The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world, and we live in both worlds at once - our mindset is modern, but the issues and problems of the developing world are still very much things we have to deal with.
I first encountered this dichotomy at a young age, when I was invited to my friend's house. It was a mansion in Bel-aire. Then another friend - a beach house overlooking Santa Monica. I was too young to know at the time, but we lived with no savings in a small apartment, and eventually bought a modest house, but even then, our furniture was mix-mash, we did a lot of poor quality self repairs, and were extremely careful about spending. Our life was focused on frugality - I remember a lot of small things I found particular, like my mom would reuse the paper towels to clean the dishes, and our TV was older than me by 1 year - it was my mom's TV from college.
When I was in high school, I visited my grandparents back in Taiwan, and I vividly remember the experience, not in a good way. They used to be rich but gambled most of their wealth away, including most of their house. It left them with this pitiful structure, a corner skeleton of what was once a majestic courtyard house that had fallen into disrepair and was never modernized. The structure wasn't fully enclosed so you had to sleep in a mosquito net, and there was barely a modern kitchen and bathroom. Needless to say, I did not want to go back.
I eventually worked at a real estate company and got a chance to view many houses on the market in SoCal. One step into the house and you can immediately tell a lot about the family's background. I remember 2 houses distinctly - a rich Asian immigrant's house, and a rich Caucasian's house. The Caucasian's was filled with relics of community - pictures of their involvement on sports teams, pictures of grandparents leading town hall meetings - it felt like they were rooted into the city and were an integral part of the community there. In contrast, the Asian immigrant's house was filled with relics of achievement - the doctorate was posted on the wall, lots of trophies and awards for their kids. The imagery offers a lot of insight into family and community development lagging behind income development in immigrant families.
From developing world living conditions, to a small apartment, to a modest house, to seeing rich houses and mansions in Bel-aire - each of these provides me a snapshot of way more than just income. Beyond wealth, there is poverty of taste, standards, and expectations, family practices and emotional intelligence that define many Asian family backgrounds. Beating your kids is not the right way to raise them. Yelling louder is not the way to win an argument. Hiding your faults hurts your family more than it helps. Our parents came from humble, uneducated backgrounds, and modern society and the cultural values it instills - while a gift from them - is something they themselves lacked.
Interestingly enough, I have a lot of friends who feel a similar regret as this article implies. Our parents have done such a good job of creating a modern world environment for us that we don't see the developing world heritage until much later. What it means is that it is hard to understand the advice and mindset of our parents growing up, and only much later do we appreciate their perspective and effort - when it feels too late.
Your testimony reminds me of a kid I met in Mali. The guy was our guide, and he spoke 6 languages, including 4 local dialects, french and english. He had a cellphone and knew how to drive a 4x4.
He drove us to the desert, in a place at the north of Bamako known as the Dogon's country. There, he asked us if we were ok to take a detour by his parents village, and we agreed.
His parents were living with no electricity, using water from a well, in a small mud-made house. They slept among the goats and chickens.
It made me realized he had to live between those 2 worlds, and it felt so unreal.
When Asian parents says, don't get a literature degree, become a doctor, they have a good reason to say it.
It's not necessarily this bad in terms of standard of living (the above description would be subsistence levels, maybe less than 200$ a year), but the median household income in China is about $12-15k US a year compared to $56k in the US. And it's not that in China everything is cheaper so 12-15k goes a long way - no, they just live with less. Things that we take for granted, like insurance, available hospitals, quality goods, good customer service, safety of food & goods (a big one we don't even notice) - these are the result of a developed economy, and we definitely pay for it - we (as an economic whole) have the additional income to allow for these things to exist.
Even with a 10% GDP increase per year, it would take China another 15 years to get to US level standard of living. With a 5% GDP growth, it would take 30 years. These are just numbers to me (12k vs 50k living, I can see one is 4 times better!), but my parents know firsthand what the difference feels like and it makes their urgency much stronger.
For reference, I think my grandparents would be living on an equivalent of around $2-3000 a year based on what I know my mom gives them (and maybe other family members).
A few days back I was discussing this with my friend who immigrated to the US and settled there. I'm an Indian. We were discussing how his wife and kids, who are Americans just do not understand his perspective of things from a living standards stand point. The thing is sometimes its impossible to erase the effect poverty has on you. When you go through tough times, your benchmarks to save and invest get set based on the worst times your life has seen.
And then that spills over to every purchase or life style decision you will ever make. Be it clothes to car or whatever.
In India I've seen people who have been born in well off families a generation early just fail to understand why the people who have just come out of lower middle class/poverty don't take vacations, or don't buy expensive sneakers or gadgets or even dine at good restaurants.
When I worked in the US, I used to be totally floored at the amount of opportunities and abundance of every thing the country had to offered. To me most of the complaints US citizens had looked like cry me a river themed whining. Eventually I realized every one just get seasoned to whatever they have and that sort of becomes their new reality over time.
Both my wife and I grew up quite poor (for US standards). We didn’t quite fit in at university and had a hard time relating to our peers who grew up with money (my wife’s parents encouraged her to not go to school but just stay and marry local).
