Book of the week: Where Underpants Come From

Humourist Joe Bennett's obsession with the origins of his cheap underpants provides a timely but unsettling insight into our dependence on China

UNDIES WHERE? Joe Bennett's quest to get to the bottom of his $8.59 five-pack of unmentionables is thought-provoking and entertaining.

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If only there had been more components to Joe Bennett's undies.

The popular columnist's quest to get to the bottom of his $8.59 five-pack of unmentionables takes him to Shanghai, Bangkok and the remote Xinjiang province of China. The journey is both entertaining and thought-provoking, and I found myself wishing their production had involved a few extra places.

The quest starts when Bennett buys six pairs of underpants - a five-pack for daily wear and a sixth for "special occasions" - from The Warehouse. He wonders how they can be so cheap when they come from halfway across the world. There's a brief hitch when he picks the wrong underwear to investigate - the Hong Kong agents for the "special occasion" pants say they don't have the time to help - but soon he is on his way to Shanghai to trace the production of the five-pack.

Bennett doesn't find out all there is to know about his undies but his mission is surprisingly successful. Pretending to be a buyer rather than a writer helps, but The Warehouse is reassuringly cooperative and he is also aided by Chinese contacts.

What he finds is unlikely to change the habits of the average Kiwi underpant shopper. He visits factories filled with young workers who have been lured away from rural areas to work long hours on repetitive tasks and live in on-site dormitories. They assemble underwear for famous brands they could only dream of wearing themselves. But there are undoubtedly worse factories in China. The one where Bennett's underpants are assembled turns out to be "spectacular only in its ordinariness".

His relative success in China becomes clearer when a visit to Thailand fails to uncover the source of the rubber in his underpant elastic.

In between the factory visits, Bennett manages to squeeze simplified summaries of Chinese language, culture, history, religion and politics in a mere 258 pages. He meets Kiwi expats in Shanghai, entertains Chinese diners with his unpredictable chopstick performances and fights the locals for train tickets.

His previous travel books, A Land of Two Halves and Mustn't Grumble, saw him exploring places with which he was intimately connected - New Zealand and England. In contrast, he admits a prior ignorance of China. Most of the people he encounters are obliging, warm and helpful to "this particular big-nose Westerner" and he quickly loses a "previously unacknowledged distrust of China and the Chinese, a prejudice born of ignorance and propaganda".

But he also encounters prejudice in China. The last part of his mission sees him venturing into the western province of Xinjiang to see how cotton is made. Xinjiang is a great mass of land to the north of Tibet that is home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnicities, of which the Uighurs are the biggest group. But the Han Chinese population has grown dramatically in recent decades and there is opposition to Chinese rule.

"Effectively, Xinjiang is the Tibet that the West doesn't bother to protest about," Bennett writes. "This may be because the subject race is Muslim rather than Buddhist. The sort of people who protest a lot have always felt warm towards Buddhists."

He is informed by local Chinese that the Uighur people are "lazy and they tell lies". I haven't been to Xinjiang, but that prejudice is also easy to find in Shanghai, where Chinese make a point of warning foreigners that Uighur stallholders steal wallets.

As you would expect of Bennett, Where Underpants Come From has a generous dollop of humour. But overall it is more unsettling than funny. It's a timely picture of the developed world's dependency on China to make all the bits and pieces of our lives - everything from toothbrushes to overhead projectors and artificial kidneys. It works well as a beginner's guide to China, entertaining enough to be palatable to readers who otherwise might not care.

- © Fairfax NZ News