PRIVILEGE: It’s in your BLOOD… (part 1 — My Attempt to be a Street Kid)
By: Diane Nguyen
Tags: Privilege, Vietnam

TL;DR

#privilege #bias #streetkid #intangibleprivilege

As I struggle to explain to certain friends what having privilege means, and I am not talking about privilege as being a part of the 1% here, I thought maybe it’s better to write down my experiences so that they can understand where I come from. Truth is, if you have privilege (even if it’s the basic thing like having a proper education/average happy supporting family, etc…), it is and will always be a part of you. The only thing that one can do is to try to be aware/woke, limit the mentality that you are the who you are SOLELY because of your “OWN” efforts, which probably partly are the reason (I don’t want to dismiss your hard works) but most of the time not the whole reason, and be considerate to those who didn’t have the same privileges. How did I come to such conclusions? Please see the exhibits below:

Exhibit 1 — My Attempt to be A Street Kid

At the tender age of 11, incredibly naive and inspired by novels about the adventures of worldly youngsters (Charles Dickens, Marxim Gorki, and Mangas are mostly to blame for this), I dreamt of leaving my parents (yes, I know, I was incredibly original), living the life of a street kid, hopefully becoming a leader of a gang of kids and then great things will follow etc….In order to prepare for such an amazing journey, I started figuring out the logistics — first, how to make a living.

If you live in Vietnam, esp. Hanoi in those days, you probably knew that lots of street kids hung around landmarks, trying to sell souvenirs to foreign tourists. One of those attractions is quite close to my house back then. Thus, I walked over to to that landmark one day and talked to one of the kids, presumably the group’s leader. I proposed that I would help them sell the souvenirs and give them all the money. Suspicious of me at first, the gang’s leader finally saw no harm in having free labour, and they could also watch over me since we would be standing in the same area so she agreed for me to join temporarily.

Armed with handful of postcards and trinkets, I excitedly started the journey of becoming a street kid. However, both the foreign tourists and the gang quickly realized that I was quite different from the others. I dressed nicer, spoke English fluently with no accent (the kids mostly have broken English as they picked up bits and pieces from tourists and each other vs. properly taught like me), and most importantly was not pushy as my livelihood didn’t depend on being able to sell X amount of postcards per day, etc…As a result, those foreigners loved to buy from me and started neglecting all the other kids, event telling them to go away/not to bother them.

At the end of that day, I came to the gang’s leader and gave her all the money, which was more than what the gang usually made in a day. However, the girl told me that I could no longer sell stuffs with them or in their territory. I was devastated! It was the FIRST and until now ONLY firing of my life and I did a great job too! I tried to protest that the decision was not fair, but the leader, bless her heart, that amazing girl, nicely explained to me how I have disrupted the dynamic of the group (me making all the $ vs. each kids make some) and made most kids uncomfortable (they themselves probably knew it deep down but didn’t “feel” the shabbiness of their clothes, the brokeness of their English, and mostly importantly the pity mixed with 1 in those foreigners’ eyes, until they got to see a comparison — a.k.a ME.

At that time, I didn’t truly understand what happened, just that even though I tried so hard to become those street kids: dress down, talk to them, do the same jobs, etc…there is something fundamentally different between me and them that I can’t seem to bridge.

Years later, after getting into a private college in the US, I realized that the “thing” is PRIVILEGE. My upbringing, my education, my economic and emotional safety net, etc…are all privileges that those kids didn’t have. Thus, whenever friends talk to me about how poor/underprivileged/repressed/victimized/etc people HAVE CHOICES and CAN BE BETTER, I can’t help but winced because most of the time CHOICES/POSSIBILITY OF ADVANCEMENT = PRIVILEGE. Yes, those street kids did have the choice of not being as aggressive, which could result in having more customers. However, if you had gone for two days with no food and little to drink other than water from lakes in Hanoi then the postcard that you can sell right now beats the multitude that you “maybe” able to sell hands down. A lot of time, ppl in those situations didn’t have the luxury to “consider” other alternatives like you and I do.

Every now and then, I think of those kids, especially the gang’s leader. They must have all grown up by now. How have their lives turned out? At 11, the leader was much smarter and more mature than me. Who has she become? While I got the chance to go to college,, work for a good company, travel as long as I can afford it, I hope that she is no longer on the street and now has a stable job with a stable income. Sometimes, I imagine her, by some strokes of luck, maybe get adopted or sponsored by someone. Then we could have gone to the same school, work in the same place and she is the type of boss that I will gladly work for. But we all know that it’s a very unlikely dream…