THE SURPRISES ARE already coming. Ace planner that I am, I didn't even realize Pizza Hut hailed from Wichita when I decided to make Wichita the second stop on my journey. Instead, I chose Wichita because it is more or less in the middle of the United States (and Glen Campbell never sang about Topeka) and because I had come up with an idea about globalization of my own in which it figured: I thought it might now be possible to eat some kind of exotic, foreign food here -- in the middle of Kansas. That the exotic food turns out to be Laotian, that I am sitting, for the first time in my life, in a Laotian restaurant, where there is cilantro in the chicken and beef intestine in the soup, are further edifying surprises.
This is the inverse of the Pizza Hut globalization story: Not only is America's culture, in the form of Gaps and Baywatch, spreading around the world, the world's culture is spreading through America. I suspected that Kansas, in important ways, isn't Kansas anymore. I suspected that the United States, and much of the rest of the world, is experiencing the sort of era that's rarely discussed or named until it is gone: a golden age -- a golden age, in this case, of diversity.
The sign on the front of this particular restaurant reads, "Vientianne." Half its patrons, the restaurant's owner, Chan Pheng, estimates, are non-Laotians. Wichita residents, prepared to brave the cold on this Friday night, could also eat at restaurants named: Abram Café, Azteca, Beijing, Byblos, El Salvador, Hunan Café, Kyoto Garden, LeMonde Café, Malaysia Café, Marchello's, Mediterranean Café, Ming's Cantonese, Passage to India, Saigon, Taiwan, and Thai House. In fact, there are more than ninety foreign restaurants listed in the Wichita yellow pages.
How authentic is the cuisine these ethnic restaurant's offer? Where could they possibility obtain the right ingredients? Chan Pheng says she has had difficulty locating one item: At the center of Laotian cuisine is a particular kind of rice -- sticky rice -- and she has been unable to buy here in Wichita the round, covered wicker baskets in which this rice is traditionally served. Instead, the restaurateur asks friends to bring them back for her when they visit Laos. Everything else -- all the requisite vegetables, meats, fish and spices -- she can purchase from a local wholesaler.
This becomes less surprising when you look at where Wichita residents who buy retail can now shop. Perhaps half-a-dozen Asian or Mexican markets have popped up along one downtown street, Broadway, in recent years. But most Wichita shoppers are more likely simply to stop by one of the branches of the dominant local supermarket chain, Dillion's. There, if the warehouse-sized store I wandered into is typical, they can now purchase fresh starfruit, coconuts, daikon, kale, bok choy, kumquats, quince, and persimmons, along with at least four kinds of hot peppers.
"Fifteen or twenty years ago you couldn't find any ethnic food in a grocery store here," notes Peter Salmeron, a Wichita businessman (who reports that he first arrived in the city from Peru on May 16, 1971, at two-thirty in the afternoon). "Now you can get panetone bread at Dillon's."
I know: You have a supermarket like this somewhere near your home. You have at least as many different varieties of restaurants. That's the point.
And it is not just food. Salmeron says he is now able to buy shirts made in Peru in Wichita. Kam Manyseng, another local businessman, is talking about holding a Laotian New Year's festival in Wichita. The city, I'm told, now has five Buddhist temples, a Moslem community center, plus Vietnamese, Hispanic, and Native American newspapers. (The Wichita area now features a demographic mix quite similar to that of the United States as a whole: just under seventeen percent nonwhite.) And look at all the entertainments that are currently being beamed into Wichita -- hundreds of times more entertainments then once could have been seen even with a trip to Chicago or New York. Look at all the information that a school kid with a modem can now grab hold of in Wichita.

