Luxury Cult

The ‘Obama Factor’ at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival

As a luxury brand author I live in two worlds – the world of luxury and the world of words.  For a change I am going to focus on the latter, and take you into the world of books and authors at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, which is now in its ninth year.  It’s my annual treat – I take a week off, switch tracks, and immerse myself in the simple pleasure of words, and the art and craft of writing them.

The overarching theme that struck me this time was the effortless mixing of cultures and places, a literary globalization if you will, where it seemed perfectly natural to have a Korean-American write about the British in Hong Kong – as Janice Lee did with The Piano Teacher – and a British-Indian write about Bulgaria – as Rana Dasgupta did with Solo.  (His first book Tokyo Cancelled would score a ten on any globalization meter, its cast of thirteen stranded airline passengers telling tales from all over the world.)  If you were at the festival, you’d think mono-cultural writing was – to borrow a phrase from the luxury world – so last season.

This literary globalization was bound to happen, following in the footsteps of the globalization of trade, of people switching countries, studying abroad, marrying ‘locals’, their children growing up in a hyphenated culture… and in the natural order of things, writing about the interconnected world they now inhabit.  I like to think of this as the “Obama Factor” – with his black Kenyan father, white American mother, and a childhood spent in Indonesia and Hawaii, President Barrack Hussein Obama encompasses a Noah’s Ark of cultures, races, religions, geographies, all in one body – and there is a growing number of Obama’s who are coming of age, and writing copiously about their globalized inner selves and outer experiences.

Perhaps the search for identity is felt more keenly in such a situation – it’s like a tough multiple-choice question where you can’t tick A, B, C or D – and it certainly provides fertile ground for writing, as Obama himself demonstrated with his poignant Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.  

At the festival the Obama Factor was very much in play and there were plenty of tales of race and inheritance.  Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires – think of it as a Korean version of the Namesake written in a racy Devil Wears Prada style – has the protagonist Casey battling her immigrant working class upbringing with her American Ivy league education, the cutthroat world of investment banking, her addiction to the good things in life – even when she is broke she maxes out her credit card on designer clothes – and her love for a white man that her father won’t look at.  Thaddeus Rutkowski’s books – Roughhouse and Tetched (slang for crazy, or “touched” in the head), both finalists for the Asian American Awards – draw from his Polish-Chinese-American childhood.  Incidentally, this is his first trip to China, and hopefully helped one more piece of his identity jigsaw fall into place.  

Interestingly, Julia Whitty, an environmentalist who explores the underwater world – her latest The Fragile Edge won the Kiriyama Award – is now planning her next book around her mixed identity.  She grew up thinking her mother was English, only to discover later that she had been lied to – her mother was Anglo-Indian.  A telling example of how times have changed: while her mother sought to bury her multi-cultural roots, her daughter – and indeed her daughter’s generation of authors – seek to explore exactly that.

If these authors navigate between cultures, Margaret Atwood, the highlight of the festival for me, takes the globalization theme to a higher plane – humanity itself and planet earth.  She spoke about her latest book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth which is her take on the notion of balance and fairness and who owes what to whom on a global basis, the impending natural disaster we all face together (“If the food runs out, you die”), human greed (“Oil isn’t being produced by gnomes underground”) and her ultimately optimistic view of the future (“The human animal is smart – we made technology that got us to this, we need other technology to get us out”).  It is her combination of immense intelligence and simple storytelling that I admire so much.

The Obama Factor is being played out in the luxury world too – just like these authors, luxury brands have increasingly multi-country parents.  The French brand Louis Vuitton has an American designer in Marc Jacobs. (One of Vuitton’s most successful collaborations was with the Japanese artist Takahashi Murakami.) The Italian brand Fendi is now owned by the French conglomerate LVMH and has a German designer in Karl Lagerfeld.  (He is also is the designer for the French brand Chanel.)  Shanghai Tang, a brand born in Hong Kong, is now owned by Richemont, a Swiss company founded by the Rupert family from South Africa.

Whether it is the world of words, or the world of luxury, the tagline is the same: Products of multiple cultures.