Flashback 1995: Addicted to the Street — How Drugs Lead to Prostitution

    

                                    From "The Immortal Plena," by Antonio Martorell

   On Monday, I wrote about the unique Chicago social service agency, The Night Ministry. That got me to wondering how many stories of mine they've been part of — dozens. This is the first, and one of those stories that burn in memory. I'd spent the night with the Cook County Sheriff's Police, arresting sex workers on Cicero Avenue. It was a revolving door — they'd be back on the street before the paperwork was finished. Toward the end of the shift, I wanted to talk in-depth to one of the prostitutes, and we picked Pamela Bolton at random. A choice that troubled me and I came to regret, because two weeks later she was picked up and murdered. I never knew for sure that the police saying she had AIDS led to her death, maybe by a former customer. But it was possible. Nobody had ever murdered her before...

     "How old do you think I am?" she says, turning her face under the streetlight; a worn, freckled face, under crinkly red hair, a face spotted with open sores. A kind viewer suggests she is 35 years old. "I'm 31," she says.
     Her real name is Pamela Bolton, but they call her "Cotton," for the drawl in her voice that harkens back to her youth in St. Louis and a half decade in Memphis, before she was a street prostitute.
     Bolton is a regular. "Just about every guy in county vice and every member of the Cicero Police Department has arrested her," said Paul Olson, a vice investigator with the Cook County sheriff's police. "We know she has hepatitis. We believe she has AIDS, but she won't admit it."
     Exactly why a person becomes a prostitute is a complex question. Drugs are a major factor.
     "The biggest problem with these girls is they are drug addicts," said Ted Kowalski, an associate judge in Branch 29 court. "I have seen hundreds of them. They all have drug habits."
     Behind the drug use is frequently a history of being abused.
     "The majority have been sexually abused in the past," said the Rev. Peter Brick, project coordinator for The Night Ministry, which does outreach to prostitutes. "My belief is that sexual abuse seriously damages one's self confidence. One result of lowering of self-concept is to feel good by escaping into drugs, and prostitution can then follow."
     Of her upbringing, Bolton says only, "I come from good family. My daddy was a police. If you had told me when I was 10 years old that I would be out here doing this, I would have laughed."
     She has been a prostitute for 12 years, and has been arrested hundreds of times, to no effect.
     "Oh baby, I walk Cicero Avenue like it's legal," says Bolton, who was arrested the day before by Maywood police and released a few hours later.
     A prostitute will charge whatever she thinks she can get, Bolton says; $10 from a drunk immigrant, $50 from a "scared, paranoid white man."
     "I'll tell you this," she says. "Any girl who tells you she won't do it for $10 is a liar."
     Bolton has three children. Her youngest is less than a year old — a "trick baby," meaning the little girl was fathered by a customer.
     "Right now this lady named Nancy's got her," Bolton says. "DCFS started having her, because she had cocaine in her system. But I got somebody to take temporary custody. Still, she was 8 (pounds) 4 (ounces). She had 10 fingers and 10 toes and a head full of hair. I don't know how it happened, but she is Puerto Rican or Italian. She's beautiful."
      Perhaps because their job involves such an assault on their dignity, prostitutes tend to be proud — of themselves, their demeanor, even their choice of trade. Even when reality contradicts what they're saying.
     "I was raised very well; I'm very well-dressed all the time," says Hope, another streetwalker, wearing her dress, it appears, backward, so that her tattooed breasts show through the plunging crisscross straps of what should be the back.
     "I come from a pretty influential family in St. Louis," Bolton says. "I've got a boyfriend who would support me if I wanted him to."
     So why, then, be a prostitute? Bolton says she has no choice.
     "Prostitution is one of the worst addictions you can have out here," she says. "This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin. I still can't come away from here. This is home. My 3-year-old's daddy would take care of me for the rest of my life if I let him. I don't have to be out here. But once you get into this, you can't stop it. Lord knows I've tried. I do go home occasionally. But I go stir-crazy. I can't take that life. Too dull. This is what I'm used to. I can't get out. I can't stop. I cannot shake this."

