This was a column that started out with a quotation that would have been taboo except that it was said by a Mexican. I thought about it for several weeks until one slow day I spun a column out of it. It ran on the business page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on September 6, 1995. Of all my columns, it is perhaps my favorite.
Antonio Haas, award-winning columnist with the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, asked a discomforting question: “Why have we never had, among Mexicans, a good commercial idea? We recognize the good ideas, and immediately copy them. But when Kleenex was invented, why didn’t we think of Huggies, and Americans did?” Look at Costco, he said, which has been spreading all over Mexico.
Of course, a Mexican may well have thought of disposable diapers or warehouse retailing. What Haas meant was they were done first in the United States.
Haas’s audience, brought together Aug. 17 by the World Affairs Council and the Washington State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, was skeptical. Mexicans are very entrepreneurial, said one man. Even kids sell things, and help support their families.
People everywhere buy and sell, Haas replied, but people in the United States hatch new ideas. “The atmosphere is different,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but everybody who comes here does better than in his own country. We’re making good films in Mexico now for the first time; the Chicanos were making good films long ago.”
I can’t verify Haas’s “no ideas” claim, but he’s right about the atmosphere. It is our chief competitive advantage, particularly over all the low-wage countries that are always supposed to be on the verge of doing us in.
Those countries typically stress duty and obligation; ours stresses self. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — your happiness, not someone else’s. Our society’s rite of passage is the driver’s license, and its greatest novel, Huckleberry Finn, is about a boy who runs away from his dad. America says, “Here you can do what you want.”
Other countries temper that more, or suppress it. In Hong Kong, which is one of the freest places in Asia, I knew a family in which the only son was his parents’ support — and could therefore take no risks. He figured he couldn’t afford to marry until he was 35. One generation earlier in that family, the daughters had been yanked out of school to work so that the sons could study.
Foreigners are proud of the support they give families, and often rightly critical of Americans’ neglect of theirs. But talk to immigrants, and you find that, for many, this country gave them crucial breathing space to get away from families, at least for a while, and pursue their own dreams.
Even those who live in America only a few years are often affected, if they’re young enough. I once edited a string of stories from Tokyo about women in their 20s and 30s starting
design shops, temporary-help agencies and even a barbershop for kids, where the customers sat in little cars. Most of these women had been educated in the United States. In Japan they were considered culturally contaminated. Shunned by the cradle-to-grave corporations, they were developing new commercial ideas.
A friend from Pakistan once said that he, too, was contaminated. An American could go abroad for decades, he said, and return home. After 10 years working for a U.S. employer in Hong Kong, he could not.
Many of the foreigners who come to study here also become contaminated; it is one reason that many stay. It’s not an easy choice. America is a strange, exotic place where people eat weird food like brown rice and vegi-burgers, pancakes and pumpkin pie. It’s a place where a woman may boss a man, kids insult their parents and even sea lions have rights. But as a British friend once pointed out, it is not a place where family connection trumps, or where your accent betrays your social class.
America is the world’s No. 1 magnet for immigrants. That’s bound to make us different from a country that isn’t. But the crux is why we attract the immigrants: because our culture is shot through with the corrosive and exhilarating idea that you can do what you want—and if you don’t, buddy, it’s your loss.
America doesn’t have a corner on that idea. Other countries have done well with it, too. But we specialize in it.
It’s not just capitalism. Japan has capitalism; so does Singapore. We have Steven Spielberg and Bill Gates. We celebrate them not just because they are rich, but because they created new things.
It comes at a price. A high rate of divorce, child abandonment, drug addiction and even homicide seem to come along with all that pursuit of happiness. Americans fulminate about this. We admire Singapore when it canes Michael Fay*. But we are not willing to become like Singapore, or like Japan. It might fix a number of problems if we did, but it would also be dissipating a major asset.
© 1995 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sometimes it takes a foreigner to tell you who you are.
*In 1994, an American, Michael Fay, 18, was sentenced to six lashes by a Singapore court for vandalism. The punishment became an international issue, and when President Clinton asked that the boy not be caned, Singapore reduced the number of lashes from six to four.