x-axis: Your Country, y-axis: The World

If you follow US politics, you might have heard a lot about income inequality recently. The dreaded 1% possess 40% of the country's wealth. Barack Obama has called it "the defining challenge of our time," and Bernie Sanders has essentially built his entire campaign on this issue. I've heard the talking points many times: wages are stagnant, student loans are oppressive, jobs are moving overseas, the wealthiest individuals and corporations are buying politicians and rigging the rules to the profit of their upper management.

I write this paragraph from a minibus, rolling through rural Cambodia, and I agree that those are all problems. But outside my window are symptoms of other problems. I've long suspected that in a world where I'm typing on my iPhone 6s driving past wooden bungalows with thatched or corrugated metal roofs that fat cat CEOs can't be the source of all these problems. Regrettably I didn't study a ton of economics and the mysteries of poverty escaped me. So I printed out some research papers before I left work and brought them along on this trip. I've read a bunch of Branko Milanovic, including his paper on the history of wealth inequality, Peter's paper on the winners and losers of globalization, and Gini's inaugural paper introducing his coefficient in the original Italian. I've also been influenced by Klein's "This Changes Everything" book on climate change that is extremely critical of globalization. And I think I have a few more answers now. (All are recommended reading except Gini, that was just for fun)

Inequality has gotten far worse in the age of globalization. Milanovic estimates that the Global Gini was 0.55 in the 1820's and 0.65 in 2002. Inequality overall fell somewhat since 1980, but almost entirely because China emerged from stifling communist economic policies into a world power, with hundreds of millions lifted, or perhaps dragged, out from extreme poverty, many into a legitimate middle class. Additionally, income inequality between countries is greater, far greater, than inequality within countries. In many ways, this latter fact is obvious, if so rarely addressed. Furthermore, while globalization has created some jobs in developing nations, it mostly has increased global consumption. Corporations keep retreating to areas where labor and environmental standards are more and more reduced, saving costs and keeping the savings largely to their own upper management (and shareholders).  The rich get to buy more things and the majority of that money goes to the even richer. As nearly all the richest multinational corporations and their boards are from the richest countries, this has aggravated global inequality.

The status quo amongst nations remains largely because our world of nations is not set up to address other people's problems. I think we can identify these problems - the largest seem to be infrastructure, whether physical or intangible. There aren't good enough roads, pipes or wires. There aren't good enough schools, doctors, understanding of contraception, financial knowledge etc. And the governments are too corrupt. So even if you have the best intentions and know-how, when you send $100 million into a country to build roads and realize that you've actually increased income inequality because $80 million disappeared into a few pockets, it's easy to throw your hands up and back away. It's true, it's not your problem that Vietnamese officials are corrupt or don't prioritize the education in this region. With our current system setup, it's much easier for people to focus on their own problems, of which there always plenty. There is no accountability for someone else's poverty, even if you are unwittingly complicit in exacerbating it.

Superstar economist Jeffrey Sachs describes the situation in another way: it's not just that there are billions of people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, it's that billions of people are not even on the ladder. Try as they might, bright as they might be, without external assistance they will never escape from poverty because the markets are working against them. The way I like to picture this situation is if you made a graph with every individuals salary on the y-axis and individual people on the x-axis and then tracked where every dollar they spent went, you'd see that a lot of the money that the rich spend goes to other rich people. Some of it trickles down, but as rich people go out to expensive restaurants and buy expensive apartments and cars, a lot of that money circulates among the rich. Similarly, down at the bottom of the graph, poor people sell goods or provide services to other poor people, very rarely getting any monetary input from the people above them.

So I thought I had an idea. If I travel to these places, I could identify the people not on the ladder, those circulating meager savings amongst themselves, and buy stuff from them, or even just give them money. In Hong Kong I'd tried to put this into practice. Whenever I could, I'd get my groceries at the wet market, where old people who didn't go to high school cut the day's meat and leave it out on tables without refrigeration. I'd eat street food or at local restaurants and buy simple items like water and socks from stall vendors instead of from a corporation. None of this was particularly onerous. However, the vast majority of my money went to rent, more expensive restaurants, bars, movie theatres etc. I estimate I spent less than 1% of my money to people "off the ladder," as identified by them running businesses with very low capital costs.

