It must have been five to six years ago. I was lunching with a table of Hong Kong friends in the mainland. Someone brought up the subject of fake eggs when supposedly real ones, suspiciously scrambled beyond recognition, were being served. To my surprise, nearly everyone had something to add to the story. Fake eggs were evidently more common than I had thought.
“Has anyone seen one?” I enquired, tortured by curiosity.
“Oh yes, many have!” one said, sure as eggs were not eggs, though she had not seen one personally.
“My auntie has! There’re dozens on YouTube! Everyone trusts my auntie.”
“My second cousin’s wife’s father-in-law swallowed one, soft boiled, and died three months later.”
“Your second cousin’s father?” Dumbfounded, I closed my eyes and drew exfoliating breaths of filtered indoor air to safeguard my own version of reality. I had learnt that trick from a guru on YouTube, long before it existed.
According to the newspapers, the Chinese knew no limit in making fake things. They had even faked stripy Japanese crab rolls which were officially fake to start with, thereby creating a logical conundrum. Do two fakes make one real? Anyways, with a bit of ingenuity, anything can be faked. But my long forgotten lectures in chemistry and material science failed to enlighten how fake eggshell could be constructed around a blob of fake egg yolk, and the final product sufficiently egg-looking to fool a consumer with IQ ten or higher, which wasn’t so uncommon back then. For the benefit of amah-raised folks, eggs don’t come sunny-side-up naturally. They actually come raw, inside thin shells which are oddly asymmetrical along the transverse axis, rather than perfectly spherical like a pingpong ball.
Ha! 3D printing! It has to be! A solution came to me.
But 3D printing was high-end technology, not generally available, and extremely expensive. It made no sense… Oh well, we Hongkongers are business people, we don’t do common sense so. I promptly derailed that train of thought, and did a quick profit and loss calculation on my biodegradable serviette instead.
Real eggs, retrieved from chicken asses, were selling at about five a RMB (equivalent to about one US dime at the time) at the market. Wholesale price had to be meaningfully less than 0.2 RMBuck each. To be marketable, fake ones had to be cheap enough to lure sellers from reliable supply channels. Egg trading is after all an old business, operating on established network, low margin and high quantity. That means a criminal manufacturer had to cover the costs of fake material, real labour, multi-million 3D printers, plus that uniquely Chinese greed — profits! — for about one American penny, while hiding daily movement of container-loads from the police. My quick estimate failed to indicate commercial viability. I remained puzzled.
Then it dawned: government involvement! Yes, only the Communist Party could afford to lose mega bucks for no reason! I better do my part to support the Party!
I looked up from my napkin and made an impromptu patriotic offer: “I’ll pay HK$2000 each if you can find me some.”
There was an uproar. Lucrative business proposals always cause an uproar among Hong Kong folks. “Ha, you’ll go bankrupt!” prophesied an egghead with Hong Kong characteristics. He was an alternative thinker in Newtonian physics, known for his spontaneous insights on nearly everything. But I was unintimidated. Since the appearance of Homo erectus about three million years ago, nobody had ever gone bankrupt from buying fake eggs. Why should I worry about being the first one huh? Nevertheless, even with statistics firmly on my side, I suffered recurrent nightmares soon afterwards. In these dreams, he surrounded my apartment with forty-ft containers, each full of fake eggs, shells covered with polyester feathers, demanding payment. Cash only! I’d wake at this point, drenched in cold sweat.
Fortunately, that was years ago. I still have not seen, not to say bought, a single counterfeit chicken ovum. People have long stopped talking about them, and moved on to envisage other iniquities which would precipitate China’s perpetually imminent collapse.
Meanwhile, fake egg induced blindness and cerebral seizure continue to spread, noisily reaching pandemic level.
James Tam 17.4.2015
7 comments:
HOT DAMN IT James Tam! I was waiting to hear how they did it - and more importantly why!
Over here, you would indeed have been bankrupted. Have you never seen one of these? http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Cadbury-Creme-Egg-Whole-%2526-Split.jpg&imgrefurl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadbury_Creme_Egg&h=145&w=347&tbnid=MvoJzjoFu8a79M:&zoom=1&tbnh=83&tbnw=200&usg=__yl2KYx7tVOphApGxx5InfZJhzDc=&docid=EJWFjDc-W8z46M&itg=1
:-) Lovely eggs from sweet African chickens. Absolutely irresistible. Worth going bankrupted for!
If you're interested, I did some digging on fake eggs, poorly written up here: http://danielliang.com/blog/fake-eggs/
It was also discussed in the award winning podcast The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, ep #493, starting around 33:06, downloadable here:
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/493
Thanks for the comment Daniel. I've taken a look at your article. Excellent analysis. I'm also impressed by your examination of your own bias! "However I had blindly accepted it as fact without examination, since it seemed to fit the narrative perfectly. I had wanted it to be true, and that was enough to obscure the warning flags. " VERY few people I know can do that. I'm often shocked by the number of highly educated persons willing to believe absolutely ludicrous stories about China, as long as they are negative!
I also have an unfashionable view when it comes to fake vanity products which are highly profitable, therefore rampant. When I look at a USD100k handbag, ugly as hell, on display in Hong Kong, I see a rapacious manufacturer exploiting the simple-minded vanity of outrageously stupid consumers. Legality apart, is it really "immoral" for someone to step in and exploit the vanity of slightly less stupid consumers who have less dumb money to spend? :-)
Thanks for the kind comments James. I try to be a critical thinker, and I write about cognitive biases quite a bit. That makes it especially embarrassing for something this trivial to have evaded my BS detector for so long.
Credulity is a comfortable default setting. Higher education, supposed to help us challenge that, rarely does so in reality, since it focuses more on what to think rather than how to think. The abbreviated letters after one’s name often just increases confidence in whatever one believes, veracious or not.
On a separate note, I find it fascinating that you blog bilingually, which is much, much harder than most people realize. A different subset of available vocabulary is challenging enough, not to mention conveying ideas effectively and eloquently to a very different audience. I’ve done a couple and it’s exhausting, despite being fluent in both languages.
I bow in your general direction.
Thanks for the kind comments James. I try to be a critical thinker, and I write about cognitive biases quite a bit. That makes it especially embarrassing for something this trivial to have evaded my BS detector for so long.
Credulity is a comfortable default setting. Higher education, supposed to help us challenge that, rarely does so in reality, since it focuses more on what to think rather than how to think. The abbreviated letters after one’s name often just increases confidence in whatever one believes, veracious or not.
On a separate note, I find it fascinating that you blog bilingually, which is much, much harder than most people realize. A different subset of available vocabulary is challenging enough, not to mention conveying ideas effectively and eloquently to a very different audience. I’ve done a couple and it’s exhausting, despite being fluent in both languages.
I bow in your general direction.
Can't agree with you more on "critical thinking" Daniel, especially in Hong Kong where it's trendy to be "rebellious" according to stock ideas and off-the-shelf slogans, uncontaminated by thinking, critical or otherwise. Weird world. You might be interested in this old post: http://guo-du.blogspot.hk/2013/09/writing-about-asia-words-and-prejudice.html
Writing bilingually is great fun, and surprisingly inspiring. I've discovered that many ideas acquire a very different perspective when examined out of the box - its inherent cultural confines demarcated by a set of words.
Yes, it's hard work in the beginning, but MUCH easier than you think once you've overcome the initial hurdles. I could hardly write a letter in Chinese twenty years ago. Simplified characters and pinyin have helped me greatly. I strongly recommend that you try!
Here's another old post about my bilingual writing process: http://guo-du.blogspot.hk/2013/12/writing-of-mans-last-song.html
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