A Bit of Relief for the New Year (Books) - 17 January 2012

Although this blog tends to be on the serious side, even cultural issues need a bit of humour now and then. Though we hate to bother readers, we would like to use this opportunity to announce two new books by your blogger...

The first is a look at cross-cultural romance, especially between Asians and Caucasians. It's a non-fiction work, with some poignant stories, but a lot of humour. It's entitled The White Husbands' Club, a take-off of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Available (and quite affordable) on Amazon:

The White Husbands' Club
http://www.amazon.com/The-White-Husbands-Club-ebook/dp/B006UH5OAS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326807698&sr=8-1

The second book is also humourous, though the subject is examines is serious: employment. The history of this book is interesting: we submitted it to a number of publishers and literary agents with little luck -- as usual, they didn't know what "category" to slot it into. But we also got a compliment: one publisher said that they loved the book... but wouldn't publish it because the humour was too "dark". Think of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", and that's the book you will find here:

Don't Pay: Why Your Employees Should Be Working For Free!
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Pay-Employees-Working-ebook/dp/B006VH0P1A/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1326807698&sr=8-2

It's a parody of those (dreadful) CEO / business self-help books that one finds in airport bookstores, all cheery and filled with the "can-do" spirit of capitalism...

More soon...

Reflections and Predictions - 26 December 2011

Well, we are back from Asia... We hope our readers enjoyed our entries from there, and we apologize for the long delay in writing here again. Re-adjusting (back) to life in another continent is not easy. And, of course, one must clean the house -- literally and metaphorically -- after a year away. Why we came back is a good question, but one that will have to wait for a subsequent entry here. Today's entry is about reflections and predictions concerning the topic of this blog, which is, still, cultural issues.

As the (Western) new year approaches, it is good to reflect on a few things that we pondered in the past and how they've played out. Take Myanmar. We were skeptical when there was talk of a "revolution" there some years ago, much as we liked the articulate and thoughtful Aung San Suu Kyi. And we were right; those protests amounted to nothing. Similarly, we said that the protests in Egypt would simply lead to military rule, and we were right there, too. Of course, some will argue that democracy is coming to Egypt, as soon as it goes through its process of elections, but let's see what happens...

Back to Myanmar. Everyone was excited recently about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to that country. (Nothing about Hillary Clinton excites us, we should note. She represents yet another monolingual Secretary of State with very little geopolitical or cross-cultural knowledge.) The media in the U.S., and even one of our favorites, the British magazine The Economist, gushed about the embrace (literally) of Ms. Clinton and Ms. Suu Kyi.

But as some commentators noted, this was all less about a successful U.S. diplomatic effort and more about, well, Myanmar being in a bit of jam. Things with its current partner, Mainland China, are not going as smoothly as they were, and Myanmar's leadership is likely getting nervous. A hydroelectric project that China was going to carry out seems to have been cancelled, even though defense ties continue (see "Chinese and Burmese Army Chiefs Sign Defense Agreement"). The point of all this is as follows: Anyone who wants to understand this situation has to begin with the fact that it's all about economics. To readers outside the Western world, this will seem obvious. But many in North America and even the more pragmatic Europe think that decisions about diplomacy and military action have some kind of origin in morality, or supporting the underdog (e.g., Ms. Suu Kyi). The fact is that Myanmar has resources (natural gas, for one) and a strategic location, and that is why both Mainland China and the U.S. are making their plays.

What about the future? Well, our prediction for Myanmar is that there will be a split in the upper echelons between those who want to do business with the U.S. (although without, of course, allowing participatory democracy), and those who want to do business with the Mainland Chinese. The latter, naturally, will allow the rulers of Myanmar to govern in whatever way they wish; but the Chinese still do irk some of the citizens of Myanmar, since the Chinese have a great deal of economic power they can wield. Remember, too, that Myanmar, like other countries in Southeast Asia, has a significant ethnic Chinese population, and this also causes issues, even vis-à-vis external policies when dealing with places like Mainland China.

Other predictions:

1. Egypt's military will not relinquish control of the country any time soon. While elections will take place, the military will retain its central role in governing, directly or by proxy.

2. In the U.S., Obama will be re-elected, as the Republicans fail to offer a candidate who has sufficient appeal. As a friend of ours noted, the Republicans in some sense are content with this situation since they have in Obama one of the most conservative Democrats ever -- one who is a close ally, for example, of Wall Street. Obama's second term will see no major improvements in the economy, nor significant foreign policy triumphs.

3. The economy worldwide will continue to stumble through 2012, with the U.S. stock market fluctuating wildly. The fate of the euro is hard to predict, but it seems unlikely that the common currency will be undone any time within 2012.

4. The U.S. (regrettably) will come to accept its current unemployment rate as normal, and the "Occupy" movement will fade.

Finally, we have seen much celebration of the U.S. troops returning home from Iraq. (Actually, given their terrible sacrifice, there should have been much more celebration by the media of their return, regardless of what one feels about the war.) But things are not over; the U.S. has still left behind a significant presence there: one of the largest embassies in the world, and plenty of personnel, too. One should ask why; what is our mission there now? We ourselves don't have a clear answer, but it is worth investigating. Our conjecture is that 2012 will see Iraq begin to sort out governance issues, with the likelihood of a strong, central power structure emerging; some cynics say that the U.S. just wants a new dictator, but we say that what will evolve will be more like the single-party state of old PRI-run Mexico.

