Being poor

This month, I'm starting a new story about poverty and have been talking to different people of their experiences. And I came across a female artist.

At first sight, she isn't someone you will notice. She has a small figure and a quiet voice, and smile.
Her eyes don't speak of a confidence like in other artists I've interviewed. Sometimes, I had to wait for her responses to my questions, as if she was trying hard to find an answer to fit. There were often pauses in between her lines, like too many full stops in one sentence. And I liked that.

After a long pause, she said: "I don't feel bad or deprived being poor."

She used to live in a small space with 20 other people, with her own family of 10 and some relatives. Being the smallest in the family didn't make her more privileged - like it would for a child in today's family.
Rather, she never had any new clothes of her own. Everything she wore had been worn by seven others, before being passing on and worn by some more relatives in the mainland.

"It was how things were," she said, politely.

Now she has a day job as a designer. In her free time, she works on her own photography projects - which to me are where her passions are: the old unwanted stuff collected and kept by cleaners; the lost art in the Chiuchow culture; the killing, bloody scene inside a cow slaughterhouse. These projects aren't for making money or her exhibitions.

"It's my interest. I'm curious to find out what other people live like in their world. I had a very limited view of the world when I was a child because of our living condition," she said.

"What do you think of money, after living in poverty for 20 years?"

She paused.

"My experience in the past hasn't made me obsessed with money, but some of my siblings have become so," she said.

She paused, again.

"I feel that every day my life is better than yesterday. That's good enough."

There was a long pause from the both of us.

I wanted to say something to her but didn't. I thought whatever I was going to say would not be good enough to appreciate her, being this quiet.