I've found this even more difficult to implement when traveling. The people off the ladder are mostly offering me things I don't want. There are lots of useless souvenir trinkets, and there are the groceries and then there are the items catering to locals that I don't even understand. The language barrier hurts. Old women in Vietnam were often selling bottles of some yellow tonic. I never figured out what it was, and never shelled out $2 for it. I do eat my fair share of local meals, but it starts to feel like a burden, trying to constantly pick out which restaurant looks the shabbiest. And I can't ensure that the guesthouse I stay in is Mom and Pop run - in fact most of these aren't on booking.com or hostelworld. Lastly, I just don't have that much money. I double my pay as a tip to people I think need it, but this usually amounts to an extra $2.50. Certainly not a life changing amount. I can't even afford to give $10 to every person who needs it much less $100. Maybe the effort is there but the effect isn't.

As we approach Siem Reap, I realize that a lot of the people on this bus aren't really going to Siem Reap. I'm the only foreigner here and while we are still about 50km away, the bus has already made two stops. It's dark but it appears the homes on the side of the road here are of better quality than before, some made of plaster with glass windows. How well educated are the people sitting next to me? Are they middle class? There are smart phones and casual brand clothing. But they didn't have their own cars to make this 6 hour trip, and it's quite possible they will never leave the country. And what sort of industry is out here? It's too far from the temples to get any tourism revenue. Even when it's right in front of you, there are a lot of pieces to an economy hidden to you.

And even when poverty is right in front of you, it's not simple to contextualize it. Are these "poor" people happy? Are they more satisfied with what they have than I am? Is it better to make $2/day in a village where that's average, or $100/day in a city where everyone else has so much more? In these philosophical debates where it becomes clear that there's no equation for happiness and so much is relative, a lot of people shy away and instead focus on poverty-related issues like health and education. We can't tell if people are sadder, but they're definitely dying earlier. I won't discount these measurable metrics, but I find plenty of other issues that poverty breeds. Poverty breeds hopelessness - when you don't see any way out of poverty because no one around you has ever created a blueprint for escaping poverty, it's easy to give up. Poverty breeds boredom - many jobs I see are monotonous and involve waiting on events outside your control. Poverty leads to distorted decision making - when you can't find a way out of your boring job in your tiny village that produces nothing and someone comes along with a promised escape, you might give up your better instincts and take this risk. It's how you have thousands of laborers signing 5 year contracts to work in deathly construction sites in the Middle East. It's how people get lured into sex trafficking, or recruited into drug gangs. Distortions like these are sprawling problems with many branches but poverty right at their root.

When you are traveling to developing countries, you often come face to face with these distortions. You get harrassed by tuk-tuk drivers desperate for your service. You come across begging children repeating the word "school" but who very often have to hand over your money to pimps. You come across hardworking people with life savings totalling less than the emergency money in the bottom of my bag. You walk around with so much power and respect simply because of where you are from.

I believe there actually is a solution here. Paradoxically, it's tied into the same source of the problem: globalization. While the hard effects of globalization may have worsened inequality, the soft effects of globalization may eventually alleviate it. When multinational corporations enter a new country looking to cooperate rather than exploit, to share knowledge and provide new opportunities rather than extract value and leave, then we have a chance. Globalization's benefits - creating more multicultural people, increasing awareness of international issues, making it easier for people from opposite of the globe to not just do business together but simply interact - all need to be magnified. We need Americans to better understand what life is actually like in a Cambodian village, and we need Cambodian villagers to learn what's going on in New York. I think we need more people traveling to developing countries and spending a few extra dollars at the street fruit stall. Even if those few dollars don't make that much difference, collectively having more globally aware people can only help. Individual travellers as an agent of change can't solve global inequality on their own, but I think they are a critical part of the solution. Hopefully some of these travellers may run a multinational corporation, and others may become players within the government. Hopefully all these people will take their experiences and refuse to be indifferent anymore.  It takes the political will of the people to stand together and say that we shouldn't be living in a world where some people are developing a hyperloop and others don't have paved roads.

Strait Thuggin' It

The turn of the half decade put me in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was in a country I had long poorly understood. I was first puzzled by Malaysian Chinese in London back in 2008, where I happened upon a group of them speaking Cantonese outside a LSE party. I was quickly impressed by how fluent they were in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and presumably Malay. As someone struggling to become trilingual, I couldn't understand and how they all so effortlessly seemed to speak all those languages. I came to find many more Malay Chinese with similar polygottal aptitude, who when pressed would often say they speak many languages at home, especially Hokkien, and learned Cantonese from watching TVB. Very little of this made sense to me.

