"... My boyfriend and I are experiencing a curious kind of post-third-world life culture shock...
“This place is so big and no one is living in it,” observed my boyfriend, as we walked down the echoing corriders of Arden Fair Mall on a Tuesday.
I thought of the Borei Keila people I’d been reporting on for the past month, who are battling intensely over tiny apartments and tiny patches of land. You could fit all of them rather comfortably by most Khmer housing standards into around 1/4 of this suburban California shopping center.
I wonder how recent Southeast Asian immigrants respond to this kind of unused space upon arriving in the USA – Sacramento hosts a very large immigrant population, after all, a number of people must have had the same thought as me about the uses and misuses of space.
It would be remiss to write this without mentioning that people are much bigger here. Upwards and outwards.
Restaurants are another curious experience, with every server speaking fluent English .....
The poor eat poorly in the USA, but at least they eat. I think of this as the Poor Are Fat countries, standing in direct relief to the Poor Starve to Death Under a Sweltering Pitiless Sun On A Regular Basis countries.
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