Zócalo last chatted with Ha Jin about his collection of essays, The Writer as Migrant, and his own experience as  Chinese immigrant to the U.S. His latest story collection, A Good Fall, takes up similar themes. Below, “The Bane of the Internet,” the story that starts the collection of tales about the uneasy and long process of immigrating.

My sister Yuchin and I used to write each other letters. It took more than ten days for the mail to reach Sichuan, and usually I wrote her once a month. After Yuchin married, she was often in trouble, but I no longer thought about her every day. Five years ago her marriage began falling apart. Her husband started an affair with his female boss and sometimes came home reeling drunk. One night he beat and kicked Yuchin so hard she miscarried. At my suggestion, she filed for divorce. Afterward she lived alone and seemed content. I urged her to find another man, because she was only twenty-six, but she said she was done with men for this life. Capable and with a degree in graphic design, she has been doing well and even bought her own apartment four years ago. I sent her two thousand dollars to help her with the down payment.

Last fall she began e-mailing me. At first it was exciting to chat with her every night. We stopped writing letters. I even stopped writing to my parents, because she lives near them and can report to them. Recently she said she wanted to buy a car. I had misgivings about that, though she had already paid off her mortgage. Our hometown is small. You can cross by bicycle in half an hour; a car was not a necessity for her. It’s too expensive to keep an automobile there – the gas, the insurance, the registration, the maintenance, the toll fees cost a fortune. I told her I didn’t have a car even though I had to commute to work from Brooklyn to Flushing. But she got it into her head that she must have a car because most of her friends had cars. She wrote: “I want to let that man see how well I’m doing.” She was referring to her ex-husband. I urged her to wipe him out of her mind as if he had never existed. Indifference is the strongest contempt. For a few weeks she didn’t raise the topic again.

Then she told me that she had just passed the road test, bribing the officer with five hundred yuan in addition to the three thousand paid as the application and test fees. She e-mailed: “Sister, I must have a car. Yesterday Minmin, our little niece, came to town driving a brand-new Volkswagen. At the sight of that gorgeous machine, I felt as if a dozen awls were stabbing my heart. Everybody is doing better than me, and I don’t want to live anymore!”

I realized she didn’t simply want to impress her ex. She too had caught the national auto mania. I told her that was ridiculous, nuts. I knew she had some savings. She got a big bonus at the end of each year and freelanced at night. How had she become so vain and so unreasonable? I urged her to be rational. That was impossible, she claimed, because “everybody” drove a car in our hometown. I said she was not everybody and mustn’t follow the trend. She wouldn’t listen and asked me to remit her money as a loan. She already had a tidy sum in the bank, about eighty thousand yuan, she confessed.

Then why couldn’t she just go ahead and buy a car if that was what she wanted? She replied: “You don’t get it, sister. I cannot drive a Chinese model. If I did, people would think I am cheap and laugh at me. Japanese and German cars are too expensive for me, so I might get a Hyundai Elantra or a Ford Focus. Please lend me $10,000. I’m begging you to help me out!”

That was insane. Foreign cars are double priced in China. A Ford Taurus sells for 250,000 yuan in my home province of Sichuan, more than $30,000. I told Yuchin an automobile was just a vehicle, no need to be fancy. She must drop her vanity. Certainly I wouldn’t lend her the money, because that might amount to hitting a dog with a meatball – nothing would come back. So I said no. As it is, I’m still renting and have to save for the down payment on a small apartment somewhere in Queens. My family always assumes that I can pick up cash right and left here. No matter how hard I explain, they can’t see how awful my job at a sushi house is. I waitress ten hours a day, seven days a week. My legs are swollen when I punch out at ten p.m. I might never be able to buy an apartment at all. I’m eager to leave my job and start something of my own – a snack bar or a nail salon or a video store. I must save every penny.

For two weeks Yuchin and I argued. How I hated the e-mail exchanges! Every morning I flicked on the computer and saw a new message from her, sometimes three or four. I often thought of ignoring them, but if I did, I’d fidget at work, as if I had eaten something that had upset my stomach. If only I had pretended I’d never gotten her e-mail at the outset so that we could have continued writing letters. I used to believe that in the United States you could always reshape your relationships with the people back home – you could restart your life on your own terms. But the Internet has spoiled everything – my family is able to get hold of me whenever they like. They might as well live nearby.

Four days ago Yuchin sent me this message: “Elder sister, since you refused to help me, I decided to act on my own. At any rate, I must have a car. Please don’t be mad at me. Here is a website you should take a look at . . .”

I was late for work, so I didn’t visit the site. For the whole day I kept wondering what she was up to, and my left eyelid twitched nonstop. She might have solicited donations. She was impulsive and could get outrageous. When I came back that night and turned on my computer, I was flabbergasted to see that she had put out an ad on a popular site. She announced: “Healthy young woman ready to offer you her organ(s) in order to buy a car. Willing to sell any part as long as I still can drive thereafter. Contact me and let us talk.” She listed her phone number and e-mail address.

