Discovery and Rediscovery
I’m now back on May hilltop and after a very comfortable 8 hours of sleep in my own bed and a wake-up call from Buddy standing on my shoulder to lick my face, I am pleased to be in rediscovery mode this morning. The most important news this morning is that I managed to lose 8 pounds during my three weeks away. I suspect this was through a combination of eating Asian cuisine every day, snacking less on my routine favorites and upping my daily walking exercise in service of our traipsing around six countries as well as all the airports and connecting travel. Traveling is hard work and it shows up in non-sedentary ways. I find it noteworthy that for me, traveling like this increases my activity level where Mike has to work hard at each stop and during each airport interlude to force his activity level to get maintained with early morning and in-between flight walks around town and around the airport terminal. The man is a full-fledged member of the clean plate club and does not lack for healthy appetite, but he isn’t happy unless he gives his body constant exercise with 5-10 miles per day (he refuses to count steps and senses that he is beyond such insignificant measurement aides) and at least one gym session. In turn, I have rediscovered sweating as a pastime on this trip by virtue of the heat and humidity in every locale we enjoyed except for Hanoi (where it was rainy and actually chilly), and that alone sapped me of a great deal of my energy. In other words, I have given my body much more exercise than normal over the past weeks and am somewhat happy to be able to relax at home again, engaging in activity as I see fit rather than as a travel schedule dictates.
We all travel to discover. We discover new places and people, and we discover new cuisines and activities. The discovery process is invigorating and healthy for both mind and body. It reminds us that there is more to life than our normal routines and it expands our horizons in a good way, including to feel why more activity is better than less to our holistic good feelings. By the same token, when we return, we enter a phase of rediscovery. Mostly that involves reminding ourselves of all the things that we like about our lives and the choices we have made is setting up our routines. The rediscovery process alone is a healthy process since all of our daily practices can always use a revision or two to accommodate a changing world, a changing body, or, God forbid, a changing perception of what might be good for us. I started the day rediscovering how much I enjoy the comfort of our bed with its thick and soft top padding that shields my hips from morning crankiness. There are few things more pleasant than waking up refreshed rather than with more aches and pains than you took to bed the night before. We rediscovered how much fun Buddy can be as he has gleefully welcomed our return. There is nothing more endearing than the unconditional love of a dog who knows he has landed in a good and caring home, especially when he is so joyous at your return. I have rediscovered my EV truck and been reminded of how much fun it is to drive. I have rediscovered the wonders of having access to all the media services I have come to build my day around, from my morning update on the world at large from MSNBC to the late-day intrigue of watching the new FX Shogun series, enthralled by the rigors of one culture (the Europeans) encountering and learning about another (the Japanese), where east and west meet.
What I discovered in SE Asia is some of what I already knew and more that I learned anew. The east has always been vastly different from the west, and there are reasons to think that difference remains and reasons to think otherwise. I think that cultural difference and how they will trend is best viewed over time. I have the benefit of having spent a moment of time in SE Asia, 25-30 years ago when I visited both Singapore and Bangkok and a bit of time in Malaysia. I was curious to see how things have changed in that span of time. What I saw was three countries that looked more like the west than the east as we culturally know it. These are the “Crazy Rich Asians” we capture in popular movies. And what I saw in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, countries that all were stalled in their development by their prolonged engagement with colonial rule and what I would call post-colonial rule (as in American intervention in Vietnam), was a far more Asian culture that is still more eastern than western.
While living in Italy in my youth, I learned that when cultures meet at an artificial boundary, like between Italy and Switzerland, the dominant culture bleeds into the weaker one. They speak Italian well into Switzerland. And yet, at the border with Austria, they speak German well into the Italian side of the border. They say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Well, Asia is clearly imitating America much more than China. All those years of Portuguese, Dutch, English and French colonialism has had a small impact on the region, but the economic prosperity of America has become the guiding light for these countries no matter what they thought of America while it was bombing them or subverting their heritage for their amusement (that was Thailand). The imitation of American culture all across Asia is palpable, and it is the basest form of imitation, it is economic, social and even spiritual. As for the Chinese influence, it can be seen as well, but since China more or less imitates America too, it is less a deviation from this cultural adoption than a reinforcement of it.
What I discovered thirty years ago in the region was a mild form of imitation by Asians wanting to be more like Americans, much like Europeans wanted to be like Americans in the 60s. But where Europeans only went so far and at some point they merged their heritage with our American economic ambition and came out the other end with a distinctly Euro version of westernization. But Asia seems to be on a one-way track towards complete mimicry. In fact, I would suggest that in the more advanced places like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, they are Americanized to the extreme and may be close to lapping us in our own race. That was less a surprise to me than where I see Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia headed. They have become the followers that the others were thirty years ago and there are signs that they will even more quickly reach full Americanization than their brother countries. But for now, they are the real Asia as it was. It makes me think that if anyone wants to encounter the real Asia, unless they go to restrictive places like Myanmar or isolated places like Mongolia, they had best go soon. So that was my most important discovery of our trip and the big rediscovery is that America seems to have found a relatively good place on the development spectrum (at least the America I know here in San Diego). That may be the greatest cultural skillset, knowing when enough is enough rather than too much.