Have a great new year...

Greetings from Asia - 1 July 2011

Well, our current stay in Taiwan is coming to a close... June was a blur of finishing up work, seeing friends and family, and packing in some sightseeing... Lots of cultural reflections, but the conversation that came up again and again in recent months, both with American expats here and Taiwanese, concerned the Westernization of the society. Taiwan has picked up some good Western habits -- increasing care about the environment, greater attention to museums and other historical and cultural venues -- but also many bad ones. We will get into the details in a subsequent post, but for now, a little anecdotal evidence that points to the negative influence of some young (?) Westerners living in Taipei. I spotted the notice below (click on the image for a close-up) on a major thoroughfare near National Taiwan Normal University (國立台灣師範大學), a place where there are many students from overseas...



The decline of the West, bringing the East down with it...

Greetings from Asia - 6 May 2011

Sorry, readers: it's been a busy spring, and somehow April flew by without a posting here. We can blame a few days excursion to Thailand (riding elephants, which is wonderful -- at least for the riders, probably less so for the elephants), and other adventures. We've been in some discussions recently, with some other expats here, about what it is, exactly, that makes the Chinese (and that includes the Taiwanese in this case) so different from us. Of course, yes, we are all people, but as we've argued elsewhere, in our business writings (see the papers on culture at www.s2r.biz), cultures can be profoundly different in their ways of thinking.

We've spent some years now trying to articulate this in a precise way, and it's eluded us. There are some books on the subject, and we often recommend Michael Harris Bond's The Psychology of the Chinese People and the harder-to-find Harmony in Conflict by Richard W. Hartzell, as well as the inside look provided by Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman.

But there always seems a deeper level to reach, some more philosophical foundation that can explain everything. Not long ago, we penned the following notes, in our attempts to achieve some greater clarity on the subject of the Western-Chinese difference...


The Jews and the Chinese: The Same... Only Different

There’s an old joke that goes like this: “What do Jews do for Christmas? They eat dinner in Chinatown and then go to the movies...” It comes from the fact that on Christmas Day, the only things that were open, at least in the old days, were the restaurants in Chinatown and movie theaters.

This is part of a larger connection between Jews and Chinese. It’s a complicated relationship, though, as we’ll see. There were Jewish merchants and traders in China who came to China centuries ago, and many even intermarried, leading to a very old Chinese-Jewish community in the city of Kaifeng (開封). These community has been well researched; see, for example, “The Kaifeng Jews: A Reconsideration of Acculturation and Assimilation in a Comparative Perspective” and “Jews in Kaifeng, China: A Brief History”.

Jewish religious history is quite complicated, but a trend in the past century or so has been the growth of a large demographic of secular Jews. They became secular for a wide variety of reasons (some, such as those in this author’s family, became secular as part of their drift into socialist and progressive movements). A significant number of secular Jews, however, began looking for new spiritual options, and turned to Buddhism. Buddhism was attractive because it had no history of anti-semitism, it was pacificist, and it was exotic. In fact, there is a least one book about this Jewish-Buddhist connection, The Jew in the Lotus (the title is a play on the Buddhist term “jewel in the lotus”).

Today, there is a marked degree of intermarriage between Jews and Chinese. Here in Taiwan (where your humble author is currently posted), there is a small community of Jews (mostly Israelis) who have married Taiwanese women. Most of these women have converted to Judaism.

More generally, however, in other parts of the world, Jews marry “out” with Chinese. The common conclusion is that these are secular Jews, and that they marry Chinese (or, similarly, Japanese) women because these women are essentially secular, too. But importantly, because they are of Buddhist (or Daoist) background, they don’t carry any “Christian baggage”. In other words, for a secular Jew, it’s fine to marry a secular non-Jew, but better to marry one who doesn’t even have a trace of Christian background!

More pragmatically, some Jews will tell you that they marry Chinese because “the Chinese share the same values as the Jews”, namely, hard work, education, and family.

But, like many such observations, it’s a gross simplification. In fact, the Jewish-Chinese connection is a very complex one. For one, Jews have a long tradition involving the “exotic”. Indeed, Jews are often considered to be in the mainstream in America, but all the way up into the 1920’s, they were considered be “from the East”. A 1998 book about the history of Jews in the U.S. has the wonderful title of How Jews Became White Folks. Just like the panic about Chinese immigration, for decades in the U.S., there was a panic about other exotic peoples flooding in. At places like Dartmouth and Penn, there were quotas on the number of Jews let in. In fact, a 2006 story in the Dartmouth News recounts how in the 1930’s Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions stated that the school’s “Phi Beta Kappa societies are getting so swarthy that it is well to lighten things up a bit.” The “swarthy” was a clear reference to Jews, who were considered “not white”, and who had begun to be come to Dartmouth in greater numbers.

On a more mundane level, perhaps because they were marginalized (or because they were worldly), Jews themselves often were attracted to the exotic: an interesting article some years ago noted how in the early twentieth century the first non-Chinese to enter into Toronto’s Chinatown to eat were Jews.

And so, the connection between Jews and Chinese has almost become a cliché — both peoples are industrious, lovers of learning, and family-oriented. But in fact, there is a very fundamental difference, as any Jew who becomes involved in Chinese culture discovers. The entire Jewish faith, and even the secular Jewish mindset, is based on law, and again whether theologically based or not, it is has a deep, transcendental foundation.

