“Give a beggar a dime, and he’ll bless you. Give him a dollar and he’ll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.” Anzia Yezierska
I’m struggling with something here, something I never thought would be an issue for me, in that I’m confronting my deep-seated feelings of compassion toward poverty—the unwavering (until now) belief that it’s my duty as a human being to help those less fortunate. It’s an unwelcome confrontation. I’d much rather hang onto my idealism, to keep it safe and cocooned somewhere in my soul. Instead, I find it’s pleading for examination: it’s changing, and I want to know why. I want to fight this change, in the face of everything that keeps pulling me in the opposite direction. It’s not an easy task.
Accosted by hordes of Chinese beggars along the city streets daily, I rarely hand out money. They are aggressive, often grabbing my arm, or maneuvering into my path, thrusting and shaking their plastic buckets in my face, while continuously calling out the one English word they all seem to know: “hello! hello! hello!” They chase me down the streets, their plaintive wails echoing in my head. This is awkward and embarrassing. I feel one part pity, one part contempt, and I don’t like feeling such a split in my emotions. I justify the withholding by telling myself I’d go broke pretty quick if I indulged every beggar. Indeed, here in China, to support the amount of beggars that make “requests,” I’d be working solely to support them.
I have been warned by savvy locals and students not to give the beggars money, that many are running scams, and will target Westerners, believing we are all rich. There is even a “rent-a-baby” scam, where young women will rent babies from poor mothers, and then use the babies as begging props to acquire donations. But it’s not only Westerners who are targeted. Once, in Suzhou, I saw this in action, when a young, smartly dressed Chinese man was chased down the street by a rent-a-baby scammer, who badgered and whined and grabbed at him until he finally reached into his wallet. He looked disgusted, and I couldn’t tell if that look was directed at the beggar—or himself, for acquiescing.
I don’t often see children begging, except at train or bus stations, with their parents discreetly watching from a far corner, but one local teenage girl told of a child beggar who approached her on the street, who wrapped himself around her leg until she gave him a coin—seconds later, she was swarmed by raggedy children demanding money and pulling on her, and she became frightened, eventually running away from them. In another instance, in Wuxi, I saw a child of about one or two years old sitting in the drizzling rain on a piece of cardboard atop the dirty, wet sidewalk. He was propped against a building wall, mere feet from the main street, with its crazy, whizzing Chinese traffic, all alone, with no parents to be seen. There was a plastic bucket with a few measly coins between his legs. And it was freezing cold. I still can’t believe I just walked by, assuming an adult was watching from a hidden vantage point. Where was my compassion, my sense of justice, my concern for the welfare of this little child? If I had witnessed this in America, I would have called the police, and waited there with the child until they arrived. But this is not America.
Daily, I grapple with these warring emotions. On the one hand, I just want them to leave me alone. I ask myself, why don’t they do something to earn their money? After all, I have to work for my money! Plenty of other people are out there on the street, doing what they need to do, shining shoes, selling fruit, etc., to make a living. On the other hand, my heart swells with compassion for them, as I know there are some truly suffering souls out there. Certainly, I cannot believe the dirty, skeletal man with the rag-strapped shoes sleeping in a city doorway, exhausted by the afternoon heat, is running any scam. I’ve seen beggars with their eyes gouged out, beggars missing various limbs, and even a beggar missing part of his jaw, who sang for alms in the most angelic voice I’ve ever heard. I’ve seen them in Nanjing, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Guiyang, Jiangyin, Suzhou, Wuxi, and Shanghai. I’ve seen them in Europe, and South America. And yes, I’ve seen them in the U.S. They are everywhere.
Sometimes, I ponder their possible holiness, wonder about the spiritual ramifications of denying them. Are they something akin to the bodhisattva, or the Hindu sadhu? Is there actually a way to discern the scammer from the holy? Is there really even a difference? I try to keep an open heart, try to love all the people of the world, believing that we all are connected, all points of light in this great web of the universe, sisters and brothers on varied paths of existence, all eventually sharing in the ultimate experience of death. I cannot agree with Shakespeare’s Calpurnia, who says “When beggars die there are no comets seen.” We are all comets, are we not?
I write this in the spirit of emotional exploration, and I try to embody this concept of compassion as I walk the streets, yet the truth is that it’s difficult to put into practice. When I am aggressively approached by beggars, I feel quite uncomfortable—as this big, scary world of human need is staring me in the face, I feel my anger rising, possibly because there is nothing I can do about it, no amount of help or money I could give to stop up that unending black hole. It’s helpless, and it’s hopeless, and it’s part of my modern reality. How very eye-opening. How very dismaying.
A paradigm shift: I’ve always believed that metamorphosis was a good thing, a change for the better, a way of evolving. Perhaps this shift within me is in relation to my first true long-term exposure to poverty. Perhaps I’m awakening into a more schooled version of my compassion. Perhaps it’s not something I need to fight, rather, something that should be allowed to expand in definition—after all, just because it’s changing doesn’t mean it’s disappearing, or hardening into bitterness, right?
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