Not even Miley Cyrus and her cheeks are keeping a new generation of fat-cheeked Asians from dominating the front pages of the global media.
Take N. Korea’s Baby Boss Kim Jong-un. The past year he’s had more screen acreage than Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian combined. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for us Asians in America. A refresh of the stale media equations will dislodge some of those disempowering old stereotypes.
Kim isn’t the embodiment of an Asian ideal by any means. It’s heinous to execute your ex-girlfriend, fire and possibly execute your uncle and mentor, and gorge nightly on caviar and imported champagne while a fifth of your people starve and two hundred thousand are worked to death in labor camps.
But let’s face it — the mass media dote on people who elevate brattiness into high-wire acts. That dotage transmografies the images associated with highly bad behavior into the bits of cultural debris that, from a future vantage point, resolves into relevance and coolth — the currencies of cultural power and empowerment in our media-drunk age.
Even to a jaded world Kim’s high-wire act has been more engrossing than the foibles of publicity-hungry celebs. For one, Pyongyang Pudge has tangible power, not only over his long-suffering people but over the people of wary neighboring nations. He can evidently lob missiles across the Pacific and set off uranium nukes which, in time, can be miniaturized and placed atop those missiles. The artillery pieces positioned along the DMZ can rain twenty thousand radioactive shells on Seoul per hour to quickly render that city of 24 million uninhabitable for a generation or two. Kim’s small army of hackers can disrupt the banking systems and media of neighboring countries, as they did to S. Korea’s earlier this year.
That kind of power surpasses anything that Justin Bieber or even John Boehner wield. Barack Obama and a few other national leaders may be able to order nuke launches that can actually hit their target. But as sane leaders, none will ever entertain the possibility except as defensive contingencies. In other words, their brat quotients are hovering around zero. That means their power, as awesome as it may be in the abstract, won’t sell pageviews.
Kim’s surreal blend of erratic power, youth, bad haircut, Mao suit and fat cheeks are likely to add up to a cultural icon that will come to recall an era — not unlike Mao Zedong, John Kennedy, the Beatles, Bruce Lee, Richard Nixon and Ho Chi Minh, for example. Kim’s extreme youth makes him more interesting to young people who would otherwise pay little attention to the shenanigans of political leaders.
Kim has become so recognizable that he has even inspired at least one full-time professional impersonator in the person of a Chinese Australian named Howard. Wandering the streets of Hong Kong last month, Howard was instantly recognized as Kim by passersby. Would most Americans instantly recognize and demand photo ops with passing impersonators of Bieber, Katy Perry or Liam Helmsworth?
Kim has added a new edge to the Asian image to help shred old stereotypes of meek conformity, obsequiousness toward elders, and slavish hand-me-down devotion to western culture. Eccentric as are Kim’s Mao suit and palm-tree cut, at least he’s no slave to western culture. A distinctive look is de rigueur for pop icons and Kim’s look is far more unique than those affected by legions of South-Central-inspired pop artists around the world.
In short, the iconizing of Kim is a sledge-hammer blow to the stereotypes born of the suburban imaginations of yesterday’s TV writers and directors.
Another chubby-cheeked Korean who commands media frenzy is Psy, the biggest pop star ever to hit the internet. For two years running his videos have had more views than those of the next three biggest stars combined. Having managed that with just two songs, imagine the media frenzy that will greet the driblets teased from his first international album. They should begin leaking into cyberspace later this week, probably ahead of his 5-day Seoul concert stand.
Psy will inevitably return to the front pages of every pop-culture medium around the world for at least the next several months, and his music will drown out every other pop artist for the duration. With his cherubic cheeks and holiday timing, his image may even become superimposed over that of Santa Claus. It’s about time the old guy looked more Asian.
Like Kim, Psy has inspired impersonators and Halloween costumes. Psy brings pleasure with his zany sense of fun and kooky individuality while Kim appears to be perpetuating misery with his obsession with control. But the duo share one important trait — utter disrespect for the established order. Meek, humble and submissive would be the perfect antonyms for the adjectives that would best describe them. Psy greets packed stadia of adoring fans around the world with the same controlled composure with which Kim greets the masses made to turn out for official events. Like Kim, Psy was born to power. In their messianic public presences, they at times recall another apple-cheeked Korean — the late Reverend Sun Myung-moon.
The domination of the global media by the sheer force of their personalities have made these two fat-cheeked Koreans — love them or hate them — the most visible exponents of the new attitude visibly emerging among today’s generation of Asians, and Asian Americans — the deep-down sense that the world is finally but swiftly turning our way — and that it’s about time.
Kim and Psy are the ultimate in-your-face challenges to those who would dare recall the old mocking images of those comically clueless chubby-cheeked Asians of yesterday’s stereotypes. These two not only seem to have some clues, they’ve assembled them into a plan for conquering, if not the world, at least the world’s collective imagination.
Taro Aso’s stupid suggestion about copying the Nazis is just another in a long series of inappropriate Japanese gestures symptomatic of a national yearning to reclaim its long-lost testosterone.
Let me start by defining testosterone. As the hormone of confidence, initiative and self-celebration, testosterone is essential to the makeup of not only healthy men and women as individuals but also to societies as a whole. The problem is that some confused people see it as the hormone of brutal aggression and mindless assertion. In other words, in befuddled minds its virtuous properties are confused with sheer stupidity and callowness.
That confused definition is befuddling some Japanese politicians who would like to lead their despirited nation back to pride and self-confidence. Aso is merely the latest example. Another recent example is nationalist Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto and his bizarre riff about comfort women, prostitutes and the need for US troops in Japan to make more use of local sex workers. There was also the threat earlier this year by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to retract Japan’s earlier apologies to its neighbors.
