California Dreaming
I’m at lunch with one of our suppliers. Perrin specializes in bamboo products. Bamboo has all kinds of qualities that make it superior to wood. It’s hard as a hammer. It grows to full size in two years. What really surprised me is that it regenerates. You can lop it off at the base and it’ll come back from the dead like a starfish growing zombie arms. That’s right all you environmentalists, no depressing stump graveyards when you cultivate bamboo.
She asks how I came to be in China, so I tell her. She ponders me briefly.
“你会不会觉得中国很落后？”
“Do you think China is a backwards country?”
This is the second most common question I get from Chinese people. People here cannot go abroad easily. To them, the outside world exists in print only. They know the headlines, but the details of life across the big blue remain a mystery. Like any dreamers are wont to do, they fill in the information gaps with solid gold of their own starstruck manufacture.
Some of my local friends tell me that, to them, an ABC is like an exotic bird-of-flight descended on an island, a journeyman with the unfiltered, full-bodied story of faraway lands. Hopefully it is one that will corroborate their rose-tinted visions.
To the people who ask this question: Firstly, Las Vegas and Manhattan are not representative of our whole country. Secondly, you now live in one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. Your telecom is better than ours. Your electronics are better than ours. You also have the world’s first maglev for commercial use. Us Yanks don’t hover at 420 km/h over superconducting tracks.
I say as much to Perrin. She nods.
“那，科技方面中国可能还好，可是福利方面美国应该好很多吧?”
"OK, China’s not so bad technologically, but America is still better in terms of social welfare right?”
I think of the few mainlanders who’ve managed to visit my family in San Diego. They catch their first glimpse of America through our car window. They see wide streets, one-story buildings, trees galore, and they ask: “So how far are we from the city?” Then we pull into our driveway, and they say disappointedly, “Wow, you didn’t tell me you live in the countryside.”
Yes Perrin, we have more purchasing power. It is easier to secure a steady flow of food and shelter in the States. But if you want to dream big, if you want towering, cherry-topped visions of the future, you needn’t look further than your own backyard.
