Andrew Lam's Blog - Posts Tagged "globalization"
Human Trafficking is a Growing Global Scourge
On the 900-mile trek of mostly desert that stretches between Eritrea and Egypt, hunting for humans has become routine.
Eritrean refugees who have fled their homeland fall prey to Bedouin or Egyptian traffickers. The refugees are held for ransom. Those with relatives abroad who can pay for their release might survive. Those who do not are often killed. The United Nations confirms that some are harvested for their organs — their livers and kidneys sold on the black market — while others, the young and able, are sold off. One survivor told the U.N., “People catch us, sell us like goats.”
Slavery is alive and well in the 21st century. There are more people enslaved today than at any other time in history. The U.S. State Department says that estimates of those enslaved through human trafficking ranges from 4 million to 27 million.
Human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal business in the world, according to the State Department. It ranks only second to drug trafficking in profitability, bringing in an estimated $32 billion annually. The majority of those trafficked are young adults between ages 18 and 24 — but children also make up a large part of it. Almost all have experienced either sexual exploitation or violence, often both, during their time being enslaved.
But the statistics can be disputed. The United Nations notes that “the lack of accurate statistics is due only in part to the hidden nature of the crime, and that the lack of systematic reporting is the real problem.” In other words, the number of those trafficked worldwide might be far greater than what is estimated.
What we do know is that traffickers practice the trade with relative impunity. In 2006 there were 5,808 trafficking prosecutions and 3,160 convictions worldwide, which would mean that one person is convicted for every 800 people trafficked.
Though most of those trafficked are exploited for their labor and or are thrown into sexual servitude, the area that’s particularly grotesque is the organ trade. One human rights lawyer who did not want to give his name said cases involving the removal of human organs for transplantation are more miserable than those involving genocide.
“At one end someone is killed for their organs, which in some perhaps overly theoretical way is worse than murder,” he said. “In the latter, the victim’s death is at least a motive — the murderer seeks to kill a human being. In the former, the victim is merely a box containing an object, and the murder is merely the process of throwing out the box and wrapping.”
The international commodification of humans is becoming the new norm of our age. In Bangkok, Thailand, a “baby factory” was discovered last year in which more than a dozen Vietnamese women were impregnated (some were raped), and their babies were sold for adoption. Whether or not the babies — unregistered, non-existent in the eyes of the law — were truly adopted, raised to be slaves or farmed out for body parts is not known.
What is certain is that Vietnam, like many other impoverished countries with a growing population of young people, has become a major supply country, where vulnerable young women and girls are in high demand on the international market. In certain bars in Ho Chi Minh City, rural girls are routinely trucked in to parade at auction blocks. The girls are often naked except for a tag with a number on it, and in the audience are foreigners — South Koreans, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are the main consumers — who call them down for inspection. They leave together under the pretense of marriage after the paperwork is done, but many end up in brothels or sweatshops instead.
Diep Vuong, executive director of Pacific Links Foundation, an organization that works to combat human trafficking by providing education to the poor in Vietnam, is pessimistic. Overpopulated and dwindling in resources, Vietnam is full of young, uneducated people.
“The only resource we have left in abundance are the humans themselves,” she noted wryly. “We’re moving toward the Jonathan Swift version of reality.”
While children of the poor are not being eaten as Swift sarcastically suggested, they are being abducted and enslaved. They work in the fields as slave laborers as in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantation where half a million children work and provide 40 percent of the world’s chocolate — something most of them have never tasted. Or they are abducted at ages as young as 5 in Uganda and forced to become soldiers. Or they work in the carpet and brick factories of South Asia, many shackled and branded by their masters. Those too weak to work are killed off and thrown into rivers.
Closer to home, border drug cartels have incorporated the lucrative human trade into their business, and in some parts of Mexico they have the tacit support of the local authorities. Mass graves were discovered last year full of migrants’ corpses. Their crime: They weren’t worth much alive.
The forces of globalization have only intensified the trade in humans. After the Cold War ended, borders became more porous. New forms of information technology have helped integrate the world market. Increasing economic disparity and demand for cheap labor have spurred unprecedented mass human migration. The poor and desperate fall prey to the lure of a better life.
Nongovernmental organization workers who battle trafficking often describe victims as being “tricked.”
In March 2004, eBay shut down sales when it discovered that three young Vietnamese women were being auctioned off, with a starting bid of $5,400. Their photos were displayed. The “items” were from Vietnam and would be “shipped to Taiwan only.”
“I was browsing on the Internet and this guy kept trying to chat with me,” one Vietnamese teenager rescued from a brothel in Phnom Penh recounted. “There’s a coffee shop in Cambodia. He said I could make money over there.”
They crossed the border from Vietnam to Cambodia, and she soon became enslaved. She was saved in a police raid, just as the traffickers were planning to move her again. The madam “was waiting for more girls to show up to ship us to Malaysia,” she said. Her fake passport had already been made.
The trafficking network is sophisticated and well organized, and if the lure of money and a better life elsewhere becomes the entrapment of the poor and vulnerable, the abundance of cheap labor coupled with an atmosphere of impunity becomes the seduction for others to become traffickers.
“A slave purchased for $10,000 could end up making her owner $160,000 in profits before she dies or runs away,” Siddharth Kara noted in a talk on sex trafficking at the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. In fact, a child in Vietnam can be bought for as little as $400.
Slavery is not going away because the agony of human enslavement remains largely invisible in the public discourse. It is just as shocking that Eritrean refugees are hunted nightly by traffickers as it is that their story remains hidden in darkness.
NAM editor Andrew Lam is author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise," is due out in 2013.
Eritrean refugees who have fled their homeland fall prey to Bedouin or Egyptian traffickers. The refugees are held for ransom. Those with relatives abroad who can pay for their release might survive. Those who do not are often killed. The United Nations confirms that some are harvested for their organs — their livers and kidneys sold on the black market — while others, the young and able, are sold off. One survivor told the U.N., “People catch us, sell us like goats.”
Slavery is alive and well in the 21st century. There are more people enslaved today than at any other time in history. The U.S. State Department says that estimates of those enslaved through human trafficking ranges from 4 million to 27 million.
Human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal business in the world, according to the State Department. It ranks only second to drug trafficking in profitability, bringing in an estimated $32 billion annually. The majority of those trafficked are young adults between ages 18 and 24 — but children also make up a large part of it. Almost all have experienced either sexual exploitation or violence, often both, during their time being enslaved.
But the statistics can be disputed. The United Nations notes that “the lack of accurate statistics is due only in part to the hidden nature of the crime, and that the lack of systematic reporting is the real problem.” In other words, the number of those trafficked worldwide might be far greater than what is estimated.
What we do know is that traffickers practice the trade with relative impunity. In 2006 there were 5,808 trafficking prosecutions and 3,160 convictions worldwide, which would mean that one person is convicted for every 800 people trafficked.
Though most of those trafficked are exploited for their labor and or are thrown into sexual servitude, the area that’s particularly grotesque is the organ trade. One human rights lawyer who did not want to give his name said cases involving the removal of human organs for transplantation are more miserable than those involving genocide.
“At one end someone is killed for their organs, which in some perhaps overly theoretical way is worse than murder,” he said. “In the latter, the victim’s death is at least a motive — the murderer seeks to kill a human being. In the former, the victim is merely a box containing an object, and the murder is merely the process of throwing out the box and wrapping.”
The international commodification of humans is becoming the new norm of our age. In Bangkok, Thailand, a “baby factory” was discovered last year in which more than a dozen Vietnamese women were impregnated (some were raped), and their babies were sold for adoption. Whether or not the babies — unregistered, non-existent in the eyes of the law — were truly adopted, raised to be slaves or farmed out for body parts is not known.
What is certain is that Vietnam, like many other impoverished countries with a growing population of young people, has become a major supply country, where vulnerable young women and girls are in high demand on the international market. In certain bars in Ho Chi Minh City, rural girls are routinely trucked in to parade at auction blocks. The girls are often naked except for a tag with a number on it, and in the audience are foreigners — South Koreans, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are the main consumers — who call them down for inspection. They leave together under the pretense of marriage after the paperwork is done, but many end up in brothels or sweatshops instead.
Diep Vuong, executive director of Pacific Links Foundation, an organization that works to combat human trafficking by providing education to the poor in Vietnam, is pessimistic. Overpopulated and dwindling in resources, Vietnam is full of young, uneducated people.
“The only resource we have left in abundance are the humans themselves,” she noted wryly. “We’re moving toward the Jonathan Swift version of reality.”
While children of the poor are not being eaten as Swift sarcastically suggested, they are being abducted and enslaved. They work in the fields as slave laborers as in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantation where half a million children work and provide 40 percent of the world’s chocolate — something most of them have never tasted. Or they are abducted at ages as young as 5 in Uganda and forced to become soldiers. Or they work in the carpet and brick factories of South Asia, many shackled and branded by their masters. Those too weak to work are killed off and thrown into rivers.
