I spent several years in Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During that time, I had a routine where I would go into central Taipei early in the morning every day (by around 6am) and go to a fast food restaurant where I would drink coffee and review the Chinese I was learning at a language school before going to work (around 7:30).
The first restaurant I went to was Lotteria. It’s not there anymore.
I remember that I liked it there, but for some reason I later started to go to McDonalds. I can’t remember why I started to go to McDonald’s. I think it was because Lotteria changed their hours and started to open later.
Whatever the case may be, there is one “sound” that I remember from this time period, and I can’t remember if I heard it at Lotteria or McDonalds or both, but it was the “sound” of a cassette tape that they played while I was drinking coffee and studying Chinese – a tape of Kenny G music.
More specifically, I remember that the cassette tape was one that must have been “eaten” by the cassette player at some point, but someone must have “fixed” the tape and kept using it, because what I listened to day after day after day after day was a “warped” tape of Kenny G’s “Forever In Love.” (Why on earth didn’t the people who worked there realize how horrible that tape sounded?!!)
That sound is deeply ingrained in my mind, but there is no easy way for me hear it again. To do so I would have to get a cassette tape of Kenny G’s music (are they still available?) and a cassette player (do they still exist?), and then I would need to find a way to get the tape player to “eat” the cassette tape and damage it. And finally, I would have to replay that damaged tape.
With that, I should be able to recapture that “sound” from the late 1980s and early 1990s in Taiwan, but that’s a lot of work and theoretically I have more important things to do. . .
With that appreciation of how difficult it can be to recapture certain sounds from the past, I was very happy to find recently that someone who worked at Kmart in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s preserved some of the cassette tapes that were played in the store at that time and has digitized them and made them available on the Internet at Archive.org.
The digitization of these tapes has generated a lot of attention, including a report on National Public Radio in the US.
While all of this might seem humorous (or ridiculous) and of little scholarly value, I see in these Kmart tapes a perfect example of why “the West” will always lead the world in producing cutting-edge scholarship about human societies.
As Asia has undergone a period of intense economic development, there have been statements about how the 21st century will the “the Asian century,” and how in the case of Southeast Asia, the “center” of Southeast Asian Studies is moving from North America to Southeast Asia.
The Kmart tapes, however, are great proof of why none of this is true.
Why do I say this? Because there is a graduate student somewhere in North America right now who is trying to find a way to theorize about the importance of “banal music” in our lives, like the music that we here in supermarkets or department stores, and that graduate student has now obtained fantastic material to work with – tapes that were broadcast in Kmart in the late 1980s and early 1990s – and after writing a dissertation on that topic, that person will go on to get that dissertation published by Routledge Press in a special series on “the sound of modernity” or something like that.
Why has that graduate student been able to obtain these materials?
First it is because a national media organization like National Public Radio has drawn her/his attention to these tapes.
Second, it is because there are people in North America who realize that “garbage” like tapes that were played in Kmart in the late 1980s and early 1990s are actually “valuable.” And such people take the initiative to SHARE those materials with the public.
And that such people are able to share such materials with the public is because, third, there are other people like the founders of Archive.org, also known as the Internet Archive, who want to make knowledge (in all of its varieties) available for free to all.
And finally, fourth, academic publishers in “the West” want to publish scholarship that pushes the boundaries of how we understand the world.
So why does this make “the West” different from Asia? Because none of this will ever exist/happen in Asia.
No one who is working in a department store in Jakarta or Bangkok or Beijing or Tokyo will ever consider that the banal music being played over their sound system is in any way important or worth preserving.
No one in Jakarta or Bangkok or Beijing or Tokyo will ever create anything as selfless and democratic as the Internet Archive.
No national media in Indonesia or Thailand or China or Japan will ever think that there is any value in reporting on the digitization of department store music from decades ago.
