November 2002
Globality.org
“That was a gas station where the exit ramp goes into Canada.
That’s the way we are. We are joined that way.”
-- Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham,
explaining how a Canadian
ended up jailed on immigration charges
after filling up in Bangor, Maine. (See Nov. 15.)
News & Views:
December 2, 2002
International migration can add up to mass movements, but ultimately it happens one person or family at a time. Here’s a great case in point: A plaque at the end of the cove in Point Arena, California, is dedicated to 15 young Japanese men who landed there on August 13, 1913 after sailing across the Pacific in a 15-meter wooden boat “to realize their dream of coming to America.” If I can find out any more about this, I’ll share it with you.
Another journey from Japan ended in Point Arena in the 1990s, when one of the major fiber-optic cables across the Pacific was hooked up there. However, that didn’t do much for communication in the town itself, as I wrote in a column last year.
November 27, 2002
To those of you in or from the United States, Happy Thanksgiving! Today is also the birthday of Wen Shang-Yi, also known as Monster, guitarist and leader of Taiwanese rock band Mayday.
What are people thinking about? I mean, people in general, as in the human race? Probably the best way to figure that out is to find out what questions they’re asking. Google, the Internet search site, has a way of doing that. They can see all the words people are putting in the search field, in 86 different languages, and where they were entered. They show this stream of queries (censored for adult content) on a screen behind the receptionist’s desk at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, according to this article in The New York Times. (Free registration required.) It may be slightly scary (though Google doesn’t sell the information), but it’s also fascinating. We aren’t all wondering about the same things, but now a lot of us are wondering about them in the same – virtual – place. Эксклюзивные предложения сварочный аппарат бесплатная консультация.
November 26, 2002
They’re not everywhere yet, but they’re getting more popular. Are Asian pop-culture products starting to gain critical mass? In the Bay Area, a wide variety of things are catching on. Like the shop that sells Hong Kong-style waffles and Taiwanese tapioca tea drinks ... in a former karate studio. SFGate points out some of the trends in this article.
November 25, 2002
Coffee, which links Third World farmers to yuppie watering holes and international commodities markets to the breakfast table, is heating up. Earlier this month, voters in Berkeley, California, defeated an initiative to restrict the sources of coffee served in the city based on prescribed fair trade practices. Now Starbucks is trying to move in on Latin America, the heartland of coffee, while the Colombian government gets into the retail business in the U.S., Miami.com reports in this article. Vietnam recently shook up the market by taking Colombia’s place as the No. 2 producer country after Brazil. Also on Miami.com is a look at Miami’s clashing coffee cultures, one from 1990s Seattle and one from old Cuba.
November 24, 2002
Spent last week in Las Vegas at Comdex, which used to be America’s premier computer trade show. Now it seems to have a greater reputation abroad than here in the U.S., judging from the share of floor space rented by small vendors who came in from China, Taiwan, South Korea, and other countries. Most of them were looking for distributors. Companies from the Indian Subcontinent were pitching development teams that can write software for American companies at low cost. Another growth industry in that part of the world is call centers, where English-speaking assistants can answer Americans’ midnight queries while working their day shift. How about hosting prime-time Webcasts? Maybe someday we’ll have “The Concert from Bangladesh.” Maybe even include some Bangladeshi pop stars. Большой выбор систем токоподвода и электропривода токоподводы подробности на сайте.
As we left Vegas, about half a mile off the Strip, we saw three identical “Swiss chalet-style” restaurants: One Thai, one Vietnamese, and one Indian. This may be nothing more than random recycling of old kitsch architecture, but it’s not uncommon to see Swiss-style buildings in Nevada. The Swiss played a big part in settling Nevada, which in 1870 was 44 percent foreign-born – the highest percentage of any state. (That’s from U.S. Census figures reprinted in Restless Strangers: Nevada’s Immigrants and their Interpreters, by Wilbur S. Jepperson.) And in the 1990s, the Asian population of Las Vegas nearly tripled, according to the 2000 census.
November 17, 2002
A Danish journalist tells me there’s a big controversy in Denmark over female genital mutilation. It’s illegal in Denmark, but many Somali refugee families there take their daughters on trips back to Somalia to have the ritual performed. Some Somali religious leaders in Denmark urge them to do so. Denmark wants to prosecute the parents for child abuse and the religious leaders for advocating it.
