Translation
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.
Translation
Victimization of the victim?
Why should anyone have to pay, to be victimized in the name of civilization? Of progress?
It is difficult to be near these people. Dirty and smelly, bad breath. Some even speak a rudimentary, survival English. Wanting only to help the true beggar, you must push them all away, for there is no way to tell the difference between the professionals and the others. The ignoring of humanity is ingrained in society, it is part and parcel of life. What has happened to us that we can be, that we have become so cavalierly coarse? Ignoring parts of humanity has become de rigueur. It is. . .human.
How empty the political and business rhetoric. The work ethic is hype. It is a myth. Farmers work their entire lives and they manage subsistence, if they are lucky. Their lot is ever the short stick draw. Despite the reinstitution of private property, in the end, if there is no one in the family to keep farming, the farm reverts to the government. . .if it's not been eaten up by eminent domain and 10% economic growth. If they are tenant farmers, they don't have much choice: if they are unproductive, they are expendable.
Expendable humans. Expendable life. Concepts that are difficult to grasp. Richelieu figured Huguenots and heretics were expendable, drafted them and put them in the front lines during the Thirty Years War. Human resources.
How empty the spiritual, pagan and theological riff. God and the gods only favor (save) the chosen, even though divine wisdom is beyond human ken, so how can a human know who's chosen (unless it's racial--and then it's racism)? Who, then, has arrogantly abrogated the ability to bespeak godly wisdom? Sam Brownback? [helter-skelter man]? Joe McCarthy? Capper, Volstead & Evans? Henry II? Cromwell? Guy Fawkes? Bernard of Clairevaux? Constantine? Charlemagne? Every succeeding Chinese dynasty? Falon gong? The Yellow hats? Name your Pope, your lama, ayatollah or caliph, your arhat, oracle or shaman. Religion, from the beginning, has espoused slavery, has said that some people are human and some are. . .not. So, we get alot of marginalization, alot of death.
People have been fighting betwixt themselves for eons, since time immemorial--why should anything change? This creates death, manmade death, and victims and marginalization and slaves and forgetfulness. War isn't always done with knives and guns and whatnot. It can be done with money and genetics. It can be done with condescendingly puerile do-gooders who are really into their do-gooderness for personal edification. Social responsibility? Ticket to ride into heaven?
Yet we keep talking, preaching about our better nature. Where is it? Pipe dream?
An ideal is something you don't have.
Please explain to me how humans can be so inhuman.
There is one big difference between PRC and the US: in PRC, all of life is visible on all the streets of all the cities, big or small. I've lived in both. In Beijing, in order to put on a good face, the social victims are shunted off the main streets. This is especially the case for the Olympics. To keep up appearances, the government is destroying old, historical homes and making people homeless. These hu tong must go, for they would be an eye-sore and give the lie to the goodness of society because it cannot be seen that millions of people live like this: in houses where there are small, high windows, no heat, no AC, no bathrooms and ceilings that fall, like Chicken Little's sky, in bits and pieces upon their inhabitants and their food and electricity is an after-thought. I know. I lived in one of these kinds of houses. I shit and pissed in a pot, throwing the piss in the drain outside the house and bagging the shit, putting it together with the kitchen scraps and throwing it in the dump out in the street. I walked ½ mile to the public showers. I did get to know my neighbors, though. People in the US don't know their neighbors.
No. The beggarly victims of society are pushed to the secondary roads and out into the suburbs, where it's alright to pollute, there being laws about the pollutability of automobiles downtown. It's okay for the plebs to sicken and die. It's okay for the downside of life to be on the outside of economic growth and well-being. But it's still there, right around the corner. Life and death, always right before your eyes. Inescapable.
In the US, the people are so full of goodness and light, the people are so full of denial and ignorance, selective blindness, that they pass laws against feeding the homeless. It is hoped that they will vacate the premises, since actually banning them from the cities would be prejudicial (against the law). Feeding them, however, is another thing. There is no law that stops cities from not feeding the homeless. So they don't feed the homeless. If there are no beggarly victims about the city folk won't have to face the collateral damage of their life style, they won't have to be reminded their self-interest and crudeness and guilt. A cold heart does not like to look at itself. How would de Bakey deal with social heart transplants? What would society on a heart pump look like? Religion with a triple by-pass?
Institute more laws
There is no such thing as a good government. But what are we to do? People are not responsible or thoughtful enough to govern themselves? How many more social abortions will we have to suffer through before humanity returns to us, as a race? Dictatorships and tyrannies don't work. Socialism and Communism don't work, though the US had the right idea with Communism coming from the bottom up, from the working class. But business and government colluded to shut down the unions or castrate them. Paracon is only good for the middle class, so it, too, is a failure. Democracy has turned into autocracy, as Aristotle predicted.
Frankenstein has made his monster and no one, not even he, listens to the created's voice: "All men hate the wretches; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissolvable by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How care you sport thus with life! Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind."
Jimsecor is a freelance writer who has travelled extensively overseas, especially Japan and China. He has published in all genre and produced several plays over the years and has taught theatre, writing and literature.
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Either you have a very good observation or you have lived in China for a long long time. It surprises me that you know quite a lot about the beggars thing. Well, some of them are professional and some people even say those professional beggars are millionaires! Human or inhuman? We live in bright houses and dress well while we are jealous of beggars? Incredible!!!
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