Tag: Asia

21st-cent Chinese expats

The Economist has a timely expose on “the Tale of two expats”.

http://www.economist.com/node/17797134

It is written from a British perspective.

If it were for the US, an entire section would have to be added in (given the background of Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Internment Camp, and 80’s Yellow Peril).

It’s hard for America to accept the reverse flow of WTO. The last time they came, they came to build the railroad which is now one of Buffet’s investments (the irony doesn’t seem to escape: first the “coolies” came to build the track, then their mainland counterparts built and shipped the goods to be transported over these railways , specifically from the Alameda corridor to the East Coast – then Warren Buffet went to China to solicit wealthy Chinese donors to join his high-profile giver’s club). Many weren’t allowed to bring their wives over (modern expats at least will go home after a short stint). Today’s Chinese expats found natural inroads (Houston, Monrovia CA, and surprisingly, MD) and better acceptance of brand Asia (Sony to Samsung, Honda to Huyndai). For now, they try to move up the value chain, from traditional Chinese Food (except for Tao in Vegas), to China Telecom.

The Economist’s article does not want to speculate about Chinese expats’ re-entry and reverse culture shock. But for sure, after a few years of  (western) acculturation, they will repat with fresh eyes and appreciation. Most will regain their posts, but all will question the assumptions about their society (No garbage strike? Maids are always women? Rote learning in school?)

For now, the US is sitting on an uncomfortable seat. It’s one thing to offshore manufacturing to China, it’s another to see them “inshore” and start making solar panels and VAS services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) right here.

If history is any guide, the Chinese expats will keep coming, not to build railway, but to build information superhighway.

They tried their hands at satellite (with centuries of experience in rocket science).

And most of all, their willingness to humbly take things apart and reverse engineer each product (watch out IP lawyers).

They will follow the Japanese tracks. When the Japanese team who built the Sienna and Lexus came to California, they were told to eat and sleep like Americans – drive-through In & Out, motel 6, Las Vegas….

Just to get into the mindset of an average US driver. The results: two sliding doors for soccer moms to drop off their kids.

21 st century Chinese expats will bring home a thing or two. Unlike their Western counterparts, foreign wives won’t be among their trophies. Higher regards for individuality and his/her right to protest will. They will come home and have a second look at their maids who for centuries have been taken for granted as inheritance from an agrarian past. The benefits of industrialization and globalization tend to flow both ways.

 

VINA MOUSE

Last week, an op-ed in the NYT lamented the death of Disney dream in America.

This week, they signed a multi-million dollar deal to build HappyLand in Long An, Vietnam. The dream doesn’t die. It simply moved offshore. Imagine you can tour both Cu Chi Tunnel and HappyLand in one full sweep.

The new Vietnam seeks to learn not only from neighboring Asian Tigers (Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) but also from America and European Union. Many signed on with Fulbright scholarship for a year at Ivy League Schools (Yale, Harvard, Standford) to “reverse engineer” America’s secret sauce.

Vietnamese young population will have their Sputnik moment at HappyLand.

Build-and-they-will-come model. Modern cities and mindset. Planned economy. No legacy.

America on the other hand is weighed down with pension plan, health plan, and deficit reduction plan.

Every day, a bunch of people turn 65 in America. And not all of them move on to live in country clubs. Some already got condos in Mexico (warmer than Florida). Others to Canada to buy subsidized medicine.

The brave ones traveled as far as India, hence spurring up medical tourism.

I noticed an interesting trend lately: more American are getting work-permits in Australia, perhaps in construction related business. New Frontier.

To think that the Disney dream is fading out is to limit the scope of the argument.

It simply found new disciples elsewhere, in the land far away, whose name was known more for past conflict than future potential.

The change will happen so fast that by the time we emerge from our tour of Cu Chi Tunnel that we see the bright lights of HappyLand with Vina Mouse souvenirs and logo.

What happened in Vietnam stays in Vietnam. And a lot has lately. I hear the fade out music of “It’s a small world after all” somewhere in the background. Time to dream on.

 

From sleigh to moped

http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/12/christmas_vietnam

Ho, Ho, Ho in Ho Chi Minh City. Toys for tots, delivered by Santa on moped.

When the US pulled out of Vietnam, it played “White Christmas” on Armed Forces radio.

Now, it’s peace-time Vietnam, where people enjoy every bit of cotton and confetti used to decorate the city’s manger.

I was there two years ago at that same spot just to witness my friend’s got pick pocketed.

Posing for a picture might cost you dearly.

But people in Vietnam do seem to enjoy the crowd and festivities.

Here in the US, on Christmas Day, all the stores, including fast food chains, are closed (except for liquor stores).

What a contrast!

