The Streets of Cairo, the Streets of Beijing

A thoughtful friend asked me yesterday whether I experienced the "stress of our world's socio-economic injustice" differently in Egypt than I had during the summer I spent in China, and I think my response will be greater than comment-length.

I am sure I bored my classmates in Egypt by constantly comparing what we were seeing to what I had found in China and spouting anecdotes whenever I saw an opening, but my experience in China definitely colored and informed my views in Egypt.

There were many similarities. The gauntlets of bargaining vendors shouting at tourists to buy their wares, the smog-laden skies, and seemingly lawless (at least for someone used to the empty streets and respectful driving of the Midwest) traffic all make Big City Egypt feel a lot like Big City China. In both countries I know that I was sheltered from most of the poverty and did not really get a feel for how hard life can be in poor areas, but that's true of my experience in the United States as well, so perhaps my observations are worth something anyway.

I guess one perhaps foreseeable difference is the distribution of wealth in the two countries. In China, people in the cities are generally wealthier than people in rural areas, and there is definitely a disparity between officials and peasants in the countryside, and between various classes in urban areas, but overall the goal for the last sixty years has been economic equality (whether it has every actually worked is questionable, but it's been a goal). This is not true at all in Egypt. Thirty percent of the country is unemployed and living in absolute poverty, while many businesses working internationally are wealthy by any standards. Our trip to Al-Azhar Park, a gated park where one must pay a fee to enter and walk by fountains and look out at the rooftops of Cairo, took us on a highway through the City of the Dead. Massive poverty and two earthquakes in Cairo in the last decade have left many people without/unable to afford housing, so somewhere between 3 and 5 million (million!) people are living on their family gravesites. Tourists are not allowed anywhere near, not because Egyptians want to deprive foreigners of any experience, but because of the desperation of the residents and how obviously moneyed tourists are.

Another difference involves the countries' relationships to tourism. China has only very recently, really only slowly during the 1980s and increasingly since then, opened up its borders to foreigners, and while tourism is a lucrative venture, it is not the backbone of the Chinese economy. Tourism accounts for 60% of the Egyptian economy. Tour guides have to attend four years of school to become certified and vendors speak more languages than I fear many Americans realize still exist. I am not sure if this makes poverty more or less visible in Egypt relative to China, but it certainly made me doubt I was getting any kind of a grasp of real Egyptian life.

Hmmm, Sarah. As usual you have posed a thoughtful question and I have muttered around related thoughts and am not really sure I answered it at all. I have spent most of the day with this question in the back of my mind and will continue to poke at it. Thank you for keeping me thinking!