Globality

June 2003

Exploring the globalization of everyday life

“Our religion is one of tolerance, but as a nation we are intolerant of each other and of other people.
We have built our relationships with others on wariness and suspicion.”

-- Wajeda Al-Huwaider, a program and evaluation analyst at Aramco, in Saudi Arabia. (See June 28.)

June 30, 2003

I don’t know much about WorldLink TV, but I thought I’d just put it out here. According to an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, the channel aims to provide “voices, nationalities and perspectives not available in the mainstream U.S. media.” I like the idea, anyway. One WorldLink series features half an hour of selected news reports from the Middle East, translated and uncensored. It’s a satellite channel, but they also stream some stuff over a Web site. I’m going to check this out.

June 28, 2003

Living under the same roof with a foreign national, not as a relative or friend but as an employee, is a way of life for millions of people around the world. Many Hong Kong families accommodate a Filipina housekeeper in apartments that most Americans would consider too small for a married couple. These are not immigrants assimilating into the local culture, they are migrant workers with no intention of settling down, though they may live in Hong Kong for a decade or more. Thousands more Filipinas go to the Arab world as housekeepers. But looking at the bigger picture, how do people people relate to each other in these mixed-class, mixed-ethnicity, mixed-religion, mixed-nationality households? In a thoughtful opinion piece on Arab View, a woman in Saudi Arabia ponders the morality and humanity of the situation.

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migrant worker illions of people live under the same roof with foreign nationals iving under the same roof with foreign nationals

June 26, 2003

Imagine being convicted of a crime in the United States, the only country you’ve ever called home, and being sent to Cambodia for it. That’s what’s happening to some Cambodians who arrived in the U.S. early in life as refugees. Most of them have no family, limited language skills and no idea how to survive in what for them is effectively a foreign country. The smart new non-profit magazine Hyphen (“Asian America Unabridged”) features a fascinating article on this very sad situation.

June 23, 2003

Major American universities are international centers of learning, with more than 500,000 foreign college students in the United States. That transnational arrangement has taken a blow since Sept. 11, 2001, as the U.S. government imposes much stricter procedures for people – especially young males – entering the country. The trend has hit Middle Eastern students hardest, but one controversial group has found a way around it thanks to information technology: members of the Saudi royal family have arranged to study at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., via the Internet, according to this article in The Washington Post.

погода в кучугурах

June 17, 2003

Some people say technology is just a tool and its effects are rooted in the way it’s used. That may be true in theory, but look at actual technologies in the real world and you see something very different. Every technology comes out of a culture and in many cases carries baggage from that culture to wherever it goes. For example, television has helped to bring Western culture – commercials, wrestling, pop stars, news about democracies – to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, according to this long but fascinating feature on Guardian Unlimited. The country’s leaders thought it was just a tool, that they could establish their own programming that reflected traditional Bhutanese culture before letting in the rest. But that failed because they couldn’t create anything that looked like “real” TV. Now they’re sitting around with their robes and trumpets and trying to come up with imitations of Western reality shows. And having glimpsed what the TV tells them they’ve been missing all these years, Bhutan’s people seem to be changing overnight. I took this story with a grain of salt, partly because it seemed too perfect, but the clash it talks about has got to be happening in some form in a lot of places.

June 14, 2003

After more than 50 years of separation, there’s once again a railroad track between North and South Korea. No trains will actually go over the new link for at least three months, and the whole project has been clouded by the recent tension over North Korea’s nuclear program. CNN seems to see the glass as half full, while The Korea Times takes the half-empty view.

The tracks go across the Demilitarized Zone, a narrow buffer zone between North and South that had been basically untouched by humans since the cease-fire in 1953. It’s the world’s last Cold War frontier.

June 12, 2003

By turns fuzzy, utopian, sober and thoughtful, The Toronto Globe and Mail’s feature on Canada’s “fusion generation” (no direct link, it’s on the front page under “The New Canada”) is food for thought about diversity, colorblindness, opportunity and all those other things we’d like to believe in. Maybe we can, or at least Canada can. I find it interesting that this “fusion generation” apparently views Canada as a young country full of space and opportunity. How many people still see the United States that way? True, Canada’s got more land and about 10 percent as many people .....

June 9, 2003

Even in a globalized city, globality can be a small world if you don’t know a lot of people where you are. That was the hardest thing about my first months in Hong Kong. For a couple of North Korean defectors living in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, it got a lot worse. In the middle of the largest Korean community outside the Korean Peninsula, these two met and became roommates, only to end up accusing each other of faking their stories. A sad story when you think about it, from the Orange County Register.

