Will write for food

In a university in Beijing, a student asked, “Do poor people in America ride bicycles?”
I was a bit defensive as I explained that poor people in America do not ride bicycles. Eyes widened.

In China then, the rich had cars, the middle class bikes and the vast majority used feet.
My explanations sounded more deranged as I went on….”Poor people in America drive car. Used cars”. My explanation wasn’t even making sense to me. In the China they knew, rich people drove new cars. No such thing as a used car.
Here was a reminder (as if I needed another one) that I was from an alien culture, where obvious rules did not apply, where if not the proverbial “land of opportunity” America was certainly the land of impossibility, where principles of history were not only culturally modified, but absolutely reversed. Yes, America was a topsy-turvy place where poor people were fat, only rich people rode bicycles and success, if not life itself, had entirely different moorings and compass points.
The more I tried to explain, the more I sounded like an inter-planetary tourist with outrageous tales of a foreign land.
I suddenly realized that I had absorbed, and was passing on, the bizarre, but somehow true extravagant legends I had grown-up with – the mythical stories of streets of gold, lost civilizations and the fountain of youth.
It all made sense in its own way. Here I was, in arguably the oldest civilization on the planet, regaling them with tales of opulence and absurdity like some delusional Pied-Piper. I had become an evangelist for something I didn’t even know I believed in.
But perhaps that's the essence of real travel, when we slam up against our own cultural constructions and discover that real travel is never abstract; our needs and assumptions are as variable, and as real, as those across the world. It's the expectations and acquired habits of culture that are abstract; humanity is real. When we touch this, with or without shared language, we touch something solid.