My perception of immigrant life, especially immigrant Chinese life, could not account for these Malays. Most immigrants I've met speak the language of their parents and heritage country at home, but speak the language of their current country best. Many immigrants can't speak their heritage language at all, and most lose it within 2-3 generations.  I've met many Chinese from Australia, America, Canada, Thailand, UK, France, Italy, Philippines, Côte d'Ivoire, Vietnam and Panama who fit my model. It seems simple.

Malacca town centre with red Dutch colonial buildings

But the Malaysian communities, which are also related to Singaporean and Indonesian communities, are very different and their histories are fascinating to me. For starters, they are a large group, which Chinese making up about a quarter of the population in Malaysia and the majority of Singapore. The oldest of them, called the Peranakan or Baba Nyongyan, came as early as the 1400s. Chinese communities were well established by the 1600s and many who arrived in the 1800's got rich. This period saw a great blossoming in trade as the West discovered the will and ability to sail to the East and the world changed forever. With Constantinople falling to the Ottoman Empire in 1421, the Silk Road was cut off for Europeans and the much desired silk and spices stopped showing up in the markets of Venice and Bruges. The Portuguese saw a market gap here and made big ships, reached India and established a colony in Goa. They soon realized the importance of the Malacca Straits in reaching East Asia from India. The Malacca Sultanate is considered the first Malay independent entity on the land after eras of empires of Indian or Indonesian extraction and established themselves as policers of the straits. With Europe really loving the spices, jade, silk and porcelain that these ships could bring back, a quote by the Portuguese Tomé Pires which is inscribed in the garden of the Malacca Sultan Palace: "Whoever is Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice."

Chinese shop houses with Straits-style architecture

So the Portuguese went ahead and conquered Malacca. That was 1521, and while their 140 year rule must have been eventful, this tale is usually abridged by mentioning that the Dutch took it over in 1640s and the British in the 1800s. The British especially had a large empire in place at this time, and they seemed to see some untapped economic potential in the resources of Malaysia. They encouraged a lot of Indians and Chinese to migrate to Malaysia, and these communities really got going. 

I read a lot of this in the book "How Trade Shaped the World." It's description of some of the major centers of trade made me pine to visit: Venice, Hormuz, Malacca, Canton (Guangzhou). I've been to three of these now in the past two years. Venice is one of the most touristy places in the world, still showing off the wealth of its ages past but no longer a vibrant economic center of trade. Guangzhou is the opposite, now a bustling metropolis but with a disappointedly paltry amount of physical history remaining to boast of its role in the Age of Discovery. I'm sitting now in Malacca, where I can see the signs of loss in the modern economy, the diluting cultural effects of tourism, but also a healthy amount of European settlement and a charming abundance of a Chinese culture no longer found in China. In Guangzhou I felt lost in the midst of what seemed like any other Chinese city, in Venice charmed but removed from the era of trade. In Malacca I can sense the melting pot history and feel connected to what seems like a much more exciting era.

The Chinese here came from many regions and in many waves. Like seemingly all Chinese diaspora, they established Chinatowns and tried to preserve their traditions more conservatively than those in China. Chinese shops are equipped with ornate signs all reading from right to left. They primarily spoke Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese and some Wu. I've met plenty of people in my generation who still claim to speak five dialects (including Mandarin) fine. All mixed together, it seems everyone could speak everything. I can envision some poor laborers in Fujian boarding a boat and ending up in a tin mine in Malaysia, working alongside lots of other Chinese men. They would have had to pick up all other dialects, which wouldn't have been too arduous over enough time. If they interacted with locals more or the authorities, they would've had to speak good Malay or English. As their children settled and an education system was standardized/imposed, they would have learned Malay and English well. Nowadays, a lot of Chinese children go to Chinese primary schools where they learn to properly read and write Mandarin (which they uniquely call 華語 Huayu). They'll also learn Malay and English from the age of 6 or so, and transition into a Malay high school because Chinese high schools are not recognized. Because English is the language of universities, those pursuing higher Ed have to keep that up. Not every Malaysian Chinese is like this, completely multilingual. My friend in Borneo doesn't speak any Chinese, and plenty of poorly educated people don't speak English. Some of my friends have admitted to struggling with Malay, particularly after years abroad.

