NOVEL NEXT Chapter 113 - How to be Poor
Johan grew up rich. He could eat caviar and truffles with foie gras, wagyu, and fancy royal bloomers for every meal if he wanted to (he didn't), but preferred white rice and rogan josh instead.
Rice was the staple food of Johan's childhood, and he'd kept the habit well into adulthood.
A tradition from his mother's side.
Johan's maternal great-grandmother was an ethnic Chinese from Northern India. She and her Assamese husband had moved to the South East of the UK after turmoil back home. They were illegal immigrants at first, and had left everything behind, selling their land for scraps and with resolve never to see their relatives again.
In the UK, they worked as janitors and cleaners, taxi drivers and waiters. They gave up even the barest hint of luxury, living in a one-room apartment as a family of six. The children, Yu Han's grandmother included, shared everything from clothes to soap to one fried egg cut into four slices.
Other kids would buy bicycles and dolls, and they'd get a plank with ball bearings for wheels or pipes glued together to make a figurine.
They were bullied both for their Indian and Chinese features. Deprived of acceptance and love of community.
They gave up everything, but two things Johan's great-grandmother refused to give up.
White rice, and education.
Education, she always said, could change one's lot in life. It could replace inheritance. It opened the door to money.
Back in India, only the rich ate white rice.
It was a symbol of status. Of power.
Johan's great-grandmother wanted her kids to grow up with that pride in their heart. No matter how much they were put down, bullied, and neglected, at least there was white rice.
Back in India, it didn't matter if one was fair or dark. White rice was blind to colour, to race, to ethnicity and religion. Knowing that a family could consistently put white rice on the table would automatically raise their status in the village.
Each of the four kids went on to make their parents proud.
Johan's Grandmother was a scholar, if a bit of a rebel. She spent her life researching pulp-making technology. After her retirement, she went into politics.
Her husband was an heir to old money. They had met at Oxford, and had a kid out of wedlock. It took a while for the in-laws to accept the thin and dark wife with strange curly hair of their one and only son.
That kid, Johan's mum, grew up without siblings too. The apple of their eyes. The heiress to a fortune. She became a doctor, a heart surgeon. She gave birth to seven kids of her own.
Johan, his siblings, cousins, and second-cousins all were raised with utmost luxury.
They had never experienced want, starvation, and homelessness like his maternal great-grandparents and grandmother.
So much changed in a few generations. Their faces looked as white as white could be in Britain, getting sunburnt after three minutes outdoors.
They had a mansion, seven ponies, and three summer cottages in different European countries.
He'd grown up eating the finest white rice money could buy. From Basmati to Jasmine, imported straight from India and Thailand.
It was different from his great-grandmother's time though. White rice was cheap now. Johan, not understanding the meaning it had for their family, sometimes associated it with poor-people food.
After all, if his great-grandmother could afford it, how luxurious could it really be? Go to any nearby supermarket and anyone could find white rice imported directly from exotic Asian countries.
He never had an issue with it. He simply disagreed with his family's fixation that rice meant pride, rice was the proof of overcoming hardship.
It was just white rice. Or maybe he simply had wanted to be a contrarian. Who knew. He didn't even feel a traditional education could help with social mobility in his day and age. Once upon a time, a Master's degree or a PhD meant something. By the time he had graduated, even the cashier at local Nando's had a Master's in Marketing.
Still, he got a PhD, and kept eating white rice. Through good times and bad.
His father's business had nearly gone bankrupt during Brexit. His mum had died suddenly of a heart attack. But they bounced back.
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Always.
Johan knew what it was like to lose people, but not what it felt to be poor. To be part of the working class. His brain could not comprehend that even in the 21st century, in many parts of the world, white rice was a luxury. Any rice, was a luxury.
Later, after the success of Nexus Assurance Auditors, his bank account had shot up with a few too many zeroes. He didn't even have to interact with the poor if he didn't want to. He invested in AI, Nanobots, Extended Reality, Space Tech, and Quantum Computers, not paddy fields and potatoes farms.
Yu Han, for his part, grew up as a loved son of a local merchant. His life had gone to the pothole, yes, but before that they had enough to feed the whole family. Even enough to pay for his tuition at a local school. They could indulge Yu Han in his charitable acts of giving away leftovers to those who couldn't afford half a bowl of congee.
Presently, after about 3-4 months of being technically poor, Yu Han was once again swimming in spirit stones.
He not only ate white rice, but Spirit Rice. Although he was cutting back to lose weight, he would keep eating white spirit rice for years to come.
But if he wanted his business idea to succeed, he would need to learn what made poor people tick. Fascinating bunch, they were. So he had to get inside their heads. That was the issue though.
Every definition of poverty he had currently was through the lens of an observer. In his psyche, poverty and poorness were operationalised not through the observations and testimonials of the ones experiencing poverty, but through a psychopathic nepo-baby's high-nosed judgement. He based his understanding on panel-data, on interviews he'd watched of rags to riches upstarts.