Yet, both seem to move up one notch on the extended families scale: the atomized US culture makes allowance for families reunion, while the extended family culture in Vietnam  joins the whole city in celebration. Whatever the reason for the season, people feel a need to embrace, to be appreciated (gifting) and to loosen their purses (hopefully giving to charity).

French cultural residue still shows, when people say “Joyeux  Noel“.

As if on cue, I have a Facebook friend who decided to post Francois Hardy’s C’est Le Temps de L’Amour.  People are seen to hang out in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon, taking pictures and taking in the scene.

When I was in Cote d’Ivoire, I sensed a deja vu. It turned out that former Saigon is not too culturally distant from Abidjan. We all read about refugees began to pour over to neighboring Liberia (which some years back had its own instability) in anticipation of a military intervention there to enforce election results.

If you ask the people there, chances are they would say they celebrate Christmas as well, but not in the form you would recognize (longer church service for one). So Santa has to adapt, from one country to the next, and in Vietnam, from one District to another on mopeds.

It must be very hot in that bright red suit in Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Ho Ho, Hot, Hot, Hot.

 

Telcom’s waste in Vietnam

From beepers to printers, from pay phones to city-phones, Vietnam was in a hurry to leapfrog to latest in Telecommunication.

After all, there are a lot of territories to be covered, even now, with 3-G. But some attempts stick, others faltered according to an article in Labor newspaper.

http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=538113

It stated that some rural households were given all three proprietary sets even when not need-justified.

Join the club! It’s not just Vietnam which tries to catch up. It’s the entire post-industrial world which try to connect 24/7. First the device, then the social network. They are discussing mutation of Web 2.0 such as Meet up when your flight is canceled, or rousing young Mexicans to join a dance to promote tourism etc….(too bad the nude photographer did not have this app available to him when he first got the idea of going from city to city to take “artful” group nude pics).

Some wise doctors even prescribed an office with treadmill and desktop combo to combat obesity, to him, an inevitable result of our information age.

I am not sure how CFO’s will buy-in to HR proposal to equip their offices with not only high-speed computers but also slow-moving treadmills (they have just considered cloud computing to get rid of the servers to save on energy bills, now this?).

It lends new meaning to “sweat equity”. Hawkins is no stranger to tapping his key board while on wheels. The guy has always been prescient (except for understanding what love is).

Wi-fi technology has given ways to a host of application (laptop and latte).

Back to our wasted phone booth and city phone (limited range, with no roaming). These apps have not been widely adopted in Vietnam.

Whoever pitched these products did not foresee the ubiquity and fast roll out of 3-G in Vietnam, hence, death on arrival e.g. S-phone. Once you got a hold of an I-phone, it’s hard to come back to beepers, pay phones and city phones. Owning an I-phone is making a statement i.e. I have arrived.

Observers new to Vietnam are marveled at its rate of  I-phone adoption i.e. how can people own an I-phone which costs nearly 2/3 of their annual income!

The same question was asked not long ago and still raises suspicion when people saw young women on Vespa and other expensive import scooters. Often, they were dismissed as being call girls until those critics themselves could afford these newly price-reduced scooters.

The next wave would be cheap auto imports and other electronics manufactured right there in Vietnam for domestic consumption (Canon and Samsung).

By then, the country will be inundated with industrial waste. And rural households will not only receive all three network termination devices, but also a host of other hand-me-down waste components such as tube TV‘s, desktop computers and even a phone booth, if they want to use is as shelter from the storm. I can’t wait to see people trying to place a 3-G mobile call inside a phone booth in the rain. At least, old technology and new technology can both be put to use in modern Vietnam, where nothing is considered waste.

 

The Elder role in Vietnamese society

I often interact with nephews, one in particular is even older than I, but all call me Uncle. To them, I belong to the previous batch. Last of the line. In the old Vietnam, once you made past 50, you are moved up to the “elder” circle (“chieu tren”) when feasting.

I had an occasion to do just so last night. I sat with much older people whose names I couldn’t recall, and whose silver hair I can hardly match. Vietnamese would commemorate their ancestors, more so than celebrate birthdays of the living. Past-oriented culture.

When Intel decided to put another of its Asia manufacturing plants, it chose the outskirt of Saigon.

In doing so, the chip manufacturer put the spin on Vietnamese time line. It will go forward from that point on. Chip set and not chess set (whose final move is to expose the King).

King, Priest, Teacher, Parent (and a host of higher-ups like Uncles). I see dead people (Sixth Sense).

Because of my “role”, I find it hard to be on the level with my nephews. We see each other, even hang out.

But we could never be friends for some reason.

There is a gap between us. It was put there by the assigned roles in Vietnamese society.

Extended families structure color coded people’s seating (just like airline class service). It would be interesting to have a software which help trace the Vietnamese family tree, so each of us can see how intricate the connection is, just as we learned how Obama was related to Palin. Hanoi was able to trace its roots to 1010, hence last week’s 1000th anniversary celebration.

