This has been the year of economic crisis — not so much of the crisis itself, which now appears to be easing, but of our travels to those countries affected by it. On our way to New Zealand in late 1998, we spent a week in Singapore, where the tourist doldrums produced some extraordinary bargains for very fine hotels; then, I spent most of May 1999 teaching classes in Argentina and Brazil.
Singapore was trying hard not to look like a country in crisis, and did a pretty good job of it. The shops, though not choked with tourists, were still bustling; black Rolls Royces bearing bespectacled Hongkong magnates plied the streets; the Raffles Hotel swarmed with Australian lawyers attending some conference, strolling in coatless gaggles through the dripping heat of the courtyard, like so many defrocked penguins on the march. Nonetheless, any conversation lasting more than five minutes turned invariably to the same subject: Japanese banks. The prevailing feeling was that the good times were over, and that Asia’s economy would not revive until the Japanese banks had come to terms with their overextended debts. Judging by how long it took for American banks to overcome a similar crisis in the 1970s, Asia was in for a good ten years of stagnation.
What is most striking about this Asian recession is that it is home-grown. All other economic difficulties in recent memory have been a case of Asia catching cold when the West sneezes; this time, however, they have proven capable of messing things up all by themselves. This means that the Asian economy now possesses its own dynamic. By one estimate, the size of the Asian middle class will exceed that of North America, in numbers if not yet in purchasing power, by 2010. What is struggling right now is the export-driven economy that has, until recently, sustained Asia’s spectacular growth, and yes, this economy has been funded by Japanese banks. The emerging middle class, however, is not so much in Japan as in China: If only one-sixth of that country’s huge population achieves middle-class status, it will indeed, in numbers, exceed America’s. This, in my opinion, is where to watch for Asia’s economic revival.
I’d been to Argentina before (in 1994), and it hasn’t changed much. In fact you could say that the biggest change was that there was no change in the value of the Argentine peso. I think this is the first time in Argentine history that they have had a stable currency for five years running. When you compare that with Brazil, whose economic crisis is not quite as bad as Russia’s or Thailand’s, but close, it’s quite an accomplishment.
In Brazil I spent the whole time in São Paolo, a city of eighteen million people with about as much Brazilian soul as Buffalo. Brazil is a cultural and racial melting pot that puts America to shame. One of the students in my class told me he was one quarter Italian, one quarter Spanish, one quarter African (his great-grandparents were slaves — Brazil had slavery until 1890), and one quarter Amazon Indian. Note that he had no Portuguese at all; this, apparently, is not unusual, since the original Portuguese settlers were overwhelmed by immigrants from all over in the past two centuries. For example, 200,000 Japanese came to São Paolo from 1890 to 1920, mainly to work the coffee plantations. The coffee fields have long since been eaten up by the sprawl of the city, and now form a neighborhood called Reforma, with torii arches and Japanese restaurants and paper lanterns on the streets when it’s not raining. Most of the people who live there even look at least part Japanese.
São Paolo has a nasty reputation for street crime. You hear stories of teenage gangs that attack taxicabs and hack off tourists’ arms to get their watches and jewels. My hotel was in a relatively safe section of town called Jardim Paulista, but even there, people told me not to walk around at night because I was a foreigner. Naturally, I did anyway, just to see what everyone else was missing. With a T-shirt and a pair of well-traveled jeans, I could pass for a local. I spent many hours, day and night, just cruising every neighborhood I could reach by foot. People weren’t particularly friendly, but then they never are in a city of that size. They were not at all hostile or fearful either. Street vendors, cafes and shops operated long into the night; lovers strolled arm in arm in every neighborhood, even the grungiest; old ladies walked to church. I saw nothing that made me feel at all uncomfortable, until my last night in Brazil.
I was walking up a busy avenue, when up ahead I saw about twelve tough-looking young men running out into traffic, shouting and trying to stop cars, pulling on their doorhandles. I was about to change my direction, when I noticed that the other pedestrians were walking right on by them, seemingly paying them no mind at all; so I decided to do the same. A bit further on, I saw the cause of the commotion. It was Saturday evening, a large church was getting ready for mass, and nobody could find anywhere to park. So these kids were hawking parking spaces. As soon as one freed up, they would commandeer it and charge a “finder’s fee” to let people park there. To a foreigner passing in a taxicab, it must have looked noisy, violent and threatening; but in fact it was just noisy.
What I brought out of Brazil was a desire to see the rest of it. The restaurants of São Paolo offer a taste of the various regions of the country, and that is pretty much what I got of Brazil as a whole — just a taste, a sip of caiparinha, a hint of something behind the spices and a rhythm deeper than the samba, something to go back and dig for.
Let that culinary note conclude the millennium. We wish everyone the happiest of Christmas holidays, and may the Y2K bug offer you the excuse to do everything you wanted to.
Auckland, December 1999
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© 1999 T. Mark James
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