Singapore’s multiracial, multicultural population looks like a twist of the American kaleidoscope: East and South Asians predominate, while whites are a distinct minority. One morning, walking against the flow of rush-hour foot traffic in City Link Mall, I suddenly realized that I was identifying with the handful of Caucasian faces rather than the darker and flatter faces that resembled mine. I was traversing the strange intersection between race and nationality, exposing my unwitting association of “white” with “American” and “American” with myself – even though those white flecks in the muddy river were far more likely to be British or Australian than American.
Being American mattered (matters) to me. Perhaps I enjoy imagining myself part of the figurative and literal weight the United States throws around the world. I remember my twelfth birthday in Taiwan twenty years ago, soon to face a maelstrom of what we now call “identity issues.” In Singapore I felt an echo of the need I had back then to be American, different (better) than my parents’ countrymen. I had worn my Nike Air Jordans like gang colors, planting myself, for once, on the other side of the chink divide. Maybe that desire, globalized, explains the popularity of western “bling” – a word my middle-aged Taiwanese aunt let drop as we shopped in one of Taipei’s modern malls.
If Air Jordans symbolized my embrace of American-ness, then it’s worth noting that Michael Jordan himself did serve as an ambassador of non-white America to both the world and to his own country. “Be like Mike,” Nike encouraged back then; today, Accenture urges us to “Go on, be a Tiger.” It isn’t all just race or imperialism, even if sometimes it seems that way. Singapore doesn’t promote English so it can become white or to replicate British colonialism but because English is, for the moment, the international language of trade. Which makes it a practical middle ground for a polyglot people.
The migration of “bling” halfway around the world through boundaries of language, culture, and generation might bring dismay to cultural purists or hard-line Marxists, but for all the evils of consumerism, it’s nice to imagine that shopping malls provide some common ground across these places I’ve been. Walking the mall has always been a hobby of mine, a legacy of my Long Island heritage. Singapore is a mallrat’s paradise, especially the touristy area where I stayed. (No less than three malls connected directly with the hotel). One of my hosts believed that a relatively high standard of living, a low tax rate, and not many other choices combined to make shopping a national pastime.
Parts of Taipei have the feel of a kitchen sponge that never gets wringed dry, and so the refrigerated mall was a refuge of sort (such is the role they played for me in Honduras, as well as in Florida). The middle-class downtown mall lacked authentic snake-bile stalls and betel-nut girls, for sure, but they made up for in their own kitschy and Engrish way. They kept enough local character that I was able to find Japanese sport coats suitable for my scrawny frame. (By contrast, I recall one Brooks Brothers in the Midwest where the smallest waist size was 38). On the other hand, the Taipei 101 mall might as well have been airdropped duty-free from Hong Kong International. Bling indeed.
Ethan Zuckerman speaks fervently of the rise of the Fourth World – people who link the local with the global and skip the national altogether. I’m not sure if he considers the Mall of America part of that world: it’s no joke, of course, that many of the products there are made in the Third World, but isn’t consumerism the main driver of globalization today? Perhaps we are exchanging our chains of racism for a more insidious worship of faux-luxury goods, but for now, I welcome this proxy battle between our parochial and our universalist identities.
