Globality

Archive: October 2003

Exploring the globalization of everyday life

“I thought I was going to Taiwan for a vacation. I didn’t know we were voting.”

-- Ping Lin, daughter of a Taiwan political activist in America who plans a trip to Taiwan
for the next presidential election. (See Oct. 31.)

October 31, 2003

Interesting piece from The Washington Post about a Taiwanese political dinner in Virginia, immigrants’ involvement in politics in their home countries, and the implications for U.S. foreign relations. This is the kind of thing that got me started on globality back in college. Are immigrants America’s shadow State Department?

October 28, 2003

I’m trying to cut back on items from my local papers and look farther afield, but this very compact travelogue from the San Jose Mercury News Web site was too good to pass up. Keep your eyes and ears open, folks.

October 26, 2003

The “Indiana Jones” movies just came out on DVD. Last night we rented the second one, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” (Thanks to whoever had “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when I was at the video store yesterday, I will be seeing the whole series in reverse order. Not that the plots really matter.) “Temple of Doom” is light, suspenseful, funny and well made. In historical context, it’s also very interesting. I’m not going to dig way into this right now, but what we have is “classic” Hollywood’s fantasy of Asia, circa 1930s, reinterpreted in 1984 even as refugees and other immigrants from all over Asia were arriving in the United States. Hollywood itself was becoming the center of a Thai immigrant community in Southern California, also home to thousands of recent immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Indiana Jones films also appeared as Americans struggled with their memories of the Vietnam War. (“Apocalypse Now” came out in 1979, “Raiders” in 1981, the first “Rambo” film in 1982, and “Platoon” in 1986.)

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I think trends in politics and society can help to shape what artists create even if the artists aren’t always aware of it. As for the Indiana Jones movies, I suspect America wanted to revisit its fantasies of the exotic Middle East and Far East precisely because they had been disillusioned by recent events there. Spielberg and Lucas knew the only way to revisit those myths, given what people knew by the 1980s, was to spoof them. So they weren’t seriously recreating the East in a colonial mode. Still, it’s a strange image: Jonathan Ke Quan, born in war-torn Vietnam in 1971, playing Indy’s sidekick, a scrappy Shanghai orphan who helps him out of life-threatening hazards and fights. Both the movies and real life were changing in 1984, but I don’t know whether America was trying to wake up or go back to sleep.

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October 25, 2003

In Hong Kong I heard a lot about Australia. Lots of Hong Kong people go there to study and many stay to live and work there. Turns out 190,000 people from China visited Australia last year, while 140,000 tourists went the other way. China’s president recently visited, but I get the feeling the relationship between the two countries is going to be built largely by contacts between ordinary people. There’s still a lot to learn, as a reporter from Australia’s ABC radio found in Beijing. You can even listen to this one.

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and.....

It’s called “deglobalization.” It happened to Japanese-Americans very rapidly with the World War II internment, and it’s happening gradually to German-Americans around New York City, The New York Times reports. (Free registration required.) Ties to a homeland disappear, and to varying degrees that country’s culture fades too. That said, I’ve been to Germany and it seemed a lot like America – more than England did.

October 24, 2003

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, who died yesterday in New York, blazed a trail toward a kind of global life that many more people live today. She was an affluent Chinese, educated in the United States, who moved easily between elites of a developing country and of the developed world on the paths of global capitalism. Yet there will never be another life quite like her 105 years, described here in an Associated Press obituary.

October 9, 2003

Some people say American-style Chinese foods like sweet and sour pork have nothing really to do with China, but there’s more globality there than you might think. One teacher in San Francisco introduced thousands of Chinese chefs to Western cooking and played a part in creating Chinese-American food, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

October 3, 2003

Though things may seem dark here for many Americans, there are still people coming to the United States with hopes of bettering their lives. Some of them have interesting reactions to the strange specimen of democracy that is the California recall election, the San Francisco Chronicle found.