The News at Oriental Outpost
From November until the end of January 2026, I will be deployed with the Air Force. This will limit shipping to just Thursdays and Fridays during this period.
Things are tough now with the tariffs and economy. In 2024, the business started making a profit again after COVID. But that was short-lived.
By April of 2025, I was paying way more in tariffs than any profit margin.
Can you make sense of this?
I'm having a tough time getting artwork to and from the Beijing workshop.
I send my prints, customer's mounting projects, and artwork from the Japanese calligrapher (currently living in the Boston area) to the workshop about twice a month. It used to take 7-10 days to get artwork to the workshop in Beijing. It's now taking a month.
For the return trip, a new development occurred: The de minimis rule was revoked, meaning that all parcels under $800 in value (even a $20 package) must be evaluated and taxed/tariffed by U.S. Customs. So a U.S. Customs officer who makes $34 per hour would need to spend 15 minutes doing paperwork on a $20 parcel to collect $5 in tariffs. If you do the math, the USA was going to lose money collecting tariffs on smaller packages.
So the USA told most postal services worldwide to collect the money for the USA and send it to the US Government.
China Post said they will not do the labor to collect someone else's tax, and are no longer accepting postal parcels bound for the USA (Europe did the same thing, so you can't get anything bigger than an airmail letter from Europe now).
My only other option is to use couriers like FedEx, which cost up to 5x the price of regular airmail postage, or fly to China and bring back artwork in my luggage (which I had been doing until new White House policy curtailed my freedom of movement, virtually barring me from travel to China since I am a military Reservist).
For now, I am paying the extra costs of shipping and tariffs, but that can't go on forever.
Given the choice between selling plasma and taking a military deployment, I took the military duty option to feed my family during this difficult time.
In no way should anything on this webpage or website be contstrued as an endorsement by the US Gov't nor the Deptartment of Defence (DoD), Deptartment of War, or whatever they call it now.