Such statements don’t just offend neighbors and other right-thinking peoples around the world but also betray a society that has lost touch with the true meaning of pride and confidence — the true benefits of testosterone. The callow and erratic mindset that makes inanely offensive statements one day, then offers lame gestures to mend fences the next is symptomatic of children raised without the example of moral elders.
In fact, that is the situation in which Japanese society finds itself. I don’t mean individual Japanese, of which there are millions of right-thinking examples. I’m talking here about the collective mindset as embodied by its putative leaders.
The overarching ambition of Japan’s World War II militarists and their industrialist patrons disintegrated, in defeat, into a collective shame so deep that it fermented into a putrid mix of denial and self-abnegation. Denial that it had ever been a nation capable of such awful savagery. Self-abnegation to hide from the responsibility for the awful national crime against humankind.
This mindset has been responsible for a kind of societal timidity, even cowardice, reflected in the inability to deliver a straightforward, wholehearted apology to the nations imperial Japan wronged so heinously. It is also reflected in the utter lack of a healthy sexual identity. Sexuality is absent from media representations of Japanese men while Japanese women are portrayed as toys willingly exploited by western men. The only Japanese business leader seen making the kind of bold moves one might associate with the world’s third largest economy is Korean Japanese Masayoshi Son. In short, the nation appears to have been sapped of testosterone.
Which is why we keep seeing its mostly second-rate politicians making inane statements in a bid in mostly abortive efforts at working up some bravado. It’s true that Shinzo Abe’s effort to stir things up with his super-easy-money policy seems to have injected some life into the economy, at least for now. But the national quest to regain its self-confidence isn’t likely to go much beyond callow expressions of mock testosterone until Japan faces the truth about its imperial era squarely. That will lead toward a shot of real testosterone.
A new immigration visa category — call it a UR-1 visa for “Urban Renewal” — is the only intelligent solution to the socioeconomic trends that are blighting our big cities like Detroit and sending them teetering toward insolvency.
Nothing hurts brand USA more than the bankruptcy of Detroit, a city that was the nation’s fourth biggest as recently as the late 1940s but had slid all the way down to 18th place by 2010. Between 1990 and 2010 its population dropped from 1,028,000 to 701,000 — a 32% plunge. Unless that plunge, which continues, is reversed through intelligent national action, the city practically synonymous with America’s rise to the world’s leading industrial power will literally disintegrate into a ghost town within two decades, maybe less.
Detroit isn’t the only big American city on the path to oblivion. Baltimore, which ranked sixth in the nation with 950,000 residents in 1950, has seen its population plunge to 621,000 and 26th place by 2010 — a whopping 34% drop during a span in which the nation has more than doubled its population. Cleveland has gone from the nation’s sixth largest, with 900,000 in 1930 to 48th place and 391,000 residents in 2010 — a 57% free fall while the nation’s population tripled.
Other large cities that have come to symbolize aspects of America’s greatness are likely to meet the same fate, albeit along a somewhat less precipitous trajectory. Philadelphia, the nation’s third largest city with about 2.1 million people in 1950, is about to drop to fifth place with less than 1.5 million today. Even Chicago — the longtime second city demoted to third place — is struggling to cling to its 2.7 million residents while cities like Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose are surging up the top-10 list.
What’s the difference between losing cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland and gainers like Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix and San Antonio? Immigrants. Contrary to what one might expect based on our immigration policy, the kind of immigrants who have made the big difference aren’t those coming over with a $500,000 or $1 million in investment capital under the EB-5 visa program.
As I pointed out in March, only 3,800 EB-5 applications had been received during the entire 2011 fiscal year, of which 80% are Chinese. We’ve attracted much bigger numbers through the H-1B visa program which seeks to attract highly educated immigrants with technical skills. Unfortunately, those programs aren’t likely to help cities like Detroit regain their economic traction.
People with money and skills go to thriving meccas with an abundance of jobs and growth potential — Southern California, Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia, New York, Austin, the Raleigh-Durham tech triangle.
Who would be willing to repopulate and rebuild neighborhoods blighted by weeds, graffiti, crumpled chain-link fences and dilapidated houses with rusting iron bars on the windows? Immigrants with an abundance of energy and motivation but not the opportunity to use them in their home countries, people willing to toil for decades under what most of us would consider intolerable living conditions so they can give their kids the chance to grow up in a land of opportunities.
Few native-born Americans — or skilled or moneyed immigrants — would be willing to make the kind of bargain needed by cities like Detroit or Cleveland or Baltimore or Philadelphia.
That’s why we need a new visa program to attract young, energetic and hardworking immigrants. Let them come over and earn their green cards by living for seven years inside any of our blighted urban areas. Require them to be reasonably healthy, literate and part of a family unit with kids. From the standpoint of economic benefit to the US, a couple willing to work to build family life in a blighted neighborhood is worth at least as much as an investor willing to spend $500,000 on a questionable investment. Hard-working settlers with little money and few skills but the desire to make a new home built out of the wilderness a thriving society that became New York City, New Jersey, and all the other parts of the United States.
For a more recent example of how opening our doors to more energetic young families can keep the national economy on the right track, we can look to Los Angeles.
The Watts Riots of 1965 had sent the few Jewish merchants and white residents who remained in central Los Angeles fleeing to the Valley and to Orange County. The riots were a symptom of two trends — the creation of a large African American under-class due to the scaling back of the defense industries that had mushroomed during World War II and the Korean War, and the harsh tactics used by the Los Angeles Police Department to keep Blacks out of white areas. Regardless of the precise cause, south central Los Angeles became filled with empty stores, weed-choked yards and broken windows, just like the deep band of dilapidation that surrounds Detroit’s financial district. There was no prospect of reversing the decay, and Los Angeles faced the specter of economic collapse like the one now facing Detroit.
