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There and Here 7:

A dial tone of their own

By Stephen Lawson

n the documentary “Refugee,” which debuted in March at the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, a young man from San Francisco sits down to dinner in Cambodia with his sister, who was separated from him in their family’s escape to the United States decades earlier. In her home, a hut without electricity, running water, or even walls, he flips open the display on a camcorder and shows her a videotaped message from their parents in California. Later, she delivers her own message that he tapes to bring home.

The exchange is one of several stunning scenes in this film about a journey home by three Cambodian-Americans, which will probably air on U.S. public television. It’s also a graphic example of a common occurrence: Diasporas, or communities of people dispersed from a homeland, often use communication technologies in new ways to keep in touch. In this case, the camcorder may have been designed as a toy for tourists, but its size, weight and integrated screen for playback also happened to be perfect for this family’s very different purposes. Communication technology companies constantly play up their “innovation,” but they aren’t the only ones innovating.

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When I moved from the United States to Hong Kong a few years ago, I read American newspapers on the Web, exchanged phone calls and e-mail with family and friends, communicated with coworkers through Internet instant messaging, and bought Western movies and music at local stores. Staying connected to home was easy, but I had a lot of things going for me: a comfortable income, a good communications infrastructure linking the two sites, and the fact that my first language was widely used in both places.

any migrant groups have none of those advantages. In many cases, diasporas exist because people have to go abroad just to feed their families. And even if they can afford more options, they may not have them where they live. For example, in Hong Kong, I was hitching rides on a network created for financial communications, something you won’t find so much between, say, Uganda and Britain. In addition, when companies design communication technology they usually aim for a big market rather than a smaller one spread across several countries. So finding new ways to use the tools at hand pretty much comes with the territory.

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Like those Cambodian-Americans in “Refugee,” another group that came to the United States after the Vietnam War also has found new uses for communication tools. The Mien, a farming people from the mountains of Southeast Asia, first came to the United States as refugees in the late 1970s after assisting in the American war effort. Leaving relatives behind on the other side of the world, and lacking a written language, the Mien in America had a communication problem.

Their language has a written form, but that’s used mostly in Mien Christian churches and most Mien don’t know it, according to Fahm Saeyang, who co-directed the documentary “Death of a Shaman,” the story of her family’s experience in America. In addition, most Mien Americans’ relatives in rural Southeast Asia don’t have easy or affordable access to phones. On this side of the connection, most Mien-Americans are not affluent. A common solution, Saeyang told me last month after a San Francisco screening of her film, is to mail audiocassettes back and forth. The technology is standardized worldwide, relatively inexpensive, and easy to transport.

he Haitian diaspora, which has spread from the Caribbean nation to cities in the United States, Canada, France, and other countries, has played a critical role in getting out information about Haiti’s sometimes chaotic politics, according to UC Berkeley anthropologist Michel Laguerre’s 1998 book, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America. Though it’s a key audience for opinion leaders in the community, the audience for Haitian news and talk radio in any given metropolitan area is too small to support a major radio station. However, Haitians have found ways around this problem.

In the 1990s, one major Haitian-American radio station, New York-based Radio Soleil d’Haiti, broadcast 24 hours a day as a “subcarrier” signal on top of a larger radio station’s broadcasts. (The most common use of subcarriers is for background music services, namely Muzak, but Microsoft Corp. is about to start using them to send news, sports, and weather to a new breed of watches.) To receive the special subcarrier signal, Haitians in the station’s coverage area equipped their radios with a receiver adapter that cost about $90. In another case of making use of the available technology in new ways, Radio Soleil’s programming was sometimes relayed to radio stations elsewhere in the United States, Canada, and Haiti by telephone. In both cases, the band is narrow but the audience is too, so it’s a good fit.

This leads, of course, to the Internet. We’ve all heard why it’s such a great communication tool: It’s two-way, cheap and getting cheaper, far-reaching and reaching farther, and flexible enough to handle several kinds of messages. We also hear a lot about “communities” on the Internet, many of them new and spontaneously created. But for some diasporas -- the original virtual communities – the Internet has a deeper meaning. They’re recreating villages and nations on computers and fiber-optic lines, going “home” without leaving home. I’ll look at how in the next “There and Here.”