WHAT BROUGHT the world to the middle of the United States? Immigration, spurred, as usual, by jobs. (Wichita builds a lot of airplanes.) Transportation, to move all those people and the beef intestine they apparently crave. Communication -- Spanish-language cable channels, email to cousins in Saigon, Web addresses ending with .br, .il or .ru. Trade. Multinationals. These are the same Mixmaster forces I'll be looking for elsewhere on the planet.
But there's also something else going on in Wichita, something that becomes clear as I sit down over a Coke with the city's longtime mayor, Bob Knight. (I'll now expect to be received by the mayor everywhere I travel.) "The sheer talent that's coming here is enormous," gushes Mayor Knight, though he is not the gushy type. "Mexicans, Central Americans, Asians are making tremendous contributions to the city. These are amazing people. They have made us richer."
Nice talk for a Midwestern politician -- a Midwestern Republican politician. And however cheap such talk may be, it sure beats the various hysterias that traditionally have greeted immigrants -- particularly immigrants of different color or religion.
Intolerance, of course, still lingers in Wichita. Manyseng, otherwise a big booster of the city, notes that he has been stopped by city police once or twice too often; in fact, he's discussed the problem with the police chief. "This is the Midwest," one Asian American notes. "There are still a lot of rednecks here." The mayor takes the point: "Unfortunately, Wichita is no different from other places in America; it still has unresolved racial issues."
Nevertheless, Wichita and America may be experiencing a golden age of diversity in part because a lot (certainly not all) of the people who live here have finally figured out that there's something for them in that diversity. "It has brought a freshness, a newness, a vitality to our community," Mayor Knight states.
Strangeness, to use Geertz's term, has never been easy for humans to value: It tends to be off-putting, even scary. We may be getting better at valuing it.
So here is a mostly cheery tale -- Wichita, of all places, goes multicultural -- to take with me as I start following Pizza Huts across borders. However, this story of globalization of -- not by -- America is not so simple.
After all, this is hardly the first time that Wichita has received immigrants (warmly or not): People from Ireland, Italy, China, and also Lebanon found their way across the plains a hundred years ago. Moreover, the traditional American culture into which these earlier immigrants eventually assimilated was itself, of course, created primarily by immigrants -- and not that long ago. Europeans didn't settle in this area until the 1860s.
And what of the Native Americans whom they so brutally displaced? It's a mistake to think that the area's "indigenous" peoples had been sitting there, all static and self-contained, for centuries. "Tribes moved all over," notes Melton Hamilton Youngbird, coordinator of the Mid-America All-Indian Center in Wichita. Tribes borrowed ideas -- agricultural ideas, cultural ideas (particularly from the advanced pre-Columbian civilizations to the south). They, too, traded widely. As an example, Youngbird mentions the Macaw feathers, from Central America, that have been in the possession of some Native American families in what is now the United States for generations.
The Mixmaster wasn't suddenly turned on in 1990 or 1900. Humans have always moved and borrowed.

I MADE the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton my first stop on this round-the-world trip because I wanted to inoculate myself with a dose of Geertzian skepticism. His going-away gift was a quick reminder about the problems of seeing. If you travel with "American eyes," Geertz suggested, "then that's what you'll see." Focus only on McDonald's and Pizza Hut, in other words, and it will seem as if that's what everything from Guatemala to Bali has become. Look for something else, and you'll see something else.
I'm pondering the subjective-observer problem -- call it the Geertz problem -- again now as I leave Wichita on I-35 south, trying to make sense of what I've seen. For in Wichita (it being part of America) all those intriguing international restaurants I was delighting in are outnumbered -- overwhelmingly outnumbered -- by a wide selection of standardized, prepackaged, franchised eateries. (I won't give the long, dismal, and familiar list, except to note that Pizza Hut sits high upon it.) Wichita's golden diversity is butting up against a huge, monolithic, red-plastic-roofed sameness. What exactly are we to see here?
Here's an answer, formulated while transecting Texas and heading toward Mexico: I suspect that, as the global currents flow faster and reach farther, the relationship between the world and places like Wichita, Kansas, is indeed changing. It is a fact that those who have lived in that area have always been exposed to some such currents. It is a fact that too many people there now are eating too much uninteresting food. But it is also a fact that there are foods and ideas available in Wichita today that would have been difficult or impossible to encounter there fifty years, thirty years, even ten years ago. And a kind of insularity may, consequently, be becoming more difficult (though certainly not impossible) for people there to maintain. This, if true, may be what is most golden about the current age.
"I've been here six years," Youngbird said, speaking of the city's increasing diversity. "Change comes slowly in the Midwest, but in that span of time I've seen it change."

WILL THAT CHANGE LAST? What happens after Laotians have been in Wichita for a couple of generations? What happens if they forget how sticky rice is supposed to be served or if some WSU students figure out how to do for sticky rice what has been done for pizza or tacos? Will another ethnic group arrive in Wichita to supply the missing newness, the missing freshness, the missing strangeness? Is the supply of such unfamiliar cultures limitless? Or is human diversity, like oil or animal species, an exhaustible resource?
It may be that Wichita represents a remarkable but likely temporary moment in human history: a moment when the world is both still large enough to be interesting but also now small enough so that we -- the well off among us -- can go about satisfying such interests in our own towns, in our local supermarkets?
Geertz, for one, isn't worried that we're about to run out of diversity. "The idea that what happens is that everybody comes out just the same," he says, "doesn't strike me as likely." So what is likely to happen to our cultures as the world shrinks? To take a stab at that mammoth question we need to have some idea of what is happening to a variety of human cultures now. That's what I hope to be getting a peek at as I travel.

Mitchell Stephens is a Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University and the author, most recently, of the rise of the image the fall of the word (Oxford). You can read more about his travels at roadthinker.com.

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