Globalization: Moving beyond love it or leave it!

            On the first day of my arrival in Frankfurt, Germany, I entered a McDonald’s restaurant.  To my surprise, I felt like I have never left the United States.  The design of the restaurant was no different than the average McDonald’s back home.  Most of the items on the menu were almost identical.  I went ahead with my order of a Big Mac and fries.  After the first bite, I realized one of the reasons why McDonald’s has been the global leader in the restaurant industry.  Their ability to maintain consistency in quality and service on a global scale is simply remarkable.  I love it that I can conveniently walk into any McDonald’s outside the United States and expect to receive a certain level of consistency in product quality and service.  McDonald’s global presence certainly makes it a company at the forefront of globalization. 

            My experience with McDonald’s abroad allowed me to see that globalization is real and happening fast.  It will continue to occur rapidly as countries and people become more and more interdependent.  This is changing the way we live in this world.  We may soon discover working and collaborating with people around the world will eventually become the norm.  As you are reading this blog, you may be doing it from anywhere in the world.  This is the beauty of globalization; distance is becoming zero.  However, globalization does have its ugly side.  It can put people of out jobs.  Those who are unable to cope with it may struggle.  It is creating this simplistic binary; either you love it or you don’t.  The purpose of this analysis on globalization is not to make an argument for or against it; it is to show how we can live in a globalized world that transcends this simplistic binary of loving it or leaving it.  We will observe the life and work of Kazuo Ishiguro and Bharati Mukherjee to better understand how they were able to demonstrate ways of living in a world that transcend simplistic binaries.    

            In Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, An Artist of the Floating World, he provided us with a narrative in Ono who struggled to cope with a changing world.  Japan was making the transition from pre-war to postwar.  Ono was an artist who grew up before World War II.  His past mistakes and the mistake of his generation to lead the nation into a world war contributed to the bitter relationship with the younger generation of Japan.  Many of the lives of the younger generation were sacrificed for a war that Ono’s generation started.  Once, the world viewed Ono and his generation as national heroes and patriots, but later, they were viewed as no different than criminals.  Ono’s attempt to defend himself was “but those who fought and worked loyally for our country during the war cannot be called war criminals” (56).  His constant denial and defensive position about his past did not assist him in making the transition into the postwar world.  He was stuck in what he called the bridge of hesitation.  He was caught in the middle of two very different worlds; the prewar world where he was loved and the postwar world where he and his generation were detested.  The world has changed; his world was a thing of the past and the nation now belongs to the younger generation to run.  It took him the whole story to acknowledge his past transgressions in order to step forward into a new world.  He finally acknowledged it in the very last line of the book.  “Our nation, it seems, whatever mistakes it may have made in the past, has now another chance to make a better go of things.  One can only wish these young people well.” (206)

            Unlike Kazuo Ishiguro’s character Ono, Bharati Mukherjee’s character in her book, Jasmine, has no problem letting go of the past to move on with the present and look forward to the future.  Jasmine, like Ono, was floating between worlds.  She married an Indian man called, Prakash who passed away in India.  She made the long immigration to the United States where she met and fell in love with a guy named, Taylor in New York.  Afterward, she moved to Iowa and met a guy called, Bud, who she is carrying his child at the moment.  In her own words, she said, “I have had a husband for each of the women I have been.” (197).  For each of the men she has been with, she has had a different name or identity.  She was Jasmine with Prakash, Jase with Taylor, and Jane with Bud.  Her approach to a successful and quick transition into a different world was to let go of her past by destroying her past identities.  In order to gain a new identity and adapt to a new environment, your past identity must be put away.

            One thing that makes Jasmine so different from Ono is her adaptive capacity.  She is not afraid to put her past behind to move on.  Her will to control her own destiny and “reposition the stars” (215) have contributed to her ability to adapt to the changing worlds that she constantly finds herself in.  Ono constantly finds himself on this bridge of hesitation between two worlds.  I don’t believe Jasmine would ever get caught on such a bridge; she would probably just jump right across it like she floats easily from world to world.

            Jasmine and Ono have shown that one can learn to live with a changing world such as that of a globalized world that we live in today.  We should not concerned yourself with whether globalization is good or evil, but try to acknowledge and accept that change is happening in the world, and globalization is part of that change.  We will probably see more of the likes of McDonald’s who want to establish a global presence.  That’s where the world is heading; the world is getting smaller, and we are becoming more independent.  We need to equip ourselves with the adaptive capacity to move with the changing world.