January 2003
Globality.org
Exploring the globalization of everyday life
“You’ve got influences like Fat Boy Slim, but you also have a lot more of the dark and moody stuff that you might see, you know, coming from Iceland. So when the two meet, these things happen.”
-- Adrienne Day, online editor for Spin magazine, on the Icelandic band GusGus, now based in Barcelona. (See Jan. 19.)
News & Views:
January 31, 2003
Are the thousands of Cuban-Americans in South Florida a people in exile still waiting and working for the Castro regime to fall? Or are they part of a body politic spanning the Florida Straits that can take part in a peaceful transition to democracy? A leader of one of the original exile groups seems to have come to the latter conclusion, offering to talk to certain members of the Castro regime – though not Castro himself. Responses, as usual, are vehement and varied. The Miami Herald has the story.
January 26, 2003
What could be more American than the Super Bowl? Why, John Wayne Westerns, of course! Except that a lot of them actually were filmed in Mexico. Starting in the early 1950s, the Duke and other Hollywood legends started filming Westerns in the deserts of Durango state. About 140 movies have been filmed in Durango. Wayne even bought a cornfield near La Joya and built a life-size Old West town for filming.
A lot of Americans miss good old Westerns and the Duke, who died in 1979. But the Mexicans around La Joya miss him, too. A whole generation of the town’s residents worked as extras or set-builders or sold food to the stars and crews who came through. Now Durango is out of the limelight most of the time even as other parts of Mexico become Hollywood South: Both “Titanic” and “Pearl Harbor” were filmed partly in Baja California. The Washington Post visited La Joya (and the Duke’s private Sixties motel suite) for this article.
January 25, 2003
Is the world becoming less global? Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking people have left the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan, just west of China. They say job opportunities have disappeared in the new country’s weak economy, but they also feel unwelcome there with increasing Islamic fundamentalism, according to this incisive article at Eurasianet.org. Another problem is that Russian-language education there has deteriorated, they say. In some ways this reminds me of what I saw in Hong Kong in 2000 and 2001, where many expatriates said the standard of English had declined since the handover in 1997. It certainly felt as if English-speaking expatriates were becoming increasingly irrelevant. Both territories once saw an economic benefit from the involvement of an outside ruling power and now are losing that. In both places, the local is resurgent in terms of language, culture, and worldview. (I’m sure these things are less true in Hong Kong than in Kyrgyzstan.) laptop notebook batteries
Here’s where the other shoe falls: For Russian speakers in Kyrgyzstan, whether ethnic Russians or from other ethnic groups, it’s now harder to get back to Russia. The country has tightened up on immigration because of security concerns due to the war in Chechnya, as well as worries about the costs of accommodating newcomers. This should sound familiar to Americans and just about anyone else these days.
Are we actually heading back to a more localized, isolated, fearful world? The great hope now for keeping Russians in Kyrgyzstan: Russia wants to build an air base there.
January 24, 2003
Southeast Asian nations including Malaysia and Indonesia fear a war in Iraq could set off more terrorist attacks in that region. In the Philippines, they’re worried it could worsen the country’s already serious unemployment, because Filipino unemployment is really a global problem: Thousands of Filipinos work in the Middle East and a lot might have to be evacuated from a war. Those insights come from Pacific Time, a fascinating half-hour show from San Francisco public radio station KQED that looks at news and trends on both sides of the ocean. I’ve listened to it a few times but it’s on at awkward times. Now I find out it’s available online! nicki minaj mp3, home artists genres.
January 21, 2003
Nearly one in five Canadians is foreign-born, according to the country’s 2001 census. The exact figure is 18.5 percent, the highest since 1931 and much higher than the United States’ 11 percent. The Toronto Globe and Mail gives a few details in this article.
The Chinese are the biggest “visible minority” in Canada, according to the article, which doesn’t define the term. Chinese immigration to Canada has surged in the past 20 years, but it goes back more than a century. Judy Fong Bates’ 2002 short-story collection, “China Dog: And Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry” provides some intimate, elegantly written glimpses of the lives of Chinese-Canadians.
