Stormy Climate

The bottom-line first: "the central question about storms in the Asia-Pacific is who pays for the damage."

 Although China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, America and Europe are estimated to have emitted 37% of the global total between 1850 and 2012. The Philippines, by comparison, emitted 0.5%. That has triggered repeated calls for wealthy countries to help poorer ones pay for the cost of the effects of climate change, not least from tropical storms. Those calls are unlikely to grow softer. But, with the Carolinas still reeling from Florence, and Mr Trump in the White House, America, at least, is unlikely to offer an encouraging answer.

Sometimes, I suspect that Republicans do not want to acknowledge climate change, or the human causation of climate change, because they worry that America will be asked to pay for it.  Because, the moment one acknowledges the human causation behind global climate change, then the immediate follow-up question will be about who caused it.  And if the question of who caused it comes up, ahem, America is on the hook for massive payments.  Climate reparations!  Republicans smell money--in this case, a potential loss of money.

Here in the US, we talk about the increasingly powerful storms.  But,

If storms can wreak such havoc in the world’s richest country, their impact in poor Asia-Pacific countries is even more far-reaching. Every year, the Asia-Pacific region is battered by more and bigger storms than reach America.

Meanwhile, people in Chennai are already worried about the coming monsoon season.  After the disastrous rains and flood of 2015, and then the cyclone that tore through the city in 2016, it has been "normal" for two years.  When the people of Chennai watched in real time the devastating floods in Kerala this past summer, it was deja vu for them.

Here in the US, the GOP couldn't care about the rest of the world.  Heck, the party and its dear leader do not care even about Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands!

Therefore, news was made when 17 Republican members of the House signed a symbolic resolution to "promising to take “meaningful and responsible action” to address human-caused climate change."  Seventeen.  Yep, 17.

It is the largest number of Republicans ever to join an action-oriented climate initiative in “maybe ever,” said Jay Butera, a congressional liaison for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which helped put together the resolution. “I’ve been working on this issue for 10 years,” he told me. “This is a high water mark.” Of course, these 17 Republicans represent just 7 percent of the House GOP.

Seven percent!

It should surprise nobody that the Democratic Party is the only hope for those worried about climate change.

More and more, voters seem to agree with California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who recently said, “If you want to go green, you better go blue.” Becerra was speaking from the stage at the Climate Summit, comfortable as part of an overwhelmingly blue majority.

An inconvenient truth!

Crazy rich failure

Fun fact first: Asia is home to about 60% of the world's population.  About 4.5 billion people.

Fun question: Can you generalize 4.5 billion with a word "Asian"?

Fun answer: Yes, but only here in the US!

Here in the US, one can easily shock most people by referring to, say, Iranians or Bangladeshis as Asians.  It will shock them because most Americans think only of Chinese and other Far East Asians as Asians.  The rest?  We are from shitholes, of course!

The box-office champ Crazy Rich Asians has done a lot to further reinforce this screwed up understanding.  (Nope, I haven't seen the movie, nor do I have any plans to watch it.)

The film has been "heralded as a milestone for Hollywood"

Not a single central or even auxiliary character is played by a white actor. On the few occasions when white people do feature, they flash across the screen as extras: as plane passengers or, on a giant container ship chartered for an over-the-top bachelor party, as bikini-clad beauty queens for hire.
Asian-Americans, including among the cast, hail this as a breakthrough moment in American cinema.

Well, ok.  But, that is the American perspective.  What is the reaction from Singapore, which is the locale for the movie? The film "ignores all Asians other than the Chinese kind."

One-quarter of Singapore’s population is not ethnic-Chinese, but of Malay or Indian descent. Yet when Malays feature, it is as valet-parking attendants. Indonesians are masseuses. As for the pair of Sikh guards at the Young family mansion, their buffoonish performance is as excruciating as Mickey Rooney’s as the Japanese photographer living above Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Brown bodies, writes one anonymous film-goer, were disembodied “footnotes”: mere openers of doors or cleaners of homes. “Crazy Rich Asians” is not just “money porn”, she goes on, it is also, to many South-East Asians, “othering porn”. What passes as a victory in Hollywood can look like a glaring failure in Singapore.

And, how about in China?  You know, the "Asia" that most Americans think about?

Well, the movie "may not even be released there":

Under China’s strict quota system, a limited number of foreign films are approved for import every year and some experts are skeptical about the movie’s chances. The depictions of profligate spending and vast wealth inequality in “Crazy Rich Asians,” they say, might not sit well with Chinese officials amid the country’s growing push for positive “core socialist values.”

