Fruit sellers plop happily outside the entrance to Yangzhou University, Yanzgzhou, China (2007). Microfinancing companies loan money to people who are otherwise unable to borrow from typical lenders, opening up their realm of economic endeavors and allowing local artisans the ability to expand their businesses.

Jacqueline Novogratz learned this the hard way. Walking in to the African Development Bank for her first day on the job in Côte d’Ivoire in 1986, she received stony glares from African women in immensely colorful dress, and felt the part of an uptight librarian in her skirt-and-blouse combo and glasses. “I hadn’t expected to encounter poisoning and voodoo among women bankers in Africa,” she says, but after a week or two, that is exactly what was faced her. As most would, when she took a job with a development company in Africa, she had been imagining something more along the lines of sitting on the ground with women in a rural village; instead, she was facing somewhat powerful and relatively wealthy women who hated what she represented: white people from the economic “North” (read: developed world), who sat in their offices thousands of miles away and wrote up plans for improving the African continent while sipping $4 lattes.

Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen Fund, wrote about her experiences as a banker out to make a difference in her memoir The Blue Sweater.

Long story short, Novogratz is today the CEO of Acumen Fund, which has successfully invested in local businesswomen in the form of microloans that have proven effective ways of empowering those who cannot start businesses or get loans the traditional way. She emphasizes loans instead of donations, proving to be a more sustainable approach, one which invests in the skills and integrity of real merchants and artisans in a bottom-up way. She has also spoken at TED about her real belief that poverty can be abolished, her determination founded not in naive idealism but in experienced optimism and creative thinking. She also wrote a book, The Blue Sweater, chronicling how it all happened. (Listen to the amazing story of her beloved Blue Sweater, and what it taught her about the world.)

I have not finished reading the book yet, but one of the most striking things I’ve discovered is how harshly the world can hit that little white girl with a big heart and some education, who wants to make a difference and see the world while she’s at it. Novogratz spent three days writhing on the bathroom floor after a reception she’d attended with the women of her development banking office, unable to drink even water; whether this was a coincidental illness or a moderate dose of poison, the event was ominous and painful. And the world is ominous and painful, especially for poverty-stricken women in villages and cities around the world, but also for little white girls who venture out into it.

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Rodale, 2009)

I crack so easily over my own trials and am such an emotional person when I’m talking about things I’m passionate about, I honestly think I would have broke down crying in front of those intimidating, strong, hardened, female African bankers. What things they have faced that I’ve never had to face myself! And then, even if I began to make progress with a new job in a new country, as Novogratz did, the work is still accompnaied by doubts and tribulations aplenty, and you go about witnessing hardships while struggling against the established status quo. This difficulty intimidates me to my core. The world of changing the world is scary, messy, disheartening business. But Novogratz never gave up hope; for it is also rewarding, enlightening, and after everything, beneficial to the people who need it the most– if you’ve got a smart plan. And great compassion. And, really, if you’re tough enough. I hope that if such an opportunity or chance position comes my way, I’m brave enough–and also crazy enough–to take it.

Subject: the subcontinent; South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh)

Reading material: William Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (Oakland: Lonely Planet Publication, 2005)

Impetus: Class, History of Modern India and South Asia

Dalrymple's travelogue

Back in 2004-05 though, I don’t think I had the background knowledge or the sensitivity to appreciate his collection of essays on various people, customs, and locations across the subcontinent. I was a teenager; one who had enough curiosity to buy the book, but perhaps not yet enough to read through the whole thing. I think I read the first two essays.

Roop Kanwar, whose picture was splashed across newspapers after she committed sati.

And this is India through Dalrymple’s eyes and made vivid through his stories and reporting. Messy, multi-faceted, in-your-face, with plenty of moral dilemmas thrown at you…

L.T.T.E. soldiers in their distinct tiger-striped fatigues

Dalrymple visits the terrorized city of Jaffna, on the northern Sri Lankan coast, which has been caught in the particular violence that raged from 1983-1990. After a particularly humorous bit on the utterly poor conditions of the hotel where he stays (which hasn’t seen a non-Tamil in eighteen months), he has the opportunity to talk to some of the gun-toting teenagers who compose the ground forces of the Tamil Tigers.

Up til now, we might write all this off as civil war, bloody and ruthless, but not posing any specific moral dilemmas to an outsider. Then Dalrymple meets Castro, a man similarly aged and the mastermind behind some brutal LTTE moves. And then he discovers a very strange source of their warfare inspiration:

I asked him to tell me more about the attack, and he happily compiled. He described the preparations, the spying and the intelligence work. He told me of the long, wet fifty-mile march through the monsoon jungle, the moonlit crossing of the lagoon and the silent belly-crawling as the guerrillas surrounded the camp and cut the wire. As he talked, I was aware of a growing sense of deja-vu. It all sounded a bit familiar, I said. Hadn’t I seen a film of this somewhere? He smiled.

