View from Taiwan: potatoes, laptops, opportunity

An e-mail I received earlier this week about Maine’s questionable commitment to its school laptop program and, therefore, its future was especially well timed. Later that day I stood at the interior balcony two floors above the main-floor exhibition hall at the Taipei World Trade Center and looked down to the hall, which was busy with last-minute construction of dozens of display booths for an optoelectronics trade show scheduled to start the next day.

Optoelectronics is the technology that yields enhanced flat screens in televisions, cell phones, cameras. Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are the leaders in this technology, called TFT-LCD, which claims to use about half the power needed for plasma display panels. It’s among the latest advancements captured by this part of the world’s aggressive investment in electronics research, and its applications – in homes, cars, public buildings, shop floors, offices – are both obvious and astounding.

But let me tell you what was on the top floor, the seventh, of the exhibition hall: Idaho potatoes, Maryland crab products and wines, jellies, flour, bone meal – the agricultural goods of a dozen states in trade offices that sat alongside the offices of Central America, one for the Sultan of Oman, another for Thailand and one for Singapore, among the many. The offices aren’t expensive, about $800 a month in rent, according to Lee L. Chen, the project manager for the public relations office there, but they give states an important presence in Asia. Two or three Taiwanese, who understand selling in their country and have the contacts to do it, staff each office. (The state that proclaims “Dirigo,” as you likely guessed, isn’t at the front of this, or in the middle or even trailing – it just isn’t.)

So, above me as I watched the construction crews hustle to prepare the trade booths, the traditional goods of a world that has been sharing food for thousands of years and, below, the bright lights of someone’s value-added future. On my mind, Haley, a Maine girl who recently wrote a letter insightful enough to be sent by her teacher via e-mail around the state and, because e-mail doesn’t distinguish Maine from Manchuria or Macao, bounced from my work computer to my laptop in Taipei.

Haley’s problem is that she passed eighth grade. That means she must surrender the laptop she used and became adept at using in middle school. Her essay is a farewell to this technology. “For two years you have been mine,” she wrote, “you have held my work and more knowledge than I can ever hope to gain. By having you for the past two years you have opened up the world to me, expanding the way I think and the possibilities of the things I can do.”

The Maine Legislature, you’ll recall, couldn’t find the money to extend the laptop program for ninth-graders. Haley, with a confidence in her and classmates’ abilities that should shame lawmakers, isn’t buying it. “Money? That’s the best you can come up with? Money?” she writes. “Think of all the money that can be made with a smarter more tech-savvy generation! We will all be computer geniuses, and with the knowledge that has been crammed into my brain for two years, I can do just about anything!”

You can be part of the world in many ways. You can set up a global farm stand or you can push out to the edge of the industries that are offering better lives for people and new chances to succeed. Or you can sit home and wonder why the world keeps passing you by.

To be clear, the United States invests plenty in the high-tech future that was blinking and buzzing into life at the World Trade Center’s exhibition space. And some of those states that sell agricultural products on the seventh floor also have the kind of investments that puts them on the ground floor of the technological future. (California’s Taipei trade office was closed temporarily because of state budget difficulties, though Ms. Chen says confidently that it will reopen soon.)

What about Maine? It certainly can prosper without a trade office in Taipei – though I wonder whether Taiwan would prefer its potatoes to Idaho’s – or a research park for the next generation of TFT-LCD. But it must choose, specifically and with a deep commitment, a path that will provide opportunity for those who want to live in this beautiful state. Maine has numerous plans and almost as many beginnings that would do this, but sacrifice now for the long-term benefit of these ideas barely enters into its consciousness.

Maine has something unusual in its laptop program – a way for its next generation of young adults to enter the creative, knowledge-based economy that is zooming ahead worldwide as the digital age moves information ever faster. The laptop program is a means for Maine to keep up in some areas and catch up in others. Hardly anyone still doubts that the program works; there’s too much evidence that says it does. The question, as Haley accurately sees, is whether Maine can remain committed to its future even when money is scarce.

An answer will be found in its willingness to do what is necessary to be on the ground floor, the seventh or some combination of them. The risk of not choosing is that we will end up nowhere at all.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.