Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
economic conditions were in Canada (Ley 2004). Mr. and Mrs. Lee, for
example, had followed a three-generation family tradition in Hong Kong
operating a successful restaurant. Upon arrival in Vancouver, they opened a
Cantonese-style noodle house in Chinatown. But 'it's very different from
Hong Kong… I think that was a mistake we made. We just brought
our Hong Kong thinking to do business here.' Business failure resulting
from inability to appreciate pervasive geographical variation aggravates social
as well as economic costs.
It can be very depressing. It's been so hard for me and my family. I think
maybe we need to take fault for rushing into our business at the beginning,
but the business we tried really burned us out. We gave a lot for it, and it
failed… My husband and I don't know any English. We had few friends.
Everything was foreign. We didn't know what was where. My kids were still
very young. The business took up all of our time. It really had a severe impact
on our well-being and the life of our family.
Mr. and Mrs. Lee had no local knowledge; their information was too partial
for success, their skill set situation-specific and not portable. Instead of dis-
playing an easy cosmopolitan facility across lubricated space, their expertise
was localized, space was sticky and confining. Amos Kwong in contrast is a
factory-owner in Guangdong province living in an expensive downtown
condominium in Vancouver. But this trans-Pacific high-flier anticipated
ahead of time that he was ill-equipped to succeed in Canada:
To have a business you must know many games. Lots of my friends started
business here in a new environment. But they don't know the rules of the
game and use Hong Kong knowledge, and it doesn't work in this place. They
have no local knowledge and most of their investments are failures. I can find
out anything in Hong Kong with one phone call. Here I don't have connec-
tions, I don't have local knowledge.
Globe talk, whether of a flat earth, a spatially extended isotropic plain or
cosmopolitan consciousness misses the point of the continuing role of local
knowledge to enable navigation through the profound differences from
place to place. Because geography still matters, mobility brings with it
uncertainty and significant capacity limitations, even in economic life. We
shall see in Chapter 7 that in social life mobility generates other penalties.
