STEVE EMBER:
Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA. I’m Steve Ember.
FAITH LAPIDUS:
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And I’m Faith Lapidus. These are important days for makers of sweets and sellers of flowers. For owners of fine restaurants and publishers of greeting cards. For salespeople at clothing stores. And for all the people whose job is to make other people’s hair and fingernails look their best.
STEVE EMBER:
These are important days because soon it will be February fourteenth, Valentine’s Day. This week on our program, we ask three generations of people what the holiday for love and romance means to them. 
(MUSIC: “Lucky” / Jason Mraz, featuring Colbie Caillat)
FAITH LAPIDUS:
We begin with the youngest generation. Sixteen-year-old Jarrah was with a group of Chinese students visiting the United States. What does Valentine’s Day mean to her?
JARRAH: “I know that’s a Western festival for lovers who date or they love each other. We are not allowed to date in high school.”
She explains that some people in China may celebrate Valentine’s Day, but China also has its own version. It is based on the story of a fairy from heaven who comes to Earth and marries a cowhand on a farm. In the end, they are permitted to meet just once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.
JARRAH: “There’s a girl named Zhi Nu and a boy named Niu Lang. Now they are stars in the sky, so they meet each other in lunar months, seventh in July, each year once. We celebrate that day like the Valentine’s Day in Western culture.”
STEVE EMBER:
So how did February fourteenth come to be celebrated as it is? Explanations date back to ancient Rome. But nothing is sure, not even the identity of the Roman Catholic saint celebrated by this day. As a result, in nineteen sixty-nine, the church removed Saint Valentine’s Day from its official worldwide calendar of Catholic feasts.
But the popular meaning of Valentine’s Day continues to capture hearts around the world, even if not always on February fourteenth. Camile and Nietzsche were among a group of Brazilian Youth Ambassadors visiting the United States.
CAMILE: “We have Valentine’s Day but in a different day. It’s June twelfth.”
NIETZSCHE: “So in Brazil, I would translate as ‘the Day of the Couple. And it’s like you don’t give friends or family gifts, you give your boyfriend or your girlfriend. And the guys, they are sometimes pretty boring because they like to give chocolate and flowers. And girls are tired and sick of that.”
CAMILE: “Yeah!”
NIETZSCHE: “So I believe I’d better give a hot Brazilian kiss. It would be better on the Day of the Couple.”
(MUSIC: “Stay Here Forever” / Jewel)
FAITH LAPIDUS:
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Next, we talk to some college students. Jack Feldman is from Iowa in the American Midwest. What is his best Valentine’s Day memory? 
JACK FELDMAN: “Any and all Valentine’s when I actually had a girlfriend.”
And the worst memory?
JACK FELDMAN: “All the other ones.”
He remembers as a child choosing valentine cards to give to his classmates, a tradition for American schoolchildren.
JACK FELDMAN: “I always tried to get like the coolest ones, like the Pokeman ones and trying to give them out to everybody. I only wanted to give them to all the cute girls, but you had to give them to everybody back then.”
STEVE EMBER:
Andrew Shim is twenty-two years old, from Maryland. We asked him what American teenagers like to do for Valentine’s Day. He listed the usual — chocolate, a movie, maybe go to a party. But then we asked him if he had ever done anything special. 
ANDREW SHIM: “Oh yeah, I actually made my own chocolate at home. But I kind of messed it up. It was OK, I give to that person I like. It didn’t turn out well, but you know, I mean it was a nice memory though, a good experience making chocolate.”
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Andrew Shim and Jack Feldman are doing college internship programs in Washington. So are these three international students we are about to meet, starting with Jeong Kim from Seoul.
JEONG KIM: “Normally in Korea, well the girls take the opportunity to give out chocolates to guys that they have a crush on.”
KATTIA: “In Mexico we’re used to like for, for more for couples, not like so for friends and stuff. It’s a cool day because everybody gets to give balloons and chocolates and all that stuff to the person you’re in a relationship in or whatever.”
SONIA ZIADE: “In Canada it’s pretty much the same as the U.S. It’s very consumer based, where we buy chocolate. We go to the restaurant, have a romantic dinner. Every day should be Valentine’s Day, right?”
FAITH LAPIDUS:
Those last two voices were Kattia from Mexico and Sonia Ziade from Montreal, Canada.
(MUSIC: “Wicked Game” / Chris Isaak)
STEVE EMBER:
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Now we talk to a group of parents. They all live in the Washington area and are involved together in the Boy Scouts of America.
Ming Hong Ward came to the United States from China in nineteen eighty-nine. What does Valentine’s Day mean to her?
MING HONG WARD: “I was in college when I came to United States and it was interesting that in America they celebrate people in love and express love to each other, because in China people are very reserved and they do not show appreciation openly.
STEVE EMBER:
Andrea Liddell says she and her husband exchange cards for Valentine’s Day.
ANDREA LIDDELL: “I look forward to getting flowers and, if I’m really lucky, a date. We get to go out together.”
And what is her best Valentine’s Day memory?
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ANDREA LIDDELL: “I knew you’d ask that. Valentine’s Day … when I’ve been surprised. When we had like a surprise — we got to go out to someplace very fancy, didn’t really know what was going to happen ahead of time. That was a really lovely one. It involved a lot of food at that time.”
And her worst memory?
