MY JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF LABUBU

The monster of mimetic desire.

I can recall the first time I saw Labubu. I was walking down Saint Marks Place, when a creature caught my eye, peering up at me from the window of a convenience mart with an impish grin. Compelled by a force greater than myself, I strayed from my path and ducked inside the market. I wandered the aisles in search of a sign of the critter, but it was nowhere to be found.

Then it was everywhere. It followed me on the train, dangling from the strap of a stranger’s bag. It taunted me from stickers I saw plastered around the city, winking at me as I went about my day. It was inside my phone when, in one strange instance, my Instagram switched to being completely Thai. My feed was flooded with images of the beast hanging out in cafes, sitting at the nail salon, grinning wildly on the beach. Frantic to find out more about this fuzzy thing’s identity, I fervently pressed ‘translate’ on the overflow of comments on these pictures. To my dismay, everyone seemed to already be intimately acquainted with it. ‘What a fun day :),’ one comment read under a photo of the creature sipping a latte next to a beautiful woman, ‘the monster is so lucky to have you’.

The fact that I was unable to identify the little thing trailing me around town felt like a personal insult. I love toys, and I pride myself on my internal Rolodex of the hottest tchotchkes on the market. One day, my daughter spotted a poster with the monster on it and looked up at me, excitedly declaring: ‘Oh mama, I loooove that funny guy’. Her genuine sense of awe forced me to reconcile with the fact that, despite it making me feel old and out-of-touch, I too loved that funny guy. The next day, I marched myself down to Pop Mart (the location of which I had jotted down straight off the poster), where a sign next to the register scrawled in marker read ‘LABUBU. ONE PER PERSON’. A sullen teen dug behind the register, handed me a box, and the hunt was over.

All the Labubus in my house right now. I’ll admit that I went back to Pop Mart a few more times…

My Labubu was beautiful, a tasteful shade of beige with adorable perky ears, a row of sharp teeth that poked out from a protruding upper lip, and deep chocolate brown eyes that sparkled beneath furrowed brows. I clipped it onto my bag with a great deal of satisfaction, and when I got home, I found myself tiptoeing back into the hallway to take a peek at it. When I took my Labubu out into the world, everyone noticed. ‘I love your Labubu,’ said a new stylist at my hair salon before gripping the arm of my chair and asking with hushed urgency, ‘Where did you get it?’ When I placed my bag on the counter at the dry cleaner, the man working the till pointed straight at my Labubu and said ‘I used to love Labubu. But you know it’s possible to get too addicted,’ and then proceeded to tell me that he saw people take their not-yet-unboxed figurines to the airport in order to have security scan them to see which version of Labubu was inside. I loved my Labubu. It really was so cute, a funny guy for sure, but it seemed capable of inciting the same fervor it gave me in anyone who gazed upon it.