Show me the money

So today was a fairly uneventful day; owning to the power outage in our dorm last night, I was unable to fall asleep at my regular time; the power went off at midnight and then it came back on again at 2am which woke me up and rendered me unable to fall back asleep for another two hours. The day started with me waking up at a very unusual hour: 11:37 am. I got up and headed straight for the baozi place.

As I was walking around campus, I noticed that many of the trees had lost most of their leaves to the persistent autumn winds. It made me a little sad realizing that each day the trees would lose a little more of their auburn colored leaves; the color of my surroundings is much more important to me than I realized. Sometimes I wish I could just stay in autumn forever, it is by far my favorite season.

I met again with my language partner, Shelly. We started talking about the difficulty of finding a job in China, even for Peking University graduates. She seemed unusually perturbed today so I decided to press the direction of the conversation a little more to get a better sense of what kinds of things she was worrying about. Shelly said that she was dealing with the pressure of trying to find a job that would allow her to stay in Beijing. In China there is a system called Hu kou, which kind of serves a purpose similar to ones social security number; one’s Hu kou serves not only to identify the person, but it also designates where certain benefits, such as for health and education, can be accrued. Upon entering a university, one’s Hu kou changes temporarily for the duration of one’s time at the university. Shelly’s problem was that she was graduating soon, which meant that she needed to find a company that would sponsor her for a change of Hu kou from Guilin, her hometown, to Beijing; she said that the likelihood of finding such a company was slim. So she is studying hard to pass the governmental office test.

Shelly asked me whether Americans were restricted in where they could live and work. I told her that such a thing would never happen in America—it would be against our freedom to live and move as we please. After a few minutes debating this topic, we somehow jumped onto the subject of money and the common belief that the most important thing in getting a job is having a high salary. I told her that this was totally against what I believed in and that was one of the reasons I was in Beijing—to get away from the campus recruiting at Stanford that tends to be focused on high paying jobs in management consulting and investment banking. This is when I started getting into the discrepancies in wealth between those who come from wealthy families, have a privileged background in terms of education and opportunities and those that come from poor families with no such privileges. We both consider ourselves fairly privileged although neither of us come from wealthy families; however we were both attending elite universities, which definitely counts a great deal in the professional world. The conversation gave me the opportunity to through out some of the irreconcilable dilemmas that I have been having with regard to future goals and plans. I told her that I felt that people like us, who have received a first class education, have the responsibility to make use of that education to help those less fortunate. Helping people and bettering society should be the end, not money. She agreed and sad that most college students at Peking University care only about securing a Hu Kou in Beijing, getting a high paying job, or studying abroad that will allow them to get a high paying job upon return to China.

The conversation went back and forth; it felt good to get it out of me, but it left that unsatisfying taste kind of like when you eat something tasty but you realize that you want more but there is none to be found. My wish for my peers is that they would find something meaningful to devote their lives to, not just securing a comfortable life for themselves, but finding a career that truly pushes them to the limits in not only skill and talent, but in social awareness and generosity as well. People should be bold and unafraid to see and do things that they have never done before. The question that seems pretty obvious to me is: Why would you want to live otherwise?

I will always be the dreamer, forever the idealist. Sigh.