People might be dead, but their city isn’t.

I see living cities. When something survives that long, in today’s modern world, it deserves a second and hard look. Let’s say this year were 1900, I would already be dead ( average life expectancy was 47.)

Call me Uncle, and see if I care. As long as I am not dead.

A flood of love

Every year, flooding in SE Asia killed people and took away their livelihood.

And every year, people rush out to give materials and their time for reconstruction.

So the mishaps were occasions for the best in humanity, and turn a flood of misery into a flood of love.

Nobody wants to be on the receiving end, unless disaster struck.

And only some are willing to be on the giving end.

It’s more blessed to give than to receive.

But only a few step up to the challenge.

I read somewhere that the billionaire dream team (Gates-Buffett) went to China to drum up supports for their cause – giving back. Social activism is calling on the richest in Asia where fatalism rules. You are born into a cycle not of your own doing, thus, can do nothing to undo it. ( As of this edit, that circus did not turn out well on follow-up.)

Live out the rest of this miserable life without exit.

Accept one’s fate.  This view has prevailed among the bottom billion. Now it is challenged by modernity and global commerce.

The region has seen neck breaking change, and with it, pollution, regulation and corruption.

It remains to be seen that a decade from now, which view (fatalism or self-determinism) will hold water.

Even with a flood of talent in IT, Asia still needs commerce and customers on the global scale to, well, scale.

We don’t know when something reaches critical mass. Like rain itself, it has its own cycle and temperament.

Let’s hope we got the right kind of flooding to lift everyone’s boat. Opportunity likes to dance with those who are already on the floor.

seeing what’s been there

Adjust your lens or change it, then you will see all kinds of things.

Even the same things, but much clearer.

The power of reframing.

Organization or organism all need to self-examine at one time or another.

For instance, after taking your shirts back from the cleaners, you might notice that even though they are clean, but they no longer have the feel of new fabrics. There lies the difference between new and clean.

Take that up one more notch. Market that might be on the uptick today, will turn mature tomorrow (hence the need for product extension or reinvention).

Toyota took a page from Hyundai which has offered product warranty, to also give two-year free maintenance (on selected models).

We all need to work harder for the money.

It makes sense for Toyota to have customers come back to the dealership voluntarily instead of via forced recall.

We will either look at the same thing in new ways, or try to find new things.

There are things about ourselves we don’t even know. Doctors can always find out these things via all kinds of test (MRI scan).

Then at the culture level, we often learn more about our culture through the eyes of  foreign journalists and tourists (a journalist observes that daily traffic in Vietnam looks like people performing circus acts every day).

One example of this is Hanoi.

Many journalists camped out to give us modern pictures of the city.  Foreigners like Old town Hanoi.  The same way I enjoyed Old Town Alexandria near Mt Vernon.

So, in Hanoi they celebrate, while in DC, people are puzzled about Vietnam Memorial structural integrity (which had a crack).

During this recession, many of us are forced to reframe, and reposition our career.

Not all can self-reinvent to get into health care, education or environment.

Meanwhile, IT companies like Dell decided to invest billion of dollars overseas where future demands are.

Welcome to a  global world where India and China consumers dictate  brand extension.

In the US the only chain that seemed to grow was Dollar stores where you can buy last year’s Christmas gift wrap on the cheap. They would rather have you store their merchandise at home, then in their stores.  A new kind of inventory outsourcing, a new way of clearing the deck. Old dog, but new tricks.

 

the infrastructure bills that come due

Infrastructure improvement could cost billions. Kids need to drive someday. And as Mr Buffet wisely put his investment dollars into railways since containers need to be offloaded to the Wal-Mart near you.

Those who travel recently can recall “boarding by zone”, “e-ticketing”, etc.. All sorts of gimmicks , except for the limited runways and slots allowed for take offs.

So, we are back to asking ourselves: to build or not to build.

No pain, no gain.

And it’s a long-term commitment.  Bulldozers and concrete. Fixing the hole while driving through it.

(reminds me of Hwy 22 in Orange County or the 405 in West LA).

Nation-building at home.

While American allies reaped benefits from its generous foreign aid ( among them S Korea, Taiwan, and to a certain extent, S Vietnam during the war – except here, more infrastructure got damaged than built) and recently Iraq, MN bridge, or New Orleans levy are illustrated cases for the new bill.

Leadership is that quality which needs to be tested in times like this. One sees what needs to be done, and one takes action. Period.

Leveraging the downturn, and solving two problems with one solution. P and P/C, the golden eggs and the goose, keeping the nation employed, while paving the road to success for next gens.

Obama can walk out to a well-paved Pennsylvania head high, just like the Clinton/Gore team did with their Information Superhighway.

