Thanksgiving Turkey-Fire!

Classic thanksgiving day, near Lake Winnapisaukee, NH. Fireplace, Turkey, ensuing food coma, ahhhhhhh

China Blue

This completely adorable girl was the main character in a movie produced by Micha X. Peled, called "China Blue". It was created in 2005, I think by using an undercover camera or something. It follows the trail of Little Jasmine, who is the 2nd child in her family (Chinese families can only have 1 child, of course) who must leave her home in Sichuan and go to the big city and work a factory job. She's only 15, though her ID says that she's 16, but she ends up in a blue jeans factory dormitory working w/ girls even younger than her. It's a very entertaining movie because of her, but it also exposes a decently crappy blue jeans factory (with a wealthy factory owner who doesn't know how to pay his workers on time-- usually it's because he doesn't know accounting or his police chief background really didn't give him business skills, and that he thinks he can get away with enslaving his factory workers) that apparently wasn't producing garments for the United States market (they didn't show product or customer purchasing for the US). Also, the movie didn't demonstrate how much money it takes to live in China. We just see US dollar amounts, such as the $1.45 that Little Jasmine and her friends made in the time the audience watched this movie. That figure shouldn't reflect off of an American standard of living. The movie demonstrates that this particular factory and others like it have a lack of respect for people and product, and how easy it is for people to accept things that are undervalued. Like I said before, the people who won't ever want to or bother to see this movie are the ones who truly need to become aware of the effects of globalization, i.e., where our blue jeans might come from, and we should all be careful about the choices that we make when we exchange money for an object. Personally, I think I'm going to decide from now on, to wear jeans that haven't gone through a pre-washing, whiskers-sanding blasting process, and break them in myself, just like them Wranglers I had in elementary school. This decreases the amount of handling in the factory, and eliminates some steps that can help shorten production time. That way people like Little Jasmine, who worked all hours as a thread cutter, can work less, and go to bed at a decent hour.