U.S. family tries living without China (Reuters)

In "A Year Without 'Made in China,'" Bongiorni tells how she and her family found that such formerly simple acts as finding new shoes, buying a birthday toy and fixing a drawer became ordeals without the Asian giant. (taken from Reuters, Jun 28 2007)

"I wanted our story to be a friendly, nonjudgmental look at the ways ordinary people are connected to the global economy," she said in an interview. "I used to see the Commerce Department trade statistics, the billions of dollars, and think it had nothing to do with me," she said.

The reality was far different.

As the year unfolded, "the boycott made me rethink the distance between China and me. In pushing China out of our lives, I got an eye-popping view of how far China had pushed in," she wrote.

-- source: Reuters