Dignity Is Like Clean Air
Regular readers of The Jaded Cynic know that I talk to taxi drivers.
I talk to taxi drivers because I'm interested in people, I'm interested in their stories.
And I talk to taxi drivers because I respect the work they are doing, and I respect them as human beings with whom I am sharing time.
I also talk to waiters and waitresses. I talk to shop clerks. I talk to cleaners. I say hello to bus drivers when I get on, and I wave my thanks to them when I alight.
Over the years, my interest in and respect for the wide range of people I have interacted with has provided me with hundreds of interesting experiences, and an enormous amount of learning about the world.
Something I have noticed during my decades in Asia: except in Japan, there is a huge and obvious divide between low-income workers and middle- and upper-class citizens. Many European, American (both North and South) and African residents of Asian countries talk to people in service industries, but locals, not so much.
India famously has a caste system that dates back over 3,000 years, and although most Indians today profess to not believe there is “a lot of” discrimination by caste in the country, over 60 percent of both men and women say it is “very important” to prevent intercaste marriage.
Japan and Korea have their own “untouchable” classes, and in China especially, low-income workers are near-invisible, which may be in part by choice, as the government’s household registration system (hukou) has created two classes of citizen: rural and urban. Guess which group has benefited most from China’s economic growth over the past 35 years?
Membership in East Asian societies (in which I have spent nearly my entire adult life) is in (large) part defined by race. The Chinese government believes the allegiance of overseas Chinese (i.e. people of Chinese descent) should be first of all to China, and has spent billions of dollars to extend the reach of its state media to the farthest reaches of the Chinese diaspora. In Japan, former Prime Minister Tarō Asō has described Japan as a nation inhabited by people who are members of “one race, one civilization, one language and one culture.” And so on. A couple of years ago, I wrote about some of my experiences of racism here in East Asia.
In Singapore, racism is a thing, of course, as it is everywhere, but a bigger divide is economic class. Singapore is a young country, and there’s not much “old money”; most of the money (and there is plenty of it) would qualify as “new money” in Europe, Japan and the Americas.
But as has been the case in Hong Kong since 1997, locals in Singapore recently have been priced out of the ostentatious wealth game – luxury property, supercars, private jets, etc. – by mainland Chinese.
Just over 10 years ago, mainland Chinese dusted off a word with a long history. During the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties, from 420 to 589, tuhao (土豪) referred to influential or wealthy people. The term was used as a pejorative during the Cultural Revolution to describe landlords who were the target of the Cleansing the Class Ranks purge that resulted in over 500,000 deaths from 1968 to 1969.
The recent revival of tuhao resulted from the rise of conspicuous consumption among mainland China’s nouveau riche, and Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes aside, there has been no consumption more conspicuous than that of mainland Chinese over the past 25 years.
Displays of ostentatious wealth have risks, of course. Yes, to get rich is glorious, and reportedly there are over 400 Chinese U.S.-dollar billionaires, but since 2012, when Xi Jinping took power, approximately 2.3 million Chinese government officials have been prosecuted for corruption. Believe it or not, there is a Wikipedia page titled Chinese Politicians Executed for Corruption.
Thinking about inequality, and classism, I recently came across a book by a Singaporean sociologist, Teo You Yenn. From her name, she is ethnically Chinese, which in Singapore means she is a member of the ruling class.
In her book, This Is What Inequality Looks Like, the passages that interested me were here:
I often encounter surprise at my research topic of poverty in Singapore. The people I speak with about my work comment that poverty is not visible here, not in the way it is in cities where there are many homeless persons and panhandlers. This is true and I am indeed often struck, when I visit other cities, by the sight of homeless people amidst skyscrapers, suits and Starbucks cups. On the other hand, as I learnt more about the jobs that low-income persons in Singapore take on, I began to see that low-income persons are in reality highly present in most Singaporeans’ daily lives. In the rental flats, I met people who work as cashiers in chain stores that I shop at; as petrol kiosk attendants at places where I refuel my car; as deliverymen at the companies that deliver my goods; and, probably more frequently than any other job, as cleaners in office buildings, condominiums and shopping malls––all places that I am at on a regular basis. When I started paying more attention in my everyday life to low-wage workers, I realized that when we say we cannot see poverty in Singapore, it is partly because its manifestations are masked and partly because we do not look.
When I paid attention to people working in low-paid jobs, this is what I saw: often, people do not acknowledge their presence, even when they are directly interacting with them. Customers generally do not say hello to cashiers or make eye contact with them. Office-workers and residents frequently sidestep cleaners in their buildings as if they are invisible. Drivers cut into the lanes of motorcyclists and delivery vans. Supervisors and customers speak to them loudly and in demanding tones. People do not consistently say please and thank you. This is the reality of being a low-wage worker: one is ignored and invisible at best, yelled at and treated with disrespect at worst. The context is important to know before one can understand why people remember and recall what seem to be small events.
The title of that chapter of This Is What Inequality Looks Like is Dignity Is Like Clean Air, and Teo goes on to write, “Dignity is like clean air. You do not notice its absence unless it is in short supply.”
Years ago, I opened an office of my Hong Kong company in Shanghai, and I traveled there from Hong Kong once or twice a week for several years. On one trip, I had managed to land a meeting with the marketing director of General Motors (SAIC General Motors Corporation), and my China general manager, Sarah, and I made the long trek from downtown (Puxi) to deepest darkest Pudong, where the GM manufacturing plant was located.
