My Hideous Progeny
James L. Secor

I live in Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China, the People's Republic of China. It is also one of the more modern and, like Shanghai, boasts a long history of international influence. Guangzhou is also one of the economic hubs of the country, offering up the highest average wage in the country, whatever an average salary is. Averages are very deceptive. I receive one of these high salaries, albeit not nearly so high as my Chinese doctoral counterparts. Let us keep in mind, too, that China, Peoples Republic of China, has a rather large economic growth, in the neighborhood of 10% in 2006, though one is constrained to ask jus what this means.

Outside of my weekends, when I dress down, I don't dress all that well. I don't own a suit. I don't even own a sport coat. When I go shopping, clothes are low on my list. For the first time in my life, on perhaps ¼ of what I'd be making in the US--assuming a job--I am able to indulge myself in all three of my top priorities: books, music and art. I live a comfortable, middle class existence.

But I am not middle class, at least, no more than financially. And even then, my job is not stable: I'm a foreigner. I am working class. I come from the working class and I still hold onto my working class worldview. I enjoy working class restaurants and working class people. I will give a local mom-and-pop shop business before an upscale business, like a supermarket or department store. These big stores, especially chains, steal jobs away from the neighborhood store owners; they also increase the cost of living for everyone. True, some of them rent out space to various little businesses, but only the more or less upscale can afford the rent. When cities modernize, they build supermarkets and department stores and renovate the stalls or shop spaces on the street, raising the rent in the process. All of those empty spaces cost somebody. . .aside from those without jobs.

Unlike my middle class colleagues, I acknowledge working class people and what they do. To a great extent, my life style is the result of these people's efforts. I have never been a janitor or street cleaner or waiter, but I have worked general construction, driving trucks and in a wholesale fish market. Unlike my US doctoral student peers, I had considerable professional and non-professional theatre experience, even running my own theatre (a losing proposition). Getting my Ph.D. was a working class decision. Now, at 60, it's paying off.

In the US, working class/poverty class folk who have "made it" often write off their working class/poverty class friends. It's considered part of making it and living the middle class ethic, which is political (in a social sense), requires it. To fit in and continue your rise, politically correct friends and acquaintances are very important. Even as working class people who have made it struggle against middle class political correctness and prejudices in an attempt to maintain acceptance, validity, they practice that which they cry out against. Ostracism is rough. To the middle class, the US is a classless society, as they ignore reality. In the Peoples Republic of China, still in the grip of egalitarian- revolutionary Communist rhetoric, everyone is a worker. Manager? Worker. Engineer? Worker. Government employee? Worker. Everyone here knows the rhetoric is empty, everyone here can see the lie. Daily. But they're still that classless worker. The college student shows a distinct prejudice against farmers' children amongst them, so the later hide their roots: their parents are workers.

I walk down the noisy, dirty street where children shit and piss PRN, men (mostly) spit wherever and whenever and everyone throws their trash on the ground, in the street, in gardens--I walk these streets filled with expensive cars and SUVs and I see beggars and homeless everywhere. Their cadging includes catching you outside big stores and hospitals, following you into lesser businesses, scrawling their misericorde on the sidewalks and banging their heads on the concrete, playing er hu (two-stringed indigenous instrument played with a bow that can be made to sound like a woman wailing, if done well) with a bucket to toss your money into set on the ground at the players' feet (mostly, this is the blind--some are damned find musicians but they are dirty and unkempt and smell and so they don't garner proper consideration). The homeless, some just as insane as their US counterparts, congregate round the open-air eateries in shopping streets and pick up the scraps. Shoppers throw away alot.

This is 10% economic growth on the year?

This is Communism eliminating poverty and taking care of its own?

There are philosophers and historians who believe that a society that marginalizes any portion of its population is a psychotic society. Perhaps inhuman? Perhaps Immoral?

Unfortunately, some of the beggars are professional. Journeymen, if you will, their children their apprentices. Apparently, they make a good enough living at it that it isn't worth the effort, aggravation or financial outlay to obtain more socially edifying job skills, for themselves or their children. The police, when they decide to do their civic duty, simply run them off. More often than not, nothing is done about it. Them. These social outcasts and victims. To begin with, begging wasn't their chosen professional. It was forced upon them by society. They have adapted fairly well. Like pigeons. Only, instead of shitting on the life around them, these social outcasts are shit on.