‘You’re right. Our camps are all equipped with televisions and videos. War films are shown three times a week, and are compulsory viewing. We often consult videos like The Predator and Rambo before planning our ambushes. None of us are trained soldiers. We’ve learned all we know from these films.’

So, I thought: video-guerrillas. To Sri Lanka from Hanoi via Hollywood. It was an arresting idea: real-life freedom fighters earnestly studying Sylvester Stallone and Arnie Schwarzenegger to see how it was done.

Later I saw the camp’s video library: complete sets of Rambo, Rocky, and James Bond; all the Schwarzeneggers, including Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, and Commando; most of the recent Vietnam films; and, touchingly, no fewer than three copies of The Magnificent Seven. Moralists have often speculated the much of today’s violence is inspired by violent movies. If only they knew. Here in Sri Lanka the tactics of an entire civil war–tens of thousands killed, maimed and wounded–seem to be largely inspired by imported videos.

Hollywood warfare at its finest

Part curious, part shocking, this is a real case to consider when we think of the world that exists around us. I’ve read of plenty of the terrible violence, deaths of innocent people, and refugees who live around the world whose lives have been destroyed or forever changed by this civil war. And it jabs at precisely Dalrymple’s point, that we cannot take this region at face value, nor can we easily label it. We cannot lump South Asia’s innumerably diverse people into one large group, nor can we simply define what “Indian” means. Most importantly, we cannot transplant our own moral codes atop the functioning of thousands of years of history and define the subcontinent in our own terms; it does not translate that way. The reality is much, much more complex.

War, in the name of peace…

The thought is bewildering, paradoxical, and also quite present in our world, both now and in the past–even if it has been defined differently throughout time. Recently, Patrick Cox mused over the meaning of the word “peace” in his podcast, The World in Words (which I’ve cited several times before–great listening), starting with President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In itself, this oratory does a number on the definition of the easily-rattled-off but elusive-to-conceive word.

Here’s a segment from President Obama’s speech:

“We must begin by acknowledging a hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations, acting individually or on concert, will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem, it merely creates new and more complicated ones.’ As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive, in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King; but as a head of state, sworn to protect and defend my nation, and I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world.”

Maybe it’s a side-effect of my historiographical debates class, where we examine the words of great orators of the past, and where we’re reading and arguing weekly about Hegelian and Marxist views of history as an up-hill march towards perfect societies, but President Obama’s speech incited several things in my mind: as Patrick Cox says in the podcast, these things, phrases like “evil exists,” and “morally justified use of force,” are all things we have heard before in political speeches. Joseph Stalin defended force and violence many times, as a means of improving the Soviet state; Mao Zedong incited suspicion and approved violence amongst his Red Guard youth devotees. These are keywords used by politicians that justify a nation’s actions, and also ensure that the people are enthralled and uplifted by the leader’s response to evil. This means of inspiration, that we are improving, that we see our goal in sight and so violence is justified, appears throughout political oratory, and indeed nearly every leader in every country in the post-Enlightenment modern world harks back to the idea that we are improving, moving towards something better. Classic, and proven to be effective.

Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nonviolence

One may write the whole thing off to being a political speech written to speak to both sides, the peacekeeping America and the two-wars America, and indeed the sentiments somehow seek to provide both at once. And that is not such a terrible thing, for nothing exists in a vacuum and nation-states tend to be bundles of juxtapositions.

So how do we define peace, within ongoing global disunity and war? What is its nature? Does it in fact, contain war, as has been argued? “The word ‘peace’ is either taken as a given or used very lightly,” said Dennis Ross, a U. S. diplomat and author. Can you have a commitment to peace but never come through, or in fact, consistently perform opposite to such peaceful notions? And on a larger scale, is progress the ability to reduce both good and bad in the world?

Listen to the entire discussion and hear the speech in the World in Words podcast #79 (the peace discussion begins around 11:30 minutes in). Then tell me what you think.

East Asia

Assisted by a Korean Chinese guide, they were doing research and conducting interviews near the Chinese-Korean border, along the Tumen River. They state in their explanation that they are neither prepared to discuss in detail their experiences as prisoners nor looking to take any attention away from the dire situation they were there to cover in the first place.