ANDREA LIDDELL: “Let me get back to you on that. Oh, oh, oh — in college, the boyfriend who absolutely forgot Valentine’s Day. That hurt my feelings. So there you go, that was the worst one.”
FAITH LAPIDUS:
Lauri and Bob Dacey have been married for twenty years. Any special memories of Valentine’s Day?
LAURI DACEY: “I don’t remember any one in particular. I mean, they’re pretty much the same, like we’ll just celebrate, exchange cards, may go out to dinner. So once we had the children, Valentine’s Day, I think, became more about them. We were starting to give them gifts and treats and really not going out in the evening anymore for that day.”
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REPORTER: “And Bob, I mean what’s a typical gift, Valentine’s Day gift that you buy?”
BOB DACEY: “Candy and sweets all the time. And we always have those little hearts. That’s what my fondest memory is, too, of the little Valentine’s hearts that come out once a year, little candies with little nice kind of love sayings on them.”
FAITH LAPIDUS:
And what does Valentine’s Day mean to their children in school?
LAURI DACEY: “In school, I think it means exchanging cards and getting a candy, or multiple candies.”
BOB DACEY: “And they exchange cards, they sometimes decorate nice little boxes so they can put valentines in each other’s box in school.”
STEVE EMBER:
Bob Steinrauf has been married for almost twenty-eight years. What does he think of Valentine’s Day?
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BOB STEINRAUF: “I think it’s actually a good opportunity to remember those things that we want to do on Valentine’s Day — you know, special things for the spouse or whoever — you probably ought to do them year-round. Because so often, especially with guys, you’ll say, ‘Hey, we had Valentine’s Day. I got you roses, I got you chocolate, it says I love you. What more do we need?’ But I think it really is a call to make sure you remember to do that during the day, during the week, during the months before and after Valentine’s Day.”
Does he follow his own advice?”
BOB STEINRAUF: “You would have to get the second opinion from my wife. Sometimes yes, but not as much as I ought to.”
And sometimes, as the old saying goes, it is the thought that counts.
BOB STEINRAUF: “Early in our marriage my wife came — she was going to school and working late and driving home, so I baked a cake. Now it was not just any old cake. It came in the round cake pans, and I baked it, but then I attempted to cut out a heart and used pink icing and decorated it. Now the sides of the cake fell apart tremendously. But that was probably the best thing I could have done. She looked at it. It was pathetic. But she goes ‘Oh, I love you.’ So that was a nice Valentine’s Day.”
(MUSIC: “As Time Goes By” / Frank Sinatra)
FAITH LAPIDUS:
Not everyone is a big fan of Valentine’s Day. This is Joe Durso, twenty years old, from Louisville, Kentucky. What does it mean to him?
JOE DURSO: “Nothing, and I’m not even sure when it is. If I was in the chocolate business I think I would probably support it. Or in the flower business. But it isn’t really something that matters to me.”
This seemed to be a dissenting opinion, though, at least among the people we spoke to. Next we meet a group of friends from a social club in Northern Virginia, including Marge Lubeley. Reporter Nancy Steinbach asked her what she does on Valentine’s Day.
MARGE LUBELEY: “I usually get together with a daughter and a granddaughter and we go out to dinner and exchange gifts. I’m a widow and so this is a fun time for me.”
REPORTER: “How about before, when you were single and younger?”
MARGE LUBELEY: “It wasn’t that important. But when I married, it was always a dozen red roses from my husband. So it was special.”
STEVE EMBER:
Sally Margolis also lost her husband. But two of her four children live locally. So on Valentine’s Day she might go out to dinner with one of them or babysit for her grandchildren.
SALLY MARGOLIS: “I think it’s a nice remembrance. It’s a nice holiday. I think it’s a meaningful holiday just to be nice to people and to remember people.”
Greg Ogden would agree with that.
GREG OGDEN: “I think probably some of the nicest ones, the more memorable ones are back when I was a teenager. And I enjoyed those. The family celebrated Valentine’s Day in a little bit bigger way than we do now. So there was bigger meal. There was a girlfriend involved, sometimes invited over to our house as well for the meal, and part of the family, and cards back and forth. When you’re teenagers, you don’t quite know what to write on there. Little Os and Xs for kisses and things like that. You brought back a moment of nostalgia for me. I thank you for that.”
STEVE EMBER:
We leave you with these words from another one of the friends, Nancy Lang.
NANCY LANG: “Valentine’s Day is a wonderful opportunity for people to refocus on what love is all about. Because it’s sharing, it’s giving. Love is a strange element of our lives. But it’s very important because without it you have nothing.”
(MUSIC: “Glory of True Love” / John Prine)
FAITH LAPIDUS:
Our program was written by Avi Arditti and produced by Caty Weaver. I’m Faith Lapidus.
STEVE EMBER:
And I’m Steve Ember. What does Valentine’s Day mean to you? Let us know. You can post comments, and read what other people around the world are saying, at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also find transcripts, MP3s and archives of our past programs. We would love to have you join us again next week for THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English.

This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.
President Obama is proposing rules to limit the size of banks and the risks they can take. He wants to prevent banks from using government-insured deposits to make risky investments. He also wants to keep them from owning hedge funds or private equity funds.
Banks took big losses as they traded mortgage-related securities that went bad. That helped create the financial crisis.
Bank shares fell after the president’s announcement Thursday. His earlier efforts at financial reform have faced strong opposition from financial companies and some members of Congress.
