Humanistic Sketches - 2006 Summer Issue

Author: Lin Xianzhi, Xiao Min / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: Bright sunshine, a group of carefree, dark-skinned vagrants sitting on the ground. He heard one of them say: "We've been waiting for days. We don't know where to find work. We have no future in our hometown, so we had no choice but to walk here. We heard this place is a paradise where you can make money. We're here with empty hands, just basking in the sun." He felt that man was like a philosopher, as if another voice was speaking from within his body.
More beggars appeared in the city, wandering the streets, their numbers far exceeding the police. Compassion was replaced by indifference. People had long since grown indifferent to the homeless on the streets. He often saw beggars kneeling by the roadside, hands spread open, palms up, faces contorted in expressions of misery and helplessness. At one moment, he felt he was merely looking at a frozen object, no different from the fire hydrant by the roadside. Many people walked past without even glancing at the beggar. He remembered it wasn't like this before. People would occasionally stop and take out coins from their pockets. If they encountered beggars who had written their tragic stories on the ground, they would read a few lines out of curiosity. Though this was just out of curiosity, they knew no one could really help them, but that kind of compassion would still flash in their hearts. Now, even a spark of curiosity was gone, let alone compassion.
Of course, it would be too harsh to blame the city dwellers for being selfish or lacking in. They were originally charitable, but they gradually realized that such charity had the opposite effect. Not only did the number of beggars not decrease, but they multiplied at an alarming rate like mushrooms after rain.
There were constant rumors about the beggar gang in the city. They were said to have strict divisions of labor and hierarchy, with the gang leader keeping concubines hidden away, and even ordinary beggars earned far more than the kind-hearted people who threw coins at them. These rumors wounded people's hearts deeply, and they vowed never to be tricked by beggar performers again.
Better to pity oneself. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? If one day you find yourself in dire straits, where will the people who can help you be? To be honest, the wandering beggars are not the shame of the city. The inner poverty of the city cannot be easily observed from the surface. The poor rarely go out, and their lives mostly unfold in vain in poor streets and squalid alleys, like moss that grows and dies in the shade year after year.
Some say that the urban poor are no longer troubled by hunger but are often overweight due to overeating. They watch the same TV shows as the rich, gamble as eagerly as the rich, and drink as much as the rich. But one must know what kind of shabby huts and sheds they watch TV in, with what kind of unemployed vagrants they gamble, and what kind of cheap alcohol they drink! These people, with no hope for the future, are like walking dead, despised and trapped. Even hard work cannot change their fate, let alone the rare opportunities that suit them. The city's social welfare cannot cover everyone. Limited relief is like a drop in the bucket. Those who are poor day after day, if they don't drown their sorrows in alcohol or try their luck in gambling dens, what else can they rely on?
Living long-term in a deprived, unsanitary, crowded, and uneducated environment, those who can change their fate through their own efforts are rare. Once they rise above their circumstances, they immediately break away from the dark world they once lived in. Many years later, a successful man from his impoverished youth returns to the streets of his childhood and finds them even more dilapidated and dark than he remembered.
Poverty in that city could never be fundamentally cured, because poverty was the price the city paid for its prosperity. Just as a beautiful dress leaves behind scraps and waste after being made, poverty was the scraps and waste cut from the splendid robe the city wore.
Compassionate social workers were few and far between in that city. Though their voices often appeared in public media, they had no real impact. Social workers said society should care for disadvantaged groups. They were silent people, without representatives, so let our conscience speak for them. They were people lacking competitiveness, so let us create opportunities for them.
But in practice, it was either talk without action or one-sided wishes. The silent majority, the majority lacking competitiveness, preferred to wait for relief money rather than work for meager wages. Some said the poor were trapped by their environment and lack of opportunities, while others, based on surveys and analysis, argued the opposite: it was the poor's dependence, withdrawal, resignation, and laziness that kept them from wanting to change their circumstances or seize opportunities.
It was said that the second view had gained the upper hand in that city. Influenced by this view, the authorities did nothing to address the increasingly severe poverty. People seemed to believe in a cold, hard rule: poverty could only be naturally limited by indifference, and relentless help would only spread it further. He did not agree with this ruthless truth of survival of the fittest, but what was the use of disagreeing?
Among the poor, those who yearned for change now dreamed of sudden wealth. How could they have the patience to earn insignificant wages for a lifetime, when their lives were stuck at a low level, repeating the same pattern? Some who dared to gamble chose crime. The crime rate in the city rose year after year, which, it was said, caused the authorities to panic. Recently, the city had created many new jobs—police and various security guards. Recruiting police and security guards from the poor and using them to protect the lives and property of the rich was truly a perfect division of labor and a great irony.
Beggars continued to wander the streets, whispering in squares. If they didn't receive alms from the city dwellers, who knew what would happen in the next minute. The shelters and transit stations had been demolished, and the personal freedom of beggars and vagrants was guaranteed. It couldn't be said that every beggar or vagrant was a potential criminal, but the police could only deprive suspects of their freedom after a crime had occurred; they couldn't act preemptively.
These hidden dangers were closely linked to the large number of impoverished people. The people of the city could think of no better solution. So when trains kept transporting carloads of gold-seekers and dreamers from impoverished rural areas to the city, turning most of them into beggars and vagrants, the rich began to quietly flee the city.
He remembered playing a game as a child under a tree: pouring water into two ant holes at the same time. All the ants came out of both holes, rushing in panic toward each other's holes. They didn't know that the place they were fleeing was exactly where the other ants were trying to escape. (From Shanghai Literature, January 2005 Issue) P19-20