As both of the articles I have linked to will suggest, the “underground” crossing North Korean citizens are making to escape the totalitarian state is dangerous and heart-breaking– and means either death or a life sentence in a labor camp if they are caught and deported. Ling and Lee were near the border where this journey begins when they were arrested, interviewing refugees and the people helping them escape in an effort to highlight their stories. It is a frightening reality to imagine that for just a 90-second stint on North Korean soil, these two American citizens were apprehended and subsequently sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp. This is a government that clearly has some issues, and seriously takes action against anyone trying to escape or trying to illuminate the situation.

Refugees camp out in the forests during their trek across China, Laos, and finally, Thailand. This photo appeared in National Geographic along with an article on the state of this escape movement.

A refugee who has landed safely in South Korea, or maybe even one waiting on placement back in Thailand or China, still has cultural and linguistic barriers to overcome. These people have been living in a hermit society, speaking a somewhat archaic and nowhere near modern version of the Korean spoken by South Koreans. Down to the phrases and greetings used in everyday life, it can be a struggle for North Koreans to communicate with their Southern counterparts. Oftentimes looked down upon for their accents, it can be difficult for them to find good jobs in the South Korean job markets; sometimes they are not qualified educationally. Every day is a struggle.

LiNK helps refugees learn language and job skills, and helps them become acclimated with their new surroundings.

Journalists Ling and Lee have been making headlines since March 17 when they were arrested. But the more important story has been going on much, much longer.

I urge you to listen to PRI’s The World in Words podcast from February 19, 2009: “Two Koreas divided by language,” which takes the listener on a journey into North Korea, from the point of view of a Korean-American young woman who is granted permission to visit with her uncle and mother. Some of their family members were suddenly enemies when the line was drawn through the peninsula in the 1950s. She is quite aware, during her stay, that their lives could just as easily have been hers; her story is stunning, and highlights the Korean split in a starkly personal way.

The novel tells Amir’s story, with amazing characters scattered all throughout the story; some are glorious; some gloriously evil– all very poignoint and very tangible. I felt I was struggling with the characters through the entire story. When there was death, sadness, joy, celebration, struggle, I left all those things as if they were my own friends and family. Adding to the depth emotion, I felt I could understand the Afghan Muslim mindset, and the code of honor and tradition maintained in the culture, even while being an American woman reading the story. More than anything, the book made me feel for Afghanistan. The last thirty years of the nation’s history read like a nightmare: peace in the streets and kite runners battling in them, transformed first by a coup (ending the monarchy), then the invasion of the Russians, then civil war, political factions, and eventually, the takeover by the Taliban. Only recently, I gleaned from the story, is there even the possibility of some governmental proceedings taking place. The story is clearly expresses the sadness author Khaled Hosseini feels over his homeland, and what the last years of violence have done to it. Violence, needless murders, food shortages, missing children and child abuse, bombings, destruction, lawlessness– the smells and sights described before 1978 are so vivid, and in such direct contrast to the ravaged, littered and dilapidated country Amir sees when he returns in 2001 (having been gone since emigrating in 1981). I had not known a whole lot of Afghanistan’s recent history, and when reading this story I really felt an honest, gut-wrenching hatred for the Taliban’s policy of violence and murder. I feel more connected to the people living in Afghanistan than I ever have. I feel for them, I hate that children live in squalor with no hope of escaping, and no one to stand up for their rights.

Not meaning for this to sound like a rant or a book review, though I fear it may be a combination of both. What I mean is to express the pain I felt, for the people of Afghanistan. I can never again think of that country as merely a place on map; I feel more connected than ever, even while never having been there, nor speaking the language. But within the history of the last thirty years, I see the strength and courage it takes to live there. Many may have no choice in the end, but hope is powerful force, and I’d like to think there are bright glimmers of hope for Afghanistan.

There is still a lot violence on the streets every day in Afghanistan. For additional reading (besides The Kite Runner, obviously), NPR has a recent report on assassinations of political, social, and religious leaders and activists. I also read a really interesting collection of stories from various peoples’ lives in Afghanistan now, but cannot seem to relocate that report now that I’m trying to find it. Expect an update later if I have luck.

To do so, we’ve read a collection of poetry written by Japanese Americans about the internment during WWII, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It has been a fortnight full of enlightening ideas regarding what your ethnicity means to others and to yourself, and how one adapts culture, and creates hybridity. The guest professor (the entire course has been taught by guest professors, except for the first 2-week segment taught by the coordinator, Dr. Tom Keene), Sarah Robbins, has facilitated a series of great class discussions, getting us really deep into what it means to be Asian-American.

