Ceci est ma Vie

All Things Asian Are Becoming Us
Commentary, Andrew Lam,Pacific News Service, Jan 12, 2005
Rudyard Kipling's famous line "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" no longer applies. Today, East and West are commingled, and in this country, the East is on the rise.Take movies. American audiences are growing more familiar with movies from China, Japan and South Korea. Quentin Tarantino is planning a kung fu movie entirely in Mandarin, and Zhang Yimou's stylized martial arts films like "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" are popular across the country. Hollywood is remaking Japanese blockbusters like "The Ring" and "Shall We Dance?"What many Asian Americans once considered proprietary culture -- kung fu, acupuncture, ginseng, incense, Confucian dramas, beef noodle soup and so on -- has spilled irrevocably into the mainstream.Three decades ago, who would have thought that sushi would become an indelible part of American cuisine? Or that Vietnamese fish sauce would be found on Aisle 3 of Safeway? Or that acupuncture would be accepted by some HMOs? That feng shui would become a household word? Or that Asian writers, especially Indian, would play a large and important role in the pantheon of American letters?American pundits tend to look at the world through a very old prism -- they associate globalization as synonymous with Americanization: i.e., how the United States influences the world. What many tend to overlook, in the age of porous borders, is how much the world has changed the United States.Evidence of the Easternization of America is piling up.Japanese animation is a good example. There are more than 20 anime shows on cable channels, ranging from "Sailor Moon" to "Pokemon" to the latest teenage craze, "Kagemusha," a series about a half-human, half-demon warrior on a quest. "Spirited Away" beat out Disney movies to win the Oscar for best animation in 2003.Sales of Japanese comic books, DVDs and videocassettes reached $500 million in the United States last year.Mandarin-language films like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," by Ang Lee, and "Hero," by Zhang Yimou, were top draws across the United States. Asian Americans have been featured as stars as in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" and "Better Luck Tomorrow."Asian stars in Hollywood include Ang Lee, Joan Chen, Justin Lin, John Woo, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeow.Sandip Roy, host of a San Francisco radio show called "Up Front" and a film critic, points to the "Bollywoodization" of the United States."Deepak Chopra has long been managing the spiritual fortunes of Hollywood's golden people," he says. "Britney Spears' new album has a Bhangra remix of one of her singles. Images from old Indian matchbooks and posters now retail as birthday cards. The vinyl seat covers of Indian rickshaws are turning into tote bags for Manhattan's chic. And yoga is now the new aerobics. "That this country is falling under Asia's spell shouldn't be surprising. If the world is experiencing globalization, the union between East and West, where a new hybrid culture is thriving, is just part of that process.Suddenly, Beijing, Bombay, Bangkok and Tokyo are much closer to the United States than we thought. And in as much as we feel reassured in seeing the Thai teenager in Bangkok wearing his baseball cap backward under the golden arches of McDonald's, Americans have learned to savor the taste of lemongrass in our soup and that tangy burnt chili on our fried fish.Writer Richard Rodriguez once observed that "Each new wave of immigrants brings changes as radical as Christopher Columbus did to the Indians."Eastern religions represent one of those changes. In Los Angeles, there are more than 300 Buddhist temples. Buddhism, writes Diana Eck, professor of comparative religions at Harvard University, "challenges many Americans at the very core of their thinking about religion -- at least, those of us for whom religion has something to do with one we call God."One cannot accept that acupuncture works on one's arthritis without considering the essence that lies behind such an art, the flow of the chi -- the energy that flows through all things -- and its manipulation with needles.One must eventually contemplate what ancient Taoist priests saw, the invisible flow of energy, which involves a radically different way of experiencing the world.One cannot diligently practice meditation without considering one's psychological transformation and the possibility of enlightenment, of spiritual revelation, waiting at the edge of one's breath.A century ago, Carl Jung, a great interpreter of the psychic differences between East and West, described the Westerner as basically extroverted, driven by desire to conquer, and the Easterner as a classic introvert, driven by desire to escape suffering. The introvert tends to dismiss the "I," Jung wrote, because in the East, it is identified with selfishness and libidinous delusions. To reach spiritual maturity, the I must be dissolved.All that has been turned on its head. Many a Westerner, tired of materialism, turns slowly inward in search of spiritual uplift, while introversion and ego-dissolving are no longer consuming Asian quests.On my wall, I keep two pictures to remind me of the extraordinary ways East and West have changed.One is from a Time magazine issue on Buddhism in the United States. On it, a group of American Buddhists sits serenely in lotus position on a wooden veranda in Malibu contemplating the Pacific Ocean. The other is of the Vietnamese American astronaut Eugene Trinh, who flew on a NASA space shuttle.Tu Weiming, the Confucian scholar at Harvard, said this is a new "era where various traditions exist side by side for the first time for the picking. "American artists and writers have often looked to the East. What is new in the age of globalization is that Asia is the active agent in the interaction, projecting its vision westward with confidence.