We’re doing well for ourselves, but still don’t really fit in among our peers. We’ve coined a phrase for it: “your poverty is showing.”
It doesn’t matter how much I make: at the core I’m still a poor kid in a rich world. Which I’m fine with; it’s what gives me drive. But I do worry about my kids who are growing up like the rich kids I never liked...
My parents didn't have a lot of extra money for things, so I rarely asked for the moon. I only asked for things I thought they could provide. But when they couldn't (not enough $), they couldn't and that was how it was explained. "I know you want this, I want you to have it, but I can't." As a child that is disappointing but understandable.
For my children, when they ask for something I'm rarely not able to buy it for them. Instead of saying I can't, I have to say, "I won't" because, well...many reasons but mainly because kids shouldn't have every damn thing that catches their eye. But it is a harder case to make. I'm telling them it is in my power to give them what they ask, but I won't do it.
"We can't afford that" was the default phrase growing up. I didn't push back, but I also didn't really learn (so to speak). Every one of my siblings (myself included) followed a similar pattern: as soon as we started making money, we bought what we wanted (because we finally could). We were only really taught that "no" was because one couldn't, not because one shouldn't.
My social experiment with my own children is still very early, but we've taken to using the phrase, "we don't think that's worth our money." Typically followed with, "you can spend your own money on it if it's important enough to you." Cheap crappy plastic toys that they're going to forget about in a matter of hours? Not worth my money. Candy at the checkout line? You have a 50/50 chance of convincing me (see above; I'm still a sucker for candy).
The other side of this was growing up we bought the cheapest of everything. On one hand, I can't go to the grocery store without looking at per unit pricing (which is advantageous). On the other hand, I have a hard time choosing between more expensive quality and less expensive junk. Some things are worth spending the real money on (our tent that we bought from REI will last forever; the Coleman tent we bought early in our marriage lasted for one season). But in all honesty, I'm still learning which things fall into the "buy it right and you only buy it once" category.
And when we're invited to fancy dinner parties and eating fancy food, I can't help but think, "I wish they just had a stack of pepperoni pizzas..."
>My social experiment with my own children is still very early,
So I had a profound life lesson at around 7 or 8 years old. I had grown up near a corner store with a lot of nickel candies, so most of my weekly dollar allowance went to candy. I had learned how to optimize that dollar, how many laffy taffy, vs tootsie rolls, vs licorice, vs jolly rancher... so I knew how much satisfaction a dollar could buy. One day, we were going through a jack in the box drivethru and they had an ad for a stuffed Pinocchio for $5, and I begged my dad for it. He in turn said something to the effect of, "if I give you the $5 dollars would you still buy it?", and my mind immediately started thinking about all the things I could buy with $5. I could buy all the candy I could want, and still have some quarters left over for the stand up arcade games. Needless to say, I didn't really want the Pinocchio doll, certainly not for the price when it was my money.
Sadly, I have no idea how to reproduce this lesson with my daughter. She has so many people showering her with stuff, that she has no concept of how to maximize her utility with the money she has. And no one seems to keep the diverse array of cheap candy anywhere any more, which makes me kind of sad.
somehow this reminded me my father, we were pretty poor until my parents got divorced and necessity forced my father to be successful in his field, so nowadays he is living in opposite extreme despising cheap things even when it's not rational and difference between top notch product and cheap/budget it's negligible
he had new door installed including electronic peephole and I fail to understand single benefit of having camera instead of peephole -viewing angle it's worse, visibility in darkness it's worse, frame rate it's inferior and you have to occasionally charge the battery (it's really just cheap phone in different package with external camera), so he paid 5-10 times more for inferior but modern looking product. same could be said about his smart watch which cost like 4-5 times of my watch, but functionality it's pretty same, some even worse, especially battery life, he need to charge his watch every other day if he dare to use them, half of the time it's just more convenient to wear his old analog watch, while i wear mine 24/7 and charge battery once in 3-6 weeks and don't use my watch as some thing to show off
When I say that my parent's couldn't buy some certain things it kinda makes it sound like I had a deprived childhood or lived in want. There's a whole host of things that were always there: safe food, clean water, AC in summer, heat in winter, clothes fit me and were seasonally appropriate, proper footwear, lights always worked, dog always fed, an adequate public school, shelves of books, an Atari 2600, at least 1 bicycle, a freaking 3 bedroom house, two cars, an attic full of Christmas decorations, parents never beat me, neighbors that could be trusted. I could go on.
Writing all that out makes me wonder why even as I child I was bummed about not getting the Kenner Millenium Falcon or the GI Joe base.
I don't know if saying no just for the sake of it is the answer lol. My parents were similar to what you were describing and if I wanted something I would have to pay for it myself. Even when I was too young to work, I'd skip lunch in school just to save enough money to purchase the things I'd rarely get otherwise. In the long-term it's turned me into a fiscally responsible adult, but sometimes I think it's made me too frugal in the long run. It may just be the people I hang around who are on the irresponsible end of the fiscal spectrum, but it's always on my mind whether it's me or them.