Somewhat by coincidence, my own curiosity lead me weeks earlier to a book on the new release table at Barnes and Noble– one that delved into the curious incident of a Powerball lottery that had several dozen winners, all of whose numbers had been identical and inspired by the same thing: a fortune cookie. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, written by New York Times writer Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, 8), takes the reader  on a  journey into everything you’ve never imagined behind the ethnic food we love so much; and, Lee argues, it isn’t really all that “ethnic” anyway. Chinese American food is essentially American food, says Lee, and from there she shares stories about the origins of the fortune cookie, the international argument caused by soy sauce, the dangerous lives of Chinese deliverymen, and a heart-wrenching tale of a Chinese immigrant family who was nearly torn about by working and living in a rural Georgia town.  I have found this book to be an interesting addition to my own understanding of the Chinese-American experience. Though it focuses on food, who can really argue that food is not a basic playing field for cultural exchange, no mater what your ethnicity or geographic location? Even without knowing a person’s language or culture or history, they can share with you their food. And so, through this familiar medium, Lee explores the whole globe to define “Chinese food.”

I am going to share an expert here, because I think it is an excellent illustration of the way we see cultural hybridity today, and how “assimilation” itself may be changing in meaning. Her sentiments in this passage echo almost exactly a point we touched upon today in class– when a minority combines itself with the majority, what elements of each culture are retained, which are lost, and to what extent might each be a bad or good thing? By giving up parts of your own culture to assimilate, how much becomes a personal loss? And what happens when walls or bumps arise between the two cultures one may be living in that might cause someone to step back an reevaluate their identity? She adds to it an interesting additional point: when the minority or immigrant population becomes an integral part of mainstream society, that society itself adapts to it, and appears different than it used to. We can see this most clearly all around us in the United States. As shes says earlier in her books, we often think of apple pie as being quintessential “American”– but when is the last time you had apple pie, and when is the last time you are Chinese food? Exactly. Probably in the last week or so. Interesting…

I think it is a testament to the writer, and a great cultural learning tool, that we can see elements of the Chinese American experience in her own exploration of American Chinese food.

I’ll leave you with her words:

“As much as the mainstream changes the immigrants, the immigrants change the mainstream. As recently as three decades ago, being American often meant distancing yourself from your immigrant ancestry. In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, ‘Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.’

Even our definition of ‘assimilation’ is changing. The old-school definition referred to how a minority blended into a majority. Now social scientists are pushing a new definition: the convergence of disparate cultures. The popularity of Chinese food shows that assimilation may no longer require that minorities be subsumed into the majority. Instead, in a country where 20 percent of the population consists of immigrants and their children, assimilation means convergence from all sides.

…

In reality, General Tso’s chicken is arguably as American as it is foreign, Chinese only in the way that burritos are ‘Mexican’ or spaghetti and meatballs is ‘Italian.’ These are ‘native foreign dishes’– ‘native’ because they originated here and may exist nowhere else, but ‘foreign’ because they were inspired by other cuisines. American Chinese food has developed its own identity– so much so that it is sold in Korea, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic as its own distinct cuisine. “

The assignment (for my World Since 1945 class) is to research an event of international political significance that has taken place between 1945 and 1999. Approaching it at a specific angle– versus just attempting to do “the Vietnam War”– we need to examine three primary sources relating to that event. So basically, I need three sources coming from the time period that the event occurred, analized and compared in 5 pages. I’ve not done much yet in my career in history with primary sources, and that is essentially the bread-and-butter of an historian’s job. Examining the documents (journals, letters, government documents, etc.) that remain from history give us the real insight. It is when the analysis comes in that books and essays are created, giving us the perspectives we may have on history. You have historians to thank for compiling and tidying much of the history you know.

For my topic, I have chosen the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that Mao Tse-tung began in communist China in the 1960′s. His confidence that tradition and intellectuals would ruin the socialist society was so strong, thousands died in the wake of their attempted obliteration. This is when the Red Guard came to be, and images  still linger of young children in their Maoist uniforms patrolling their country for “revisionists” who posed a threat to the state.

From this period of Chinese history I will draw several primary sources and narrow it down to the three that best bring varying viewpoints to the table. My initial research returned several works of compiled documents from the state and Mao, a compilation of first-person accounts of the response of Chinese villagers and peasants, and several works from reporters and diplomats from abroad who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand while there. I will be going through these sources and others, and hopefully narrowing it all down to my main three points of view on the singular movement. From there, I will look at the Cultural Revolution as an entity and use those three viewpoints to analyze it; vise-versa, I will use the context of the Cultural Revolution to analyze what is said in the documents I choose.

Sitting at the start, this seems like both a daunting and exhilarating project. But at the same time, this is an essential part of doing research– looking at primary sources. And I couldn’t ask for more flexibility in the topic, nor for a better topic. China is, after all, full of intrigue for a foreigner. So, I must get started.