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In the Senate, sixty votes are needed to prevent unlimited debate on a bill. But the Democrats have lost their sixtieth vote. On Tuesday voters in Massachusetts elected a Republican to finish the term of Ted Kennedy who died in August.
Scott Brown opposes the health care legislation in Congress. His election could also affect other areas, like climate change legislation and reforms in the financial system.
 

And at the same time a separate development could affect elections around the country. The United States Supreme Court has cleared the way for businesses to spend more in political campaigns. The ruling is expected to apply to labor unions as well.
The court decided Thursday to ease campaign finance restrictions that were in place for many years. The vote was five to four. The decision overturned rulings that barred corporations from using their own money to pay for campaign ads for or against candidates. The conservative majority on the court said the restrictions on political speech violate the free speech guarantee in the Constitution.
President Obama called it a “major victory” for powerful interests like big oil companies, Wall Street banks and health insurance companies. He directed his administration to talk with congressional leaders from both parties to develop a “forceful response.”
Elections for Congress are this November. The next presidential election is in two thousand twelve.
Wednesday marked Barack Obama’s first anniversary in office. But the Republican victory in liberal Massachusetts was seen in large part as a sign of voter anger across the country about the economy.
Unemployment has doubled in two years to ten percent. Many people are angry that they struggle while the government rescued big banks. Some banks took losses last year but others earned record profits.
And that’s the VOA Special English Economics Report. I’m Mario Ritter.

VOICE ONE:
I’m Faith Lapidus.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today, we begin the story of the life of a famous Southern writer, William Faulkner. He wrote about an imaginary place and described changes in the American South.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
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William Faulkner was born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time when there were two Souths in the United States. The first was the South whose beliefs had existed from before the American Civil War which began in eighteen sixty-one. This South did not question rules, even when those rules did not satisfy human needs. It was a South filled with injustice for black people. It held the seeds of its own destruction.
The other South was a land without any beliefs. It was a place where success was measured by self-interest. This was a South where each person had lost his place in the group. It was a place where people owned things that they did not know how to use.
Faulkner saw that the old beliefs were not right or even worth believing. And he saw that they could not provide justice because they were based on slavery. Yet he felt that even with their lies and half truths the old beliefs were better than the moral emptiness of the modern South.
VOICE TWO:
In Faulkner’s story called “The Bear” a group of men are talking after the day’s hunt. One man reads from a poem by the English writer, John Keats:
“‘She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair. ‘
“He’s talking about a girl,” one man says.
The other answers, ‘He was talking about truth. Truth is one. It doesn’t change. It covers all things which touch the heart — honor and pity and justice and courage and love. Do you see now. ‘”
The American writer, Robert Penn Warren says about Faulkner, “The important thing is the presence of the idea of truth. It covers all things that involve the heart and define the effort of man to rise above the mechanical process of life. ”
VOICE ONE:
Faulkner has been accused of looking back to a time when life was better. Yet, he believes that truth belongs to all times. But it is found most often in the people who stand outside what he calls “the loud world. ”
One of the people in his story “Delta Autumn” says, “There are good men everywhere, at all times. ”
Faulkner’s great-grandfather accepted the old beliefs. He was one of the men who had helped build the South, but his time was gone. Now money had replaced the old order of honor. What Faulkner saw was that there could be no order at all, no idea of doing what is right, in a world that measured success in terms of money.
VOICE TWO:
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This is the changing South that Faulkner describes in the area he created. He named it Yoknapatawpha County. He describes it as in the northern part of the state of Mississippi. It lies between sand hills covered with pine trees and rich farmland near the Mississippi River. It has fifteen-thousand-six-hundred-eleven people, living on almost four-thousand square kilometers. Its central city is Jefferson, where the storekeepers, mechanics, and professional men live.
The rest of the people of Yoknapatawpha County are farmers or men who cut trees. Their only crops are wood and cotton. A few live in big farmhouses, left from an earlier time. Most of them do not even own the land they farm.
The critic Malcolm Cowley says, “Others might say that Faulkner was not so much writing stories for the public as telling them to himself. It is what a lonely child might do, or a great writer. ”
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in eighteen-ninety-seven. His father worked for the railroad. William’s great-grandfather had built it. His grandfather owned it. When the grandfather decided to sell the railroad, William’s father moved his family thirty-five miles west to the city of Oxford.
Growing up in Oxford, William Faulkner heard stories of the past from his grandmother and from a black woman who worked for his family. He heard more stories from old men in front of the courthouse, and from poor farmers sitting in front of a country store.
You learn the stories, Faulkner says, without speech somehow from having been born and living beside them, with them, as children will and do.
VOICE TWO:
Faulkner was a good student. Yet by the time he was fifteen he had left school. Except for a year at the University of Mississippi at the end of World War One, that was the last of his official education.
He took a number of jobs in Oxford, but did not stay with any of them. He began to think that he was a writer. Then in nineteen-eighteen the woman he loved married another man. Faulkner left Mississippi and joined the British Royal Flying Corps. He was sent to Canada to train to fight in World War One.
The war ended before he could be sent to Europe. He returned to Oxford, walking with difficulty because of what he said was a “war wound. ”
VOICE ONE:
At home Faulkner again moved from one job to the next. He wrote bad poetry, drew pictures that looked like other men’s pictures, and wrote uninteresting stories. A book of his poetry, The Marble Faun, was published in nineteen-twenty-four.