I used to dislike "rich kids." What worked for me is to look inside and ask myself exactly why I don't like them.
It turns out that, at least for me, there isn't any valid reason. It boils down to me being upset at their 1) privilege, or 2) difference.
I was upset that they had privileges that I didn't. But was that their fault? Not really. We can't really fault individuals for having advantages in life---indeed, my intellect and work ethics are also things I were born with.
I was upset that they are different from me. Put into words, this sounds mean and petty, but that's really the root of much hate. They eat differently, wear differently, play differently. But being different is certainly not wrong! If I hate on rich kids for being different, that's just pure bigotry, no more no less.
So I try to judge "rick kids" just like I do everyone else. Do they treat others nicely? Do they elevate people around them? And despite the stereotype, I've found that many rich kids are just as nice. Indeed, I certainly plan to raise my kids, who are born wealthy, to grow up as nice people.
I'm not a parent so take this advice with a grain of salt but I think holding your kids accountable for their actions can go a long way.
Like if they break their phone you give them an old flip phone so they are still reachable but they have to earn money (mowing grass, do the chores...) to pay for a new one (even if paying them a new phone doesn't make a dent in your budget).
My parents grew up very poor. We were comfortably middle class until my dad died while I was young. I helped my parent with bills from the time I was 18.
Even in me, you can see the difference that never going hungry makes vs my mother, who regularly went hungry growing up. And will still drive 45 minutes across town to save $2 on gas.
"Habit" isn't even a strong enough word, as that implies it has a chance of changing. It's more like an outlook/heuristic that was formed in one environment, and now that environment has changed but there's no acceptance/reasoning about that change.
> It doesn’t matter how much I make: at the core I’m still a poor kid in a rich world.
Does this tend to bring destructive tendencies? I earn well over median income and have investments etc. I still live cheap enough to be self-sufficient on less than $12K a year (inclusive of rent). I am so scared of what's going to happen when it all ends that it keeps me up at night.
There's a mix of being over-cautious and buying all the things you were ever deprived. But really it means that I don't really fit in socially. Really the only people I tend to enjoy for long periods of time were others who came from a poor background but have found success.
In your opinion what do you think of the abundance? In my opinion this abundance is nice to be kept aside for tough days but should not be used/exposed on a day to day basis.
I too am an Indian and I see not only the well off but even the middle to lower middle class who look at the well off and set the standards based on them. So many of them buy so many useless stuff and waste a lot be it food or some other material things.
My earliest childhood memories are of the varied households we bounced around in because my mom couldn't keep the rent paid reliably after she threw my alcoholic father out. She remarried a Marine and that experience of poverty, along with the constant familial abusiveness, never directed at me but rather my mom, went away overnight, to be relived once a year when we took summer trips back.
Abundance to me is something you need to fight for in order to keep in your life. I'm the first one to notice and complain at my job when the team lunches start to go away under the pressure of meetings, the first one to start playing ping pong again when time pressures keep us from going.
The little abundances we have in life are to be managed, never vilified. There's an amazing soul food restaurant that's a little ways away, the portions are huge and the taste is so decadent. I'd go there every day almost if it was closer. I'd take half the food home or get less carb-heavy sides. But when I suggest going as a team there's just so much pushback.
Every time I find a new form of abundance I need to also find a way to integrate it into daily life, otherwise it goes away.
Yes. The liberal arts are “the objects of study worthy of a free person” as opposed to a wage slave. The public university system was meant to make these aristocratic pursuits available to the masses. Until costs exploded, it worked.
Even if it was free, the ability of the non nobles to provide for themselves as they don't have a family to live off of is something they really should take into account when pursuing a degree. And one can always earn two degrees in 4 years, one for the aristocratic pursuits, one so that retirement is possible.
> Until costs exploded, it worked.
What costs are you talking of, specifically? Moving manufacturing to lower wage countries has actually reduced costs of goods quite a lot, and productivity gains throughout the world have consequently increased wealth.
The real problem seems to be income inequality; whereas right after WW2 inequality was low, it has recently exploded with the implementation of reckless tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting down on essential social security nets.
Its a shame really: the US has its problems, but the American middle class has generally been a source of prosperity and stability, and it seems to be rapidly fading away.
Reminds me of the Paul Erdős quote: ”Hungary was a poor country - the natural sciences were harder to pursue because of cost, so the clever people went into mathematics.”
Without being too much of a prick, my dad grew up in a first world western country in a house with a dirt floor, had no power until after 1970, ate a diet of mostly potatoes a few months before they were due to be planted and 10 months since they were picked, slept with the cows because it was more comfortable than sleeping in a bed with the other male children, and ended up a comparatively wealthy amateur entomologist only because he got a free studentship and became a teacher. They used to store meat in a Coolgardie safe before they bought a kerosene fridge.
Anyone in a developed country has an insane level of wealth even compared to our parents, for the most part. I'm reading High Output Management right now, and it's basically the opposite of every strike and industrial action my parents found themselves in. There's an inherent tension between a stable life and a rich life that I find hard to resolve.
