Video Night in Kathmandu (54 page)

YET WHO BUT A CHURL
would argue with success?

In 1985, for the first time ever, not a single American team qualified for the final of baseball’s Little League World Series, and, for the fifteenth time in eighteen years, the competition was won by a team from Asia.

And at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, where the United States, as host, chose to introduce baseball to the world as an exhibition sport, the home team fielded what was said to be the strongest amateur team in history. “The gold is ours,” said one American pitcher, speaking for the entire country. “They’ll need an army to take it away from us.” In the final, however, before 55,235 fans, one of the largest crowds ever to witness a game at Dodger Stadium, the Japanese decisively trounced the Americans at the American national sport, by a score of 6-3.

I
HAD THOUGHT
, when first I visited the Orient, that I would find myself witnessing the West in conquest of the East, armies of its invaders bearing their cultural artifacts across the barren plains of Asia. Yet the discovery I made most consistently throughout my travels was that every one of my discoveries had to be rejected or, at best, refined. And as I got ready to leave the East, I began to suspect that none of the countries I had seen, except perhaps the long-colonized Philippines, would ever, or could ever, be fully transformed by the West. Madonna and Rambo might rule the streets, and hearts might be occupied with secondhand dreams of Cadillacs and Californians; but every Asian culture I had visited seemed, in its way, too deep, too canny or too self-possessed to be turned by passing trade winds from the west.

Bali, for example, drew its strength, its magic and its eerie purity from the ancestral currents that pulsed through its soil, currents that Westerners could sense, perhaps, but never touch; just so, the moving yet unwavering faith of Tibet would with
stand the ravages of tourists, I hoped, as surely as it had withstood the vicious assaults of the Chinese. Burma had calmly closed its door to the world, and China had opened it up just enough, so it planned, to take what it wanted, and nothing more. Prodigal, hydra-headed India cheerfully welcomed every new influence from the West, absorbing them all into a crazy-quilt mix that was Indian and nothing but Indian; Japan had taken in the West only, so it seemed, to take it over. As for Nepal, and Thailand even more, both gauged Western tastes so cleverly and adapted Western trends so craftily that both, I felt, could satisfy foreigners’ whims without ever becoming their slaves. Even Hong Kong, the last pillar of the Western Empire, was now getting ready to return to Asian hands.

On other fronts too, the East had clearly outmaneuvered its self-styled saviors from the West. Vietnam, for example, had added a political victory to its military triumph, according to William Shawcross, by fabricating an entire famine in order to win funds from a West made gullible by its guilt. Gradually, the overfamiliar lines from Kipling began to seem less specious than once I had supposed:

As I made my way home, in fact, I began to suspect that my original formulation should, if anything, be reversed: the East was increasingly moving in on the West. “The wheel has come full circle,” as Norman Lear once observed, “and now the Marco Polos and Francis Xaviers of the Orient set out for the Hangchow of the West, Manhattan Island.”

En route from Bombay to L.A., I happened to stop off for three days in London. There I found West Indian sitcoms crowding the airwaves and
samosas
filling the sandwich bars. Culturally, the talk of the town was a new movie written by a twenty-nine-year-old Pakistani, My
Beautiful Laundrette.
The film had shocked English audiences with its unblinking portrayal of an alliance between a soft-faced Pakistani boy and his skinhead neo-Fascist chum. More startling to me, however, was the deeper social
conquest it revealed: in
Laundrette
, every white is on the dole, and every black on the rise. The movie draws back the curtains on a Britain so tossed about by a new sense of meritocracy that the imperialists now lording it over the natives are the chic and silk-shirted Pakistanis: it is the Pakistanis who hire unemployed Englishmen, the Pakistanis who command white mistresses, the Pakistanis who turn people in and turf them out of their apartments. The picture might almost have been an undeveloped negative of some portrait of the Raj, so precisely does it transpose the familiar positions of black and white.

