America: Why I Loved and Left It

As an American expatriate in China, I hardly care about America these days. I seldom worry about what's going on in the USA or think about the 308 million Americans who live there. I'm an American expat, a US citizen who no longer resides in nor holds any allegiance to the country of his birth. My native country, the sweet land of liberty for which I no longer sing, is dead and gone to me. I once loved and lived in America. I believed in the American way of life. For better or worse, I've quit her. I've loved and left America for good.

The bad news in America is going to keep on coming. Like the BP oil spill, greed and corruption in the guise of industrial progress are going to keep on gushing in business as usual form until the only people left standing in the USA are wealthy corporate titans driven like mad cows to conquer, control, devour and destroy every inch of America's twenty-first century turf.

I recently saw Donald Trump say on Larry King Live that the Chinese were "eating our lunch" as a superpower financially. That's just Trump's way of saying he's not getting a big enough piece of the PRC pie. Trump, like so many other it's not personal, it's just business and dog-eat-dog fortune 500 fat cats, thinks his wealth makes his way of thinking the right way. Trump would jump at the chance to cash in on the current investment bonanza of economic growth and development taking place in China.

To say I don't care at all about America or what happens in the bad ol' USA would be a lie. The key words above are hardly and seldom, words which many of my former fellow Americans would like to ignore. I may be an expat, but I'm also a human being. I was born in La Jolla, California, in 1959. I was the second son in a middle-class American family of three boys and one girl. My parents loved me and I enjoyed a free and happy childhood. I also grew up in the 1970s, a time when Richard Nixon and a vast majority of Americans were hell bent on banning Deep Throat from adult theaters while dropping napalm on women and children in Vietnam.

In my youth I was naturally too naïve, too young and dumb, too immersed in the comforts and temptations of the American way of life to see the lies. I saw and heard no evil. Yet, deep down in the very fabric of my life as a young American, I saw the odd lunacy and fallacy in the patriotic patchwork of a country cut and hand sewn from the stolen lands and brutal extermination of its native peoples. Beneath the stars and stripes of nationalistic madness lurked something sinister and secretly off-kilter.

I left America in 2002, not long after the Twin Towers tumbled down in a pile of smoke and glass and steel and ash and disintegrated American body parts. That day sums up the way I feel about America today. America is a fallen nation of liars, thieves, and double standards. The USA is a rubble of its former self. Finally, after 100 years of planetary domination, the smoke and mirrors of the former greatest nation on earth are being exposed for the magical shams of pure propaganda they really are.

I make my living as an English teacher in Asia. Many Americans, along with expats from other countries where English is the native language, are leaving their homelands for fresh opportunities and the chance to start new lives abroad or overseas. The field of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) has grown tremendously in the past decade, especially in China.

After eight years in the TEFL trenches, I'm now teaching journalism and public speaking courses at a university in Xiamen. It's a good job for me. Back home, when I returned for a few months in 2004, I worked as a call center customer service agent, temporary laborer, and teacher's assistance earning an average of $8 per hour before racing back to South Korea to pick up my TEFL career again.

From a TEFL perspective, China is a good place to be right now. In the past three years I've saved more money in the PRC than I could ever save in America. I'm going home this summer, 2010, for the first time in five years. As long as I hold a valid American passport I'll always be allowed to travel to America. But I no longer want to live there. I no longer have any interest in living in a country, or calling a country my home, where my lifestyle choices and career options are so limited because finding a suitable and enjoyable job with a decent wage has become such a difficult thing to do.

In China, about 1.3 billion people could care less about the goings-on in America. Most Chinese folks have no idea who Donald Trump is or what he thinks. If Trump were as smart as he thinks he is, he'd know that dissing the Chinese for their success in the twenty-first century of human history - the age of the renminbi - is just another example of selfish and self-important American arrogance. I may not like the way China is following in the urban-development footsteps of other superpowers, but that's not something I need to care or worry about.

Like most of my Chinese neighbors, I care more about the daily ups and downs of the Chinese way of life. As the socioeconomic woes in America seem to worsen, China's financial future appears rosy. Politically, while the two big guns roll by different rules on opposite playing fields, the expat life in China is much better for those of us who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by living and working in the PRC.

The USA does, however, continue to have a great deal of influence on China and its people. America, the great melting pot of cultural diversity, is still one of China's main eyes and ears, her windows, to the west. As China mightily and assertively shakes and stretches during its current monumental growth spurt, the socialist nation is constantly assessing the American value system and continually weaving and molding itself into a hybrid model of the western way of life.

China could not and would not have become the China of today without America as a guiding beacon towards the western ideals of peace and prosperity for all. As an American expat with nothing to lose and everything to gain, China represents a new kind of freedom. I can work and contribute to the world on my own terms. I'm earning $20-$35 an hour doing something I enjoy and I no longer have to concern myself with America's job market, with the political fallout from oil spills or democrats versus republicans or conservatives versus liberals or the Tea Party and the Christian right versus the Green Party and left-wing socialists. I'm out of the American name game for good.

As an American expat in China, I now spend a lot of my time teaching the next generation of citizens in the PRC how to thrive and survive in the twenty-first century. I'm on their team now. Like most other Chinese men in their 50s, I'm also saving for my retirement while trying to make the most of my life along the way. America, and the American way of life is now just a red, white, and blue part of my past. And that's exactly the way I want it.