I wondered if she was just bluffing. Perhaps she was. On the other hand, she was such a hothead that for a damned car she might not hesitate to sell a kidney, or a cornea, or a piece of her liver. I couldn’t help but call her names while rubbing my forehead.

I had to do something right away. Someone might take advantage of the situation and sign a contract with her. She was my only sibling – if she messed up her life, there would be nobody to care for our old parents. If I had lived near them, I might have called her bluff, but now there was no way out. I wrote her back: “All right, my idiot sister, I will lend you $10,000. Remove your ad from the website. Now!”

In a couple of minutes she returned: “Thank you! Gonna take it off right away. I know you’re the only person I can rely on in the whole world.”

I responded: “I will lend you the money I made by working my ass off. You must pay it back within two years. I have kept a hard copy of our email exchanges, so do not assume you can write off the loan.”

She came back: “Got it. Have a nice dream, sister!” She added a smile sign.

“Get out of my face!” I muttered.

If only I could shut her out of my life for a few weeks. If only I could go somewhere for some peace and quiet.

Excerpted from A Good Fall by Ha Jin Copyright (c) 2009 by Ha Jin. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

*Photo courtesy like, totally.

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Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
by Colin Dickey

Our grim fascination with the autopsies of prematurely passed stars and starlets – the craving for those intimate, if clinical, details of the body – is not just a modern phenomenon.

Take the case of Elizabeth Roose, a Viennese actress who died in childbirth in 1808. The critically acclaimed scion of a prominent theater family, Roose came to be the subject of a peculiar indignity, or distinction (it was, after all, a fate that generally only befell the famous). An accountant and amateur scientist, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, unearthed her body weeks after her death and stole the head, hoping to carve off the remaining flesh, burn away the residue with lime, and preserve what he believed to be the most crucial signifier of human talent: the skull.

Colin Dickey’s Cranioklepty uncovers the obscure history of the study and thievery of the skull – “a scientific fetish, a secular relic” – focusing particularly on 19th century Europe. The study and reverence of skulls dates much further back, of course, but Dickey’s century is a critical one. He captures an era in which pseudoscientific theories granted the skull great authority in the study of human intelligence, talent and behavior. That gravesites and corpses still bore an aura of sanctity, and autopsies a whiff of heresy, gave skulls a totemic allure. The nearness of death – which happened at homes rather than in pale hospitals – and the beginning sparks of celebrity culture made skulls familiar and coveted and display-worthy objects.

Like a historically-minded and writerly TMZ, Dickey hounds the famous and the dead. The skull of Charlotte Corday – who famously stabbed Jean-Paul Marat in his bath – was guarded by the descendents of Napoleon Bonaparte. The German philosopher and poet Friedrich Schiller’s skull was kept on a velvet cushion in the library of a duke, “almost as if it were another book on the shelf.” Francisco Goya died in exile, and when the Spanish government sought to exhume his body 70 years later, gravediggers found no skull. The government telegrammed, “Send Goya, with or without head.” (The head remains missing to this day.) Sir Thomas Browne fretted about death and remains while he was alive, most famously in Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; his skull passed for centuries between thieves and hospitals and libraries. The skulls of the living were studied for signs of talent, even in America – Walt Whitman’s phrenological chart, dotted with head bumps supposedly indicating brilliance, was published in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass.

But the skulls of composers Beethoven, Mozart, and especially Haydn have the most fascinating stories. Beethoven’s skull suffered serious abuse and a botched autopsy; broken fragments were sold off after World War II. Mozart’s was rescued from a mass grave, changed hands many times, and now rests in the Mozarteum.

And Joseph Rosenbaum hung on to Haydn’s for a while. He had badly botched the preservation of Elizabeth Roose’s skull and couldn’t stand the associated smells – but the actress was only a trial run for Haydn, whom Rosenbaum deeply admired, and knew well in life. Rosenbaum stole Haydn’s skull and concealed it well from the many authorities who wanted it for crypts or museums – once even popping it into bed with his wife as the police searched his home.

Haydn’s skull wouldn’t be buried again for a century. As Dickey traces the travels of these and other  men’s bones – from grave to crypt to shelf, from the skilled hands of scientists to the worshipful ones of admirers, across borders and through wars and disasters – he finds that there is more to skulls than morbidity. Stealing them is something of a tribute, an act of love; studying them is at once mystical and medical, ancient and modern. Skulls today, of course, have a primarily symbolic rather than scientific currency. They long ago relinquished their status as the ultimate key of human knowledge, the seat of our selves, to the brain, the folds and grooves and chemicals of which have become our new obsession, our new keys to the mysteries of human nature.