Recall that Moses receives the law; the Israelites don’t invent it on their own. Compare that to the Chinese model: it is Confucius who established the rules for conduct in the society. Certainly, there is a nod to the idea of tianxia (天下) — that is, “under Heaven”. There was also the idea that the Emperor — the head of society — only ruled with the “mandate of heaven”. But really tian (天) is better translated as “cosmos” or “universe”, since there is almost no theological content in the term. Chinese concepts of “right” and “wrong”, and how humans should conduct themselves is based on pragmatism rather than any kind of universal law. It is all relationship-based, and there is even a special word in Chinese for these relationships, guanxi (關係). “God” has nothing to do with it.

In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, laws have to come from somewhere, and they are transcendent, irrefutable, and non-negotiable. However, there can be debate, since humans can interpret the law, and this is part of a great Western tradition of moral questioning, arguments about principles, and ideas. And certainly, later Jewish thinking adopted elements of Platonic thinking (through such figures as Maimonides), which, despite its pagan origins, also builds a very similar idea of a transcendental realm, from which all law (and beauty, and other key values of civilization) are derived. Similarly, too, humans can use dialogue (a Greek word, in fact) to explore and interpret this divine realm and its meaning for society.

This is a highly complex and profound model: in it, human society always has a “level beyond this one”, a perfect place, a transcendental realm that it can look (up) to. Society can use that realm as a goal, to push itself forward, and to try to build a more ethical society.

But it also leads Jewish people, in their dealing with the Chinese, to a huge gap in understanding. That is because their model encourages Jews — and Westerners generally, it must be said — to argue things on principle. This simply doesn’t exist in Chinese thinking.

So, despite some superficial similarities, Jews and Chinese are very different in their fundamental mental framework. And since much of Western thinking is influenced by this kind of Jewish and Platonic principled idealism, it means that we are heading for deep trouble as we try to negotiate with the new world power — China.

Greetings from Asia - 27 March 2011

On the Earthquake

Based as we are in Asia at the moment, we had to say something about the recent earthquake in Japan. See our article published in the Broad Street Review by clicking here...

Greetings from Asia - 15 February 2011

Cultural Tropes

This blog focuses primarily on cross-cultural issues, with occasional excursions into other areas. In this entry, we will return to one of our favorite topics — learning about cultures from examining cultural minutiae. As some readers may know, we hate when cross-cultural “experts” reduce every cultural identifier to things such as “Americans shake hands, but Japanese bow...” Not only are statements of this kind not quite true, they don’t really tell you anything. Naturally, sometimes cultures operate at very broad levels — the Chinese usually use chopsticks and Westerners don’t — but even those kind of identifiers are not particularly interesting.

What is really key to getting a profound insight into another culture is to look at what we call tropes. This word has different definitions in different contexts — scientific, artistic, and so on. Technically, “trope” is from a classical Greek word referring to “turning”, and in science, for example, it can refer to the behaviour of a plant as it turns towards the light, i.e., “phototropism”.

Here, we use the term “trope” to mean a subtle activity, configuration, or scene that reveals a macrocosm, essentially, in its microcosmic form. “Trope” here is a “turning” or “point” towards a cultural pattern. In Taiwan, some of the best tropes are visual — tiny configurations and settings, out in the street or in people’s homes. Here are some examples, which we will present below before offering interpretations:

1. a can of “Taiwan Beer” (台灣啤酒)

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2. a gas unit outside a home, with its base protected by tied-together plastic food crates

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3. old boxes and furniture stacked outside a store

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4. PVC pipes squeezed under an apartment building door

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5. random wiring outside a store

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6. scooters parked on a sidewalk

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7. sign held up with packing tape

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8a. small plant tucked away in rundown, dirty building

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8b. small plant tucked away in rundown, dirty building (detail)

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9a. repaired statue

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9b. repaired statute (detail)

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10. trash bin made of old calendar page

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The first picture says a great deal about Taiwanese business — problems in branding. Indeed, there is no brand here at all: in both English and Chinese, the name is simply “Taiwan Beer”. Most other countries have names for their beer, e.g., Singha, Tusker, and so on. There is also no logo on the can: in addition to the generic name, there are abstract stripes on the can.

The second picture shows what happens when a rural people are suddenly thrust into technological modernity. This is a classic case of what we would call in the West a “spit-and-gum” repair — which is, actually, very common and appropriate in rural societies where there are no tools and parts for proper repairs. Here, though, the setting is urban, and obviously the person carried out the repair in whatever would be the most expedient way possible, expediency, alas, being another common Taiwanese trait. Finally, this picture reveals another cultural trope — a disregard for safety. The plastic food crates can in no way protect this dangerous piece of equipment against a vehicle collision — and this setup is right on the corner of a very busy street, out in the street itself.

In the third picture, we again see expediency at work — there was simply no more room inside, so the person has used the outside as an extension of their personal space. On a more positive note, it would seem to indicate a safe culture, where one can store things on the sidewalk without fear of theft. In that case, Taiwan’s culture beats American culture, for sure!

In the fourth picture, we again see a repair that exhibits he cultural tropes of both “rural repair” and expediency. Sure, there are building codes in Taiwan, but the pragmatic culture knows how to work around them... We see the same clever, if messy, workaround in the fifth picture.

