Are Our Lives Really That Different?

I have only two cousins because of the one child policy. My older cousin is named Yang and he is three days older than me. Before I left China, we were sort of like twins and played with each other quite often. Last year, he finished his masters in wireless engineering in Nanjing and recently my mom told me that he got a job as an wireless engineer in Shanghai that pays about 5000 yuan a month. I thought that was great news because jobs in China are very difficult to find for young people since there are just too many college graduates. Then my mom started to name all the things she thought were negative about this job because it is her duty as a Chinese mom to report all the bad things in a gossip session.

First of all she said that my cousin is paying over 1000 yuan to rent a small apartment in the city of Shanghai even though he is only paid 5000 yuan. Second, the company he works for does not provide job security. They fire anyone at anytime they please, and some employees have committed suicide because of long work hours. Third, she said that my aunt told her that it is impossible for Yang to afford to buy a place in Shanghai on his salary. I pretty much laughed at this and said, “you think my life is so different?” When I just graduated, I was paid exactly 5000 dollars a month, and I also had living expenses of nearly 1000 a month. If I lived alone I would also have paid rent of over 1000 dollars a month. So on the expenses front, the difference between my cousin and I is that one of us uses dollar and one of us uses yuan, but our expenses are pretty much the same in terms of percentage of income. I also do not have any job security because California is an at-will state that can fire anyone they want at any time for any reason. Finally, on the real estate front, I can’t afford a place in San Francisco on my salary either! (I am using San Francisco as a parallel to Shanghai because they are both big and densely populated cities with very expensive real estate). The only thing I don’t have is the long work hours, but that is because I choose to not work long hours.

After talking to my friend Mary who goes to China often, we both came to the conclusion that the struggles of young people in China and America are very similar. Financially, we are all dealing with rising prices, stagnant pay, and unstable careers. There has also been a housing bubble in China since the Chinese Communist Party allowed personal ownership of real estate. Politically and socially we all do not have much of a say in  governments that are ruled by the generation before us. Sure, America is supposedly democratic, but honestly how many politicians actually care about our generation? Even Obama, who is supposed to be “young”, is proposing a tax proposal that eliminates taxes for seniors making under $50,000. What about the young people that make under $50,000? Anyway, I could write a whole other rant on this issue, but basically the challenges American young adults face politically are not so different from Chinese youths who are under a totalitarian regime. American youths are taught to believe that they can affect the decisions of the government, but in actuality the government is controlled by an older generation that could not care less. In a way that’s more frustrating than knowing for certain that your government will not listen.

One thing that is marked different between the lives of Chinese young adults and American young adults is that many of the urban Chinese youths we know have quite a bit financial and physical support from their parents. For example, some married only children have all four of their parents taking care of their kids. On the other hand, American young adults have to deal with costly childcare or just not have children at all. I don’t know of any non-Asian households where all four grandparents are taking care of their grandchildren full time. A lot of Chinese parents also buy houses for their children, and again, that is rare in America.

So having said that, I think my cousin is doing great in China. He has officially become independent, and that is a great achievement for any young adult.

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