I arrived in Los Angeles on the very last day of the 1970s, on a plane and not a boat. During the next decade in sunny Southern California, it seemed there was a constant stream of Asian immigrants coming in just like I had. Those of us who mastered English – and it usually took just a few years if we were young enough and watched enough television – would call more recent immigrants FOBs, a derisive term that stood for Fresh Off the Boat and was meant to certify our American status by setting us apart from those who spoke English with a heavier accent and dressed like unsophisticated foreigners. It’s a sad fact that a child’s desperate need to fit in is matched only by his capacity for cruelty.
At the turn of this millennium, something beyond just a temporal unit also seemed to turn. You could hardly read the news without coming across an article about the rapidly strengthening Asian economies. Hyundai and Samsung were threatening their Western counterparts, Taiwan seemed to be manufacturing just about everyone’s computer parts, India had hundreds of millions of college educated workers waiting to do our work for a fraction of the cost, and then there was China. The book title “When China Rules the World” says it all. Not if, but when.
But it was more than just an economic turn. I started to notice Asian Americans listening to pop stars from Japan and Taiwan, and Korean dramas ruled the airwaves as far away, geographically and culturally, as South America. Anthony Bourdain, a chef and famous food writer, claimed that the most exciting places to dine were all in Asia, Vietnam and Singapore in particular. People – young people in their 20s and 30s – were making increasingly frequent visits back to their motherlands, and many decided to return permanently. But the biggest sign, to me at least, that the gravitational center was in fact shifting westward to the East were the reports that Asians recently arrived in America, disappointed by what they found here, were going right back. The FOBs began turning their noses at us. How things change in just twenty years.
I’ve built a life that I love in San Francisco, and I call this American city home. But this global shift is simply too compelling to ignore. So I quit my job, packed a suitcase, and I’m heading to Asia with a camera, the appetite of a viking, and a thirst for adventure. You might say I’m getting ‘back on the boat,’ or BOB for short, a play on FOB that I facetiously coined to describe Asian Americans returning to Asia. This blog is a record of this journey. I don’t intend to use this pompous prelude as a strict guide for my posts. Instead, I’ll update my blog with impressions – of the food I eat, the people I meet, the places I visit – and the larger story will hopefully emerge quite naturally. I hope you like it.
The boat
I arrived in Los Angeles on the very last day of the 1970s, on a plane and not a boat. During the next decade in sunny Southern California, it seemed there was a constant stream of Asian immigrants coming in just like I had. Those of us who mastered English – and it usually took just a few years if we were young enough and watched enough television – would call more recent immigrants FOBs, a derisive term that stood for Fresh Off the Boat and was meant to certify our American status by setting us apart from those who spoke English with a heavier accent and dressed like unsophisticated foreigners. It’s a sad fact that a child’s desperate need to fit in is matched only by his capacity for cruelty.
At the turn of this millennium, something beyond just a temporal unit also seemed to turn. You could hardly read the news without coming across an article about the rapidly strengthening Asian economies. Hyundai and Samsung were threatening their Western counterparts, Taiwan seemed to be manufacturing just about everyone’s computer parts, India had hundreds of millions of college educated workers waiting to do our work for a fraction of the cost, and then there was China. The book title “When China Rules the World” says it all. Not if, but when.
But it was more than just an economic turn. I started to notice Asian Americans listening to pop stars from Japan and Taiwan, and Korean dramas ruled the airwaves as far away, geographically and culturally, as South America. Anthony Bourdain, a chef and famous food writer, claimed that the most exciting places to dine were all in Asia, Vietnam and Singapore in particular. People – young people in their 20s and 30s – were making increasingly frequent visits back to their motherlands, and many decided to return permanently. But the biggest sign, to me at least, that the gravitational center was in fact shifting westward to the East were the reports that Asians recently arrived in America, disappointed by what they found here, were going right back. The FOBs began turning their noses at us. How things change in just twenty years.
I’ve built a life that I love in San Francisco, and I call this American city home. But this global shift is simply too compelling to ignore. So I quit my job, packed a suitcase, and I’m heading to Asia with a camera, the appetite of a viking, and a thirst for adventure. You might say I’m getting ‘back on the boat,’ or BOB for short, a play on FOB that I facetiously coined to describe Asian Americans returning to Asia. This blog is a record of this journey. I don’t intend to use this pompous prelude as a strict guide for my posts. Instead, I’ll update my blog with impressions – of the food I eat, the people I meet, the places I visit – and the larger story will hopefully emerge quite naturally. I hope you like it.
James
San Francisco, April 2010
Share on Facebook