What saved Los Angeles from succumbing to fast-spreading urban blight is the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1965 which effectively ended the half-century ban against immigrants from Asia and other non-western-European regions.
By the late 1960s new immigrants from Korea began moving into LA’s bleakest neighborhoods. They cleaned up and reopened shops and restored houses and apartment buildings. Small grocery markets and eateries began opening in neighborhoods that had been without them for years. By the early 1970s a stretch of Olympic Boulevard and a few Western and Vermont Avenues boasted enough Korean shops and restaurants to earn the nickname “Koreatown”. By the late 1970s Koreatown was the backbone of Los Angeles, linking downtown with the Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills and the Westside in a contiguous band of vibrant commercial activity that not even the 1992 Los Angeles Riots could break.
Of course the rebirth of central Los Angeles also owed to an influx of immigrants from other Asian nations as well as from Mexico and central America. Very few of these newcomers brought large amounts of money or specialized skills. They mostly brought their willingness to work at whatever economic activity would produce enough to afford their families a roof and food — attending gas stations, working in sweatshops, opening hole-in-the-wall shops, eateries and dry cleaners. That was enough. Today they live in the suburbs and their children are the professionals and business owners of one of the world’s most vibrant cities. A city once seen as a symbol of middle-class flight has become a magnet for the most moneyed and skilled people from around the world.
To jump start a similar revitalization in cities like Detroit, we need to remember the concept behind the INA of 1965: shedding prejudices about what kinds of immigrants are needed to fuel America’s economic and social vitality. Yes, we need highly skilled immigrants. But when we institutionalize narrow-minded notions of what kinds of people can be assets to our society, we are planting the seeds of America’s decline into a society of exclusionary geriatrics like Japan and, increasingly, much of western Europe.
Ultimately, the issue isn’t whether it behooves us to save Detroit and other cities on the brink of collapse. The issue is whether we remain a dynamic enough society to continue to invite immigrants with little more than high energy levels and big dreams to tame the new wilderness opening up in large swatches of America — cities that have fallen victim to bad social and economic policies.
The defamation suit Asiana Airlines plans to file against an Oakland TV station for using fake pilot names that mock Asian names may herald a new era of Asian corporate sensitivity to US racism.
During KTVU’s Friday noon broadcast anchor Tori Campbell read a list of fake pilot names crafted to suggest the phrases “Something Wrong” and “We Too Low”. The report was deemed by Asiana to be “demeaning” enough to prompt a review of “possible legal action” against both KTVU and the NTSB.
In the past Asia-based companies have never shown sensitivity to American racial stereotypes or attitudes toward Asians. Even when Asian American groups have asked Asian companies to show support for demanding more respectful treatment of Asians by pulling advertising from shows that offended Asian American sensibilities, they have remained aloof, anxious to avoid becoming identified with Asian American interests.
Their thinking may have been the short-sighted belief that they are here to rake in dollars from Americans at large, not to become identified with one not particularly large ethnic segment. Of course that kind of thinking overlooks several important factors, not the least of which is the fact that such Asian companies rely heavily on the services of highly educated, bi-lingual Asian Americans who are often the sinews of their American operations.
Asiana’s announcement of its intention to sue KTVU is the first time that an Asia-based company has shown any willingness to address a racially offensive media portrayal. Of course the mockery in question happened to involve the names of Asiana’s own Korean pilots and not an offense against Asians in the abstract. Still the impulse to threaten suit is a step in the right direction though the legal basis of the suit itself may not hold up in court.
The suit is no doubt intended as a way to slap the station with negative publicity in a metro area full of Asians likely to be offended by the elementary-school playground mentality behind the mock pilot names. Legally the suit isn’t likely to win a substantial verdict since it would be virtually impossible to show any actual damage to Asiana’s reputation above and beyond the fact of the crash itself.
Still Asian Americans should hail Asiana’s willingness to use the legal system and attendant media publicity to counter the callowly racist attitude that surfaces from time to time on American media. We can only hope that it’s the beginning of an era of Asian companies recognizing their stake in not having Asians and Asian culture undermined by blatantly disrespectful media portrayals. After all, any sense that things Asian aren’t entitled to the full measure of respect would redound to the detriment of the the pricing power of Asian companies and their ability to attract quality employees.
With their economic clout, companies like Asiana, Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Toyota, Honda, Panasonic and the like can be a powerful force in the fight against the perpetuation of shabby attitudes by stubbornly racist elements in American society. The loser who thought he could get away with slipping mock Asian names into a major news story is crying out to be ferreted out by his employer through the legal discovery process and thrown into the square to face the wrath of Asians who have had enough of that kind of nonsense.
Let’s hope that Asiana’s lawsuit marks the birth of a sense of ethnic citizenship by Asian corporations doing business in America. Then they may actually be worthy of our support as America’s most affluent consumers.
The basketball pundits who had been insisting — erroneously — that Jeremy Lin was a flash in the pan are now coming out of the woodwork to declare him unwanted cap fodder now that Houston appears to be on the verge of signing center Dwight Howard without a deal to trade Lin.
Such premature proclamations of Lin’s pariah status during trade season are popping up in basketball sites like Blasksportsonline and Bleacherreport. The gist of their dark prognostications for Lin is that his performance during the season has exposed him to have been a marginal player who had managed to get himself overvalued on the strength of a few weeks of play over his head. They gloss over his solid season record and focus on his limited play during the playoffs, conveniently forgetting that a serious chest contusion had kept Lin from being able to shoot during three of those games.