Closer to home, border drug cartels have incorporated the lucrative human trade into their business, and in some parts of Mexico they have the tacit support of the local authorities. Mass graves were discovered last year full of migrants’ corpses. Their crime: They weren’t worth much alive.
The forces of globalization have only intensified the trade in humans. After the Cold War ended, borders became more porous. New forms of information technology have helped integrate the world market. Increasing economic disparity and demand for cheap labor have spurred unprecedented mass human migration. The poor and desperate fall prey to the lure of a better life.
Nongovernmental organization workers who battle trafficking often describe victims as being “tricked.”
In March 2004, eBay shut down sales when it discovered that three young Vietnamese women were being auctioned off, with a starting bid of $5,400. Their photos were displayed. The “items” were from Vietnam and would be “shipped to Taiwan only.”
“I was browsing on the Internet and this guy kept trying to chat with me,” one Vietnamese teenager rescued from a brothel in Phnom Penh recounted. “There’s a coffee shop in Cambodia. He said I could make money over there.”
They crossed the border from Vietnam to Cambodia, and she soon became enslaved. She was saved in a police raid, just as the traffickers were planning to move her again. The madam “was waiting for more girls to show up to ship us to Malaysia,” she said. Her fake passport had already been made.
The trafficking network is sophisticated and well organized, and if the lure of money and a better life elsewhere becomes the entrapment of the poor and vulnerable, the abundance of cheap labor coupled with an atmosphere of impunity becomes the seduction for others to become traffickers.
“A slave purchased for $10,000 could end up making her owner $160,000 in profits before she dies or runs away,” Siddharth Kara noted in a talk on sex trafficking at the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. In fact, a child in Vietnam can be bought for as little as $400.
Slavery is not going away because the agony of human enslavement remains largely invisible in the public discourse. It is just as shocking that Eritrean refugees are hunted nightly by traffickers as it is that their story remains hidden in darkness.
NAM editor Andrew Lam is author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise," is due out in 2013.
Curiosity for Life on Mars: Our Place is in Space
Mars has become a very busy place, being orbited by satellites and crisscrossed by Land Rovers. As if that's not enough, Curiosity, a roving science laboratory, just successful landed at the planet's ancient crater to probe for signs that the planet was life-friendly in the past.
Indeed, we are mapping and processing our neighboring planet so extensively that it feels as if Mars has already been colonized. There is even a Google Mars website if you want to see the planet's surface in technicolor.
Man, despite our earthly crises, remains enthralled by the cosmos. NASA is planning manned missions to Mars in the 2030's- with the cooperation of Japan and Europe - and plans to establish a permanent station on the moon. China, too, hopes to have a manned station orbiting the moon, having sent a moon orbiter in 2010 to map it out and in 2013, it'll send a landing rover. All the while, our satellites, probes and telescopes are peering deep into the heavens looking for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Welcome to the post-global age. We are now entering an age where human interactions reach beyond the stratospheres of our world toward the cosmos.
Call it cosmozation, or better yet, empyrealization--an age where man's reach for the heavens is realized. Neither words exist yet in the dictionary, but for that matter neither did globalization 3 decades ago. (So feel free to come up with a coinage that may be à propos to our post-global age.)
Roland Robertson, a social scientist, defines globalization as "The compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole." The world shrinks, geographical constraints are overcome, while identities become multilayered, complex. As a species, we may not always get along with each other, but these days, thanks to an integrated economy and unprecedented mass movement across the various borders, and modern technology--satellites, cell phones, jet planes, the internet, and so on--we are, like it or not, constantly aware of each other's existence. Humans are, in fact, interacting and influencing one another on an unprecedented scale and intensity, regardless of the distances.
Taking Robertson's definition a step further, it seems inevitable that the universe too, shrinks and compresses as we explore and measure it, and as we infer profound implications from our discoveries. Cosmozation, or empyrealization, is then the process by which man's awareness and influence expand beyond our planet: We grow cognizant that we exists on intimate levels with the rest of the universe, that we are interacting with it, and, increasingly, having an effect upon it.
While thinkers and writers still haven't come to terms with the full impact of the forces of globalization, another age is already upon us - one in which man's awareness expands beyond the globe as his relationship with the cosmos intensifies.
There's a radical shift taking place in regards to our relationship with the universe. Not so long ago, until Copernicus came along, we assumed our world was the universe's center -- and, for that matter, flat -- and that the sun orbited Earth. Most of last century we held on to the notion that our solar system was unique. And scientists just a generation ago assumed, too, that conditions on Earth -- a protective atmosphere, ample water and volcanic activity -- made it the only planet that could possibly support life.
Now we know that the conditions on our home planet may be unique, but solar systems are not at all anomalies. In fact, we are in the process of accepting that we are very much part of the larger universe. Furthermore, by sending space probes to the edge of the solar system, by collecting moon rocks and comet dust, by landing probes on Mars to dig for soils and search for signs of life, we are in constant exchange with the universe.
As astonishing discoveries are being made, that sense of self-importance has eroded, giving way to a more humble assessment of our place in the cosmos.
Consider some of these recent discoveries.
*Using the Hubble telescopes and the Kepler observatory, which orbit Earth, and the Hale Telescope in California, astronomers have discovered hundreds of other solar systems, and nearly 800 exoplanets--planets that are outside our solar systems. One planet in particular, 150 million light years away, is believed to have an atmosphere.
*We know that Earth is constantly bombarded by meteors when we look up into the night sky and spot shooting stars. But more astounding is astronomer Lou Frank's recent discovery. Using the Hubble Telescope to study Earth's atmosphere, Frank proved that Earth is constantly being hit by snowballs from space. The implications are enormous: If ice from outer space hits Earth regularly, it could be "raining" onto other planets too, providing much-needed water to support life. The universe is suddenly very wet.
*A few years ago a meteorite from Mars found on Earth, known as the Allan Hills meteorite (or ALH 84001 to scientists), astonished everyone when some scientists claimed they found tantalizing traces of fossilized life within it. Their findings have been contested, but the discovery fired up the imagination.
*Moreover, the Galileo space probe that orbited Jupiter showed us that on Europa, one on Jupiter's many moons, huge oceans lie beneath an icy surface. Scientists found active volcanoes as well - that is to say, ingredients that could spark and possibly support life.
*More tantalizing still is the organic materials found in comet dust collected from the comet Wild 2. Here's NASA's press release on the comet dust brought back to Earth by the space probe Stardust: "These chunks of ice and dust wandering our solar system appear to be filled with organic molecules that are the building blocks of life."
The finding surprised scientists because many predicted that the space probe would find mostly ice. Instead, the finding could lend support to the belief that comets could have "seeded" life on our planet as well as others.
*Then, of course, there's the discovery of water on the moon. Scientists found this by deliberately crashing a rocket stage into the moon in 2009, and, in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater, found up to a billion gallons of water and ice near the moon's south pole.
And if there's water aplenty in the universe, then why not DNA? "Panspermia" (originating from the Greek word for "all-seeding"), the hypothesis that seeds of life could have been delivered to Earth - and possibly other planets--is now revised; this theory of an interstellar exchange of DNA was championed by Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule with two other scientists more than half a century ago, was ridiculed last century. But if scientists laughed behind the Nobel laureate's back when he first suggested it, no one is laughing now.
Besides, there is such a thing as self fulfilling prophecy: If Earth didn't receive DNA for a primordial start- up way back when, we are now actively sending out our earthly DNA to space via the forms of various microbes that are riding along with our space crafts and satellites and shuttles that are scattered out into the universe.
As a result, ours is no longer just a lonely blue planet amidst the heavens. As we send probes and manned missions to the comos and map the universe, as we enthusiastically search for signs of life elsewhere and collect comet dust - earth seems to exist increasingly as part of an open and intricately complex system.
War and strife and revolutions and bloodshed seem endless on our home world, but when man gazes up at the night sky, it remains alluring and sublime. To paraphrase the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, that sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus. And with a rover named Curiosity actively searching for signs of past life on Mars, there's no doubt that our place is in space, and the cosmic age has indeed arrived.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in March, 2013.
Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam
Indeed, we are mapping and processing our neighboring planet so extensively that it feels as if Mars has already been colonized. There is even a Google Mars website if you want to see the planet's surface in technicolor.
Man, despite our earthly crises, remains enthralled by the cosmos. NASA is planning manned missions to Mars in the 2030's- with the cooperation of Japan and Europe - and plans to establish a permanent station on the moon. China, too, hopes to have a manned station orbiting the moon, having sent a moon orbiter in 2010 to map it out and in 2013, it'll send a landing rover. All the while, our satellites, probes and telescopes are peering deep into the heavens looking for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Welcome to the post-global age. We are now entering an age where human interactions reach beyond the stratospheres of our world toward the cosmos.
Call it cosmozation, or better yet, empyrealization--an age where man's reach for the heavens is realized. Neither words exist yet in the dictionary, but for that matter neither did globalization 3 decades ago. (So feel free to come up with a coinage that may be à propos to our post-global age.)
