Sweet Potatoes and Homelessness
I remember my first Saturday night as a freshman in Columbia. I found myself strutting the streets in Five Points on what I expected would be a night to remember with some of my new friends. This night did indeed become one that would stick in my memory; but, not for reasons I originally anticipated. I don’t remember what music was playing or which outfits we wore or whom we all danced with. I do remember my giddy excitement turning to shock, as we walked past more than 20 homeless people. I remember seeing these people sprawled on the sidewalks, asking students for money or trying to remain unobtrusive and hidden from sight. I remember the looks of disgust on my friends’ faces as we passed these people, and I remember how my stomach dropped and my heart raced and how walking by without a word or an acknowledgement or providing any sort of help made me feel sick. I remember feeling the need to do something to learn more about the situation, and to find some way to help these people and contribute to their lives.
However, it wasn’t until one year after this experience that I finally decided to translate my uneasiness and desire to help into concrete action. One of my friends told me about a class offered by the Honors College, SCHC 330: Homelessness in South Carolina, that offered students a chance to learn about homelessness in depth, while concurrently planning their own projects to serve the homeless community in Columbia. I enrolled in this class, and while learning about stress factors leading to homelessness, family and youth homelessness, and blaming the victim, I helped to plan and execute an event, called Neighbors in the Streets, for Transitions Homeless Shelter. This events’ purpose was to help de-stigmatize homelessness in Columbia by encouraging community members to help those in need by volunteering their time, money, clothes, and by getting to know these people and understanding their stories. A year after this classroom experience, I found myself in Shanghai, China, a city quite unlike Columbia in its enormity, but more similar than I could have imagined in terms of its societal problems. Issues that I experienced in my everyday interactions with my friends, peers, and strangers, like homelessness and discrimination against migrant workers, struck me as very similar to the theories and issues I was exposed to in SCHC 330.
In my time studying abroad in Shanghai, I sought out opportunities to interact with members of migrant worker and homeless communities, in order to learn their stories and understand their situations for myself, just like my Homelessness in South Carolina class encouraged me to do with the individuals living at Transitions Homeless Shelter. Through my work teaching English at a school for the children of migrant workers in Shanghai, and an experience helping homeless mothers sell sweet potatoes on the street in order to raise money for their children to attend school, I was afforded many opportunities to understand homelessness and the discrimination of migrant workers in China, and to connect these issues in the Chinese context to the very similar issues that we spent the semester exploring and analyzing in SCHC 330.
In SCHC 330, one of the concepts we studied was “victim blaming.” I learned that many people view homelessness as an individual-level problem in terms of their own fundamental attribution biases. People see those who are without a home as bad people, whose own poor financial decisions or substance abuse, has specifically led to their current problematic situations, without considering the societal factors outside of individual control, which are responsible for creating structural problems that exacerbate homelessness. Thus, because we perceive homeless people less as people, and more as anonymous beings who are to blame for their own fates, we are vulnerable to blaming the victim, and not truly addressing the deeper issues responsible for high rates of homelessness. I observed this victim blaming at play on my first night in Five Points through my friends’ behaviors and as I listened to people I met at Transitions divulge the horrible ways in which people had cast them aside as unworthy of help. Furthermore, I observed it in my daily life in China. While living in Shanghai, I learned that Shanghai locals are not too different from Columbia locals or the average American in their disdain towards homeless people. Shanghainese locals are extremely skeptical of homeless people they observe begging on the streets or in crowded subway cars at rush hour. These sights are common, and Chinese people feel distrust towards those in need, as they believe these victims are either lying about their situation or that their laziness puts them at fault for their own misfortunes. There was a homeless man who would always sit on the same spot on the sidewalk, which I would pass every afternoon as I walked from my university’s front gate to the subway station. After passing him a few times, I started to buy extra food with the intention of giving some to him. When I told my local friends about what I decided to do, they were appalled. They informed me that this man had stayed in the same spot day after day for years, and earned an exorbitant amount of money from naïve, foreign university students who wanted to help him without realizing his deception. Although I perceived my actions as kindness, they perceived my behaviors as fueling a rampant social problem. In my Issues in Chinese Society class, my professor reinforced this idea of societal distrust towards people visibly in need, when he explained to us how Shanghai locals have become desensitized in their everyday interactions with homeless people. According to Professor Wei Wei, locals largely perceive these people begging as manipulative, lazy, and profiting from the kindness of others, rather than perceiving them with sympathy and listening to their individual situations and stories. With people, mostly younger people, taking viral news and social media stories of manipulation and bribery as social norms, Chinese society has begun to form social norms against those in need, for fear of being taken advantage of when trying to help others who seem to be in need.
