World Journal, Isabelle Hsu, Translated by Eugenia Chien, Posted: Nov 03, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO — On a cold, crisp, typical San Francisco morning, Robert Chan, 38, sat on a bench in Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square with a pair of Marriott Hotel slippers on his feet. Chan is a Chinese immigrant from Vietnam who lost his wallet and ID on the bus two months ago. He had been staying at his sister’s house, but because he had not found a job for weeks, and perhaps for reasons he didn’t want to say, his sister kicked him out of her house, effectively starting Chan’s life as a homeless person in San Francisco. 

Chan is one of the uncounted Chinese among San Francisco’s 6,000 plus homeless population. The homeless may come from varying backgrounds but they share the same daily struggle with violence and survival. The Urban Institute estimates that there are 450,000 to 850,000 homeless people in the United States. San Francisco has an estimated 6,248 homeless people, the third highest concentration of homeless in the country. According to the Urban Institute, 1.4 percent of San Francisco’s homeless are Asian, 36.4 percent is African American, and 31.5 percent is white. 

Ed Jew, the only Chinese American on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s committee to end chronic homelessness, said that because of cultural sensitivities, Chinese homeless often do not admit their situation and refuse to go to homeless shelters. As a result, the official estimate of Asian homelessness is probably low, Jew said. 

For Chan, lessons of survival came the hard way: everything he owned was stolen while he was on the street. With no clothing, no address, and no phone number, Chan stood in line for three or four hours at the homeless shelter everyday to sleep and shower. At the shelter, Chan’s shoes were stolen when he took them off to sleep. This was his first lesson as a homeless person, he says, and the reason why he was sitting in Portsmouth Square with a pair of Marriott Hotel slippers. 

Being homeless is made even more difficult by racial conflicts. The scuffle that often happens between blacks and whites at the homeless shelter is keeping him away, Chan said. He only goes to the homeless shelter if he has to shower or sleep. Racial violence notwithstanding, without shoes, Chan’s daily trip from Chinatown to the homeless shelter on Fell street is nearly impossible. 

At the homeless shelter, nurse Yolanda, who declined to give her last name, is frank about the risks of her job. The police who patrol the shelter have shifts longer than officers who patrol outside. On her break, Yolanda doesn’t dare to go outside for some fresh air in case something erupts inside. She is even more nervous when she has the graveyard shift. Yolanda said that everything from sheets, towels, and clothing is lacking in the shelter. When the homeless shower in the shelter, it is almost pointless because they would have to put their dirty clothes back on, she says. Three months ago, all the towels in the shelter were stolen, and the shelter had not been able to replace them. So, for months, the homeless who shower at the shelter had to get dressed while still wet from the shower. 

San Francisco has 10 homeless shelters and four free kitchens. The Chinatown North Beach Mental Health Services on Filbert Street provides help in Mandarin and Cantonese. 

As the morning wore on, the scene at Portsmouth Square is busier with the addition of Michael Sao, 52, a lanky Chinese man. Sao, a Laotian Chinese immigrant, had attended high school in Taiwan and lived in Japan and other cities in the United States. He landed in San Francisco 20 years ago and was working in restaurants until a back injury put him out of a job two years ago. Sao had been living on Social Security and tried staying in a homeless shelter, but the violence and conflict in the homeless shelters made him swear he would never go back again. 

When Sao is tired, he spends $12 on a bus ticket to go to a casino. He sleeps on the bus for six or seven hours on the way to the casino. When he arrives, the casino gives each person a $25 voucher. Instead of using the voucher to gamble, Sao and other homeless people on the bus pool together their vouchers to get a room at the hotel where they can shower and sleep. Sao says that using casino vouchers to solve the sleeping/showering problem is common, and more than 10 Chinese homeless people he knows does this.

Sao has a younger sister who graduated from a prestigious college in Taiwan and settled in Chicago with her doctor husband, and two sisters who live in Japan. But his life is so far from theirs that they have stopped keeping in touch with him. 

Sao has lost many of his teeth from not having health insurance, but he stressed that he’s perfectly healthy, except for his back pain. He said that he has already given up looking for a job to sustain himself. But when he sees other homeless people in their 40s, he says he feels regret for them. He says he tells them to not give up, and that social workers need to “rescue people who still have hope.” 