The speculation about Lin’s fate as a discard unable to find a home is way premature, of course. There’s little doubt that Houston, in its perverse sudden blindness about Lin’s contributions, would love to relieve itself of Lin’s $8.3 mil average annual salary to spend on players like Atlanta forward Josh Smith or Clippers’ point guard Chris Paul as lures for Howard.
The Lin-bashers forget that the object of their determined scorn continues to have superstar appeal in every markets with large Asian populations — which happen to be most of the biggest metro areas — New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco Bay, Washington DC, Seattle and Portland. More importantly, his skill as a court general would make him an asset to at least a third of the teams in the NBA.
At this stage of trading season there’s a lot of posturing and precious little concrete bargaining going on. And the teams interested in Lin — probably at least a dozen — have no reason to tip their hand in light of how blatantly Houston has telegraphed its eagerness to do anything it can to clear room for Howard and his supposed trade cohorts. The other GMs know that a little patience will save them millions in any deal for Lin with a Howard-fixated Rockets management.
The eagerness of the basketball press to write off and stomp on Jeremy Lin even as his career is getting started gives us a hint of the kind of prejudice the first Asian American basketball star has had to face throughout his basketball career. No doubt the experience of having been miscast by the Rockets into a limited role during the past season has been unpleasant for Lin. On the other hand, it’s probably a valuable learning experience on his way to claiming his rightful place as probably the most talented and exciting point guards to emerge this decade.
Last month’s industrial espionage case filed against three Chinese NYU Med Center researchers only underscores what I’ve been suspecting for some time — as a group we Asians are seriously lacking in the capacity for top-drawer acts of disloyalty, betrayal and treachery.
Even with hundreds of thousands of us working in fields like biotech, semiconductors, aerospace, nuclear energy, defense, IT and finance. we simply haven’t shown that we’re capable of committing the kinds of treacherous and venal acts that have been so generously imputed to us over the years. Imagine the deepening disappointment of the army of journalists and rightwingers who have been earnestly waiting for the kinds of stories that would prove once and for all that we’re worthy of our image as people prone to heinous acts of disloyalty to our country, or at least to our employers.
What do we have to show for all their faith? A pitiful case in which someone offered technical insights about work he’s doing at NYU Langone Medical Center to people linked to a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government.
Despite the level best efforts of eagle-eyed US Attorney Preet Bharara to work up the facts into another headline case that Barack Obama can use to badger Xi Jinping about intellectual property protection during their summit this weekend, the best Bharara could come up with was a bribery charge for having failed to reveal that they were on the payrolls of Chinese companies with whom they discussed their NYU work in the medical technology of magnetic resonance imaging.
If they had at least managed to steal and sell a bona fide trade secret or two, Bharara could have slapped them with economic espionage charges. The worst that could be said about this trio? That they discussed “nonpublic information” about their work. Not exactly sexy reading.
Yet another huge disappointment in a line of cases that have the right atmospherics — Chinese talking to Chinese about American technology — but simply fail to live up to the hype about our limitless capacity for treachery. Once again we’ve fallen short of the kind of diabolical cunning that could spice up newspapers or justify breathless TV breaking-news feeds.
Of course the biggest disappointment in recent memory is Dr Wen Ho Lee. The guy was a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Labs and the best he could do to live up to American expectations was copy some semi-classified files onto his laptop. Never tried to send them to China. Never tried to sell them to an agent. Even refused a Chinese agent’s request for data while they were engaged in a tête-à-tête inside a hotel room.
Despite all of Lee’s work with classified data, and despite the best efforts of the FBI to set him up, the lamer only managed to snag a single count of “improper handling of restricted data”. All those poor news organizations that had been salivating at the atmospherics — nuclear energy, Chinese scientist, classified data — ended up having to publish retractions about their innuendos and chip in for the $1.6-million settlement paid to Lee. Disappointing all around, especially after Lee spent nine months in solitary and got everyone worked up over the possibility of the first ever case of an Asian American betraying his adoptive country to help the homies back on the other side of the Pacific.
And of course those Japanese Americans never amounted to much in the treachery department either. Not a single act of sabotage or espionage or even cooperation with the enemy during World War II after the US government went through the trouble of sending 120,000 of them to rural retreats, presumably to protect them from white people who were out to harm them for their sneaky treachery in tracing their roots to a land that would later bomb Pearl Harbor.
It’s gotten so I’m beginning to wonder if we Asians are worthy of our vaunted reputation for cunning, deceit and treachery.
History and common sense tells us that the global spending spree by China’s state-owned firms will promote more progressive values in China rather than subvert western ones overseas.
The New York Times recently published an essay by Heriberto Araújo and Juan Pablo Cardenal derived from their book China’s Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers and Workers Who Are Remaking The World in Beijing’s Image. Titled “China’s Empire”, their alarmist Times essay argues that China is using the vast resources of its giant state-owned enterprises to pressure foreign governments to acquiesce to its agenda and value system.
Superficially the argument seems to have merit. After all, a giant economy like China’s, with control over trillions of dollars saved by its repressed people, can and does command deference from governments of societies in need of infusions of capital to sustain and revive their economies. It’s only natural that such government will tone down their criticisms of China’s human rights problems and even weaken some regulatory provisions as necessary to lure the desired influx of Chinese capital.
