Beijing has beggars. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Notoriously, large numbers of rural peasants are flocking to China’s big cities to look for work and opportunity. Many of them find neither. Consequently, despite the best efforts of the local government to bus some of them back out to the sticks, Beijing boasts a population of miserable beggars that rivals many Southeast Asian cities.
As an aside, I should probably not exclude American cities. San Francisco has legions of beggars. For some reason, we don’t refer to them as “beggars” in the United States. “Begging” appears to be something that happens in squalid, third-world countries. In the US we may have panhandlers, bums, vagrants, potheads, and, of course, the marvelously vague group referred to as “the homeless”. These are acceptable side effects of capitalism. Beggars are not. We’re too rich for beggars.
China is not too rich for beggars. China has plenty of beggars. After Singapore, this was a real change for me. All my years in Singapore had eroded my psychological defenses, once toughened by San Francisco’s legions of homeless. (Not beggars!) Singapore has done a masterful job of convincing the world it has no bitter poverty, although it has. Alone in virtually all of Asia, its streets are nearly devoid of beggars, buskers, and teenage wastrels. When people do beg in Singapore, they often camouflage it under a veneer of trade, like the old Indian woman who sells packets of tissue paper at the busy intersection of Orchard and Grange.
Like constant rubbing builds a callus, Beijing has been toughening up the skin of my defense mechanisms. Wudaokou, my neighborhood has a regular crew of beggars that prowl the bottom of my apartment block, the area underneath the subway bridge, and the commercial blocks between here and the BLCU campus. They’re regular enough that I’ve given them mental labels: Woman with Child 1, Woman with Child 2 (stakes out the opposite corner), the Monk (always kneels and prays), Sleeping Guy (why waste the effort?), the Midget (will he take a smaller donation?), Grandma (likes the supermarket entrance), the Amputee and His Wife.
This game of mental dehumanization, turning them from real people into absurd parodies, is one of my defense mechanisms. In fact, I’ve rediscovered many of my San Francisco techniques: Walking purposefully; avoiding eye contact; using other pedestrians as shields; mental dehumanization; and, of course, simply treating beggars as though they were wraiths incapable of physical interaction with me or the world I inhabit. Ralph Ellison’s invisible man would recognize them immediately.
Why all the gyrations in a country where one yuan—12 US cents—would be a magnificent tithe, and half that amount an acceptable one? I tried to analyze my rationalizations. These were, of course, the standard-issue ones used by tightwads around the world: Other people will donate; I won’t make any difference; He’s got a few bucks in his bowl already; They’re probably a syndicate and it will all go to the boss.
I realized I had a few Beijing-specific ones as well. First, I am resentful at being singled out regularly. Foreigners get extra attention, sometimes very persistent attention. At a bus stop in Xidan one beggar harried my roommate relentlessly until the bus came and we got on. For this sin, I administer collective punishment.
Second, I realized that I was nursing another fear as well. I didn’t want to get a reputation as a “giver” among the regular crew neighborhood beggars. I feel conspicuous and recognizable here, and I have a fear that I will be identified as an easy mark. As though I might step out of my apartment one morning, and find the entire legion of Wudaokou beggars on my landing, tin cups extended.
I was humbled by the charity of a Tibetan woman with whom I spent much of my last Saturday. As we wandered through Jianguomenwai, Yonganli and Xidan she popped yuan notes into the cups of beggars with cheerful regularity, at one point giving me a couple of yuan to drop into a busker’s cup. I felt like explaining to her, “Don’t worry. Where I come from it’s completely acceptable to pretend beggars don’t exist! Keep this money. Buy yourself an ice cream.” Perhaps she sensed that my karma needed some assistance.
In fact, I have seen locals tithe to the beggars fairly often. A yuan here, a spare piece of fruit there. The white, enameled cups are seldom dry. In a country where a bowl of noodles or half a watermelon can be had for three yuan, it doesn’t take many donations to make a meal.
But, still, my yuan stay in my pocket, and the noodles stay in my bowl. I think, like many people, I ultimately punish beggars for making me uncomfortable and reminding me of my own comfort and privilege. How dare you confront me with your poverty?
This, then, is the real difference between Singapore and Beijing. This is also the reason why Singapore is so comfortable to live in but feels so unreal to visitors. It’s not that the city is physically clean, many parts of it aren’t. It’s not that it’s modern. Cleveland is modern but no one is overcome by a sense of surreality there (except maybe people from Cincinnati). Singapore feels unreal because it’s a city of four million that somehow keeps its poverty completely out of your way. Of course Singapore has poverty and misery but it is supremely well camouflaged, and, unless you specifically go looking for it, you are almost never confronted with it. Singapore’s poverty is sealed for your protection. Beijing is simply like the rest of the world, the developed world included. Its poverty is unsealed, there is lots of it and, from time to time, it is going to get in your face.
And when it gets in my face my reaction is very American and, I daresay, very Singaporean. Subconsciously I blame beggars for their own poverty; very consciously I resent them for thrusting it upon me. I work through all my rationalizations and all my defense mechanisms, and I keep my hands in my pockets. I’m rich. Fuck you.
Dangerous. There but for the grace, right? Woman with Child 2 sure didn’t plan on being a beggar on a Wudaokou street corner. Her four year old son isn’t hoping for a career in the family business. When Grandma in front of the CRC market was 16 and good looking I bet she didn’t imagine spending her declining years cadging jiao notes from middle-class shoppers and indifferent foreigners. I wonder what she did imagine.
So maybe I’ll try to find a little more compassion and put the brakes on some of my defense mechanisms. A few yuan here or there won’t make any difference to me in a country where a 12 inch deep-dish from the Wudaokou Pizza Hut knocks you back 70 kuai. Soon enough I’ll be back in Singapore, where, once again, I won’t have to think about it. Meanwhile, I am sure my Tibetan friend will approve of any charity I can muster.