The reception of the new movie "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" shows how Asian tastes and culture have become an accepted element in American life. This, too, is an element of globalization. PNS editor Andrew Lam is a short story writer and journalist.

When we first came to America from Vietnam, my cousins and I would pretend to be martial arts heroes on a quest. In the backyard of my father's house, we fought with extraordinary weapons and skills.

The "iron palm," "dragon stance," "purple sword of dark soul," "six-finger point energy" -- this was the language of our childhood wonders. We knew all the lore of martial arts: the right acupuncture pressure could paralyze one's enemy, the antidote to the deadly flower from the Cave of Desperate Love was the poisonous sting of a certain bee, Wu Tang's secret fighting manual would teach you how to soar high above the tree tops....

Our private language derived from the imagination of Chinese pulp fiction writers. Alas, it did not translate well in mid-1970s America. The neighbors, blond kids who played softball and skipped ropes, used to mock us.

"How can you paralyze someone with just a few fingers, that's just so stupid!" They would jeer when we tried to explain, and so we would retreat, embarrassed and angry, to the garage to continue our imaginary adventures in the dark.

Fast forward 25 years. How things have changed! Watching Ang Lee's film "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" was like seeing my own childhood imagination emerge from that musty garage and spill onto the silver screen.

As two beautiful women dueled on temple rooftops, a villainess ran on the surface of a pond, and a swordsman perched like a bird on a bamboo branch. As swords clashed and silk flashed, the American audience erupted in cheers.

A while back a journalist friend of mine complained that globalization is turning Asia into a regular shopping mall, with McDonald's and Coca-Cola. But he failed to see the irony in the fact that we were in a Thai restaurant eating stir fried squid in a pungent sauce and fish in tamarind soup. McDonald's may be proliferating, but so are Thai restaurants.

In fact, globalization may in large part entail Americanization, but a large chunk is involved in the easternization of the West.

Two decades ago, for instance, who would have thought that sushi -- raw tuna and salmon and ginger and wasabi -- would become an indelible part of an American taste? Or that Vietnamese fish sauce would be found down aisle three at Safeway? Or that HMOs would accept acupuncture or that Fengshui would become a household word?

The National Book Award this year went to a Chinese immigrant in America, Ha Jin, the Nobel Prize in literature to Gao Xingjian, a Chinese immigrant in France whose bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity is opening new paths.

Ang Lee's movie is the first American production in Mandarin to play at major cineplexes across the country instead of a few art houses -- and doing very well, thank you. The New Yorker movie critic Anthony Lane noted, "China and the Pacific Rim are delivering the liveliest and least cynical filmmaking in the world."

Increasingly the West relies on the imagination of the East as a source of musings and entertainment. The black teenager down my block practices tai chi, the Irish bartender up the street does his yoga exercise each morning, my Hawaiian neighbor has just converted to Buddhism, and the kids at the local kindergarten are fanatic fans of the Pokemon cartoon from Japan.

Thirst for Asia is nothing new. America's story began, after all, with a vision of the East -- it was in search of the riches of Cathay and the Indies, that Columbus sailed West and found America. And American artists, writers and thinkers often look to the East for aesthetic and moral strength or unusual spiritual states. From Walt Whitman and Emerson to the Beat generation and the Beatles to the action heroes on TV -- Xena, Dark Angel -- the East is the source of new forms of expression.

But this time the Far East is the active agent, projecting its vision westward with confidence. The Dalai Lama, Jackie Chan, arguably the world's most famous film star, Salman Rushdie, and Ang Lee, a native of Taiwan who has made films about the mores of 19th century Victorians and 1970s suburbanites, are in some ways far greater diplomats than those representing their states in D.C.

We are fast moving into a world where East not only meets West but the lines are blurring some, creating a new hybridized space. The old black and white dialogue no longer describes the new borderless America.