THURSDAY, 12 JUNE 2003
The World of the Working Adult is your destination if you are old enough to leave school and someone offers to pay you for your labour; also when you’re done with your tests and exams at a tertiary institution, or when you’re plain tired of learning, or when you have to start repaying your student loans.
Nineteen-ninety-six was the first year of my adult life that I was no longer a student. This was the first year I had to demonstrate where I was going to fit into the Great Hierarchy. The year started for me in a municipal apartment – without furniture, because I had sold all of it during the last few weeks of the previous year. From that very first month of my post-university adult life I couldn’t afford to pay the rent of a municipal apartment. By the middle of this month the electricity was cut off, so I couldn’t even celebrate this new phase of my existence with a cup of tea.
If you don’t start with some paid work after your tertiary education ends, and you live either in a municipal apartment without electricity, or with your parents for a few months, or in your older sister’s living room (not even in the middle of the living room, but behind the couch), you are a failure in the eyes of your friends, your family, other people who know you, and in the eyes of society at large.
To go abroad is – as it also was in the mid-nineties – a way to escape this negative view of your person. If you emigrated, or accepted a job in a foreign country where you received a formal work permit before you left, that would be one thing. You’re still in a formal work situation contemporaries in your own country will understand, and can identify with to some extent. If on the other hand you only pack a backpack or two suitcases, and you go to England for a year or two, or to Northeast Asia to work as an English teacher for a year or three, it is commonly expected that you will “return” at some point to begin a life in your own country as a Working Adult, and to take your Place in the Great Hierarchy.
My years in Korea and Taiwan fall in this second category of Going Abroad. The difference is that after seven years I still haven’t made my reappearance in the Republic to take my place in the sun. (There was the experimental return in 1998 which ended in a domestic servant’s room with pink walls, but that was over quickly enough.)
Now I know that I have been struggling for almost a decade to find an answer to a specific question: Where is my place in the Great Hierarchy?
My difficulty with this question can be attributed to a large extent to the fact that I don’t sit comfortably in middle-class company – because of the “poor white” years, and also because of my personal ideology of Creative Independence before Financial Comfort.
Without an answer to this question it has always been difficult to work out what kind of life I wanted to live as a Working Adult, with what type of work I’d be able to identify myself, where I would (like to) live, with whom I would socialise without feeling like a “failure”, and what kind of life I would be able to give a family.
An interesting situation developed in our family regarding this matter. My parents both came from rural areas and worked their way up to the Urban Middle Class. Things went wrong just when they reached the peak of their success in their mid-forties. From then on they were in and out of the Poor White Class (mostly in). My older sister mastered the game well and now enjoys a relatively comfortable Middle-class Existence as a reward. My younger sister, who was eight years old when she stumbled into the Poor White Class with the rest of the family, can together with her husband be classified with ease as Working Class – or Aspiring Middle Class.
Me? I’m a tough case. I had the opportunity to achieve membership of the Petite Bourgeoisie as a high school teacher. For ideological reasons, a problem with authority, a small degree of artistic talent, and too much ambition I politely declined the opportunity.
Where do I therefore fit in, in this great Socio-Economic and Cultural Hierarchy? I am nothing more than a Poor White Intellectual.
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