I think the reason Malay Chinese haven't dropped their Chinese language heritage and fully adopted Malay is largely owing to the size of their community but partly because of the role of English. For us immigrants abroad, learning the local language is a prerequisite to upwards mobility. For Malaysian Chinese, a lot of high paying colonial jobs required English first, and nowadays with great English you can go abroad and study. Many of the educated elite Malay Chinese in fact speak primarily English at home. Thus Malay has been relegated to a role language, used strictly for communicating to the Malays and other ethnicities around. Cantonese, Hokkien and now Mandarin are the lingua francas within the Chinese community, Malay the lingua franca within the country, and English within the world. Depending on which communities you spend more time in, your linguistic aptitudes will adjust naturally.

I'll finish with one personal anecdote. I wandered far outside historical Melaka center, past shopping malls and seaside construction and residential neighborhoods in search of the Portuguese settlement on my map. I didn't find much there. Closely packed ranch or two floored houses with intense Christmas decorations were exhibiting an ordinary Saturday afternoon that could have just as easily taken place in North Attleboro, Massachusetts or Irvine, California. I reached the seashore finally, after the entire previous 4km stretch had been blocked by construction or industrial activity. There wasn't much here either. I was very confused, no seaside city passes up on coastal development, much less one historically known as an entrepôt. So I found a restaurant that was completely empty save for what seemed like staff and children. A brown man served me a bottle of water, while an old man and woman conversed in a Chinese language. I tried but all I could pick up were phrases that I thought were purely Mandarin or English. Finally I asked the woman if she could speak Cantonese, with an idea what the answer would be. She said, "yes, no problem la" but spoke with a fairly strong and unusual accent. She told me that they had been conversing in Hokkien, and that they spoke basically everything in their community, but qualified this statement by saying "we can speak some of everything, but all of nothing." Her Cantonese wasn't perfect, but it was communicable, kinda like mine. The guy didn't seem to fully understand us.

I asked if there were any Portuguese here. The woman explained sure, this place was setup specifically for Portuguese, from all over Malaysia in fact. I asked how many this was. 2000, 3000 about? she confirmed with the man. In fact her husband, who was moving crates around in the restaurant, was of Portuguese and Malaysian descent. He still spoke Portuguese, but she added "已經變了" meaning the Portuguese they speak has already evolved to the point of unintelligibility with Europeans. At this point the man jumped in, and explained in English the history of the settlement. Portuguese had been in Malaysia since the 1500's, and amazingly some of them were still there as a distinct entity. In 1933, the community was granted a tract of land on swampy, reclaimed land 5km from city centre. The reason this waterfront lacks much development or history is that it's not historical at all, and "there's no fish out there." The community seems so unremarkably residential belying their unique heritage were it not for the very visible Christmas celebrations still up in January. In a country where it has become controversial for Muslims to even say "Merry Christmas," the Portuguese community are known as Kristang (from Christian) and defiantly loving the Christmas spirit. 

The man reintroduced himself as Mr. Lau and said his mother was a Peranakan. I would learn from my museum visit later that the Peranakan were, as the earliest Chinese arrivals, usually the first to take advantage of the crops and trade here and become societal elites. It was no wonder that he was so well versed in the region's history and his English evidently fluent. He told me about a black house built in 1945 that was of a more original style, still made entirely of wood, and was now inhabited but also preserved by the local museum. He told me how there used to be a bell to alert people to fires and events by the statue of St. Peter. He told me he'd been to Hong Kong and how it was nice but that there were too many people.

I had never been much of a history buff growing up, but I'd never been so affected by the history of a city as I was now. When I visited the Peranakan house and museum, a 19th century two story triple house owned by a rich Peranakan family of the last name Chan, I understood the history a lot better. The original Mr. Chan had come penniless from Fujian and ended up owning a spices plantation and diversifying into rubber and fruits. The house had cool elements, including a peephole from the 2nd story bedroom to the front door, rainwater collection, furniture from England and a stone bowl for grinding spices. The family is now 5 generations descended from the original immigrant and spread throughout the English speaking world (Canada, Singapore, US, UK, Australia). As I looked at the family picture taken just a year ago, I felt like I was seeing familiar faces. How many Chinese people had I met along the way who mentioned some heritage to Malaysia that just confused me? One of them easily could have been from this family. The world was somehow making more sense now. Maybe I've done a poor job of explaining it, but this group of Malaysian Chinese that was so puzzling to me had been solved after this one trip, and that was as much as I could expect for a New Year's holiday.