I was brought up in a middle-class+ family in France. We read what we needed and my parents lived a simple life.
I am now much better than them, financially. I still live a simple but comfortable life and my children somehow get infused with it (they have everything they need to the point that I never know what to get them for xmas).
I was very surprised when the 12 yo one told me one day "rich people are rich because they live a life of less welthy ones, and the less wealthy want to live a life of rich". He was referring to his friend whose parents have a hard time making the month buying him the latest iphone because his friend insisted on having the latrst one (while my son has a mid level phone he is genuinly happy with)
What do distinction do you make between "dialects" and other languages? I understand "dialect" to mean something like "one of several (usually regional) variants of a language", but that is only really meaningful when the language is referenced. Do you mean he spoke 4 local dialects of the same (unspecified) language, or of French or English? Both of these seem to be the wrong interpretation, since you count them as six languages in total.
What you both describe is large cultural division between survival values and self-expression values between two generations.
In quickly developing countries some people already live modern life but their parents come from very traditional valued society. What in the west is cultural division between grandparents and grandchildren can be division between parents and children.
Political scientist Ronald Inglehart (known for Inglehart-index and Inglehart–Welzel cultural map used in the World Values Survey) noticed the same difference between post-war generations and their parents. His book 'The Silent Revolution' (1977) was the first attempt to map these differences between generations and cultures.
I noticed similar cultural division after Soviet Union collapsed in 1992 and I made friends with Russians of my age who moved to Finland, I realized that they shared the same values as my parents (and I have old parents).
this is very good point about generational differences based on how fast it's country developing
when I compare household of my Chinese parents in law with my parents households it really seem like we skipped generation, because their household it's closer to my deceased grandma's household with few exceptions and same can be applied also about opinions and thinking even when i compare my wife with them and even she has to admit the have really old school opinions closer to generation of my grandma than my parents and these are quite educated urbanites which are almost middle class (and didn't object their daughter marrying foreigner it expecting some money from me as happened to many of my colleagues in China), not some poor uneducated farmers where the difference must be even starker
"Survival values" is just right, and key. I've lived this divide (1st gen Russian), and as a teenager could not comprehend why my parents constantly pressured me to study physics and maths, which did not come naturally to me, and why they did not see any value in my achievements in the humanities, or even recognise them as work at all.
As a young adult I understood that from their perspective, physics and maths was the most sure-fire way for Soviet Jews to gain a modicum of stability and security in a country whose industrial and military sectors were prestigious and financed above all else. But I still resented them for not truly internalising that they were raising their child in a different culture and a different economic reality.
As an adult, I eventually came to see how a life that started in Stalinist Russia had robbed my parents of the cultural and emotional intelligence that would have allowed them to empathise with a child growing up in such radically different circumstances. And how instead of those intelligences, there was an unsleeping instinct for survival and a permanent anxiety, knots that are just starting to show signs of loosening in what are probably the last years of their lives.
Except that math background still gets you work in the US. There is a reason why a lot of Russian immigrants that were born in the 60s are directors of departments in the US. You gotta give the USSR its due - it had the best education in the world for a bit.
The USSR also completely shut down the humanities. Generations without philosophy or sociology or anthropology or psychology, it impoverished the culture.
> "Beyond wealth, there is poverty of taste, standards, and expectations, family practices and emotional intelligence..."
This insightful post really hit home. I'm first-generation Russian, my parents arrived in NYC in the late 80s. The cultural and mental gaps between us are vast, it feels like we're from different planets. It's only in my 30s, with some emotional maturity and pointed study of history, that I'm starting to understand it, and what I'm starting to understand is very similar to what you wrote. That probably explains why, growing up in 90s NYC, I felt an easy and immediate camaraderie with first generation Chinese kids.
"Russian" diaspora living in NYC is quite different from the Soviet people who settled in the other parts of the US. Living in Brooklyn actually had caused a significant amount harm to the immigrants, ended up living there, because it sheltered them from the normal, mainstream American culture.
Yours was a valuable testimony. Let me just comment on one aspect of the mindset bit. Class, as you noted, still very much exists, but modern day aristocrats don't expose themselves to snipers as they did two or three centuries ago. Instead we get celebrities and players and self-made rich critters out there to catch the limelight and flak. And family, the key base to aristocratic wealth and power, is played down as unnecessary, because a meritocratic system needs no more than individual prowess to succeed.
Instead we get celebrities and players and self-made rich critters
out there to catch the limelight and flak. And family, the key base
to aristocratic wealth and power, is played down as unnecessary,
because a meritocratic system needs no more than individual prowess
to succeed.
Terrific observation!
Although I think I get what you mean by this I'd love for you to expand on it. I'm sure you have dwelled as I have and arrived at some keen insights.
Also who or what did you mean by
snipers as they did two or three centuries ago
Were aristocratic families the object of scorn back then? All the attention they received from society eventually led to bad stuff?
Bad actors?