*Photo courtesy hugovk.

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The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
by Robert Darnton

–Reviewed by Shahnaz Habib

The debate between physical and digital books is often framed as an either-or proposition. It seems as if the romantics who love the smell of musty books are arrayed under a flag on some medieval battlefield, while a Kindle-wielding new generation launches digital warfare from the safety of their laptops.

This is why it is refreshing to read a narrative where the two factions negotiate peace. Robert Darnton brings to his The Case for Books a wide variety of experience as a historian, writer, reviewer, publisher, and currently, director of the Harvard University Library. As can be imagined, he is passionate about books, but luckily, he is also passionate about enabling access to books, and about the possibilities of technology to enhance that access.

From Darnton’s bird’s eye view of the history of books, digital technology is only the latest in a series of breakthroughs that have transformed the reading experience – just as the codex let readers turn pages instead of reading a scroll, and as the printing press and later paper enabled the preservation of text. But ultimately, according to Darnton, while digital technology has remarkable powers to disseminate text in ways that the codex cannot, when it comes to the tangibility of the reading experience and the preservation potential, the printed codex is still the clear winner.

Is it possible then to create a medium where the physical and the digital combine their strengths instead of fighting for supremacy? Print-on-demand technology is a good example of such a complementary relationship. Darnton discusses e-books at length, and in particular, his old pet project, Gutenberg-e. Designed to take advantage of the digital form as well as provide the comfort of the printed medium, Gutenberg-e produced electronic monographs in scholarly fields. In their digital form, these monographs are embedded with hyperlinks, images, music, video, and links, but depending on the individual reader’s choices, they can be selectively printed out in the traditional book form.

What makes Darnton’s discussion of Gutenberg-e truly fascinating however is his analysis of the crisis in academic publishing. With inside information from the publishing industry (and the heart-ache of a library director who shells out tens of thousands of dollars to subscribe to academic journals), Darnton convinces the reader that print and digital need to work together and can work together, in the interests of readers and writers.

Unfortunately Gutenberg-e did not take off. Perhaps it would have if it had the muscle to take on suspicious academics and booksellers. Which brings us to Google.

Darnton is not opposed to Google’s digitization of books, but he does caution eloquently against trusting Google too much. One of his most chilling sentences comes early, in Chapter 2: “Google employs thousands of engineers but, as far as I know, not a single bibliographer.” The burden of this sentence sits heavier on the mind after reading Chapter 9: “The Importance of Being Bibliographical.” There is a science to understanding how literary documents come into existence. The detective art of generations of bibliographers is why we know of a particularly slipshod seventeenth-century workman called Compositor B, who is responsible for many corruptions in the Shakespeare plays that he published. When “digitized texts are detached from their moorings in printed books,” we can expect an exponential increase in the instability of text. We can also look ahead to losing valuable insights into the context and history of books.

The Case for Books was published before the Google settlement last fall. One cannot help but consider the irony – the book cannot be updated to include the latest information from a post-court-ruling world. But the irony is fleeting. The Case for Books is a manual on how to think about books and reading; its value is not simply in information, but in its understanding of the history and act of reading. This is why electronic communication, for all its speed and flexibility, will not destroy printed books – what we seek from literature is not so much updatability as wisdom.

Further Reading: The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control and The Book: The Life Story of a Technology

*Photo courtesy Chocolate Geek.

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Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq
by Christina Asquith

–Reviewed by Saskia Vogel

Sisters in War reads like a serial drama, kicking off with the fall of Saddam Hussein in a time of naïve hope. Christina Asquith’s breezy style still captures the complexities of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, particularly how one can be anti-Republican, think that war always has an especially negative impact on women, and still see the good in clearing the way for a new Iraq.

Asquith closely follows three women who represent different political perspectives. Zia is a recent university graduate and the go-getting daughter of a progressive Baghdad family with hopes for free speech and equality post-Saddam. Her family is supportive of her public career with the American-run Iraqi Media Network, even when her professional and romantic alliances with the occupiers put their lives in danger.

Lieutenant A. Heather Coyne works to help Iraqi women join public life but finds herself hindered by military bureaucracy. Aggravated by the casual sexist remarks and ass-slapping she endures in the military, her commitment to empowering women grows. Though untrained in aid work and lacking any real knowledge of Iraqi culture, Heather charged with distributing a large government grant to establish Baghdad’s first women’s center.

Heather seeks the help of Manal Omar, an Iraqi-American NGO worker who has ingratiated herself with Baghdad’s locals. Manal, who chose to take the veil to her Iraqi mother’s dismay, makes slow progress in her mission to encourage women to drive their humanitarian agenda: the needs of women across the spectrum of Islam seem irreconcilable, and women’s rights workers are targets of violence. Understanding that they need each other, Heather and Manal set aside the usual rift between U.S. military and aid workers.