It was a rainy, cold spring day, and when we arrived at the gatehouse, it turned out that the marketing director had forgotten about the meeting and was at the company’s Puxi office (!). On the phone, he said, “Grab some lunch and I will be there in 45 minutes.”
We were not permitted inside the GM plant, so we picked our way across the puddled road to a trucker café that was absolutely disgusting. Sarah and I used to play a game – “How Cheaply Can We Eat Lunch”, which in China in the 1990s was very cheaply indeed – and after playing the game scores of times, this trucker café was the overall winner, but the floor and tables were filthy and food was disgusting. After we both ate a small part of our meals, I said to Sarah, “Let’s go back and wait in the gatehouse. It’s less horrible than this place.”
The gatehouse was a concrete building with half a dozen plastic chairs against the wall and a high concrete desk separating three guards from visitors. There were no visitors except us, and after sitting there for a few minutes, I said to Sarah (Shanghainese with an Australian passport and near-fluent English), “Let’s talk with these guys.”
I needed her help as an interpreter, but she was always willing to indulge my crazy laowai (老外) ideas, and she said to the guys, “My boss is from America. Is there anything you want to talk about with him?”
Now this was just a few weeks after a Chinese fighter jet had crashed into a U.S. signals intelligence plane off the Chinese coast (but outside Chinese airspace), forcing it to land on a military airfield on Hainan island. The Chinese government had been using the incident to whip up anti-American sentiment, and it was an interesting time to be an American in China.
Of the three guards, one guy was one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. But it was clear after only a few minutes that he was also one of the least intelligent. He had no questions for me. The second guard did not seem happy to be a guard at SAIC General Motors, and also had no questions.
The third guard was ordinary looking, of average (which is to say, in China in the 1990s, thin) build, and not tall. He thought for a minute, then said to Sarah, “Would you please ask him [me] if he thinks there is a difference in the sense of humor of Chinese and Westerners.”
Wow. Good question!
I thought for a minute, then replied, “I think the main difference is that Westerners are more willing to laugh at themselves.” At that time (and mostly still today), Chinese (and Japanese) humor that you could see on television was slapstick. Takeshi’s Castle is a great example from Japan, and spawned hundreds of similar shows all over the world (including the U.S.). Takeshi’s Castle was a game show that set difficult physical challenges for contestants, who if they failed, would very often fall into water or mud. Cue audience laughter.
The guard (I’m sorry to say that I have forgotten his name) absorbed my response, then said, “Yes, maybe.”
Through Sarah, I spoke with the guard for another 30 minutes or so (the marketing manager did not get back to the factory within the promised 45 minutes), learning about his family background (he was the son of peasants from Shandong, one of China’s poorest provinces) and how he liked Shanghai (not very much, as migrant workers were discriminated against).
We learned that he shared an apartment with a large group of migrant workers in a sort of dormitory set-up, and that although he was making much better money than he could have made in Shandong, the cost of living was proportionally higher, and he had been unable to save much money.
I asked him what he thought about “the Hainan spy plane incident”, as it was known, and he – inundated by Chinese government propaganda – replied with one of the best bits of geopolitical analysis I have ever heard. He said, “I don’t believe what your government says … and I don’t believe what my government says.” Good strategy!
At a certain point, the grumpy guard returned from his shift monitoring the gate barrier arm and handed over the duty to our new friend. He excused himself to go outside, but I didn’t want our conversation to end, and said, “We’ll join you.”
Which is how Sarah and I (in a suit and tie) came to be standing outside a concrete guardhouse in Pudong, next to a Chinese security guard in an ill-fitting suit, learning that Shanghai women are uninterested in dating low-paid migrant workers from Shandong province.
While we were standing there, dozens of Chinese middle managers came and went on foot through the gate (this was before SAIC-GM had sold millions of Buicks, Chevys and Cadillacs to the Chinese middle class), mostly dressed identically in shirts and ties and sweaters or sweater vests. Not one of them looked at the guard, or acknowledged his presence.
You see where I’m going with this.
To these newly minted Chinese yuppies, our friend was invisible, a member of the unnoticed servant class that cooks and cleans and drives and guards.
And to me, the invisibility of our friend was noticeable. I imagine he took it for granted.
But then, something happened.
A car pulled up to the gate, and our friend pressed the button to open the barrier arm.
The vehicle was chauffeur-driven, and in the back seat was a middle-aged white man whom I guessed to be a senior executive working in the plant.
Our friend, in his uniform, saluted the executive, and standing alongside him, in my suit, I saluted as well.
The exec looked through his window at us, smiled slightly, and slowly brought up his arm in a crisp salute.
His car pulled away, and with Sarah translating, the guard said to me, “See what I mean about sense of humor? A Chinese would never, ever have done that.”
A few minutes later, the marketing manager turned up and Sarah and I had our meeting. We didn’t get the business and I don’t remember a thing about the guy, or the meeting. But I will remember that guard, and our conversation, for the rest of my life.
I talk to taxi drivers. And cleaners. And security guards.
And dignity is like clean air.
Good story, it resonates with me because for years I myself was one of those low-income workers, although I think that in my country, for cultural reasons, there is no real discrimination based on work, all jobs are respected and we all talk to everyone (except, like in any other part of the world, with those people who look down on everyone), unless there are orders that limit conversations with clients, users or anyone in general.
I have had conversations with cleaners, shop assistants, security guards, receptionists, etc. As you say, everyone usually has something interesting to tell, even things that officially cannot be told, and that they find out about because they are often "invisible" to their arrogant bosses or clients.
Great story!