Yesterday I went to pick up my son at his preschool, in a little nondescript building at the foot of a mountain on the outskirts of Seoul. My wife and I took our shoes off at the entrance and slipped into the sandals they provide, which always make my feet look bigger than they really are. We followed the laughter down the hall to his classroom, filled with five and six year old’s bumping into eachother as they ended the day’s Lego class.

All heads turned as I walked in, the most glaring evidence of my son’s distinctness from his fellow playmates. At three and half — or four in Korean age — he is of course too young to be embarrased by the questions my presence would raise among older, meaner kids. He ran up to me, and then past me and did a little dance as he went to get his shoes. We were headed to E-Mart to buy him a toy, a bribe I had promised to convince him to go to school earlier in the morning.

As I waited the kids approached, giggling as they practiced their English. “Hello, my name is Janice… heeheeheee.” They pointed at me, repeating “waegukin” or foreigner over and again. “Where,” I’d say jokingly, looking behind me for the stranger they saw. Then I told them I was Chinese. Ni hao.

They were silent for a moment, and then burst into laughter when they realized I was kidding. Then, in unison, they came up to me and said, “Do you like melamine?” Now I was silent. These are babies. They play, they run, they laugh, they cry. Their world’s are made up of cartoons and candy, and now toxic Chinese imports as well. “Mellllamine,” they said, drawing out the ‘l’ sound, “is bad for you.”

Of course it is. It’s used in making plastic for Christ’s sake, and has no business being in food or baby formula. But it struk me that as soon as these kids heard the word China, melamine was the first thing that came to their impressionable minds. Not its history, or its language or culture. No, what China conjured for these kids was a toxic industrial poison.

Every country has biases against its neighbors. To Americans, Canadians are a bunch of… well, they’re just not American. And as for Mexico, we just won’t go there. Those same prejudices exist here too, and yesterday I got a glimpse of how they’re formed early on. Parents telling their children to stay away from all those treats they used to enjoy.

“They’re from China, they’re bad.”

I see an ad on CNN every so often promoting tourism to China. Images of the Great Wall, a row of red lanterns above an empty canal and a group of smiling shoppers in Shanghai flash across the screen, with a knowing voice telling viewers that China is everything they can imagine.

I’ll say.