Poor People

William T. Vollmann

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062043795
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Poverty in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.

Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.

Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.

SELF-DEFINITIONS

ONE

I THINK I AM RICH

(Thailand, 2001)

1

The first time I met Sunee, I was in Klong Toey seeking a poor person whom I could ask why poverty existed, and she rushed right up to me, drunkenly plucking at my sleeve, pleading with me to come home with her. In the opinion of my interpreter, she was surely a former prostitute since she could speak a few words of Japanese and since when she poured out water for us she cried laughingly in English, exactly as the bargirls did in Patpong: Dlink, dlink!

Against the interpreter’s advice, I decided to accept Sunee’s proposition. We had been in Klong Toey less than five minutes. Turning into the nearest slum, which began fifty steps away, we found ourselves in the accustomed maze of dank, sloping sidewalks, with house-crates close enough to touch on either side. The inhabitants inspected me slyly from their window-holes: Would I buy heroin or little girls? Sunee staggered triumphantly ahead, clutching at her heart. In two minutes more we’d arrived home, which is to say Sunee’s mother’s shack, whose ceiling and walls were planks nailed together, with warped gaps here and there for the greater convenience of Thailand’s mosquitoes. The four of us sat down cross-legged on a blue vinyl sheet which mostly covered the concrete floor. What I noticed was firstly the scrawny, reddish cat licking and gnawing at itself, I assume because it had fleas, secondly the round mirror which unfailingly expressed the corrugated wall (jars on a shelf), and thirdly the smell of bad water all around. What my still resentful interpreter for her part noted were Sunee’s mother’s household goods, particularly the pair of fans, one of which, the good one on the ceiling, our hostess had plugged in for a welcome; I should also enumerate the water filter, television and midget refrigerator. The interpreter sullenly informed me that Sunee couldn’t be the least bit poor, for Sunee, or at least Sunee’s mother, owned more appliances than she did!—My interpreter was shrewd, experienced, and, except when bitterness of one kind or another misled her, never wrong. In this case, her appreciation proved as accurate as it had been rapid, for I soon learned that the old lady owned this house; she’d bought it with her own money. Fine; so they were rich. Meanwhile Sunee kept looking at me, half caressing her breasts through the shirt, with whose tails and collar she continuously wiped her face.

She’d taken her first husband at seventeen, in those lost days before her father died. The result: four children. He was a construction laborer. In Sunee’s words, he didn’t love me true, since he left her for another woman. A decade later, she married again and got rewarded with the next baby. If I understood properly, this man also abandoned her, although Sunee, swaying and drunkenly weeping, passed over his memory in a confusing manner which might actually have been the reticence in which one clothes a private grief; nor was the bored, disgusted interpreter as helpful as on prior occasions. At any rate, the two husbands seemed less important as protagonists of the tale than as impersonal impregnation agents who’d passed through her like illnesses. Sunee woke up and found herself the mother of five; that was that. She’d worked hard to take care of them all, she sobbed, blowing her nose in her shirt, leaning against her mother’s shoulder. Three were at university now; they never came to visit. The fourth worked in a bank. The youngest still lived with her.

The mother’s fine, well-kept silver bangs trembled in the breeze from the ceiling fan as she traced S-shaped patterns in that blue vinyl floor covering whose edges had been repaired with brown packing tape. She herself had given birth to eight children, three of whom were already dead. She was sixty-seven, and Sunee was in her forties.

Now, my life is only with my mother, Sunee insisted to the world. My only power is my mom. She’s always told me, Sunee, you try to be strong because I am here and I’ll never throw you away.

And her mother, with a broad, gentle, broken-toothed grimace, gazed steadily at the drunken woman.

Every few moments, Sunee made a wai, the clasp-handed Thai bow of greeting, gratitude or respect, and then she said kap kum kah, thank you, sometimes to me, sometimes to her mother.

She worked for an illegal Chinese cleaning company which never allowed her any holiday; her boss had a very bad heart, and the memory of his existence shrilled her voice quite out of fervent mother-worship; for a long, long time she clawed at the air as she denounced him, until, exhausted by her own anger, she blew her nose in her shirt again.

The mother gently controlled her extremest gestures. Sometimes she told her not to speak impolitely.

Since you’re unhappy, do you want to be a nun? the interpreter inquired.

No, I don’t want to. Give me your telephone number, she said to me. The mother mournfully touched her knee; but Sunee, ignoring this warning, all the sudden began to plead and demand, leaning forward, gesturing, smoothing back her hair. My interpreter, who liked and helped almost everybody, including terrorists, could not squeeze out any respect whatsoever for Sunee, who kept saying: My daughter is good; my mother is good. I’m a drunk.

What do you like to drink? Mekong?

Local whiskey.

If you could have any one thing, what would you hope for?

She clutched her fists to her breasts and said in a tearful voice: Money! About ten thousand baht for the youngest’s education. My daughter is good. My own life doesn’t matter now.

A mosquito was biting my arm.

Sunee supposed that I must be a Christian missionary. Why else would I, Caucasian and a man, have agreed to enter this house? After all, she was too old to be sexy, right? If not, why wouldn’t I give her my telephone number? Staring at me roguishly or perhaps defiantly, she cried out: Jesus said, I can die for humans. Me, too, I can die—for my daughter.