As part of Asquith’s intimate tableau, the personal impact of events such as the decapitation of American businessman Nick Berg by Islamic extremists, the drafting of a constitution, and the invasion itself hit in the gut. Vibrant peripheral characters – an uncompromising American aid worker, the contractors who find it easier to be in a war zone than to deal with problems at home, and Zia’s string of unlikely Iraqi suitors – flesh out the experience of life for women in Iraq until 2009.

But it’s Zia’s quiet younger sister who makes the biggest impression. Like all the true victories in this book, hers is personal, not political. Nunu’s story of self-realization is a tender one – from her excitement at the arrival of the Americans (and the girlish dream of being swept away by a soldier) to falling into deep depression after uncontrolled violence against women on the streets forces her to stay indoors. She sits uncomfortably between admiring her sister’s independence and wanting a traditional feminine role. With the help of a newly-aired TV show called Oprah, she becomes her own mistress.

Asquith challenges stereotypes by showing how Americans and Iraqis perceive each other and why. As time passes, the warmly welcomed American liberators are viewed with increasing suspicion. With a 70% unemployment rate and political tensions high, Islamic extremism and conservatism grow more prominent in Iraqi civic life. In turn, the U.S. occupiers treat all Iraqis as potentially violent and untrustworthy. Lost in the mire is the generation of Iraqis, like Zia’s parents, that embraced Western attitudes before the 1963 rise of the Ba’ath party and hoped to participate in the culture again.

In this political and social maelstrom, Asquith finds the silver lining in small triumphs of feminism.

Excerpt: “Zia knew there was no more striking symbol of the ultimate conquest than for invaders to have sex with Islamic women – and if the woman does so willingly, there is no greater betrayal.
She’s a dead woman, Zia thought horrified.
“But Mama, everything is different now,” Zia said, her voice rising. The Americans were bringing a whole new kind of society to Iraq-  full of freedom and opportunity like nothing she and her sister had seen before. She wanted to be a part of making that happen. She just had to get the job, and she couldn’t bear to wait while things were changing out there, without her.
For Nunu’s depression, they gave her small white tablets. Now she slept even more, and she couldn’t even get up from the bed. Nunu turned her anger and frustration inward. She wondered if the Islamists were right? I am a weak girl, she thought. I am unimportant and stupid. Her journal entries grew darker and darker.”

Further Reading: Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur and The Emergency Teacher: The Inspirational Story of a New Teacher in an Inner City School

Saskia Vogel writes a lot. She also edits magazines. Visit her at http://Saskiavogel.com.

*Photo courtesy The U.S. Army.

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Each day that summer just as it ended we swam in Bachman’s Pond.  Small maples screened out fields and houses.  Diving off the little dock landed you on cold springs, chilling the torso as you stroked over or drifted on your back. There were leeches too.  Mr. Bachman touched their slime with his cigarette and they let go, leaving less a bite than mosquitoes.

At first, we would sneak down through his evergreens and slip in behind the dock. One day I saw him watching in khakis from his deck, looking like Clark Gable, exotic because he didn’t go to church.   I was in love.  At that distance he might have thought I was one of those neighborhood kids.  He didn’t know my name.  He called and offered the pond. My parents thanked him.  When he and his wife adopted a little girl, we took her too.

At the post office in his nursery store’s corner, a collection rotated under counter glass when you pushed a button. In swinging racks, coins in cardboard mats flashed with foreign words and dates against blue paper. I looked at them, waiting for packages we weren’t home to get.  It was the coins his killers came for, all the way from Florida where news of them had reached the little trade books. They tied him up, and his wife and her mother, and shot them in the head while their daughter spent the night with friends.

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Gordon Laird, after years as a student and journalist in China, started to see “that this part of the world was becoming a major driver of human history.” Combining his work on energy, climate, and poverty issues with his work in China, Laird began work on The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization. “I was just following the story. It’s a very old-fashioned project in that regard,” he said. “The reporting launched some big questions that led to a larger investigation of how we are becoming captives within our own economy.” Laird chatted with Zócalo about why bargains are dangerous and why globalization may be going into reverse. (And read an excerpt of the book here.)

Q. In a recession, many people are probably finding many things unaffordable. Do we really have a bargain-filled economy? And how did it become so?

A. Certainly we now have more bargains, in objective terms, than a decade earlier. Wal-Mart has claimed that it alone has decreased inflation for Americans, and this is probably true to some degree. But collectively, much of our economy has worked toward lowering the prices of many of our goods, and it has achieved that in part by following the Wal-Mart model, which is part of the most sophisticated and interdependent version of globalization ever devised, one that interlinks affordable labor, cheap energy, cheap transport, and cheap credit in ways that created surprising amounts of prosperity and growth. Much of our modern consumer economy has been leveraged on this model.