Roland Robertson, a social scientist, defines globalization as "The compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole." The world shrinks, geographical constraints are overcome, while identities become multilayered, complex. As a species, we may not always get along with each other, but these days, thanks to an integrated economy and unprecedented mass movement across the various borders, and modern technology--satellites, cell phones, jet planes, the internet, and so on--we are, like it or not, constantly aware of each other's existence. Humans are, in fact, interacting and influencing one another on an unprecedented scale and intensity, regardless of the distances.
Taking Robertson's definition a step further, it seems inevitable that the universe too, shrinks and compresses as we explore and measure it, and as we infer profound implications from our discoveries. Cosmozation, or empyrealization, is then the process by which man's awareness and influence expand beyond our planet: We grow cognizant that we exists on intimate levels with the rest of the universe, that we are interacting with it, and, increasingly, having an effect upon it.
While thinkers and writers still haven't come to terms with the full impact of the forces of globalization, another age is already upon us - one in which man's awareness expands beyond the globe as his relationship with the cosmos intensifies.
There's a radical shift taking place in regards to our relationship with the universe. Not so long ago, until Copernicus came along, we assumed our world was the universe's center -- and, for that matter, flat -- and that the sun orbited Earth. Most of last century we held on to the notion that our solar system was unique. And scientists just a generation ago assumed, too, that conditions on Earth -- a protective atmosphere, ample water and volcanic activity -- made it the only planet that could possibly support life.
Now we know that the conditions on our home planet may be unique, but solar systems are not at all anomalies. In fact, we are in the process of accepting that we are very much part of the larger universe. Furthermore, by sending space probes to the edge of the solar system, by collecting moon rocks and comet dust, by landing probes on Mars to dig for soils and search for signs of life, we are in constant exchange with the universe.
As astonishing discoveries are being made, that sense of self-importance has eroded, giving way to a more humble assessment of our place in the cosmos.
Consider some of these recent discoveries.
*Using the Hubble telescopes and the Kepler observatory, which orbit Earth, and the Hale Telescope in California, astronomers have discovered hundreds of other solar systems, and nearly 800 exoplanets--planets that are outside our solar systems. One planet in particular, 150 million light years away, is believed to have an atmosphere.
*We know that Earth is constantly bombarded by meteors when we look up into the night sky and spot shooting stars. But more astounding is astronomer Lou Frank's recent discovery. Using the Hubble Telescope to study Earth's atmosphere, Frank proved that Earth is constantly being hit by snowballs from space. The implications are enormous: If ice from outer space hits Earth regularly, it could be "raining" onto other planets too, providing much-needed water to support life. The universe is suddenly very wet.
*A few years ago a meteorite from Mars found on Earth, known as the Allan Hills meteorite (or ALH 84001 to scientists), astonished everyone when some scientists claimed they found tantalizing traces of fossilized life within it. Their findings have been contested, but the discovery fired up the imagination.
*Moreover, the Galileo space probe that orbited Jupiter showed us that on Europa, one on Jupiter's many moons, huge oceans lie beneath an icy surface. Scientists found active volcanoes as well - that is to say, ingredients that could spark and possibly support life.
*More tantalizing still is the organic materials found in comet dust collected from the comet Wild 2. Here's NASA's press release on the comet dust brought back to Earth by the space probe Stardust: "These chunks of ice and dust wandering our solar system appear to be filled with organic molecules that are the building blocks of life."
The finding surprised scientists because many predicted that the space probe would find mostly ice. Instead, the finding could lend support to the belief that comets could have "seeded" life on our planet as well as others.
*Then, of course, there's the discovery of water on the moon. Scientists found this by deliberately crashing a rocket stage into the moon in 2009, and, in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater, found up to a billion gallons of water and ice near the moon's south pole.
And if there's water aplenty in the universe, then why not DNA? "Panspermia" (originating from the Greek word for "all-seeding"), the hypothesis that seeds of life could have been delivered to Earth - and possibly other planets--is now revised; this theory of an interstellar exchange of DNA was championed by Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule with two other scientists more than half a century ago, was ridiculed last century. But if scientists laughed behind the Nobel laureate's back when he first suggested it, no one is laughing now.
Besides, there is such a thing as self fulfilling prophecy: If Earth didn't receive DNA for a primordial start- up way back when, we are now actively sending out our earthly DNA to space via the forms of various microbes that are riding along with our space crafts and satellites and shuttles that are scattered out into the universe.
As a result, ours is no longer just a lonely blue planet amidst the heavens. As we send probes and manned missions to the comos and map the universe, as we enthusiastically search for signs of life elsewhere and collect comet dust - earth seems to exist increasingly as part of an open and intricately complex system.
War and strife and revolutions and bloodshed seem endless on our home world, but when man gazes up at the night sky, it remains alluring and sublime. To paraphrase the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, that sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus. And with a rover named Curiosity actively searching for signs of past life on Mars, there's no doubt that our place is in space, and the cosmic age has indeed arrived.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in March, 2013.
Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam
Curiosity for Life on Mars: Our Place is in Space
Mars has become a very busy place, being orbited by satellites and crisscrossed by Land Rovers. As if that's not enough, Curiosity, a roving science laboratory, just successful landed at the planet's ancient crater to probe for signs that the planet was life-friendly in the past.
Indeed, we are mapping and processing our neighboring planet so extensively that it feels as if Mars has already been colonized. There is even a Google Mars website if you want to see the planet's surface in technicolor.
Man, despite our earthly crises, remains enthralled by the cosmos. NASA is planning manned missions to Mars in the 2030's- with the cooperation of Japan and Europe - and plans to establish a permanent station on the moon. China, too, hopes to have a manned station orbiting the moon, having sent a moon orbiter in 2010 to map it out and in 2013, it'll send a landing rover. All the while, our satellites, probes and telescopes are peering deep into the heavens looking for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Welcome to the post-global age. We are now entering an age where human interactions reach beyond the stratospheres of our world toward the cosmos.
Call it cosmozation, or better yet, empyrealization--an age where man's reach for the heavens is realized. Neither words exist yet in the dictionary, but for that matter neither did globalization 3 decades ago. (So feel free to come up with a coinage that may be à propos to our post-global age.)
Roland Robertson, a social scientist, defines globalization as "The compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole." The world shrinks, geographical constraints are overcome, while identities become multilayered, complex. As a species, we may not always get along with each other, but these days, thanks to an integrated economy and unprecedented mass movement across the various borders, and modern technology--satellites, cell phones, jet planes, the internet, and so on--we are, like it or not, constantly aware of each other's existence. Humans are, in fact, interacting and influencing one another on an unprecedented scale and intensity, regardless of the distances.
Taking Robertson's definition a step further, it seems inevitable that the universe too, shrinks and compresses as we explore and measure it, and as we infer profound implications from our discoveries. Cosmozation, or empyrealization, is then the process by which man's awareness and influence expand beyond our planet: We grow cognizant that we exists on intimate levels with the rest of the universe, that we are interacting with it, and, increasingly, having an effect upon it.
While thinkers and writers still haven't come to terms with the full impact of the forces of globalization, another age is already upon us - one in which man's awareness expands beyond the globe as his relationship with the cosmos intensifies.
There's a radical shift taking place in regards to our relationship with the universe. Not so long ago, until Copernicus came along, we assumed our world was the universe's center -- and, for that matter, flat -- and that the sun orbited Earth. Most of last century we held on to the notion that our solar system was unique. And scientists just a generation ago assumed, too, that conditions on Earth -- a protective atmosphere, ample water and volcanic activity -- made it the only planet that could possibly support life.
Now we know that the conditions on our home planet may be unique, but solar systems are not at all anomalies. In fact, we are in the process of accepting that we are very much part of the larger universe. Furthermore, by sending space probes to the edge of the solar system, by collecting moon rocks and comet dust, by landing probes on Mars to dig for soils and search for signs of life, we are in constant exchange with the universe.
As astonishing discoveries are being made, that sense of self-importance has eroded, giving way to a more humble assessment of our place in the cosmos.
Consider some of these recent discoveries.
*Using the Hubble telescopes and the Kepler observatory, which orbit Earth, and the Hale Telescope in California, astronomers have discovered hundreds of other solar systems, and nearly 800 exoplanets--planets that are outside our solar systems. One < href=http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/... target=blank>planet in particular, 150 million light years away, is believed to have an atmosphere.
*We know that Earth is constantly bombarded by meteors when we look up into the night sky and spot shooting stars. But more astounding is astronomer Lou Frank's recent discovery. Using the Hubble Telescope to study Earth's atmosphere, Frank proved that Earth is constantly being hit by snowballs from space. The implications are enormous: If ice from outer space hits Earth regularly, it could be "raining" onto other planets too, providing much-needed water to support life. The universe is suddenly very wet.
*A few years ago a meteorite from Mars found on Earth, known as the Allan Hills meteorite (or ALH 84001 to scientists), astonished everyone when some scientists claimed they found tantalizing traces of fossilized life within it. Their findings have been contested, but the discovery fired up the imagination.
