"the poorer you are, the weaker you are."

Why are the poor poor? No matter in China or the United States, the mainstream has an unstated but tacit view about it: because they are lazy, drink too much, and gamble. There was a post that went crazy on Weibo, when a mother selling pirated CDs was chased and jumped into the water by the chengguan. At that time, a female doctor commented that Beijing's good sister-in-law earned more than 10,000 yuan a month, so why choose such a bitter way of life? The vision of the middle class is not that of the poor. Just as the author of this book has pondered hard, why do workers not ask for higher wages, or look for higher-paying jobs, or even form trade unions to protect their own rights and interests? The answer is, the poorer you are, the weaker you are.

best-selling female author Barbara Allen Rick enters the bottom of the United States to experience whether hard work can survive at an hourly wage of $6 to $8. Her answer is: no. Unless you share a house with someone else, or work two jobs.

she has worked as a restaurant attendant, hotel waitress, cleaning lady, nurse and Wal-Mart saleswoman in three cities. she works hard and tries to make ends meet, so she has worked bravely two jobs, seven days a week, and two or three free meals a week at the nursing home where she works. But in the peak tourist season, the rent will triple, and as a maid, she will have to go bankrupt again.

the author has an advantage that the poor do not have: in the previous decades, she had higher-than-average medical care, a good diet, she lifted weights all the year round, and her body was "unusually strong." And, as far as this experiment is concerned, she cheated. She rented a car for herself and paid by credit card. Every time she went to a city, she had a start-up fund of more than 1,000 US dollars. She opened a plug-in, but still did not win.

I once thought that my Life at the bottom-as a columnist as a waitress, had come to hack the United States, because American TV series and Hollywood movies had never said that there was such an American existence: low-paid white workers. Three or four people live in a small room; pregnant cleaners dare not ask for leave; one day they have no salary, the next day they have no money to buy groceries. Wal-Mart employees can't afford the rent and live in shelters; they vacuum and kneel on the ground with a dozen pounds of vacuum cleaners. Maids talk about which brand of painkillers are the best to use. There is no health insurance because it is too expensive, which means that if you get sick, you have to spend more than others.

the waitress is considering moving into a motel that costs $40 to $60 a night (she only earns more than $40 a day). The writer was surprised to ask her what she thought. Her colleague looked at the female writer like a fool: where can I get a month's rent and deposit to rent an apartment? On the other hand, the reason why the female writer was able to rent a 500-yuan-a-month apartment was due to the $1000 deposit she brought from her real world and the first month's rent.

rising rents are a nightmare for the poor, and the authors have found that more and more poor people are staying in motels. The latter can check out on a daily basis, like opium, tempting the cash-strapped poor to fall into it, burning up their meagre savings, and even less likely to have the money to rent an apartment. The author found that two men took turns sleeping in one bed, with one taking a nap in the car while on Rest. And it suddenly dawned on me that the poor people in Carver's novels, the families who sold the farm and went to the city with all their savings to look for a job, stayed in a motel and walked away one day without saying a word-they were the victims of motel opium, they didn't walk away, they fell to the next level of hell.

the author believes that the poor go bankrupt because the salary is too low and the rent is too high. This must also resonate with Chinese readers. When the rent runs like Bolt on the Olympic track and field, the poor can keep moving into one unfurnished apartment after another, with pots and spoons and furniture for a sum of money, or a motel capsule apartment. with a room the size of a bed, you realize how similar Rest is to death. The consequence of not being able to cook is that you have to spend more money on meals. In the end, she, as well as us, is not difficult to find an absurd law that if you are poor, you have to spend more money than non-poor people to live. This is not the United States in American TV series, but it is no stranger. The law of money flow is the same all over the world: money gives birth to money, poverty gives birth to poverty.

the author has a strong political stand, and her real and ferocious working experience balances her tendency. In the final analysis, this is not a book written on the basis of political ideas while sitting in an air-conditioned room. She works nine hours a day and stays in a hotel without a screen window air conditioner fan. Because the door cannot be locked, she has to sleep with her clothes closed. Her job is to clean "a house with five bathrooms" at 35 degrees Celsius, pout her buttocks, kneel on the marble floor, wipe every inch of the floor with a rag, wipe every fingerprint on the whole row of glass doors, and follow the maid's virtues. Do not drink water at the master's house; It is to serve nearly 40 elderly patients with Alzheimer's disease on six days a week to eat three meals, clean the dishes, and clean the table and suck the floor. "I can only try my best to keep up with the dishwasher spitting out dishes and dirty dishes pouring in." lunch is five minutes when you stop to go to the toilet on the highway; you have to clock in to go to the toilet. Even so, several times she had to turn to a charity, which provided free food that was not practical for the poor without a refrigerator, and a "cheap" full bed costs $19 a night. The charity lady advised her to "move into the shelter" so that she could save enough money to pay the first month's rent and deposit.

she dedicated herself to being a guinea pig, and we were able to observe how poverty erodes one's spirit.