In the sixth picture, scooters are parked on a sidewalk. In some places in Taiwan, this is legal, but on this particular stretch it is not. But obviously here people have made their own rules — one person parked illegally, and then another next to that person, and so on. The cultural trope? An organic way of structuring rules and regulations...

Nearby, there is a “no parking” sign. But what is really interesting here is that it is simply a piece of paper held up with packing tape, even though it is outdoors, directly exposed to Taiwan’s subtropical rain and humidity. It is a quick, feeble fix... but an expedient one.

In the eighth picture, we see a cacophony of signs and hideous buildings, and then at the very center a small plant tucked away on a sill right next to a window. Why is it there? How did it get there? The cultural trope here is the strange use of space, the odd juxtaposition of ugliness and natural beauty, attempt at bringing nature into the most typical polluted, overbuilt Asian megapolitan setting.

In the ninth picture, we see another example of “rural repair” — the statue has been repaired with a rebar and bailing wire. No attempt was made at a more subtle, artistic repair.

The final picture shows a small trash bin made out of a calendar page. This is a common trope in Taiwan, as people here love to eat peanuts, watermelon seeds, etc. while having tea or drinking beer, and need a dish for the shells. This kind of bin is a quick, efficient reuse of materials, and certainly has its own engaging aesthetic. The cultural trope here is about a society still in touch, again, with its rural roots — not afraid to reuse materials in a simple but pleasing way.

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Greetings from Asia - 22 January 2011

A Brief Note on Western Painting by Chinese Hands

Since the focus of this blog is cross-cultural issues, I thought that readers might be interested in this issue from the perspective of the visual arts...

I used to dislike Western painting that was done by Chinese artists. The works bothered me because they seemed fake somehow, being in my mind both an abandonment of thousands of years of perfectly good Chinese painting, and an attempt at Western styles, but without Western emotion. But over the years, I’ve found painters whose work has changed my mind.

The term “Chinese painting” covers a broad range of styles and themes, but here I refer to what might be most familiar to readers: the vast watercolor-and-ink landscapes typical of the Song and Yuan Dynasty period (A. D. 960 -1368) and the traditional paintings of nature in the latter history of imperial China (A.D. 1368 - 1895). Typical paintings of these periods include “A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks” by Li Cheng (李成) (919 - 967) and “Mountain on the Other Side of the River”, 1703 by the Qing Dynasty Chinese painter Shitao (石濤) (1641 - 1707). As for “Western painting”, in this case, I mean scenes of people and places that that are found in nineteenth and early twentieth century art, particularly among the Romantic painters and the Impressionists. Many Chinese have studied these styles (as well as Cubism and other movements), and have become adept at them, but I think only a few have done anything really interesting in Western-style painting.

A colleague of mine, Prof. Tsai Minghsun (蔡明勳), is a Taiwanese painter who studied Western-style oil painting in the U.S., at Fontbonne University in St. Louis. He is a good painter, and likes to do scenes of Taiwanese life from the old days. I asked Tsai why he chooses to paint in the Western style, and he told me that Western painting allows him to engage in themes that Chinese art doesn’t normally investigate in any depth — the emotions of childhood: joy, nostalgia, loneliness and longing...

Many of his paintings portray puppets and other toys, objects not unknown to traditional Chinese painting, but not at the scale or in the mood that one finds in Tsai’s work.

Tsai studied in the U.S., but in the old days, to study Western art one went — oddly, perhaps — to Japan. Japan, of course, had opened up to the West in terms of industrialization and modernization at least a century before Chinese culture did. Japanese artists had studied Impression, Cubism, and other trends in European art almost as soon as those trends came on the scene. Taiwan was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945, and many young Taiwanese men studied in Japan during this period — indeed, Japan was their primary access to the outside world. One famous Taiwanese painter, Li Meishu (李梅樹) (1902 - 1983), studied Western painting, with a focus on Classicism and Romanticism, at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts from 1929 to 1934. He particularly enjoyed rendering realist paintings of the Taiwan landscapes, although he was also very skilled in portraiture. Li worked to adapt Western romantic notions in the portrayal of a traditional way of life in Taiwan that he knew to be rapidly disappearing. He was interested in and skilled at Western theories of perspective — something certainly rare in traditional Chinese painting — and the figures in his paintings seem to “reach out” to the viewer.

The reasons that Chinese painting itself never underwent the radical transformation that Western art did — Cubism, Impression, Fauvism, and subsequent modern and post-modern trends — must be the subject of a separate discussion. In addition, there are complex reasons that artists in both Mainland China and Taiwan felt a need to look to overseas techniques and styles in the first place.

Obviously, the embracing of something from a foreign culture entails a rejection of something in one’s own culture. It is the rare artist who can somehow embrace both, and I was intrigued when I stumbled upon the work of the artist Ma Paisui (馬白水) (1909 - 2003). Ma was born in Mainland China and worked for many years as an art teacher. Although his studies were in China, and his later adult years were spent in Taiwan, he beautifully combined traditional Chinese styles with Western techniques and themes.

