My friend is in transit from China back to his home in Boston. He is currently in San Francisco Airport waiting for a flight to Boston. He called me to say that China is 20 years ahead of the United States.
“Don’t mind the American propaganda,” he said. “China has since taken over.”
He went on a business trip to the industrial city of Guangzhou. He was in awe with the China’s infrastructure. He said there is no airport in the United States that is as sophisticated as Beijing airport.
He found the streets of China spotless. “You won’t find a piece of paper on the road,” he said.
He called the fast speed train connecting several Chinese cities fascinating. My friend lives in Boston and has travelled all over the United States. He said nothing like it exists anywhere in America.
“The people are so nice,” he noted. “If not that it is so far, I would have been going there once a month.” He travelled 15 hours from Los Angeles to get to China.
“In the last one week,” he said, “the only discrimination I faced was the one I just passed through at San Francisco airport where I was pulled over and searched because I was the only black man in our Boeing 747 flight from China.”
He is not the first person I know who went to China and was amazed. I have two other friends who came back with the same impression. One went to China from Africa and afterwards said he had no need of coming to the United States.
These eyewitness accounts mirror what Thomas Friedman of the New York Times reports whenever he visited China.
“What use is the talk about freedom if you are allowed to carry a gun but not to live a decent life,” my friend complained.
Hm! What do you think?