He had looked down on the poor.
After all, getting filthy rich was easy as baking a pie. Right? Being poor was a mindset, not a systematic problem. If they tried hard enough, surely they could get a million or two in hard cash. So he had believed. Rather, forced himself to believe.
The alternative was that he was a talentless bum. His success was only attributed to what he had inherited, the connections his family built over generations. He rarely made bad investments, though was he the one making the investment or his team of nerds? If his invested went sour, there were folks to bail him out. He liked numbers and data, he could see patterns where others saw gibberish. But he had world-class mentors on ridiculous payrolls.
Despite all that, surely if he had started from the same piss-poor slums as the other guy, he could've achieved the same success, right?
Yu Han could barely hold the groan in. He had been defective. Something had been missing in his brain, or it was organised wrongly. After mum died, dad was the only one who could love him and his sick jabs.
What did his great-grandmother think like? Why did she associate white rice with luxury and success? What did she feel when she had to flee her home? Why did she value education for her kids above her own life?
Why did Huang Niuniu punch him, when he pointed out Li Yao's past poverty and not hers?
"Apologise to him," Huang Niuniu said. She cracked her knuckles as if to show off her superior Body Cultivation prowess.
"Cow Girl, violence won't make him fall for you," Li Yao said, his expression breaking into a grin. "Even though tubs fell on his butt from a weak pretend punch."
"He needs to learn not to make enemies," Huang Niuniu said. "And the first step is to control his mouth."
"It hurts…" Yu Han groaned. It didn't. But he'd milk the sympathy. That would teach her.
Everyone ignored him.
Even Fei Rui. How cruel.
"Apologise to him," Huang Niuniu repeated.
"You don't even like him—"
Two fingers pinched Yu Han's cheeks.
"Apologise!"
"I'm swowwy!" Yu Han cried out and the demonic cow girl let go. She harrumphed, then gave him a light pat on the shoulder.
"Why are you alienating your friends?" She asked. "It's not a good idea. Since when does an idea man have bad ideas?"
Yu Han sat up and rubbed his chin. The girl had pushed more than punched. It felt nice. But she was strong enough to disorient him and he tripped.
"Was it a joke?" Huang Niuniu said, pulling him up. "It's a joke, right?"
"I wasn't poor," Yu Han said. "We weren't super rich—" Well, Johan was—"but we didn't starve. I need to know how poor people think. It's for important stuff. Girls won't get it."
Huang Niuniu let his hand go, her face morphing into the image of disgust.
"It's called phenomenology!" Yu Han defended himself. "Okay, girls do get it. That part was a joke."
"If it was anyone else," Li Yao said, "they'd think you were mockin' them. Tubs, don't state the obvious."
"The obvious?" Yu Han tilted his head.
"No one in their right mind would ever think you starved," Li Yao said. He gestured up and down at Yu Han's belly.
"You…" Yu Han could not beat Li Yao in a fight. He rolled up his sleeves but a wheezing Huang Niuniu held him back.
Tea was served.
「Yu Han, here is your food,」 Fei Rui dropped one half of a coconut. 「Meow Miao might come back today. Do you think they have a surprise for us? I miss Fang Fang.」
Yu Han patted the crab. He opened his mouth—
「I understand. It's not that I miss Fang Fang. It's that there is no Fang Fang to miss if I don't remember him. But I do. I'll make the memory pearls. They're important.」
"Uhhh…" Yu Han hadn't said anything. The crab walked away.
"Poor, yeah?" Li Yao leaned against the wall. The three of them along with Fei Rui had been tackling the cesspools recently. They would meet up like this before heading to the Night Alchemists' Yard. Li Yao held up one sword in front of his eyes. He unsheathed it slightly. There was a nick on the blade. After sheathing it again, he spoke. "When you're poor in cash, you're poor in it all."
"Explain," Yu Han took notes, which pissed Huang Niuniu off even more. But the girl didn't bother him.
"Poor in will, poor in power," Li Yao said. "Poor in moral character. Poor in love. Think, Tubs. How'd you feel when Gong Muhua slagged you?"
Yu Han couldn't answer immediately. Seconds passed, then minutes. "I felt helpless."
Li Yao snapped his finger as if he was talking about the most mundane topic. "You feel that, every second of every fucking day. You're trash. When you beg for food to save your baby sister, you're punched and slapped and called a rat. As if we're dirty and eating the same food'll give them the bug. You lose her, and when you want to dig up a grave in the same place proper folks are buried, the guards kick you in the shin and leave you to rot with a broken leg. You got half your baby-teeth, and you crawl back to town with nails bleeding. A fat kid gives you two and a half dumplings. What you feel isn't gratefulness, but jealousy. And humiliation. And hate and fear and… you just wanna end it all. You don't get to make any decisions. You kill an old dog the next day, eat it raw and shit out your guts. Then you sleep there, beside all the other corpses that died from the Pale Breath Sickness."