Made

At the end of the day, I bought a Fujitsu LifeBook.

It costed HK$11000 (when Hang Seng Index closed at around 23000). In fact, I chose the more advanced model with touch-screen function; ordinary ones were sold at around HK$7000. (My friend KM actually bought one around the same time at HK$4000.)

Why did the price decline over the years? Simple. For those who have not read The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, the manufacture of a laptop (and many other daily utilities) are much less expensive nowadays - as compared to two decades ago - because the production lines have moved to developing countries (notably mainland China) that have cheap manpower.

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While I was wandering around the computer store to pick a desired model, my wife reminded me, "You know, there are two kinds of Fujitsu: some are made in Japan, others elsewhere. Watch out."

I could not help but smiled, "It really doesn't matter. Although I admired the precision of Japanese workers, there is no genuine made-in-Japan computer as such. Those with such a label on the top merely mean that they are assembled in Japan; it is equally likely that their parts - battery, CPU, monitor, DVD drive, and so forth - are made in other exotic countries."

Alas, the same problem applies to almost everything in our life - and, the sobering truth is, the term self-sufficient has disappeared from the dictionary of modern man.