While in the Shanghai airport waiting at the gate for my flight home, this middle-aged lady sat next to me. She was traveling by herself and struck up a conversation with me. At first I responded only enough to be polite. Just another nosy Chinese lady eager for connections or someone to compare her children against, I assumed.
Turns out she had been living in the States for close to three decades, in Memphis of all places. She had moved for her husband's academic prospects and raised three English-speaking children. Although virtually indistinguishable from another China-based Chinese person in appearance and speech, she had opinions that skewed toward my own, a perspective seemingly based outside Chinese culture, which I welcomed.
One of the things that annoyed her about her visit was the constant need to dress to the nines just to go out for dinner. As if every public meal was necessarily an occasion to show off. She eventually dropped all pretenses and just didn't go out anymore. She was used to dressing casually, comfortably, and it seems the norms in China had changed, at least for anyone who was even slightly well-to-do.
Thinking back to this memory, and this unexpected but welcome exchange, I wonder if there's something like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs on a macro scale. So if a country's people climb the hierarchy along with their nation's rising level of development, China would be represented on the "esteem" level, where its people are busy flaunting the wealth of a new industrialization. Post-industrialized nations such as America would be on the "self-actualization" level, where people are primarily concerned with pursuing their passions.
Except we know that isn't true, at least not here. So many here are stuck squarely at the bottom, still living hand to mouth and barely surviving. Which isn't the mark of a truly well-developed nation. It won't be until everyone is pulled up to the upper levels of that hierarchy of needs that we can truly call ourselves self-actualized.
Maybe looking at it this way can change people perceptions. It's not about taxing the rich and handing out to the poor. It's about allowing, no, making opportunities for everyone to realize their potential. And to have an equality of dignity.