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, August 21, 1995 

One feeds minds, the other feeds bellies and offers warm socks

 

     Let The Night Ministry take you by the hand and show you souls in hell. Virgil to your Dante, a View-Master of the Damned, forcing your well-fed face against the eyepieces and clicking through scene after awful scene.
     The old woman, covered with huge MRSA sores — methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a hard-to-treat staph infection — slumped on a Humboldt Park bench. Those aiding the homeless deal with MRSA all the time. But police don't, and seeing her so rattled a pair of District 14 cops that they hurried over to a nearby Night Ministry medical bus making a scheduled stop.
     "Can you help us please?" one officer said.
     The teenage girl ejected from The Night Ministry shelter, The Crib, because there wasn't enough room for all the young adults with nowhere else to sleep that November night to curl up on foam mattresses on a church basement floor. Her housing plan for the night was a CTA fare card with $2.50 on it.
     "What am I going to do?" she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks, standing on a windswept Addison Street L platform. "I don't know where to go."
     And the three abject crack cocaine addicts huddled in a nest of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. I was tailing a Night Ministry nurse carrying a backpack to get to the cut- off places where the medical bus couldn't navigate — there are always hells below this one, lanes and narrow subterranean warrens below Lower Wacker Drive.
     I asked the trio if they minded my taking their photo. But honestly, they didn't care about anything other than getting drugs into their bodies as quickly as possible. Nearly a decade later, I'd be surprised if any of them are still alive.
     Why was I there? The Night Ministry is not only the last strand in Chicago's fraying social service network, caring for all those people too lost to even try to avail themselves to what scant aid is available.
     But they're also very good at letting the Sun-Times show the public the work they do. They've helped me write dozens of stories over the past 30 years, ever since I called them in 1995 to talk about sex workers the Cook County sheriff's deputies were arresting along Cicero Avenue. Whenever I've reached out to the Night Ministry for insight, they rise to the occasion.
     That's rare. Many organizations do good work but botch the communication part. They don't respond to inquiries, or they answer three days after the story ran. Or don't understand the assignment. Last week I reached out to Catholic Charities for a column on medical anxiety among the needy, asking to be put in touch with one of their social workers.
     What I got was self-promoting boilerplate beginning, "As a cornerstone human service provider and trusted partner within our region, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago provides vital services, including food, direct financial assistance, housing, counseling, and other support for more than 370,000 vulnerable people across Cook and Lake counties ..."
     All true but never addressing the matter at hand, therefore useless to me.
     I'm writing this today because the Sun-Times has joined with The Night Ministry for a joint cup rattle. The paper, itself a struggling 501(c)3 charity like The Night Ministry, has a goal of drawing 1,500 new donations to help keep the newspaper going. A small portion of each donation to us in March will go directly to The Night Ministry.

To continue reading, click here.

'Is that what we do in a democracy?'

       As a rule, I don't do protests. The futility of appealing to those deaf to reason, or in this case, savoring the distress they've created, is too much. But having encouraged readers to attend the "Stand Up For Science" rally at Federal Plaza on Friday, and being downtown anyway, I thought I should go. It was blustery, and cold, and snowy, but there were at least 300 people, maybe more, and I felt their enthusiasm. It's a truism to me that protests benefit the participants more than anything else but, having participated, I see the value in that. Several readers — hi Jill A.! — paused to say hello, which was nice. I didn't plan on writing anything, but the paper skipped the rally, to my surprise, so I though I should at least share the remarks of two speakers.
     The first was Sen. Dick Durbin:

Sen. Dick Durbin

      "The situation facing us now in Washington is pretty obvious. Just a few days ago. I have a purgatory experience called the State of the Union address."
   The crowd lustily booed.
    "It was worse than that. I will tell you, I brought as my guest, Elizabeth Sokol. Dr. Sokol is a medical researcher at Lurie Children's hospital. Her speciality is neuroblastoma, the No. 1 pediatric cancer in children 1 through 5. Through the research they have been part of the past decade they have cut the death rate from 100 percent to 50 percent.We need to keep her on the job and we need to keep you on the job."
   "My science is political science, so let me tell you — the key to this campaign to restore funding for medical research is very basic, It comes down to six words that should be part of your conversation on this subject: 'Let me tell you a story.' Tell a story about your research and the difference it makes in the lives of ordinary people. Tell your story about parents desperate to hear from a doctor, 'There is a cure.' That kind of information gets to the heart of the issue here. We need to stand together for medical research. 
    "The last point I'll make is this point: If you want a great nation, you don't eliminate the Department of Education. You don't eliminate research. Research looks into the future and gives us hope. We need to stand together. "