*Moreover, the Galileo space probe that orbited Jupiter showed us that on Europa, one on Jupiter's many moons, huge oceans lie beneath an icy surface. Scientists found active volcanoes as well - that is to say, ingredients that could spark and possibly support life.
*More tantalizing still is the organic materials found in comet dust collected from the comet Wild 2. Here's NASA's press release on the comet dust brought back to Earth by the space probe Stardust: "These chunks of ice and dust wandering our solar system appear to be filled with organic molecules that are the building blocks of life."
The finding surprised scientists because many predicted that the space probe would find mostly ice. Instead, the finding could lend support to the belief that comets could have "seeded" life on our planet as well as others.
*Then, of course, there's the discovery of water on the moon. Scientists found this by deliberately crashing a rocket stage into the moon in 2009, and, in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater, found up to a billion gallons of water and ice near the moon's south pole.
And if there's water aplenty in the universe, then why not DNA? "Panspermia" (originating from the Greek word for "all-seeding"), the hypothesis that seeds of life could have been delivered to Earth - and possibly other planets--is now revised; this theory of an interstellar exchange of DNA was championed by Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule with two other scientists more than half a century ago, was ridiculed last century. But if scientists laughed behind the Nobel laureate's back when he first suggested it, no one is laughing now.
Besides, there is such a thing as self fulfilling prophecy: If Earth didn't receive DNA for a primordial start- up way back when, we are now actively sending out our earthly DNA to space via the forms of various microbes that are riding along with our space crafts and satellites and shuttles that are scattered out into the universe.
As a result, ours is no longer just a lonely blue planet amidst the heavens. As we send probes and manned missions to the comos and map the universe, as we enthusiastically search for signs of life elsewhere and collect comet dust - earth seems to exist increasingly as part of an open and intricately complex system.
War and strife and revolutions and bloodshed seem endless on our home world, but when man gazes up at the night sky, it remains alluring and sublime. To paraphrase the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, that sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus. And with a rover named Curiosity actively searching for signs of past life on Mars, there's no doubt that our place is in space, and the cosmic age has indeed arrived.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in March, 2013.
Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam
Indeed, we are mapping and processing our neighboring planet so extensively that it feels as if Mars has already been colonized. There is even a Google Mars website if you want to see the planet's surface in technicolor.
Man, despite our earthly crises, remains enthralled by the cosmos. NASA is planning manned missions to Mars in the 2030's- with the cooperation of Japan and Europe - and plans to establish a permanent station on the moon. China, too, hopes to have a manned station orbiting the moon, having sent a moon orbiter in 2010 to map it out and in 2013, it'll send a landing rover. All the while, our satellites, probes and telescopes are peering deep into the heavens looking for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Welcome to the post-global age. We are now entering an age where human interactions reach beyond the stratospheres of our world toward the cosmos.
Call it cosmozation, or better yet, empyrealization--an age where man's reach for the heavens is realized. Neither words exist yet in the dictionary, but for that matter neither did globalization 3 decades ago. (So feel free to come up with a coinage that may be à propos to our post-global age.)
Roland Robertson, a social scientist, defines globalization as "The compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole." The world shrinks, geographical constraints are overcome, while identities become multilayered, complex. As a species, we may not always get along with each other, but these days, thanks to an integrated economy and unprecedented mass movement across the various borders, and modern technology--satellites, cell phones, jet planes, the internet, and so on--we are, like it or not, constantly aware of each other's existence. Humans are, in fact, interacting and influencing one another on an unprecedented scale and intensity, regardless of the distances.
Taking Robertson's definition a step further, it seems inevitable that the universe too, shrinks and compresses as we explore and measure it, and as we infer profound implications from our discoveries. Cosmozation, or empyrealization, is then the process by which man's awareness and influence expand beyond our planet: We grow cognizant that we exists on intimate levels with the rest of the universe, that we are interacting with it, and, increasingly, having an effect upon it.
While thinkers and writers still haven't come to terms with the full impact of the forces of globalization, another age is already upon us - one in which man's awareness expands beyond the globe as his relationship with the cosmos intensifies.
There's a radical shift taking place in regards to our relationship with the universe. Not so long ago, until Copernicus came along, we assumed our world was the universe's center -- and, for that matter, flat -- and that the sun orbited Earth. Most of last century we held on to the notion that our solar system was unique. And scientists just a generation ago assumed, too, that conditions on Earth -- a protective atmosphere, ample water and volcanic activity -- made it the only planet that could possibly support life.
Now we know that the conditions on our home planet may be unique, but solar systems are not at all anomalies. In fact, we are in the process of accepting that we are very much part of the larger universe. Furthermore, by sending space probes to the edge of the solar system, by collecting moon rocks and comet dust, by landing probes on Mars to dig for soils and search for signs of life, we are in constant exchange with the universe.
As astonishing discoveries are being made, that sense of self-importance has eroded, giving way to a more humble assessment of our place in the cosmos.
Consider some of these recent discoveries.
*Using the Hubble telescopes and the Kepler observatory, which orbit Earth, and the Hale Telescope in California, astronomers have discovered hundreds of other solar systems, and nearly 800 exoplanets--planets that are outside our solar systems. One < href=http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/... target=blank>planet in particular, 150 million light years away, is believed to have an atmosphere.
*We know that Earth is constantly bombarded by meteors when we look up into the night sky and spot shooting stars. But more astounding is astronomer Lou Frank's recent discovery. Using the Hubble Telescope to study Earth's atmosphere, Frank proved that Earth is constantly being hit by snowballs from space. The implications are enormous: If ice from outer space hits Earth regularly, it could be "raining" onto other planets too, providing much-needed water to support life. The universe is suddenly very wet.
*A few years ago a meteorite from Mars found on Earth, known as the Allan Hills meteorite (or ALH 84001 to scientists), astonished everyone when some scientists claimed they found tantalizing traces of fossilized life within it. Their findings have been contested, but the discovery fired up the imagination.
*Moreover, the Galileo space probe that orbited Jupiter showed us that on Europa, one on Jupiter's many moons, huge oceans lie beneath an icy surface. Scientists found active volcanoes as well - that is to say, ingredients that could spark and possibly support life.
*More tantalizing still is the organic materials found in comet dust collected from the comet Wild 2. Here's NASA's press release on the comet dust brought back to Earth by the space probe Stardust: "These chunks of ice and dust wandering our solar system appear to be filled with organic molecules that are the building blocks of life."
The finding surprised scientists because many predicted that the space probe would find mostly ice. Instead, the finding could lend support to the belief that comets could have "seeded" life on our planet as well as others.
*Then, of course, there's the discovery of water on the moon. Scientists found this by deliberately crashing a rocket stage into the moon in 2009, and, in the floor of a permanently-shadowed crater, found up to a billion gallons of water and ice near the moon's south pole.
And if there's water aplenty in the universe, then why not DNA? "Panspermia" (originating from the Greek word for "all-seeding"), the hypothesis that seeds of life could have been delivered to Earth - and possibly other planets--is now revised; this theory of an interstellar exchange of DNA was championed by Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule with two other scientists more than half a century ago, was ridiculed last century. But if scientists laughed behind the Nobel laureate's back when he first suggested it, no one is laughing now.
Besides, there is such a thing as self fulfilling prophecy: If Earth didn't receive DNA for a primordial start- up way back when, we are now actively sending out our earthly DNA to space via the forms of various microbes that are riding along with our space crafts and satellites and shuttles that are scattered out into the universe.
As a result, ours is no longer just a lonely blue planet amidst the heavens. As we send probes and manned missions to the comos and map the universe, as we enthusiastically search for signs of life elsewhere and collect comet dust - earth seems to exist increasingly as part of an open and intricately complex system.
War and strife and revolutions and bloodshed seem endless on our home world, but when man gazes up at the night sky, it remains alluring and sublime. To paraphrase the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, that sea on which humanity now sails is infinitely more vast than that imagined by Columbus. And with a rover named Curiosity actively searching for signs of past life on Mars, there's no doubt that our place is in space, and the cosmic age has indeed arrived.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in March, 2013.
Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam
Buddha in the West: Even Bill Clinton Turns toward Meditation
Buddhism made a bleep in the news early this month when the Times of India, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton, has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former US president went as far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation.
While this may come as a surprise to some but to many others it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.
I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.
In October of 2009, CNN reported that, "programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country." There are more than 75 organizations working with some 2,500 people, most of them prisoners, and they inspired a documentary called "The Dhamma Brothers." where inmates reached inner peace and spiritual maturity through meditation and the practice of compassion.
This was the same year that Thomas Dyer, a former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor, became the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army and he was sent to Afghanistan to administer to Buddhist American soldiers.
Over the past quarter-century, Buddhism has become the third largest religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant. The UT San Diego newspaper estimated that there are at least 1.2 million Americans who are buddhist practitioners, the majority of whom live in California. Other scholars estimated that number to be as high as 6.7 million.
Even if small in population, the influence of Buddhist ideas are clearly strong on the cultural spheres. When the Dalai Lama visited the US three years ago, for example, he was a celebrity at every American institution. One scene in particular remains memorable: the most famous monk in the world sat on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world and exploring the concept of the soul, as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.