There is a catch to that of course. This system isn’t designed to survive the 21st century. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to show that the cheap labor, cheap oil, cheap transport and consumer credit that helped fuel the economic bubbles since the 1990s has already become more scarce. Moreover, former externalities like climate change, poverty, and geopolitical shifts from West to East are making our world more expensive.

Consequently, we’re seeing a breakdown in our chosen economic model, a confluence of spending, shipping, and shopping where roughly 70 percent of our GDP is tied to the consumer. The credit crisis of 2008 and the current hard times are very much a reflection of how consumers themselves have become a threatened resource. Talk of recovery shows how little we actually understand our economy, as many leaders seem to expect that we can go back to normal, circa 2006. The Great Recession is actually part of a phase change in our society and economy that is transforming business as usual. Incremental bits of growth in manufacturing and retail since last fall are likely artifacts of massive government intervention that rivals the command economy experiments of former Communist nations. Western governments have put hundreds of billions of dollars into forestalling the realities of the 21st century with bailouts and stimulus spending, but a great many consumers are still in crisis, especially in the U.S. where as many as six million households now live off food stamps with no other income.

There is still a great paradox at the core of our economy: certainly we’ve been blessed with a great many things – electronics, flat screen TVs, phones – that have become cheaper and more accessible. But the truly important things – food, education, healthcare, energy – have been gradually and persistently growing more expensive. This is one of the main challenges in the current century, one that is only amplified by climate change and the need for carbon pricing. I don’t see that trend abating.

Indeed, our material systems and our economy have come to resemble troubled ecological systems. They’re becoming gradually destabilized. Even now, many of our leaders make the assumption that we’ll have persistently affordable energy going forward. I’m not suggesting there’s an imminent collapse – I don’t generally believe peak oil theories – but in a world addicted to cheap, even incremental decline in our resources make it hazardous to cling to old ideas and assumptions about what constitutes real growth, prosperity, and security.

Q. In addition to Wal-Mart, what else contributed to building the economy we have today, that you say is now destabilizing?

A. Wal-Mart is, in a sense, a symbol. It gets blamed for a lot, and it certainly is a dominant force in the economy. But if Wal-Mart didn’t exist, someone else would’ve invented something fairly similar. The logistics, the technology, the offshore labor markets, the transportation system – which includes complex warehousing and distribution chains – management strategies, all are resources that Wal-Mart or another company would have taken advantage of. It’s another way of saying that the innovations and opportunities of the late 20th century really pushed us toward the current model. I’m not saying it was all fated to be so, but Wal-Mart is an important illustration of a much broader set of circumstances. Blaming Wal-Mart for everything actually clouds the broader reality. What they’ve done underlies how things work today, and they’ve thrown their weight around and broke some laws in the process. But we’ve allowed them to do that, and many many other companies have done so.

One of the things that continues to amaze me is that what changed our economy in the late 20th century – the way that globalization gained momentum – has a lot to do with changes and innovations developed not long after World War II. There was the development of the credit card. There were a number of failed Communist revolutions not just in China but in Vietnam and other places turned out to be major sources of affordable labor. Petrochemicals began to be developed – many of the things we use every day owe themselves to tremendous innovations in petrochemicals and overall intensification of the use of nonrenewable energy. We’ve upped the ante on that not just by driving more, but consuming more. Our groceries are in large part embodied energies. All these things became everyday aspects of the 20th century. Yet markets and companies and consumers and governments found ways to optimize these things over the course of a few years, mostly during the 1990s, as illustrated by the rise of Wal-Mart as the world’s largest corporation. The bubble of growth in the 21st century wasn’t just about financial speculation and housing, it was also about the consumer economy reaching its fullest expansion, one that I argue isn’t built to last.

Q. You mentioned that the U.S. is heavily reliant on the consumer economy. What about around the world – how does the consumer economy impact other Western countries, or countries like China that provide cheap goods and labor?

A. The good part of the European Union is very similar to the U.S. Big retailers, like Tesco, from Europe compete globally with American companies. Parts of Europe vary – some countries are more in debt and some less, some are more dependent on globalization and some less. Germany used to be the world’s largest trading nation; just this year that title went to China. But there is sort of an East-West divide. North America more clearly encapsulates the trouble with having an economy highly dependent on consumerism, but our problem is by no means limited to that. Most rich nations in the world have adopted, by default or design, economies that depend on affordable input and consumer activity to drive growth. These countries are characterized by having a large portion of their economy be service industries – the part that doesn’t actually make something but includes retail, software, finance. That’s what you hear when people say about 70 percent of our economy is consumer-based.