January 20, 2003
Today in the United States we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., who helped to end racial segregation here in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then it was considered mostly an issue of black and white, and segregation was written into laws. Now it’s more informal, and the situation is more complicated, partly because people from all over the world are trying to get along here.
Maybe what we need is not just laws that let people live next door to each other, but a shared knowledge of our mixed culture. Phelan Lake Elementary School in St. Paul, Minnesota, is going to integrate Hmong and Spanish language lessons into daily classwork and spend some time each day going over other subjects in those languages. Some kids are already excited about becoming trilingual. One reason the school did it was that local Hmong voters were a big force behind a measure for increased school funding, according to this story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
January 19, 2003
When I was a teen-ager, I dreamed of the day when I would could afford a really good stereo, with tall speakers flanking a stack of components in a smoked-glass cabinet. I’ve had the money for one of those for years now but never bought one. These days we have a hodgepodge of audio and video gear and computers around the house that can all play music. I don’t know whether they sound as good as my 1970s Dream Stereo would have, and I don’t really care. What I care about is that I can listen to pop music from all over the world, something I never even dreamed of back then. Thank CDs, the Internet, adventurous artists, and above all, international migrants for that. One place to find new stuff from around the world is “Global Hits,” a regular segment on Public Radio International’s show “The World.” On the show’s Website, you can listen to segments from this month and a few months back.
January 17, 2003
Child-smuggling is a survival strategy for many families in Somalia, according to an AP article at Yahoo.com. Parents sell their homes and move in with relatives to raise the US$3,500 to $7,000 it costs to have their children taken away from them. Once in Europe or the United States, the children usually live with people from their own clan but aren’t necessarily treated well. The key is that they have greater opportunity than their parents – and send money back home. “It’s an economic system,” says an author of a U.N. report on the practice.
My essay on borders, “The new frontier is everywhere,” struck a chord with some readers who are more well-traveled than me. Nigel recalls another strange international “in-between” space:
Freidrichstrasse station in Berlin was also a weird border before the wall fell. In East Berlin, but a transport hub for West Berlin because of its pre-WW2 status as an interchange between mainline rail and the 2 metro systems. You could change trains between 2 stations in West Berlin and you'd be in the heart of [East Germany]. Only the armed police with dogs walking across the gantries of the train shed and the statist advertising provided a clue as to where you were.
January 16, 2003
It may be the oldest kind of international experience, a place where state-to-state intersects with thousands of individual lives: War. Thousands of Americans are now leaving home in a slightly mysterious movement in which those giving the orders won’t say where they’re going. Millions of American hearts and minds may soon be focused on the Middle East, a region that’s a mystery to most outsiders. In the future, will a generation know the geography of Iraq the way the elderly of today know the South Pacific? The experience of saying goodbye, in any case, can’t be much different from what it was. Bayarea.com was there as 2,000 troops left Camp Pendleton on Wednesday.
January 13, 2003
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service now says it wasn’t prepared for the number of male immigrants from countries with large Muslim populations who reported to the INS under what it calls an anti-terrorism program. (See Dec. 20.) Some had to be detained for interrogation because of the backlog, the INS told The New York Times (free registration required) in this article. They say most of those detained have been released, but the whole debacle caused a lot of anguish for a lot of people. Don’t these immigration officials have any idea how many Iranians there are in Southern California?
January 12, 2003
Nadir Shah, 35, is cycling across Europe. Another dot-com refugee? No, he’s traveling from his native Afghanistan, amazed at the lax border controls and ripped jeans of Europe, and hopes to ride his bike to Ground Zero in New York. It’s all to let people in the West know they shouldn’t forget about his country again, or there will be more refugees – the old-school kind. The Institute for War & Peace Reporting caught up with him in London and filed this report.
January 11, 2003
The latest essay in my There and Here series is now online. It’s called “The new frontier is everywhere.” Check it out and let me know what you think. There is a new e-mail address on my Contact page because it looks like there’s a problem with the previous one.
Recent Chinese immigrants to the United States are turning on to Christianity in big numbers, according to this article in The Washington Post. In the process, they’re revitalizing churches in the Washington area and evangelizing other immigrant Chinese as well as the general population. The irony of Chinese coming in like missionaries and converting Americans to Christianity is not lost on at least one church member.
