People used to say a man’s happiness is consummated when he is able to “live in an American house, eat Chinese food and marry a Japanese woman,”  I am not sure about that, but I do know that to live in an American house is a tough thing to do.

Take the residential area now I live in, a middle-class town in the suburb of New York, for example.  The single houses, hundreds of them, aligned one by one along the latticed streets and avenues.  The lot, the size, and the style of each house in the same block of same street are originally identical.  Throughout so many years, due to different owners of the houses refurbishing and remodeling their properties occasionally, each house appears its own characteristic: different colors, moldings, sidings, lawns, trees and yards.  Basically, every single house consists of building itself, flat or two-storied, front yard, back yard, a garage, a driveway; each property is symbolically demarcated by fences or hedges.  The whole community is relatively a tranquil place, no hawkers, no horns; the only noises you could hear sporadically are the sound from lawnmowers in the neighborhood, and the sound from vehicles in distant expressways; the only people who are passing through your pathway are old couples walking the dog in the morning, mailmen, couriers and schoolchildren in the afternoon.  Is life comfortable here?  Yes, it is.  The question is how to make it sustainable at lowest cost and least time, and that is the problem.

Not exaggeratedly, most of the house owner’s spare time, whether he or she is still working or retired, are devoted to maintaining his or her home comfortable.  Except doing the domestic chores in a place bigger than an apartment, you have a lot of outdoor work to do: lawn mowing and branches trimming in all seasons, topdressing your yards in the spring, sweeping the falling leaves in the autumn and shoveling the drifts of snow in the winter, let alone the daily sprinkle except in winters.  Those are small nuisances when comparing with really big ones.  The houses were all built decades ago, basically framed in bricks and wood, and installed with the pipes made of less durable material when fabricated.  After so many years, the houses would inevitably confront various problems: plumbing, heating systems, termite-bitten wood and over-grown trees, and some of them would be conducive to endangering the safety of the house and even human lives.  Therefore, unless being an extremely home-proud person, as well as a most dexterous and able-bodied handyman, one just can’t tackle with those house jobs alone.  Under this circumstance, the maintenance cost, especially labor cost thereof, which enabling a single house to be comfortably and safely livable, and not becoming a blot on the landscape in neighborhood will be one of largest spending of a family.  In addition to the maintenance, usually the owner is encumbered with relatively high mortgages and property taxes.  You know, average Americans don’t have much savings, that leave them to own a house with less down-payment and larger loan, and with longer debt henceforth.  Besides, unlike in Taiwan where property taxes are ridiculously low, sometimes even lower than the fuel tax and plate fee combined for owning a vehicle, whereas in the America the property tax is levied upon the value approximately close to the market that makes the basic “managerial fee” burdensome for owning a house, particularly for the one in wealthy district.  So in my view, a house in the America may make its owner a miserable slave, not a happy master.