Clashes like this one are becoming more common in Europe as immigrants, especially fundamentalist Muslims, bring in values considered incompatible with individual rights in Western liberal democracies. Having come for refuge and welfare aid, are the Somalis bound by Danish law even when they leave the country? And in the daily life of Europe, what practices or speech by immigrants can a government outlaw?
November 16, 2002
She’s Iraqi-American, but her friends convince themselves she’s Iranian, or just an American, or part Scottish. A New York poet writes an eloquent essay about the struggle over personal identity in a political world in The New York Times (free registration required).
November 15, 2002
How does filling up at a gas station become an international incident? (Well, a good place to start would be the Suez Crisis of 1956, and it kind of goes on from there.) But what if the gas station’s driveway were in your country and the pumps in another? And you didn’t speak the language of that other country? The Toronto Globe and Mail tells how Bangor, Maine, became an international hotspot.
November 14, 2002
The U.S. government says it’s looking high and low for speakers of Middle Eastern languages to help out with intelligence operations. So, where can you find a couple of top-notch interpreters? Doing play-by-play at Lakers games for an all-Farsi radio station in L.A., of course! Who’d give up that job to be a spy? Salon has a column on it.
Refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan who had occupied a church in Calais, France, and threatened suicide were forced out by police on Thursday. They were among many refugees who made the hard journey to a French refugee camp near the English Channel in hopes of sneaking across to Britain, where they saw a better chance of asylum. That camp recently closed to new arrivals in a deal with the British government, which is trying to stem the flow of refugees to its shores. The New York Times (free registration required) has the Reuters story.
November 13, 2002
Good news: Indian fast food! Chaat, a variety of snacks possibly analogous to Chinese dim sum, has followed Indian immigrants to Silicon Valley, according to Bayarea.com. In India, especially in Delhi, it’s street food, sold from little stalls and eaten at all hours. (I’m picturing something like the night markets of Taiwan and Hong Kong.) Though casual, chaat is actually quite complex in flavor and hard to make at home. Chaat shops are springing up all over the area, and they sell it like popcorn at a Bollywood multiplex in Fremont, according to the article.
The Washington Post has a long, ambitious feature on an emigrant wave out of Afghanistan, the first of a series of articles about global migration. As is so often the case, war isn’t the only thing people are fleeing: There’s also drought that began in 2000. It’s so bad it dried up a lake that was 130 feet deep.
November 12, 2002
Here’s a sad story from a place where international conflict is a part of daily life but some people have worked against all odds to live in peace with their neighbors, according to this article from the New York Times. (Free registration is required.) Whether for economic reasons or sanity or survival, Palestinians on the West Bank and the residents of a nearby kibbutz established in 1953 made it work despite their history and circumstances. An attack by a Palestinian splinter group on Sunday may have ended that.
November 11, 2002
Today is an international holiday (Veterans Day here in the United States) that commemorates the end of World War 1. For a military history of the war, which was fought from 1914 to 1918, look at this Website. In the end, in military casualties alone, about 8 million people had died, about 22 million had been wounded, and about 2 million were missing. I’m not an expert on that period of history, but in addition to being a watershed in capitalized International Relations, the war must have had a big effect on how the survivors saw the world. For one thing, many young people went overseas, some halfway around the world, for the first time.
A story on Bayarea.com reports on efforts to get full veterans’ health benefits for Filipino-Americans who were called into service by the United States in World War II, when the Philippines was a commonwealth of the U.S.
November 10, 2002
Readers in the New York area might want to check out “Blood Links,” a one-man spoken word show by Chinese-Australian artist William Yang. Here’s a description: “a tender, humorous piece which tracks the widely dispersed offspring of Yang’s ancestors, who migrated to Australia in the 1880s. Created with some 500 images, it is a compelling exploration of the ties which bind families and the issues which arise from belonging to two cultures distinctly different yet inextricably linked. 90 minutes.” I saw the show in Hong Kong and loved it. It’s really a multimedia show, with great photographs, a beautiful soundtrack and Yang’s gentle manner and wry humor at its center. It’ll play at the Asia Society & Museum on Nov. 20 and 23 and at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island on Nov. 22. TONS OF EXPLICIT rape movies, SADISM, BONDAGE, ASSAULTS AND MUCH MUCH MORE.
