Soul and Sushi: Forget what you�ve heard. For African-American professionals looking for a fair shake, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong are hot.
By Lynette Clemetson, Newsweek | May 4, 1998 http://www.secussa.nafsa.org/underrepresentation/oldnews/soulsushi.htm Damon Woods landed in Beijing to study Chinese two years ago with a chip on his shoulder. An American black man, he had been warned by friends and family that the Chinese looked down on Americans and American blacks in particular. Woods, then 21, got on the plan anyway. For the next year he struggled though language classes. He also learned the joys of Chinese life. He drank rice wine late into the night with Chinese families. He bargained and joked with street hawkers. He chatted with villagers on long train journeys. When it came time to fly back to Pittsburgh last year, Woods discovered he didn�t want to go. �So what was it like as a black man in Asia?� friends at home asked, waiting for horror stories. �It was liberating,� answered Woods. Liberating? Even a decade ago, few black students would have considered studying in Asia. And corporate America resisted sending black employees across the Pacific, believing �like Woods�s circle of friends�that they wouldn�t be accepted. But in the past few years, African-American�s presence in the region has grown substantially, as black lawyers, bankers and other professionals joined the great investment rush into East Asia. Once they arrived, they found a surprising reality: life in Asia is in many ways more comfortable than at home. In U.S. cities where political and social agendas are set along race lines, racial concerns consume daily life. In Beijing, says Woods, �I can drop all of that racial mess and get on with my life.� In practical terms, that translates into the freedom of driving an expensive car without being stopped by the police, the luxury of browsing in exclusive shops without being followed by clerks and the delight of advancing professionally without being tagged an unqualified beneficiary of affirmative action. �It�s like an asthmatic taking his first puff from an inhaler,� says Charla Weiss, an educational psychologist in Hong Kong. �All your life you�ve been taking half breaths, and suddenly you realize what it�s really like to breathe.� Western professionals, black or white, enter the Asian corporate world as foreigners. There are cultural barriers to deal with, especially for those with no language skills. There also is limited access to influential Asian business circles built on family relationships and clannish affinities. But the Asian business environment is pragmatic. In financial services, information technology, engineering and the sciences, where Western expertise is in demand, any experienced foreigner is as good as the next. There may be even more opportunity in the wake of Asia�s economic meltdown, as systematic reforms open regional markets to greater foreign involvement. �It doesn�t matter if you�re green in most parts of Asia,� says Malcolm Robinson, a black Hong Kong-based fund manager, �as long as you have the skills to do the job.� It�s an attitude that smashes conventional American wisdom. Incidents of overt racism in East Asia have drawn high-profile press in recent years. There were violent clashes between Chinese and African university students in China in thelate 1980s over African exchange students� dating Chinese women. In 1986, the then Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone said in a speech that America�s overall intelligence level was pulled down by blacks, Hispanics and Puerto Ricans. American politicians and civil-rights groups protested, urging boycotts of Japanese goods. But blacks living in Asia say that such blatant offenses are rarer in Asia than in the United States. More commonly, blacks struggle against stereotypes exported through American media: that they can sing and dance or that they are lazy and violent. �There is a big difference between plain ignorance and real hostility,� says Carlyle Peake, a debt analyst with Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong. �You get some crazy comments in Asia, but it�s not deep and hateful the way it can be in the United States.� And the stereotypes are relatively easy to overcome. When Reginald Canal, 29, came to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. from New York last summer as a project consultant, coworkers were thrilled at the prospect of beefing up the basketball team. �I didn�t know how to break it to them,� says Canal, laughing. �I�m like the only guy in America who can�t play basketball.� For blacks who make the jump to Asia, there is a growing network of support. Executives socialize at trendy clubs featuring R&B bands and �Soul Train� nights. Black women�s groups welcome newcomers to Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Many friendships are struck, members say, with the familiar question from newcomers in Asian cities: �Girl, who does your hair?� And folks tired of dim sum can eat jambalaya and catfish at Lori Granito�s Hong Kong restaurant, The Bayou. �Hong Kong can use a little more soul,� says the New Orleans native, who picked Easter Sunday to launch The Bayou�s live-music Gospel Brunch. Looking to Asia for liberation from American racism is not entirely new. The Black Panthers of the 1960s turned to Maoist ideology for guidance, and Panther leaders like Huey Newton traveled to China to study revolution. Performer Paul Robeson also studied Chinese. His association with the communist movement eventually tarnished his career. In the 1930s black leader and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois traveled throughout Asia and lectured at Japanese universities. He wrote a series of articles for the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier on the warm reception he received. In one article he expressed awe at the freedom he felt when a Japanese hotel clerk waited on him before a white customer demanding immediate service. �It�s a complex history that neither blacks nor Asians today are aware of,� says historian Reginald Kearney, whose book �African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition� comes out this spring. Maybe not surprisingly, some of the strongest resistance to accepting blacks in Asia has come from American companies. Blacks in corporate America have struggled for years to change the perception that they won�t be accepted in Asia. After 10 years as a marketing executive with an American multinational company, Iris Harvey expressed an interest in transferring to Tokyo. Her company hedged, so she took a leave of absences and went on her own. She started a consulting firm, developing business strategies for clients like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo. When the Japan Times ran a profile on Harvey in 1994, the headline read simply: THE AMERICAN JAPANESE CAN SAY YES TO. Now in Atlanta, Harvey has an office in Tokyo and works with U.S. corporations doing business in the Pacific. �In Asia, for the first time, black professionals are able to enjoy the full benefits of their American citizenship.