By Stephen Lawson
In 2000 and 2001, while working in Hong Kong as a correspondent for the IDG News Service, I wrote a newsletter for family and friends about living in a Special Administrative Region of China with a still-vivid colonial history. Last August I came home to San Francisco and found a fresh perspective about my own city, my country and the world beyond.
I met some interesting people in Hong Kong. Ernest, the Webmaster at IDG’s Hong Kong subsidiary, is a native of the People’s Republic of China and moved to Hong Kong years ago with his parents. They aren’t the flashy new rich of China, just entrepreneurs with a small jade business, looking for opportunity. As a southern Chinese from the mainland who works for an American company, Ernest speaks Cantonese (a southern dialect), Mandarin (China’s official language) and English all the time. His brother now lives in Canada, and Ernest wants eventually to follow him there. Ernest is a friend of Wilson, a writer and editor in two languages, who speaks a mellifluous British English as well as Cantonese. He is a native Hong Konger who was born under British rule – though that doesn’t automatically give him the right to live in Britain.
In Hong Kong, which sits both politically and culturally in between East and West, these kinds of distinctions are everyday issues. One afternoon Wilson and Ernest were trying to explain to me something about Chinese culture, and Wilson said, “In our country ...” Ernest interrupted him, speaking English, but in the ecstatic holler that Cantonese speakers frequently use.
“I have a country! You have a territory!” he said. We all laughed.
People like Ernest and Wilson deal with multiple political systems, cultures and identities all the time. My own adventures as an expatriate were trivial and brief compared to the complexities of their lives. Yet their way of life isn’t just the product of one territory’s odd political history. Across most of the world, where Western cultures come in like 24-hour radio stations with the promise of new lives and export markets, most people regularly find themselves bound up in something happening across a border.
In this country, despite concerns about terrorism and overseas wars, life is still comparatively insular. The Top 40, most weeks, is all in one language. Newspapers and magazines usually are dominated by domestic news. Passports expire in the back of a drawer. Yet our lives increasingly are intertwined with other parts of the world. This was true before the tragedies of September 11 and probably will remain true regardless what ultimately results from those events.
Despite tighter immigration controls, the world is still coming to our door. The companies we work for are still expanding into foreign countries. So are the mutual funds we invest in. We see new imported products every time we shop, most of them made in several different places. We want to know how the Chilean fishing industry operates and what a garment factory in Indonesia looks like. The things we create go out to an increasingly diverse audience both around the world and at home. More than ever, we’re faced with choices: Where should I invest my money, my vacation or study time, or even a chunk of my career?
In a sense, those concerns are what “globalization” is all about: easier communication, distributed manufacturing, free flows of capital and labor. But globalization isn’t just about multinational corporations establishing beachheads around the world and bringing the world to the local strip mall. It’s happening from the ground up, too.
For people like Ernest and Wilson, globalization is personal. They have relationships, cultural links, and economic arrangements that may span the world, but exist below the radar of diplomacy, international organizations, and multinational corporations. These transnational connections are easily overlooked, but they exist in many forms.
• McDonald’s dominates fast food in many countries of the world, but not in the Philippines. That’s the province of Manila-based Jollibee, which itself operates in several countries, including the U.S. It’s less a chain than a web of restaurants that links Filipinos who live and work around the world.
• The United Nations probably could tell you how many land-mine victims it aided in Cambodia in 1990, but it doesn’t have a personal relationship with any of them. If you live in the U.S., it’s not unlikely one of your neighbor does.
• The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service controls the movement of migrant workers in and out of the U.S. It doesn’t stop them from logging on to village Web sites and following the news from their hometowns in Mexico.
The city I live in is laced with transnational connections. Not only do I stand on one end of a set of personal links to Hong Kong, I am also living in the midst of other people’s pathways to places all over the world. That’s what fascinates me, and that’s what I’ll be exploring in this newsletter.
I’ll try to keep it at a human level and keep out the ten-dollar words. After all, I’m trained as a journalist, not as an academic. Please let me know how I’m doing, and tell me about the pathways you know yourself and see around you.
Copyright © 2002 Stephen Lawson