuality wasn't a question.
SPEAKER_12: Lester was never very shy as a gay person. He was there all the time.
SPEAKER_14: Gaba had turned to teaching design at a local college and writing a column about fashion display in Women's Wear Daily.
SPEAKER_13: And Morton was also in the fashion business. He was a clothing designer. Jackie Kennedy actually wore one of Morton's dresses as First Lady.
SPEAKER_12: And one day, Lester saw the photo of Mrs. Kennedy in Morton's dress.
SPEAKER_14: And he said, oh, that would have really worked for Cynthia.
SPEAKER_12: This was one of the few times Morton remembers Lester bringing up Cynthia at all. For the most part, he wouldn't talk about it. He didn't like people joking about her.
SPEAKER_14: Oh no, oh no, no. Cynthia was not a joke. In fact, he apparently had been laughed at so much doing this that, no, no, Cynthia was something he was very serious about. That she was a creation of his.
SPEAKER_13: But Lester's friends had a hard time taking Cynthia as seriously as he did. The world had moved on.
SPEAKER_14: It was just like now where something is a hot topic and it lasts about 27 seconds and then they go on to the next hot topic. Well, it was no different then except it was just a little bit slower. So Lester's Cynthia was still an oddity. People would still talk about it, but he was the oddity, not Cynthia.
SPEAKER_12: Morton says Lester always had one foot in a world of his own creation. He made grand pronouncements about the fashion scene or European culture with so much conviction that they almost sounded true, but weren't. Even at the end of his life, Morton says Lester was still that small town boy from Hannibal, Missouri, trying to fake it till he made it in the big city. See, Lester had a lot of the thoughts that had to do with unreal things that he made real, but he couldn't make them real any longer.
SPEAKER_13: Lester Gabba died in 1987, by which time unique, painstakingly crafted plaster mannequins like Cynthia had gone out of fashion. They were too expensive to make, too difficult to move.
SPEAKER_12: No one knows what happened to Cynthia. In one interview, Gabba says he took her down to a friend's attic in the East Village, where he left her to sit and gather dust. And the rest of the Gabba girls are unaccounted for, too. I like to imagine all the Gabba girls that must be tucked away in the basements of department stores, forgotten. And all the store clerks up above, with no idea that the mannequin they've abandoned was once a socialite. That she once looked out over Fifth Avenue, watching the crowds gaze up at her, as they dreamed of a better life.
SPEAKER_13: Up next, we learn about the store that's the polar opposite of the opulent Fifth Avenue department store. The dollar store, after this. Inequalities facing women and girls. Ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. A generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. What's more important? Making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow. You can actually do both at the same time. With annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial, you're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. And their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to Lincoln financial dot com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect, and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc., a broker dealer.
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SPEAKER_16: So here we are in the 99-cent store in West Oakland.
SPEAKER_13: Go into any dollar store in the United States and you'll find the same kind of stuff. They've already got the Christmas stuff out and like Santa stuff everywhere. Little Santa booties that you can put on your baby.
SPEAKER_12: A little Santa costume that you can put on a wine bottle.
SPEAKER_13: In U.S. dollar stores, there are grocery items and cleaning products and some of them are name brand items. But then there's this other category of things for sale. Little bags of plastic festive gourds. A slotted spoon. It's just, yeah, everything is like this doesn't have a brand name. Like where is it from?
SPEAKER_16: Toys and jewelry and knickknacks that seem to have a sort of generic cheapness to them. Loofahs.
SPEAKER_16: Very generic looking razors. Little fake plants. Do I want this chocolate toothpaste? I don't think so.
SPEAKER_16: Dollar stores aren't just a U.S. phenomenon. They're in Australia and the U.K. They're in the Middle East and in Mexico. They're all over the world.
SPEAKER_13: And a lot of that stuff, that generic cheap stuff that lines the shelves of these stores comes from one place. A market in China called the Futian Market. The Futian Market, where all this stuff comes from, it goes on for miles. For miles and miles of just these tiny little stores.
SPEAKER_13: That's documentary filmmaker Daniel Whelan. The Futian Market is about 43 million square feet, or around 10 times the size of the Mall of America. You could enter the market and walk around it for days and never see the same store twice.
SPEAKER_15: Daniel and his co-producer, Tobias Anderson Ocrebloom, made a documentary film called Bulkland about the Futian Market and the city in China where it's located. Ewoo.
SPEAKER_13: There's about two million people here completely dedicated to making this stuff for us, but no one's ever heard of it.
SPEAKER_13: The city of Ewoo is about 200 miles southwest of Shanghai.
SPEAKER_15: It's a market city, so it's quite vibrant in parts, but it's not an incredibly livable city, an incredibly lovely green city. It turns from a sort of bucolic mountain town to what kind of seems a cookie cutter industrial city now.