A year later he went to the Southern city of New Orleans, Louisiana. There he met the American writer, Sherwood Anderson. They became friends. Anderson told Faulkner to develop his own way of writing, and to use material from his own part of the country. He also told Faulkner he would find a publisher for the novel Faulkner was writing. But Anderson also told Faulkner that he would not read the book.
VOICE TWO:
The book was called “Soldier’s Pay.” It would not be remembered today if it were not for Faulkner’s later work. The same could be said of Faulkner’s next book, “Mosquitoes.”
Money from these books made it possible for him to travel to Europe. He educated himself by reading a large number of modern writers. Among them was the Irish writer James Joyce. From him, Faulkner learned to write about people’s inner thoughts. He also read the books of the Austrian doctor, Sigmund Freud. From him, Faulkner learned some of the reasons people act in the strange way they often do.
Instead of remaining in Paris, as many American writers did, Faulkner returned to Mississippi and began his serious writing. “I was trying,” he said, “to put the history of mankind in one sentence. ” Later he said, “I am still trying to do it, but now I want to put it all on the head of a pin. ” He created Yoknapatawpha County and its people, and gave them a meaning far beyond their place and lives.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
In nineteen-twenty-nine Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, the woman he had loved since they were in school together. Her earlier marriage had failed. She had returned to Oxford with her two children.
They bought an old ruined house and began the costly work of repairing it. Faulkner also took on the job of supporting the rest of his family. His letters from this time on are often full of talk about what he must do to support his family and to continue the repairs to his house.
VOICE TWO:
Faulkner’s next book, “Sartoris,” presents almost all the ideas that he develops during the rest of his life. First, however, the book Faulkner wrote had to be cut by about twenty-five percent.
Faulkner resisted. He said, if you grow a vegetable, you can cut it to look like something else, but it will be dead. Yet, when Faulkner read the book after his editor cut it, he approved. He even cooperated in more re-shaping of the book.
In “Sartoris,” Faulkner found his subject, his voice, and his area. He writes about the connection between an important Southern family and the local community. He describes how the Sartoris family seems to help in its own destruction.
VOICE ONE:
In the next seven years, between nineteen-twenty-nine and nineteen-thirty-six, he seemed to re-invent the novel with every book he wrote. “Get it down,” he said. “Take chances. It may be bad, but that’s the only way you can do anything good. ”
At that time, most novels about the South described a land that never existed. After Faulkner, few northerners were brave enough to write about a South they did not know. And no serious Southern writer was willing to describe a South that did not exist.
(MUSIC)
VOICE TWO:
This program was written by Richard Thorman. It was produced by Lawan Davis. I’m Steve Ember.
VOICE ONE:
And I’m Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for the rest of the story about William Faulkner on PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.

SAN FRANCISCO, California — In response to the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Northern Japan, a group of concerned citizens from the Bay Area’s Hawaiian and Asian American communities have organized Kōkua Japan San Francisco, a fundraising concert in Japantown’s
Peace Plaza from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, April 2, 2011.
“Kōkua” means “help” in Hawaiian. Donations to the Northern Japan Earthquake Relief Fund will be solicited at the free event, which will also raise funds through raffles of donated merchandise and T-shirt sales. The nonprofit Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival will collect the monies and deliver them to the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC), which administers the earthquake relief fund along with Union Bank. One hundred percent of the fund will be distributed for direct assistance to residents of the affected area of Japan. The entertainment on the Peace Plaza stage, at Post and Buchanan streets, will be emceed by NBC Bay Area newsman and stand-up comedian Mike Inouye.
The lineup includes:
* Hawaiian music groups: Steven Espaniola & Friends, Faith Ako & Friends, Side Order Band featuring Chris Kamaka & Asa Young, ‘AHAmele ‘Ukulele Band, Ho’omana and JD Puli & Friends
* Polynesian dance troupes: Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu (hula), Ke ‘Olu Makani ‘O Mauna Loa with kumu Meleana Manuel (hula), Ka Liko Pua O Kalaniākea (hula), Merahi O Tehani (Tahitian ‘ōte’a)
* Diverse musical acts: Feelosophy (funk, soul), Project Gojira (fusion), Native Elements (reggae), Stymie & the Pimp Jones Luv Orchestra (funk, rock, ska.)
Local merchants have donated items for raffle prizes, while Hawaiian Airlines is flying in 200 special “Aloha” T-shirts for sale with the help of the Hawai’i Lieutenant Governor’s office, which is coordinating the islands’ Aloha for Japan fundraising effort. The T-shirt, which uses a rising sun for
the “o” in “Aloha,” will sell at Kōkua Japan San Francisco for $25, from which the $15 profit per shirt will go to the JCCCNC’s earthquake relief fund. Sponsors include Aloha Warehouse, Colortone Digital, Osaki Creative Group, Susie Kagami and Sound Innovations. Thanks also go to Sandy Lee
of the San Francisco Parks and Recreation Department, which manages the Peace Plaza.

Hyphen and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop are very excited to present the 2011 Asian American Short Story Contest – the only, national, pan Asian American writing competition of its kind.
PRIZE: $1,000, PUBLICATION IN HYPHEN MAGAZINE AND THE HONOR OF SHORT STORY OF THE YEAR.