While I don’t agree per say with all of the author’s diagnoses, he does bring up some little-known points about the money markets of the U.S. in relation to those in Europe. We’ve been learning about the financial and investment relationships between those markets in my International Political Economy class; definitely pay close attention to the section “What’s Icelandic for ‘Domino’?” – European markets could very well be even more vulnerable than the American market, based on commercial banks’ investments.

I just thought it was an interesting argument, and worth a read. Here’s the link: World on the Edge. Enjoy!

Ray McGovern’s report on Consortiumnews.com points directly both the president’s and our own misguided step, quoting committee chair Jay Rockefeller:

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

No matter your opinion on what we should do to fix our blunders in Iraq, we must take a very calm, intent look at the delicate precipice at which we now stand. It is foolhardy to use military force on Iran. For one, we have not even made an attempt to talk with Tehran. Heathens, we assume. Terrorists, we assume. And who can blame us– we’re fed a distorted media image along with press conferences from a president who depends far more on his advisers than any other source. I would like to think that the president makes sure to double-check certain bits of information– when they involve starting another war– and that he might also be wary of the administration that started the debacle in Iraq. And I know the public opinion is dominated by high-school graduates and relatively uninformed individuals, but I know I read brilliant commentary on foreign affairs every day– why aren’t those voices being carried to the president’s desk? Is this administration really looking to go deeper into our national pocketbook, and father from ranks of satisfactory eras in American history, all within the next 7 months?

Why have we not arranged sit-downs with Iranian leaders? Our president and his preemptive VP are so sure that they are building bombs, so sure that it will be much wiser to simply start dropping our own. There’s nothing quite as cocky as fighting bomb-building with bombs: a sort of shoving-in-the-face move we’d expect from anyone less noble than us. Not us, the United States, great facilitator of democracy (the our-way-or-the-highway kind).

McGovern reminds us that, “all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded last November that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons-related work in 2003 and had not resumed it as of last year.” A tidbit our administration likes to overlook, in favor of the Massive Threat Iran poses for peace. (Peace, ha, yeah right.)

And bombs are immanent, with the last stretch of this administration. Talks in early June with Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert brought Bush farther along the path towards a new war, this time attacking the “Iranian Threat.” See, you say! There is political support abroad– and from the region, no less! Oh yes, you mean from Israel, to whom we are nothing less than a life support? Israel who is also barraged with bombs by its own wars, using American backing and American military tanks and ammo to supply its own feuds. That is hardly international support. Who dare disagree with the hand that feeds?

On top of everything, Bush’s administration is falling into the awful trap of impulse action, nearing the end of its reign. Involving the US in another war in the Middle East at a time when we are so near a change of approach is insurmountable. Looking at the last few decades, one can at least glean that we cannot possibly end things as simply as the Persian Gulf War. There was no way to undo the mistakes we made in Afghanistan, when we fought the Russians and started the roots of Al-Qaeda. There is no way to easily solve Iraq now.

But there is a way to prevent errors with Iran. We need to talk to them.

A good relationship with Iran could be our key to achieving stability in Baghdad; it could mean Persian Gulf oil under far safer terms; it could push towards agreement between Israel and Palestine; it could lead to improvements in cooperative talks and democracy potential in Syria and Lebanon, respectively. And one thing it will definitely do is ensure that we avoid another Iraq: a war with no factual, reasonable trigger.

Iran is a country that wants a regional role, and it will what is needed to achieve this. Dmitri Trenin, in Foreign Policy (Jan/Feb 08), likens it to Nixon’s embarkment upon a relationship with hostile socialist China. A “quasi-alliance” it might become, but that has a much better chance at facing the dilemmas of a plagued region than continued warfare ever will. There will already be enough of that contained within the region, you realists retort– so why not keep it at that? At least self-contained, nothing more. Iran is not a new country; it is used to political shifts, and those shifts, when they come, will be internal. Whatever it does, we should be ready to meet them, and meet them now, with communication. Says Trenin:

“What is certain is that the only thing that stands between Iran and  the nuclear future it threatens is dialogue with the United States, the sole audience it truly craves. The terms will be tough: the lifting of sanctions, security guarantees, the right to a peaceful nuclear program. Mutual agreement on those alone will be difficult, but they will be the only incentives powerful enough to convince Iran to forgo the pursuit of weapons.”

Isn’t that a goal worth aiming towards? Bombs will surely lead only to more bombs, and haven’t we exhausted the idea that pulverizing a nation still doesn’t make them give in to our western ideals? Let’s speak with our ideas, compromise and theorize, and point ourselves instead towards resolution.