Julia Wang

   There was a boy who lived next to the apartment building where my family and I lived. The boy was exactly my age. As I grew older, I saw him nearly everyday on my way to school. If I ever took trips to buy groceries with my mother, or was walking home from church with my father, I would see him. Sometimes I would smile, and sometimes I would wave, but I never talked to him. I couldn't speak his language. We literally grew up side by side, but there was nothing even remotely similar in the way we grew up. He was the son of a woman who lived on the streets and begged for a living. He didn't go to school, he didn't learn to read or write, and he certainly never saw the inside of a hospital. As I grew taller and stronger, he stayed small and thin. When I got presents and new clothes for my birthday, he would be sitting on the sidewalk, wearing the same grimy rags he always wore.
   Growing up as the daughter of missionaries to southern Asia, there was never one single incident or event that offered a sudden realization of class differences. I think the combination of walking down the filthy narrow streets of Calcutta, India, dodging panhandlers on the way to the market one day, and playing with the daughter of the British ambassador and her brand-new indoor slide the next kept me quite aware of the drastic dissimilarities of the people I was constantly surrounded by. The only world I knew was one where poverty was only a few steps out the front door, and a few more steps from that, a multimillionaire could be stepping out of one of his many chauffeured cars. Just because the extreme disparity between the rich and the poor didn't seem at all uncommon to me didn't mean I had no opinion about it. I can remember running to my room and sobbing into my pillows because it seemed so unfair that there were children living on the streets when I had a comfortable bed to sleep in and air conditioning to keep me cool.
   When my family and I moved to the United States, I was nearly seven, and I remember thinking how nice it was to see everybody living so comfortably. It was a relief not to have to see children begging on the streets, or old women pleading for money to feed her starving family. It was hard for me to understand how people could be unhappy with their current financial situations. For the first year or so of living in America, there was never a time I thought about class, but didn't take long for me to realize that some people lived more luxuriously than others. In all the time I've spent in America, it still doesn't seem fair to complain about not having the best when I do have at all.