The Times essay cites the example of the agreement by the Danish-controlled territory of Greenland to allow Chinese firms to bring in workers at below-minimum wages to work on an epic project to develop the infrastructure needed to extract natural resources from the territory. The deal — which has yet to be concluded — is presented as an example of how China is using its economic clout to spread its values while subverting western ones. The authors seem to imply that letting in Chinese workers willing to work for less than the minimum wages of Greenland is a bad thing — presumably because it’s a subversion of Greenland’s higher living standards.
Even the authors acknowledge, however, that without China’s ability to sink billions into a project that may not pay off for decades, if ever, Greenland would remain what it has always been — a vast, inhospitable island near the North Pole with not a single highway into its vast interior. They also acknowledge that Greenland simply doesn’t have enough workers with the skills needed for the project regardless of wages offered. They even concede that only China’s state-dominated economy could have produced the immense accumulation of capital needed for the massive undertaking of transforming Greenland into a more economically productive land, with real highways and other infrastructure necessary to support significant populations.
I find it a bit ironic that the example was cited in an essay intended to show the dangers of opening the door to buyouts and investment deals with China’s state-run companies. If anything, the Greenland project — assuming it actually comes to pass — illustrates the major strength of China’s economic system. In a resource-hungry world in which cataclysmic changes to climate patterns are in the offing, the ability to direct epic amounts of capital toward massive projects may not only be desirable, but essential for the survival of modern civilization.
In the not-so-distant future a more habitable Greenland may become one of the more hospitable regions in the Northern Hemisphere, allowing million to migrate from populated coastal regions becoming submerged or regions becoming parched due to changing climate patterns.
As for the Chinese workers imported to do the job, it’s hard to understand how they’re being hurt. They’re coming voluntarily to enjoy what, in their minds, are well-paying jobs. Because they aren’t competing for jobs that locals want, the Greenlanders aren’t suffering as a result of their presence. If anything, they may gain in the future when the infrastructure projects give a big boost to economic activity.
Even run-of-the-mill Chinese buyouts of companies like the US Smithfield Foods or French Club Med — both examples cited by the Times essay — present financial boons for the sellers without any subversion of either the local economies or their government policies. Rather than prognosticating the ultimate fates of these companies, we have only to look to the outcomes of other major foreign buyouts. The best examples that come to mind are the many big Japanese buyouts of US companies during the 80s and 90s.
Japan’s Sony bought Columbia-Tristar in 1989 for the then-astronomical sum of $3.4 billion. There was much sensational media speculation about how Sony would subvert the studio’s culture by bringing in Japanese overlords and management concepts. None of that came to pass. Instead, Sony quietly kept pouring hundreds of millions more into its studio venture to expand and refurbish facilities and to bring new talent into the management.
It took Sony two painful and costly decades to nurture what became Sony Pictures Entertainment into one of the most profitable and respected Hollywood studios. Rather than imposing Japanese management over the studio, Sony ultimately brought over the American head of Sony America to become chairman of the Japan-based Sony conglomerate in hopes of infusing it with a bit more US-style dynamism. Unfortunately, as Sony chairman and CEO Howard Stringer presided mostly over Sony’s demise from the world’s leading consumer electronics company into an also ran falling behind Samsung.
Another high-profile Japanese purchase of an American company came in 1990 when Matsushita Electric (maker of Panasonic) paid $6 billion for MCA/Universal, owner of America’s oldest movie studio. Unlike Sony, Matsushita was impatient to turn its studio into a moneymaker in its own image. But the resulting culture clash proved disruptive rather than revitalizing. Five years later Matsushita threw in the towel by selling 80% of the studio for $5.7 billion — essentially a break-even price.
The buyout of Chrysler by Germany’s Daimler-Benz is yet another high-profile example of how foreign ownership doesn’t translate into subversion of local values, even when the subversion of Chrysler’s then bloated and inefficient corporate culture would have been the best possible outcome. Daimler paid $36 billion for Chrysler in 1998. It then proceeded to lose money year after year, with no end in sight, as its efforts at streamlining local management met with too much resistance. Eight years later, it essentially paid the private equity firm Cerberus to take Chrysler off its hands. And of course now Chrysler is again under the control of a foreign company, Fiat of Italy.
These examples show that the spectre of Chinese firms using their financial clout to subvert local values make for sensational headlines but isn’t borne out by real life. The more likely scenario is the foreign firm becoming a long-suffering surrogate parent obliged to keep investing time and money in hopes of coaxing better results from its acquisition. Rather than subverting local values, the buyer has little choice but to adjust its own expectations to local values. If it fails to do so, it has little choice but to walk away and cut its losses. If it succeeds, it learns what it can from the local acquisition while imparting its own best practices.
Given the benefits to the local economy, with little in the way of countervailing detriments, it’s little wonder that rational governments are willing to tone down criticism to lure Chinese investments. That may not be a bad tradeoff. In reality, criticisms have had a limited impact on the behavior of China’s governments. On the other hand, the steady increase in foreign interactions by China’s business leaders — who have close ties with its political leaders — are likely to translate into fewer offensive government actions that damage the ability of major Chinese firms to engage in buyouts and other overseas business transactions.
As a practical matter, encouraging increased international business investments by Chinese firms is the most effective way to ensure that the west has some meaningful points of leverage for influencing the policies and actions of China’s government. Once Beijing has invested billions into a local economy, it has a direct and substantial financial stake in seeking to build and maintain a positive image for China. That would ultimately translate into more policies calculated to win the favor of the outside world.
Shinzo Abe and Kim Jong-un need each other in a way that few national leaders have needed each other since the early days of World War II — and they appear likely to become summit partners even if it means alienating their traditional friends and allies.