Graduate students in (or from) Jakarta or Bangkok or Beijing or Tokyo will never consider the fact that the music that is being played in the shopping centers that they walk through (perhaps) daily can be analyzed to say something insightful about the human condition.
Instead, people in the societies of Asia and in the countless educational institutions in Asia will talk endlessly about the need to teach people how to develop critical thinking skills, etc., so that people from these societies can compete with people in “the West” . . . but no one will notice the music that is playing in the department store they visit, and no one will preserve it, and no one will study it. . . and “the West” will continue to be seen as unique in its “critical thinking.”
People! Listen and think!!
“No one who is working in a department store in Jakarta or Bangkok or Beijing or Tokyo will ever consider that the banal music being played over their sound system is in any way important or worth preserving.”
Will this be true in the future, I’m not sure, but it was probably true in the recent past. Why is that?
First of all, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was someone in Japan who has done this, but I picture him (probably a guy) living in a tiny apartment with stacks and stacks of cassettes which he has meticulously cataloged, but which. . . he doesn’t share with anyone and doesn’t have any plan to do anything with them either. So my point is that it’s a combination of things that enables people in some societies to do things that they don’t in others.
Why did this guy save those tapes? He doesn’t really explain, but he says that after hearing the same songs 8 hours a day for a month. . . he started to like them. What he doesn’t explain is the cultural background – that it was widely perceived in the US in the 70s and 80s that the music in places like Kmart was terrible.
So there is something ironic going on here. That irony leads to/inspires things. Do people in Bangkok feel any sense of irony about what they hear in shopping centers/restaurants. Do they even notice the music? Does the fact that the music playing is usually Western influence what they perceive? How?
I think that without that sense of irony, there would be little reason to want to preserve something like those Kmart tapes. At the same time, the irony and the preservation of those tapes then makes it possible to ask a lot of question: So what was so “bad” about that music? Why did people think it was bad? Why did the folks at Kmart think it was a good idea to broadcast it?
On another note, I was looking for something in a store this past weekend and they were playing U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
That’s ironic.
Thanks for explaining it at length. What I wonder was why, as you observed, *generally* people from “the West” do these things (preserve, share, build the platform to share, and draw attention) more and better than people from “the East”. Did anyone come up with some plausible explanations? I heard and thought of a few reasons but I don’t remember reading any authoritative sources about this kind of social/cultural difference.
I don’t think there is any “authoritative source” on this. People keep struggling to try to understand why societies are different, and there is no single reason. . . so having said that, let me bring up one single reason!! – philanthropy (giving money to help the common good). While one could argue that all of this has ugly origins (people who became incredibly rich by stealing land and building railroads or by selling opium to Chinese ended up feeling like that needed to do something “good” for the “bad” way that they were making money), and that there is (or has been) an equally ugly relationship between certain foundations and the American government, the reality is that there is a concept in the US among some (certainly not shared by everyone) that when you make a lot of money, you should do something good with that money by giving it away. This is not a universal outlook. I know Cambodians in the US who think that the best thing to do with their money is to go to Cambodia and build a Buddhist temple to increase their karmic merit, for instance. Meanwhile, Bill Gates made tons of money and then decided to try to improve health conditions in Africa, because. . . it seemed like a good idea to him.
I think there is a different mindset about what you do with your knowledge and or wealth in “the West” and in some other places. “Sharing” is not a concept that is universally promoted. And then we can add to this all kinds of crazy ideas that people have about their own societies when they do decide to share. I vaguely remember a case, for instance, from the 1990s when a wealthy Hong Kong businessman gave something like 100 million to Harvard, and people in HK were like what the. . .!! Why not give that money to a HK university?!!
Ooops, my “single reason” is starting to break up into multiple reasons. . . I’d better shut up before I contradict myself even further. 🙂
Well… It might just come down to capitalism, you know. You can get rich in more than just one or two ways so you “think of” more ways to give back the money 🙂
Leminhkhai,
I just started reading your blog and watching your youtube videos for the past month or so, and I am thoroughly impressed. I totally agree with what you have said here in this article. I also think I can empathize with your sentiment, having spent the past 6 years of my life almost constantly obsessing over the differences between “the East” and “the West,” however problematic those two terms are.To put it simply, I get it! I look forward to reading your future posts. You are one of my maverick scholar heroes in Asian Studies.