This is not easy feat — the results can often seem awkward or tacky. Ma spent some time in Europe and the U.S., and did a series of beautiful paintings of New York City and its environs, rendering the modern Western landscape and its tropes (for example, suspension bridges and skyscrapers) with Chinese traditional brush called a mao bi (毛筆) and gouache colors. The results are splendid, with vivid colors and bold line-work. Even his painting of the Guggenheim Museum, although at first glance seeming to be completely Western in style, subtly employs Chinese ink to create profound contrasts of light and dark not normally encountered in Western watercolor work.

Ma’s work has an almost transcendent quality, reminiscent of the later work of the Canadian “Group of Seven” artist Lawren Harris.

The artist’s role is to transcend culture, and even time and place (Harris was a Theosophist), to reach some abstract truth or vision of the world. Indeed, as different as Chinese and Western cultures can be, this role of the artist often appears in both places. Why is an artist like Ma Paisui so important? In part, it’s because he breaks a very common stereotype — that Asians are good imitators but not good originators. We’ve heard it said that the Curtis Institute of Music is filled with Asians who play beautifully but with no feeling. I’ve also heard it said that Chinese people can crank out Western landscapes but with an equal lack of passion. In Ma’s case, though, we see an artist who truly has taken something Western and made it his own. This is important because in an age of globalization, there is a great risk at homogenization, with everyone becoming superficially “Western”. Ma shows that a painter can bring his own cultural tools to bear, and create a true — and original — synthesis.

At the same time, artists like Tsai have consciously embraced Western styles as the Chinese themselves have become increasingly subject to Western emotions — or more exactly, the emotional states, such as anomie, that have been brought on by the Chinese people’s rush into modernity.


Li Cheng (李成)
“A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks” (晴峦萧寺)
ink and slight color on silk
Northern Song Dynasty (A.D. 960 - 1127)
111.76 x 55.88 cm


Shi Tao (石濤)
“Mountain on the Other Side of the River”
ink and slight color on paper
1703
57.79 x 35.56 cm


Tsai Minghsun (蔡明勳)
“Flying” (飛揚)
oil on canvas
2002
103 x 139 cm


Li Meishu (李梅樹)
“Washing Clothes by the Clear Stream” (清溪浣衣)
oil on canvas
1981
116.5 x 80 cm


Li Meishu (李梅樹)
“Dressing” (梳妝)
oil on canvas
1971
116.5 x 91 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Yehliu” (野柳)
ink and color on paper
1972
66 x 33 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Hudson River in Autumn” (哈河之秋)
ink and color on paper
1975
51 × 61.5 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Central Park, New York” (紐約中央公園)
ink and color on paper
1981
38.1 × 50.8 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
“Red Maple Leaves near George Washington Bridge” (紐約GW橋楓葉紅美)
watercolor on paper
1984
45.5 × 61 cm


Ma Paisui (馬白水)
ink and color on paper
“Guggenheim Museum, N.Y.” (古根漢美術館(紐約))
1974
40 x 50 cm

Greetings from Asia - 26 December 2010

Some More Thoughts on Asian Success...

As noted in our last comments here, we are currently writing about the so-called "Asian success story". Again, we are posting these thoughts in several parts, linking to an article we wrote for the online publication Broad Street Review. This article provides another personal perspective on "Asian success", with a particular focus on China:

"How Chinese is China’s Success Story?: China vs. the West: Who has Conquered Whom?", Broad Street Review (25 December 2010)

Enjoy!

Greetings from Asia - 23 December 2010

Some Thoughts on Asian Success...

Well, while Europe and North America are having a nice cold winter holiday, here in semi-tropical Taiwan, the sun is shining and Santa could go out in no more than a red hat if he wanted to...

Our current entry concerns the so-called "Asian success story". We are posting these thoughts in several parts, and due to copyright agreements, our first entry on this subject is a link to an article we wrote some weeks ago on a few aspects of the strong economy in Taiwan. Taiwan, where this author is currently posted, has weathered the recent economic crisis relatively well. The following article provides some a personal perspective:

"Economic Lessons from the Far East: I Have Seen the Future, and It’s in the Far East", Broad Street Review (4 November 2010)

Stay tuned for more...

Greetings from Asia - 23 November 2010

Tutto il mondo è un cheesesteak / 世界很小

There’s been no entry here in this blog for about a month, and the reader has my apologies. Too much going on: life never stops in Asia. Well, it was that, and then weeks of depressing rain. There is a fall and a spring rainy season here, and both are irritating. Yes, they do, however, lead to wonderful semi-tropical foliage, so one shouldn’t complain. Also, unlike in our dear old U.S.A., there is no Thanksgiving break, nor even Halloween (although they do celebrate the latter here a bit in the local schools, just for fun). Otherwise, it’s work, work, work...

Since it’s been rather dreary here, and we don’t feel like writing about existentialism or other philosophical topics, we shall turn to lighter subjects... Well, not really that much lighter, since we are going to talk about cheesesteaks.

Cheesesteaks in Taiwan? No way!

But yes.

It was all very odd. A fellow teacher here, from Michigan, had his father visiting. We were heading into Taipei for a day of sightseeing, and as we were sitting there on the bus, the gentleman was talking to me, and heard that I was from Philadelphia. “Hey,” he said, “Isn’t that where they have all those cheesesteak places?” “Yup,” I answered, and I began to explain to him the subtle rivalries and differences between the various cheesesteak places in Philadelphia — Pat’s Gino’s, Jim’s, and so on. All this talk was making me hungry, but before you knew, they we were in Taipei. No cheesesteaks, just noodles and tofu.