Yet, despite Buddhism's message of inner peace and compassion, it, in its own way, is a very radical spiritual practice for its refutation of the existence of a creator. In essence, the serious practitioner aims to extinguish the self by defeating his own ego and, thereby, seeing beyond the illusion spun by the ignorant mind.
The ultimate Buddhist experience entails neither god nor self, neither "out there" nor "in here," for that membrane that separates the practitioner's being and that of the world, upon awakening, has been lifted. All that remains is - ohm - absolute awe and bliss. Imagine, if you will, Moses not turning his face away from the burning bush that is god but approaching it then fully merging with that terrifying fire. To reach spiritual maturity, the I must, at least temporarily in meditation, be dissolved.
"Buddhism," writes Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, "challenges many Americans at the very core of their thinking about religion -- at least, those of us for whom religion has something to do with one we call God."
As ties deepened between the two continents, as immigration from Asia continues unabated, and as the Dhamma [Buddha's teachings] spreads beyond all borders, we are entering what many thinkers and philosophers call the second axial age, an age of pluralism where the various spiritual traditions co-exist.
In these global days, no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change, all exist to a various degree of openness and exchange. And the old Silk Road along which so many religious ideas traveled has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications, and the information highway, which transcends geography.
I once kept on my study's wall two very different pictures to remind me of the way East and West have changed. One is an issue from a Time magazine on Buddhism in America. In it, a group of American Buddhists sits serenely in lotus position on a wooden veranda in Malibu overlooking a calm Pacific Ocean. The other is of Vietnamese-American astronaut named Eugene Trinh's space shuttle flight. The pictures tell me that East and West have not only met, but also commingled and fused. When a Vietnamese man who left his impoverished homeland can come very close to reaching the moon, while Americans are becoming psychonauts - navigators of the mind - turning inward, trying to reach nirvana with each mindful breath, I think that the East-West dialogue has come a long, long way.
New America Media's editor, Andrew Lam, is the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in Spring, 2013.
While this may come as a surprise to some but to many others it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.
I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.
In October of 2009, CNN reported that, "programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country." There are more than 75 organizations working with some 2,500 people, most of them prisoners, and they inspired a documentary called "The Dhamma Brothers." where inmates reached inner peace and spiritual maturity through meditation and the practice of compassion.
This was the same year that Thomas Dyer, a former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor, became the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army and he was sent to Afghanistan to administer to Buddhist American soldiers.
Over the past quarter-century, Buddhism has become the third largest religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant. The UT San Diego newspaper estimated that there are at least 1.2 million Americans who are buddhist practitioners, the majority of whom live in California. Other scholars estimated that number to be as high as 6.7 million.
Even if small in population, the influence of Buddhist ideas are clearly strong on the cultural spheres. When the Dalai Lama visited the US three years ago, for example, he was a celebrity at every American institution. One scene in particular remains memorable: the most famous monk in the world sat on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world and exploring the concept of the soul, as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.
Yet, despite Buddhism's message of inner peace and compassion, it, in its own way, is a very radical spiritual practice for its refutation of the existence of a creator. In essence, the serious practitioner aims to extinguish the self by defeating his own ego and, thereby, seeing beyond the illusion spun by the ignorant mind.
The ultimate Buddhist experience entails neither god nor self, neither "out there" nor "in here," for that membrane that separates the practitioner's being and that of the world, upon awakening, has been lifted. All that remains is - ohm - absolute awe and bliss. Imagine, if you will, Moses not turning his face away from the burning bush that is god but approaching it then fully merging with that terrifying fire. To reach spiritual maturity, the I must, at least temporarily in meditation, be dissolved.
"Buddhism," writes Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, "challenges many Americans at the very core of their thinking about religion -- at least, those of us for whom religion has something to do with one we call God."
As ties deepened between the two continents, as immigration from Asia continues unabated, and as the Dhamma [Buddha's teachings] spreads beyond all borders, we are entering what many thinkers and philosophers call the second axial age, an age of pluralism where the various spiritual traditions co-exist.
In these global days, no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change, all exist to a various degree of openness and exchange. And the old Silk Road along which so many religious ideas traveled has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications, and the information highway, which transcends geography.
I once kept on my study's wall two very different pictures to remind me of the way East and West have changed. One is an issue from a Time magazine on Buddhism in America. In it, a group of American Buddhists sits serenely in lotus position on a wooden veranda in Malibu overlooking a calm Pacific Ocean. The other is of Vietnamese-American astronaut named Eugene Trinh's space shuttle flight. The pictures tell me that East and West have not only met, but also commingled and fused. When a Vietnamese man who left his impoverished homeland can come very close to reaching the moon, while Americans are becoming psychonauts - navigators of the mind - turning inward, trying to reach nirvana with each mindful breath, I think that the East-West dialogue has come a long, long way.
New America Media's editor, Andrew Lam, is the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in Spring, 2013.
Buddha in the West: Even Bill Clinton Turns toward Meditation
Buddhism made a bleep in the news early this month when the Times of India, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton, has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former US president went as far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation.
While this may come as a surprise to some but to many others it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.
I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.
In October of 2009, CNN reported that, "programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country." There are more than 75 organizations working with some 2,500 people, most of them prisoners, and they inspired a documentary called "The Dhamma Brothers," where inmates reached inner peace and spiritual maturity through meditation and the practice of compassion.
This was the same year that Thomas Dyer, a former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor, became the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army and he was sent to Afghanistan to administer to Buddhist American soldiers.
Over the past quarter-century, Buddhism has become the third largest religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant. The UT San Diego newspaper estimated that there are at least 1.2 million Americans who are buddhist practitioners, the majority of whom live in California. Other scholars estimated that number to be as high as 6.7 million.
Even if small in population, the influence of Buddhist ideas are clearly strong on the cultural spheres. When the Dalai Lama visited the US three years ago, for example, he was a celebrity at every American institution. One scene in particular remains memorable: the most famous monk in the world sat on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world and exploring the concept of the soul, as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.
Yet, despite Buddhism's message of inner peace and compassion, it, in its own way, is a very radical spiritual practice for its refutation of the existence of a creator. In essence, the serious practitioner aims to extinguish the self by defeating his own ego and, thereby, seeing beyond the illusion spun by the ignorant mind.
The ultimate Buddhist experience entails neither god nor self, neither "out there" nor "in here," for that membrane that separates the practitioner's being and that of the world, upon awakening, has been lifted. All that remains is - ohm - absolute awe and bliss. Imagine, if you will, Moses not turning his face away from the burning bush that is god but approaching it then fully merging with that terrifying fire. To reach spiritual maturity, the I must, at least temporarily in meditation, be dissolved.
"Buddhism," writes Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, "challenges many Americans at the very core of their thinking about religion -- at least, those of us for whom religion has something to do with one we call God."
As ties deepened between the two continents, as immigration from Asia continues unabated, and as the Dhamma [Buddha's teachings] spreads beyond all borders, we are entering what many thinkers and philosophers call the second axial age, an age of pluralism where the various spiritual traditions co-exist.
In these global days, no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change, all exist to a various degree of openness and exchange. And the old Silk Road along which so many religious ideas traveled has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications, and the information highway, which transcends geography.
I once kept on my study's wall two very different pictures to remind me of the way East and West have changed. One is an issue from a Time magazine on Buddhism in America. In it, a group of American Buddhists sits serenely in lotus position on a wooden veranda in Malibu overlooking a calm Pacific Ocean. The other is of Vietnamese-American astronaut named Eugene Trinh's space shuttle flight. The pictures tell me that East and West have not only met, but also commingled and fused. When a Vietnamese man who left his impoverished homeland can come very close to reaching the moon, while Americans are becoming psychonauts - navigators of the mind - turning inward, trying to reach nirvana with each mindful breath, I think that the East-West dialogue has come a long, long way.
New America Media's editor, Andrew Lam, is the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in Spring, 2013.
While this may come as a surprise to some but to many others it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.
I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.
In October of 2009, CNN reported that, "programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country." There are more than 75 organizations working with some 2,500 people, most of them prisoners, and they inspired a documentary called "The Dhamma Brothers," where inmates reached inner peace and spiritual maturity through meditation and the practice of compassion.
This was the same year that Thomas Dyer, a former Marine and one-time Southern Baptist pastor, became the first Buddhist chaplain in the history of the U.S. Army and he was sent to Afghanistan to administer to Buddhist American soldiers.
Over the past quarter-century, Buddhism has become the third largest religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant. The UT San Diego newspaper estimated that there are at least 1.2 million Americans who are buddhist practitioners, the majority of whom live in California. Other scholars estimated that number to be as high as 6.7 million.
Even if small in population, the influence of Buddhist ideas are clearly strong on the cultural spheres. When the Dalai Lama visited the US three years ago, for example, he was a celebrity at every American institution. One scene in particular remains memorable: the most famous monk in the world sat on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world and exploring the concept of the soul, as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.