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the author can move from a restaurant with an hourly wage of $5.15 to an hourly wage of 7.5 because she has a car, can apply everywhere and has a more flexible range of work. If her colleagues change jobs, transportation is a big problem, and they even need to change their homes. The poor are more conservative and less willing to change than the rich, just as slaves are more conservative than slave owners. Material hardship makes them unable to afford to change or risk being out of work for a week. That means they will starve, be evicted from their current houses and fall to the scarier lower floors of hell.

but the state of the author when looking for a job, her spiritEnergy and courage are the biggest differences between her and her colleagues. Also humiliated and exploited, she is eager to form a trade union, but her colleagues only want to take an occasional day off and have money to buy some groceries the next day. This part can also be used to explain the importance of education. The author conceals his doctorate but cannot take away his own thinking. Spiritual poverty is the biggest obstacle for the poor to extricate themselves from poverty.

after living at the bottom for more than two months, the author's back injury relapsed and herpes developed all over her body. Moreover, as a "democratic socialist" and "feminist", her fraternity towards the people at the bottom gradually diminished and replaced it with numbness and even hatred. A salesgirl less than 1.4 meters tall had a dispute with her. she watched the latter step on a ladder to reach the high clothes, and there was a malicious rush, "hoping to see her fall to the ground with a snap." while the disabled employee sat sadly in a wheelchair, her first feeling was, "at least you're still sitting." She suddenly realized that if her father had not separated from his status as a miner, if he had taken away his education, she might have been what she is now: harsh, cunning and full of resentment. She doesn't emphasize it, but readers can sum it up: the poor hate the poor. This is nothing new, but it is difficult to face-aren't the poor all kind? The French writer Serena wrote in his long Night Walk in 1935: "A gap of five francs between us is enough to generate hatred and hope that they will all die." The "five francs" can be replaced with a quota at the beginning of a small promotion, a job opportunity, or even just a seat on the bus during the rush hour. It is still "enough to generate hate. I hope they all die out." If you don't believe it, look at the post bar in Beijing and Shanghai, where there are so many "outsiders get out of here".

Poverty is a tyranny that raises its own slaves. When you are used to being deprived of your self-esteem, you are used to being treated as a thief /slacker /alcoholic, when you live on the fringes of society, the meaning of your existence is erased as if you don't exist. Turning on the TV-- both Chinese and American-- is the boss, male and female white-collar workers, and even Beijing drifters, who is shouting and struggling, lives in three bedrooms and two living rooms that you will never live in. It will make you think that "only I am abnormal." This is the end of spiritual despotism. There are generally two kinds of poor slaves, one is to gain a sense of value of being superior to others by hating others, and the other is to accept that they are the weakest, like depressed monkeys who are forced to fall into a subservient position in their own social system, they become anxious and flinch, stop struggling, and even have no interest in self-defense.

with the help of iron wire and scissors, dwarf pine that does not exist in nature can be cultivated and successfully shaped. Even if the wire is loosened, the pine trees are fixed in a twisted posture. Similarly, spiritual despotism makes you believe in your heart that you are a dwarf. Barbara Allen Rick wrote delicately and eloquently about the road to spiritual destruction, but I saw familiar faces in it. As a descendant of the survivors of the Great Famine, she painted portraits of the mentally poor, which I am no stranger to. Those faces roam around us, like the sand of the Ganges, like ghosts.

what should I do? There may be no cure for poverty, but at least the next time we see a desperate poor man, he can think for another second before accusing him of laziness and drinking, and before shouting "outsiders get out of here". We can also think about where this hatred comes from; even if our initial value is a bonsai cut into a dwarf, we can try to stand up and stand up straight after being untied.

female writers with plug-ins can never make ends meet. But when she really wants to be on the street, she can dig out her credit card and have a big meal. But what about the real poor, her colleagues?

I think of the last paragraph of "the Colonel who has no one to write to him": the desperate wife grabs the colonel by the collar and asks what we eat these days.

the colonel lived to be 75 years old-75 years old, which he had accumulated every minute of his life-to this point. He felt that his mind was clear and open, and nothing could stop him. He said 'eat shit'. "