Auldey: Playing in Two Worlds
Graphics by Sihan Wu
A few months ago, when I was cleaning out my closet, I found a few familiar items tucked in a box in the back. The smooth plastic they were made of was quite a change from the books, papers, and clothes that made up the rest of the inventory. Each was marked with a few Chinese characters and emblazoned with the same logo: two gems in red and blue squares with “AULDEY” printed neatly beneath.
The “Auldey” that this logo referred to was Auldey Toys, a company that was part of the Alpha Group, a Chinese toy and animation company based in Guangdong Province. They were one of the largest animation companies in Asia and responsible for the shows that had defined my elementary school years. I hadn’t really thought about those shows in years, but unearthing the old toys from their boxes had reminded me of them.
I was taken back to my childhood, when my parents insisted that I get experience with Mandarin, banning English television from our house and only allowing me to watch Chinese programs instead. So I spent many an afternoon in front of the television, fascinated by the wide selection of animated shows the Chinese children’s channels had to offer. The slice-of-life shows were especially captivating, as the scenes of school and home life were quite different from the life I had in America, and yet were intensely relatable as the interactions the child protagonists had with adult characters reminded me of my own experiences with my parents and the adults of the local Chinese diaspora community.
“As soon as I left the house, however, it was like these shows never existed.”
As soon as I left the house, however, it was like these shows never existed. Not a single person in my small elementary school in suburban New Jersey knew or cared about them, and I could only listen in confusion as my classmates discussed American television channels and celebrities as if they were common knowledge. Not even the other Chinese American kids I knew had watched them. The four walls of my living room were an entirely separate world, just for me, and every day I ventured out of them and pretended to belong to another realm.
The only evidence I had that this other world existed beyond my television screen were the toys I brought home from China. On a visit to Beijing, my grandparents and my aunt had taken me to an Auldey store, where the aisles were full of tie-in merchandise for many of my childhood shows. I picked up two yoyos and a small mecha figurine that rolled across the floor by itself when I yanked on a pull on the back. These, along with the other souvenirs I brought home from China, became my treasures. I was terrible at the yoyo, too short for the strings that came with it unless I stood on my bed and incapable of even basic tricks, and there wasn’t much to do with the mecha figurine other than display it (it had clearly been designed for staging fake battles with playmates, but I wasn’t interested in that sort of thing). Instead of playing with them, I kept these toys as little keepsakes on my shelf, to be taken out and fiddled with whenever the mood struck me. There was a strange comfort in knowing that, thousands of miles away, my favorite shows and characters were popular enough for a whole store worth of toys.
However, as I got older, my parents stopped restricting me to Chinese media, and I outgrew these shows and their trite plotlines and stock characters. With age came a sense of embarrassment for my love of these childish shows, and so I turned away from it and to more Western media. American television was utterly unfamiliar to me, as I didn’t know any of the channels and only knew the name of a few shows, most of which had already ended. So I stopped watching television, and turned to novels instead, immersing myself in American and British science fiction and fantasy. I found friends with a similar appreciation for reading, and I tried to leave the shows of my youth and the sense of isolation they brought behind.
And yet, these toys remained on my shelf, tucked in a box, mostly invisible except for the times I would look back at them and remember. They’re not the only childhood relics I have, as I am a sentimental person. I keep empty bottles, torn up folders, volumes worth of old notes and papers, all piled up on my desk and in my closet and on my shelf. It drives my father insane to see all of these old things collecting dust. Have you even used that in the past year? Why are you wasting your space? I can only sheepishly shake my head at his questioning. Sometimes, when his frustration bubbles over, he’ll sit me down and force me to go through everything I own, disposing of anything that is too useless to justify holding on to.
“they are relics of another world”
The toys, though, are things that I can’t imagine letting go of. Even if I only keep them in boxes, for years, they are relics of another world, of a girl who felt that the world outside was alien from the realm of her home. Holding onto them means holding on to the memory of who I was, before I felt the need to forget the parts of myself that didn’t make sense in the strange world outside.
In the past few months, I’ve been watching Chinese shows again. They’re easy to find on YouTube now, and dedicated English-speaking communities have formed around them. Fans from around the world, many of whom don’t even speak Chinese, discuss these shows online and form group buys in order to import official merchandise bought off of Chinese retail sites like Taobao. There’s something distinct about watching Chinese shows now in an age where the Internet has made this a much less isolating experience for people like me. But while I have been enjoying the increased accessibility of Chinese media, I’ve also been reminded of my own complex history with it. The world is much different now, as am I. And yet my old toys sit on my shelf, reminding me of the girl I once was and the two worlds she walked between.