    Several academics spoke:  Dr. Luella Allen-Waller, a post doctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago, said this:

 Dr. Luella Allen-Waller

     "In 2017 I chose to dedicate my life to studying the ocean," she said. "And  I thought I knew the stakes. I knew that rising temperatures meant bigger storms, crumbling coastlines, sicker animals, poorer fisheries. I thought that understanding these risks meant that people around the world could come together to come up with strategies to survive. 
     "But of course it's gotten worse than I predicted. The White House's severe  new funding guidelines directly attack the work of me and my colleagues.  Projects trying to identify strategies for resilience to climate change are now at risk. Projects like indigenous land stewardship. Things like protecting low income communities that are at risk from pollution. 
      "And not only are they trying to defund life saving science, but now they want to censor the research outcomes too. Is that what we do in a democracy? If we are going to meet the challenges of climate change, we need to be able to predict it. We need to support a diverse group of scientists able to predict the towns most at risk of flood and fire. We have the support of people around the world getting involved in  community science because they rely on food from the forest in their backyard or the coral reef that they fish every day. We need free and independent inquiry into these problems like our lives depend on it, because they do. 
     "I hesitate to talk to younger students about this part sometimes: but I'm afraid. I'm afraid for the ocean that I study. For our future on a warming and more unstable planet... But I don't hear speaking up, when there are so many of us speaking up, and the more of us who speak the stronger we are.
     "Go reach out to a community science initiative. Get involved. Reach out to your grad student union. Talk to your colleagues. Get started building solidarity. If we can build a shared vision for what we want and need, with the people we are already spending 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day in the lab with, we have a much better shot at making lasting change at a national level. It is urgent we do so. The time is now, we cannot afford to lose this moment and we cannot afford to lose each other. "

      Tina Gnade, "an educator, and an earth lover," with her children, Lily, 11, Max, 8, and Ben, 10, attending their first protest rally. "We want people to know science is good," said Lily. 

Flashback 2007: Breathe easy, Cook County TB district is on the way out

      Friday I got an email from the source of the planter story below, inspiring me to take a look at the column and decide to post it today. The opening item about the Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium District might be a reminder that government can always use some cutting, though of course not the wholesale hacking that even the Orange Enormity is now having second thoughts about. The TB district was finally dissolved in 2013.
      DEI might be on the ropes, but I should probably point out that the second item, while  considered funny at the time, counts as fat shaming now. So if that kind of thing bothers you — and people do get bothered — please skip today's offering and avoid the need to write in, scolding me. This is when the column filled a page, and I've included the original headings and the joke at the end.

OPENING SHOT

     The case of Jeffrey Speaker, the Atlanta attorney flying about the world with his case of untreatable tuberculosis, of course brought to mind my favorite entity of local government: the Suburban Cook County Tuberculosis Sanitarium District.
     "We're still here," said Dr. Susan Marantz, medical director of the district, a living monument to the ability of governmental entities to outlast the problems they were created to address.
     We may not have sanitariums anymore, but we have a district, with offices in Oak Park and satellites in Harvey and Des Plaines, all battling the scourge of tuberculosis.
     "We see patients every day," said Marantz. "About 125 active cases a year, though we need to screen two or three times as much in suspect cases."
     So far, they have not had to forcibly quarantine patients.
     "We have been lucky," she said, explaining that usually people voluntarily agree to quarantine.
     If not, "there's a whole system set up," she said. "I literally need [only] to make a phone call."
     Times change, even in Cook County government, and the sanitarium district, redolent as it is of spittoons, cane-backed wheelchairs, and Eugene O'Neill in a straw hat, is being absorbed, at long last, by the Cook County Health Department.
     "I don't know if we're going to be division or a program," she said.

