Life is All Right in America

A couple of years ago, I got to see an outdoor screening of West Side Story at the Tribeca Film Festival, in lower Manhattan. It had been quite a while since I had seen it on video as a kid, but I can honestly say, the experience of seeing it on the "big screen" (actually the wall of a warehouse overlooking the Hudson River) was breathtaking.

I saw the film with a couple of friends from whom I am , for reasons I will not delve into, now estranged. We had coffee after the film, and one of my friends asked me which of the songs in West Side Story was my favorite I didn't know then. But after a couple of meetings with people now, I think I do. I would have to say that honor goes to the song "America" ("Life is all right in America" / "If you all white in America").

Friday, as I noted in my last post, I met up with my new friend Jacky, whom I met while changing money at the Bank of Taiwan. Over coffee, he told me about his experiences studying in the United States, where he earned his undergraduate degree and spent a year in some vague corporate work I didn't understand before returning to Taiwan. He told me clearly that, had he had a choice, he would not have come back. The pace of life clearly seemed more manageable to him on the other side of the Pacific, and he returned only because he could not get a work visa to stay in the United States.

Then yesterday, our school had its grand opening--of sorts. I say, of sorts, because it turns out I won't start teaching right away. Eve and Ruby have decided that, since I have to go to Hong Kong on the 7th, it doesn't make sense to open the school and then have me take two days off so quickly. So the school will open on the 12th, when I'm back.

Anyway, among the other attendees at the grand opening were two women who made a point of introducing themselves to me. Their names were Claire and Sherri, and they ran the Shane English branch in a small town (by Taiwan standards, at least) near Jonghli, a bit to the south of us. Sherri told me that she, too, had studied in America--at the University of Oklahoma, of all places. I told her my family was in Kansas and that I have been to boarding school in Missouri, so I knew very well the kind of Midwestern milieu she had experienced there. Like Jacky, Sherri was also swept up in the desire to go back to the States.

The overall impression I've gotten from Jacky and Sherri is that Taiwanese people who go to America seem enchanted with what the perceive as the slower pace of life in America. Unlike the Taiwanese, we Americans are apparently not as prone to workaholism and a rush-rush-rush mentality. Even more so, Taiwanese visitors to America are impressed with the vast open spaces of the country. Jacky spoke of driving ten hours in parts of the Midwest and not coming upon a single town of any size. I imagine he must have been exaggerating; even to drive from Kansas City to Saint Louis is only a drive of three or four hours. But it amazed me how the drive across Kansas that even native Kansans find so onerous--it regularly gets compared to being an ant crossing a frying man--was found so exhilarating by both of these new acquaintances.

Back home, America feels like a society beset by insoluable problems: a sputtering economy, a failing education system, and standards of living that supposedly have not risen since 1973 (I actually think this last issue is a myth, but more on this in another post). The overwhelming feeling you get from the media is that America's best days are behind her, never to return. But to my new Taiwanese friends, America seems not to have lost any of its glory.

What does it say about America that so many other people around the world still want to come there? Even from a society as well-off as Taiwan, a country Americans used to fear as one of the "four Asian tigers" that was bound to overtake America's place as top of the economic heap?

I think it says that Americans need to be more grateful.