Curiously, though, in China, the portion of their economy that is the service economy has recently grown larger than their export economy. It’s another way of saying that their economy is becoming a little more like ours in ways that may surprise people. As I discuss in the book, the current path of globalization is a path of deglobalization. Trading nations may need each other less. China’s interests and the interests of North America in particular are diverging. It’s in no small way related to the fact that exports are becoming very gradually a smaller portion of China’s economy. They’re becoming less dependent on shipping the U.S. cheap stuff and building our technological and Internet networks. I’m not saying this is happening overnight – the economic collapse of 2008 slowed that process a little bit. China will continue to make things for us, but their long-term path will not be toward our advantage. I think two recent geopolitical moments – President Obama’s China visit and the Copenhagen climate talks – underline how confident and powerful China has become. And we financed this change because we can’t seem to stop buying cheap stuff.

Q. The idea that the economic crisis actually stopped deglobalization, and kept globalization going, seems a bit counterintuitive. Can you explain deglobalization a bit more?

A. I argue that we may well in fact have reached the peak of what we can gain from globalization. There are a number of things pushing us toward a pattern of deglobalization, like the diverging interests of major trading nations and conflicts that arise. The climate negotiations in Copenhagen reflected this – China doesn’t see its interests in aligning with America. A lot of that has nothing to do with climate – it’s about who will be the superpower of the 21st century. A lot of this conflict has been managed by the interlinked economy – countries that have Wal-Marts or McDonald’s generally don’t go to war with each other. But as their core interests start to diverge, that’s going to change.

One of the things driving this is energy. If we go back to $150 for a barrel of oil for an extended period, that profoundly changes the economics of shipping. It’s not something we’ve had to think about much in recent decades – the cost of transportation – but that’s a major issue. To move containers half way around the world for relatively cheap has been one of the blessings of our time, but it is not going to persist. This is just one aspect of deglobalization. There are a number of weak spots in our current model.

I would argue that it isn’t merely about resources growing more expensive. We have trouble putting value on things that do matter – we tend to undervalue labor, natural resources, and energy. This is certainly illustrated by the failure of the Copanhagen talks, which was really about our inability to price carbon in the face of climate change. This isn’t an economic question – it’s a social, ethical and cultural question. We’ve had it very good for quite a while, and we haven’t been challenged to think about the true cost of things.

Q. Is deglobalization dangerous, or is it corrective, and bringing us to some sort of equilibrium?

A. If we were to describe it as a correction, that would suggest we’re going back to some kind of normal. I’m not sure we have the luxury of some kind of normal in this century. As I mentioned, there is a lot of momentum behind this idea of recovery after a recession – just put enough money into the economy, and jobs and spending pick up, and we go back to how it was in 2005. It’s unwise to assume a return to normal. By the same token, globalization has become such a major part of human civilization. We are dependent upon it in ways that will surprise us.

Consequently, with deglobalization, there will be opportunities and challenges, and more profoundly, there will be winners and losers. Dealing with poverty is going to be a bigger challenge. As some of our goods and services have become more expensive, and we will have trouble maintaining the great bargains and consumer empowerment we’ve had. If we can’t even maintain the cheapness found in dollar stores – which have become something of a private sector food bank for many households – a great many people already facing hard times will fare worse. It’s not just the unemployed – it’s 17 or 24 percent of people having serious employment issues and facing grave instability. Even incremental changes in the relative affordability of things would have big effects for people who are literally on the brink of foreclosure, of homelessness, of malnutrition.

If we put our efforts into regaining the status quo of even a few years ago, I think it would be an irresponsible use of resources. Personally, I would love to go back to normal, but it’s not a realistic goal. Partly it’s just human nature – we cling to what is familiar.

*Photo of candles courtesy ken mccown.

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Six hours into the Texas desert, headlights bubble-wrap the darkness where others who have just crossed over walk days without speaking.

The first thing she did was change her shoes.

Her father drank the half-finished mimosas left on the veranda, muttering “those are like five dollar bills flying away.”

Don’t we all possible a different self in that distant, visible land, living like cargo, smuggling one body into another?

By morning, the scenery should show up, mesquite elbows in the pearly Pecos light.

He kept thinking he hadn’t even had a chance to try the salmon.  Humming a few notes of
Guadalajara, recalling the widowed aunts, the way they dance with emptiness

The radio speaks in two languages until it is too late to turn around.  Then commences
steady and silent seeking.

One of them will eventually realize they are walking in circles, coyotes breaking the air into teeth and chatter, and how fast this canyon translates as river, the rain still miles away.

A deer glows sudden at the side of the highway, then steps onto it.  Such significant moments
shake the frame.

As they walk to where they think the dying animal waits, they hold hands, imagining
the damage they’ve already left on the road.

One shiny nickel of blood.

The close call?  A warning shot.  Nothing is what we thought.

You might have to marry me again, she says.  Your mother wasn’t sure that banjo-playing preacher was legal.

You might have to marry me again, she thinks, but does not say, when your eyes stop moving me across this land.