Yet, despite Buddhism's message of inner peace and compassion, it, in its own way, is a very radical spiritual practice for its refutation of the existence of a creator. In essence, the serious practitioner aims to extinguish the self by defeating his own ego and, thereby, seeing beyond the illusion spun by the ignorant mind.
The ultimate Buddhist experience entails neither god nor self, neither "out there" nor "in here," for that membrane that separates the practitioner's being and that of the world, upon awakening, has been lifted. All that remains is - ohm - absolute awe and bliss. Imagine, if you will, Moses not turning his face away from the burning bush that is god but approaching it then fully merging with that terrifying fire. To reach spiritual maturity, the I must, at least temporarily in meditation, be dissolved.
"Buddhism," writes Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, "challenges many Americans at the very core of their thinking about religion -- at least, those of us for whom religion has something to do with one we call God."
As ties deepened between the two continents, as immigration from Asia continues unabated, and as the Dhamma [Buddha's teachings] spreads beyond all borders, we are entering what many thinkers and philosophers call the second axial age, an age of pluralism where the various spiritual traditions co-exist.
In these global days, no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change, all exist to a various degree of openness and exchange. And the old Silk Road along which so many religious ideas traveled has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications, and the information highway, which transcends geography.
I once kept on my study's wall two very different pictures to remind me of the way East and West have changed. One is an issue from a Time magazine on Buddhism in America. In it, a group of American Buddhists sits serenely in lotus position on a wooden veranda in Malibu overlooking a calm Pacific Ocean. The other is of Vietnamese-American astronaut named Eugene Trinh's space shuttle flight. The pictures tell me that East and West have not only met, but also commingled and fused. When a Vietnamese man who left his impoverished homeland can come very close to reaching the moon, while Americans are becoming psychonauts - navigators of the mind - turning inward, trying to reach nirvana with each mindful breath, I think that the East-West dialogue has come a long, long way.
New America Media's editor, Andrew Lam, is the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in Spring, 2013.
East And West Meet And Greet
Nina Sankovitch of Read All Day reviewed my book East Eats West: Wrtiing in Two Hemispheres in 2010. Below is her review in
Andrew Lam’s collection of essays, very cleverly entitled East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a timely ode to the growing Eastern influences on Western, particularly American, cultural traditions.
But even more, it is a moving recollection of how Lam himself, as Eastern as could be when he arrived in San Francisco as a twelve-year old refugee from the fall of Saigon, fell under the influences of the West. Lam covers the big three “e”s of everyday life — entertainment, education, and eating — and discusses how Western and Eastern takes on these all-importance endeavors play back and forth against each other, everything from action movies to comics and manga, to the deliciously described Pho stew, prepared worldwide now but a salient and significant memory from Lam’s Vietnamese childhood.
Lam takes on the education question with brave gusto, pitting the Eastern tradition of respect for the teacher, self-effacement, and community against American individualism, egotism (the self-esteem movement in education that may be leaving whole generations with inflated egos and unfulfilled potential), and freedom (he is grateful for the career of writer, a bliss he never could have discovered if he had stayed in Vietnam or on the medical career course proscribed to him by his parents).
Lam writes with honesty, wit, and excitement — this man is never bored by what he covers in his works. For him words are sacred, and are to be spent only in recording what is deserving of remembrance. Much as his mother lights the daily incense in honor of deceased relatives, Lam writes his daily words in honor of all the interesting ideas, people, activities, sights, smells, and sounds that make up his marvelous world. How lucky for us that he shares his words, and his world.
Andrew Lam’s collection of essays, very cleverly entitled East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a timely ode to the growing Eastern influences on Western, particularly American, cultural traditions.
But even more, it is a moving recollection of how Lam himself, as Eastern as could be when he arrived in San Francisco as a twelve-year old refugee from the fall of Saigon, fell under the influences of the West. Lam covers the big three “e”s of everyday life — entertainment, education, and eating — and discusses how Western and Eastern takes on these all-importance endeavors play back and forth against each other, everything from action movies to comics and manga, to the deliciously described Pho stew, prepared worldwide now but a salient and significant memory from Lam’s Vietnamese childhood.
Lam takes on the education question with brave gusto, pitting the Eastern tradition of respect for the teacher, self-effacement, and community against American individualism, egotism (the self-esteem movement in education that may be leaving whole generations with inflated egos and unfulfilled potential), and freedom (he is grateful for the career of writer, a bliss he never could have discovered if he had stayed in Vietnam or on the medical career course proscribed to him by his parents).
Lam writes with honesty, wit, and excitement — this man is never bored by what he covers in his works. For him words are sacred, and are to be spent only in recording what is deserving of remembrance. Much as his mother lights the daily incense in honor of deceased relatives, Lam writes his daily words in honor of all the interesting ideas, people, activities, sights, smells, and sounds that make up his marvelous world. How lucky for us that he shares his words, and his world.
Kung Fu Secret Fighting Techniques: Available Soon in English
Lam Chun-fai, a master of Southern Chinese kung-fu style, Hung Kuen, is the first of the kung fu masters to publish a fighting manual in English. Hung Kuen is a secret technique that has been closely guarded and, up until now, only transmitted orally to trusted pupils. News of the publication of the manual stirred excitement among some kung fu aficionados in Europe and in the United States.
Teacher Lam's reason: Kung fu is in steep decline in Hong Kong, where he lives. There, youth are too obsessed with the internet -- video games, social media, YouTube and so on -- to be focusing on something as complicated as martial arts practices. To save his knowledge from extinction, the aging teacher is willing to divulge fighting secrets and techniques to foreigners.
The old master's techniques will be more than welcome in America and beyond. For a few decades now, martial arts have become the norm in America. On magazine racks at bookstores, you can find dozens of magazines with titles like "Inside Kung Fu," "Martial Arts Experts," "Black Belt," "Official Karate," "Dojo" and so on.
Turn on the TV and you'll see ads like the one for EASPORT where Golf legends Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer are engaged in kung fu fighting or see an ad for razor where a baby learns kung fu to fight his own father for the attention of his mother. For the video game enthusiasts, there are an array of choices: Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fu Rabbit, Kung Fu Master and countless other titles. And mixed martial arts have become the rage, with fighters using various fighting styles to do full contact combat.
So much has changed since Bruce Lee first flew like an avenging god across the silver screen in his awe-inspiring kick nearly half a century ago. Lee not only introduced martial arts to the West, he redefined cinematic language itself. Gone is the notion that bigger is better. Swiftness and a precise kick can topple mass. Agility proves superior to brawn. The body in martial arts motion is pure art, a kind of acrobatic dance endowed with a kind of lethal elegance and grace that had not, up until Bruce Lee, been imagined for cinematic fights.
Since then, it has become obvious to observers of globalization and its effects that no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change. All exist with varying degrees of openness and exchange. The old Silk Road, along which so many religious ideas traveled, has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications, and the information highway, which transcends geography.
We live now in an age of crossover, after all, where traditions from the East and the West exist side by side for the picking. Roles are being switched quickly enough. Steven Spielberg sells Kung Fu Panda to the Chinese and the Chinese sell blue jeans and iPhones to us. The majority of yoga teachers are white here in San Francisco, and when asked why Indians don't like to teach yoga, a journalist who hailed from Calcutta said, "Actually, most Indians I know don't do yoga, either. I wouldn't know a downward dog if it bit me." And a computer programmer who came from New Delhi joked, "Oh no, Indians are too busy doing computer programming in Silicon Valley. We might think about it if they have stock options."
The lesson we are quickly learning in the 21st century is that no one owns culture. The most popular ideas tend to transgress borders and in time, shed its old skin for a myriad of rebirth. It should come then as no surprise that the new martial arts master of the Hung Kuen style might have blond hair and blue eyes and the colonizers of the moon will speak Mandarin.
Meanwhile, with the Internet shrinking the globe, and with the world defined by mass movement, rendering geography obsolete, the whole world becomes a virtual library of Alexandria.
Some in Hong Kong may gripe about how cherished Southern Chinese fighting secrets are now literally an open book, but they may be surprised to find that Chinese kung fu itself not purely Chinese.
Historians may disagree but the 5th-6th century figure, Bodhidharma, a Buddhist monk from South Asia, looms large among Chinese martial arts practitioners as well as Buddhist scholars. Legend has it that, along with being the patriarch of Zen Buddhism, the reportedly ill-tempered but holy sage taught monks at the Shaolin Temple marvelous ancient yoga breathing techniques (which enabled him to scale tall mountains to arrive in China in the first place). Boddhidarma's disciples and their disciples went on to invent a myriad of kung fu fighting styles.
Which is to say, secrets often become an open book, and the heritage of one nation can quickly become the heritage of another in a blink of an eye, and that's the way it should be. It's the energy that is fueling the major part of the 21st -century global village, and it reinforces our knowledge that the borders have been porous all along.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost.
Andrew Lam's latest book, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about boat people who remade themselves in America's West Coast.
