LOS ANGELES, 15 June — I am writing this column from the tiny studio apartment of an immigrant Filipino friend who lives in Hollywood. My move from Long Beach to Hollywood brings with it a complete change of atmosphere. The area where I stayed in Long Beach was completely white and upper middle class. The people there drove huge SUVs, one neighbor drove around in a Bentley, and kept yachts in the bay just a few feet from their front doors.
Immigrants, Latinos from Mexico and Central America, Chinese, Filipinos, and Vietnamese, mostly populate Hollywood. It's much grittier here: Garbage strewn on the sidewalks, a few homeless people walking the streets, and whole streets that used to be populated by crack dealers. These are the reasons for the big white flight to the American suburbs: The want for safety from crime, a craving for clean and green neighborhoods and the inevitable fact that white Americans don't really want to have immigrants living right next door to them.
I myself felt a little of the alienation of Anglo-Americans when I took the Blue Line Metro into Long Beach from Hollywood a few Sundays ago. I was practically the only native English speaker in my carriage: I was surrounded by fresh immigrants gabbing away in Spanish, out with their babies and kids for the afternoon.
But America needs these economic refugees to do its dirty work, work that Americans no longer want to do. They work in fastfood restaurants, clean offices and basically toil away at minimum-wage jobs that anyone else with enough education or skills tries to escape from. Capitalism, with its never-ending need for cheaper labor, creates new jobs for these thirsty immigrants.
****
The flipside of this, of course, is that capitalism is also ruthless and doesn't care who it puts out of a job as long as things are manufactured at lower cost. Here profit reigns supreme; the bottom line is everything. I read a sad story in the Los Angeles Times about how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was supposed to create a huge free market between Canada, the US and Mexico, instead has moved many jobs into cheaper Mexico. In a twist of fate that is extremely ironic, the Times story tells how one immigrant Mexican who had worked for 15 years for a Los Angeles lock manufacturer was suddenly put out of a job when his firm decided to move its whole manufacturing plant, lock, stock and barrel, to Mexico. The immigrant was being paid $15 an hour, a salary that allowed him to get married, have children and buy a house.
The workers in Mexico are being paid only $10-$15 a day, a huge economic saving that no one can really argue with. Of course the quality of the locks plummeted when production was moved to Mexico, because the workers were not trained properly and there was no quality control, but hey, the savings were so great it was certainly worth it for the owners.
The immigrant in Los Angeles is, unfortunately, still without a job. Many Americans now doubt the sanity of NAFTA, and don't see any benefits emerging from it. Instead, with so many jobs being lost with American corporations moving production to Mexico, they can only hear, as Ross Perot once said, that big sucking sound from the south.
****
Little things I see in America startle me. At the Rite Aid drugstore I notice that people leave huge amounts of space between themselves when they line up at a cash register to pay for their goods. I think I have been away so long from Western cultures where personal space is so valued, that I am amazed when people physically stay away from each other.
I miss the lines in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines where everyone stands very close to each other, jostling to get ahead in the line. Here in America it seems that people are almost scared of interacting with each other, of accidentally bumping into one another.
Another thing that amazes me is the friendliness they express in the most mundane transactions. At the Kinko's copy center a cashier and a customer startle me when they banter back and forth, each wishing the other to have "a good one." Have I become cynical, or is it because I find this friendliness a bit phony? I can't seem to bring myself up to speed to this breezy and informal chattiness with store clerks. In Jeddah and Manila I was always chatting up store clerks just to be friendly, with most of them giving me shocked looks, unaccustomed to customers asking them how they were.
Perhaps I find the instant intimacy that many Americans are guilty of practicing a little too forced and phony.
****
It's not surprising that many Americans are not into world events. The United States is so huge itself, geographically, that many Americans find they don't need to be informed about the what's going on abroad. It's already a challenge for them to keep up with domestic news. Naturally this downplay of foreign news doesn't sit well with me. CNN here is boring except for the talk shows. I miss CNN International with its constant update of world events.
Too bad Americans can't watch it. I also miss BBC News and when I find out that I can watch it here on public television, albeit for only an hour a day, I'm ecstatic. Another public television station carries a special edition of the British ITN News broadcast. This also pleases me as it's an escape from local news stations here, which carry stories about a bear coming down from the Hollywood Hills and swimming in a person's backyard pool, and about young schoolgirls who are nearly being kidnapped on their way to school.
****
Sending and receiving mail have always given me joy, for whatever silly reason. I guess I'm just one of those people who love to receive something in the mail, whether a package, letter or piece of junk mail. I thus find the efficient US Mail system a joy. I find myself buying Snoopy and Great Prairie stamps from the post office. Mail boxes are everywhere here, unlike in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines. I clip articles and send them off to friends in Manila and Jeddah just because it's so easy to do so here. In Jeddah or Manila I would have to schlep to the post office or a mailing center, the preparation and distance needed to reach such places a great disincentive on its own from mailing anything to begin with.
When I lived in Brazil we would have mail delivered twice a day, a joy for a mail junky such as myself. In India there is also mail delivery twice a day, something I think any decent country should have.
I know most people have given up writing letters on paper a long time ago, using e-mail instead. Yet I still find immense satisfaction in writing a letter or postcard, placing a stamp on it and then dropping it into a mailbox. The thrill of receiving letters from exotic countries, with their strange yet lovely postmarks and stamps, will never be replicated by e-mail.