What N. Korea’s young hereditary ruler needs more than anything is a Grade A economic power to help rebuild and prime his nation’s broken and rusty economic pump. That would help it break the ice with other nations that have been reluctant to violate the US-led economic blockade.
What Japan’s new headline-chasing prime minister needs is a geopolitical coup that will revive his nation’s flagging self-confidence by putting it out in front of regional developments instead of perpetually being victimized by them.
During the past decade Tokyo and Pyongyang have kept each other at a distance in deference to the wishes of their close allies and friends. Any move by Japan to take the initiative to boost ties with N. Korea would have been tantamount to thumbing its nose at Washington and Seoul and their concerted efforts at trying to bring Pyongyang to heel. Any effort by Pyongyang to cozy up to Tokyo would have offended its old generals with memories of Japan’s brutal colonial rule, and Beijing, its sole military ally for the past sixty years.
Now both Japan and N. Korea find themselves increasingly at odds with their traditional allies.
Washington has made it clear that it won’t back Tokyo in the dispute with Beijing over the Senkakus (Diaoyudao). No US aircraft carriers and missile cruisers will be sent to keep Chinese submarines, ships and fighters from slowly tightening their picket around the Senkakus. Washington is committed on paper to responding militarily against any Chinese attack on Japanese assets, but Beijing doesn’t need to fire a single shot. It will simply continue using its inexorably growing numerical superiority in ships, jets and manpower to put the Senkakus gradually out of reach of Japanese defensive capability.
S. Korea is challenging Japan in its most important export segments — everything from consumer electronics to chips to sophisticated oil tankers and state-of-the-art cars. It has also begun eclipsing Japan both culturally and politically around the world. Abe’s aggressive stance on comfort women, visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and the rocky little outcroppings known as Dokdo (Takeshima) has convinced many S. Koreans that he wants to lead Japan to embrace its imperialist past.
Abe knows that he has to change its current dynamics with China and S. Korea if Japan is to keep from becoming East Asia’s punching bag. In practical terms Abe sees only two initiatives within his power that can change the current oppressive equation. One is to send the yen plunging to make Japanese exports more competitive with those of S. Korean and China regardless of the impoverishing effect on the less affluent half of the nation’s population. The other is to have Japan fill the vacuum left by Beijing and Seoul in response to Kim’s recent provocations.
Abe has already done the former, sending the yen on its way to losing nearly half of its value between last February and next, sending exports and stocks surging while increasing the cost of fuel, food and household goods. Now he’s about to pull off what may be the most daring move of his political career: position Japan as N. Korea’s main patron and economic sponsor.
Nothing could be more welcome for Kim Jong-un than the prospect of a summit with Abe. It’s Kim’s last and best chance to secure meaningful economic aid and legitimacy from a nation with the means to bestow both. Nothing could better vindicate Kim’s five months of saber rattling like getting Japan to fill the void left by S. Korea and China at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the Diamond Mountain resort and various projects in Rason and other special economic zones.
Abe has the ideal cover to keep his pas de deux with Kim from appearing to be seeking to support East Asia’s public enemy number one as a vehicle of self-promotion or opportunistic national aggrandizement. Seventeen Japanese citizens were abducted by North Korean agents between 1977 and 1983. During a 2002 summit between former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and the late Kim Jong-il Pyongyang admitted to having abducted 13. It returned five abductees and their families but insisted all the others were dead. Having good reason to disbelieve Pyongyang, Tokyo has made the return of all abductees or their remains a foreign policy priority.
To be sure, making some substantial progress on the abduction issue would in itself elevate Abe’s stature even further than it has been by aggressive debasing of yen. But to both he and Kim the real objective of a summit would be to elevate the stature of both leaders and of their respective nations by resolving the much bigger issue on the minds of everyone concerned — ending N. Korea’s nuclear weapons development and restoring its economy to a condition that will allow the proper feeding of all its citizens.
If an Abe-Kim summit manages to take a step toward achieving those objectives, both leaders will have strengthened their personal prospects immeasurably. In addition to trumping Beijing and Seoul in regional politics, Abe will have blunted a challenge from the right by charismatic Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto who has recently appeared to be competing with Abe to sound like the more rabid nationalist. Kim will be able to stick a tongue out at Beijing and Seoul while securing a foundation for his stated goal of raising his people’s living standard.
If food is a window to a culture’s competitive potential (as I’ve suggested in my earlier piece about Korean vs. Japanese cuisines), American cultural hegemony may ultimately give way to the Chinese.
I’ve been through every food infatuation — Korean, Cajun, Italian, Mexican, barbecue, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Indian, Persian, Russian, Afghan. I remain a promiscuous eater, susceptible to the lineup of cuisines that only Southern California can offer. But when I have time to indulge my deepest cravings, Chinese is increasingly becoming my go-to option.
I’m not talking about any old Chinese food. I’m talking about the offerings of what may well be the world’s most competitive eateries — the modern Taiwanese and Chinese cafés that thrive in the brutal competition of Asian foodie hotbeds like Atlantic Times Square, Valley Boulevard, Baldwin Ave and Colima Road.
My earliest memories of Chinese food are of the jjajiangmyeon (noodles with black bean sauce) and tangsooyook (sweet & sour pork) I ate as a kid in Korea. Their flavors and textures were a world apart from my daily fare of Korean and American. Looking back to those days I marvel at the proliferation of Chinese restaurants along Korean streets, including the streets and alleys of Myongdong, Seoul’s lively entertainment and shopping district. Back then Korea was poor but it was already crowded with restaurants offering Korean and foreign cuisines. Chinese restaurants outnumbered them all.
