Hey, China's Still Cool

Heard a sound like thunder come from the room next door and for a brief moment I thought my roommate had set her hair on fire.

"I'M GOING TO CHINAAAAAAAAA!"

She's been selected to go teach in China for a year through her former university. She spent a year studying abroad there and in Japan and just loved the place. Couldn't wait to get back.

So good for her. She's been really looking forward to this and now she's got her chance. I'll be losing a roommate and a partner in directing (and a good friend), but this is a wonderful opportunity and I'm so happy for her.

China is the new black, the new Europe. China and India. Seems like more and more that's where the young people like to go. Costa Rica and the rainforests, too. Eco-tourism in Belize.

It makes sense, in that whole The-World-is-Flat-kind-of-way. New century is all about those places, while Europe consolidates and regulates itself into being a solid character actor instead of the main star. Actually, "Europe" lost first billing a while ago, after the war maybe, when big blond America took center stage and hammed it up under the lights.

But like a spastic, ever-grinning Tom Cruise, people grow tired of your shit and want something new and different. America isn't even the big star any more. America is Fat and Europe is Old, but China and India are young and hungry.

Perhaps this exposes my own irrelevancy in the modern age--this fat American is drawn to those Old places, the dark streets of London or the standing stones in Ireland. I'd rather ride the rails through Europe than visit the Great Wall, or walk the streets of Mumbai. Not that I don't want to visit these places--I'd love to go visit Cori in China or drop in on my cousin Ben in Tokyo next year. But overall I'm still fixated on old Europe and her stony secrets. (It doesn't help that a ticket to Asia is significantly more expensive than a ticket to Dublin.)

It's like all those books on my shelf, all those myths and old stories and histories of long-dead civilizations. Western civilization. Quaint old history books sitting on the shelf.

A wave is about to crash onto our beach, in fact it already has, a wave filled with the myths and ancient tales of the East, filled with Asian technology and college-educated engineers, borne on the backs of millions of hungry young Asians leading a different kind of cultural revolution.

Most people don't want to know about Marie Antoinette or the Plantagenets like they did a while back (all those 1960s movies about British kings, for example.) The kids aren't looking to Paris or Prague to discover what's cool. It's not that these people and places aren't still important or relevant; it's just that there's all this new stuff coming our way that draws people attention now.

And I'm all for it, because there's no sense locking the door and trying to stop it. Foreign cinema used to mean Truffaut or Fellini and now it's Hong Kong and Wong Kar-wai. The suburban kids today get henna tattoos and watch Bollywood movies and do their year abroad in Tokyo or Hubei Province. The old stuff is cool, but the new stuff is cool too, and as it all mixes together it'll make one crazy interesting world to live in. But it'll be led by that teenage girl listening to Indian pop music, or by the young Chinese boy quietly studying in the corner.

Studio 60 ended up being a pretty terrible show, but there's one line from it that I like to tell my kids when they start wanting to discover something new, something that might lead them towards the future, something that'll make them stand out from the crowd:

"Learn Mandarin."

Norman Borlaug

There was an article about Africa in my mailbox this morning. New Boss wants me to start up an Eco Club at school, to better educate the kids about the environment and what they can do to help save it. He and I both agree that it shouldn't just be about recycling and thinking that trees are "nice." Best thing to do is to get the kids to have a better appreciation for the outdoors and the natural world, since all they hear is doom and gloom when think of "the environment."

I'd also like the kids to have a better awareness of their world, and the challenges different countries face in environmental terms, which is where that article about Africa comes in. An excerpt:

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent over the past half-century trying to do something about the region's crushing poverty, but the situation remains desperate. Rural Africa is hollowing out, unable to feed itself, let alone supply food to the continent's rapidly growing megacities.

The Gates and Rockefeller foundations are stepping in with $150 million, but what they really need is another Norman Borlaug. West Wing fans may recall his name being dropped in that episode about the deposed African president. I spent a little time over lunch today reading about Borlaug, and it's some pretty amazing stuff. He's spent his entire life working on wheat hybrids that allowed starving countries to feed themselves and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He's credited with saving over a billion lives in India and Pakistan with his "dwarf wheat" and is referred to by Penn and Teller as The Greatest Human Being Who Ever Lived. He's still alive and in the past couple of decades has been working on solving Africa's farming problems, so I guess they don't technically need another Norman Borlaug.

He's not without his critics, though. Borlaug's hypothesis states that since farmland isn't really increasing, what you gotta do is work on higher yields with the land you have. And so he promotes genetic crossbreeding, use of fertilizer, and other "modern" farming techniques in order to get countries the ability to feed themselves.

It's obvious that the world is getting better at feeding itself, but Africa still has a long ways to go. So, all I gotta do is produce another Norman Borlaug here at school and we should be in pretty good shape. Wish me luck.