If you look at XIX century sources, you'll see there were groups whose idea of fostering human progress was to terrorize the ruling class, mostly by piecemeal killing of its members with guns and bombs.
Chesterton wrote The Man who was Thursday (1908) spoofing the policial mindset about anarchist plots that was pervasive at the turn of the century. If you search for "XIX century novels about terrorism" you'll find more material.
I don't think this story is particularly limited to immigrants. I remember that when my grandfather died, I didn't know about it for two months because I was studying abroad and my mother "didn't want to upset me". Our family has been living in the Americas since the 1600s.
Coming from a smaller Southern town that existed to produce textiles--none of which are produced in the US anymore--I grew up relatively poor and without guanxi or even any role models and mentors to advise me. Only in the past decade since leaving college and living in a large US city do I see the huge deficits in my understanding and network that such a background creates.
pff, only two months, my wife (Chinese, if it matters) just learned her grandfather passed away last summer year ago, because they didn't want to upset her when she was like 5 months pregnant and this was almost 90yo guy with health issues, so not much surprise there to upset anyone
as I pointed to her if they lie about such big thing how can you trust them even with smaller things where they would not hesitate to lie at all
You speak so eloquently of Chinese diasporic issues. Being Chinese American myself, I would literally sign up to read more, since you hit the nail on the head so well. Would it be possible to get your contact info? - if just to buy you a coffee if I'm ever in your area.
Really flattered by all the responses, did not expect it. I currently live in Hong Kong. You can reach me here - spencer @ terminal1.co
For blogging, I prefer interjecting my thoughts into existing conversations rather than starting them, so I don't write my own blog pieces that often. But I would be happy to receive emails with questions, encouragement, or further discussion.
If I do write something related to Asian American issues, I can add you to a simple mailing list - just let me know you'd like that, although don't expect to receive much content.
Likewise here! It's rather comforting sometimes to have one's inner thoughts and worries laid bare in the public by someone else. One of the many benefits of the arts and writers -- especially those who shared a common experience with you.
As others have said you are actually describing class and cultural differences which don't depend on country. I moved from the Midwest to LA and am still in shock and awe at the displays of wealth here. I grew up with a much more frugal mindset and in a place with much more modest homes. Keep in mind even in the US, the fraction of people living in Bel-Aire mansions, or anything even close to that wealth, is very, very small.
Also, I suspect that there are plenty of very wealthy people and luxurious residences in Taiwan that would be equally jarring to you. My point is it's not the country, it's class and culture.
> The harsh reality of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese is that while many of us went to the top universities and grew up with a modern, 1st world mindset, we can't escape the fact that our financial and family background is from the developing world
The harsh reality of a large number of people (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation and beyond) living in Los Angeles is that they did not go to any universities, don't have any family or friends in Bel Air / Santa Monica, eke out an existence in a series of apartments (sometimes with their extended family, or in a car, or in some sort of civic transition shelter or on the street), and have a close relative with a chronic drug abuse problem or a chronic disease.
"Beyond wealth, there is poverty of taste, standards, and expectations, family practices and emotional intelligence that define many Asian family backgrounds."
This is a great insight and I see it all the time in the Asian community. The comparing of children's credentials and achievements, the psychological terror of getting less than an A in class growing up, the the keeping up with the Joneses w.r.t. other Asian families. This stuff really messed with my head growing up and now as an adult, I appreciate the work ethic they instilled in me but I will never raise my kids like that and I appreciate the simple things in life and spend more on quality not quantity. I never faced the horrors and atrocities they faced in their respective countries growing up and I'm forever grateful for their sacrifices in dropping everything to immigrate here and being born and raised in America. I simply would not be the person I am today if I had to come here via H1-b visa so I'll take my odd childhood in the best light possible, my first generation parents made the best of their situation compared to the educated and stable parents of my peers.
Can anyone here first generation American relate? I may be younger than most, turning 30. Would love to hear your experiences and relationship with parents w.r.t. culture and practices growing up in America (or immigrating young) and how it effected how you raise(d) your children.
I can certainly relate to some of this stuff coming being a child of immigrants from the Balkan countries (not born in the US) but having grown up here most of my life. My father grew up on a farm with no electricity and a well for water. And my mother grew up in a tiny apartment in the city.
Oddly, I see a ton of advantages from my background. The focus and hard work ethic of my parents was easy to replicate and I didn't take anything for granted which I think makes successes sweeter. I found seeing their perspective helped me complain less and feel more confident in myself. Sure my parents weren't perfect but I super appreciate them.
I don't think your perspective is uniquely Chinese. I think it applies to every Immigrant Family.
Most grow up poor and parents typically sacrifice their lives so their children can go on to be successful.
The Chain of Poverty requires an Epic amount of sacrifice to set the next generation free. Unfortunately it leaves the next generation with a feeling of loss. It's tough to see a parent give his life so his children can live a better one.
You are conflating cultural difference with class/mental health.
