The Bay Area is, of course, the world’s laboratory for new technology. I tend to meet people finding solutions for problems I never knew we had. A woman told me she was developing an algorithm that would determine what kind of books a child might want to read.

Everyone keeps offering me credit in America. I drove away from a dealer with a brand-new $30,000 car without handing over a penny. It was so thrilling that I keep repeating this routine. I bought a Vespa. Why not? At 2 percent interest the money seemed almost free. Then I bought shopping carts full of home improvement materials at Home Depot and was told I didn’t have to pay for them for two years.

Someone needs to tell Equifax to decline my next credit application. This could end in penury.

Of course some of what I’ve encountered has been less alluring. During all my years in Asia I constantly grappled with the perniciousness of poverty. Yet somehow I was unprepared for the scale and severity of homelessness in San Francisco.

The juxtaposition of the silent whir of sleek Tesla electric vehicles, with the outbursts of the mentally ill on the sidewalks. Destitution clashing with high technology. Well-dressed tourists sharing the pavement with vaguely human forms inside cardboard boxes.

I’m confounded how to explain to my two children why a wealthy society allows its most vulnerable citizens to languish on the streets. My son, when he first encountered a homeless man, asked why no one “wanted to adopt him.”