Tag: Asia

On being a foreigner

Train, plane or automobile, we all try to get somewhere, point A to point B.

Far enough to be looked at as “foreigner”.

The Economist has a piece on this subject to highlight the decade of globalization.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108690&source=hptextfeature

I was surprised to find Vietnam, especially in HCMC and Hanoi, to be very cosmopolitan i.e. a large body of expats and international tourists. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese themselves travel overseas for educational and occupational opportunities.

Recent news showed violent incidents among the Vietnamese expat workers in Eastern Europe and Vietnamese students in Taiwan.

This is a withdrawal syndrome of a minority group (cocoon) when facing the “threat” of a larger majority, the Others.

And while regrouping, they turn onto each other, love or hate. It happened in Paris with the Russian immigrants, Little Italy in the US etc..

In the 1920’s, Americans found Paris, its cuisine and culture (as Parisians perhaps now discovering Big Mac and small Mickey) fascinating. Hemingway and Maugham all had memorable recollection on this era.

Something about greeting the New Year in a foreign land, far away from home.

The balloons, the balls and booze are the same, yet in the company of strangers, one experiences “lonely crowd” syndrome.

And everybody is aware that while it is New Year there, it’s not yet New Year else where (a testimony to our globalized world) e.g. Russian New Year lands on the 13th, Chinese a month later etc….

The Greek have two different words to express this sense of time: kairos and chronos.

Kairos is the fullness of time, while chronos is just the ticking of time (like 60 minutes on CBS, or 24 hours with Jack Bauer). In Kairos, one can greet the New Year with a sense of awe and anxiety e.g. a decade ago with the Y2K scare. Kairos brings about convergence of chances and choices. Cultivation and harvest time.

Other time zones will have to endure the chonos, to take their turn at counting down. Ten, nine, ….

Everybody sings Abba’s “Happy New Year“. Cheap champagne was passed around. Balloons were popped. Kessler described this experience of Russian celebrating their expat New Year in lowly quarter of Paris (The Night of the Emperors).

It is only to show that we have no control over the passing of time, and the changing of places.

More and more cities are being transformed to accommodate population growth. And real estate are in demand, driving the poor to the outer edges. Dark side of change.

The hard part is to get pass that denial: the more things stay the same, the more they have to change.

Thatcher was found to be utterly against the influx of Boat People into former British Hong Kong.

And look at where things are now . The economy in Asia is resilient, just as its people.

In this 21st century, the real foreigness perhaps lies within ourselves: that ardent refusal to admit that the world had moved on, and that it will be easier to be Margaret Mead than Margaret Thatcher. Not with the broadband penetration, not with the mobility of smart phones, and not with supersonic boom in E commerce and global commerce. If Made-In-China is no longer foreign, then nothing is foreign today. Just a hop on the plane, you will be from point A getting to point B.

Global shuttle and reshuffling of the card deck. An illness or blessing? All in the eyes of the beholder. But no longer a foreigner in 20th-century sense. Not with I-pod, I-phone and I-nternet.

California Dreaming

TIME spotlights California on its cover this week.

As a country, California would be with the G8 ( between Italy and Brazil, thus displacing BRIC with CRIC  i.e. California, Russia, India and China).

Yet it has no world-class soccer team (despite having in-shored Beckham) just yet. That’s said, it is one of the brownest States in the Union. And it will stand tall, demographically and technologically.

I wrote about the up-trading Taco truck in my earlier blog. TIME also showed a Korean BBQ truck  using Twitter to announce its stops (high-tech high touch).

What surprised me was foreign students’ major in the State: more chose Business and Management over Science, Math and Engineering (exactly what the Chinese need to move up the value chain).

With 13 percent Asian, California has a natural inroad to Asia (just a plane-hop away).

Washington State has also capitalized on its geographic “proximity” to set up strong ties with the East (and sell some apples, Window and Starbucks while at it).

Who wouldn’t want to live in California: paradise and paradox, problems and promises, most congested freeways, yet greenest state. It has a underexploited Modesto and an overexposed Hollywood , clean tech and bio tech; gay and straight.

California is home to dream factories (Disney and Dream Work). So enamoured with the big screen that the State elected actors to be its Governor not once but twice. Its script keeps getting a rewrite even on location (budget cut? well, hold up a knife Governor. “This is a knife” the line last said by Crocodile Dundee on his first visit to the Big Apple). It’s used to be “Go West young man!” Now, it’s keeping going West and follow the sun.

I talked to people in the Orient and they wanted to come and live in California. To them, California is America (especially if they have a free account on Yahoo, own an I-Phone and watch YouTube, all California home-grown, like its wine and raisins). In up scale China, one can find new developments that were modeled after Newport Beach.

“All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray”. If the gubernatorial race is an early indicator of things to come, we are in great shape. After all, anything can happen in a dream, or when we “sit down and pray”. The truth is, my relationship with California has been a dysfunctional one, as is the State.

Despite its high costs of living, California is where you’ll find innovation around the corner, or in the garage .

