Amanda and Global Fusion

What I figure is a six- or seven-year-old Thai girl with silky black hair plops down next to me at the Stempfer Cafe in Khao Lak.

"What's your name?" she asks me confidently in perfect English.

"Evelyn. What's yours?"

"Amanda."

"You speak English?"

"Yes. And Thai and Swedish."

I take another bite from my strudel-like dessert in the German cafe where I go for air-con and the closest thing to a latte I can find around here. After a month, I find I occasionally need to escape out of Thailand. A slice of Europe for a small siesta works wonders.

"I'm five," she barrels on answering my question before I get a chance to speak. Amanda soon after runs out the door and disappears before I have a chance to finish the conversation or dig out my camera and capture her photo.

The Thai waitress volunteers, "She's half-Thai, half-Swedish." By the look on her face I can see we both in silent agreement: she's cute, precocious - and a quite a handful.

I get back to my latte and my International Herald Tribune Thai Day issue story about the Tamarind Cafe in Bangkok. Luka Wong and Sylvie Bruzeau opened their vegetarian cafe two years ago. From their website:

"Having grown up in Taiwan and France, lived in ten countries on three continents, their cuisine is a mix of Asian flavours and European techniques, and the result is a vegetarian fusion unparalleled in the region."

Christy Srisanan, a Thai-American, currently has an exhibition at the cafe's gallery. Well, it's actually not Christy's work on display. In the last six months, more than 300 Thai children have been exposed to photography through Christy's SeedArt Project. Their photography is on display at the Tamarind Cafe through January 31.

Srisanan came up with the idea after the tsunami. She was in New York, working as an IT consultant and wanted to do something to help. She believed giving children camaras would help to ease their suffering. - "Full Belly, Wide Eyes", International Herald Tribune, January 16, 2005 (not online)

That was page 7. But I'd already read this story before in the Bangkok Post. And on page 5 there was another story (heard already too) about the upcoming Rhythm of the Earth World Festival, Bangkok's first world music event this weekend.

The most popular TV show on the Thai airwaves isn't the prime minister's reality show on his own cable channel (uh, that's another post) but a thoughtful Korean soap opera Dae Jang Geum that's based on the true story of Korea's first female royal physician. LG Electronics dropped its "Western presenter representing LG as a global brand" from its advertising and is now using the Dae Jang Geum star "to capitalise on the rising infatuation of all things Korean."

It's easy to be breathless about global fusion.

That is until you read about the opposite, the closing down of exchange and sharing: the NGO's that were set afire in Pakistan by a mob in retaliation for the recent U.S. missile strike or the cease-fire in Sri Lanka "that is hanging by a thread" or the ongoing Internet censorship in China.

This is one example of global fusion - high-tech companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco aiding the Chinese government - we could do without. Jonathan Mirsky's editorial states: "Some of the world's most famous Internet companies have lined up to show China how to cripple the Web."

The op-ed closes with a rather strange, although altogether common, assumption that Americans need to bring the issue home to censorship on their own turf to relate or care: "Americans who think in any event China is far away may be jolted by this suggestion by Rebecca MacKinnon, a former foreign correspondent in China..."

Americans who think China is far away period are going to be in for a rude surprise in a global economy. China, as is much of the world, is closer than ever. It's in the pearl tea I drink at the neighborhood cafe back in San Jose and in the electronics I buy.

I'm not even sure what my point was anymore in this post. All I know for sure is when I connected with Amanda's curious wide eyes, the notion that anywhere or anything is that far away popped like a taut balloon. 

Bonus: You don't hear about 9/11 much anymore. This story of regeneration, global fusion, creative fundraising and innovative company structures is about the Windows of the World restaurant survivors starting a new venture. Snippets below:

Windows on the World survivors - those not on the schedule that morning - are opening an upscale Greenwich Village restaurant just a walk from ground zero. The restaurant, to open Thursday, is owned by the workers and offers a menu sprinkled with food from the staff's 22 native nations...

At first, the grieving workers considered making their restaurant a sort of tribute to 9/11, including memorabilia. But a survey they commissioned concluded that customers want to enjoy fine food and atmosphere, not be reminded of terror and death...

So they decided on a restaurant with dishes that include favorite family recipes contributed by the workers, whose native lands include Haiti, Jamaica, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Colombia, Egypt, Bangladesh and China_ and even a handful of workers born in the United States. The eclectic menu will change with the seasons and aims to satisfy both traditional and exotic tastes with fare ranging from organic chicken with cranberries and New York aged ribeye steak to bartender Silverio Moog's Philippine lobster and minted sweet potato spring rolls.

"This is the new American food. It's cooked in a kitchen where everyone is equal, no yelling, no screaming. And you actually own the dishes you're washing," said executive chef Raymond Mohan, born in a village in Guyana...

The Colors waiters, busboys, bartenders, chefs and dishwashers all have a stake in the venture, financed with about $2.2 million. The Italian food consortium Good Italian Food (GIF) offered $500,000 as an equity investment, and the Nonprofit Finance Fund put up $1.2 million for the project from 15 smaller lenders. Modest funds came from Roman Catholic nuns in California, Michigan and Ohio.

"We got nowhere with the big banks," said Bruce G. Herman, a workers rights advocate who represents the Italian consortium. "And who stepped forward? The religious community, a nonprofit fund, a foreign cooperative."

Each Colors staffer also spent at least 100 hours working for the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC-NY), a Manhattan cooperative organization that raised another half million dollars. Its members are teaching other restaurant employees how to build a worker-owned restaurant - an innovative model for the international food industry...

The Italy-based GIF consortium includes the cooperative CIR, which has sponsored joint-venture restaurants and pasta factories in China, Vietnam, and Croatia.

GIF president Ivan Lusetti, speaking from Italy, said GIF's 7,000 worker members drive successful businesses "because people are more motivated when they share the profits, they pay more attention.

"Now, let's see if our democratic model can work in America. That's the challenge.""Windows on the World Survivors Open Restaurant - Worker-Owned with Global Food", NY Newsday, January 4, 2006

Bonus: Ethan Zuckerman's view: "I’m even happier that we’re finally beyond the question of whether the Internet and blogging are important and deep into the debates about how we protect the Internet’s most powerful feature - the ability to give anyone online a voice."