Author Description

In 1979, Frank Viviano, then a reporter for a San Francisco wire service, bought a round-trip ticket to Asia. The Cultural Revolution was ending in China, and the final chapter of the Indochina War was unfolding. There were rumblings of change from Singapore to the gates of Beijing. Viviano thought he'd be back in a few months. Thirteen years and more than a million miles later, he was still on the road. Throughout his travels, Frank found a world of people adrift - caught between the waning past and a vague future, between cultures east and west. There were two stories in the dawn of the Pacific Century: one was the quantified balance sheet of high technology, gross national products, and the Japanese-American rivalry, the Pacific of the economic boom. The second story could only be seen from the inside, where the currents of immense cultural change coursed, uprooting some of the earth's most traditional societies and replanting them in the twenty-first century. Viviano's Pacific is the bui doi - "dust in the wind" - orphaned Southeast Asian teenagers who roam an archipelago of cheap hotels, surviving on petty theft. It is Zhuhai City, the Chinese Las Vegas, a honky-tonk resort town on the Pearl Delta for the newly affluent of the People's Republic. It is Irkutsk, Siberia, in the summer the Soviet Union fell apart, jammed with fast-buck artists from a dozen nations and reeling with consumer fever. It is the arrival of the lambada in Mongolia, and democracy in Taiwan. Dispatches from the Pacific Century pictures an entire world in cataclysmic upheaval, where Red Guards have become commodity traders, Stone-Age tribes from the Golden Triangle emigrate en masse to California, and vast newcities explode into existence in a matter of months. A world where the familiar everywhere is yielding to a road without maps.