The People You Snub.

One of the biggest fights that Gina and I had in our turbulent marriage was the fact that she always felt that my parents and the people around me snubbed her. It didn’t help that at the time, I was living with my father who lived in a swish condominium opposite the Shangri-La Valley Wing (a place often inhabited by VIPS like former Chinese President Zhang Xi Min) and she lived with her family in a Housing Development Board Flat in the North of Singapore. I remember going out with her on an occasion and not wanting to follow her home and she lashed out at me, yelling, “Is it because I live in an HDB flat.” Another of her out burst was against my family’s group of friends, who consisted mainly of prominent members of the advertising community – she felt they were weird and at one stage stressed that her father’s business associates were just as rich as the well to do executives my father knew.

In fairness to my ex-wife, my friends and family really did think I was married to trailer park trash. In fairness to my family and friends, they disliked her for reasons other than the ones she felt. My Dad said, “It’s not about snobbery – her father could probably drown me in his cash,” and in fairness to my Dad he is actually quite comfortable with Huong aka the Ruthless Half, who has a better claim to come from the gutter than Gina ever did i.e. Vietnamese village girl who barely speaks English, as opposed to Gina who did go to a recognized university of sorts.

While my ex-wife and family didn’t get each other right, I bring up the topic of how she perceived by family because it highlights one of the major issues of our time – namely the cultural and communication gaps between people. We often assume that culture gaps are about things like race and religion. The talking heads of the West often enjoy talking about how you’ll get a clash of “civilizations” or about the “North-South” divide and the struggle between light and dark-skinned people. While these are valid discussion points, I believe the biggest cultural misunderstandings and conflicts happen between “social” classes in the same place. Trump was elected by White Skinned people from rural Pennsylvania who lost touch with white skinned people in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. I live in Singapore am living on the bridge of being in the world of corporate restructuring and waiting tables.

I’m something of an oddity in both worlds and I guess that gives me an insight into both. The funny thing is both worlds are very similar. People in both want the same thing – namely to earn enough money to build a decent enough life for themselves. Yet, they’re incredibly unable to understand the struggles of the other. While collar people for example, cannot understand why I would ever want to work a blue-collar job and the well-meaning ones often feel they have an obligation to rescue me from the dregs of being a blue-collar worker. 

I can appreciate my well-wishers. Blue-collar work is financially unrewarding for the hours that you have to work. In my blue-collar existence, I earn the princely sum of $10 an hour and I’ve worked there for six-years. My co-workers are barely paid S$2,000 a month and they easily work eight hours a day and six days a week, including public holidays (which is actually the busiest time to be in a restaurant). The mathematics aren’t exactly in favour of the worker.

Having said that, I don’t understand why people feel that I need to be “rescued” from my blue-collar existence. Just because the financial rewards are lesser, it doesn’t mean that the existence is without benefits. One of the benefits of being in a blue-collar existence, for example, is that you have tend to have peace of mind. When the restaurant shuts, I’m not obliged to think about the place until the next time I enter the place. By contrast, in my existence in corporate restructuring, there’s always the nagging feeling that I have to jump at a moment notice because of this or that.

White-collar people also have a tendency to forget that life exists beyond their own and the worst part is that they forget that life is often fluid and the way of the white-collar worker isn’t the only way. Which brings me back to the point that Gina once made – her father’s friends, aka the small time Chinese businessmen were as wealthy as the high flying multinational executives that my parents knew. She’s right.

The executive class often overlooks the fact that knowledge isn’t always from books and more importantly, the key to success boils down to guts. My former father-in-law sold eggs for a living and somehow managed to put two kids through to university in a country that doesn’t subsidize much. Think about it – the old man had to sell a commodity where the margins are calculated in cents and its easy to get undercut by the big boys and somehow, he managed to put his kids through to school. I stress this point because how many of us can gather this type of money by doing that?

People from the rougher side of life have knack of looking at things that matter. I give the example of Zen, my favourite flesh ball from the rough streets of Geylang (Singapore’s red-light district). Somehow, flesh ball has a way of measuring people up pretty accurately. How does she get this ability? She’s probably been screwed more than enough times than most to have learnt the hard way. I take the example of Huong, who looked at a girl I had brought to a function – she said, “That girl only wants money from you.” She could pick this up from one glance. Interestingly the young lady in question said the same thing on my other half but qualified it as, “I’ve done my research and it’s proven that Vietnamese girls only want you for money.”

They also network much better and as my father said to Huong on his first meeting – “You are from a third world country where people still help each other. “I look at the communities formed by the foreigners from the poorer parts of Asia and I notice that people help each other and that’s how they manage to thrive.

Somehow, my white-collar friends can never understand how people without a degree can obtain money. It’s such a pity that they have this blind spot because if they were only able to look at the things that matter, they’d find a way of prospering for themselves too.

I remember going to see the fancy high-priced lawyers we were working on in a case. The client was an old Chinese businessman who could not speak English and who operated out of a hole in one of the streets that needed to be cleaned up. The client threw cheques at the lawyers. It occurred to me that it wasn’t the guys in the suites throwing the money……………..I believe this is something many young professionals need to understand about the way the world works.