Social Class or the Lack of It

 

When I first took on work as a waiter in 2012, one of the people I hung out with told me that I should ensure that I was not paid CPF because it would reflect badly on my work history. This friend of mine also got upset when I told him that I did do things like use newspaper to clean the class door and he said that it would upset my family that I, as a graduate Chinese, was doing menial task.

I bring up this conversation I had all those years ago because many people assume that because I had no qualms taking on a “menial” job in my late thirties, that I am not class or status conscious. As is often said, I clearly didn’t have the pride not to want to be seen doing “menial” things.

This impression about me is actually wrong. I am exceedingly class and status conscious. I actually believe that there are “high” class, “low” class and “no” class people in. I can’t say that I don’t get impressed by external factors like how someone is dressed (“Cosmetics count” as an uncle and former boss used to say), wealth (who doesn’t like being around the guys who have a “good” life) and education (who doesn’t like being around witty people), the biggest differentiator of class is in one’s behavior, particularly in how they treat those they perceive to be of a “lesser” social status.

I live in fear of being thought of as a “low life pariah.” So, I am extra conscious of being polite to the point of being meek whenever I speak to people like construction workers, street sweepers and maids. I believe that if I ever spoke like an “overlord” people around me would cringe in embarrassment of being in my company.  

 

He said it Best

One of the best impressions I had was of a former colleague. This colleague of mine is one of those chaps who is happily laid back and chilled out. His idea of “formal” dressing is a polo-t-shirt and he has no qualms about being known as “low-life-scum” (which he proudly told me was one of the email addresses he had). Yet, whenever I was around him, he was always polite. When we were served lunch at the client’s location, he made it a point to wash up (or in his words “don’t want them to think we’re animals”). His behavior was such that I understood him to be a high-class, well brought up person.

By comparison, I have met people who have everything that I don’t have like money, brains and hair. Yet, instead of feeling envy, I’ve been so repulsed by them that I’ve been praying for the opportunity to take a baseball bat to them and then to myself because I wouldn’t know how to clean of being contaminated by them. I meet a lot of such people in the liquidations industry. One of the very worst were a group of directors of a former listed construction company (the type that gets government contracts). Everyone in the group was well to do (the least paid was the finance manager on a small salary of $8,000 plus a month). Yet, they were repulsive and I cringed every time I was in their presence. You’re talking about guys who thought were pretty cool to be able to feed the 60 over construction workers they had not paid for several months and left on the construction site with no food, running water and a generator for electricity – which only had fuel for a few days by the time they went into provisional liquidation (and they only paid the said $600 because we advised them that they needed to get the workers off their payroll).

Working a “menial” job in my late thirties helped propel me into the leagues of the “class-sensitive.” I would notice that people who were nice to me but rather less so to my Pinoy or elderly colleagues, who were actually doing the same job as me.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a casual acceptance of what you’d call “pariah” behavior in Asia, especially if the pariah in question has a bit of money to throw around or comes from a prominent enough family. I remember an Italian colleague at the Bistrot getting the shock of her life when one of our customers, who happens to be from a wealthy enough family and a good friend of the Bistrot owner, slammed her class on the table in her direction. This girl’s sister used to think it was a point of generosity to invite the chef out to drink her left over wine. It was, as they say, acceptable behavior because she had money and came from a “good” family.

You could say that this is life. When dealing in business, you want the people with money to spend it with you, so you do what you need to do. However, that doesn’t mean that such pariahs need to be respected as anything more once they are of no use to the people who know how to speak human to each other.