Over the past decades, the Chinese economy has been growing, at breakneck speed, largely fueled by tremendous export volumes, massive debt, and over-reliance on the real-estate sector. Now, manufacturing is suffering under ongoing coronavirus lockdowns, energy shortages, and supply-chain disruptions. The debt bubble seems about to burst, and the real-estate industry will be the first casualty, with ripples eventually being felt throughout China and the rest of the world.

Timor-Leste is a country under construction. The road up to Maubisse was patchwork: stretches of glorious tarmac interspersed with much longer stretches of road populated with construction vehicles and their operators, filling in fissures and creating drainage systems. A work in progress, like much of the nation. The directions we were going off were shaky, to say the least: amalgamated from the collected advice of old blogs and people whose friends had been there recently. Second- or third-hand instructions; recycled wisdom. But that was the easy part.

Like millions of other Americans, Ted, who also found a new career working in the high-tech end of the film industry, fled America and reinvented himself overseas. And nowhere is the expat invasion more evident than in East and Southeast Asia. In Hong Kong alone the number of American expats is estimated to be 60,000 in 2009, though many say that number is much higher.That is almost the number of expats living in mainland China, which is somewhere around 72,000, according to the Chinese census.  

Not much has changed since then as far as being wasteful goes. In fact, it’s gotten worse. Sure Americans recycle. We talk green and want to save the polar bears. But Americans still remain as wasteful as ever. A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council released this week found that Americans “waste 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia, up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s.”

For longtime Indochina observers, the developing story is one full of irony and a signal for a major shift in the long if arduous U.S.-Indochina relations. Nearly four decades have passed, but America barely recovered from its psychic wounds. Vietnam, after all, was our “hell in a small place.” It spelled America’s ignominy. The country known for its manifest destiny was soundly defeated by what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once called a “fourth-rate power.” Still, here we are, at the turn of the millennia, seeking a return.