While study abroad is purportedly supposed to get you to understand foreign cultures, cultivate tolerance and provide an escape if (and when) you get bored of Whitman, it also provides another perspective on your own culture. In America it’s often hard to get a fresh look at what precisely America is because, well, whatever it is has surrounded us from day one. It’s hard to recite what American culture is aside from brand names and clichés about “independence,” “freedom” and “democracy” if that’s all you’ve grown up with.

In China, one of the first thing people have asked me is what living in America is like. Is it easy to become rich? Not as easy as it sounds. Is the environment cleaner? Yes. Is it more free? Yes, but that depends on what freedom means. Sometimes though, I have to temper their expectations and in that process you come to understand exactly what it is that you’re tempering.

See, America’s a unique place: a nation of immigrants whose identity is continually in flux. Just witness the uproar over the immigration law Arizona recently passed. From what I gather, any police officer can demand to see the immigration papers (such as  passports) of people they stop for other offenses like jaywalking, an open container on a street, or a traffic violation. Sounds draconian, and it is, but the debate on illegal immigration not only reflects economic and security anxieties but more fundamentally an anxiety over what it is to be American. I mean, let’s be frank; Arizona’s new immigration law will lead to racial profiling for better or for worse.

So, when I talk to Chinese students, almost all of them want to come to the United States for our world-renowned educational system, for a higher salary and for a more comfortable life. What I also tell them is that it’s challenging to fully integrate oneself into another society, even one as open as America (see the kind of rhetoric emanating from Rush Limbaugh on the immigration debate).   Moreover, these conversations offer a new perspective, a kind of critical self-analysis, because no one in America talks about what America is. It’s assumed there is a consensus.

Well, there’s not. On one hand, I’ve learned that the elderly face a dramatically different situation in America than in China. The whole tradition of valuing family extends, of course, to the elderly. As a consequence, you’ll see hundreds of retired people waltzing together at parks or doing calisthenics to upbeat high school football music at parks (which I saw in the city of Chengdu, home to pandas and spicy food). You won’t see that in America, at least in my experience.

Our privatized communities (a contradiction?) mean that at night, you’re more likely to see teenagers selling drugs, drinking or hanging out than a sea of elderly people lined up waltzing. Now, there are reasons for this cultural difference but what’s interesting to me is the difficulty I had in realizing this difference until I stepped outside and looked back in. And it’s that very act of stepping out and looking in that’s so helpful in watching American politics and culture from afar but not as a stranger.

On the other hand, living in an area with a high urban density makes you realize just how much land there is in America. You won’t see open lots, open fields or just uninhabited places in the middle of a city in China. There’s literally not much room. Almost 1.3 billion people live in 22 percent of China’s landmass despite the fact that China and the United States share a relatively equal portion of the globe. We’re only about 250 years old politically, and while manifest destiny spread Americans (or what constituted Americans in the 19th  century) across the continent, it’s not as if there’s no room left in the country.

Moreover, the openness in our lands precisely parallels the openness of our society and hits at the core of American identity. There’s enough room in America for more people. Not all of them are criminals nor are all immigrants illegal. If they are taking American jobs, then what jobs should they get? Why are some jobs fit for Americans to do but not others? These are the questions that proponents of Arizona’s immigration debate should be answering and it would behoove them to ask people who want to immigrate to America why.