moving on

As I was saying yesterday, I noticed these Chinese people hanging around on street corners and in plazas every evening well into the morning hours of Madrid.

Now since I can count the number of Spanish words I know with one hand, I couldn't tell what they were saying. I could only tell that they're from Mainland China by what they said when they came across each other as they paced in the plaza. So I watched them walk back and forth with their backpacks in the plaza and sit idly behind their cardboard boxes on street corners all over central Madrid.

Finally, I saw. I witnessed a transaction. No, not drugs. Beverages. They were selling drinks to pedestrians and folks hanging out in plazas. How uninteresting, I thought. How strange... How sad.

The longer I watched their expressionless faces the more curious I became. How could selling drinks on street corners in a foreign land where you could easily be discriminated against be a better life than what you had in your native land? I immediately knew how naive and how privileged I am to not know the answer to such a question. I wondered about their lives in China. Various possibilities came to mind - none satisfied my curiosity.

Then I reflected on the new Chinese immigrants I've encountered in each of the cities to which I've traveled: New York, Paris, Vancouver, Sydney, and now Madrid. They worked in restaurants, they sold newspaper on street corners, they owned grocery stores, they opened laundromats. These were jobs that required little language skill; but still, selling bottles of water at 4 a.m.? I didn't understand.

Days later, when I joined with my friend Andrés in Valencia, he would attempt to explain by telling me that immigration is a relatively new concept in Spain. As these hopeful foreigners arrive, they have no choice but pick up any job they can find, however undesirable (I understand that is completely subjective). Sometimes, they have to create new work - whatever it takes to survive.

So is this what people mean when they say "welcome to the real world"? Yes, there is a world where people labor, work, compromise, and sacrifice to make a living counted in pennies. There is also another real world where money isn't counted in dollars but in thousands of dollars.

I live in neither. I can't imagine either.

Perhaps that's one reason I travel. To see. To learn. To love.