asia

"In appearance everything is fine these days in Asia. The wars are over and peace reigns, with very few exceptions, over the whole continent. Everywhere people speak of nothing but economic growth. And yet this great, ancient world of diversity is about to succumb. The Trojan horse is "modernization".

I find it tragic to see this continent so gaily committing suicide. But nobody talks about it, nobody protests - least of all the Asians. In the past, when Europe was beating at the doors of Asia, firing cannonballs from her gunboats and seeking to open ports, to obtain concessions and colonies, when her soldiers were disdainfully sacking and burning the Summer Palace in Peking, the Asians, one way or another, resisted.

The Vietnamese began their war of liberation the moment the first French troops landed on their territory; that war lasted more than a hundred years, and only ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Chinese fought in the Opium Wars, and in the end trusted to time to free themselves from the foreigners who ruled with the force of their more efficient weapons.

Japan, on the other hand, reacted like a chameleon. It made itself externally Western, copied everything it could from the West- from students' uniforms to cannons, from architecture of railway stations to the idea of the state- but inwardly strove to become more and more Japanese, inculcating in its people the idea of their uniqueness.

One after another the countries of Asia have managed to free themselves from the colonial yoke and show the West the door. But now the West is climbing back in by the window and conquering Asia at last, no longer taking over its territories but its soul. It is doing it without any plan, without any specific political will, but by a process of poisoning from which no antidote has yet been discovered: the notion of modernity. We have conviced the Asians that only by being modern can they survive, and that the only way of being modern is ours, the Western way.

Projecting itself as the only true model of human progress, the West has managed to give a massive inferiority complex to those who are no 'modern' in its image - not even Christianity ever accomplished this! And now Asia is dumping all that was its own in order to adopt all that is Western, whether in its original form or in its local imitations, be they Japanese, Thai or Singaporean.

Copying what is 'new' and 'modern' has become an obsession, a fever for which there is no remedy. In Peking they are knocking down the last courtyard houses; in the villages of South-East Asia , in Indonesia as in Laos, at the first sign of prosperity the lovely local materials are rejected in favour of synthetic ones. Thatched roofs are out, corrugated iron is in, and never mind if the houses get as hot as ovens , and if in the rainy season they are like drums inside which the occupants are deafened.

So it is with everyone these days. Even the Chinese. Once so proud to be the heirs of a four-thousand-year-old culture, and convinced of their spiritual superiority to all others, they too have capitulated; significantly, they are beginning to find it embarrasing still to eat with chopsticks. They too feel more presentable with a knife and fork in their hands, more elegant if dressed in jacket and tie. The tie! Originally a Mongol invention for dragging prisoners tied to the pommels of their saddles...

By now no Asian culture can hold out against the trend. There are no more principles or ideals capable of challenging this 'modernity'. Development is a dogma, progress at all costs is an order against which there can be no appeal. Mercely to question the route taken, its morality, its consequences, has become impossible in Asia.

Here there is not even an equivalent of the hippies who, realizing there was something wrong with 'progress', cried 'Stopped the world, I want to get off!' And yet the problem exists, and it is everyone's. We should all ask ourselves -always- if what we are doing inproves and enriches our lives. Or have we all, through some monstruous deformation, lost the instinct of what life should be: first and foremost, an opportunity to be happy."

A fortune-teller told me, 1993.

Tiziano Terzani