How about the content of the movie?

Dong Ming, a Shanghai film critic, said: “Maybe the content of the film wouldn’t get censored but it’s a question of whether the film would even be popular in China.”
“Chinese people really dislike this kind of westernized Chinese culture,” he added, comparing the movie to American Chinese food staples like General Tso’s chicken and fortune cookies. “The flavor is not authentic.”

We are a crazy rich people!

What do they eat in Iran?

Consider the following map:

Source

Asia is pretty darn huge, right?  Look at Iran and Kazakhstan alone.  Asia is huge.

No wonder then that the New York Times has a lengthy write-up: Asian-American Cuisine’s Rise, and Triumph.  It is about "America’s long, complicated love affair with Asian cooking":

As a nation we were once beholden to the Old World traditions of early settlers; we now crave ingredients from farther shores. ...
These are American ingredients now, part of a movement in cooking that often gets filed under the melting-pot, free-for-all category of New American cuisine. But it’s more specific than that: This is food borne of a particular diaspora, made by chefs who are “third culture kids,” heirs to both their parents’ culture and the one they were raised in, and thus forced to create their own.

True, right?  What a melting-pot this country is!

The report continues:

Could we call it Asian-American cuisine? The term is problematic, subsuming countries across a vast region with no shared language or single unifying religion. It elides numerous divides: city and countryside, aristocrats and laborers, colonizers and colonized

So, at this point, I should lower the boom.

The "Asian-American" discussed there has no place for Iran. No Kazakhs, No Nepalis.  It is all about the "Asia" that Americans refer to: China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand.  Not even Indonesia!

The American (mis)understanding of the world is unique in many ways.  Reminds me of another map on this theme:

Source

If only we would spend some time and energy understanding the world!  Oh well; hasn't happened before, and ain't gonna happen in trumpistan!!!

Did you know that I am an Asian-American?

First, read the following sentences from an otherwise wonderfully informative essay:

Iraq taught us the cost of going to war against an adversary that we do not fully understand. Before we take a radical step into Asia, we should be sure that we’re not making that mistake again.

Do you see what I see?

No?

"Before we take a radical step into Asia" is the key there.

That phrasing seems to ignore that Iraq is in Asia.  (Afghanistan, too, is in Asia.)  So, it should be phrased as "Before we take another radical step into Asia." Right?

Perhaps you are thinking that I am being picky.  No, I am not.

In the US, "Asians" has come to mean only people from the Far East: China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam,  and maybe even the Philippines.  This has been an issue that I have been fighting ever since my graduate school days when I reminded many white Americans that I too am an Asian.

One of my favorite encounters on this topic was post-graduate school, when I was working as a transportation planner.  An Anglophile colleague, Marilyn, walked over to my work space during a coffee break to ask me a question.  She was reading a novel set in London, and was confused that the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi characters were being referred to as Asians.  I had to explain to her that Asia is a continent, and people from that continent are Asians, as much as the French and the Czech are Europeans!

A couple of months ago, I wrote a letter to The New Yorker, on this very topic.

In the essay on how television made Trump's presidency possible, Emily Nussbaum writes that “The Apprentice” attracted diverse contestants and audience.  Nussbaum notes: "It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants."  In that sentence, Nussbaum makes the same mistake that is often made here in the US--she identifies "Asian" as being separate from "Indian, and Middle Eastern," even though India and the Middle East are very much part of Asia.
In America, "Asians" has come to mean only those from from the far eastern edges of Asia--like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam.  Perhaps this resulted from our military entanglements with those countries.  But then given our military expeditions elsewhere, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one would think that by now we would have figured out that the people of those countries too are Asians!

I didn't care whether that would be published (it was not) but I had to get that off my chest!  This time, I am not going to bother writing to that magazine again about Iraq being in Asia.  It is a losing battle!

Australia pivots towards the Asian Century

That is the official document from the Australian government on how the country could/should adapt to the changing conditions outside Australia and to the demographic changes within the country. (ht)

I wish the report didn't have a corny map like the one below... looks like Australia is trying to parachute down and away from the dark clouds way above :)

Yes, a good idea to systematically think about how to integrate with Asia where the action will be this century, unlike the approach here in the US, which is to portray China as a villain that we have to be ready to fight against.  Our pivoting is for all the wrong reasons, it seems like.

What a long way from this cartoon that I saw, among others, at the immigration museum in Melbourne!

Good luck to them.