Now in its third year, the 2011 Asian American Short Story Contest will name 10 finalists and one grand prize-winner who will win a cash prize of $1000 and have the winning story published in an upcoming issue of Hyphen.
Judges for the 2011 contests include renowned Asian American writers:
* Yiyun Li, a 2010 MacArthur Genius Award winner; author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and, The Vagrants, winner of the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction.
* Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and a 2007 California Book Award winner.
Our first contest winner Preeta Samarasan was discovered based on her contest-winning story. She went on to write the acclaimed novel Evening is the Whole Day (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Orange Prize.
The deadline for this contest is May 16th. Open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada. Please visit http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/shortstory or http://www.aaww.org for more information.
About the Contest:
Held in collaboration between San Francisco-based Hyphen, a non-profit news and culture magazine, and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the preeminent literary arts organization devoted to Asian American literature– the 2011 Asian American Short Story contest is a unique competition highlighting the amazing literary talent coming out of our communities. Garnering hundreds of submissions from all parts of the country and representing all peoples of Asian America, this contest has proven itself as a major cultural event.

CBS 5 Reporter/Anchor Thuy Vu, Vince Garrido and Greg Marasso have won a First Place National Headliner Award for their documentary and series of stories, “Vietnam Revisited,” which explored the on-going health impact of Agent Orange, the toxin used by the US military to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam.
But there’s more.
The stories also won “Best of Show,” an award given to the best TV entry in all categories of the contest!
Founded in 1934 by the Press Club of Atlantic City, The National Headliner Awards program is one of the oldest and largest annual contests recognizing excellence in journalism.
“Vietnam Revisited” covered a number of aspects of current life in Vietnam, with a special focus on the long-term impact of the defoliant, Agent Orange. Thuy and Vince were asked to go to Vietnam by San Francisco State University’s Journalism Department – a trip underwritten by the Ford Foundation to raise awareness of Agent Orange’s legacy.
Fifteen journalists from across the country were asked to participate in this program, with complete editorial freedom. Thuy was the only television reporter. The work of the reporting project can be seen at www.vietnamreportingproject.org
Thuy Vu is a three-time Emmy award winner. She joined CBS 5 in December 2005, based in the San Jose bureau. She is now the host of the station’s “Eye on the  Bay.”
Thuy has returned twice to her homeland of Vietnam for special reports on the country’s political and economic changes since the Vietnam War.  She won Emmy and Associated Press awards for a report on the 30th anniversary of the first Operation Babylift flight rescuing orphans right before Saigon fell to the communists.  The story featured rare interviews with the pilot, the orphanage director and one of the orphans, now grown and living with his wife and children in Seattle.
She started her journalism career in public radio at KQED-FM in San Francisco.  She later moved on to National Public Radio (NPR), where she first covered Congress and national politics in Washington, D.C. before returning to their San Francisco bureau. Thuy emigrated from Vietnam in 1975, fleeing the country with her family as Saigon fell to the communists.
Vu is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association.  She’s also on the board of directors for the Asian Pacific Fund, a community foundation that provides scholarships to students and funding grants for Asian nonprofits in the Bay Area.
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Editor’s Note: Italian journalist Federico Rampini presented his latest work, Occidente estremo (“Far West” – Mondadori, 2010) at the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco on March 28. His book addresses the decadence of the West contrasted with the rise of China, drawing from the author’s first-hand experience as a foreign correspondent for the Italian daily La Repubblica in Beijing. The following is an English translation of his work.
A year of exploration in the Far West.
Federico Rampini
In 2009 I left Beijing and moved to New York. It was a return to the United States for me: until 2004 I had lived on the other coast, in San Francisco. Those five years in between in China seemed as long as a century. Not for me, but for the balance of power between Asia and the West. When I left California, China was still a student, busy emulating its American teacher. I returned to find an America exhausted by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis that China avoided, in a masterly way, using the leverage of its state capitalism or “market dirigisme.” And so history had a sudden acceleration. It was clear that the 21st Century would be Asian, but the East’s fast rise soon gave the impression that the die had already been cast. China seems master of its own destiny, set on a fast track to modernization while America laboriously drags itself out of the darkness.
And yet in New York I have the feeling of being at the center of the world. For an Italian journalist it is evident: everything that happens in the United States is news, it immediately garners high visibility and is “trendy” across Europe and the rest of the world. Whether right or wrong, a maple leaf falling in Central Park causes a ripple in the air that is felt across oceans.
If the United States is in decline, then it is a beautiful decline. And it could even do us all some good.
That there is a crisis is a matter of fact. The US’s position as world leader is being threatened by the People’s Republic. All the predictions indicate that sooner or later, in the course of this century, China will become the planet’s greatest economy. The precise date of the overtaking is disputed: it can be delayed by some unexpected hiccup, like the workers’ struggles in Guangdong in 2010, which indicated that not all is “stable” within that giant. But the handover is inevitable. The American decline follows the parable of other empires, worn out by excessive territorial appetites: the cost of two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (3000 billion) is impoverishing the United States, forcing it into damaging and dangerous privatizations. The collapse of public resources is evident in the crumbling infrastructures. New York is itself a metropolis that is falling apart: from the subway to the streets, the hospitals, the budget cuts are clearly visible. However, the knowledge of this decline is still not enough for Americans to spark a sudden change that suddenly alters the course of history. It brings to mind what the great historian Eric Hobsbawm said to explain why Bismarck’s Prussia surpassed England: the British did not understand that their economic supremacy was running out, “because the system was still working”. For better or worse. A patch here, a stitch there, that give the illusion of being able to carry on. Meanwhile, the adversary-rival is taking great leaps towards the future.
