poverty

We went out to the white people’s restaurant, as he calls it, which is a street stall on a dirt laneway behind the supermarket. There’s no street lighting, no cutlery. Collapsible plastic tables are set up between the parked cars. Vivid local tunes blast from the tiny bar across the road, which brings icy beers […]

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On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy […]

In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.” We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He […]

Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys […]

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I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his […]

We say, they have so little, yet they complain so little. They have so much suffering and stress, yet they smile so much. Secretly we think, I think, That’s because they feel things less. Otherwise the difference would rub intolerably. Secretly we must think, the smiles mean they need less: we deserve all this. Imagine […]

It’s very nice to “take time every day to think through your day and see if there’s anything you can be genuinely grateful for”. But such advice also makes me a little sick. Why don’t our social-media lists of “today I am grateful for…” start with breathable air (thank you, Shanghai), clean running water (thank […]