BIG LOOK HUGE FOR MEN IN SPRING

     The following is the result of reading a fashion column immediately before walking across the Loop:
     Morbid obesity is bigger than ever this spring season, and men are showcasing their beer keg bellies with bold horizontal stripes or seeking to camouflage them with enormous tent-like tropical shirts.
     Size 48 waists are girt with woven belts, disappearing under waterfall shelves of fat, and sport big black plastic holsters where BlackBerrys would go were they ever removed from their owners' ears.
     Security cards are de rigueur, jangling jauntily at mid-sternum, with creative souls customizing their own brightly colored lanyards that tell the world, "I'm not a corporate drone, I'm not! I'm not!"
     Not everyone is 100 pounds overweight, yet, and the pre-obese set is hitting the boulevards in tight polyester shirts, untucked and matched with sandals and over-the-shoulder rice planter's bags for the popular "Saigon 1975" look.
     With June upon us, men of all sizes are leaving their suitcoats at home, creating a dramatic Q-Tip effect for the narrow-shouldered, while the necktie-sans-jacket ensemble boldly states: "I won't be in this cubicle forever!"
     Dark pinstripes aren't just for British bankers anymore. Pinstriped navy suit pants are being worn with clashing broadly striped shirts of brown, purple and green, and not just by those who dress in the dark.
     Meanwhile, the entire concept of fashion, if not civil society, is being challenged by beefy young technocrats showing off the mandala tattoos on their swollen sausage calves by wearing big-pocketed cargo shorts and Cubs T-shirts.
     So whether your look is elfin Lord-of-the-Rings refugee in a child's hooded sweatshirt and neon Crocs, or hip hippo proudly clearing the sidewalk with your blend of plaids, stripes and floral prints, spring is here, time to let it hang out and celebrate the glory that is you!

SOMETIMES YOU JUST GOTTA KNOW

     There it was. A small advertisement in the Reader: "Myopic Fine Books" at 1564 N. Milwaukee.
     It stopped me cold.
     "Myopic?"
     Doesn't that mean "shortsighted?" "Shortsighted Books"?
     With a sigh, I reached for my Oxford American.
     "my-o-pi-a — n. nearsightedness; lack of imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight. . . . my-op-ic adj."
     I dialed the store's phone number.
     "It's shrouded in mystery," said store manager Catherine Behan.
     There was a pause. I thought there'd be more, but there wasn't. That was it.
     "Shrouded in mystery — it really is," she continued. "There's different theories, if you read too much. . . ."
     The store is 16 years old. Behan has worked there for six years and no, she doesn't know if she's related to the Irish playwright either ("I'm not really much help, am I?" she said).
     "The logo is a big, huge occult-looking eyeball," she said. "So maybe that has something to do with it."
     Another why-don't-you-hang-up-now? silence, which I filled with questions.
     She said the owner, Joseph Judd, was not available to elaborate.
     "He's farming," she explained. On Mars, apparently, or some place beyond the reach of modern communications.
     "Just say, 'It's shrouded in mystery.' That's the best answer," she persisted.
     I don't argue much, but I argued here. "Shrouded in mystery" isn't the best answer for my curious readers.
     She laughed an I-don't-care laugh.
     So there you have it: It's a mystery. Some things are mysteries. The Easter Island statues. The Loch Ness monster. Myopic Books.

TAKE GOOD CARE OF MY BABIES

     It's one of those crimes you feel embarrassed even reporting to the cops — two 70-pound planters, stolen off the porch of Jeffrey Smith's home in East Ravenswood during the small hours of Memorial Day.
     It isn't as if the police are going to drop everything and start pounding on doors.
     But the loss of the planters rankled Smith, and he printed up this sign, both to tweak the conscience of the thief and to see after the well-being of his purloined plants. Who knows? It just might work.
     

      Russia is much in the news, eager once again to lock horns with the United States. Which means it's time to recall Calvin Trillin's timeless assessment:

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

      I have read about those Russian tractor factories where vodka-sodden workers fulfill their monthly quota in a frantic last-minute push that can succeed only if they attach the transmission with Scotch tape. So why have I always taken it for granted that those goofballs would be so good at annihilating continents?

— Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 1, 2007

Proposed cuts make scary health care system even scarier

     "I'm so sick from this COVID," Jacqueline Smith cried over the telephone. "I don't have $952!"
     On Sunday, Smith, a Sun-Times subscriber who lives on the North Side, had written to the metro desk:
     "Dear Sir or Madam," she began. "I'm 85 years old and somehow caught COVID-19. I've tested Saturday and when I went to get a prescription filled for Paxlovid I was told it would cost me $1,450. The cheapest I could get it from two pharmacies was $950. I am on living on my [Social Security] check every month. I have no savings. I'm supporting my mentally disabled daughter also. ... I called Medicare to find out why it's not covered but they aren't available on weekends so someone is calling me back on Monday, hopefully. Can you help me find out what is going on with this? I'm desperate."
     Among the many uses of a newspaper — news, puzzles, filler for packing boxes — is court of last resort for the desperate. The city desk forwarded the email to our consumer reporter, who was on vacation. She passed it back to an editor, who nodded at me. Among my several functions is to be the paper's free safety, lurking in the backfield, ready to tackle any story that slips past my sturdier colleagues.
    First, call her.
     "I don't know if Trump canceled ..." Smith said, quite upset. "Maybe he did something where people can't get Paxlovid for COVID."
     I said I'd see what I could find out. Nothing online about Medicaid refusing to pay for Paxlovid, the drug used to squash COVID in its early stage. If this were a thing, as the kids say, something probably would be there. Though perhaps this is the vanguard in the fast-moving destruction of the government over the past month.
     Next call, her physician, Dr. Ariel Katz — I identified myself to the nurse and said why I was calling. She hung up without a word. I phoned back and went straight to voicemail. Far be it for me to lecture a doctor. But remember the Bible story about being kind to strangers, lest one be an angel in disguise. Or a newspaper columnist ready to question the professionalism of your office in print.
     I had better luck with her pharmacy, at the Mariano's on Halsted.
     "Her insurance on Medicare wanted something ridiculous," Mariano's friendly pharmacist said. But it isn't that Medicare won't cover it. "Other patients have gotten Paxlovid; Medicare completely covers it. The problem might have been her deductible."
     So not a societal issue, but something particular to this reader. That happens. Many, as Thoreau neatly put it, "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.”
     Or is it? This is where time helps. A situation sometimes has to mellow for the news to rise to the surface. The next morning, the part of the above that represents a significant development we will see across the country in the days, weeks and months to come occurred to me. Let's play, "Be the Reporter" — can you spot it?
     It's the uncertainty, the "I don't know" part. Not knowing whether your medicine is still covered or if there is anyone still employed in the right department to help you — an issue already, on our health care system's most efficient day, now made far worse by Donald Trump and Elon Musk ripping out the guts of federal agencies and flinging them over their shoulders like toddlers going at a low china cabinet, slashing programs that help regular Americans so tax breaks can be given to billionaires.
     "The whole nation is anxious and that includes older people, especially these Medicaid cuts," said Dr. Naoko Muramatsu, a professor in the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health and co-director of the Center for Health Equity in Cognitive Aging. "Whether you can get this coverage, whether this procedure is covered, that kind of thing has been always there. The new thing is uncertainty about anything that involves federal funding."

To continue reading, click here.

Nine words

     Almost every morning, if it's not terribly cold, Kitty and I take what my wife calls "The Used-To Walk," because it's the route she used to take when she walked the dog, before she started going downtown for work. It's a nice walk; about three-quarters of a mile, total.
    We begin by heading two blocks west on Center, a few step jog to the left, then another block, entering a T dead ending against by a pair of houses I think of as "Sagamore Hill," in that personal iconography you develop after walking around a place for years and years. Lovely, imposing homes, without the tasteless grandeur of the French chateauettes or the futuristic weirdness of all those giant white farmhouses. 
    To the left, in the blue — Sagamore Hill South, I supposed — is all field stone and mullions, Sagamore Hill North, blue gray, has cross braces and solid American style. Both sport generous porches, though I've never seen anyone sitting on one. In fact, I hardly ever see a person associated with the houses at all — I assume they're at board meetings and charity lunches.