Sao waves a hand to warn a reporter to stay away from another homeless Chinese man who seemed mentally disturbed. The chill in the air is dispersing away, but the chill of the uncertain future of the homeless stays frozen in the air.

In one of his prose poems, Baudelaire describes how a man spends a day walking around Paris with a woman he feels ready to fall in love with. They agree on so many things that by evening, he is convinced he has found a companion with whose soul his own may unite. Thirsty, they go to a glamorous new cafe on the corner of a boulevard, where the man notices the arrival of an impoverished, working-class family who have come to gaze through the plate-glass window of the cafe at the elegant guests, dazzling white walls, and gilded decor. The eyes of these poor on-lookers are full of wonder at the display of wealth and beauty inside, and their expression fills the narrator with pity and shame at his privileged position. He turns to look at his loved one in the hope of seeing his embarrassment and emotion reflected in her eyes. But the woman with whose soul his own was prepared to unite has a different agenda. She snaps that these wretches with their wide, gaping eyes are unbearable to her, she wonders what on earth they want and asks him to tell the owner to have them moved on straightaway. Does not every love story have these moments? A search for eyes that will reflect one’s thoughts and that ends up with a(tragicomic) divergence - be it over the class struggle or a pair of shoes.

Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty. 

In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”

In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.

This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that “attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.

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IN 1925, AGED 20, THE HUNGARIAN POET ATTILA JÓZSEF WAS EXPELLED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF SZEGED FOR A RADICAL POEM PUBLISHED IN A PERIODICAL. HE LEFT HUNGARY FOR VIENNA, WHERE HE SQUATTED IN A SLUM WITH TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER PEOPLE, MANY OF THEM REFUGEES FROM EASTERN EUROPE. HE SOLD NEWSPAPERS OUTSIDE RESTAURANTS AND CLEANED UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS. AS HE DID FOR MUCH OF HIS LIFE, HE LIVED IN HOUSING HE HAD NO FORMAL RIGHT TO, AND EARNED A LIVING WITHOUT A WAGE, UNRECOGNISED BY THE STATE. HE EXISTED, TO USE A MODERN PHRASE, IN THE INFORMAL ECONOMY.

After four months in ‘that frightful slum’, József had a rare stroke of luck. He was invited by the Hatvany family to live at their mansion. Even for those without benefactors with mansions to share, over the next few decades more and more Viennese residents became, as it were, legitimate (give or take a Nazi invasion). Land rights were formalised, social housing was built and slums diminished, as they did across Western and Northern Europe.

It seems unlikely that the informal settlements of the global south will dwindle as did their forebears in Europe, at least in the near future. In fact, slums are getting bigger. According to the UN’s 2003 report ‘The Challenge of Slums’, in 2001 around 924 million people, or thirty two per cent of the world’s total urban population, lived in slums. In the first thirty years of this millennium that number is likely to double. The term slum is usually defined by standard of living rather than rights to land, although it is often used interchangeably with informal or extra-legal settlement. In developing countries, the majority of people living in slums are also employed in the informal economy.

Contemporary slums are in many ways similar in the conditions they provide for their residents to those of Vienna in the 1920s or Manchester in the 1850s. Most lack basic amenities, are cramped, crowded and susceptible to the rapid spread both of diseases and flames. But whereas Victorian slums were largely a product of the industrial revolution, in the last few decades there has been, as Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums, mass ‘urbanisation without industrialisation’. The growth of huge informal settlements on the fringes of cities, in some cases larger than the cities themselves, has not necessarily followed economic growth. Davis argues that many poorer countries have been hamstrung by the ‘anti-rural’ terms of loans given to them for economic development by the World Bank and IMF, by which privatisation and the loss of a public sector safety net has been encouraged or even necessitated. Millions of people have moved from rural poverty in the hope of unpoor urban living, and instead ended up living in informal developments, subdividing the limited work available with those who were already urban.

