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Last night, I had an interesting conversation with my kids. Linya brought up the question why she felt like she was the poorest kid in their class in school. It was not as if she was embarrassed by it but it seemed a query in that direction. It is something a parent is bound to dismiss as something to answer once the kid is bigger but I know better. Linya especially is quite smart enough to bring up the hardest questions. Every time we talk about serious things I always end up thinking she’s older than I think.
But the question opens up a whole universe of thought. Why are there poor people anyway? That’s a good place to start. I could do the Marxist theory, the old structural analysis of society. But I doubt that’s the type of discourse that would appeal to my eight-year-old kid. Being the older person, I should rephrase her question in a way we both can understand. She is really asking: Why do her classmates have so much while she must contend with less? It is a perfectly legitimate question for an eight-year-old to ask her Papa. And the Papa must somehow answer without resorting to Marxist analysis.
I always take the safe path when I talk to my kids. The academic methodology is actually quite applicable. First, refine the definitions. What does it mean to be “poor” or to have less? Does Linya really have less? Our conversation from then on becomes too personal. Let me jump straightaway to our conclusion that while she might have less than her classmates in many respects she also has a well-known artist, a competent writer who is also a university professor to pick her up from school every afternoon. We both agree that counts for something.
But still she cannot get over the fact she obviously has less money. This translates into the size of her daily allowance. It is an important argument for her. Her classmates have big houses while hers is a work in progress. Very clearly, she wants to touch the fundamental premise involved. Why indeed am I poor, or at least poorer than most?
I explain to Linya I come of an old and proud tradition of poverty. It is not ordinary poverty by any means. My parents came of age at a time when the economy was shifting from the old agricultural system into the hybrid capitalism we have today. For my mother and her siblings, a good education was important more for breeding than for acquiring a profession. Thus, my grandfather disallowed my mother from pursuing a medical career as this might compromise her chances of getting married. (My mom was quite good-looking.)
Yet, by the time my mother had children of her own, she had come to realize a good education was the best means of giving her children upward mobility (or becoming rich to you, Linya.) She spent all her resources and her years working towards this goal. And indeed, as would be the case, all her children would be quite well-educated. Were we in Europe or in America we would have by now become quite rich. Unfortunately, we were in the Philippines where a good education may not always yield high returns. Indeed, we have come to an age where educational background has become quite undervalued compared to trades and skills that are exportable abroad, as for instance, call-center work.
I tell Linya this fact has not dampened my appreciation of the fact I am quite well-educated and learned. Plato had written something about the love of knowledge for its own sake and indeed I cannot help finding the pleasure in knowing things: This, over other pleasures like a home theater system or a new car. But, of course, this bias would compromise my ability to maximize my entirely human urge for hard currency. And that must account for a certain percentage of my personal poverty. I am almost sorry this has immediate impact on Linya and my other children. We would have to be poor together and it is inevitable that they would have to contend with the potential embarrassment of this poverty, no matter how proud.
This father would have to end with the most fundamental and age-old argument of all. It is not at all a fair world, and there are many pressures that children should fight against rather than accept as if they were simply part of growing up. They have somehow to get over the embarrassment of being poorer than others. All the more so, because this embarrassment is really just the tail end of a bigger monster that mainstream societal values feeds like a malignant old pet. There are other embarrassments much worse, yet abjectly just as ill-deserved, if for nothing else because all of us whether rich or poor would have to go through them. Eventually, Linya will have to contend with the embarrassment of being sick, of growing old, and then finally of dying. I would like to teach her to fight back as soon as possible.
