By Stephen Lawson
When I think of fusion cuisine, I usually think of celebrity chefs and well-heeled diners, sometimes called “the jet set.” Typically it has a morsel of this (something Japanese) and a drizzle of that (maybe a French sauce). But here’s real fusion cuisine: deep-fried chicken, lightly marinated and salted, with a chewy skin and lots of oil. Completing the picture is sticky steamed rice and American-style brown gravy.
That’s what you’ll find at Jollibee, the McDonald’s of the Philippines, along with the Aloha Burger (with bacon and pineapple), spaghetti, miniature deep-fried Shanghai Rolls, and a shrimp-flavored noodle dish called Palabok Fiesta. For dessert, the choices include Peach Mango Pie and various milkshake-like drinks made with sweet beans.
Jollibee dominates the fast-food industry in the Philippines even though it has competition from many well-known American chains, including KFC and McDonald’s itself. In a sense, it won by copying the bun and then changing the meat inside. But it’s like McDonald’s in another way, too: It’s set out to conquer the world -- or at least the Filipino world, which spans borders, continents and oceans. Jollibee has stores in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brunei, Guam, Saipan, and California. On Sundays, the store in Hong Kong’s central business district buzzes with Filipina maids on their day off. Some Jollibees in the Middle East fell on hard times, but every international business struggles in some locations, as McDonald’s has in the Philippines. The Golden Arches entered the Philippines in 1981, but Jollibee has led the market since the mid-1980s, according to The Economist.
The beaming, bright-red bee (his slogan: “Bee Happy”) exports familiar Filipino dishes to a buzzing international work force of his countrymen and women, who can be found working as maids, nurses, construction workers, merchant seamen, and musicians in many countries, especially around Asia and the Middle East. From a polyglot country, colonized by several world powers and influenced by Spain, the United States, and Chinese immigrants, comes a national cuisine of many flavors.
It was probably inevitable that Jollibee would bring its interpretation of the burger joint back to America, where millions trace their life’s journey or their ancestry back to the Philippines. That happened in 1998, when a Jollibee store opened in Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco that is almost one-third Filipino, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. On the first day, newspapers reported the lines stretched around the block, and now there are Bees in Union City, Carson, Cerritos, Vallejo, National City, Long Beach, and San Francisco. It’s an archipelago of cities that have long had one thing in common: big Filipino communities. Now they can add the label of Great Cities for Fried Chicken.
The Jollibee in San Francisco is right across the street from the convention center, so I often go there when I get hungry while reporting on the grand schemes of computer giants such as Intel and Microsoft. What’s happening at Jollibee is not as different as you might think from the seemingly monolithic world of information technology. That’s been globalized from the ground up, too.
Down the block from Jollibee is Central Computer, a Chinese-owned computer store staffed mostly by Chinese. Sometimes I see them having lunch at Jollibee. This isn’t a retail giant selling boxes with well-known American and Japanese labels on them. Central’s staff will build you a computer or sell you the parts so you can build it yourself. It’s one of many such stores around the Bay Area. Most are small, individually owned shops in Chinese neighborhoods such as the Richmond district of San Francisco.
The majority of the parts sold and assembled by these stores are made in Taiwan, and many of them also come through American distributors who are from Taiwan. That didn’t happen by accident. According to Saul Yeung, Central’s president and the current chairman of the Chinese American Computer Association, this network was created in the 1980s after students from Taiwan at U.S. universities saw the PC industry open up to new “clone” manufacturers. Some took PC technology home to Taiwan and started making components. Others became distributors and retailers of those parts, Yeung wrote in an introduction to the group’s 2002 yearbook. Together, they helped expand the industry and drive down prices to make the PC a fixture in homes and offices.
Today, companies in Taiwan make most of the world’s PC motherboards, the boards of circuits that connect microprocessors, memory, and other components. They also make many other parts found in a typical computer, and much of the low-cost networking gear that consumers and small businesses use to connect their PCs also is made in Taiwan. Meanwhile, Yeung and other immigrants from Taiwan play a big part in the U.S. market for “white box” PCs, so-called because they are typically custom-made and sold under a store’s own name.
Globalization is loudly heralded at events such as the Fortune Global Forum I covered in Hong Kong in 2001, where I sat with journalists from all over the world and watched corporate executives applaud people like Chinese President Jiang Zemin, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and AOL Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin. We sat on bleachers in the back of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, watching an ocean of executives and dignitaries enjoying the addresses from tables in front. (I couldn’t see their cocktails or hors d’oeuvres with my telephoto lens, but it was probably fusion cuisine.)
At the same time, globalization is attacked by those who fear that Western corporations now paving commercial highways into the developing world gradually will dominate its cultures and economies.
McDonald’s, IBM, and other corporate giants really have changed lives in East Asia and other regions. Economic crises caused in part by policies of the International Monetary Fund and other Western institutions have caused some people to leave in search of a decent living. However, globalization isn’t simply a rising tide from the West that lifts all boats and boat people, or a regime being forced on poor Third World peoples by tycoons in New York and London. Immigrants from developing countries and entrepreneurs who form their own links around the world are active players, too. Today, there are many different jet sets, and there’s more than one way to do chicken right.
Copyright © 2002 Stephen Lawson