Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

Introduction: Reading Globality

ix Introduction Reading Globality For several years now, “globalization” has been the mantra for the expansion of international trade and foreign investment and the integration of markets. But we are now beginning to see a reality beyond globalization—the world of “globality.” This is not so much a process as a condition, a world economy in which traditional and familiar boundaries are being surmounted or made irrelevant. —Daniel Yergin, “The Age of ‘Globality’” In an article in Newsweek ten years ago, Daniel Yergin made observations about globality based largely on the merger of big, big companies from different countries, such as car manufacturers Daimler-Benz and Chrysler,1 pharmaceutical makers Hoechst (Germany) and Marion Merrill Dow (United States), and consumer electronics king Sony (Japan) and Columbia Pictures (United States). He noted that “the world is entering into a new type of capitalism.” Governments are “retreating from control of the commanding heights of their economies: they are privatizing and deregulating. Barriers to trade and investment are coming down rapidly. Ever-cheaper communications and ever-faster computers, along with the Internet, are facilitating the flow of goods and services, as well as knowledge and information. Increasingly, companies are integrating their global strategies with global capital markets.” Globality, as Yergin and others have noted, has come about because of improved technology and enhanced modes of transportation. According to Yergin: Companies and investors operate in a twenty-four-hour world. Currency traders see the same information at the same time, and can act on it simultaneously, whether they are in Singapore, London or New York (assuming only that they are all awake at the same time). Billions of dollars move at the push of a button. Global branding is the great game. Work is networked among North America, Europe and Asia via computer . And even the very idea of a corporate headquarters is beginning to become a metaphysical concept; increasingly, the corridors in which managers run into each other are not physical but electronic.” Globality has changed our world enormously: not only the way we work, but our values, our way of production and consumption, even our sense of space and time. Martin Shaw notes, “In its simplest meaning, globality is the condition or state in which things are global” (Theory of the Global State, 17). He argues that globality is a condition that has not been forced on us but that we have embraced, or in some cases accepted: “Globality is not the result of a global teleology” but “the outcome of the conscious and intentional actions of many individual and collective human actors” (17). Globality and the Domestic: A Personal Anecdote At about the time of the big mergers that Yergin wrote about (around 2000), I was raising two young children: one was almost three and the other almost one then. Playing with them at the park near my home in suburban Mississauga2 one morning, I met a young Filipina with a little blond boy. Immediately I knew that she was a nanny in Canada’s live-in caregiver program.3 My children were on the swings nearby; both had brown hair and their father’s Scottish-Canadian coloring. After a friendly visual acknowledgment and the recognition that we were “kababayan” (folks from the same town/country), we exchanged the usual hellos and introductions. Daisy, who had just turned 20, told me that she was working in her first domestic position. She had been in Canada for only about eight months. “Oh,” I told her, with a smile, “I’ve been here for over twenty years now.” She gave me a look of disbelief, mixed with scorn, and said, “What? You’ve been here over twenty years, and you x Introduction are still a nanny?” I had to explain somewhat embarrassingly that the two children I was watching were my own and that I was not a nanny but a “teacher” at a university. We were both diasporic Asians, but our situations then were not similar. I’ve told this story to a few friends, and we have laughed at Daisy’s mistaking me for a nanny and especially at her assumption that I was so lazy or hopeless that I was stuck in that position for such a long time. Yet the encounter is revealing of how aspects of globalization have now permeated our domestic sphere and even our psyches. It is no longer unusual to find strangers in...