Tag: Thatcher

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.