The plight of Germans who returned to their homeland from the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War brings up the problem of what makes a person belong to a country – race, language, culture, or a law? The Russians called them Nazis, and neo-Nazis in Germany call them “dirty Russians.” Bayarea.com has the story.
November 9, 2002
The latest installment of my There and Here column, “The $2.99 Power Lunch,” is now posted in the Essays section.
Pai Gow Poker wasn’t invented in Asia but instead in southeastern Los Angeles County, where it took off partly due to its popularity among Asian-American gamblers, according to the man who introduced it to the Bell California Casino in 1985. From one card club, it spread around the world, even to Macao. A feature in the Los Angeles Times (free registration required) profiles the game and the man who didn’t patent it because a lawyer told him it was unpatentable.
November 8, 2002
The Miami Herald looks at the World War II internment of about 3,300 German and Italian citizens in the U.S. and Latin America. A former internee brings up interesting complexities of that selective internment program, which coincided with the comprehensive internment of more than 120,000 ethnic Japanese (including U.S. citizens) during the war.
November 1, 2002
Yesterday marked a century since the first messages were sent along the All-Red Route, a telegraph cable across much of the British Empire – and the world. (Thanks to SlashDot for the tip.) From Britain, it went under the Atlantic, alongside Canada’s transcontinental railway, then down to Fanning Island (now part of Vanuatu), Norfolk Island (now in Fiji), New Zealand, and a small coastal town near Brisbane, Australia. Messages had to be relayed at each station. On Norfolk Island, cables of local interest were simply pinned to a tree. Having news transmitted in seconds using the technology of the great metropolitan power, only to then be posted on a tree, must have made the contrast between the two worlds seem suddenly greater. On the other hand, technology made those small islands and that coastal town important – probably more important in the world than they are today. Places that had been associated with isolation became key sites in communication. Meanwhile, an English-speaking, Anglocentric virtual community suddenly shared space with islanders’ real communities. But probably neither of them thought of it that way then. Новостройки Киева в рассрочку
October 31, 2002
Canada has issued a travel advisory, for Canadians born in some Middle Eastern countries, about travel to the U.S. Under new procedures, the U.S. may take their pictures and their fingerprints. Among other things, this shows how international events can create tensions even at a formerly relaxed border, and demonstrates the limits of citizenship. A story in the Toronto Globe and Mail points to the advisory.
The Globe and Mail also reports that a Canadian-born teen-ager who allegedly fought with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is being held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Naval Base. His Egyptian-born father, who emigrated to Canada in the 1970s and frequently traveled back and forth to the Middle East, is alleged to have close links to al-Qaeda.
October 30, 2002
A strange case of international displacement is becoming even more strange . . or is it? The Christian Science Monitor reports. Some of the Japanese who were abducted by North Korea in the 1970s in bizarre infiltration plot have now been returned to Japan. Yet after decades away, and still separated from their North Korean-born children, some of the abductees say they want to go back. The Japanese government says it won’t let them.
October 29, 2002
According to the San Jose Mercury-News, Vietnamese actor Don Duong is under attack from the government of Vietnam for appearing in the films “We Were Soldiers” and “Green Dragon.” They say “We Were Soldiers” misrepresents the behavior of Viet Cong soldiers in the Vietnam War and “Green Dragon” shows the U.S. as a paradise compared to Saigon at the end of the war. The latter film, about a refugee camp in California, was made by Duong’s nephew, Vietnamese-American director Timothy Linh Bui. It’s an interesting article about how family, politics, and economics create both links and conflict across the Pacific.
October 28, 2002
The San Jose Mercury-News recounts the experience of a Santa Clara woman who was injured in the Moscow theater hostage crisis. She left Russia for the U.S. several years ago after retirement. As a U.S. citizen, she might have been able to get out before the end, but she didn’t want to leave her Russian son behind.
October 27, 2002
An article in the Christian Science Monitor profiles Afghan women who have come to U.S. universities under a special scholarship program. The women are adjusting to American life, as all foreign students do, but as part of the program they also are expected to help rebuild their country after they return. The office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai helped screen the candidates. Are the five students being hosted by world-famous schools in the Northeast? Nope. Tiny Roger Williams University in Rhode Island kicked off the program and will host three students. The others will attend Notre Dame College in Ohio and the University of Montana. The “great cities” are no longer alone as international meeting points where impressions are made and key relationships formed.
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