Globalized is better than Americanized
- By Andrew Lam
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, November 29, 2013
Ondaatje’s novel, on the other hand, is a world rooted in numerous particularities. It’s a world where people from dissimilar backgrounds encounter one another and are trying, by various degrees of success and failure, to connect and influence each other. And it’s a world complicated by memories and ambitions and multiple connections and displacements. Its unique and rounded characters refute simplification.
America, besides, has changed radically in the last few decades. Demographic shifts are changing the racial make up of the country and by the year 2050 there will no longer a majority in the US, since whites will decline to below 50 percent of the population. And the fastest growing population? Asians. And American children are growing obsessed with Japanese anime, while the fastest growing religion in America is Islam.
So, while it’s undeniable that the Americanization effects are still taking place, the Easternization of the West is also going on.
Koreatown in Los Angeles and Chinatown in San Francisco and the Cuban community in Miami are, after all, not places created for nostalgic purposes but vibrant and thriving ethnic enclaves.
They are changing the American landscape itself — a direct challenge to the old ideas of melting pot and integration. Such is the complexity of the globalized world. Ours is a world in motion, in flux: the number of people who pass through those gates at San Francisco airport each year exceeds the entire population of California.
At last count, there were 112 languages spoken in the Bay Area, and 80 in the 30-square-mile city of Richmond, population 100,000.
On warm summer afternoons, Nob Hill, where I live, turns into the modern tower of Babel. The languages of the world — Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Vietnamese, and many more I do not recognize — waft in through my open windows, accompanied by the cable cars’ merry cling-clanging bells.
Click of a mouse
For the first time in human history, all of the world’s traditions and ideas are available at close proximity, and with the information of the world compressed and compiled and available at the click of a mouse, and people of the world assembled often in one metropolitan area.
East and West — the twain has met, with the blessing of shared fascination. Tu Wei Ming, the Confucian scholar at Harvard, calls our new millennium “a second axial age.” “It is a kind of era where various traditions exist side by side for the first time for the picking,” he says. Traditions not only exist in our global village, they coexist in such a way “that a Christian project would have to be understood and perceived in a comparative religious context,” he notes.
So Starbucks and McDonald’s golden arches may be proliferating in every major metropolis across the world, but so are Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants.
Many other original cultures and languages and traditions continue to thrive despite the powers of Hollywood. Think Korean movies. Think Balinese dancers, Think kung fu, and a myriad of cultural practices — these will not simply wash away because CNN and MTV are accessible now to the peasant in his mud hut.
Andrew Lam is editor at New America Media and the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” and “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees on America’s West Coast, which won a Pen award in 2013.
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