LITTLE ROCK — Nearly every week in China presents another cultural lesson for me. As an Arkansan who made such a stark transition to China, I am more than amazed each time a new event happens.
It’s enough that I am a nearly 6-foot black woman walking around in a sea of 5-foot Asians, but on top of it, I teach English to children who are very curious about the land that I come from.
“Mei guo!” they call it. It means beautiful country. They believe that America is a beautiful country.
Daily when you watch the national news, you hear of “those Chinese companies” that have taken our manufacturing jobs. It’s sad when you think about it. So many Americans have lost jobs at the manufacturing plants, where they could at one point have counted on their steady paychecks, because the plant was shut down, sold to an overseas company or chose to outsource jobs overseas.
CNN Money recently ran a couple of stories about this issue and highlighted a group of young Americans who are making strides in the manufacturing industry, which brought both a positive and a negative element to the forefront of this issue.
The positive is that there are some people under the age of 40 who have decided to engage in the manufacturing trade, which many people feel is a dying profession. The negative is that there is still a gaping hole of availability in the manufacturing field.
The United States has to make a collective effort to return to its manufacturing roots. With such a high unemployment rate, it is a shame that we are not hiring more people in this field to help increase the size of our economy.
CNN Money reported that U.S. factories are creating many new jobs, but owners are hard-pressed to find skilled American workers to fill them.
Rob Akers, chief operating officer of the National Tooling and Machining Association, recently stated that there is a “critical shortage of machinists,” and that enrollment in technical schools has been down for a while. The issue is how horrible the timing of this problem is because domestic contract manufacturers are actually seeing an uptick in business.
Although people poked fun at Newt Gingrich’s insight into developing space-exploration technology as a way to address some of the country’s economic issues, the truth of the matter is that in places like Kennesaw, Ga., companies like Win-Tech are receiving more manufacturing orders than they can fill from customers in the defense and aerospace industries.
The interesting thing about all of this is that for all the shipping of American jobs to China, the Chinese would rather buy items made in America. That’s right. They value products made in America more than the products made in their own country. They know that American manufacturers produce goods that last longer and perform better. That is why it is hard to fault people in America who protest that we should only buy American-made products. There are some caveats to that argument, particularly if you are a true believer in free trade, but it is indeed an understandable stance to take.
And, perhaps, we are learning something after all. I’m spending a year in China on an English-teaching contract, but while I’m here, I’m also paying close attention to China’s economy. A February economic report showed that U.S. small businesses that initially hurried over to Chinese factories are now ditching them for U.S. manufacturers.
Mitch Free, CEO of Atlanta-based MFG.com, told CNN Money that his company has seen a 15 percent increase since 2009 in inquiries from U.S. firms looking for American factories to replace Chinese suppliers. Despite this glimmer of positive news, the country is still dealing with the serious issue of having too many American manufacturing jobs outsourced to China and the closings of U.S.-based factories in general.
The innocence of a child can often teach us a lot. One of my students whose mother asked me to tutor him is a 10-year-old boy whose English name is Prince. (Kind of close to Princella, don’t you think?)
Prince saw a shiny silver pen on my desk during his tutoring session. The pen looked newer than it actually was and had “Cross County Sheriff” engraved on it. Sheriff J.R.Smith of my hometown of Wynne had furnished me with several of them during a campaign visit I made to his office during the 2010 primary election cycle.
Prince’s eyes lit up as he saw the pen. “Is from America? Very beautiful!” he said. Of course, I gave it to him and told him to keep it. He went home skipping because he “Have pen from America now! Have pen from America now!” (We’re still working on his English grammar.)
It was quite intriguing to me that a pen from the humble sheriff’s office in Cross County could bring a 10-year old such joy, but it did, nonetheless, and it opened my eyes a bit wider about the value of the American-made product.
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———Princella Smith is an Arkansas native. She is the founder of the American Pride PAC and currently serves as an instructor of oral English in the Hunan province of the People’s Republic of China.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 03/26/2012