Teacher Lam's reason: Kung fu is in steep decline in Hong Kong, where he lives. There, youth are too obsessed with the internet -- video games, social media, YouTube and so on -- to be focusing on something as complicated as martial arts practices. To save his knowledge from extinction, the aging teacher is willing to divulge fighting secrets and techniques to foreigners.
The old master's techniques will be more than welcome in America and beyond. For a few decades now, martial arts have become the norm in America. On magazine racks at bookstores, you can find dozens of magazines with titles like "Inside Kung Fu," "Martial Arts Experts," "Black Belt," "Official Karate," "Dojo" and so on.
Turn on the TV and you'll see ads like the one for EASPORT where Golf legends Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer are engaged in kung fu fighting or see an ad for razor where a baby learns kung fu to fight his own father for the attention of his mother. For the video game enthusiasts, there are an array of choices: Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fu Rabbit, Kung Fu Master and countless other titles. And mixed martial arts have become the rage, with fighters using various fighting styles to do full contact combat.
So much has changed since Bruce Lee first flew like an avenging god across the silver screen in his awe-inspiring kick nearly half a century ago. Lee not only introduced martial arts to the West, he redefined cinematic language itself. Gone is the notion that bigger is better. Swiftness and a precise kick can topple mass. Agility proves superior to brawn. The body in martial arts motion is pure art, a kind of acrobatic dance endowed with a kind of lethal elegance and grace that had not, up until Bruce Lee, been imagined for cinematic fights.
Since then, it has become obvious to observers of globalization and its effects that no single system can exist as a separate entity, nor can its borders remain impervious to change. All exist with varying degrees of openness and exchange. The old Silk Road, along which so many religious ideas traveled, has been replaced by a far more potent thoroughfare: unprecedented global migration, mass communications, and the information highway, which transcends geography.
We live now in an age of crossover, after all, where traditions from the East and the West exist side by side for the picking. Roles are being switched quickly enough. Steven Spielberg sells Kung Fu Panda to the Chinese and the Chinese sell blue jeans and iPhones to us. The majority of yoga teachers are white here in San Francisco, and when asked why Indians don't like to teach yoga, a journalist who hailed from Calcutta said, "Actually, most Indians I know don't do yoga, either. I wouldn't know a downward dog if it bit me." And a computer programmer who came from New Delhi joked, "Oh no, Indians are too busy doing computer programming in Silicon Valley. We might think about it if they have stock options."
The lesson we are quickly learning in the 21st century is that no one owns culture. The most popular ideas tend to transgress borders and in time, shed its old skin for a myriad of rebirth. It should come then as no surprise that the new martial arts master of the Hung Kuen style might have blond hair and blue eyes and the colonizers of the moon will speak Mandarin.
Meanwhile, with the Internet shrinking the globe, and with the world defined by mass movement, rendering geography obsolete, the whole world becomes a virtual library of Alexandria.
Some in Hong Kong may gripe about how cherished Southern Chinese fighting secrets are now literally an open book, but they may be surprised to find that Chinese kung fu itself not purely Chinese.
Historians may disagree but the 5th-6th century figure, Bodhidharma, a Buddhist monk from South Asia, looms large among Chinese martial arts practitioners as well as Buddhist scholars. Legend has it that, along with being the patriarch of Zen Buddhism, the reportedly ill-tempered but holy sage taught monks at the Shaolin Temple marvelous ancient yoga breathing techniques (which enabled him to scale tall mountains to arrive in China in the first place). Boddhidarma's disciples and their disciples went on to invent a myriad of kung fu fighting styles.
Which is to say, secrets often become an open book, and the heritage of one nation can quickly become the heritage of another in a blink of an eye, and that's the way it should be. It's the energy that is fueling the major part of the 21st -century global village, and it reinforces our knowledge that the borders have been porous all along.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost.
Andrew Lam's latest book, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about boat people who remade themselves in America's West Coast.
Globalization: The World Changes America
A good friend, well traveled and educated, views the evils of globalization in very simple terms. It's a world in which everyone drinks coffee at Starbucks and eats at McDonald's and listens to Lady Gaga. That is to say, he sees globalization as synonymous to Americanization, and it depresses him.
But I tell him that he is mistaken. Though sometimes it's hard for many of us Americans to make that distinction, Americanization is only a small part of globalization. And if America is changing the world, the reverse is true also.
For me the most crucial aspect of globalization is the psychological transformation that's affecting people everywhere.
Let me offer my own biography as an example. I grew up a patriotic South Vietnamese living in Vietnam during the war. I remember singing the national anthem, swearing my allegiance to the flag. Wide-eyed child that I was, I believed every word.
But then the war ended and I, along with my family (and eventually a couple of million other Vietnamese), betrayed our agrarian ethos and land-bound sentiments by fleeing overseas to lead a very different life.
Almost four decades later, I make a living traveling between East Asia and the United States of America as an American journalist and writer. My relatives, once all concentrated in Saigon, are scattered across three continents, speaking three and four other languages, becoming citizens of several different countries.
Once sedentary and communal and bound by a singular sense of geography, we are now bona fide cosmopolitans who, when we get online or meet in person, still marvel at the difference between our past and our highly mobile if intricately complex present.
Yesterday my inheritance was simple -- the sacred rice fields and rivers that defined who I was. Today, Paris and Hanoi and New York are no longer fantasies but my larger community, places to which I feel a strong sense of connection due to familial relationships and friendships and personal ambitions.
Once great, the distances are no longer daunting but simply a matter of rescheduling.
I am hardly alone. There's a transnational revolution taking place, one right beneath our very noses. The Chinese businessman in Silicon Valley is constantly in touch with his Shanghai mother on a cell phone while his high-tech workers build microchips and pave the information superhighway for the rest of the world.
The Mexican migrant worker moves his family back and forth, one country to the other, treating the borders as if they were mere nuisances, and the blond teenager in Idaho is making friends with the Japanese girl in Osaka in a chatroom, their friendship easily forged as if time and space and cultural barriers have been breached by their lilting modems and the blinking satellites above.
The differences between my friend's view and my propositions are essentially the differences between a Disney animation and a Michael Ondaatje novel, say, "The English Patient."
Disney borrows world narratives ("Mulan" and "The Little Mermaid," for instance) for backdrops, but it rewrites all complicated stories toward a singular outcome: happily ever after.
It disembowels complexity, dismisses tragedy, forces differences into a blender and regurgitates formulaic platitudes. Thus, somewhere along the way, globalization is somehow equated to how America changes the world.
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 U.S., 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 afternoon in San Francisco 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.
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, Balinese dancers, kung fu, acupuncture, 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 the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
But I tell him that he is mistaken. Though sometimes it's hard for many of us Americans to make that distinction, Americanization is only a small part of globalization. And if America is changing the world, the reverse is true also.
For me the most crucial aspect of globalization is the psychological transformation that's affecting people everywhere.
Let me offer my own biography as an example. I grew up a patriotic South Vietnamese living in Vietnam during the war. I remember singing the national anthem, swearing my allegiance to the flag. Wide-eyed child that I was, I believed every word.
But then the war ended and I, along with my family (and eventually a couple of million other Vietnamese), betrayed our agrarian ethos and land-bound sentiments by fleeing overseas to lead a very different life.
Almost four decades later, I make a living traveling between East Asia and the United States of America as an American journalist and writer. My relatives, once all concentrated in Saigon, are scattered across three continents, speaking three and four other languages, becoming citizens of several different countries.
Once sedentary and communal and bound by a singular sense of geography, we are now bona fide cosmopolitans who, when we get online or meet in person, still marvel at the difference between our past and our highly mobile if intricately complex present.
Yesterday my inheritance was simple -- the sacred rice fields and rivers that defined who I was. Today, Paris and Hanoi and New York are no longer fantasies but my larger community, places to which I feel a strong sense of connection due to familial relationships and friendships and personal ambitions.
Once great, the distances are no longer daunting but simply a matter of rescheduling.
I am hardly alone. There's a transnational revolution taking place, one right beneath our very noses. The Chinese businessman in Silicon Valley is constantly in touch with his Shanghai mother on a cell phone while his high-tech workers build microchips and pave the information superhighway for the rest of the world.
The Mexican migrant worker moves his family back and forth, one country to the other, treating the borders as if they were mere nuisances, and the blond teenager in Idaho is making friends with the Japanese girl in Osaka in a chatroom, their friendship easily forged as if time and space and cultural barriers have been breached by their lilting modems and the blinking satellites above.
The differences between my friend's view and my propositions are essentially the differences between a Disney animation and a Michael Ondaatje novel, say, "The English Patient."
Disney borrows world narratives ("Mulan" and "The Little Mermaid," for instance) for backdrops, but it rewrites all complicated stories toward a singular outcome: happily ever after.
It disembowels complexity, dismisses tragedy, forces differences into a blender and regurgitates formulaic platitudes. Thus, somewhere along the way, globalization is somehow equated to how America changes the world.
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 U.S., 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 afternoon in San Francisco 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.
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, Balinese dancers, kung fu, acupuncture, 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 the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
Go Far East, Young Man: Americans Abroad
After losing a lucrative job in 2001 in San Francisco, Ted decided, instead of moving home, to live in Hong Kong, where he fell in love.