The experiences of people living outside of the formal structures, their measures of deprivation and happiness, are of course diverse. But they share with József the condition of having ‘no country’. The speaker of ‘With a Pure Heart’, the poem that ended József’s academic career at the university, is a stateless orphan with no lover now and no grave when he is dead. He is a person without rights to being a person in an area where political representation is suspended, where normal rules don’t apply. From no-man’s land, being no-one, the poem’s way of asserting a self is radical and still shocking. ‘With a pure heart, I’ll burn and loot. | If I have to, I’ll even shoot’; he will die fighting and earn a burial, so that ‘death-bringing grass will start | growing from my beautiful, pure heart’. If being is being able to make things happen (as he wrote later in ‘Night in the Slums’: ‘damp and clinging wind | is nothing | but a fluttering of dirty bed sheets’, tr. Bakti) then his only way to be is to allow seeds to take root in his body. This is his abject redemption.

Should western nations be cautious of a supranational class of people who bear against them legitimate complaints? Davis thinks so: ‘[i]f the point of the war on terrorism is to pursue the enemy into his sociological and cultural labyrinth, then the poor peripheries of developing cities will be the permanent battlefields of the twenty-first century’ (In Praise of Barbarians). Davis’s use of the term ‘war on terror’ sounds dated, but the question Davis implies, of what sort of battlefield the poor peripheries of cities might be, is a good one. What might resistance look like? What ideas or practices might be resisted and in whose terms?

Bill Moyers: But here’s the problem for journalism. When we write about inequality, we use numbers that are profound but numbing. I mean, here’s something I just read: over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent, but their tax burden shrank by about one-third. Now, those facts tell us something very important: that the rich got richer as their tax rates shrank. But it doesn’t seem to start people’s blood rushing.

David Simon: You start talking about a social compact between the people at the bottom of the pyramid and the people at the top, and people look at you and say, “Are you talking about sharing wealth?” Listen, capitalism is the only engine credible enough to generate mass wealth. I think it’s imperfect, but we’re stuck with it. And thank God we have that in the toolbox. But if you don’t manage it in some way that incorporates all of society, if everybody’s not benefiting on some level and you don’t have a sense of shared purpose, national purpose, then it’s just a pyramid scheme. Who’s standing on top of whose throat?

Bill Moyers: Why do you think, David, that we tolerate such gaps between rich and poor?

David Simon: You know, I’m fascinated by it. Because a lot of the people who end up voting for that kind of laissez-faire market policy are people who get creamed by it. And I think it’s almost like a casino. You’re looking at the guy winning, you’re looking at the guy who pulled the lever and all the bells go off, all the coins are coming out of a one-armed bandit. You’re thinking, “That could be me. I’ll play by those rules.” But actually, those are house rules. And most of you are going to lose.

Bill Moyers: Do you really believe, as you said to those students at Loyola, that we’re not going to make it?

David Simon: We’re not going to make it as a first-rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. Empires end, and that doesn’t mean cultures end completely, and it doesn’t even mean that for nation-states. If you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys, you’d have said, “Man, what’s going to be left?” But Britain’s still there, and they’ve come to terms with what they can and can’t do. Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. A lot of our foreign policy represents that. And this notion that the markets were always going to go up, and that once we had invested stocks to death, we could create some new equity out of nothing.

Ten Chinese migrant workers are living in a public toilet in the city of Hangzhou, according to local media.

They are believed to have been living there for several months, and the toilet is now kitted out with a bed, cooking facilities and a television.

One of the women said she could not afford to rent a room or pay normal living expenses.

Correspondents say the story highlights the poor pay and living conditions of many migrant workers in China.

China’s rapid economic growth has transformed the country, says the BBC’s China analyst Shirong Chen - but many migrant workers are struggling.

China has an estimated 20 million migrants, who have moved from the poorer countryside to find work in the rapidly expanding cities and manufacturing hubs.

Strong smell

A woman called Ai, who lives in the female toilets, told the Zhejiang Morning Express: “We have got used to the strong smell of urine. The worst thing is that people keep stealing my stoves and cooking pots.”

Ai’s friend Wang Yuhua lives in the male toilets.

“The bad thing is there are mice everywhere,” she said.

Local Hangzhou residents are reportedly sympathetic to the plight of the migrant workers and generally avoid using the facilities.

But some are still surprised by the sight of the toilets’ new residents.

“When I ran inside to use the toilet, I was stunned to see several people sitting around, chatting or doing things,” Mr Du told the newspaper.

One of the migrant workers even said that a friend of hers was a little envious of her, as she could live in the toilets rent-free.

But a spokesman for the local council warned: “It’s forbidden to live inside the toilets, as they are supposed to be for public use.”