supersize

I am back in Asia, trying to compress my large American life into the confines of Malaysian society. The challenges are both physical and psychological.


On a purely physical level, we loom large in our surroundings. I am of average height for an American woman and seem to be about the same size as most of my middle-aged friends - not as thin as I used to be, but well within the healthy range. My husband is tall, though not inordinately so, my children are fairly normal sized American teenagers. But here in Asia we are massive. We do not easily fit into Malaysian clothes, cars or restaurant booths. We block the view when we sit in front of people at movies or in church. We spread widely on the seats of trains and buses, feeling as if we take up more than our fair share, unable to compact ourselves small enough to fit into Asian personal space.

It doesn't help matters any that we drive an enormous van in a country where most of the cars are subcompact or smaller. The minivan is relatively rare here, and even then it is an abridged version of the American one - narrow and tight. Parking spaces here are sized for Toyotas, Hondas and their miniature sized cousins - tiny little cars that look like they might have come out of Christmas stockings. People double and triple park along streets which already have parking spaces along both sides, leaving narrow passageways for drivers who are expected to be driving narrow cars. Turns are tight, hurricane gutters are wide and deep, upping the ante for the careless driver or the rare one with a wider wheel base.

We are large in other less tangible ways, too. We laugh a lot, we are familiar, we do not know when to show proper respect (though we try) and we are excessively casual. We sprawl too much, we lounge and slouch, we extend ourselves beyond our neat, electric gates too freely. We fool around at the swimming pool while most other families swim laps or take swimming lessons. We do cannonballs and have chicken fights, we lie down on the poolside benches and stare up at the sky while other people sit properly in the chairs.


I have long been familiar with the theories that suggest Americans are like they are because of their peculiar geography and history - that we spread ourselves wide because we live in a big land, that we are still looking for elbow room centuries after Daniel Boone moved West. I paid scant attention to such musings when I encountered them, mostly in academic journals or the occasional Atlantic Monthly type magazine. I figured they were primarily final projects for American Studies majors who later parlayed them into money making opportunities. But my year in Asia and brief visit back to the US has made me a true believer. We are a large people because we are from a large and spacious land. We have no idea how the rest of the world lives, and we can hardly imagine it.

While back in the US we took my daughter to college in the MidWest. We drove for 18 hours across the northeastern states, the width of New York, across northern Ohio, Indiana and into Illinois. The weather was perfect and the landscape was lovely beyond belief, even along the interstate. Most of the time the roads seemed nearly empty to me, used, as I had become, to driving in Kuala Lumpur. Even the 18 wheelers, unknown in Malaysia, did not seem too large for the road. the sky stretched out vast and blue; clouds floated high, even the airspace seemed huge and spacious.


If the St Lawrence Valley was grand, the MidWest was endless. Farms houses and silos looked miles away, with nothing but fields and empty space between them and the highway. Entrance and exit ramps were long and sweeping, profligate in their use of space since there was seemingly no end of land to be used up. Humble rest stops along the highway were vast, roomy caverns; the Ohio Welcome Center looked like a ballroom. Even the fullest parking lots had plenty of wide spaces to choose from. One could nearly always swing wide.


I have always nurtured what I believed was a healthy cynicism about the United States; I have never been a "my country right or wrong" kind of person; I have always tried to see things from a broader perspective than my own cultural lenses, and I welcomed the opportunity to live elsewhere for a year, to leave at least some of my cultural trappings behind and try in some small way to see my own world from the outside. I see that a year in Asia has changed my perspective the tiniest bit, but it has also made me realize that my culture is woven in and through every molecule of my being. I love being back here where everything seems larger than lifesize.

And yet, driving through the heartland my husband and I shook our heads over the amount of money, energy and resources required to sustain even the most frugal American lifestyle. Choosing to live where we used to, for example, requires us to spend more on gasoline in one month than many people live on for an entire year. And having seen another kind of life, we realize that is, indeed, a choice, not a fact of life. But at the same time I found myself longing to be home to stay, vowing I would never take anything for granted again, almost in the spirit of a foxhole conversion. "God, just let me move back to the US and I will send all the money I can spare to the Third World and never forget how blessed I am."


For now I am back in Asia - a expat version of Asia to be sure, with a big house, big car, plenty of money to dine out and travel - but close enough to rub shoulders daily with real people who know a very different life, and I find myself wondering if it is possible to have too much freedom, too many choices, too much space, too much money, too many rights, too much land. I don't really know, though I am certain it is possible to be much too attached to that kind of life.

I have before me a year to think about it, a tidy, compact, polite, manageable Asian year. I hope to think some big thoughts.