"I come home, but not frequently," said the 34-year-old, who hails from Minnesota. "My life is here now." (Ted didn't want his last name to be used because of privacy concerns.)
Like millions of other Americans, Ted, who also found a new career working in the high-tech end of the film industry, fled America and reinvented himself overseas. And nowhere is the expat invasion more evident than in East and Southeast Asia. In Hong Kong alone the number of American expats is estimated to be 60,000 in 2009, though many say that number is much higher.
That is almost the number of expats living in mainland China, which is somewhere around 72,000, according to the Chinese census. Kathy Pauli is one of them. She and her husband, both lawyers, decided to move from Washington, D.C., to Shanghai 10 years ago.
"We struggled at the beginning," she said. "Everything was difficult. Even opening an account at the bank was a big struggle."
Since then Shanghai has become home, and the couple have found lucrative work as attorneys dealing with international law.
Indeed, in my various travels, I have met countless Americans of all ages who have made lives outside of America, far from home. I know a Vietnamese-American woman who left America for Vietnam when George W. Bush became president and promised not to come back until he was out of office. I know another who had lived in Arizona most of his life, but who retired to Phuket, Thailand.
View of Shanghai from the Huangpu river.
As an immigrant to America, however, I feel an impulse to defend the sacred myth I tell myself: that one goes to America to reinvent oneself, not vice versa, that opportunities remain abundant in the promised land.
On the other hand, having traveled to East Asia regularly over the last two decades, I have been struck by the diaspora of America's young. Some years ago, one young businesswoman told me in Thailand: "No one says the American dream has to be within America's borders." In the age of globalization, she goes where the opportunities beckon.
Americans, of course, have ventured in waves to Asia many times before, usually bent on some form of conversion. By contrast, the new generation ventures abroad with a surprising sense of humility and open-mindedness, eager to rid themselves of America's "parochialism," bent on reinventing themselves through immersion in local cultures. In the process they are ultimately redefining the American frontier.
American immigrants too are discovering that the new frontier lies in the lands their parents abandoned. In Hong Kong, Asian American actors tell me they have found more work than Hollywood ever offered. In Saigon and Hanoi, a parade of young, well-educated Vietnamese Americans, who once saw themselves as history's losers, now feel they are riding a new historical wave. Vietnamese American filmmakers who couldn't make films in the United States are now making waves in Vietnam with their directorial debuts. An average film in Vietnam is made for less than $500,000 (USD).
Scene from Johnny Tri Nguyen's film, Clash
From Dustin Nguyen (21 Jump Street) to Johnny Tri Nguyen (Once upon a Time in Vietnam), the Vietnamese film and TV industry got a boost from its expat population. "Viet Kieu are now involved with at least half of the commercial films made in Vietnam -- a stunning development considering that not long ago those who returned faced deep suspicion from the Communist government as well as opposition from staunch anti-Communists in San Jose and Orange County," according to the San Jose Mercury News.
East Asia beckons. And young and now not-so-young Americans are responding (along with Australians, British and countless other Europeans).
Ironically, emigration out of the United States remains a little noted phenomenon -- no federal agency has a mandate to count emigrants. The State Department estimates 3 million U.S. citizens now live abroad, but most expats believe the actual number is much higher. Work exchange and education abroad programs report a rise in the number of students and recent graduates seeking to work abroad. U.S. companies overseas continue to grow.
If restlessness is a human impulse, Americans in particular have made it a national trait. It follows then that a country built on the proposition of expanding territory and transcending history requires a trans-Pacific imagination if the new generation is to have room to reinvent itself.
The future? I have seen it, but it belongs not to the old politicians cashing in on anti-immigrant hysteria, nor to the cranky intellectuals insisting America should look back to its European roots. Instead, the future belongs to the young American executive who sings Japanese songs in a karaoke bar in Tokyo "very well and without an accent," according to his Japanese counterpart; to the Cantonese-speaking American who negotiates across the continents as easily as she straddles two dissimilar cultures; to the Vietnamese American businesswoman who could have told us that home for her, for a while now, consists of two addresses, two time zones, two languages, two senses of history.
When he was growing up in Minnesota, Ted knew nothing about "the Orient," he said. "I didn't even know any Asians." By pure chance, after the dot.com bust, he was offered a lucrative software job in Taipei. Then he found love in Hong Kong. "I can travel the whole continent from here," he boasts as he looked out to the Hong Kong harbor. "I'd discover a new country, a new city every few months."
A more humble Columbus, Ted is finally imagining the two hemispheres as one.
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 the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
"I come home, but not frequently," said the 34-year-old, who hails from Minnesota. "My life is here now." (Ted didn't want his last name to be used because of privacy concerns.)
Like millions of other Americans, Ted, who also found a new career working in the high-tech end of the film industry, fled America and reinvented himself overseas. And nowhere is the expat invasion more evident than in East and Southeast Asia. In Hong Kong alone the number of American expats is estimated to be 60,000 in 2009, though many say that number is much higher.
That is almost the number of expats living in mainland China, which is somewhere around 72,000, according to the Chinese census. Kathy Pauli is one of them. She and her husband, both lawyers, decided to move from Washington, D.C., to Shanghai 10 years ago.
"We struggled at the beginning," she said. "Everything was difficult. Even opening an account at the bank was a big struggle."
Since then Shanghai has become home, and the couple have found lucrative work as attorneys dealing with international law.
Indeed, in my various travels, I have met countless Americans of all ages who have made lives outside of America, far from home. I know a Vietnamese-American woman who left America for Vietnam when George W. Bush became president and promised not to come back until he was out of office. I know another who had lived in Arizona most of his life, but who retired to Phuket, Thailand.
View of Shanghai from the Huangpu river.
As an immigrant to America, however, I feel an impulse to defend the sacred myth I tell myself: that one goes to America to reinvent oneself, not vice versa, that opportunities remain abundant in the promised land.
On the other hand, having traveled to East Asia regularly over the last two decades, I have been struck by the diaspora of America's young. Some years ago, one young businesswoman told me in Thailand: "No one says the American dream has to be within America's borders." In the age of globalization, she goes where the opportunities beckon.
Americans, of course, have ventured in waves to Asia many times before, usually bent on some form of conversion. By contrast, the new generation ventures abroad with a surprising sense of humility and open-mindedness, eager to rid themselves of America's "parochialism," bent on reinventing themselves through immersion in local cultures. In the process they are ultimately redefining the American frontier.
American immigrants too are discovering that the new frontier lies in the lands their parents abandoned. In Hong Kong, Asian American actors tell me they have found more work than Hollywood ever offered. In Saigon and Hanoi, a parade of young, well-educated Vietnamese Americans, who once saw themselves as history's losers, now feel they are riding a new historical wave. Vietnamese American filmmakers who couldn't make films in the United States are now making waves in Vietnam with their directorial debuts. An average film in Vietnam is made for less than $500,000 (USD).
Scene from Johnny Tri Nguyen's film, Clash
From Dustin Nguyen (21 Jump Street) to Johnny Tri Nguyen (Once upon a Time in Vietnam), the Vietnamese film and TV industry got a boost from its expat population. "Viet Kieu are now involved with at least half of the commercial films made in Vietnam -- a stunning development considering that not long ago those who returned faced deep suspicion from the Communist government as well as opposition from staunch anti-Communists in San Jose and Orange County," according to the San Jose Mercury News.
East Asia beckons. And young and now not-so-young Americans are responding (along with Australians, British and countless other Europeans).
Ironically, emigration out of the United States remains a little noted phenomenon -- no federal agency has a mandate to count emigrants. The State Department estimates 3 million U.S. citizens now live abroad, but most expats believe the actual number is much higher. Work exchange and education abroad programs report a rise in the number of students and recent graduates seeking to work abroad. U.S. companies overseas continue to grow.
If restlessness is a human impulse, Americans in particular have made it a national trait. It follows then that a country built on the proposition of expanding territory and transcending history requires a trans-Pacific imagination if the new generation is to have room to reinvent itself.
The future? I have seen it, but it belongs not to the old politicians cashing in on anti-immigrant hysteria, nor to the cranky intellectuals insisting America should look back to its European roots. Instead, the future belongs to the young American executive who sings Japanese songs in a karaoke bar in Tokyo "very well and without an accent," according to his Japanese counterpart; to the Cantonese-speaking American who negotiates across the continents as easily as she straddles two dissimilar cultures; to the Vietnamese American businesswoman who could have told us that home for her, for a while now, consists of two addresses, two time zones, two languages, two senses of history.
When he was growing up in Minnesota, Ted knew nothing about "the Orient," he said. "I didn't even know any Asians." By pure chance, after the dot.com bust, he was offered a lucrative software job in Taipei. Then he found love in Hong Kong. "I can travel the whole continent from here," he boasts as he looked out to the Hong Kong harbor. "I'd discover a new country, a new city every few months."
A more humble Columbus, Ted is finally imagining the two hemispheres as one.
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 the Pen/Josephine Miles Literary award.
