I grew up in the countryside of a city called Xinyang, one of the poorest areas in China. Back then, young men and women dropped out of school early to move to coastal cities to make a living. It was rare to have meat on the table. On my birthdays, my grandma would boil some eggs, laid by the chicken I tried to scare daily. She would peel the boiled eggs and put them into a big bowl of sugary water. That was my special birthday meal. There was no plumbing, hot showers or running water.
But as a kid, being poor was something I was aware of, but hardly thought about. Everyone around me was poor. Every kid I knew was poor. I could, however, sense the anxiety from the adults around me. But me? I was having the best time of my life. I loved running around in the village and all over the fields with my friends, playing all kinds of silly games. I loved planting and harvesting peanuts with my family. I loved the long summer vacations without school.
As I grew older and subsequently went to middle school and high school, I met kids from a wider range of economic backgrounds. They weren’t like me anymore. They dressed nicer, they had nicer things, they even had more confidence. I just seemed… worse in comparison. Gradually I became more self-aware and anxious. When I entered university and met people who were actually wealthy, I was in a really bad state. I watched them spend money without a care while I had to be frugal to avoid running out of money each month.
Life seemed unfair and I felt bitter. Worse still, I experienced a deep sense of self-doubt, inadequacy, and shame. My desire to leave China and study abroad seemed unattainable because I had to get a full scholarship to make it happen. Meanwhile, some of my classmates, with much lower GPAs, casually discussed their plans to study in Australia, the UK or the US. My options were limited. I gave up on the US universities after some research and found out that they were quite expensive and rarely offered scholarships for a master’s program. I talked to a friend in university about my plans of studying abroad, he said plainly, only rich kids could do that.
I’m not here to tell you a sob story. I survived. I got a scholarship to study in Canada, took the first flight of life at the age of 21 to cross the Pacific Ocean, and it all worked out from there. I’m glad I went to Canada, a country that I grew to like much more than the US. I’m no longer envious of the wealthy kids. Life takes us on different journeys and we just need to make the best of it. I’m also not interested in selling you an inspiring story. However, I do hope to touch on the complexity of being an entitled tech worker while never being able to mentally escape the shade of poverty.
A while ago I complained on Instagram about how expensive hotels were in a city and that inadvertently offended someone. They lectured me on how privileged I was and that I shouldn’t have complained. They told me that people outside of tech made a lot less money and they could hardly afford to travel. “Why do you act like you’re poor while you’re not?” They accused me of living in a bubble.
Isn’t that funny? It reminds me of the times when I told people I went to study in Canada. They just automatically assumed that I came from a wealthy family. This person didn’t know that my first significant trip only happened in 2019 when I visited Cuba. I was 27. I had dreamed of traveling the world since I was little. It took me long enough to get started. I was jealous of people who had traveled to tens of countries before they were 25. When I was finally able to travel, I felt guilt doing so. I thought of how hard it was for my parents to earn a living. I felt uneasy whenever I had to spend any significant amount of money.
I wasn’t amused by that person’s lecturing. They grew up in a first world country and I’m fairly certain they had it a lot easier than me. I find it laughable they would claim that I am the privileged one. However, they did remind me of the absurdity of my situation. I had spent years feeling terrible about myself because of poverty. I felt ashamed about my background. Now that I’m more financially secure, I feel terrible still, albeit in a different way. And now people feel they can come for me because I’m “privileged”. Oh hey there, you’re a bit late to the party, but thanks for joining me on the journey of making myself feel even shittier. That realization ignited anger in me — do I fucking deserve all this?
We all grew to have a different kind of relationship with money. My generation of Chinese, for example, are overly fixated on it for the lack of it when we were growing up. There is no denying that money is important, but there are far more important things in our brief existence on this planet. We should, if we’re lucky enough to, forget about money and get on with our life, doing things we truly desire to, things that make us happy.
For what it’s worth, I now travel guilt-free.