SPEAKER_13: In the late 1970s, Communist China began to open itself up to capitalism. It would no longer be illegal to run private businesses in China. The province of Zhejiang, where Ewoo is located, had a history of being a center for trade, and the people there were eager to join the new economy.
SPEAKER_15: The villagers spent all their sort of life savings on cheap industrial equipment and started producing items that were really easy to make. Playing cards or Christmas decorations or wooden toys.
SPEAKER_13: And soon a market opened up in the city of Ewoo to sell these items.
SPEAKER_02: It's just a street market. People started making Christmas decorations and arts and crafts. More and more people started to come to this market, and that's how it's grown up.
SPEAKER_13: This is Nigel Cropp. He's a British trader who lives and works in Ewoo, and he originally came to this city just to have an adventure and teach English.
SPEAKER_02: So I started teaching at this English training center, and I was teaching adults, and they were factory bosses and trading company bosses. So little did they know, I was teaching them English, but at the same time, they were teaching me how to do the business here, how it all worked. I used to do day trips to the futa market and they used to show me around. The street markets grew and grew and eventually came to encompass four huge buildings connected by sky bridges and roads and parking lots.
SPEAKER_15: And each of the buildings is divided into different products. You'll have the jewelry building, the toy building, the arts and crafts building, and the clothing building.
SPEAKER_13: Every day, thousands of foreign traders visit this massive market in Ewoo. They're haggling in Chinese, looking for things to buy in bulk that they can sell to dollar stores and other vendors in their home countries.
SPEAKER_02: Once you get inside, it's a lot different to a normal shopping center or shopping mall. It's thousands and thousands of market stores.
SPEAKER_15: These market stores are about five by five feet. So usually run by one person or two people, and they're sitting in there surrounded by their products. And none of the products are for sale. You can't go in there and say, I want one key ring. You have to go in and say, I want 1,500 key rings.
SPEAKER_13: That's exactly the kind of volume Nigel, the British trader who lives in Ewoo, is looking for when he heads to the market. And we need to find generic animals. Okay, like ocean animals is okay. Also gecko, lizard.
SPEAKER_02: We go to the market and the supplier will give us a price. And then we do the ordering. The goods are delivered to my warehouse. The niche I have is that I'm a Westerner. I speak English, obviously, and I have the Western eye. I know what products are not going to sell. I know the quality expected. It's quite an important thing, I think. At the Foutien Market, my business is mostly bulk sales of electronic Santa gifts.
SPEAKER_04: This is Wong Shao Young. She has a stall in the Foutien Market filled with hundreds and hundreds of plastic Santas.
SPEAKER_13: We started this business in 1992. That's when my dad started it.
SPEAKER_04: Seven days a week, she's in this shop completely surrounded by Santas. Santas surfing, Santas climbing out of chimneys, Santas riding motorcycles with Ray-Bans on.
SPEAKER_15: Before we started this business, I had never heard of the concept of Christmas. I had no idea what it was.
SPEAKER_04: To me, Santa is a very kind old man who slides through your chimney on Christmas and brings you gifts and happiness and good fortune.
SPEAKER_04: Christmas is a holiday for people overseas, but for us Chinese people, we don't get any time off for it.
SPEAKER_13: Wong Shao Young and Nigel are just two links in the economic chain that starts in China and ends at your local dollar store. The hub of that economy is certainly the Foutien Market in Ewoo, but the whole Zhejiang province is involved. Neighboring towns to Ewoo all have their specialties.
SPEAKER_02: For Halloween, we export witch brooms and there's one village that will make these brooms. There's a town that just makes wheelbarrows. You go to a town for toys or wooden puzzles or Christmas decorations. Each town has its niche. And most of these little toys and trinkets are being produced in small operations. Maybe a family has been able to buy one piece of industrial equipment and hire a few workers.
SPEAKER_13: There's a scene in Daniel's film where some migrant workers are sitting around in someone's garage making cheap costume jewelry by pouring molten metal into a machine that's setting it in a mold.
SPEAKER_15: And then they're sort of filing it down and chucking it into a container. And then later that day, a guy will probably come by us and grab that that bucket of jewelry and take it to a different part of the town where someone will put it into packaging. And then the next day, he'll come back and pick all that up and take it to the market.
SPEAKER_13: And for many people in the province, this isn't even their full-time day job. This is just a side business.
SPEAKER_15: Everyone from the age of sort of 20 to 80 or 90, they'll work in the farm and then they'll come back at night and start making witches brooms.
SPEAKER_02: A bit like the cottage industry back in Industrial Revolution in England.
SPEAKER_13: That's Nigel Cropigan, the British trader who lives in Ewoo.
SPEAKER_02: We're at Great Britain, 200 years. It's taken China 20, 30 years.