We split up, with me heading through the west side of the city to do some errands. But having gotten off the bus, I hadn’t gone more than four blocks, when there it was, as if posited by some Jungian synchronicity, from my consciousness to hard-and-fast culinary reality: a cheesesteak place...











The people working there, though all Taiwanese, wore that same vivid, horrid orange that is the color of one of those cheesesteak places in Philly. It was as if a piece of South Philadelphia had been ripped out and transplanted — through a strange Asian inversion — into Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Inside, there was even a mural of the city of Philadelphia, complete with the Ben Franklin Bridge, Liberty Place, and that awful building next to 30th Street Station.

I went in and tried the cheesesteaks. And you know what? They were pretty good... In fact, they were less greasy than most of the cheesesteaks in Philly, and the french fries were not bad either.

So, what about the title of this entry, “Tutto il mondo è un cheesesteak / 世界很小”? Well, the first part is a riff on the Italian expression, “tutto il mondo è un paese” — that is, “the whole world is one country”. It’s their way of saying, “It’s a small world”, or as we say in Chinese, “/ 世界很小”. Indeed, it’s a very small world, if I can talk about Philly cheesesteaks miles away from Philly, and then somehow they magically appear...

Greetings from Asia - 15 October 2010

High-Speed Bullshit
Even far away here in the “mysterious East”, I find myself missing Philadelphia. I am one of those expatriates who, believe it or not, does indeed admire the country I was born in, even though I find myself consistently disappointed in the direction it has decided to head. Former President Jimmy Carter correctly called it a “crisis of confidence” in a famous speech he gave during his presidency.

Particularly when one is overseas, it is easy to spot the foibles, if not out-and-out absurdities of one’s own country. At this point in U.S. history, it has become outright embarrassing at times. Without even trying, one finds such news reports as this:



A close examination of the piece reveals how stupid this issue is in the U.S. Indeed, even reader comments on the piece were quick to point this out:



And yes, from an overseas perspective, it’s easy to see how crazy the ideas presented in the article are. In France, Germany, Japan... hell, even in Taiwan, there is high-speed rail. Real high-speed rail, not the ridiculous “Acela” nor the “somewhere in the distant future” high-speed trains that may — may — be built some time in the coming decades. What is ridiculous, too, is that people in the U.S. are subjected to this strange kind of propaganda that somehow, someday, we are going to have what is considered “normal” in other countries. If you want to see real rail systems, take a look:

The European TVG: http://www.raileurope.co.uk/tgv.aspx
The Japanese Shinkansen: http://english.jr-central.co.jp/about/index.html
The Taiwanese HSR: http://www.thsrc.com.tw/en

Now, I’ve heard one of the key counter-arguments: that countries like France, Germany, Japan, and so on can afford these systems because we bear so much of the burden of military defense. But if we wanted to, we could also have afforded to build a proper rail system decades ago — indeed, we had a good rail system — but we decided to let it go to ruin. And all the pronouncements in the world will never bring it back.

Greetings from Asia - 4 October 2010

The subject of safety is a complicated one here in Taiwan... On the one hand, this is one of the most dangerous places you could imagine... that is, in terms of traffic. Drivers here are, for the most part, impatient and reckless. This is odd in that it runs counter to the generally low-key attitude of the people here. But there are cultural reasons why the driving here and in places like Cairo, and so on is like this, and I can provide that explanation if readers are interested.

In Taiwan, although the driving habits present significant danger, this is one of the safest places in the world, with very little street crime. It is a particularly safe place in terms of the kind of crime one finds in the U.S.: gun crime. It disturbs me that in the U.S., we have become inured almost to the point of ignorance about how unusual our situation is in terms of shootings and violent crime. In Philadelphia, there is some kind of gun crime virtually every single day of the year. When you live in a place like Taiwan, you suddenly see how aberrant this is. My favorite such story is how, a few weeks ago, after I had dropped our child at preschool, I came home and saw this news report from my hometown:

One could not even imagine such an incident here. But even back in Philadelphia, for the most part we don't even really care — after all, the shooting wasn't in OUR neighborhood...

People in the U.S. have questioned my critique of the violence in the U.S., noting that place like Brazil have much higher crime rates. But this misses the point in several respects; for one, another country having a higher crime rate does not somehow "forgive" us for being so prone to violence in our country. But more profoundly, it is interesting to look at the nature of crime and violence in a place like Brazil versus a place like the U.S. In Brazil, much of the violence can be directly tied to enormous class tensions in the society. There is violent crime connected to the drug trade (as in the U.S.), but also propensities to violence from an underclass which is clearly marginalized in the society. By contrast, in the U.S., although one could argue that the same dynamic exists, one also finds very bizarre crimes, violence that seems to spring from nowhere, or from some kind of "mass psychosis". As violent as Brazil is, one does not find so often what one finds more and more frequently in the U.S.: reports of shootings on university campuses, shootings in the workplace, and so on.

Finally, it should be noted that all societies have to reckon with violence, but it is worth comparing where the violence springs from in each culture. Resorting to violence because of social class or political frustration may be repugnant, but at least it fits in the framework of human nature. Shootings in the workplace in the U.S. may fit into that category, but the figures involved are usually quickly marginalized as unrepresentative of anything but a personality disorder.

