Wednesday May 3 2006 - Beggars

Last night it was pouring rain when we were coming back from the Tapas Bar in TST (which was yummy, by the way). We had avoided most of the rain by using the subway and staying underground as long as possible, and only coming to the surface right by the taxi stand where we wanted to be (it makes us sound like a couple of moles, doesn't it!). As we were waiting in the queue for a taxi, there were several beggers going up and down the line. I didn't give them anything....for one thing I'm afraid in Hong Kong that if you give one beggar something a dozen will appear from nowhere and you'll be surrounded. It’s different than the US, though. In the US it tends to be younger people, mentally ill, probably drug addicts, etc. Here, they're old, obviously disabled, sometimes horribly disfigured. I saw one the other day wearing an old army uniform of some kind (boy did THAT make me curious). I'm still inclined not to give them anything, but Jill's encounter has me thinking. There are charitable organizations here, so why are these people out on the streets? They're mostly little old men and ladies. There aren't that many really, considering the size of this city. Apparently the homeless problem in Tokyo is much worse than here...Beth told me that in Tokyo a lot of the homeless men are people that lost everything when the bubble burst and because of their loss of face they choose to be homeless instead of going home to their families. Weird.

Thoughts anyone? Since you heard Jill's story, have you had different thoughts about what to do when you see someone begging?

Just to add another wrinkle to the whole thing...you saw the numbers I posted earlier about what the average income is here. Our income, including all the "funny money" that we get to compensate us for the housing differential, is just insane. On paper we make FIVE TIMES as much as we did in the US, and that's without my income! Of course, most of that goes to our apartment rent. What's weird is that sometimes I get a little jealous pang because we are in the older building of our complex, and we're "only" on the 6th floor (our building has 24 floors; the newer building has 45). But that's just crazy! We have more square footage than we had in Austin (okay, but we don't have a garage...it still seems like this apartment has better storage than our house in Austin did). And the apartment itself is in a wonderful location. What happens is that I think sometimes that Lee is being taken advantage of; that he'll "pay" forever for turning down the move to Singapore when Sarah was in high school. I don't regret him doing that at all, but sometimes I feel bad when I realize what a huge sacrifice he made career-wise. He always says he has no regrets, and we'll think of what happened with my niece and nephew and think "thank GOD" we were in the US when all of that happened, but still. I don't think at the time I really had any idea what kind of choice he made, for his family.

I'm babbling.

What do you all think?