XXVII (Freedoms: Part 1)

A couple weekends ago I went to a party hosted by a colleague and his wife. At the party I talked to other colleagues from work and also met some folks who worked with his wife at a preschool on the other side of town. Conversations in China between foreigners meeting for the first time, as I've experienced them, usually touch on how long a person has been living in China (about 15 months) and how one's Chinese is progressing (level 1.1). At any rate, I was having this conversation with one of the preschool teachers (four years, "pretty good" [okay then]), a person originally from Los Angeles. I asked her what keeps her in China and she said, "the economic freedom." By this she meant the ability to make enough money to live (eat, pay rent and bills) and also have enough money to travel and do stuff. Of course, any janky cost of living website will tell you that its cheaper to live in China than the US, and though I am certainly not qualified to talk about economics, it's stunning how economically painless it is to get on a train, get a Didi (China's equivalent of Uber), or even rent an apartment. Of course there are things here that are more expensive, relatively speaking, like buying an apartment or a tank of gas or a Ford or a pair of "real" Nikes, but generally, its easier to move about here in China and do what one desires, so long as one's desires are within the bounds of acceptable behavior: "Economic Freedom," that is, the freedom to not have to devote all one's time towards the ends of survival.

There is already much that complicates this experience of Economic Freedom so instead of a straight line, a series of incidents and a few facts:

• Just last week my neighbor, upon entering the elevator with me, asked me how much money I make.
• When talking to a friend about how things like travel and long term planning are difficult to do in the United States, instead of sympathy, she raised the issue that Americans are too caught up in the short-term to do long-term planning and this is why they are not able to make ends meet.
• Last year a student said to me that she had bought a water boiler for her dorm room to cook eggs because the hard boiled eggs in the cafeteria were too expensive.
• Via Wikipedia: "The total GDP of Kunshan was 316 billion RMB, listed as No.1 of all Chinese county-level city in 2016."
• My second to last year at Purdue a colleague and began collecting some preliminary data about the perceptions of fair wages for graduate student TAs and found that international students, especially those from China, had different views than Americans about compensation. 

A few things are going on here that needs to be acknowledged: The first is that people's perceptions of money are weird, vast, and connected, somehow, to culture. This a is subject for another time (or better yet, a sociology study), and that discussions of money spur all kinds of emotions. Second, of course I must acknowledge that I am making more money than average here in China by a wide margin, and so my experiences of Economic Freedom are colored by this fact. That said, it has been quantified and well-documented that both a) economic mobility in the US has been declining for some time, and that b) it has been rising in China for some time. Please have a look at this short, info-graphic heavy piece about the "China Dream," in comparison to the American Dream.

Economics aside, inseparable from the experience of being foreign in China has been the experience of my new found economic freedom: freedom to take trips, to make plans, to think about what I want to do rather than what I can do based on my available resources. If I want to go to Shanghai and buy a pair of pants, for example, it is not a question of how much I can afford but what kind of pants do I want to have (within reason, and if I can find my size). For me, this is a stark contrast in lifestyle that I'm still not sure what to make of. That is, a contrast in how I imagine the future in that the goal, for now at least, is no longer survival and making ends meet. Arjun Appadurai in The Future as Cultural Fact, argues, at points, that folks primarily concerned with survival do not have time to plan for the future. This suggests those born into favorable positions, and those who have gained a degree of financial stability, will gain more practice making future plans, and therefore will become better at the task of dreaming. I'm "lucky" to be in this position, as I am supposed to say, but at the same time I have been working continuously for my entire adult life to put myself into this position. Last month I turned 40 (!), and so it's been 18 years of financial insecurity up until this point. I regret nothing, and have no desire to construct a narrative of victimhood. But I do want to make the point that the experience of economic freedom is one that many in China, including myself, have experienced as of late. Much has been said about China's lack of political freedoms, but I can attest to the fact that an economic freedom is also a life changing force.