Greetings from Asia - 26 September 2010

More cultural observations... For readers who don't know: I have lived in Taiwan before, from 1993 to 1996. The place has changed a lot, but much has stayed the same, particularly the peculiarities and peccadilloes of the place. In terms of what — to an American — is peculiar, one place to start is the schooling here. On a previous visit here with a friend of mine, he was shocked to see some elementary school students cleaning the school. In fact, in Taiwan and Japan, there are no school janitors; the children clean their own school. Even here at the university, the other day I noticed a team of students who were repainting the main gate. Students are asked to do this not as a form of free labor for the school but because the students are imbued with a feeling that the school belongs to them.

I noticed another peculiarity the other day when we enrolled our daughter in a local preschool. On one of the forms we had to fill out, my wife pointed out that the school gave families three options for their children to return home at the end of the school day: (a) the school bus; (b) parents coming to pick up their children; (c) relatives coming to pick up their children; or (d) children returning home by themselves. That's right: kindergarten-age children can walk home themselves here. That certainly tells you something about the state of the society here...

In terms of peccadilloes in Taiwan, I'll leave the reader with a simple one: "Copyright 個屁!" I won't translate that at the moment, but it basically means that for all the tortuous negotiating the U.S. has done with other countries, one can still find copyright violations all over. It's not as egregious in Taiwan as it used to be, but one still finds (sometimes humorous) examples. Not far from where we live, I found this great place that serves quite delicious fried chicken:


The place is called "KLG"... Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Looks kind of familiar, too... But let's take a look at their packing:


Totally original? No. Good fried chicken? You bet...

If some of you are still uncertain about where this cool KLG restaurant might have found its "inspiration", we can provide a quick comparison:





















Check out how much the KLG chicken looks like the good old KFC colonel; they even have the same bow tie!

Greetings from Asia - 4 September 2010 (ES)

Why There Are No Existentialists in Taiwan
I had promised my colleagues in a study group back in the U.S. to use this blog to discuss some ideas related to the group's work. That group, based in Bryn Mawr College, is called the Evolving Systems (ES) group, and can be found at http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/evolsys/home. What's the group about? To quote from the group's "Overview" page (http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/evolsys/overview):

An inquiry into emergent relationships among randomness and form, meaning, and aesthetics... with particular attention to

• What would be the implications for scientific method and the various sciences of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for cultural studies and the human sciences of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for intellectual activity generally of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for artistic activity of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for religious and spiritual activity of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

• What would be the implications for day to day practical life of recognizing emergent interdependent relationships among randomness, form, meaning, and aesthetics?

In the group, we've discussed everything from deep time and earth history to object-oriented ontology. Now that I am ex-officio, living overseas here in Asia, the group's Project Organizer, Dr. Paul Grobstein, asked me to participate via a blog.

So, here is my initial post for the ES group, and it concerns an observation I had the other day. To begin, let's look at the title of today's entry, the rather hyperbolic, "Why there are no existentialists in Taiwan". Taiwan has grown from a primarily agrarian society to a highly-industrial society within the space of one generation. As can be seen in my earlier entries in this blog, in fact, the old and new co-exist in very interesting ways here. But my concerns here are not the fact that I can buy the latest computer hardware in a certain neighborhood in Taipei and then in the same neighborhood walk around the corner and buy roast squid from a street vendor who only speaks Taiwanese and who grew up on a farm somewhere in the south of Taiwan. My concern here, rather, is that in any agrarian society, be it in Asia or elsewhere, the people tend to be pragmatists.

As I have commented before, even in this blog, the Chinese are paramount pragmatists. Pragmatism and existentialism don't go well together. Pragmatists just "get on with it", while existentialists reflect on the fact of our existence. Of course, pragmatists and existentialists do share one important quality: that in the end, one must just live. But the Taiwanese do that without the torturous reasoning beforehand. No Taiwanese would ever have written No Exit. Of course, the Taiwanese struggle with the vagaries of existence all the time, going to the various temples scattered everywhere here, praying for good health, for prosperity, and so on.

But even that "spiritual" side is profoundly practical, focused on potential pragmatic benefits to one's life. As I have also noted before, this is one reason that the Taiwanese do not worry so much about work as we do. Naturally, parents here would rather have their child become a doctor or some similar profession, but even the "lowest" (note quote marks) forms of work, such as street vendor are considered perfectly fine here; the only criterion in judging one's work, in fact, is whether one can provide for one's family. Work is a necessary evil, a means to earning money to provide a comfortable life. Work is virtually never a vehicle for some kind of abstract fulfillment as it is in the U.S.

In short, the Taiwanese do not suffer from the existential "angst" one finds so often in the West.

But I want to end with a caveat, because in another way, one could say that Chinese culture actually founded a kind a existentialism, since an important strand in Chinese philosophy looks at the very question of the meaning of existence. The Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, which as some readers here know are two of my favorite works, look directly into the mysterious question of the existence of the universe. I will talk about this further in a later post; the point I wish to make here in my conclusion here is that this kind of "Chinese existentialism" does not seem to have entered the popular consciousness. In the West, by contrast, particularly through the work of Jung and Freud, the "larger questions of life" became part of personal therapy, not to mention part of popular culture. More to come...

