or today's generation of
Asians, the nightmare decades of the past - of war's
decimation, of riots and poverty and political cruelties -
are simply history and not very well remembered at that.
Asians are otherwise engaged - consumed, in fact, with
building a new middle class, transforming themselves from
largely agrarian societies into a heady new world dominated
by technology. In doing so, they are driven by pragmatism
and materialism and a keen optimism in pursuit of the twin
goals of improved living standards and family enrichment. At
the same time, what they are learning as they go is that
virtually each forward step creates tensions between the
promise of prosperity and the concerns of the traditional
past.
There is no place on the planet where tradition looms larger than in East Asia - or, in the past, where it was deemed to weigh heavier. In the colonial era, both Asian revolutionaries and apologists for Western domination would argue that encrusted tradition stood in the way of Asian progress in science, industry and commerce, tacitly making the point that such things had to come from outsiders. And yet, in the postwar period, some key elements of that tradition - love of education, respect for rulers, familial harmony - became the basis for Asia's economic explosion. Tradition lives on, but how will it fare on a continent increasingly rich, prosperous and powerful? How much of Asian tradition can survive in a technology-dominated world?
So far, Asians are managing to maintain a rough balance that provides comfort and stability without totally losing their sense of tradition. When a Japanese company president in Osaka calls in the Shinto priest for theo-harai (purification) of a new office building, or when a Hong Kong tycoon builds a new house only after a feng shui geomancer inspects the ground, or when Communist officials reverently attend the ceremonies at Confucius' shrine in Qufu, they are not succumbing to the ghosts of superstition but asserting their sense of values.
One of the most important Asian values of all continues to be the drive to improve and extend education. Learning and training were once the attainments of a privileged class, but nowadays virtually anyone who strives for social improvement through instruction can find it. Following the Japanese pattern, families in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and more gradually those in lands of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) scrimp to send their children to a university and often a business or graduate school overseas. This year alone more than 250,000 Asian students are enrolled at American universities, the large majority of them studying engineering or science. This includes nearly 50,000 Chinese, followed by slightly smaller totals from Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan. Nearly all the members of the Communist political hierarchy in the People's Republic - Deng Xiaoping included - have sent their children to U.S. universities. In Indonesia, Suharto's original government technocrats, having been trained at the University of California, are known as "the Berkeley Mafia."