Beautiful, this decline? Certainly. New York has never been so vital, so creative, so full of talent and projects. It is an amazing cultural center, much more dynamic than Beijing or Shanghai. Visiting one of my favorite museums in Manhattan, the Neue Galerie, I find it unavoidable to draw a parallel with Vienna at the beginning of the last century: Klimt, Schiele, Mahler, Kafka, Freud, Musil, Joseph Roth. It is striking the list of great thinkers and artists that lived in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it was fading, falling apart under their eyes. There is something fertile in that decline: it is the phase in which the empire loses its certainties and so becomes more eclectic, it questions itself, it experiments, it makes connections, it opens itself to contamination by the Other. The Roman Empire accepted Christianity when it had already exhausted its diving force in the age of great achievements. England in the early 1900s, at the time of the Bloomsbury Circle, with Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, was a far more interesting place than during the triumphant times of Queen Victoria.
When I moved to San Francisco (at the beginning of the millennium), my blog on the Repubblica website was called Far West, because California was the spearhead of American modernity, the incubator of all the technological and cultural revolutions. While I was on the West Coast, an area that is hyperaware of what is happening in Asia, I sensed that the “Far” was starting to cross the Pacific.
The vigor of growth, the belief in progress, the optimism was moving to the other shores. The Chinese modernity is an extreme one, and for a good portion of my life I immersed myself in it, I observed it up close, its strengths and weaknesses, its mystique and its dangers.
And so the laboratory of the future has moved, at least in part, to the other side of the Pacific, what is paradoxically West from California. But it is not more Western, in the sense that we give that word: a term that has become the synthesis of a civilization, of a set of values. Naturally this opens us up to immense problems. Not just because we are condemned to marginality, the Europeans even more so than Americans, but also because of the rise of a “Chinese model” in large areas of the world (in Africa and Latin America) brings up troubling questions about the future of democracy and of human rights.
In this book I created a mosaic of experiences and observations, of places and people, that I have collected in my life as a gypsy of globalization. I tried to unite them with a common thread: the search for meaning, a direction, an interpretation key of this period of transition from a Western hegemony to something that we are still unsure of the form it will take. We live in a century marked by historic transition, the return of the East at the center of events. But the challenge has just begun and in the creation of a new world all the actors are forced to change something about themselves. As I write about what seems like the unstoppable rise of China, which is pushing its influence in unexpected places, I also describe the most terrible memories that I have of this country: the repressions in Tibet and in the Xinjiang Province which I witnessed firsthand; because in the shows of pure power, of unlimited strength, I also see weaknesses, the first cracks in a hegemonic project. In these pages there is also the tragic figure of Barack Obama. Tragic because destiny has handed him a cruel task: managing as best as possible an age-old decline. After the momentum of innovation that allowed the American democracy to elect such a different leader, in the belly of this country there are feelings of resistance, afterthoughts, fears, resentments, and even ancient hatred. Fear is a powerful force: those who know how to use it in politics can pull the masses towards irreparable choices. But the impulse to experiment with the new in America has not died. Today in New York, I once again live in a Far West: because while conquering of the world it has given to the best of its abilities, and now that its at the end of the line of its hegemony it becomes a place where every experiment is allowed.
In civil society, in culture, in science, the American laboratory is still milling ideas at full capacity. A part of the book is dedicated to this: a journey through the people that imagine this new society, the values and ways of life that are developed in Manhattan and in San Francisco, in Detroit and on the campuses of all the great American universities. As a factory of projects and dreams, the Far West still has no rivals If the Chinese have conquered production, reached a world record, when it comes to inventing (objects and trends, ways of life and social paradigms), Americans are still the best, thanks in part to the foreign talents that the United States regularly “adopts” in their open society. A typically Western value remains the right to doubt, to dissent, the love of unconventional thought. This attachment to freedom has even had effects on the business dynamism. If Steve Jobs, the genius creator of Apple and Pixar, lived in China instead of California, maybe he would have ended up in jail or in exile before becoming…Steve Jobs. Some creative pinnacles are possible only in a system that rewards the originals, the rebels, the outsiders. And so I have collected a gallery of these unusual characters, I describe the places where their genius is free to flourish, the new frontiers that they explore. In these pages I tell of the troubled birth of a different ethic of consumption and of production, the embryo of the “green metropolis”, the adjustments to multiethnic cohabitation: all the things that make the rest of the world so darn curious about America. The cultural penetration of the East – from yoga to Buddhism – sometimes arrives in Europe after it has been metabolized by American society, the first stop in the transmigration of Asian influence. The problems that Italy is only now discovering in the proliferation of Chinese communities from Prato to Milan, from Rome to the Veneto, America has already experienced in the Chinatowns of San Francisco or New York.