It sounds like your parents are raised by grandparents with addiction problems, and either in poverty or in unstable financial conditions. So they put an extremely high value on stability. This contrasted your experience and worldviews, because growing up financially secure gives you different take on life. On top of that, now you're peers with some ultra-rich, you see how different you are with your ultra-rich peers and somehow contributed the differences to being Asian.
If your grandparents are poor Americans with addiction problems, I don't think you will magically grow up with wealthy taste, standards and expectations, nor will you have pictures of them leading city town-halls in your house.
On the other hand, if you keep doing well, then in a couple generations, your grandchildren will grow up with those taste, standards, expectations and possibly with a picture of you leading some important events somewhere.
That experience is not restricted to "3rd world". I think what you describe could be simply called "class differences".
Even what we now call 1st world countries had incredible poverty some 60 years back and it's not so long back, even if the face of poverty has recently changed from lack of opportunity to lack of achievement.
Up to 1980's, in the Finnish welfare state where I grew up, you would see men who slept in trash boxes through the -30°C winter nights. Men broken by war, alcohol and unemployment. Some women, too. With the minds, bodies and experiences they had, they did not have opportunity for anything better.
Yeah, seriously. My family has been American for at least four generations. I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where - before about my great-grandparents, there isn't much genealogy to follow, and for the most part that's because most of my ancestors were trying to keep a low profile and avoid having any records that the police could follow. I'm doing OK for myself now, but I grew up at the end of a dead-end dirt road that was connected by another dirt road to the actual paved roads. There's poor everywhere.
True enough, but having a history doesn't make one "high-class". I do know part of my genealogy up to a landed gentry nobleman who wreaked havoc in Germany and Prague in the 30-year war on behalf of the Swedish king, but still my father was born to a tenant farmer family.
But you may have a point that apparently the social differences are smaller small countries and communities where genealogy is better known. To take an example, in Iceland, there is extremely good genealogical data about everyone for over a millennium. Social differences are not very big and were not that big even before the adoption of modern welfare state.
Actually it probably does a "poor" kid from the right back ground (minor nobility landed gentry or even middle class ) will find it easier to get into Oxbridge / Harvard and also grok the social aspects as your parents told you how it works - Boris Johnson is a good example originally not rich but had a lot of connections.
For example know why not to wear "brown" shoes in town to an interview for a high paying job / internship.
I'm not British, but I've worked for several British companies and this topic has come up in conversation when I complimented someone on their black shoes with a Navy suit, as it's a combination that I never thought to pair (I hate black shoes).
My understanding is brown shoes are considered to be sporty or informal Britons. It's something you'd wear to go hunting or on a picnic, never to a work. So I think wearing brown shoes with business attire is seen almost like an American wearing hiking boots.
Because it shows that you don't know the rule not to wear "brown" shoes in town to an interview for a high paying job / internship and thus are not of the right class to get a high paying job / internship.
Though here perhaps the "class" is not exactly the right word. To know etiquette is not quite the same as belonging to a social class.
Question: do upper class Americans eat with fork in the left hand and knife in the right? Because I notice most everyone in America that I have met eats with the fork in the right hand, and I am almost unable to eat that way (except dessert).
It's curious, as a lot of etiquette norms are grown out of simply practical considerations (in this case, dominant right hand considered safer for knife).
If you are 4th generation, you probably are from a bit of everywhere given the way mixing works. But then even Europeans might ask themselves this question, since migration was/is a common thing in Europe as well.
Europeans know where they're from, their biggest question is what do you call the place they're from. "The conglomerate of free counties of supreme holiness", or "the post WWII ethnic safe districts masquerading as countries"
in a lot of the world there are good reasons to only talk about the current national identity, but that doesn't mean they don't know where their family is from.
Going back four and five generations, unless you're from a prominent family or living in a family register-using country or something like that, the records are probably pretty spotty
don't think so, coming from small country which was part of empire until WW1 there was not much issues to track records back to around 1750 mostly thanks to church (i remember national census around 1850) and it was family of farmers and guys doing odd jobs, nothing prominent, heck i remember one couple in family tree which had even birth date hour, both born between 2-3PM it got stuck in my head or poor fella having 14 children but only 5 of them surviving and their mother dying in 42
There are lots of issues with the accuracy of that stuff, but even if there weren't, really, what does it matter, if you don't have any sort of connection to the places your forebears were from anymore?
I don’t know, I feel it connects and grounds us to know a thing of our past. I like to ask people about their ancestry as part of bantering and I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations that way.
I’m a fourth generation American of Eastern European Jewish background and I’ve been able to track my ancestry back into specific countries in Eastern Europe via documentation I’ve dug up on ancestry.com but haven’t gotten further. I’ve found it a fascinating exercise. I have not been able to determine the source of my surname (Soffian) which still remains a curiosity for me. Sometimes you uncover interesting artifacts. I learned I had a great uncle who immigrated to America from Romania aboard the RMS Carpathia in 1904. Eight years later in 1912, this would be the first ship to come to the Titanic’s rescue, and six years after that would itself be sunk by a U-Boat. My great uncle had left Romania likely to escape anti-semitism. He’d eventually find his way out to Denver. Sadly, he’d die in 1918 (the same year the Carpathia was sunk) at the age of 25, very probably from the flu.