Additionally, I was able to go beyond listening to the opinions of my Chinese friends and peers, and actually experience getting to know these people on my own terms. I stood beside the “sweet potato mothers” in Taipei as people averted eye contact, muttered insults under their breath, and refused to spend their money to help these women and support them in their careers. Just like the Shanghainese locals, Taipei locals were also skeptical towards the women on the street. Our group of loud, outgoing foreign volunteers truly drew attention to these mothers on the street, but I found myself wondering if as many people would have stopped to support the mothers if we had not been there to encourage them. I also directly observed the positive impact of providing homeless women with careers a means to earn their own incomes on their confidence and determination to rise above their situations. In SCHC 330, we contrasted the notion of victim blaming with housing and job first approaches to solving homelessness being implemented in cities across the United States. We learned that these solutions, which provide homeless mothers and their families with a low-cost place to stay and a guaranteed job training, supplies, and support to earn their own incomes, have a clearly observable positive impact on rehabilitating homeless women and reintegrating them back into society. I was able to observe this concept while we worked with the sweet potato mothers, as they explained to us how much being able to earn their own incomes and provide their families with a safe place to live had restored their confidence and helped them to get back on their feet. Although this experience was short, it was meaningful to connect the concepts I studied in SCHC 335 to a real life issue faced by women halfway around the world. I realized that although Chinese culture is different than anything I’ve experienced in many ways, the issues people face are more universal than I would have imagined. No mater the location, victim blaming, fueled by a deep lack of understanding and sympathy, is a societal trend that needs to be reversed if we are to truly support victims of homelessness and give them the resources they need to improve their situations. Although homelessness is a deeply complex problem linked to social and cultural issues that vary across cities and countries, a housing first approach can help victims around the world.
My experiences learning about these topics in SCHC 330, combined with my experience working with the sweet potato mothers in Taipei and encountering homeless people in my daily life in Shanghai, have inspired me to work towards encouraging a deeper societal understanding of homelessness, both in the United States and China, and encouraging housing first approaches to homelessness wherever I find myself living after graduation. I have started by taking small steps, from reminding my friends and peers to respect homeless people and their situations, to always being kind and compassionate towards the homeless people I meet in my everyday life. However, I eventually want to be able to become an advocate for the homeless, and I want to do all in my power to encourage lawmakers to pursue housing-first solutions and job-training programs for homeless people, particularly mothers and their children.
However, it wasn’t until one year after this experience that I finally decided to translate my uneasiness and desire to help into concrete action. One of my friends told me about a class offered by the Honors College, SCHC 330: Homelessness in South Carolina, that offered students a chance to learn about homelessness in depth, while concurrently planning their own projects to serve the homeless community in Columbia. I enrolled in this class, and while learning about stress factors leading to homelessness, family and youth homelessness, and blaming the victim, I helped to plan and execute an event, called Neighbors in the Streets, for Transitions Homeless Shelter. This events’ purpose was to help de-stigmatize homelessness in Columbia by encouraging community members to help those in need by volunteering their time, money, clothes, and by getting to know these people and understanding their stories. A year after this classroom experience, I found myself in Shanghai, China, a city quite unlike Columbia in its enormity, but more similar than I could have imagined in terms of its societal problems. Issues that I experienced in my everyday interactions with my friends, peers, and strangers, like homelessness and discrimination against migrant workers, struck me as very similar to the theories and issues I was exposed to in SCHC 330.
In my time studying abroad in Shanghai, I sought out opportunities to interact with members of migrant worker and homeless communities, in order to learn their stories and understand their situations for myself, just like my Homelessness in South Carolina class encouraged me to do with the individuals living at Transitions Homeless Shelter. Through my work teaching English at a school for the children of migrant workers in Shanghai, and an experience helping homeless mothers sell sweet potatoes on the street in order to raise money for their children to attend school, I was afforded many opportunities to understand homelessness and the discrimination of migrant workers in China, and to connect these issues in the Chinese context to the very similar issues that we spent the semester exploring and analyzing in SCHC 330.
