Obama, China and an Emerging New Reality
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

The world is changing faster than our imaginations.

The world has become a surreal place these last few months.

A black man has taken over the White House. China has become the world’s biggest car-buying nation for the last three months in a row, and looks to be taking over the top spot permanently. The most successful movie in years is a Hollywood knockoff of a Bollywood flick.

What’s next? A Chinese basketball star dominating the playoffs? A Korean company supplying hi-tech batteries to help an American auto giant see tomorrow? An Indian company buying Land Rover and Jaguar? China lecturing America on the evils of unbridled capitalism while holding $1.2 trillion of its $2 trillion foreign exchange reserves in Uncle Sam paper?

These are epochal shifts. They portend an almost unimaginable change in the way Americans will come to see ourselves in relation to Asia and the world. The change is so overwhelming that the American media hasn’t yet invented the jargon for describing their magnitude. It’s numbed by the hailstorm of changes.

The shift is especially meaningful for us Asian Americans. We feel it on a personal level in our daily lives because it affects how waiters and hotel clerks and bankers treat us. Suddenly we’re draped with a cloak of respectability, even cache, as essential players and partners working toward a future that is no longer black and white. There are no more easy assumptions about who will be enjoying the social advantages that lead to the upper rungs of society. We have waited a long time for this.

That doesn’t mean that we’ve somehow been liberated from all those annoying and infuriating stereotypes, or that we aren’t subjected to racial prejudices. All it takes is a few minutes of channel surfing to see that we remain in the margins of the American consciousness. But it is gratifying to see that the margins are closing in on the middle.