Californians don’t do attic or basement like East-Coast counterparts. They compose music on wheels (Jewel), produce TV shows on wheels (Jay Leno), and of course, cater tacos on wheels. Year round, they don’t need the bottom half of their jeans (hence the cut off or zip out). This recession and recent gold price peak led a bunch of people to the high mountain, once again, creating a mini Gold Rush, California’s original raison d’etre.

Most listened to is its rush hour traffic report. Least visited is the downtown LA library, before or after the fire. When EReader and Kindle get full adoption, they will turn library into museum .  What’s hip in California (women volleyball, muscle beach) can’t be easily duplicated .  This Wednesday, Google will team up with Lala to help us search for that “California Dreaming” tune. Just a phrase, such as “I walk into a church” can trigger a bot crawl.

Or ” I’ll be back” to pop up the Terminator. It doesn’t hurt to have a Governor with sound bites or once picked up a dumb bell in what remained of  a LA fire.

And the media ate it up: light, camera, action (background lighting, actor, prop and audio). Keep dreaming California.

 

Kaizen

In the 80’s, we saw many books about Japan e.g. Rising Sun, The Japan That Can Say NO.

Now, the Most Admired Country list seems to say NO to Japan, and places it at number 5.

Versace closed its door there after having sold to all the old people of the laggard group.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5e6a886-b325-11de-ac13-00144feab49a.html

(in Dalat, Vietnam, a plan to build an all-Japan city for retirees was also scrapped).

Meanwhile, Toyota put out a recall for many of its late- model vehicles (its floor mat made the gas pedal stuck and killed 4 in San Diego).

And last month election results ushered in a new Prime Minister  from the opposing party.

Japan needs a quick fix.

Not from Robots, or foreigners, whose labor it needs (especially for the service sector), but whose origin it despises.

Young Japanese, generation without the Sun, got their play book from the Woodstock generation, hence no Versace

or if they needed accessories, they try SampleLab, or knock-off. When you sleep on your parent’s couch,

you don’t want to get caught trading up. Besides, high-end accessories don’t jibe with dark leather.

I admired the Samurai spirit, and how quickly Japan adopts technologies: AI, nano, just-in-time manufacturing, and

of course, the Beatles.

I also respect their stamina when faced with humiliation, from France’s De Gaulle to America’s Japan-bashing era.

I also wowed at their bouncing back , from the real estate fiasco to the Asian crisis of the last decade.

Somehow, Japan, personified by Toyota, seems to be able to pull rabbit after rabbit out of the hat (kaizen?)

Lexus, Scion, Sony (with Samsung “closer than it appears in rear view mirror”).

Its export-driven economy has been its crown jewel. Until neighboring China, India, Singapore, Korea

joined the game. All of a sudden, Japan found itself defending its home turf.

No more shopping trip to destination Vegas (whose show hosts used to greet the tour audience in Japanese in between drum rolls).

The outlet mall which served as a bus stop in between Los Angeles and Las Vegas has seen this boom and burst too well.

Now, at Number 5, Japan needs a miracle to get out from bad loans, to sustain its world tourist life style and to take care of its aging population.

At least, its defense bills have all been paid for since WWII.

Now, it needs to open up to fresh voices and visions. It did that when sending a Toyota designing team to drive up and down California Freeways. The result was the Lexus. It should now do the same, only this time, Kaizen at home.

 

Red lanterns

There is a story on BBC news about an Indian engineer who complains that he only married thrice:

“why would the Muslims have all the wives, and me, a Hindu, cannot have multiple marriages” he vented his apparent frustration.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8224746.stm

Truth be told, he was confirmed to have been married at least six times, concurrently.

This reminds me of a joke . It goes like this.

Three guys battling around. First guy says ” my girl got a very nice crooked tooth” (in Asia, esp. VN, one crooked tooth is considered exotic and rare).

The second guy chimes in “mine got them on both sides”.

The third guy instinctively refuses to lose face “you guys know what, mine have a whole jaw like that”.

I call this misplaced competition.

Sure, It’s the survival of the fittest. So nature lends itself to competition in the process of natural selection.

But competition knows no bound. During the 80’s, cheerleader’s mom went way out of bound to ensure her child’s admission.

My first daughter went to a lot of cheer-leading competitions in S California, so I know the sacrifice and commitment

parents made to their child’s team.

With hip hop, my child learns the value of team work,  hard work  and their place in the larger scheme of things.

We keep hearing for days now how Senator Kennedy was able to reach across the aisle to make sure work get done.

I am sure the Last Lion wanted to win, but he also knew the other side had the same thing in mind.

The art of negotiation is to sell to yourself and your position.

How much compromise are you willing to make? When to hold, and when to fold.

And most of all, to resist the urge to sacrifice all the hard work in the heat of the moment: I win, you lose.

All or nothing. Chances are… you might have the last word, but you may not win. If anything, it’s your girl who ends up with  crooked teeth by the mouthful.

 

It’s a good IKEA

A billion+  prospects. Wow!

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-ikea25-2009aug25,0,3900096,full.story

IKEA in China. More  a  theme park then a show room.

They try, they buy.

Today it’s the A/C and ambience.

Tomorrow, it will be CHIKEA everywhere (not only the font, but spelling change as well!).

