HOW SHE SEES IT Image of poverty more dire than the reality

By LINDA SEEBACH
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
The year we lived in Shanghai, we were rich by local standards, but far poorer than most people who are counted as poor in America. Remembering that helps to illuminate what Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson are saying in a recent Heritage Foundation paper, "Understanding Poverty in America."
Poverty, as officially defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, does not mean destitution.
My then-husband, Arthur Seebach, taught mathematics at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., which had an exchange program with East China Normal University in Shanghai. When he was on sabbatical in 1987-88, I took an exchange "foreign expert" position preparing students for study abroad. ECNU didn't want a mathematician, and fortunately for me, nobody else with real credentials for teaching English wanted to go to China that year.
My salary as a foreign expert was 1,350 yuan a month. Since I was officially an employee of the Chinese government, I was paid in renminbi, "people's money," which was not a convertible currency. At the time, a dollar was worth about four yuan, so my pay amounted to $337.50 a month for the three of us, including our 15-year-old son Peter.
Technically, as a foreign expert, I had the right to exchange half my renminbi for convertible foreign-exchange certificates, which were worth eight yuan on the street. But I never did so, because in fact that was plenty of money -- far more than the Chinese faculty earned, although they had much lighter teaching schedules, too. Indeed, we seldom spent more than 900 yuan a month during the semester, though we used it up traveling during school holidays.
Of course, this was not like trying to live in America on $110 a month. After all, we had Arthur's sabbatical pay (half salary), a princely income by Shanghai standards. But we spent very little of it (except on travel) and didn't need it for living expenses.
Exotic food items
We enrolled Peter in ECNU's Chinese-immersion program, and the university wanted to be paid in dollars. I changed dollars every week so I could buy English-language newspapers and magazines for my students at hotel gift shops catering to foreigners, which were the only places they were available. And we bought some exotic food items --such as butter and cheese -- for foreign-exchange certificates at the little supermarket operated by the Jinjiang Hotel, because they weren't to be found in local shops.
But we didn't need to do any of those things to survive, and we'd have been quite comfortably off on my salary alone.
It's true we had an apartment (living room, two small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen), provided by the university. I can't say what it would have rented for in the private housing market, because such a thing scarcely existed in Shanghai at the time. It was about 500 square feet, spacious for Shanghai, but rather minimally equipped.
The kitchen had a sink and single-burner gas jet sitting on a counter, loosely attached by a rubber hose to the source of the gas. We shared a refrigerator with two other apartments on our floor. We didn't have a television -- our contracts called for one, but the money had somehow vanished -- or a telephone or a washing machine or a car.
Of the 35 million Americans classified by the Census Bureau as poor, Rector and Johnson point out, most are better off than that. Not that there aren't truly destitute people, but most of those "in poverty" are not destitute or close to it.
Non-cash welfare
The Census Bureau defines "poverty" as income less than $14,702 for three people, $18,556 for four. The definition exaggerates the number of people who qualify, because it fails to count non-cash welfare such as food stamps, so it is more accurate to look at what people spend than what they nominally earn to judge their standard of living. After adjusting for inflation, the poorest one-fifth of Americans spend about as much as people in median-income household did in the early '70s.
Nearly half of households classified as poor own their own homes, only 6 percent are overcrowded, and on average they have more living space than the average person in major European cities. Nearly three-quarters own a car (and 30 percent have two or more), 90 percent have a telephone and 97 percent have color television. The number of people who went hungry at least once in 2002 because they lacked money to buy food was 6.3 million adults and 567,000 children, but only 2 percent of poor households reported that happened often. On average, poor children are as well-nourished as those who are better off.
Scripps Howard News Service