It used to be, 15 years ago or so when I first came to the US, that everything from abroad is a little rare. My parents spent three years in Japan, and when mom came home she bought back the family the microwave, and I remember all my aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, and myself crowding around the magical box that instantly made food. When a foreign friend of my dad's visited us in China back in the early nineties, their gift was a jar of peanut butter. I spent the duration of their visit circling and ogling at the foreigner's beautiful little blonde daughter with half of my cheek stuffed with "peanut sauce," the most magical concoction that first gave me a taste of America. Years later, when I became "the daughter from abroad," I brought home chocolates, fish oil, vitamins, and floss (which no one understood). Today, I bring back organic soap. I bring back organic soap because dammit, China is now a land of commodities and materials, a market flooded with Dove chocolates and microwaves and peanut butter and Lays chips and Pepsi campaigns and "everything foreign shall be embraced." It is instead me going home to gobble up as much goodies as I can. The food, the snacks, the service, the tennis shoes that I like. Every overseas family seems to have trouble finding things to bring back from America.
And so, soap it is. I'm bringing back soap because everyone needs soap and because it is not ostentatious and ridiculous (Louis Vuitton, for example, a bag that my aunt mistakenly thought they sold in America for $200-300... fuck LV man, and every HKer with an LV. I say this as I plan on buying lots of Shiseido, but I'm for fashion democracy, not mindlessness like what it's happening in China.). I'm bringing back a little bit of the organic movement where things are handmade instead of on an assembly line. I'm bringing back a mentality that counters China's mighty army of man-labor, where man is treated as a machine. I'm not sure my relatives will get it. I'm sure I'm being hypocritical as I plan on going to a fancy hair salon that will cost me half the price in the US because labor is cheap.
BUT.
Soap is sure as hell healthier than chocolate.