Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Friday, November 20, 2009 10:16 am TWN, By Anne E. Kornblut, The Washington Post

Sponsors
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.

Barack Obama's personal story infused tour of Asia

At a town hall meeting in Shanghai, Obama summoned the image of his two young daughters using the Internet to make a point about open Web access. And he dwelled on a theme well-worn in the United States but new to many Chinese: Of his diverse nuclear family, including a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother and a sister who is half-Indonesian and married to a Chinese Canadian.

“So when you see family gatherings in the Obama household, it looks like the United Nations,” Obama said, drawing laughter with a familiar line from his presidential campaign.

Afterward, several guests described his personal appeal as impressive. “He talks about himself a lot, how he educates his two daughters,” Xie Lijun, a 28-year-old Shanghai woman, said. “I would like to be his friend.”

While President George W. Bush had a famously boisterous friendship with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi — taking him to Memphis to visit Graceland, where Koizumi impersonated Elvis — Obama has adopted a more professional stance. The new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, reported after meeting with Obama that the two had “grown quite accustomed to calling each other by our names.”

Asia provides far less fertile ground for Obama's multiethnic biographical message than America, where it meshes with the country's self-image as a melting pot of immigrants. As a continent, Asia is hugely diverse, but its individual countries tend to be far more ethnically homogeneous, and often wary of diversity.

John Park, a Korea specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said that Asians also look at people through the lens of economic development and business. “They like CEO types,” he said. “In Europe, personality and the spoken word are at much more of a premium. In Asia, it is all about track record. No one has written President Obama off, but people are looking very carefully at what he'll achieve.”

1|2