My second infatuation with Chinese food came when I was a teen coming home to Korea for the summers. My friends and I would crowd into one or two of the tiny kimchi cabs waiting outside the gate of the US military compound and head downtown. We started our evenings by buying bottles of cheap wine to take into the private rooms of our favorite Chinese restaurant. We drank them with yakki mandoo (fried dumplings). Each plate was always served with little dishes of dakkwang (yellow Japanese-style pickled radish) and onions with jjajiang (salty black-bean sauce concentrate).
Looking back I marvel that we paid only the equivalent of a dollar for a heaping plate of yakki mandoo, each dumpling stuffed and elegantly folded by nimble fingers into plump pleated crescents and browned so the edges were crispy. We ordered plate after plate while taking advantage of our room’s paper-door privacy to engage in teen shenanigans. Our summer carouses through the streets and clubs of Korean cities were fueled by Chinese potstickers. For us they were the equivalent of pizzas, hamburgers and tacos all rolled into one.
Settling into the life of a young professional in the states I didn’t visit many Chinese restaurants. In those days yappies (young Asian professionals) ate Italian, Cajun, French, sushi, Thai and, of course, nouvelle. Back then Chinese restaurants were seen as purveyors of inauthentic fare cooked up for Americans who didn’t know better — hardly an image that appealed to ambitious young Asian Americans. It also didn’t help that Chinese food was linked to the culture of an impoverished communist giant struggling to emerge into the modern world.
After I had kids priorities changed abruptly. Image went out the window; taste, comfort and value moved to center stage. Suddenly we found ourselves back in Chinese restaurants a couple times a week. Country-style tofu, moo-shoo vegetables, orange chicken, broccoli beef, egg fu-young and, yes, noodles in black bean sauce satisfied my family’s collective palate without putting big dents in our plastic. And unlike Korean or Vietnamese restaurants, Chinese restaurants were everywhere, including even our coastal suburb.
In those days Chinese restaurants were of the old-school, serving dishes drenched in thick, often undifferentiable sauces. The menues were probably little different from the ones concocted in Chinatowns in the 19th century. On the westside the Chinese restaurants were scarcely less pricey than their European or Japanese competition. Still our favorite ones became our erstwhile home kitchens, always ready with comfort food when we were too rushed to cook.
Fast-forward two decades. Having exhausted the possibilities of every cuisine displayed along pedestrian-friendly streets from San Diego’s University District to Napa, a decade ago we rediscovered Chinese food. Our new infatuation began with drives to the eastside for dim sum. On New Year’s Day, the one day of the year when America goes into hibernation, we could immerse ourselves in the festive din of a hundred families engaging in ritualistic gluttony. What could be more fun than ordering twenty plates and OD’ing on the assault of flavors, textures and shapes? And all for about the price of a meal at a mid-level restaurant in Santa Monica or Brentwood.
What moved Chinese food from the occasional excursion to a weekend routine were the hip new cafés that began appearing in Asian enclaves. Applying modern Taiwanese and Hong Kong sensibilities to traditional Chinese dishes and flavors, they served up an updated version of Chinese cuisine that’s tasty, aesthetic, quick and cheap. Just as importantly, they freed the Chinese dining experience from dim dens lined with red overstuffed booths and moved them out into open spaces with tall windows, clean lines and modern, upbeat decor. Rather than descents into the not-so-glorious past, a Chinese meal took on the feel of a sneak preview of a healthier and richer culinary future.
Despite their sleek look Chinese cafés are much more than suggested by their names. Their menus typically fill a half dozen pages. Places like Fortune Dumpling, 101 Noodle Express and Guppy Teahouse serve much more than exquisite steamed dumplings, flavorful beef noodle soups or dozens of flavors of milk tea drinks. You can also find delicacies like wasabi fried oysters, exquisitely sautéed fish filets and beef wrapped in fragrant herbs — all at prices ranging from $5 to $9, not counting special deals like $3.99 for a 10 steamed pork dumplings at Fortune Dumpling. The same can be said for many other cafés like Din Tai Fung, Green Island, Chef Hung’s and Tasty Garden.
Of course we probably spend more on gas and wear-and-tear on our cars driving out to the eastside than what we save on the delicious food. And we always end up ordering more food than we should. But that’s beside the point. We’re all suckers for great food at great prices no matter how much time and money we have to spend to get it.
And while I’m enjoying our Chinese café meals I can’t help reflecting on the rich culinary heritage, disciplined aesthetic sensibility, industry, efficiency and daring that went into creating and running such establishments. Their incredibly low prices are only possible because they serve so many customers each day with such impressive efficiency — without skimping on service and amenities. For example, our steamed dumplings come with several tiny immaculate sauce dishes, including one filled with slivered fresh ginger. Our beef noodles come with a stack of extra bowls and spoons that we didn’t even ask for. All this for what we might pay for pizzas or hamburgers in our suburban neighborhood.
I can’t help wondering how many Americans will ditch pizza parlors and burger joints for Chinese cafés as word spreads of their values. Thirty years ago few Americans had heard of sushi. Today there isn’t an American town of over 20,000 that doesn’t have at least one sushi bar. Modern Chinese cafés may even become as ubiquitous as their old-school predecessors. I don’t think I can find a town of over 5,000 without a Chinese restaurant.
Already Chinese buffets — admittedly a different kind of food venue than modern Chinese cafés — are becoming a fixture in towns across American, even ones far removed from metropolitan areas. Several years ago, during a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia I was surprised to see at least two Chinese buffets.
