Forget about keeping immigrants out. More and more Americans are heading the other way.
Go East, young man
Illustration by Sharon Henry
By ANDREW LAM
Amidst the high tech glitter of Hong Kong a young American woman nonchalantly told me that "America's reputation as the land of opportunity is overrated." A graduate of UCLA in liberal arts, she grew tired of "temping" and moved to Hong Kong where she is now fluent in Cantonese and a jet-setting junior executive for an import/export company. Her future, she says, lies in East Asia.
I felt a vague impulse to defend the sacred myth we immigrant Americans tell ourselves: that America is a land of milk and honey, that one comes here to reinvent oneself, not vice versa.
On the other hand, having traveled to East Asia regularly over the last seven years, I have been struck by the diaspora of America's young. In Japan alone, there are at least 100,000 American expatriates. In China and Vietnam, large American colonies are growing. "No one says the American dream has to be within America's borders," observes a 20-something American working as an interpreter in Bangkok.
Americans, of course, have ventured in waves to the Orient many times before, usually bent on some form of conversion. By contrast, the new generation ventures abroad with a surprising sense of humility and openmindedness, eager to rid themselves of America's "parochialism," bent on reinventing themselves through immersion in local cultures. In the process they are redefining the American frontier.
Laura Stephens, an English major from UC-Berkeley, fled a waitressing job to teach English in Yokahama. Now fluent in Japanese, she says, "I make more money teaching English here than an engineer makes in Silicon Valley." After four years, she has saved enough for a substantial down payment on a house back in San Francisco while spending luxurious vacations in a dozen East Asian countries -- a lifestyle close to what she had always envisioned.
Peter Seidel interned for several different newspapers in California before going to Vietnam. Seidel first taught English in Saigon, but moved on to edit an English language business magazine in Hanoi. Now a prolific writer who has mastered Vietnamese, he has fallen in love with a country his parents' generation viewed as "hell in a small place." His few years in East Asia have cured him of his generation's pessimism.
Next page: A reverse brain drain