As correspondent from Beijing I followed many US-China political summits, observing them from the Chinese side. So it was with a certain emotion that I traveled with Obama during his first official trip to Asia in November of 2009. I was returning “home”; ready to see my many Chinese friends while at the same time being part of the White House Press Corps caravan. This is why I lived as a personal humiliation the episode that took place in Shanghai, when on November 16th Obama gave a good speech on the freedom of expression to an audience of Chinese “students”. I later found that those youngsters had all been selected among those registered to the Communist party, regimented, controlled. It was a missed opportunity, a dialogue with those determined to not listen. A sense of impotence and of frustration.
Three months after the disappointment in Shanghai, Obama “dared” to receive the Dalai Lama in Washington, in the Map Room of the White House, on February 19th, 2010: cautiously and with bated breath for fear of Beijing’s protests. America is nervous in managing its relationship with China because it finds itself vulnerable, besieged by the great Asian rival, on new and unexpected fronts: trade and finance, yes, but also scientific research, culture: the “soft power” on which a global hegemony is built.
The upsetting of the balance of power naturally starts with the economy. Right on the eve of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Washington, it came to light that Beijing had “liquidated” a part of its enormous investments in US Treasury Bonds. Commenting on the record sale of Treasury Bonds, for 34 million dollars, the Wall Street Journal anxiously asked if this was “a sign of distrust towards America”. It was humiliating: the Treasury of the United States treated as if it were Greece, at the mercy of the Chinese judgment. Most likely the partial disinvestment by Beijing was a precautionary measure. For years the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had denounced the risk of high American debt and the rise in inflation, and feared that Washington would reimburse the Chinese with scrap paper. And so Beijing is diversifying its investments. Instead of BOTs, it is buying American companies directly. The CIC (China Investment Corporation), the sovereign fund of the Chinese Government, has disclosed a list of the large corporations it became a minority shareholder of. It reads like a who’s who of American capitalism: Apple, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Visa, Johnson & Johnson. It was a strange coincidence that during those high-tension days the China Institute in New York inaugurated a large exhibit on Confucius. He is the philosopher of the 5th-6th Century BC whose philosophy the Chinese regime “appropriates” altering it into the theoretic of a modern authoritarian paternalism.
The Confucius exhibit is a state initiative financed by the People’s Republic. “Confucius: His Life and Legacy” costs less than owning stock in Apple, but is a sign that a new frontier of Chinese penetration has opened. The cultural push, supported by the economic power, now challenges the West in the field of ideas. Mandarin is taking the place of Spanish as the fastest growing foreign language in American schools. When the news broke that the boom in Chinese language enrollment at elementary schools was generously subsidized by Beijing (with scholarships, teacher training, teaching and audiovisual materials), the New York Times received letters of protest from parents. “It is unacceptable,” wrote an alarmed father, “that educational policy in the United States is decided by a foreign government”. And what a government. The subsidies of Nicolas Sarkozy for the study of French abroad, certainly didn’t arouse the same alarm.
The advancement of Chinese civilization isn’t perceived by the West as a purely cultural phenomenon. Minxin Pei, researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reminds us that America and China are divided by “insurmountable differences in terms of values, political systems, vision of the international order, and geopolitical interests.” Almost by a cruel trick of the fate, the People’s Republic’s rampant funding for the study of Mandarin in American schools, comes at a time when the United States, on the verge of bankruptcy (from California to Florida), is forced to cut teachers’ salaries and reduce the number of classes. Martin Jacques, the British scholar author of the shock-book that aims to open America’s eyes (When China Rules the World), believes that this is exactly one of the disruptive effects of the economic crisis of the West: “China is a model of a State that works. From now on the debate on the role of the state in modern societies will no longer be able to disregard the Chinese model.” Ian Buruma, another expert on the Far East, points out that “faced with the crisis of the Western liberal democracies, the fascination with China is advancing in areas of the world that are close to us”.
The comparison with China is evermore reason for anxiety and frustration for the leading superpower. In 2010, Obama finally gave the green light to spend federal funds to set up the high-speed rail in California and in Florida. For the president it was supposed to be part of his legacy, one of those great public works that he had been talking about since his inauguration. But the Obama’s high-speed rail was disposed like this by a “friendly” newspaper, the New York Times: “If all goes well the first high-speed train will go into service in 2014 from Tampa to Orlando, a stretch of only 84 miles. But by New Year’s 2010, Chinese travelers will have inaugurated a new high-speed train, 664 miles in three hours, from Guangzhou to Wuhan. By 2010 the high-speed railways in operation will be 42: all of China will be connected.”
A bitter comparison. In the race between two state models, it is America that finds itself in the minor leagues. Probably no one more than Obama is aware of this. For this president the comparison with China has become his constant, the recurring theme in his speeches. Obama tries to spur his country, like John Kennedy did with the space race with the Soviet Union, after the surpassing of the Sputnik. Using China as the benchmark, as a point of reference in a competition, Obama hopes to turn the humiliations into positives, to transform them into adrenaline, in as many stimuli necessary to recapture the leadership. He is aware that “China is also beating us in the field of Green Economy, producing more solar panels and wind turbines than us.” The energy experts draw a disturbing picture. In a not so distant future, America could find itself dependent twice over: on Arab oil on one hand, and on green technology (photovoltaic panels, electric car batteries), ever increasingly made in China, on the other. But the American establishment and institutional system seem numb, unable to react to the frustrations of the President. From energy to the environment reforms languish, blocked by political vetoes and lobby resistance. In front of Chinese authoritarianism, American democracy struggles.
