Not just Chinese, either. Look anywhere in New York this year, and you could see an Asian influence on culture, fashion, food–even, during those fall days when everyone wanted to know the level of the Hang Seng index, the conversation of cabdrivers. Video stores stock manga and kung fu; Nobu, a downtown restaurant serving Japanese food, is stuffed with celebrities, and Michelle Yeoh, Malaysian martial-arts star of the new James Bond movie, ““Tomorrow Never Dies’’ (and ex-wife of Poon), does her ““don’t mess with me’’ look from billboards.
Yet explore this a little, and the picture changes. This isn’t the pure Asia. Nobu’s food is really a blend of styles from Japan, South America and the United States. Yeoh’s movie has its roots in a mixture of British novels and Hollywood spectacle. David Tang’s clothes may proudly say they are MADE BY CHINESE, but it’s not clear how many Chinese wear them. ““If I walked into Chinatown now,’’ he says, ““they’d think I was an alien.’’ Dress designer Vivienne Tam, a Hong Kong-born New Yorker, puts it simply. ““Everyone is influencing each other,’’ she says. ““Of course we are interested in Asia, but what ultimately comes out is a cross-cultural esthetic.''
Cross-cultural estheticism: sounds like a nice way to end a year, century or millennium. Never has Rudyard Kipling’s old line about East and West seemed more wrong. The sporadic contacts that started when Chinese silks made their way across the steppes to turn up, mysteriously, in ancient Rome have become an interpenetration so constant it is hardly noticed. Moving in one direction, Indian novelists like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie rejuvenate English; Chinese director John Woo and Ang Lee, and stars like Gong Li make films in America. The West, meanwhile, takes its own sensibilities to the East, bringing barbecue to Beijing rap to Rajasthan. And it’s a truism that economies have become more integrated–that widows and orphans in the United States have investments in Indonesia, or that workers in Valenciennes, France, might be employed by a Japanese company.
On the surface, there’s a nice equality about the trade. At even the most symbol-laden events, it’s hard to figure out who is dominant, and who subservient. Take perhaps 1997’s most dramatic moment: the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China at midnight on June 30. The flag came down on the British Empire. (““Seven hundred million people in 1947 to 700,000 in 1997,’’ muses David Tang. ““That’s quite a collapse.’’) Prince Charles and the colony’s last governor sailed away as fireworks showered the harbor, and China rid its territory of the official successors of those barbarians who had once forced ““unequal treaties’’ and opium down its throat.
And yet . . . take a look at Hong Kong. The city’s skyline owes everything to Western styles. The limousines shuttling Chinese officials up and down the Peak, wrecking their transmissions, have their roots in 19th-century European technology. And when the Chinese Army raised China’s flag at the handover, did they wear mandarin coats and velvet slippers? The heck they did. They were in crisp, medaled uniforms whose origins lie in the 18th-century general staff of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Modern Asia has largely adopted that quintessentially Western doctrine, market economics. But it doesn’t take much to get the old resentful juices flowing. When the Asian miracle ran out of gas this year, the Malaysian prime minister was quick to blame Western speculators applying Western values for his country’s ills. In South Korea, the imposition of financial discipline by the International Monetary Fund was widely greeted as a new form of neocolonialism. Even in Japan, which has long embraced American culture, national characteristics remain important. Naoki Kajiyama, a senior Ministry of Finance official, warns that ““on the surface you will see McDonald’s, but at the bottom of our hearts the Japanese will always be in search of our own identity.''
Identity–now, there’s a word that the global optimists have trouble dealing with. It’s possible that in the big picture, culture and economics may not count for all that much. Other things–attachment to blood and soil, or religion–may be what really matter to people, and hence what shape global politics. In a book last year, Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington challenged the assumption that cultural and economic integration necessarily implied political stability. ““Somewhere in the Middle East,’’ he wrote, ““a half-dozen young men could be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.''
For Huntington, what matters is the transmission not of goods and money but of ideas. ““The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their acceptance of the former.’’ Actually, this understates the problem; in a world where information flows freely, there’s no guarantee that the right things will flow from East to West, or vice versa. The greatest damage to modern China, as David Tang says, was done by ““a frightful old German sitting in the Reading Room of the British Museum.’’ (Having to take the good with the bad is as old as the hills; medieval Europe got not just silk from China but the bubonic plague, too.)
This line of argument is pretty depressing. Why might it be wrong? Why might we hope that the trade of goods, ideas and people from West to East and back again is the harbinger of a genuinely new global order? Mainly because–forgive the obvious–this is new. Sure, people and things–and seeds and animals–have always been on the move. In the late 14th century, Marco Polo famously made his way along trade routes from Italy to China. Three decades later the treasure ships of the great Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He sailed to Arabia and down the coast of Africa. But such adventures were rare. The easy, cheap transportation of individuals and goods is strictly a late-20th-century phenomenon. Until 1964 most Japanese were not allowed to travel abroad for pleasure. It was not until 1972 that more than one in two Americans had ever boarded an aircraft. In two generations we have gone from a time when a vacation was limited by a day’s train ride to one determined by a night’s flight–say, 500 miles compared with 5,000.
That shrinkage of distance is one of the great transformations of the world. It is far too early to assess its impact on the way we live, the things we believe. Maybe there really is no significance in American preteens’ snacking on pot noodles while wearing Shanghai Tang T shirts, or in Chinese children’s dancing to the Spice Girls. Or maybe those for whom a global culture is as natural as breathing will change everything. ““The world is the world’s world,’’ wrote a Japanese ruler to an angry Chinese emperor in 1382. Six hundred years later, there’s a chance that may soon be true.