June 7, 2003

We need a new way of writing about Buddhist temples in America. What I’m also saying, of course, is that we need a new way of thinking about them. And naturally I’m not just talking about Buddhist temples. That said, this article in the Miami Herald is actually pretty good. After living in Miami for years and trying to get permission to build, some Thai Buddhist monks finally made friends with the neighbors and other religious leaders and got their temple built. Thai people in South Florida (there are more than we think, apparently), non-Thai spouses, plain old Buddhists, and people who just like the place go there.

Nearly 20 years ago, I visited a Thai Buddhist temple in a tiny, unexplained industrial suburb of Los Angeles called Maywood. It was a small, nondescript building from the outside but totally fascinating inside, I thought. I was really just out of high school at the time. I don’t remember much about the service. On the whole, it seemed pretty natural that my Thai friends and all those other Thai people in Hollywood (living in Hollywood, not “Hollywood people”) had a place to practice their religion. What I didn’t know was that at the time, there were only seven Thai Buddhist temples in the United States. Now there are 100, this article informs me.

Maybe it’s just natural to take a somewhat exotic view of Buddhist temples. After all, you don’t see one on every corner. Most of the people in this South Miami neighborhood had probably never seen such a thing in person before their neighbors started building one. Yet it made me think of Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, just over the hill from where I grew up. Hsi Lai, a Chinese Buddhist temple with roots in Taiwan, may not look like most of the buildings around it, but I think it’s a natural feature of the San Gabriel Valley, a largely Chinese part of the Los Angeles suburbs. Far from sticking out like a sore thumb, in some sense it actually signifies the fundamental character of the area. Hsi Lai played a role in American political history, too, when then-Vice President Al Gore visited the temple in 1996 to do “community outreach” at what turned out to be a fundraiser. Allegations arose that he had taken money in exchange for bringing the U.S. closer to Taiwan.

It’s tempting to look at that scandal as an event involving “aliens” and at Hsi Lai as an alien place. Describing Hsing Yun, the founder of Hsi Lai, as “the spiritual leader of more than a million believers worldwide,” as CNN did in this 1997 report, helps to create a sense of him as possibly an international political force. The temple’s own Web site says the order of Buddhism he founded has more than 100 temples worldwide. This clearly links Hsi Lai to a community that transcends borders. Though I don’t know much about the new Thai Buddhist temple in Miami, I suspect it would be easy to make a similar observation about it.

However, does that make them alien places? And by extension, would that make the San Gabriel Valley an alien place? Think about it: The Pope is the spiritual leader of hundreds of millions of believers worldwide. He’s certainly an international actor, now on his 100th international trip, and he even operates out of his own sovereign country. Followers of one of his predecessors established the European presence in the valley by establishing Catholic missions, converting the Indians who lived there, and giving it the name we use today. They were agents of Spain and the Vatican.

Like the missions, which all grade-school students in California used to build in miniature and probably still do, the arrival of Buddhists and the establishment of their temples is American history. To writers of textbooks it’s recent history; to thousands of Buddhists in America (and me) it’s personal history; to teen-agers it’s ancient history. And when you think about the history of any place, certainly any place in America, you have to go back pretty far to say, “this is native and this is alien” or in other words, “this is local and this is global.” The two are constantly mixing and one changing into the other. Just something to think about, and write about.

June 6, 2003

Last month, North Koreans and South Koreans went to the movies together. For the first time, a movie opened simultaneously in both countries, according to this story in the Korea Times. Not surprisingly, it seems it’s not easy to get a movie released in North Korea. To make that happen, the South Korean filmmakers had to reach back into Korean history in more ways than one. “Arirang” is a faithful remake of a famous silent film from the 1920s, when Korea was still one country and had a common enemy, Japan.

June 5, 2003

You never know where you’ll find global life. But an airport is a good place to start. In Leeds, an old industrial city in the north of England, is usually considered well off the beaten track. Maybe that’s one reason why it’s where Saddam Hussein’s cousin once lived in exile. He came back yesterday and evaded a pack of reporters, who nevertheless encountered some surprise guests, as The Guardian’s Martin Wainwright recalls in a clever audio report: “Saddam’s cousin, Rudolph Giuliani and Saudi footballers.” (Sorry, they took it off the site. Hope it’ll come back somewhere....)

June 4, 2003

Most Americans have never been to the Middle East, never had a chance to talk to people in those countries where hatred of America is widespread. But American images have traveled there through the ever-popular, well-financed and globalized U.S. film industry. What happens when a stream of images of violence and destruction pours out into the world? The Kurdish Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi has some ideas, according to this profile in the The Washington Post.