*Photo courtesy maveric2003.

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Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo, an assistant principal and school board member in El Monte, California, was shot to death last week while spending the holidays in Mexico. As his family, his friends, and his city honor his memory, Michael Jaime-Becerra, an El Monte native who explores the city in his fiction, pays tribute to his long-time friend.

On New Year’s Day my wife and I were driving to my parents’ home for our annual tradition of menudo breakfast when my sister called with the news of Bobby Salcedo’s death. She related the preliminary details – Bobby kidnapped at gunpoint from a restaurant, that he was in Gomez Palacio, Durango visiting his wife’s family for the holidays, that his body was found the following morning with those of the five other abducted men. I was shocked as I made the turns toward home and horrified as I drove past the Salcedo house. Their driveway was crowded with vehicles, and I recognized this as the first indicator that the tragic news was true.

The Salcedos live around the corner from my parents and a major portion of my childhood was spent with Bobby, his brothers, and their neighbor. We mostly played basketball in each others’ driveways. The Salcedo driveway was narrow and long, epic shots flung from the sidewalk, a low brick wall along the right sideline that tore up your knees if you weren’t careful. All sports at the Salcedos were typically rough. One brother would pound you like Charles Barkley until he scored, and another was nicknamed “Chueck,” a version of “chueco,” as “crooked” was the best way to describe his unorthodox moves driving the ball toward the basket. Their neighbor was quick and agile. I recall that he also played tennis. At this point, Bobby was old enough to get in the mix if he didn’t feel like sitting out with his younger brother. Bobby wasn’t particularly good, but he always seemed to have fun talking smack as we played. This was how a number of my summers passed. Eventually we all got older, and our paths diverged as the brothers found a passion for hockey and I traded out Oingo Boingo for the darker thrill of punk rock. Soon we graduated from different high schools. Then we went to college and our paths diverged some more.

But I never lost sight of Bobby or his family. His sister became a teacher at the elementary school where my mother was a clerk, and around this time I recall hearing that Bobby had started working as a cashier at the dairy on Durfee Avenue. I remember hearing from one of the brothers that he had been held up at night, but that he needed to continue working to put himself through school. Each Fourth of July my sister and I bought our fireworks from the stand where Bobby would be volunteering, following him from the 7-Eleven parking lot on one end of Durfee when he began teaching at South El Monte High School to the Big D’s parking lot at the other end of Durfee when he became Assistant Principal of Instruction at Mountain View High School. This past spring Bobby invited me to speak to an assembly of his students at Mountain View about my writing, which is set in the El Monte of our adolescence. I was happy to do so, honored really, for I knew that we were of a similar spirit when it came to our hometown. In fact, Bobby’s love for our city and the pride he had in its community were only surpassed by the optimism that he had for its young people.

Call me biased, but as I write about Bobby I find myself reluctant to call him “promising” as some news reports have. To call him “promising” suggests that he had yet to accomplish much, if anything, when in reality Bobby had long ago dedicated his life to the service of others. His record of toy drives and international fundraising and other seemingly endless charity work dating back nearly two decades is both inspiring and humbling. And the commitment to education – history teacher, assistant principal, elected school board member – is undeniable. At the outset of his thirties he was overseeing his former teachers and administering structural changes to improve the classroom experience for the students in their charge. Police helicopters don’t fly in a salutary formation for people who are only promising. Thousands of people don’t sit in vigil in a chilly football stadium for someone who is only promising. Bobby was tremendously accomplished and, more importantly, he used his accomplishments to make a difference in the lives of the people around him. It seems to me that he somehow fit a lifetime of achievement into the short span of time that he was here.

Despite the manner of Bobby’s death, I also refuse to associate him with the drug traffickers rampant in the region of Mexico where he was killed. In my opinion, Bobby and the Salcedo family represent the absolute best of El Monte. They also represent the best of the immigrant American experience. It is truly remarkable for any family to go, in the span of one generation, from parents with grade-school educations to all five children earning college degrees, some continuing on to master’s degrees. At the time of Bobby’s death, he was only a few courses away from a doctorate in educational leadership. When I visited him at Mountain View last May, his office was decorated with images of Cesar Chavez. His email signature quoted education reformer Horace Mann. Bobby struck me as someone possessed of a vision beyond the material. I continue to understand him as someone with the intelligence, work ethic, focus, and sheer will to achieve whatever goal he envisioned for himself.