I have never opined on this blog, except on empowering people, through technology or globalization.

But I know, without infrastructural improvement, globalization will stall (imported goods cannot get to their destination, leads to exporting goods stall at home as well).

Do unto others what you would like yourself be done unto. May the best plan win.

In Vietnam, the town approved a new Happyland, to make Long An Vietnam’s equivalent of Anaheim. By the time the expected 14 million visitors frequented this Happyland, we hope here in the US, 220 million travelers would tell AAA that their holiday travel were excellent due to infrastructure improvement. Our reaction and action during this downturn separates leaders from followers, visionaries from Yes men.

Blind man amidst Saigon traffic

Yesterday I saw a blind man, cane first, feet followed, amidst really busy traffic.

He was neither assisted by a companion, dog or human being, nor by traffic alerts for the blind.

Yet he made it to the other side (without music from the Door) , and was on his way into an alley, which must be his way home.

I am sure his hearing must be extremely sensitive to compensate for his lack of eyesight.

Then I reflect back to my situation. I am  sure I have missed tons of signals during my trip: designer glasses, upscale bikes, Vespa resurgence, Western-style brewery, less road fatality and infrastructure improvement.

Still I have been blind to many situation, most obviously, the absence of the middle class.

Yes, more are out of the poverty level, but it will be another 10-20 years before we see the emergence of a “middle-class Vietnam“.

Since this society is inter-linked on a web model (extended families), we won’t see all-boats-rise for a while yet.

Case in point: the credit system has yet taken hold here because people have used to borrow from friends and relatives, and not institutions (which rely on home ownership as collateral). Banking, insurance and heavy industries are dominated by State-Owned Enterprises.

ATM‘s weren’t even around back in 2000 (one exception was at the Diamond Plaza).

Micro loan (similar approach has been successful in India), hui (turn-taking to borrow from the common pot) and pawning are still prevalent.

So, an economy whose rate of growth is only behind China and India, still functions under the old “trust”system, which further insulates Vietnam and impedes its otherwise ascension on world stage (i.e. access to a larger FDI pool.)

20 years from now, I hope to see Electronic Medical Records take hold here, as well as E-government and E-services. Vietnam Airline now allows self-check-in and there will be a traffic audio alerts to help our blind hero in his daily walk.

There was an Iranian film (the Willow Tree?) about a blind professor who after undergone surgery in France, decided that he did not like his new state of “seeing”.

Way philosophical for me, but the gist is : we can only control the smaller circle and  not the macro one.

To play God is to invite guilt. And I am sure our blind hero has every right to curse the dark (and traffic). Instead, he goes about his way, using cane for feeler and ears for sensors. Wonder what he hears everyday. Certainly, more than those who listen from their I-pods to tune out Saigon noisy traffic. Perhaps on the I-pod, we hear “Getting on to the other side” by the Door.

Jazzy Saigon

I attended Quyen Thien Dac and the Nilsson Trio (Jazz) performance a while ago.

Cultural exchange. But “fant” or on-the-dime invention is not new here.  Saigon traffic has already been jazzy, zigzagging at every turn.

I was with friends. He himself brought an ensemble of jazz men to Vietnam a while back.

Mighty proud of my friend who is multi-talented and multi-tasking.

I also noticed an “order in chaos” pattern here in Vietnam.

You might visit  Nha Tho Duc Ba (Notre Dame de Saigon) and  a taxi hop later, visit Lang Ong (the Grand General Temple). In one jazzy move, you embrace both a Church that glorifies the Maternal side of divinity, and a temple that honors a local patriarch who died a martyr death defending the city (of Gia Dinh) against invaders. Yin and yang, zigzagging at the highest level, both East and West. Young people are into Hospitality Management (to capitalize on booming tourism and the lack of service mentality, taken for granted  in Thailand . Four-star price demands four-star service.

Thus, at the service level, we still have room for improvement.

But not to take away credits. Young Vietnamese, having completed their studies abroad are coming back. Reverse brain drain; just like their Indian and Chinese counterparts (my housemate was toasting a US-bound relative last night. She will be attend US College this Fall).

Marriott is here. So are Inter-Continental, Hyatt and Hilton. Chinese building boom (latest horse-shoe Sheraton for one) echoes here as well, since constructors need work.

Everyone is snapping up valuable real estate and talent.

Need a musician? Done. Hair and make up? Done.

Even M&A. Things might have slow down due to the Recession, but many are seeing opportunity in crisis (young expat filmmakers have given it a try).

This paradox has traditionally been a Vietnamese trademark: thriving in chaos. So Thien Dac personifies what everyone already knew: the positive spirit needed to rise above one’s humble circumstances.

It’s weather perfect last night. And I knew I was sitting in the middle of change, and perhaps, might be swept away by whatever comes with it.