There Will Always Be More
Being at home has its advantages. For one, rather than wandering from couch to couch in an endless search for meaning and the perfect travel food, I find myself inundated with Couchsurfing requests now that I have a place in Austin. Every week at least one traveler emails me requesting a place to crash for the night, or if we can meet for a drink and talk about the finer points of my fair city.
All well and good. Just this past week I offered to meet a Chinese girl at a sushi place downtown to talk about her road trip across the states. There was some friendly banter: where our paths had intersected… where we wanted to go… our views on sushi… and then the subject of American behavior came up.
Credit cards are still a relatively novel concept to Chinese (though one they’re taking to with extreme fondness). Chinese (and Asian) food portions aren’t particularly excessive. Without even thinking twice about what I was saying, it suddenly occurred to me the perfect way to describe my countrymen…
“The thing about Americans is… well… we believe there will always be more of everything. More food, more money, more resources. I mean, do you think like that, as a Chinese…?”
“No…”
It actually stirred up a memory of an episode of the TV show Dinosaurs (cue to about 4:00), when the teenager is posed a hypothetical question; suppose these (indicating the closest grapes) are the last grapes in the world. Now eat them. Munch munch munch. Now what? Even in the face of dwindling resources, we always assume something will come along.
No money? No problem; we’ll pay for everything with a credit card and dig ourselves into a hole. The forthcoming job will only stem the tide, not stop the flow.
No food? Well, there’s always food. Around every corner. It’s part of the reason I had a little difficulty in beginning eating mediation at Vimutti. How can I truly appreciate the fact that I have all this food when I’ve never been without? When I know I will never be without. Yes, I’ve seen hungry children in foreign countries (not starving ones, though), but it’s as though they exist in a separate world. Even in some of the more rural parts of Thailand when I taught students who couldn’t afford to “splurge” on extra pencils and paper, I could still enjoy a full dinner at restaurants to which they had access… like I said, it’s a block in my mind.
Thoughts? Has this crossed anyone else’s mind?
2 responses to There Will Always Be More
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Michael Lynch said on June 25, 2009
Ryukyu Mike
This reminds me of an old Trini Lopez song (can’t remember the title) that went something like, “I wanna be in America. Everything’s free in America”
You could make a checklist of 10 things that strike foreigners as different about Americans and get some really interesting answers (depending on where they came from) right in any Hometown, USA.
candicew86 said on June 11, 2009
you’re right entirely of course, there will always be more. or so we think. i remember being in france a few weeks ago and wondering what would happen if i didn’t have a credit card to get around… what would happen when i ran out of cash? how could i possibly grab a cab/eat/find a place to sleep when my resources run out? hard to imagine having such limited options.