Deconstructing the Cookie

I bought a box of chocolate chip cookies from the Watson’s convenience store on Zhangyang Rd. yesterday.

The cookies were produced by a company called “Nissin”, (“Nissin” being the Japanese pronunciation for the two characters that appear just above the company logo) The name alone identified company as Japanese and the elegantly decorated box the cookies came in made the identification even more clear.

As I broke open the box to get at the contents, I happened to glance at the fine print on the bottom of the box and to my amazement discovered that “Nissin” is, in fact, the brand of a Chinese company operating on the outskirts of Shanghai. This discovery prompted me to take a closer look at the packaging and on further investigation I discovered a number of other intriguing items that elevated the box from a bit of clever packaging into a bona fide cultural artifact

Chinese young and old are not shy about expressing their dislike for the Japanese. This is not surprising given the frequent and portrayal of Japanese as either villains or buffoons in films and in the consistent stream of historical dramas shown on television
And yet when you look at the numbers, Japan is consistently at the top of the list of China’s largest trading partners. Shanghai is home to thousands of Japanese expats and hundreds of Shanghai residents are employed by Japanese companies.

So why would a Chinese company go out of its way to masquerades as a Japanese one especially if it is promoting its products to the local market?

The implication is that despite an avowed and widely publicized dislike for the Japanese, Chinese nevertheless recognize an inherent value in Japanese products and appreciate their quality. Capitalizing on the opportunity, Chinese companies are not squeamish about putting commercial gain ahead of national sentiment.

The rest of the box’s cover features text in English that describes the product as “A delicious cookie manufactured by traditional European method”. According to a recent New York Times article, creation of the first chocolate chip cookie is ascribed to a Mrs. Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Wakefield, Massachusetts and has no European antecedents.

So why the fictitious reference to “European methods” and the use of English ?

Chinese companies are becoming more refined and subtle marketers who realize that they can enhance the cachet of their product by cashing in on a growing penchant of Chinese consumers for European goods and a long-standing obsession with English, a “porte d’entree” for those who have designs on joining the swelling ranks of China’s middle class

The icing on the cake, or rather the cookie, is a band of Chinese characters featured prominently at the top of box that reads “Qu Qi”, a word that at first blush has absolutely no meaning in the Chinese language. But when you sound the characters out you realize that they are not being used for their semantic content, but rather for their phonetic value. They are quite literally a transcription or a rough approximation of the English word “cookie”

The number of English words that have been transcribed into Chinese is growing by leaps and bounds. “Hei Ke” (hacker), “Mo Te (fashion model), and the ubiquitous “Tuo Ke Xiu” (talk show) have become staples of common parlance and represent the pinnacle of Chinese literary fashion

“Qu Qi” or cookie then is clearly an exponent of this trend, but more than just a mere example that makes the point it sends a signal to customers that the company has caught the spirit of the time and perhaps more subtly enables those customers who can’t read English to appreciate the “foreign” cachet.