Like a patient coming out of a high fever, East Asia today, three years after the financial crisis struck, is in a mood of utter sobriety. People all over the region are rising to smell the coffee in the morning and appreciate the cool fresh air. The world is more real somehow, more grounded. PNS editor Andrew Lam, a Vietnamese American writer and essayist for NPR, spent the last two months in East Asia. Lam wrote this for New California Media's web site at ncmonline.com. Lam's e-mail address is lam@pacificnews.org

BANGKOK -- Three years after the financial crisis -- or the Crisis -- blew hard like a typhoon across the entire region, the shock and despair are dissipating. All over East Asia, people are waking up as if from a high fever that finally broke, feeling utterly sober and somehow more grounded.

Before the Crisis in the early 1990s, I came to East Asia to write about Pan Asianism. The Asian economic miracle, as it was called then, was fueling a cultural renaissance. From Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, from Bangkok to Hong Kong to Tokyo, a new middle class was flexing its muscles, shrugging off a five-century-old colonial yoke, embracing a cosmopolitan lifestyle of glittering highrises, high-speed trains, streets jammed with luxury cars. Optimism was unprecedented.

What I liked best about that era was that people were growing aware of one another for the first time, reaching out to one another and finding common interests, borrowing wildly from each other's art forms -- Japanese animation influenced Hong Kong film, Balinese dance influenced Japanese Noh, and so on. The region was experiencing unprecedented integration, perhaps for the first time in its history.

What I didn't like about that era was the chauvinism that came with economic prowess. The dragons' and tigers' interpretation of the economic phenomenon was that Asia's destiny was to rise above the rest of the world. "Look East" -- the mantra of Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir -- suggested a regional fortification against the West, as if somehow the West had nothing to do with Asia's modernization: Asia for Asians only, as it were. Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew coined the term "The Asian Way," implying that the region's newfound wealth came from neo-Confucian ideals which, when boiled down to "obey authority, take care of family, and work as hard as you can" conveniently rationalized his one-party rule, among other things.

Then the Crisis hit and hit hard. Currencies were devalued overnight, investors lost their fortunes, developers and stockbrokers wound up street vendors, and many of the bankrupt committed suicide.

Today the region has largely recovered and is, in fact, the process is reassessing itself, its strengths and weaknesses, with little of its former smugness.

"People are hunkering down," Koblarp Yangpryoon, a well-traveled interior decorator of shopping malls tells me in his Bangkok office. "It no longer matters if people call this the American Century or the Pacific Century or even the African century -- as long as people are doing well and improving their lives. The talk is not so big any more, it's more honest."

Deikas Sakya, an Indian who owns a tailor's shop on Sukhmvit Ave., says "People are still hurting but it's what we call growing pains. And there's a more realistic assessment than before the Crisis -- people aren't rushing out to buy diamonds and Rolexes and extravagant things like before. But they are beginning to invest again."

In fact, imports of capital goods are rising regionwide, along with consumer spending, though more on durable goods than on luxury items. Large companies across Asia are once again revealing expansion plans. Most startling is that Asia is planning to launch 73 communications satellites over the next decade to network the region and the global marketplace. Along with the restructuring of banking systems and investment practices, there's a marked shift towards a new industry -- the Internet and Internet commerce.

"There's a dot.com frenzy here," says Mark Orme, a businessman from Australia working in Hong Kong. "But unlike before the Crisis, the market is more mature--Asians are much more aware of the pitfalls and corruption of easy money, and more cautious about investing."

The irony is that while there is less talk of regional pride or "The Asian Way," globalization is evolving even more quickly than before the Crisis hit. Open a newspaper in Kathmandu or Bangkok or Hong Kong, and the top job listings are for web designers and computer programmers -- bilingual applicants preferred. Everywhere people are rushing to learn English and get on line, and computer sales are soaring. Even in previously war-torn Phnom Penh, internet cafes are sprouting like mushrooms.

Mathias Woo, an art critic who manages a performance art group in Hong Kong, says people have realized that if there is, indeed, to be a Pacific Century it won't happen without a lot of support from the other side of the Pacific -- California, especially. "English is the dominant language in Asia -- to write computer programs or design webs, you still need good English skills. And Asian web designers are nowhere as skillful as American ones. We've still got a lot to learn from America."

"This is the critical point in Asia where people are discovering that in order to compete, they have to be imaginative -- copying and mass producing was a good formula a decade ago, but you can't do that with information," agrees David Pham, a Vietnamese American web designer selling his services from Taipei to Ho Chi Minh City.

If stocks and currencies in many countries were overvalued before the Crisis, many East Asians now admit that so was their self-image. One afternoon, at a Buddhist temple in Chiangmai, a third generation Chinese Thai businessman struck up a conversation with me. He was in the construction business during the boom, but now he is running an import-export business, much smaller in scale, but he's quite happy. "I used to have to take all these politicians to brothels and go drinking with them, I was getting fat and bloated. Sure I made a lot of money, but I was unhappy. I think it's not good to expand and expand. What kind of values are we setting up for ourselves and our children if money is always the end point? What happened to frugality, humility, and mutual respect, the traditional values?"

Few here doubt that Asia will be the dominant economic powerhouse in the 21st century. But one lesson is clear: The Crisis was a wake-up call for those who thought they had already arrived.