Pacific ties

I topped the crest of a hill in the late evening. Through the windshield I noticed a bright star over the horizon. Capella! Capella’s appearance means that summertime is slipping away. We’ve only got one more quarter to plow the conceptual ground for 2018. On this note many people on Saipan are facing the same old conflicting currents. On one hand, Saipan is a hard place to do business, but on the other hand it’s sitting on the doorstep of Asia’s decades-long rise to global preeminence.

Oh, the opportunities. Ah, the problems.

This tension has yanked people in two directions for 25 years now. The trick, of course, is to enjoy the advantages of Saipan without getting sunk by the drawbacks. I never had to reinvent the wheel on this count. I just noted how the smart set played things. Like anything else in the real world, a good approach doesn’t assure success, but it can at least nudge the odds in the right direction.

What I noticed is that the savvy folks, as much as they liked Saipan, didn’t put all their eggs in one zori. They had action rolling in other places as well. And, in fact, they typically spent a lot of time and money traveling.

It wasn’t strictly a matter of hedging bets. Anybody can hedge bets. What takes some skill (and money, and energy, and patience, and even some luck, too) is spreading out projects so they mutually enhance each other. That makes sense if you think about it the right way. After all, we can walk a lot faster on two legs, which are nominally opposing forces, than we can on one leg.

Paradoxically, then, the people who have held out the longest on Saipan, and who seem to be happiest with the place, are often the people who didn’t bet too heavily on it. That’s not cynicism; it is, by contrast, a positive outlook, since it provides a real-world way of making a better situation.

If we confine our outlook for the future to a rough extrapolation of the past, the opportunities for Pacific trade are going to keep growing and are going to spread into more and more places. The “Pacific rim” reaches ever farther from the actual rim.

Las Vegas, for example, is hundreds of miles from the Pacific, but, thanks to Chinese tourism it’s very much a part of Pacific trade. There’s an entire Chinese district there now comprised of businesses and homes for those who own those businesses. This is an entire layer back-stopping the visible surface of see-it-on-the-street tourism.

Vegas is an obvious example, but the nature of business activity is that it’s largely mundane, invisible, and quiet. For example, I know one guy from Saipan’s business circles who now lives on the Atlantic coast and markets handmade goods sourced in the West Pacific. He was a popular guy when he lived on Saipan—honest, friendly, and reliable—so he had a large network of people to collaborate with once he decided to broaden his net.

An economics professor will tell you that people work for money, which, of course, it true, but some people also work just to help each other out and because they’d rather have an interesting project to join than not have an interesting project to join.

After all, even on the warmest tropical beaches you can spend only so much time drinking from blenders and searching for lost shakers of salt. OK, I’ll admit this observation doesn’t apply to everybody. Either way, though, you do have to choose the company that you keep. And, likewise, you either are, or you aren’t, someone who gets calls at 10:30pm asking for help with a business or technical problem. I’m not promoting either camp; I’m just pointing out that they attract different breeds of campers.

The action you see from the shores of Saipan is, of course, so familiar that it may seem unremarkable, but many people in the mainland don’t have the benefit of this perspective. In the mainland some hardy souls want to jump into the West Pacific’s working world but they don’t really know where, or how, to start. Over the decades I’ve received my share of queries along these lines. But that’s the newbie end of the spectrum, and, hence, a topic for another time, since today I just wanted to mention what I’ve seen from the more seasoned players.

The stars, for me, resonate more than the calendar does, so 2018 seemed like a vague notion until the heavens prodded me into action. There are a lot of strands to be tied between East and West, and I hope that next year is a busy year.