� The experience is even more empowering for younger black professionals who struggle with increasingly hostile attitudes toward affirmative action in the United States. David Andrews moved to Taiwan as a marketing officer with First Chicago Bank in 1995 after completing his M.B.A. He was the only person in the home office interested in the post. At 30, he�s now executive with ABN AMRO in Hong Kong, selling banking services to multinational companies with headquarters in the region. He hopes his next position will be in China. �There�s no question here that I�m qualified and capable,� says Andrews. �When I go back [to the United States] nobody will ever be able to tell me again that they had to spot me points because I�m a brother.� Black expats are invading Asia just as black-American pop culture is becoming seriously vogue in the region. High-school kids from Manil to Seoul strut the streets wearing low-slung jeans revealing multi-colored drawers. Life-size cardboard cutouts of NBA stars like Michael Jordan and Shaquille O�Neal tower outside basketball shops in Taipei. In Tokyo�s trendy Harajuku district, teenagers flock to the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Boutique to buy vinyl dance mixes and Afro-centric club clothes in red, black, and green. Around the corner, Japanese stylists at Natty Hair salon labor for hours to mat Japanese tresses into dreadlocks. The styles are far removed from the conservative suits and haircuts sported by most black professionals in Asia, who say their presence helps to balance out the image. �Were like ambassadors,� says Terrance Alford, 26, a fund manager in Hong Kong. �In addition to all these cool things Asians see on TV, we let them know that we are bankers, lawyers and business owners, too.� And in an Asia increasingly inundated with shopping malls, McDonald�s and other trademarks of mass American culture, black expatriates are transporting unique elements of their own African-American culture. In December, Jan French took homemade swee-potato pies to daughter Angela�s school and gave a talk to her class on Kwanzaa. Says Jan: �It�s essential that our children be proud of who they are.� She and her husband, Greg, a marketing executive with Citibak, value the international eduction their kids are receiving abroad. But as the kids get older, the parents day, it will be important for them to spend some time in the United States to prepare them for racism they may experience there later. It is especiall important, they say, for Marcus, 8. �He is a black, American male,� says Greg. �And at some point I need to make sure he understands everything that they means. Good and Bad. Fair and unfair.� It is a reality check that all African-Americans experience returning home. And it can hit hard at any age. Jennifer Smith came back to the United States just before Christmas, after a five-year stint in Tokyo as director of the Institute of Foreign Bankers. Browsing an upscale Chinese antique shop on Manhattan�s Upper East Side, Smith, 44, was confronted by the Chinese shop owner who questioned what she was doing there. When she explained that she had lived in Asia and was a collector of Asian antiques, Smith says the owner told her, point blank that she didn�t believe her. She left the store feeling an anger, and a sadness, that she hadn�t felt in years. �In all my time in Asia, I never had to face such a purely racial response,� says Smith. �That shopkeeper had clearly learned the American way.� The American way is something blacks have been trying to alter for decades. For sure, black expats in Asia won�t be bringing back any cure-alls. But they�re finding a whole new world of possibilities. �Once the boundaries come down, it�s hard for anyone to pull you back in again,� says Smith. America can only be the better for it. Land of Opportunity: An African-American professional reveals how he found his future in the Asian financial marketplace. By Eugene Matthews, Newsweek May 4, 1998 Thirteen years ago, I left a prominent Philadelphia law firm for the first of several jobs in Asia. I became the only foreigner working for a traditional Japanese manufacturing company, complete with uniforms, morning songs and calisthenics. Before I started work, I got some stern advice fron Yahara-san, who had been my �host mother� when I studied for a year at Waseda University in Tokyo. �Be the first one at the office, work harder than everyone else and be the last one to leave,� she said. �They will think you are lazy because you are a foreigner.� It was not the first time I had heard that advice. My real mother gave me the same lecture, practically word for word, when I took my first paying summer job in a small Pennsylvania steel town more than a decade before. Only instead of preparing me for life as a foreigner in Japan, she was trying to prepare me for life as a black man in America. As the age of 39, I have spent most of my career in Asia, having worked in Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. I am as comfortable discussing Japanese investments at a sumo match in Tokyo as I am discussing the American market at a Knicks game in New York. My Japanese is fluent, and my contacts are good. It was a Japanese investor who put up the capital for my first trading company (I doubled his money in two years). Race can be an issue in Asia, if you allow it to be. But for me, it has never been a determining factor in a significant business transaction. No American with an eye on Asia�s future should allow worries about race to get in the way. In the next century, international experience, particularly in Asia, will be crucial for anyone who wants to play a majore role in American business. I plan to move back to the United States eventually, and I am confident that the track record I built in Asia will help me prosper there. Asia�s current financial meltdodwn had created more opportunity for American investors than ever before. The same fundamentals that stimulated the region�s economic growth still exist: a strong work ethic, a discipliened labor force and a propensity for saving. Now governments are being forced to fix some old problems: cronyism, collusion and protectionism. In Japan, undervalued companies are priming a boom in a buyout business that previous was closed to Westerners. Startups and young companies offer a market ripe for aggressive, American-style venture capitalists. This evolving Asia is open to anyone with the skills and nintai (Japanese for patience) to go for it. If anything, black American professionals are uniquely equipped to overcome cultural challenges they may face in Asia. We are used to being in the minority. We are used to working a little harder to prove ourselves. We are used to stereotyping and petty slights. When I see a white colleague get angry because a taxi passes him by to pick up a Japanese customer, I can�t help but be amused. I�m used to it. But at the end of the day, I also know that my skills are what count most in Japan. Down at the bottom line of a financial statement, race is irrelevant. Matthews, a graduate of Harvard Law, is president of Nintai Capital Inc., a U.S. firm specializing in private equity investments in Japan. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/pkgkPB/SOnJAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