At this assertion, which might indeed have annoyed a Christian missionary, the mother sadly slapped her on the knee. Ignoring the reproof as she had all the others, Sunee pressed on in a louder tone: I don’t make anything for others, only for my child. Why did Jesus make things for people all over the world? Why not for my daughter?

Her mother slapped her knee again.

Do you consider yourself poor? I asked.

Yes …

Whenever I think of Sunee now, I remember that habit she had, that gesture of touching her breast and flinging her arms wide, as if gasping for air. I remember somebody who was suffocating.

I don’t want to be rich like the Prime Minister, she whined. If I had money, I’d just give it to my children …

Forty-five baht made one American dollar that year, so the sum of Sunee’s visions worked out to about two hundred and twenty-five dollars, which I could easily spare. Would it do any good?

My mom calls me uneducated, but I’m actually very clever … — and she leaned forward, milking her breasts at me. My daughter works in the bank; she has a car, but she never gives us anything. Well, I don’t want to cause her trouble! Actually, she sometimes gives me five hundred baht and like that …

In short, Sunee the provider might be Sunee the leech. The mother stared down, embarrassedly caressing the floor.

When I’m not drunk, I’m a quiet person. I’ve been drunk for twenty years. If I’m not drunk I can’t sleep. Whiskey respects me more than men do! My mom never takes a whiskey …

Why do you think some people are poor and others are rich?

She grasped at air and said: We believe in the Buddhist way. Some people are rich because they were giving in a previous life. What they gave gets returned in this life.

And what about the Communist idea that people are poor because the rich take everything from them?

Yes, because when I was in Japan before—

Don’t believe her, the mother said. She’s never been in Japan!

But the interpreter was sure that she had. Most likely she had indeed, and never told her mother. Many a year I’ve seen the Patpong girls all in a row under YOUR’S HOUSE, a dozen of them in long lowcut gowns red or blue or pink, standing on the very edge under the lights and arches, the door behind them almost never opening; at the passport office in Bangkok I once met a literal busload of girls who resembled them right down to the pastel gowns; a nice Japanese was paying for their visas to his country, doubtless because he possessed a pure heart. Ladies of Sunee’s nationality have filled my glass in Kabu-kicho, which is the red light zone of Tokyo; once I asked three hostesses in lowcut gowns whether their mothers knew which country they were in right now; they clapped their hands over their mouths when they laughed.

Anyhow, our King is very good! Sunee patriotically shouted. He’s always giving.

I asked her mother whether she too thought that rich people, corporations or nations might be at least partially responsible for her poverty (oh, excuse me; she wasn’t poor), to which she assented in that ready Thai way which means nothing. Buddhist like her daughter, she knew that her past existences determined this present one.

So, if you are poor in this life, does that mean you did bad things in your previous life?

Of course, Sunee answered for her. A moment later she was pulling up her shorts to show me her wrinkled thighs.

Sit down! she shrieked in gleeful English to a tattooed old neighbor man who was peering in through the window, and when he entered, she slapped her thigh.

But she couldn’t forget the illegal cleaning company that owned her, the company that never gave her any holidays, which was why she took her own holidays, right now for instance, anytime she needed to get drunk. Here she sat, unpaid, in the abode of her choice, the half-bottle of whiskey already sweetening her blood, and she still couldn’t leave work! Without self-expression there is no self. That must be why the victim of an atrocity, no matter how many times well-wishers advise him to “just get over it,” returns again and again to the horror. Sunee’s working day ran from eight in the morning until five-fifteen at night. Presumably she got an hour for lunch and a fifteen-minute rest somewhere, because the company paid her for eight labor-hours. I became quite familiar with eight in the morning until five-fifteen at night, because every time I met Sunee, she recited it three or four times; it was a benchmark of her life. Most of us wouldn’t consider an eight-hour working day excessive, so we may as well agree right now that Sunee had nothing to complain about, that her need to protest, and therefore to poison the happy oblivion which she ostensibly sought, deserves contempt. After all, the Victorian prescription, quiet renunciation, remains the most widely sold elixir in our pharmacopoeia of expectations for the poor. But for some reason Sunee just wouldn’t keep quiet. Whenever she returned to the topic of her job, which she did as often as a lunging mastiff gets yanked backwards by the recoil of its own chain, she’d begin to slap at the air, her voice shrieking and coarsening. She hated her boss so much; she hated the company so much. —Like extortion! she kept exclaiming.

You talk so much! yelled the lady three houses away.

Sunee picked up the cat and reasonlessly slapped it, not hard. It fled. She said to me: Maybe I can work in a restaurant again. I can be a waitress! See, I’ll show you: What kind of coffee do you want, strong or not strong? My boss likes my mix. I make it for him with one and a half teaspoons of sugar.

Winking at me, the neighbor man said: You mean one and half kilograms of sugar, and then lots of whiskey!

People say I’m clever, Sunee ran on. I could have been a Bolshevik! Better I stayed in Russia …

No, better you stayed in America, in that World Trade Center they bombed yesterday! Then they would have knocked you off!

Everybody laughed at this, even the staid old mother; Sunee chuckled chokingly, punching the air …

2

Destiny was what they always said. In other countries, to be sure, people treasured different explanations. I remember the young Algerian babysitter who, widowed and stranded just before she was to be married, quietly told me that nobody was poor because we’d each been given something by Alla...