Boning Up On Asia

Boning Up On Asia

At this moment I am somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on a JAL flight from LAX to Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Since I had only ever flown into Narita Airport in Tokyo, and that was last about 17 years ago when Kim and I went over for a half-business, half-leisure trip that took us to Tokyo and Kyoto, I assumed that Haneda was the new airport for the city. I was disabused of that by our fellow traveller, Yasuko, who grew up in Tokyo. Since a direct JAL flight to Narita from LAX could be heard preparing for takeoff about an hour before our flight took off, I have to assume that Haneda is used for transiting passengers such as ourselves. The LAX to Tokyo flight at 12 hours in duration is the first half (actually about 60%) of our trip to Singapore. We have a layover of 6 hours and 40 minutes at Haneda, so the whole trip, door-to-door, should be about 32-33 hours. In fact, today is Kim and my 17th Anniversary (19 years together) and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a holiday we are literally just skipping given that we left on February 13th and land on February 15th. I guess we are losing it as we cross the international date line, so in honor of that we each leaned across the gap between our business class cocoons and kissed to mark the occasion.

Before starting this odyssey, I bothered to go into the Audible library to see what they could offer me to get me more familiar with the history of SE Asia since we Americans have a tremendous gap in our educations when it comes to eastern history. We all get a dose of western civilization in several flavors (in my case including the study of Latin for four years in high school). But except for the Tales of Marco Polo or perhaps watching James Clavel’s Shogun TV series or book’s like Clavel’s Tai Pan, the writings of Rudyard Kipling or Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, my understanding about SE Asia was all too heavily influenced by what I saw on the 1960’s evening news in places like The Bay of Tonkin, the Mekong Delta and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Audible offered up a number of historical summaries of SE Asia overall, Thailand (a.k.a. Siam), Laos (the Hmong), Cambodia (the Khmer Empire) and Vietnam. I have set the playback speed at 1.5X and I have to admit that there is a lot to keep track of given that I have virtually no starting place in my educational framework. In fact, the only way I can keep track of all the toing and froing is to correlate the events to what I know was happening in Europe or America at the same time.

The one thing I can already tell, even though I am early on in the recitations, is that these people of SE Asia have perhaps had more to contend with than most people in other geographies. To begin with, the landmass of SE Asia has been more fractured and made into archipelagos by what I assume were tectonic shifts and melting ice ages. In that way, the area may be a good cautionary tale for people in areas like the SE United States, where climate change seems to be driving sea levels to make a similar disconnected mess of the current land mass. The area is squeezed between China (and the Mongols) to the north, India (and its Mughals) to the East and the sea all around otherwise. Listening about the early recorded centuries of SE Asia has lots of Chinese and Indian influence through war and conquest, trade and cultural overwhelming. Despite all of that, like the tribalism of Africa that wracked the peaceful existence of much of the population, the mixture of religion (Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist for the most part) and local power centers (strangely enough not generally called tribalistic even though it seems pretty similar) kept things fluid through the region.

In addition to history, I want to get a sense of the current political and economic climate in the area. We all understand that between the English, Dutch and French colonialism and the American game of military dominos, the political economy of the region did not find its own footing until the late 1970s. We also know of the economic miracle that is Singapore, but it is somewhat unclear who was an Asian Tiger and who was more like an Asian lamb…or perhaps mongoose. I know that tourism has taken off like a rocket in the territory and have seen that the cost structure of visiting and enjoying the luxuries that these new economies offer visitors is quite a bargain. What I am curious is to learn of the extent to which these nascent and small economies (especially like Laos and Cambodia) have found other means to develop and provide sustainable prosperity for their populations. I know there are plenty of Crazy Rich Asians in all of these countries, there always are such wealthy in the emerging markets. I’m more curious to see if there are signs of a growing middle class or if its the usual juxtaposition of the haves and the have nots. When I ran a global private banking business, I recall a visit up a remote Malaysian river from Singapore where a small village held two families that had accumulated over $50 million of investible wealth. I know how that always happens and it is often not a pretty picture. But I haven’t been to the area since the internet has perhaps leveled the playing field somewhat.

Of the six countries we are visiting, two (Singapore and Malaysia) do not require traveller’s visas. The other four are still somewhat suspicious of westerners I presume. Of the six, I was able to get local currency for four (Singapore Dollars, Malaysian Ringgits, Thai Baht and Vietnamese Dong). There is apparently a two-way market for all four of those currencies though I can tell that the bid/offer spread is wider the further away from Singapore that you get. I don’t think I will get much if any Laotian Kip and Cambodian Riel since if you buy it you have to spend it or own it, there is no market outside of those countries to buy those currencies. Those data points tell you a fair bit as a starting point for the differences in these economies. While I know Cambodia has Angkor Wat as a big tourist draw, the most I can find for a headline for Laos is that a lot of the Ho Chi Minh Trail runs through it as the Vietcong tried to avoid getting bombed as they travelled the trail north/south to supply their troops (we know the Pentagon didn’t care so much about those boundaries in trying to stop their rice patty bleeding in Vietnam).

We will see Raffles Hotel in Singapore and the ultra-modern Marina Bay Area (including the infamous Singapore Flyer giant observation wheel). In Kuala Lumpur we will see the Petronas Towers and the Batu Caves. The Highlights in Thailand for us will be the Elephant Preserve for Kim the animal-lover and the Bridge over the River Kwai for the WWII buffs like me. Because I do not want this trip to blend all six of these very different countries into one tropical amalgam, I plan to compartmentalize each country and whatever I can gleen from my audio library of their unique histories and cultures. I care a great deal about antiquities, but they have to connect to some sort of understanding for me to prize them. I will try to incorporate all of my boning up on Asia into my stories for the next few weeks and make it as current as I can and not a history lesson, but with a definite nod to what formed these unique Asian Tigers.