    Which is why someone coming out of Sagamore Hill South caught my attention last week as Kitty and I turned on Briarwood. She was bundled up, against the cold, and I couldn't tell if she were an adult or a youth, and decided she had to be the latter. A question of posture more than anything. The young lady got into a mid-size SUV and I continued walking, listening to music.
    I'd just turned right on Catherine, at the corner where The Artist's house is — for a few years she festooned the corner with chalkwork, culminating in her magnus opus, The Enormous Hopscotch — when I heard a bang, so loud it cut through my noise cancelling AirPods.
    I turned, and there was an SUV crunched against a red car that it had hit so hard it had pushed it onto the grass. A third, white car, was parked across the street, and I instantly saw what happened: the parked car narrowed the roadway, both cars had tried to pass each other without yielding properly and the younger driver had plowed into the front of the other car — its whole front left fender was torn off.
     The young woman who'd I'd seen get into her car, a few houses down, moments earlier, was now out of it, cell phone in hand, using the phone to photograph her car's front end mashed against the other vehicle. She seemed okay, and I turned to go. And went a few steps.
     But that didn't seem right, and I turned back, and walked toward her.
    "Are you okay?" I said. 
     She nodded.
    "Do you need help?"
     She thought a moment.
     "No."
     There was nothing more to be said, but that usually doesn't stop me, and I groped for something to say that might comfort her on what had to be a very bad morning.
     "It happens," I said, simply, and Kitty and I went back, the way we came, turning left on Center. Giving me time to see the woman jog back to Sagamore Hill South, knock on the door, where a man in shorts received the bad news, the beginning of not the best morning of the week for him either.
     I felt bad for the young person. We here in the tony North Shore are not often ruined by calamitous events — more inconvenienced and humbled. Forced to call insurance companies and auto shops. Light stuff, comparatively. Though it can feel like ruin, for a while anyway, and anxiety stalks our thickly carpeted halls. I hope she shakes off the troubles, and returns to heading toward whatever glittering future no doubt awaits. Myself, I felt I'd played my small role — it doesn't take much to get involved. In this case, nine words: "Are you okay?" "Do you need help?" and "It happens."
    It costs nothing to care, and hurts no one to try to get involved. Even offering no practical assistance, I felt better for having tried. You don't want to be the person who ignores someone else's distress and just walks away. There are too many of those already.

A philosopher goes to the housewares show

Meredith McNamara

     "Beauty," Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, "is no quality of things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."
     Which might make me unqualified to contemplate the Inspired Home Show — the International Home + Housewares Show to those not yet adjusted to the new name, changed in 2022. Because my mind belongs to neither a buyer for discount stores, nor an importer/exporter, nor anyone looking for items to fly off their shelves.
     Instead I took a headful of airy metaphysics Monday to confront what the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls, with the lack of practical empathy that is the bane of those lost in the world of ideas, "the unproblematic being of the world of things."
     There's nothing unproblematic about selling stuff, starting with the show, a sprawling affair occupying the better part of two large halls at McCormick Place.
     Sprawling enough that I groped for some kind of organizing principle to decide what to focus on. I settled on the old standby, Plato's four elements: fire, air, water and earth.
     "That's what we specialize in: cocktail smokers for the home bartender, all of them adding an aroma to, say, an old-fashioned or a margarita or a Negroni," said Meredith McNamara, co-owner of Spirits with Smoke, applying a blowtorch flame to its "smoking saucer," a crucible sitting atop a rocks glass. "We try to elevate the cocktails at home so you can have that restaurant experience but not spend $35 for a cocktail. It's all about adding that extra flavor profile dimension to your cocktail."
     The show, which ran Sunday through Tuesday, always offers first looks at new products that may or may not become household fixtures. A dozen years ago I noticed something called the Dipr, a hook intended to facilitate lowering sandwich cookies into milk. I would not have predicted great things for the Dipr, but every year its display seems bigger, and this year is no exception.
     The word “necessity” (anagkē) appears hundreds of times in Plato's "Republic," and indeed came to me often at the show, such as when contemplating the Nello Air Shower & Pet Drier, a pet-crate-sized box that blasts air at your pet.
     "You take your dog out, gets a little sand on them, some dirt, you put them in there and it'll have air circulating and takes it out," said Jennifer Sierra, a PR associate for Cuckoo Electronics. "We're a South Korean brand, mostly known for our rice cookers, and a lot of advanced technology, a lot of R&D used for rice cookers is used for all our products."
     She said the Air Shower retails for about $900.
     Regarding the third Platonic element, the show was sodden with water bottles.
     "Stainless steel, ceramic interior, so it can keep cold and hot," said Zhizhong Hu, a senior product manager at Wuyi Soniu Houseware, showing off their NIU water bottle. "The water bottles feature a tea infuser, you can use, or not. You can put some fruit inside. It's our new product."

To continue reading, click here.