The Changing World

The Changing World

After weeks of study and experience from this course, it turns out to be the time to thread the conceptions of transnational, cosmopolitan and immigration together to give a personal interpretation. To start with, I need to borrow the conception of transnational to include not only physical population flow like immigrants and tourists but as well as the capital flow and information flow such as foreign investment and the spread of western pop culture and Asian traditional cultures. This is crucial for the further discussion upon cosmopolitanism which is affected by every means of transnational behavior besides conventional immigration, especially for the countries which are not the popular destinations for immigrants.

The consensus on the merits of this transnational behavior is that it encourages the communication and recognition between each culture group and political regime. This blending of culture and population mostly will lead to the cosmopolitanization of a city or a country as the residents are actively or passively receiving the information from heterogeneous cultural and ethnic groups. For the popular immigration destination cities like Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Singapore, the cosmopolitan character is obviously contributed by the decades of significant inflow of Asian population. This impact of immigration on cosmopolitan of a city has been heatedly discussed but exception is held for quite a lot of Asian cities which are not the prime choice of foreign immigrants. Like Beijing and Shanghai which are considered cosmopolitan cities in the both Asian and global scale do not experience a large and mixing flow of foreign immigration relative to its large domestic population flow. The corresponding transnational activities are attributed to the influence of foreign capital investment and western pop culture and values. Thus even though there is not a significant number of foreign immigration residing in these cities which is large enough to form a social group or cultural group to shape the landscape, the economic consideration and cultural influence can take the role to build the cosmopolitan characters of the city as well. 2008 Beijing Olympics Games and 2010 Shanghai Expo are exactly two cases helping the cities to expose itself to a global culture and raise the consciousness of cosmopolitan among the residents or citizens by cultural exhibition and consumption. Actions are taken to transform the cities into more cosmopolitan like signboards of English and other languages are set up and English speaking is promoted among the officers and service industry like public transportation. This government-led cosmopolitan process is successful to raise the consciousness among the local residents and shape the landscape of the city to be more cosmopolitan but the impact rarely sustains to alter local residents' mindset after these mega events.

Other than immigrants, tourist is never a negligible force in transnational behaviors to shape the city landscape and contribute to the cosmopolitan of a city. These temporary visitors of the city provide the economic motivation for both government and local residents to get exposed to different cultures. Therefore compared to the mega events which introduce the new cultures to the cities and gain a global attention deliberately by government, tourism sometimes function more powerfully by integrating the current local cultures with a globalized standard in order to cater to the tourists in different backgrounds. This is more financially sustainable and bring a longer change to the soul of the city and mindsets of the citizens as well. For example, the holding of Youths Olympic Games (YOG) or Formula One give a blast to Singapore in a certain extent within a period but the planning and building of two mega casinos is really changing this city as promoting its cosmopolitan brand to the level of Dubai. Both the locals and government may proudly perceive the building of casinos as the milestone for Singapore to step into the list of cosmopolitan cities with New York, London and so on. However the change brought by tourists is still not that powerful enough to go beyond the superficial level of consumption to the level of the culture blending. As mentioned, it helps to alter the mindset of the citizens to embrace the fact of cosmopolitan of their home city but there will be few cases like how Hawaii altered by constant Japanese visitors inflow.

However, all these transnational flows from culture spread and tourists consumption lead the cities to be transformed to be alike. This is described by T.C. Chang as "somewhere" becomes "everywhere" and finally is "nowhere". The direct consequence of this homogenization process is that western cities are more Asian like and Asian cities are more westernized. China town and Asian towns for new Asian immigrants are built up in different European and American cities while Central Business District and modern opera houses are planned in Asian mega cities. When Thomas L. Friedman use the phrase "the world is flat" to visualize the globalization trend across the world, probably we can have "the world is alike" to describe the homogenization process under transnational behaviors. Nevertheless, when we scrutinize the nuance of the cities, we still can feel the difference on cosmopolitan pattern and immigration pattern of cities. There are always other factors playing to differentiate the cities and corresponding immigration. Sometimes seeking or establishing a pattern is crucial to theorize a phenomenon but in other cases we really appreciate the difference raised up which tell an individual story of different cities. This is how I rationalize our projects from a different perspective.

Back from other transnational behaviors on cosmopolitan, we realize that immigration is just one chapter of the whole transnational story. To investigate the difference of immigration and its impact on individual city, both macro and micro side of the story should be explored. The macro side of immigration tells about the social, political and macro economy backgrounds to rationalize the transnational flow. On one hand, the booming Asian economy and vulnerable market regulation result in a large group or class of wealthy from the early profitable stage of free market. However, the unmatchable education resource and life quality cannot fulfill their pursuit of better life and showing off of the wealth. Their worrisome over the loss of wealth due to the inconsistency of market policy as well as insecurity of the political environment give them sufficient reasons to transfer their gained property and make good use of them by immigrating to a more developed and well improved society. Besides the wealthy, talented with professions who try to seek a better pay off for their skills to improve their life quality also joins this wave of immigration. To summarize, the improvement of mobility and inequality of life opportunities and quality nurture the current Asian immigration towards popular destination countries like Canada, Australia and States. On the other hand, the booming economy of Asia is now the prime market in the world. People turn their sight from USA or Europe to Asia and economists keep prophesying that the future of the global economy is in Asia. Therefore even though the Asian wealthy are moving to the west but they keep their business here and western multinationals are also moving here with large numbers of expatriates residing in Asia for business. This economic and social difference is also reflected by the government policy about their attitude towards immigrant and talents which explains a lot in our project about the immigration in Singapore and Vancouver.

The micro side of immigration is more targeting on the personal story of individual immigrant. In our project, each interview with the Kerrisdale shop owner or Bukit Timah expats family gives a more personal perspective about immigration. I can feel their personal consideration and emotional change from their narration like the Orange Corner owner in Kerrisdale, David Wu's attitude change about his children's language choice. Sometimes it is more impressive and persuasive to hear from the interviewee to rationalize their choice to immigrate. For example, I quite agree with Linny Ye about how her 8 year old son gained the chance to be enrolled in baseball team without any previous experience which is very difficult and network-needed task. This is far more touching than the statistical figure about how Asian immigrants parents move to Canada for their next generation's education. To wrap up, the micro side gives individual difference on immigration pattern and reflect the genuine side of the immigration.

Till here, I am really glad our project's focus on these special immigrant groups' story including their reasoning to immigrate and their efforts and difficulties during this process. We are all impacted by the larger picture of the world but also it is the individual story and life experience encourage us to make the decision. The difference in both macro and micro sides of immigration contributes to the diversity and multiplicity of the city. Even though the debate about cosmopolitan and transnational which I have come up with in previous journals will continue, it is still fruitful for me to gain an insight about how the world is connected and how people change and adapt in their continuing move.