One thing China does well is to mass-produce these household items on the scale hard to compete with.

But IKEA will keep reinventing itself, tossing in a satin pillow here and a straw basket there to create the right look and feel for the place. After all the construction “bad” loans comes interior decoration.

China, a hyper power of consumerism. The force of the unleashing wallet.

By 2020, we can expect a new generation of male child, mostly over fed and under exercised (due to the proliferation of automobiles and computer gaming) all want to start their own Alibaba or Baidu.

IKEA would then have to move up the value chain to accommodate Hummer drivers and Lenovo users (or suffer the fate of Sears, whose catalogue was first, just as IKEA’s now the most printed).

It made so much sense to see the Chinese bid for Unoco 76 gas and once failed, they hit the Safari trail in search for oil.

Young overseas Chinese workers will come home with a wealth of knowledge, having been exposed to the latest and greatest from abroad. While at home, their counterparts are still seen napping at the IKEA’s A/C theme parks.

Either the world is coming to China, or China will go out to the world. The Olympic is just a start. Central Casting is on a

look out for a new bad guy to play the role of   X as  “made in X” .

Back in the late 70’s, we used to laugh at “made in Japan” automobiles (remember the Datsun?)

I vote for the Made-in-China solar panels though.

They are quick to smell money-making opportunities. Either that or they will have to ship their workers overseas, as they did with trucks and cars during the pre-Olympic months to “clear out” the smog in Beijing.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Solar panel, at this time, is a good IKEA.

Fat pipe, fast food

FIOS in Triple Play, for $79.00 for the first six months.

The last time I looked, it was $100 for the Triple Play package: phone, TV and broadband.

In China, kids played until they dropped dead (unwilling to lose their seats at the Internet cafe and online, where supposedly, they were up against competitors from all over the world. Sort of 24/7 Beijing Olympics).

And the China you and I had in mind (Nixon and Mao, Madam Butterfly and man in front of the tanks) is now replaced by a new generation of only boys, obese and online.

It will be just another step before they are online and home alone (at least, they drag themselves out to the internet cafe around the corner for now).  At home, one has access to Haeir small refrigerators: lactose, sugar, carb diet are in abundant supply. Stressed over a lost game? Have some more sweet!

The chairs and screens grow larger to accommodate larger “young” population. The next Billion ( according to Jump Point).

Marketers always seek to win over the next generation. Well, they are no longer the Generation without the Sun as in Japan, but something resembles Bangalore and Beijing. Without repeating Friedman’s mantra, but they are the ones who will take away my kids’ jobs, if not mine already, while we are asleep.

Their older and rural counterparts might have been mistreated and working under age at off-shored garment plants,

but these Asian urban kids are internet savvy, and fast food junkies.

They could multitask (typing and eating fries at the same time), code, and speak two if not three languages. Hard to beat!

The future prospects are quite frightening, if you can envision the Hongkongization of  China. 1.3B entrepreneurs and consumers of every thing fatty: fat pipe and fast food. It’s quite a recipe for a disaster, if not, obesity and obscurity.

Asians kids are by and large, not that extroverted. Now, they spend hours in front of the screen, developing and playing games. We will have to take old maid’s matchmaking from an art to an industry. Honey.com anyone? Remember now, when both boys and girls look like Sumo, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Plus, they can do a lot of stuff online nowadays to alter the look, size and shape of a person. Plastic surgery goes East, right after Madison Ave.

YouTube China will have quite an audience to reckon with, provided they roll out enough fat pipe for fat people.

 

Asian drivers

It’s been a long way since Sixteen Candles.

In it, we found Long Duk Dong, the male Asian actor, portrayed a Japanese exchange student who wrecked the host family car on a night out

“what auto-mobile?” he asked laying on the front lawn at mid morning the next day.

Fast forward to today and the sentence of Madoff.

We found judge Denny Chin, arrived from Hong Kong at age 2 and lived in Hell Kitchen in Times Square, to rise to a federal judgeship. His high-profile case today provides a catharsis for the blood-thirsting public.

There have been a slew of Asian men moving into the lime light: Ang Lee (BrokeBack Mountain),

Ray Young (GM’s CFO) and David Li (Recipe for disaster, wired magazine) who came up with the formula to slice and dice CDO’s (should have been COD’s).

Sociologists have noticed an interesting pattern in interracial marriages: White male-Asian female, Black male-White female, but not Asian male-Black female (some how it’s at the opposite ends of the spectrum).

But the American racial landscape has evolved a bit, since the Japanese internment during WWII to today’s sentencing.

It’s a white-collar crime, and the country origin of the judge has not been an issue. During this Recession, we find

Ling (now working for a private equity company in China), Chin and Young all came across as

“could hold the water”, a long way since the days of  Sixteen Candles’ “what auto-mobile??”

I forgot if it were a GM car or not, but it certainly was a Detroit huge car given the early 80’s time-frame.

Time has changed. Hyundai and Fiat will soon be as popular as the 90’s SUV’s. Wait until the QQMe arrives from China.  At least, marketers should know enough to avoid pushing  pink cars to Asian men or any male.