A thoughtful meditation on East and West
Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World, by Patrick Smith. Pantheon Books, 2010. $25.95, 242 pp.
“This is not a useful book in the way we ordinarily think of one,” Patrick Smith tells us at the beginning of Somebody Else’s Century. Forgoing the economic forecasting and political theorizing of so many books on the rise of the East, Smith’s slim volume tells a story, replacing analysis with reflection. Somebody Else’s Century is a journey: the experiences of a Western reporter who has spent his life immersed in the cultures of China, Japan, and India. It is a book more concerned with the past than the future, and that is useful enough, in its way.
Smith’s argument centers on the effect of the East’s first interactions with the industrialized West. Inability to compete with a stronger, more efficient West overthrew Asian notions of superiority, particularly in a humiliated post-Opium War China. This forced the East to change its focus. Eastern countries, in Smith’s telling, felt the need to cast aside their central philosophical traditions in order to compete on the world stage. The new goal of imitating the industrialized West changed how the East perceived its history and identity. A society that had always emphasized “what was” now had to emphasize “what will be.” A rift in the Asian conscience developed, as people realized that “an old [Eastern] self had to be put in a camphor chest for special occasions, and a new [Western] self had to be ‘put on.’”
One of this book’s greatest strengths is its exploration of this encounter, which Smith illustrates through the ancient Eastern philosophies of ti (the essence of a thing) and yong (its application). The arrival of the West caused these two concepts to change meanings (ti now meant spirit, yong things), pushing apart what had once been intertwined ideas.
Consumer Culture
Eventually, as the emphasis on industrialization grew, the “ti… collapsed and yong simply became the new ti: Things themselves became the new ideal.” This new paradigm has created a contemporary society based on what Smith calls “consumerist nihilism.” Asia today is a land of empty affluence, which Smith compassionately demonstrates through the people he encounters: from the rural Indian textile weaver to the urban Chinese filmmaker and the Japanese entrepreneur.
These people and experiences make for an extraordinary work whose thesis is grounded in the realities of day-to-day Asian life. We meet the teashop owner who sees the historic district torn down for the sake of modernization. We walk down a modern Chinese side street and realize that the occasional lantern is the only discernible difference between it and an American suburb. These stories are the strongest part of the book, replacing abstract concepts with concrete images, placing us in the midst of a changing continent and its people.
A Modern Asia
Still, this book is not without its faults. Despite his best efforts, and his belief that “there is more, always, to say” about Asia, Smith starts to become repetitive at times. He is so involved with his subject matter that his arguments and stories sometimes feel like earlier points rephrased. He also employs a somewhat sentimental writing style that causes him to wax poetic too often. While it is still good writing, this style is very hard to sustain over nearly 250 pages, and he falters at times. Then there is Smith’s strange affection for Nietzsche, which seems out of place, along with a few other minor quirks that may irritate some readers. But most disappointingly, towards the end of the book he indulges in irrelevant editorializing about recent American politics, particularly the war in Iraq. While his points may be accurate, they ultimately detract from the impact of the book.
That said, Somebody Else’s Century is worth reading, particularly for those interested in East Asian studies. The power shift from West to East will not create a supreme Asia, but instead a world of multiple powers. Smith envisions a new Asia, one that “can be modern and still be Asia.” What this means for the world we cannot be sure, but as Smith says, “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties. … We stand to gain much as we dispense with our distinctions between human attributes as either ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern.’”
Raul Quintana ’14 is a Contributing Writer.