Much the same point had been made by Timothy Mo in
Sour Sweet
, in which a Hong Kong Chinese family settles down in a London so cantonized—and Cantonized—that throughout the novel’s 278 pages of English life, not a single Englishman is named. And in
Oxford Blood
, the princess of the status quo, Lady Antonia Fraser, had slyly introduced her readers to the ultimate upstanding Englishwoman, who just happens to be Chinese, and the proverbial Scottish nurse, who turns out to be West Indian.

Thus the colonials were effectively staging their own takeover, erecting tandoori palaces in their former rulers’ home, introducing their own pungent terms into the mainstream, even seizing control of much of the nation’s culture (during the ’80s, the highest literary trophy in Britain, the Booker Prize, had been won by an Indian, an Australian, a New Zealander and a South African). The empire had struck back.

When I got back to the United States, I felt more than ever like some Rip Van Winkle awakening to the lineaments of a new order. My featureless neighborhood in Manhattan had now, I gathered, become Koreatown, with Little India just around the corner: in the building next to mine, Miss Kim—one of the Koreans who had taken over more than half the grocery stores on the island—was energetically dishing out sushi, gelati, moussaka and salad twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. In L.A., fifty Thai restaurants had sprouted up along Sunset Boulevard almost overnight, and my first night back in town I was taken to a sing-along Japanese country-and-western joint. The Great California Novel, I was told, had been written by Vikram Seth, a British-educated Indian. And before the month was through, I was greeting the New Year in downtown San Francisco, in a
Cambodian restaurant just down the street from Bangkok Massage, Thailand Massage and a mess of Vietnamese cafés.

On a broader level too, the Asians seemed sovereign. For as the world had been turned on its axis, all the old trade routes were being reversed. These days, in fact, David was giving Goliath a hand-up. Thus the Sandhurst-educated Sultan of Brunei, a British puppet just one year before, was now pumping several billion dollars into sterling in order to boost the economy of his former white rajah rulers (and also, it later turned out, helping Washington in its covert arms dealings). Japan was so dominating the markets of its onetime American conquerors that it now sat uncertainly on a $50-billion trade surplus. And in Australia, it was said, local whites were pulling rich Japanese tourists along in the modern equivalent to the rickshaw, the pedicab!

Deeper than all the surface imports from the East, though, and deeper in its way than anything in the Western penetration of the East, was a more fundamental trend: the Asians had begun to take over the American Way of Life itself. Masters of adaptation and design, they had so faithfully reproduced the models they took from America that they were, in effect, producing forms more American than the American. A decade ago, as Gita Mehta has shown, lines of communication were so crossed that the East looked to the West to bring it the wisdom of the East; now. the process was reversed. For what the Asians brought over to the West were often not so much fragments of the East as new and improved versions of the West: the Japanese provided Tokyo-made Plymouths; the Thais filled L.A. with Bangkok-style American bars; the Chinese served up sweet-and-sour pork (a dish created expressly for Western palates). Japanese country-and-western bars, Korean grocery stores, Vietnamese French restaurants, Indian-run motels—all suggested that the Asians had absorbed the West, and mastered it, more fully and more subtly than anything that could be imagined in reverse (were there American-owned
bhel puri
stands on the streets of Bombay, or English-made temples in the hills around Chiangmai?). Turn over any American product or practice these days, and you would likely find the telltale stamp: “Made in Japan,” “Made in Hong Kong.”

That mark was even on the country’s founding principles. For the greatest of all the Asian immigrants’ products were simple All-American success stories. In reviving the country’s economy, the Asians had resuscitated many of its hallowed myths; they had brought new life, new meaning to the Puritan ideal of a clean-living, family-based community, to Franklin’s belief in hard work and thrift, to Whitman’s affirmation of a collective identity larger than the self and, most of all, to Horatio Alger tales about turning rags to riches. Not only were almost half the Phi Beta Kappas at Harvard in 1985 of Asian extraction; not only did Asians, who represented less than 2 percent of the population, account for 30 percent of the places at Juilliard and 30 percent of the winners of the Westinghouse Talent Search; but the most moving monument in the capital, a testament to the country’s losses in the East, was the work of a twenty-year-old Chinese girl from Yale. The Asians devoutly believed that America was the land of freedom and boundless opportunity. And by acting on that belief, they had made it true.