SPEAKER_13: And you can see the effects of this super fast growth in Ewoo. The city grew so quickly that it still hasn't had time to build basic infrastructure.
SPEAKER_15: You see, it's entire neighborhoods without roads, with no paved roads because they just need people to immediately move into these buildings and start making stuff in the basements.
SPEAKER_02: A few years after moving to China, Nigel met his wife, Jessie, an Ewoo local.
SPEAKER_13: When I started the trading company, she had a booth in the market selling bags. And also she was one of my students.
SPEAKER_13: Jessie's family is one of many in Ewoo to benefit from China's turn toward a free market economy. She wants me to go and eat something. Upstairs. I can go upstairs and eat something. Got any cold beer?
SPEAKER_02: I've always felt part of the family. They've always accepted me. They've always made me feel very welcome. I've never felt any different. You got it as well. You got it.
SPEAKER_13: Nigel's wife's great grandparents can remember Ewoo before it opened itself up to capitalism.
SPEAKER_07: We've lived here since we were born. We built our own house. In the old days, it was suffering. It was really terrible.
SPEAKER_08: That's Nigel's great grandmother-in-law, Gong Jinshong.
SPEAKER_08: Just mentioning the suffering time, I feel so sad I could cry. Life was so tough that a single sweet potato was divided into pieces for several meals.
SPEAKER_16: In the old days, there were no cars. Now, a lot of people can afford luxurious sedans.
SPEAKER_08: I am so comforted by the change.
SPEAKER_13: Of course, capitalism has also taken its toll on China.
SPEAKER_15: I think globalisation is ruinous. When it's unchecked, like it is in places like Ewoo, you see a landscape almost completely destroyed. The mountains are all dug out. There's people burning rubbish everywhere. It's smoggy all the time. And you're sort of like, for what? And then you see why. It's people who spent years almost completely malnourished now being able to sit around with a giant family and all eat and have a lovely time. But now, people in China who have been able to move out of desperate poverty want more than to just make a living.
SPEAKER_15: And those people are demanding a better lifestyle.
SPEAKER_07: We are at the market every day, every day, every day. It never changes.
SPEAKER_13: That's Wang Xiaoyang again. Her business selling Santas has grown substantially since her father first started it in 1992. It's allowed her family to move into the middle class. But it's also swallowing up her existence. She's there seven days a week, from sun up to sun down.
SPEAKER_07: Maybe everyone has some regret in their lives. If I got to do it again, I would study harder.
SPEAKER_04: Then I would not have to rely on the business that my parents ran for my entire life.
SPEAKER_07: Like a lot of middle class Chinese people, Wang Xiaoyang wants something more.
SPEAKER_07: My dream is to travel all around the world. The first place I want to go is Egypt. This is the place I've wanted to go ever since I was a kid.
SPEAKER_04: She doesn't want to just sell Santas seven days a week until she's able to get her daughter to do the same thing and then continue on forever.
SPEAKER_15: For now, though, Wang Xiaoyang just has to work harder because costs in China are going up and her profit margin is getting slimmer.
SPEAKER_13: Our costs for workers in China is increasing yearly. Every part of production, starting from the smallest fitting part to assembly costs, it's getting more and more expensive.
SPEAKER_04: As the cost of labor goes up, people seek out cheaper labor markets.
SPEAKER_13: Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, they're right there and they've got the facilities to do it and they're ready to take that work and they are starting to take that work away from places like Ewoo.
SPEAKER_15: The Chinese government is also interested in moving the country away from its reputation as the world's factory.
SPEAKER_13: They don't want to be where all of our junk comes from. They want to be the next South Korea or Taiwan or Japan that makes computers and cars and solar panels and things like that.
SPEAKER_15: But Ewoo is the city that cheap junk built, or really only half built. The city grew so fast that basic infrastructure has not caught up to the growth.
SPEAKER_13: In the coming years, the people of Ewoo will have to find ways to finish building their city and then new ways to survive as the global economy changes. The world's dollar stores will continue to be full of plastic Santas and cheap trinkets of all kinds, but soon this stuff may be made in the basements and garages and factories of some other city. Part 1 of 99% Invisible was produced this week by Mitchell Johnson, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Real. Part 2 was produced by Katie Mingle. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director of the rest of the team, is Jelani Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Le, Chris Berube, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Additional music by O.K. Akumi. The English voiceovers in part 2 were done by Sean Wen and Claire Shelyn. That story was adapted from the film Bulkland by Daniel Whelan and Tobias Anderson-Aukerbloom. The full film is about an hour long and includes a bunch of other interesting characters that we couldn't fit into this radio piece. You should really see it. It's called Bulkland, you can buy a copy of it on Amazon. 99% Invisible is a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. And beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Support them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But our home for beautiful nerds is 99pi.org. Radio-Topia from PRX.
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