In SCHC 330, one of the concepts we studied was “victim blaming.” I learned that many people view homelessness as an individual-level problem in terms of their own fundamental attribution biases. People see those who are without a home as bad people, whose own poor financial decisions or substance abuse, has specifically led to their current problematic situations, without considering the societal factors outside of individual control, which are responsible for creating structural problems that exacerbate homelessness. Thus, because we perceive homeless people less as people, and more as anonymous beings who are to blame for their own fates, we are vulnerable to blaming the victim, and not truly addressing the deeper issues responsible for high rates of homelessness. I observed this victim blaming at play on my first night in Five Points through my friends’ behaviors and as I listened to people I met at Transitions divulge the horrible ways in which people had cast them aside as unworthy of help. Furthermore, I observed it in my daily life in China. While living in Shanghai, I learned that Shanghai locals are not too different from Columbia locals or the average American in their disdain towards homeless people. Shanghainese locals are extremely skeptical of homeless people they observe begging on the streets or in crowded subway cars at rush hour. These sights are common, and Chinese people feel distrust towards those in need, as they believe these victims are either lying about their situation or that their laziness puts them at fault for their own misfortunes. There was a homeless man who would always sit on the same spot on the sidewalk, which I would pass every afternoon as I walked from my university’s front gate to the subway station. After passing him a few times, I started to buy extra food with the intention of giving some to him. When I told my local friends about what I decided to do, they were appalled. They informed me that this man had stayed in the same spot day after day for years, and earned an exorbitant amount of money from naïve, foreign university students who wanted to help him without realizing his deception. Although I perceived my actions as kindness, they perceived my behaviors as fueling a rampant social problem. In my Issues in Chinese Society class, my professor reinforced this idea of societal distrust towards people visibly in need, when he explained to us how Shanghai locals have become desensitized in their everyday interactions with homeless people. According to Professor Wei Wei, locals largely perceive these people begging as manipulative, lazy, and profiting from the kindness of others, rather than perceiving them with sympathy and listening to their individual situations and stories. With people, mostly younger people, taking viral news and social media stories of manipulation and bribery as social norms, Chinese society has begun to form social norms against those in need, for fear of being taken advantage of when trying to help others who seem to be in need.
Additionally, I was able to go beyond listening to the opinions of my Chinese friends and peers, and actually experience getting to know these people on my own terms. I stood beside the “sweet potato mothers” in Taipei as people averted eye contact, muttered insults under their breath, and refused to spend their money to help these women and support them in their careers. Just like the Shanghainese locals, Taipei locals were also skeptical towards the women on the street. Our group of loud, outgoing foreign volunteers truly drew attention to these mothers on the street, but I found myself wondering if as many people would have stopped to support the mothers if we had not been there to encourage them. I also directly observed the positive impact of providing homeless women with careers a means to earn their own incomes on their confidence and determination to rise above their situations. In SCHC 330, we contrasted the notion of victim blaming with housing and job first approaches to solving homelessness being implemented in cities across the United States. We learned that these solutions, which provide homeless mothers and their families with a low-cost place to stay and a guaranteed job training, supplies, and support to earn their own incomes, have a clearly observable positive impact on rehabilitating homeless women and reintegrating them back into society. I was able to observe this concept while we worked with the sweet potato mothers, as they explained to us how much being able to earn their own incomes and provide their families with a safe place to live had restored their confidence and helped them to get back on their feet. Although this experience was short, it was meaningful to connect the concepts I studied in SCHC 335 to a real life issue faced by women halfway around the world. I realized that although Chinese culture is different than anything I’ve experienced in many ways, the issues people face are more universal than I would have imagined. No mater the location, victim blaming, fueled by a deep lack of understanding and sympathy, is a societal trend that needs to be reversed if we are to truly support victims of homelessness and give them the resources they need to improve their situations. Although homelessness is a deeply complex problem linked to social and cultural issues that vary across cities and countries, a housing first approach can help victims around the world.
My experiences learning about these topics in SCHC 330, combined with my experience working with the sweet potato mothers in Taipei and encountering homeless people in my daily life in Shanghai, have inspired me to work towards encouraging a deeper societal understanding of homelessness, both in the United States and China, and encouraging housing first approaches to homelessness wherever I find myself living after graduation. I have started by taking small steps, from reminding my friends and peers to respect homeless people and their situations, to always being kind and compassionate towards the homeless people I meet in my everyday life. However, I eventually want to be able to become an advocate for the homeless, and I want to do all in my power to encourage lawmakers to pursue housing-first solutions and job-training programs for homeless people, particularly mothers and their children.
Using the link above you can view my class notes from SCHC 330: Homelessness in South Carolina, from a class period in which we discussed the concept of "victim-blaming." I observed this concept at play in shaping perceptions of homeless people firsthand in my work with Transitions Homeless Shelter for my class project, and in while I was abroad, in my daily life in Shanghai and my volunteer experience in Taipei.
Using the link above you can view my Term Paper for SCHC 330, in which I discuss my work doing volunteer inreach at Transitions Homeless Shelter and coordinating a Neighbors in the Street Event. In this paper, I discuss my experience with victim-blaming, both on a personal level and a societal level in coordinating an event for Columbia residents to connect with the city's homeless population.