Proud: “My board says Made in Cambodia!”

So happy to have exotic Asian surfboard!

Yesterday, hothead Peter Schroff hit a nadir with his anti-made-in-Asia surfboard posts on Instagram. Using pens and with his hair tied into a bun, Schroff fashioned his sixty-three-year-old face into a facsimile of the stereotypical oriental.

“Does our dollar ‘av dis face on it?” wrote Schroff.

Earlier,

“Fuck Asian imports.”

And, “Let’s keep our dignity in this battle for a Asian import free nation.”

And, “Ask our foundin fathers wud day think of chinese junk?”

Well, I’m a proud owner of a made-in-Cambodia surfboard and I’d like to put in my two cents worth.

Last year, while visiting California, I made my bi-annual visit to an advertiser to accept payment. It’s always a theatre of the absurd with this particular company, who cry poor and offer boards instead of money.

“Three thousand dollars? Are you trying to break us?” And so forth.

When I deliver the usual analogy that they wouldn’t accept surf trunks from a surf shop in payment for boards the finance man weeps about the twenty or thirty dollars it costs to wire the money to my Australian bank account.

As per tradition, I buy dinner at a crummy restaurant to cover the bank transfer fee, compromise a little on the boards, accept that he didn’t realise the amount was in US dollars and Australian dollars and leave with a promise of immediate payment of the shrivelled balance (although that comes a dozen emails and two months later).

Well, on that trip I came out of the deal owning a surfboard wrapped in carbon and valued, according to the sticker price, at almost one thousand dollars. I was surprised, although not offended, by the Made in Cambodia sticker just visible near the tail.

I know how labour costs cripple the biz model of surfboards, and making boards offshore is the same smart biz decision clothing companies made two generations ago, although companies like GSI do like to talk down the cheap labour part. 

Two dollars an hour instead of thirty-five? I’m sure even you retarded sons-a-bitches can do the maths.

All wetsuits are made in Taiwan. Do you care?

My Cambodian surfboard gets tossed under the house like the rest of ’em. Gets surfed, thrashed, fins roughly pulled out and looks, feels, rides like anything I’ve had made in the US or Australia.

What do we owe the surly homegrown bastards who made you wait six months for a custom? Who don’t pick up the phone? Who say your board is being sanded when the blank hasn’t even been taken out of the rafters and tossed through the machine?

Nothing?

Or everything?