THE ORIENT, THEN
, was taking over the future, a realm that had long seemed an exclusively Western dominion. More and more, indeed, the West was looking to the East not just for its spiritual but also for its material and technological needs. Thus the influence of Japan was everywhere in the United States—but not so much in its traditional forms of white-heron lyrics and snow-soft woodblocks as in its ready provision of all the latest in post-post-Modernist chic: Miyake gowns and sushi earrings, New Wave designs and Laurie Anderson motifs. Japan was now the source of rock videos as much as rock gardens and Japan was fast becoming the Paris of the ’80s, the place where the young went to be young: as Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Miller had once gone to the banks of the Seine to steep themselves in both the old and the new, so such contemporary descendants as Jay McInerney, Brad Leithauser and John David Morley—to pick but three—sought the same cultural currency in the Land of the Rising Yen.

In part, of course, this latest development betrayed nothing more than the universal fascination with the foreign: it was hardly surprising that Americans who defined their status in
terms of Ferraris, Rolexes and Harris Tweeds (or even such ersatz exotica as Le Bag and Häagen-Dazs) would fill the air of East Village clubs with clove-scented cigarettes, Nam June Paik videos and cuts from Lucia Hwong. Even artificial grass was greener on the other side, and as surely as the trendies of Roppongi wore their Gucci watches to the local burger joint, so their counterparts in Soho and West Hollywood inevitably wore Yamamotos to the sushi bar.

But beyond the fads of the moment, Asia seemed the place to which everyone was headed. Asia was now the state of the art. “The whole world is looking east,” gushed Diana Vreeland, arbiter of taste, in
Vanity Fair
, anthology of trends, “to the Orient—to the future.” When the West fashioned blueprints of its destiny—in the movie
Blade Runner
, for example, or in the picture of a future London on the cover of
The Economist—the
result looked suspiciously like the back streets of Shinjuku today. When pundits talked of geopolitical prospects, their favorite new buzzword was the “Pacific Rim.” Already, the two fastest-growing regions in the world were the Far West and the Far East. And before very long, there seemed little doubt, the world would be read from right to left, if not from bottom to top.

Ten years ago, the shrewdest and most seasoned of modern travelers, Jan Morris, had looked at Singapore and Hong Kong and seen “a new energy of the East … a sort of mystic materialism, a compelling marriage between principle and technique which neither capitalism nor Soviet Communism seems to me to have achieved.” By now, that formidable channeling of Communist forces and Confucian values into capitalist systems had sent many bright, high-rising Asian societies into overdrive; using American principles of free enterprise, they had begun to eclipse the Americans themselves. Indeed, perhaps the greatest surprise of all my travels was to find many Asian cities—Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, even Bangkok—so highly developed and technologized, through industry both human and mechanical, that they actually made the West seem backward and inefficient by comparison. “Nobody looks to the West,” chirped a Singapore pop singer called Don Lee, “nobody wants second best.”

———

As it was, when one flew across the International Date Line, one already felt oneself, in mind as well as in fact, to be winging one’s way into tomorrow. And as the influence of laser blips and microchips expanded, so too, no doubt, would that of their Eastern masters. If the nineteenth century was generally regarded as the European century and the twentieth as the American, the twenty-first, I thought, would surely be the Asian.

ON A MORE
personal level, though, the transaction was, as ever, more complex and more equivocal. For myself, I found that the East had staked a much deeper claim than ever I would have expected. It was only when I returned home that I felt homesick—not just for the gentleness and grace that I had found in many parts of Asia, but also, and more deeply, for the gentler self it had found in me. It was not corruption that stayed with me from my travels, but purity—the absolute stillness of mornings in the high monasteries of Tibet; the chill winter sunshine above the villages of Nepal; the dazzle of blue afternoons in Burma; and lanterned nights in Kyoto so lovely that I almost held my breath for fear I might shatter the spell. Surrounded by conveniences at home, I began to long for the luxuries to which I had grown accustomed—open hearts and quiet mornings and smiles that asked for nothing but smiles in return.