While so many things made Bobby’s life spectacular, I am not forgetting those qualities about him that I see in so many other people. He loved the Dodgers, even in the leanest of years, and he loved the UCLA Bruins, even in the face of cross-town juggernaut USC. He was loving and supportive to his family, both here and in Mexico. He was a husband. A brother. A son. In these ways he was just like you or me, and his murder has left me with a profound sense of interconnectedness. The events of foreign drug wars and gangland executions no longer seem isolated to passing news clips. They are not fleeting glimpses at another world. I cannot shake the impression that Bobby’s death could have happened to anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I am steadfast in my belief that such violence is unacceptable. I will be writing my elected officials, informing them about Bobby and demanding that they do all in their power to bring closure to his family, and to the community grieving his loss. If you recognize yourself or your loved ones in the story of Bobby’s life, I encourage you to tell others about him as well.

-El Monte, California, January 5th, 2009

Michael Jaime-Becerra teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

If you would like to contact your elected official, please click the following links: Senator Gloria Romero, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, President Barack Obama.

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In the subway I see a couple dancing salsa for money. He is spinning her in a red blur. I worry about how close her head is coming to the wall, but she is loose and unconcerned. Her hair is flying and her skirt is coming up. She pays no attention. He stops spinning her and I am amazed at how close they dance, how her feet seem attached to his at the toes. His face is ecstatic, sweat-beaded, eyes turned upwards. He must be in love. But there is something strange about the woman, I realize, something strange about the way she’s moving. They turn and I see that her face is plastic, her arms are tied around his neck, her feet are attached to his at the toes, her legs are foam. He controls her movements with his hands inside her hips. His eyes are closed.

-from The Balloonists, Hanging Loose Press (2002)

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1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
by Mary Elise Sarotte

–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

It’s been more than 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we still can’t agree on how it happened. One general approach is to give some credit to American policy, and in particular Ronald Reagan’s famous “tear down this wall” speech, for creating conditions that weakened the East German regime and thereby empowered the East German people.

Mary Elise Sarotte’s 1989, however, takes a much more specific approach to the end of the Cold War. She focuses on the “unintentional” opening of the wall, precipitated by an East German regime spokesman named Guenter Schabowski. In a press conference on the evening of November 9, 1989, he bungled an announcement about travel law alterations that gave the impression that it was “possible for every citizen” to leave “immediately.” People started streaming for the exits, and in the confusion, the border guards did not stop them. The rest is history.

Sarotte, a professor of international relations at USC, focuses the majority of her study on how that history unfolded.  She concludes that the reunification of Germany was a success, but that the management of relations with Russia was not. And, she says, neither outcome was inevitable.

After the wall came down, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and American Secretary of State James Baker worried about the speed with which the status quo was dissolving. Reunification was not a priority for them – moving slowly and managing democratization were. President George H.W. Bush disagreed. He was “not afraid of reunification,” as he said in his memoirs. And he was open to letting Helmut Kohl, then the West German Chancellor, move forward with it.

Kohl seems to be the hero of 1989. He, according to Sarotte, saw the urgency in bringing the East into a unified Germany, and he responded far more quickly to East German demands for “unity, unity, unity” than the nervous big powers. Kohl insisted on complete integration, from military unification under NATO to economic integration into the European Community.

The NATO point – the march of the organization’s borders eastward, toward Russia – proved especially contentious, and remains so today. The problem originates in Kohl’s plan to use West Germany’s existing legal structure to incorporate the East. (It’s what Sarotte calls the “prefab” model of reunification.) A post-World-War-II-era law allowed former parts of Germany to voluntarily come under the jurisdiction of West Germany. Using the law meant that East Germany could quickly be merged with West, once it organized into states and expressed a desire to unify. It also meant that all of West Germany’s existing treaty structures would prevail.

The border of NATO thus shifted by default, accomplishing the “swift installation of the Western military pact on the still-smoking ruins of the old one.” Sarotte questions the propriety of this expansion since it unnecessarily continued the military divide between NATO and Russia into the post-Cold War period. She also argues that it might have been better managed with clearer communication.

Still, Russia’s hostility to NATO expansion was probably unavoidable and, as Sarotte notes, there never was any formal prohibition on expansion. Whether Russian and Western interests could ever have been reconciled remains an open question. But 1989 ably demonstrates that the (probably necessary) haste to create order after the fall of the Berlin Wall was successful insofar as it led to a united and thriving Germany. But it also represents a missed opportunity with Russia, a failure to establish a cooperative relationship with the country when it was both vulnerable and willing to work with the West.

Excerpt: In 1989-90, [Kohl] displayed a talent for knowing when he should submit his visions to authentic and credible legitimizing moments. In other words, he knew when he needed popular support, but realizing that did not mean either that he should completely stage an appropriate event or be at its mercy. Rather, by influencing the East German vote with promises about the one-to-one exchange rate, scheduling the FRG’s own election early in December 1990, and ensuring that it would be the first all-German national election, he improved the chances that both elections would produce results favorable to himself and his party, yet remain credible. He thereby made a virtue out of necessity.

Further Reading: The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer and The Fall of the Berlin Wall by William F Buckley Jr.

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy Roozbeh Rokni.

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