This was him btw, along with his headstone and declaration of intent to become a citizen:
My wife convinced me to do one of those this year actually - not 23andme, maybe ancestry.com? It's the one where you spit in a tube and mail it in. The results came back 98% Caucasian, northern Europe, and a lot of other stuff that looked like they just randomly made it up to make me feel like they really did something. I told one of my (Mexican) wife's (Mexican) friends that the results confirmed that I'm the whitest white guy in town and he said, "I could have save you $200 and told you that!"
The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.
It won't map because of our national obsession with crime and punishment. I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's far cheaper to put a drunk in a homeless shelter AND give him treatment (AlAnon, etc) than it is to lock him in a cage with a herd of sociopaths. But the Prison Industrial Complex has got to look out for its own, after all.
I agree with everything you said except for this. The idea that many/most/all prisoners are violent or sociopathic is a myth propagated by those who stand to benefit from the prison industrial complex. Prisoners are human and prisons are inhumane. For another take, here's the IWW IWOC[0]:
> Incarcerated people are legally slaves as per the 13th Amendment which abolished "slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime". We are legally slaves. If you've been to prison you'd know we are treated like slaves.
Billions are made annually off our backs. Outrageously priced or grossly inadequate privatized 'services' like health care, food, phone calls, assault our humanity - they feed us like animals, suck our families dry, and when sick leave us to die. The government spends as much as an elite college tuition per person to keep each of us incarcerated, but this money does not develop us as human beings, reduce crime or make our communities safer.
I wasn't making any claim to the tendencies of many/most/all prisoners. My point was that putting non-violent petty offenders in jail/prison puts them in the path of a concentration of sociopathic people, those who really should be kept out of society.
The intention isn't so much crime and punishment as is the justification. The need to reallocate idle citizens producing no economic value is the systemic reason to high prisoner count domestically. America's prisons are largely forced labor camps recycling rebellious, able-bodied men into a working, productive labor force. One local example for me is paying californian prisoner's $1/hour to fight forest fires in the American west.
Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college.
To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas.
But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.
You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it.
To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make.
The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.
You don't generally have to force folks to get help. We (the US) do it in a small portion of the population: Severe mental illness, dementia, and substance abuse. They aren't talking about forcing folks to do things. You can encourage folks to do such things, though.
Most folks don't actually want to live like that, but some really do want to shun society. You can offer folks things like primitive cabins to help them shun society. Substance abuse, mental illness, and job loss are real problema with real solutions. Heck, if you can't solve someone's substance abuse or alcoholism, you can at least make sure they have shelter and food available to keep them safe even if they won't pay for such things. For a single person, it doesn't have to be luxurious: A dorm setup with private bathrooms and shared kitchen can work out.
Or maybe USA has way more people or other factors that make it a harder problem.
Some homeless people can't be helped since they have mental illnesses and break away from hospitals (USA has 70 times more people and homeless people are concentrating themselves in population hubs - that could make the problem more visible), and so on.
Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs.
When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blame poor people for being poor. This lets them justify voting against social security programmes because they believe "it will never happen to me, I'm not the kind of person who becomes poor".
Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.
Homelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage.
Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.
Poverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?
In a lot of ways America is undergoing a "Caribbeanization" where there are two strata of society who rarely interact with each other except in contexts like buying something from a store and so have little concept of the other's way of living.
Not all social security programmes are good. Some of them are unrealistic, some of them are unfair to other people, etc. Voting against a particular social programme doesn't imply the person doesn't feel solidarity in general.
Maybe they're voting against it because while they're not poor, they still don't have more than enough - you can solve that by funding it through a progressive tax, but that makes it unfair in the views of many people.
That is true as well, including things like slavery, historical and recent immigration waves, and generally a rather different approach to social security, and much much more diversity.
I'm a Caucasian American whose family has no records of where we came from, not even where in the US my ancestors lived before they moved to the farm in middle of no where. My parents grew up on farms where the food they grew was the food they ate, and while my own childhood wasn't improvised (probably upper working class, if that's a thing), a lot of OP's post resonates with me.
For example the following feels like it was describing my own childhood.
>Beating your kids is not the right way to raise them. Yelling louder is not the way to win an argument. Hiding your faults hurts your family more than it helps.
When one focuses all their efforts in and before college in the sciences, neglecting a rounded, liberal education in the process, I am not all surprised by the lack of class knowledge.
My grandparents were born end of the 1930s. They grew up in the second world war and lived through the rebuild. The mother side in the west the father side in the east, so they even lived through socialism.
Their views on life were so removed from what I encountered in the world...
Even a smaller generational gap here: my father was born in 1920, my uncle in 1918, at time of civil war in my country (Finland). The family was not the poorest but getting food on the table was a concern. Boys went to work in the forest at the age of 12. Uncle went through prisoner of waonr camps in Russian in 1940, father spent 1941-1944 the front, looking for bread crumbs in the pockets of any Russian KIA he'd find.
