Westerners

Have you ever heard the term Westerners? Have you ever thought about what it means or who it is referring to? I don't think I had really heard the term, at least not used in any common way, until arriving in Hong Kong. Here we hear that term weekly, if not daily, and we have started using it ourselves very often. "Westerners", as far as I can figure, refers to anyone from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zeland, England, and the most of the rest of Europe. To Asians a "westerner" seems to look like someone with light skin, light hair color (that includes everything but black), light eye color, and usually speaks English to some degree. In Hong Kong there is such a large number of western ex-pats that there is a huge mix of east and west that creates this dynamic city. There are "western" restaurants "western" supermarkets and "western" toilets throughout town...the comforts of home are easy to find.

In other, less wealthy parts of Asia, it seems that westerners also look like walking bags of money. We were constantly bombarded with people trying to sell us thing in Indonesia, Thailand and China were similar, but to a less degree of annoying. In places that are used to getting foriegn tourists, just by seeing us the price we are asked to pay is often quadrupled or even increased more than that compared to what the locals pay. While a $15 cab ride that should have been $2.50 is annoying to be bamboozled, I'm sure that $12.50 made a much bigger difference in the weekly income of the cab driver than it did in our loss.

It makes sense...we do have more money than most people in Indonesia will see in their lifetime. People in the Phillipines, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries are starving to death because of the soaring rice prices and I can't even imagine the possibility of not being able to put whatever food I want on the table for dinner. We are definately VERY wealthy by world standards.

But it is interesting being faced for the first time with really having to consider this discrepancy. There are several things that I've been considering this week
1. First is what people think when they first see you...for many in this part of the world I feel that they see money when they see us, and that is a weird feeling to have as I've never felt particly wealthy in the US, just average middle class. In my Cantonese class that I am taking I am on of 5 westerners. The class is technically for ethnic minorities of Hong Kong (which we are) and is subsidzed by the government to encourage/enable immigrants to learn Cantonese. Now in it's origin it was meant for poor imigrants who need Cantonese for hard labor or domestic helper jobs. The government is threatening to take away funding for the class if it is not being used for more impoverished people. I understand that this is a needed service and I would be fine being asked to pay more for the class or being barred from it because of my income, but here is the interesting part. They took a photo of the class to send to the government and they asked the westerners to step out and not be part of the photo. Fine. But left in the room is an Indian doctor who according rumor is quite well off, a Cambodian woman who was raised in the US and relocated to HK as an ex-pat for her husbands job, an Indian school teacher....the point is when someone looks at a photo they see the "westerners" and think "wealthy" but they can look at the Indian doctor or the Cambodian-American and just assume that they are poor imigrants. It just interesting being in a place where I can feel so much judgment being placed on just how I look. Our Indian friends had less trouble traveling in Indonesia than we did...just because they look different.
2. Just traveling in the US we are so unaware of how wealthy we are...which in a lot of ways is nice. You can walk into a souvenier shop, look around at your convenience and buy something if you want...no one really cares too much. You are with other travelers that are generally similar middle class Americans and no one feels particularly wealthy or poor. On the great wall we had someone following us for a half hour, just incase we changed our minds about the cold bottle of water or the souvenieer t-shirt. For these people the food they put on the table may very well depend on the daily sales that they make. The entire fact that we can be visiting their country means that we are more wealthy than them.
3. How is it possible with the ammount of wasted food that we have in the US and in Hong Kong that there are still so many people starving in the world?!? I've seen so many unfinished plates of food in my life that it is so hard to imagine that for some people even buying enough rice to eat daily is too expensive. On my last trip I watched a man digging half eaten food out of the trash can in Beijing for dinner and mothers beggining with their starving babies in Shanghai. I know that we have starving people in the US too, but I think there is a much smaller number and we have a lot of services set up to help. Giving handouts isn't not a sustainable solution, but it is hard to watch people not get enough to eat and know that I have never gone hungry a day in my life. The question is: Is it possible, and if so, how, to somehow share the excess from developed countries with the lack of food in 3rd world countries. I know it is very complex and something that many NPOs have been working on for years, but it is still hard to believe how many starving people there are.

Okay, this is a long post so I will stop rambling now, but it has been interesting to get a little glimse of a new pespective to see the world!