This topic – “The West” leading scholarship – is so vast that I’m not sure how to approach it even. One factor, I think, is the reception and reaction of a country’s state and society regarding dissidents. I don’t mean political dissidents (though obviously them too), but cultural and intellectual dissidents and critics. It’s one thing that there are critics like Foucault and C. Wright Mills. It’s another thing that they are received with seriousness, at least by small but not insignificant groups in their countries and regions.
Another possibility is considering the thre Ts as described in the article below: technology, talent, and tolerance. Look at the map and it’s clear that the vast majority of the top countries would be classified as “the West.” Regarding your topic above, Japan is the exception as it doesn’t quite belong to the same class in term of historical scholarship. But there is something about the rest of the countries in this survey. http://qz.com/523124/these-are-the-worlds-most-creative-countries/
“This topic – “The West” leading scholarship – is so vast that I’m not sure how to approach it even.”
Yes, I agree, and one of the reasons I wrote this is because I keep hearing people across Asia talking about how all they need to do is to find a way to “teach critical thinking” and then everything will be ok. I think that view misses the point. Every educated person can think critically. Differences come from other factors, like the ones you point out here. As I’m sure you’ll agree, the “creativity” that this study is measuring is more focused on “the creativity of inventing things and getting patents for them.” So in the case of something like historical scholarship, if you take out the T for technology, since a large investment in technology is not necessary to engage in that kind of research (unless you’re doing some massive digital humanities project), then we are left with talent and tolerance, and I think that does explain a lot (again, this topic cannot be explained by one factor, but this is one important factor in the overall mix). Someone can be very talented, but if s/he lives in a society where the government is not tolerant of academics, or where the older generation of scholars is not tolerant of younger people challenging their ideas (and I think I’ve just described much of Asia, and certainly most if not all of Southeast Asia). . . then you are not going to get much creativity. In which case, trying to find “the key” to “teaching” critical thinking also isn’t going to bring about any major changes. 😉
The Vietnamese have a great word, undoubtedly of Chinese original – ý thức. To me it means a combination of attention and awareness. In your story, it seems like fast-food workers in Taipei lacked ý thức because they kept playing a damaged tape. You have ý thức because you noted the tape contemplated what it meant.
Maybe it’s also a lack of awareness of what can be lost and what is being lost. There are so many documents in my field that I know have existed – there had to have been several thousand unique 78 rpm titles produced in Vietnam, but I only know of a few hundred ever being found. You have to rely on private collectors more than institutions.
Librarianship and stewardship of the cultural heritage is lacking. The institutes that have held on to the documents don’t have the interest or knowledge to make them available. We’re fortunate if they are able to preserve them. The one small exception was the scanned newspaper project at the Thư Viện Quốc Gia – but that was just a tiny random morsel, just enough to make one hungry for more. But it doesn’t help when so much material has been banned, confiscated and destroyed at various times.
The fundamental question is whether having the faculty for critical thinking would be an asset to somebody in Vietnam? It would lead to asking questions, coming up with answers that are either unacceptable or unpleasant. I know a few critical thinkers there, but it’s not easy for them.
Yea, I know people who are really focused on raising the English-language ability of people in places like Vietnam, and I always wonder, “Ok, so after people learn English, what do you want them to do with that ability?” That’s the part that is always missing. As is the end result of “critical thinking.” We need people who can communicate with the world and think critically so that. . . they can gain a better sense of what is “normal” and then critique the flaws in their home society?. . . uh, no, bad idea. . . but we need to raise the national English language ability and transform the curriculum so that students can learn critical thinking. . . . I see.