Us westerners have deluded ourselves that China, in its haste to modernize, would become more and more similar to us. Chinese diversity remains profound, rooted, unshakeable. The lack of democracy hasn’t been a handicap, at least not in the short term: even the majority of the European nations (as well as Japan) governed their modernization and development through authoritarian regimes. And the Chinese hegemony – expanding from money to politics, from technology to culture – can recreate in modern form that which was the ancient relationship between the Celestial Empire and its neighbors: a “tax system” of vassal states, obsequious satellites.

Otto Lee
A lawyer, Sunnyvale councilman, commander in the United States Naval Reserve, and a father, Otto Lee is a very busy man.
He saunters into the coffee shop to have an 8 a.m. meeting with me after dropping off his two daughters, ages 3 and 6, to their respective schools. He is all excited to tell me there will be an addition to his family coming near April 15, when wife Sally Wu will deliver the newest Lee family member.
This is also the day when Otto is scheduled to speak before supporters at the Second Annual Silicon Valley Spring Luncheon hosted by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, but he laughs and reassures me, “The phone is here and the hospital over a few miles away.”
Otto Lee is to speak about his adjustments when he came to America as a teenager from Hong Kong at this luncheon, which I am chairing, so he knows I am nervous he might be busy elsewhere. Although Otto says it is hard for any 15-year-old to move from his old comfortable environment to a new land, he says he looks back at his Berkeley High School days as happy ones. He grins when I ask him if he faced any discrimination issues as many Asian immigrant young people experience as newcomers. He said, “ I counteracted that with a little white lie. I told the kids I was distantly related to Bruce Lee and had also studied kung fu in Hong Kong, so they more or less left me alone although I do admit I did look a bit nerdy.”
Lee went on to involve himself in school politics early on participating in the high school senate and eventually became the president of the Student Council, in fact. He fondly remembers getting some kind of an award for being the most active student and won a trip to Sacramento, which he says gave him his first taste of government workings.
He said he heeded one counselor’s advice in high school which was not to just join Asian associations or organizations, but to spread out and assimilate with all segments of the school. He proceeded to make friends by choosing such non-Asian attended classes as public speaking and Latin.
A lawyer by occupation, Lee also served in the Navy, which he said was influenced by his grandfather who in the 1930s was recruited in China and joined the US Navy there.
He recently was deployed to Iraq when called upon by his reserve status, thereby interrupting his City Council term.
As the only Asian American on the Sunnyvale City Council, he feels not only responsible to all of his Sunnyvale constituents, but to the Asian citizens which total approximately 40% of the city’s population. He feels an immigrant’s biggest challenge is language assimilation and is happy his city offers ESL and citizenship classes, easy accessibility to ethnic newspapers and many ethnic based shopping centers.
He adds, “Although I myself will be off the council later in the year, I hope there will be other Asian Americans who will be elected to represent this segment of the city and bring to the table the specific problems of Asian Americans, especially the immigrant population.
Besides his appearance at the Angel Island Immigration Station April 15, 2011 luncheon to talk about his life entering the USA as an immigrant from Hong Kong, Otto Lee will also be speaking at another Asian American event.
He will also be the guest speaker for the Chi Am Circle Club’s annual Scholarship Luncheon on May 12 at the Newport Restaurant in Sunnyvale. At this event he will be addressing over 20 of the high school graduating students receiving grants from the Chi Am Circle, their parents and members. For info: www.chiamcircle.org.

Asian immigrants at Angel Island.
In its mission to share the 2011 plans for expanding the Angel Island Immigration Station exhibits and activities this year, the AIISF will be hosting a luncheon April 15 at the Dynasty Restaurant in Cupertino’s Vallco Park. Director Eddie Wong will disclose plans for an online exhibit site, titled “Immigrant Voices” which will enable users to not only read of other immigrant stories, but also to post their own family history on this ongoing site.
Wong said, “In this way families can network with other family members from other countries and share their histories to learn more about their past generations and the family roots.”
At the luncheon, Chairman Gerrye Wong says three local senior citizens, who came through the Angel Island Immigration Station as young children, will share their memories of the interrogations they and their family faced in order to enter the United States.
Honorees that day will be Dr. John Kao, Frank Lum, and Louise Lee Jang. They immigrated from China during the years of 1910-1940, along with hundreds of thousands of people from many countries.
Although Chinese were the largest number of applicants coming through Angel Island, many immigrants were of Russian, Jewish, Korean and Japanese descent. Chairman Wong adds, “We are expecting up to 200 guests who will learn about the AIISF and its goal to restore the Immigration Station to make it a national symbol of Pacific immigration. Much like Ellis Island is a highly visited site to educate visitors on immigrants crossing the Atlantic ocean, we want Angel Island to be a tourist destination for people to learn about this part of American history.”
Former Sunnyvale Mayor and present Council Member Otto Lee will be guest speaker, talking about his experiences as a teenager coming to America in the 1980s when immigration laws were much more lenient than in the Angel Island Immigration Station years of detainment and interrogation.
For more information on attending this Second Annual Silicon Valley Spring Luncheon for AIISF, contact Executive director Eddie Wong – ewong@aiisf.org.; info@aiisf.org; (415) 262-4429.

Japan’s natural and nuclear disasters could worsen an inflation problem already looming over Asia’s fast-growing economies, as supply-chain disruptions and increased Japanese demand for raw materials and untainted food boost pressure on prices.