Sun, May 16, 2004 page17

• Barbie's back in town

  The citizens of Taishan, Taipei County, have opened a doll museum that brings back the township's days as a manufacturing center for dolls

  • By Yu Sen-lun / STAFF REPORTER
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  I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world. Life is plastic. It's fantastic!"

  Twenty years ago, Lin Ah-ching (林阿錦) did't know about the pop song Barbie Girl, but it encapsulates her life as a Barbie doll maker, in Taishan, Taipei County, the former home of the Mattel factory.

  From 1967 to 1987, Taishan was home to the flagship factory of Mattel Ltd, producing Barbie dolls for the world. Each day the factory produced 50,000 to 60,000 doll heads. Lin was one of the 8,000 workers who worked in this small semi-industrial township.

  

  From sewing the hair lines to accessories and buttons, making a perfect Barbie was a painstaking process. The dolls collected at the Taishan Doll Museum wear clothes designed by local citizens.

  PHOTO: YU SEN-LUN, TAIPEI TIMES

  Following the opening of Taiwan's first Doll Museum last month, the little-known past of Taishan has come into the spotlight again.

  "Look, this part of her body is made by the revolving machine. And for the hair, we had to sew the hair circles then use ovens to make [the hair] curl," Lin said, pointing to a doll in the museum and recounting her 20 years of making Barbies.

  Lin said she originally worked in a clothing factory in Taoyuan and in 1967, Mattel set up and she moved to Taishan to become one of the earliest employees in the factory.

  

  The business soon took off and peaked in the 1980s. The factory was divided into many departments that included body-shaping, spray-painting, hair-implants and sewing.

  "For example,

  Barbie's eyes, eyebrows, cheeks and lips, and also Ken's hair, are all made by spray paint," Lin said.

  

  Teng Cheng-ming (鄧正明), is another former Mattel employee. For 18 years at Mattel, he mostly worked in the body-shaping department and in the revolving department. Teng remembers that the orders were so many that the body-shaping mold was operating 365 days a year non-stop. "A machine produces 250 legs an hour," he said.

  Mattel in Taiwan was a joint venture between Mattel and Hua-hsia Plastic (華夏塑膠). In 1967, the earliest productions were puffed dolls. In 1968, production began to use plastic for the doll's head and hands. Then the whole body of the doll became made of polyvinyl chloride and mass production began.

  "In the beginning, it was very primitive. There was no machine for us to curl the hair. We had to use chopsticks and wire to roll up the hair and use rice cookers to steam it. But you could not steam too much or it would damage and blur the paint for the doll's eyes," Lin said.

  The factory became so busy, the work needed to be contracted out to workers outside of the factory. Thousands of housewives took up the piece-work jobs, doing knots, sewing buttons and laces, or putting on little shoes and earrings for the dolls.

  Ku Tsuei-eh (古翠娥) was one of those housewives in the 1980s. "It was really good money. So good that you wanted to work all day and didn't feel like sleeping," she said.

  Ku said she if worked hard, she earned NT$360 a day. At that time, Lin Ah-ching's salary was NT$700 a month. A Barbie doll, however, cost NT$1,200. In today's NT dollars, that works out to more than the price of a Louis Vuitton bag.

  Factory community

  It was, therefore, common for the employees to take home a Barbie doll. "People would think you were weird if you didn't take one home," Lin said.

  Some would hide the doll in their bell-bottomed pants. Others took hands and legs in their underwear to assemble at home.

  This made the company hire security. "Whenever security showed up, workers would give signals to each other and some had to throw away the dolls out into the rice fields. Sometimes they threw them into people's houses," Ku said.

  Of course, workers caught carrying a doll home were sacked immediately. Generally, according to Teng, also a labor-union member at Mattel, the company treated its employees fairly well.

  "The company put in plenty of employee-welfare funds. We ate well and had parties in the factory. It was like a big family. We dated the girls and got married here," said Teng, whose wife was also a Mattel employee.

  In 1984, employees were informed that the factory would move its operations to Indonesia and China and the factory closed in 1987. There were no disputes or fights from the labor side, as the union negotiated a severance fee with the management.

  Each worker was paid between NT$100,000 and NT$200,000. But the local economy suffered.

  Ku Tsuei-eh now serves in the Taishan Township Office and Community Rebuilding Team. He was one of those behind the setting up of the doll museum. The museum now displays 400 differently clad Barbie dolls, as well as antiques and photos of the history of Mattel in Taiwan.

  "The doll-making was a major part of Taishan Township. So we want to restore doll-making culture in this town," Ku said.

  In the past five years of preparing the doll museum, the team set up workshops for Taishan residents to learn designing and making clothes for Barbie dolls. The workshop also invited old employees, such as Lin and Teng, to talk about their experiences.

  Recounting her days at Mattel, Lin Ah-ching feels that living in Barbie's world was accidental but nice.

  "It was all about making a living. I was never a big fan of dolls and I never had the luxury of collecting them. But I know how to make a perfect doll," she said.

  For your information :
  

  Taishan Doll Museum: 26, Lane 26 Fengchiang Road, Taishan, Taipei County (台北縣泰山鄉楓江路26巷26號)
  

  Telephone: (02) 8531 1406

  For your information

  How to make a perfect Barbie

  The body: Made using a polyvinyl-chloride mold and shaped in a revolving machine. The joints of the doll must be able to bend in five ways. The face: Spray paint is used for the eyes, lips and cheeks. Spraying the white-colored eyeballs first and then using needles to hand-draw the blue-colored pupils. If the pupils are blurred or just one eyelash is lopsided, the doll will be returned. The hair: Mostly blond. Use sewing machine to stitch the hair. One stitch needs to have hundreds of hairs. Dressing up: All the little pockets, buttons and laces need to be prepared. Some dolls need handbags, earrings and shoes. The final check-up: The hair needs to be pulled. The body will be bent and the tickness will be tested.
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