The spread of the modern Chinese café will bring renewed respect for a culture that had been dusted over by two centuries of misfortune but which is now reclaiming its proper place in modern civilization. To my mind they embody the vitality of a culinary tradition reborn into the modern world with all the advantages of a flavor palette that took thousands of years and dozens of regions to develop.
Anyone who watched the Rockets’ regular-season finale against the Lakers could see that Jeremy Lin is no longer the point guard who came off the bench to lead the broken Knicks back to respectability.
He’s also no longer the point guard who scored 39 points in a Harden-less battle against the Spurs last October. Sadly, Lin may even end up back on the bench unless he can reverses some disturbing trends that have become apparent lately.
Let’s start with the fact that Lin has been looking brawnier in the upper body than he did even mid-season. Standing next to opposing guards, he’s usually the beefier one. The added muscles on the shoulders, chest and arms are likely to be the cause of one of his emerging problems — sluggishness.
Strength training is imposed by NBA teams eager to protect their investments because muscle is seen as body armor that can enhance durability. Team trainers also believe, spuriously, that adding muscle mass will enhance athletic performance.
The opposite is more commonly true. Misguided muscle-building has the potential to nip the most promising sports careers in the bud. Examples of Asian American careers diminished by weight training include Michelle Wie, Tiger Woods, Anthony Kim and, yes, Jeremy Lin. I suspect all that added mass may have contributed to the persistent foot injuries suffered by former Rockets center Yao Ming.
Using weight training to focus metabolic resources on building muscle mass in the arms, shoulders, back and torso dampens the subtly-balanced, typically leg-powered motion needed to drive, putt or shoot a basketball into a small hoop at a great distance.
A gifted young athlete represents an optimal allocation of physical resources toward a very specific and limited objective. Building up upper-body mass is the surest way to throw that delicate machine off balance. The burden of building superfluous muscles can also rob the body of its capacity to repair daily wear-and-tear, as well as to keep the brain well nourished. Combine that with athletes’ natural tendency to compensate for the loss of touch, timing and balance with more brute effort and you end up with crippling injuries.
As soon as Michelle Wie turned pro at the age of 16 and signed huge contracts with sponsors like Nike and Samsung, she made the mistake of hiring an expensive coach. The first thing high-priced coaches do is bringing in trainers. The results have been dismal, as the world knows by now. The physiological and other changes to her body (and mind) destroyed her only real gift — a perfectly natural and balanced swing.
The same can be said for Anthony Kim who tried to build a more muscular swing and ended up crippling himself due to the inevitable cascade of adjustments. Tiger Woods too was getting too muscular from weightlifting. His extramarital tomcatting was blamed for the collapse that began in late 2009 but the beefing up compounded his inability to maintain his high level of play.
Lin has been packing on muscle since entering the NBA. To the extent that he was focusing on leg strength, the results were generally positive, adding to his explosive quickness and preparing him for his meteoric rise last February. But that same muscle-building push probably also contributed to the torn meniscus that ended his season in late March.
The pounds Lin has been packing onto his shoulders and arms recently are slowing him down and throwing off his shooting touch. It’s time to reduce the upper-body weight training to maintenance levels so he can become rebalanced. If he persists with the muscle-building, he’ll find himself out with another major injury, possibly even during the playoffs. The recent sluggishness may be an early warning sign that he’s heading toward injury.
Another dangerous habit Lin has fallen into is the focus on turnovers. He’s brought his turnovers down from over 4 per game to just over 2 during the final two months of the season. That’s way too few turnovers! The psychology that puts low turnovers above inspired playmaking is a prescription for what we’ve been seeing lately — too much passivity and too little hustle.
When Lin focuses on turnovers, he loses sight of the freewheeling high-intensity play that made him the league’s leading pickpocket early this season and the most exciting point guard of last season. No one is interested in watching a cautious Jeremy Lin who worries about turnovers. It’s time to remember what started Linsanity — his decision to stop worrying about turnovers and start playing his own game. That game isn’t about caution but about lust for the paint, the dish and the swish.
Last but not least is the sense that Lin is deferring too much to James Harden. It’s hard to buck the conventional wisdom that the Rockets have become Harden’s team because he’s played more aggressively than Lin the past season. But a Harden-centered team was neither originally intended nor mandated by the powers that be. It resulted largely because of Lin’s acquiescence to the perception that he needed to be something other than what he is.
That acquiescence hasn’t been good for the team. With all the talent the Rockets have — as well as the league’s highest-scoring offensive system — to end the season as the Western Conference’s 8th seed isn’t a triumph but a travesty. Much of the blame goes to coach Kevin McHale for failing to make better use of Lin’s playmaking skills. Lin himself also deserves much blame for not fighting for his proper role as the team’s court general.
Lin amply demonstrated that generalship not only at Harvard and during Lisanity days but in the Rockets’ preseason games and the handful of regular-season games missed by Harden, most of which the Rockets won. Yet in many of the games in which Harden played, Lin was content to be passive and wait for Harden to make rain. That has put on Harden a burden that has proven too heavy too often. No matter how many baskets Harden can squeeze out under pressure, over the course of a long season the Rockets will never match the potential of a team sparked by a true court general like Jeremy Lin.
If Lin can’t bring himself to buck the expectations that have emerged of a Harden-centric Rockets team, he owes it to himself to get traded to a team that will make full use of his core playmaking ability, even if means playing off the bench. Mark D’Antoni and the Lakers can use Jeremy Lin now more than ever with both Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash questionable for next season, because of their age as well as their injuries.
The first playoff round against the Thunder will be a brief one unless Lin reclaims his true gifts in time to make some thunder and rain for himself and for the rest of the young and hungry Rockets.
