"There's something just not right about strolling around the former Imperial Court with a cappuccino in hand."

So says Kirk Kenny, a freelance contributor to CBC's Viewpoint. In a mixture of homesickness and a desire to expand the little bubble of life I lead in Longgang, I was scouring the CBC website and came across Kenny's article, "Beijing on parade", a piece summating the often grim effects of modernization and unrelenting development on this historic city's cultural fabric.

To me, this article did well in articulating how foreigners like myself feel when we land in a world that is undeniably different in terms of language, values, government, and cultural temperament, and yet at times strangely, almost disturbingly, familiar. This strange familiarity is really only on the surface, however - a thin veil masking the darker realities beneath. It lies in the Wal-Marts and McDonalds and other corporate franchises, the western-style restaurants and grocery stores and modern high-rises. I use the word "disturbingly" because, although we most often equate the concept of familiarity with feelings of comfort, this familiarity is far from comforting. It points instead to the corporate takeover, the harsh reality of an increasingly globalized world threatening to erode the truer cultural fabric of nations when historic sectors of a city are razed to make way for towering skyscrapers and people rely more and more on KFC and Wal-mart to meet their everyday needs. Cultural identities and values threaten to fade away in wake of this mad rush for development, a rush that seems to leave more and more people behind in its frenzy to move ahead.

But am I playing the selfish tourist when I wish all the McDonalds and Starbucks would just go away so I could see instead the "real" China? Pico Iyer, in his beautifully searching essay titled "Why We Travel", takes a more optimistic outlook when he says "the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. . . these days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another". At times, it’s not so much a blatant replacement of traditional heritage with cold, unrelenting modernization, but more a peculiar, even fascinating, mixture of the two.

From studying history and archaeology I realize that no culture develops in isolation to the ones surrounding it, and this is particularly true of today's globalized world, as more and more nations rise up to gain an economic foothold in the global market and modernize their infrastructure. It is silly to think with all this interconnectedness that a country like China would remain essentially unchanged. So alongside the rice paddies and water buffaloes, pagodas and Buddhist shrines, bicycles and street vendors come towering skyscrapers, inner-city highways laden with traffic and glitzy shopping malls. This is the "real" China - the China of the 21st century, a country that has come to have a huge impact on the modern world as much as the modern world is influencing China. I can't say I like it, or that I'm OK with it, but I can be more optimistic and believe that somewhere amidst all this frenetic change and meeting of cultures eastern and western, ancient and modern, there are some lessons to be learned, like how to modernize a nation without so much environmental and cultural degredation. I just hope that we can learn these lessons ourselves and not leave them up to the historians of the future to learn for us.