January 10, 2003
Living in a foreign country and then returning home gives you a special perspective, especially if you lived overseas for 40 years. Today’s Korea Times has a column about two old friends who’ve seen both sides, talking about anti-Koreanism in America and anti-Americanism in South Korea. There’s also news about a survey: South Korean students want to make friends with North Koreans, though not necessarily with North Korea.
January 8, 2003
The Vietnamese came to ease a shortage of workers in the local garment industry, but ended up without jobs after demand fell. Now they’re starting their own small companies. There’s not much money in labor-intensive factory work, but that’s OK, the Vietnamese can get by on a lot less than most of the local people because they’re frugal, the article says. What American city is this? None. It’s Kobe, Japan. Daily Yomiuri has the story.
January 5, 2003
Sorry to point to the registration-required Los Angeles Times two days in a row, but this is too good: From war-torn Sudan, to a refugee camp in Kenya, to San Diego, to a movie location in Mexico, a band of African “Lost Boys” have helped each other along. Now they’re playing 19th-century African sailors and meeting Russell Crowe. After reading their engrossing story, I hope someone has the good sense to make a movie about them, too.
January 4, 2003
Immigrant rights groups, Congress, the Bush Administration, immigration lawyers. They all have an angle about who ought to be in the United States: Whose husband or wife should be deported, who faces even odds of being murdered in their home country and who would really just rather stay in the U.S. Can a judge rule on an appeal in 15 minutes? Are judges really being forced to do that? An article in the Los Angeles Times (free registration required) looks at the effects of a new order on dealing with appeals.
Whatever’s really going on in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, keep this in mind: Most immigration cases don’t involve suspected terrorists or even immigrants from countries targeted in the war on terrorism. And among the people being deported for committing crimes are a lot who simply violated immigration laws, such as by staying on after their visas expired. They aren’t monsters, they’re like people a lot of us know in our daily lives. In a country where 11 percent of the population is foreign-born, immigration laws affect everyone. They’re worth keeping an eye on.
January 3, 2003
Looking for a vacation spot that’s safe in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks? For most people in the West, Muslim countries are probably near the bottom of the list. But for tourists from the Middle East, Malaysia is gaining popularity, according to this AP article at CNN.com. Seems they feel more welcome there, as it’s a largely Muslim country. The cities, beaches, and hilltop resorts there have been popular with tourists from around Asia for years.
A recent article in Northern California’s Santa Rosa Press-Democrat sheds more light on Vietnamese nail salons. For one thing, it’s one of the easier professions to be certified for with limited English. Also, chatting with customers gives manicurists a lot of chances to improve their English.
January 2, 2003
It was a happy Hmong New Year yesterday in Fresno, California, which enjoyed its 23rd annual Hmong New Year fair, according to the Fresno Bee. The Hmong originally came to the United States after the Vietnam War, mostly from Thailand and Laos. Many of them had aided the U.S. war effort. Hmong are well known in California’s Central Valley, but the largest Hmong community in the U.S. is around Milwaukee. Interestingly, I am told there are Hmong New Year festivals in many different places around the U.S., all at different times of the year.
January 1, 2003
Happy New Year! As I post this entry, it’s not quite Jan. 1 here in San Francisco, but it already is in most places where people can see it. Today is probably the closest thing to a universal holiday, though other calendars still coexist with the one that calls this the beginning of the year 2003.
Where did Chinese laundries come from? What about all the motels owned by Indo-Americans? It’s not just a question of career choices. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle explains how immigrant-owned businesses reflect the history of United States relations with other countries and their peoples. It’s a subject that deserves deeper study. For example, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Timothy Linh Bui once recalled in an interview that he got interested in film partly because his family, newly arrived in the U.S., opened a video store. Other Vietnamese did, too. Was it just that a new technology created the demand for a new kind of small business just as a new group of entrepreneurs arrived in America? Or were the reasons more complicated? Who was the first Vietnamese-American to open a video store? Who was the first to open a nail salon?
Last month’s entries can be found in this archive.
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