Tag: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

Go a bit more native

In 2000, after 25 years of being away, I made a short trip back to Vietnam.

What a culture shock (especially when I landed in Hanoi, where I had only heard about).

Twelve years. A dozen trips later. A little deeper into the alleys and byways.

I think I have touched on different parts of the proverbial Elephant.

Vietnam now has malls that are as sterile as the ones in the States (on weekdays).

The first Starbucks is having its soft-opening.

Raybans, I-phones and Vespas are as common as the remaining rice fields.

French colonial presence is confined in the centres with boulevards and sidewalks (just like in Cote d’Ivoire). But urban sprawl doesn’t stop there.

At the outskirts of Saigon, shops after shops compete for retail customers.

Fresh flowers are shipped in from the highland just in time for Tet celebration.

Coffee shops with Wi-fi serve up tea to go with coffee (East and West blended).

When you see a bunch of well-dressed Asian get off a bus, you know they are APEC tourists.

Or else, backpackers would try to hopelessly blend in with flip-flops and shorts. Lonely Planet. I read that guide on my first trip. Now, I rely on instincts and instructions from my taxi and scooter drivers.

Like any city, Saigon is divided into various social strata The upper crust lives behind iron-gates and tinted Mercedes.

Everyone else, crowded flats and scooters, wearing required helmets and optional surgical masks.

Fortune are made and lost here. One bubble after another. 1997 and 2008.

Not as severe as in Thailand. But the poor have always suffered, below the radar. They will probably continue this trajectory for a while, even with more foreign investments. With brands like Nike, Intel, Starbucks, KFC and Jabil , change is undeniably in your face.

Vietnam has grown out of the “war” box. It has evolved into an emerging market and “Happy” country (behind only Costa Rica). It is worth visiting and studying.

While people are increasingly materialistic, that alone is not what makes them  happy. Perhaps with the right mix, one can be content.

Let’s not forget, people do share the spoil, which makes them materialistic, but not yet individualistic.

To give is more blessed than to receive. But not for long since the mono-chronistic, individualistic and modernistic cultures are invading, and people start putting up fences and walls. Fences make good neighbors, as Frost put it.

But it also slices away those invisible connections people are born into for centuries, before the French, the American, the Russian and the APEC people arrived under the pre-text of global village. In truth, what do we know about life in a village? I certainly don’t. The US arm forces didn’t. Nobody did, except the people who had lived there, and now are living in the city. They too wouldn’t tell (I found “After Sorrow” by Lady Borton quite informing).  While I try to go a bit more native, they went the opposite (urbanized). Somewhere in between, we cross-path like two ships in the night. Oh, don’t forget to bring cash if you want to go a bit more native.

Noodle cultures

Imagine you can slurp a spicy, mouth-watering noodle bowl on a rainy night.

Even when it is instant, thanks to the King of Noodles (they even have a noodle museum in Yokohama).

Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thailand and Vietnamese; all love this staple.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/marketing/259168/tf-eyes-vietnam-for-noodles

Take the Korean and Vietnamese samples.

Both are known for North and South.

Both seem to have become what they fought against (Korean industrial might resembles Japan’s rising sun in the 80’s, while post-war Vietnam is defining its multi-polar identity i.e. Chinese, Franco-Russian, or APEC).

These emerging blocks interact and influence one another: young Vietnamese love Korean soaps and stars (Rain), while the Korean invest heavily in Vietnam’s young workforce (who might not endorse the 55-hr work ethic, due to the lingering French laissez-faire  35-hr work week, with coffee and cigarette breaks).

When these cultures export themselves, they stake out block by block, with the Korean districts in Wilshire District (LA) and Garden Grove (OC); similar pattern emerges as the Vietnamese found work in Silicon Valley or  Camp Pendleton near Little Saigon enclave.

Korean cinema, meanwhile, has drifted in the direction of its former enemy ( Japanese) by exploring the grotesque and domestic brutality ( the dark side of an industrial culture coming of age.)

The threat that ties all these disparage cultures (island-apart, literally) is the string noodle, originated in pre-Marco Polo China.

Even Samsung started out as a noodle company.

The Asian retail gal might be in suit, in compliance with industrial codes, but at lunch time, reverts back to her larger cultural codes (segregated, slurping and spicy).

Those culture groups now come face to face with modernity, under the disguise of free trade. Samsung or Sony? Toyota or Tata? Coke or Pepsi (wherever there is Pepsi, there is music, but not “the real thing”).

I used to work on the same team with my dear Korean colleague, and our markets were literally side-by-side (geographically, but culturally apart, just like Tijuana and San Diego).

Companies which try to expand to Asian markets need to understand these deep divides, the same as found in Europe or Latin America.

At least, shrewd observers can count on a set of common denominators i.e. food, fun and festivities.

Cultures are moving targets. But underneath, there are forces at work . The average person on the street just know they have changed, slowly, to becoming what their parents and grandparents had once detested (leaving the local village for a global one).

The collective self is giving way to the individual self (see Last Train Home, where inter-generational conflict was played out on their annual journey back to the village).

Consequently, you can take any of the above folks out of the noodle shop, but you can’t take the noodle away from them. Not on a cold day, or rainy day.

That’s what triggered the invention of instant ramen. Our noodle King saw a need (why all these people have to stand in the rain, waiting their turn to order noodle). That solution has been the key to unlock a kingdom, where modernity (speed, efficiency and technology – food processing) was married to tradition (childhood memory, communal activity and uncompromising taste). It’s all in the spices. At least, it was one of the triggers for Columbus to set sail and discover a rounded Earth. The end of all journeys it seems, is to come home and learn to know the place for the first time. That place, for a lot of people, has noodle waiting albeit in instant packages.