I was born in 1960's and even though the world has changed hugely since that time (mostly for the better), I never worried about having enough food. I was frustrated by my parents' need for hoarding: no old piece of cloth or broken tool or piece of scrap metal was too worn out to throw away. But I notice I have mental trouble of throwing away scrap metal or old pieces of electronics myself.
This is just being rational - measure the time and cost of keeping something. Any time you keep anything, it collects dust, causes a mess, takes up space, and costs you time considering whether or not to toss it every time.
The joke's been around for a long time, I was not very old when first time hearing sarcastically "eat your plate empty, because if you don't, some kid in Biafra will starve".
You are the only person besides my mother (born in the late 1950s in the Southern USA) that I've seen/heard mention Biafra. Her knowledge of Biafra was due to her being told a similar thing as a child, "eat everything on your plate because there are Biafrans starving."
I was less than 4 years old when the Biafra war ended, but it lived in public consciousness here longer due to a church [1] being built at the time, and some students spraying big red letters BIAFRA to the rock wall to protest church construction when people were dying of famine over there. It's an iconic photograph of 1960's here.
Not that it would have been very easy to relieve that famine with whatever amount of money, without military intervention.
Biafra received also special attention from my country because they adopted "Finlandia" by Sibelius as national anthem of their short-lived nation (with different lyrics, but same theme about rising from oppression.)
I remember 2 houses distinctly - a rich Asian immigrant's house, and a rich Caucasian's house. The Caucasian's was filled with relics of community - pictures of their involvement on sports teams, pictures of grandparents leading town hall meetings - it felt like they were rooted into the city and were an integral part of the community there. In contrast, the Asian immigrant's house was filled with relics of achievement - the doctorate was posted on the wall, lots of trophies and awards for their kids. The imagery offers a lot of insight into family and community development lagging behind income development in immigrant families.
Nicely written but I somewhat cringe because it's just an anecdote feeding a narrative about immigrants and we always have to be aware of it.
I also feel this narrative has a strange tone about praising the caucasians of being "rooted into the city and were an integral part of the community", and softly blaming the immigrants for lagging behind in community development.
I mean, isn't it normal that the immigrants do not have influential grandparents running town-hall meetings in the city they immigrated to?
This immigrant didn't hear that overtone. What I heard instead was the chagrin of recognition. It's not only a lack of influential grandparents, but also the attenuation of communal bonds and instincts that comes with being poor, aggressively upwardly mobile, and originating from a traumatised and turbulent society.
Not praise, just a noticable difference in investment. If you are climbing out of poverty you focus on yourself and your family rather than integrating yourself in your community. For example, representing your school by being on a sports team is not something Asian families promote.
I first encountered this dichotomy at a young age, when I was invited to my friend's house. It was a mansion in Bel-aire. Then another friend - a beach house overlooking Santa Monica. I was too young to know at the time, but we lived with no savings in a small apartment, and eventually bought a modest house, but even then, our furniture was mix-mash, we did a lot of poor quality self repairs, and were extremely careful about spending. Our life was focused on frugality - I remember a lot of small things I found particular, like my mom would reuse the paper towels to clean the dishes, and our TV was older than me by 1 year - it was my mom's TV from college.
When I was in high school, I visited my grandparents back in Taiwan, and I vividly remember the experience, not in a good way. They used to be rich but gambled most of their wealth away, including most of their house. It left them with this pitiful structure, a corner skeleton of what was once a majestic courtyard house that had fallen into disrepair and was never modernized. The structure wasn't fully enclosed so you had to sleep in a mosquito net, and there was barely a modern kitchen and bathroom. Needless to say, I did not want to go back.
I eventually worked at a real estate company and got a chance to view many houses on the market in SoCal. One step into the house and you can immediately tell a lot about the family's background. I remember 2 houses distinctly - a rich Asian immigrant's house, and a rich Caucasian's house. The Caucasian's was filled with relics of community - pictures of their involvement on sports teams, pictures of grandparents leading town hall meetings - it felt like they were rooted into the city and were an integral part of the community there. In contrast, the Asian immigrant's house was filled with relics of achievement - the doctorate was posted on the wall, lots of trophies and awards for their kids. The imagery offers a lot of insight into family and community development lagging behind income development in immigrant families.
From developing world living conditions, to a small apartment, to a modest house, to seeing rich houses and mansions in Bel-aire - each of these provides me a snapshot of way more than just income. Beyond wealth, there is poverty of taste, standards, and expectations, family practices and emotional intelligence that define many Asian family backgrounds. Beating your kids is not the right way to raise them. Yelling louder is not the way to win an argument. Hiding your faults hurts your family more than it helps. Our parents came from humble, uneducated backgrounds, and modern society and the cultural values it instills - while a gift from them - is something they themselves lacked.
Interestingly enough, I have a lot of friends who feel a similar regret as this article implies. Our parents have done such a good job of creating a modern world environment for us that we don't see the developing world heritage until much later. What it means is that it is hard to understand the advice and mindset of our parents growing up, and only much later do we appreciate their perspective and effort - when it feels too late.