Greetings from Asia - 1 September 2010

We have been seeing many members of Charlotte’s family, and have been taken out to so many great dinners that today we finally had to take a break and just eat a sandwich for lunch! Charlotte’s father took us out for a lavish dinner, as did her second brother. There are certainly many great places to eat here: there seems to be a restaurant or cafe or food stand every hundred feet or so along the street — seriously. Chinese are, as a Chinese-Canadian friend once pointed out to me, very id-oriented, and part of that is having food available wherever they might go. For the Chinese, eating is good, and that's that. Here are some views of the meals we've been treated to...










I read somewhere the other day that the people in Taiwan consider eating to be almost a hobby, in addition to being a necessity. That would explain why one finds food everywhere, and why people talk about eating all the time...

Greetings from Asia - 30 August 2010

So far — and, of course, this is based only on a week’s experience here — we have had a very positive impression of life here, in the sense that Taiwan still embodies the best of the new and the old. There are modern transportation and other facilities, along with the great night markets, vendors selling food from outdoor stalls, and a general relaxed pace of life in many respects. The efficiency of the immigration office was amazing, too, and even when service is not particularly friendly, it is well-organized.

We have also noted that even as Taiwan has modernized even more since we left in 1996, and even as the new generation differs so much from the old, the youth have also turned back to tradition in some ways. For example, there are many more museums and archaeological exhibits now, books on old architecture, clothing, and so on, and there are even shops that sell updated versions of traditional Chinese clothing. Moreover, of course, even as one sees young people with weird hairstyles and modern garb, one also sees that they behave with a certain modesty still. On the train, for example, you don’t encounter anyone talking loudly on cell phones, or yapping with their friends. As my friend Don Denton noted when we were travelling in Turkey, people here have some sense of reserve still.

It is also great to still see the school uniforms, the children cleaning their own schools, the continued importance of family and education, and other Confucian values alive and well here.

Naturally, the traffic is still a nightmare, with everyone driving at top speed and ignoring all the rules of the road. I guess this is where the Chinese take their (naturally human) aggressions!

We had to go the office here that handles immigration, both for my working papers, and for other processing. The service was amazingly efficient, and we were in there and out of there within a half an hour. Readers might be interested in the following document that I noticed there. See below...

Greetings from Asia - 28 August 2010

HinterNet is off to Asia... This album comprises photographs and notes from our journey to Asia, 2010-2011. The primary subject is Taiwan, our base, along with some excursions... Click here to read about Taiwan in the CIA World Factbook. Click here to read information about Taiwan from the Lonely Planet guidebook. Naturally, all information in external websites is beyond the responsibility of HinterNet. That information is just for background for you, the reader.

Some initial images from Taiwan... Street scene in 台北市 (Taipei): the covered sidewalks are a feature one finds all over the Pacific, from Tahiti to Taiwan, as well as in other tropical and semi-tropical climes... even in New Orleans.
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Another scene in Taipei... Note one of the many contrasts here between the old and the new: on the left, a traditional food stand next to an ultra-modern store selling Canon cameras. The contrast is highlighted by the fact that the vendor sells 豬血糕 (zhu xie gao), literally, "pig's blood cake". Although the term "cake is used", it's actually shaped like a popsicle (as it's served on a stick); it's sticky rice, cooked in blood, and then rolled in ground peanuts, with a touch of cilantro. For a further description, click here.
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Another contrast of old and new... This is in the town of 鶯歌 (Yingge), not far from Taipei. In the foreground are the remains of a traditional Chinese house, while just behind are modern apartments. I have only encountered one case in Taiwan where the owner of a traditional house modernized the interior rather than just sold the property and moved into an apartment. The person I met did a lovely job of fixing the house, and then air-conditioning the interior, putting in good plumbing, etc. If I had the money...
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Street scene in Yingge, the hometown of my wife... This street has become a tourist destination (primarily for Taiwanese tourists), and each shop sells teapots, teacups, and other ceramic items, both low-end and high-end. Yingge used to be the main ceramics center in Taiwan, and while it still is important in some sense in its original identity, it has some aspects of a simulacrum... See Jean Baudrillard. Regardless, as tourist destinations go, Yingge did a good job of preserving itself...
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Astrid and I in front of the 布政司衙門 (Bu-Cheng-Shih-Szyamen / Bu Zheng Si Yamen), an old government building and now a museum in the Taipei Botanical Gardens.
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Taiwan is still in many ways a very conservative place, in the real sense of that word. This sign is outside the girls' dormitory at the university where I work. Very clear...
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Some of the rooms in our apartment; it's actually a hotel, run by the university for their Travel & Tourism Program. So, we are living in a hotel suite... No complaints! Our kitchen and dining room...
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The view from our window, looking down on the campus and the town of 龜山 (Guishan), which means "Turtle Mountain". The entire area of northern Taiwan has these kinds of low mountains, which have some great hiking trails. Larger mountains are in the eastern portion of the island...
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A picture of myself (between Charlotte and Astrid, with arrow) with some of Charlotte's family members, at one of the several welcome banquets we were greeted with... From left to right: Charlotte's father and step-mother; Charlotte; me; Astrid; Charlotte's niece Juliet; Charlotte's second sister-in-law, and her two sons and her husband...

All images and text are the property of Benjamin B. Olshin, and are protected under United States and International copyright law. They may not be copied, reproduced, stored, or manipulated without written permission of the artist.