On the Level
What socioeconomic class am I? Did I grow up rich? Plus I finally joined a gym.
Lately I’ve been reading a bit about class, and more specifically, how Americans don’t talk about it. “People are always saying that Americans don’t like to talk about social class. In some sense this is true: we’ve never had a legible and clearly-articulated class system along English lines, and we pride ourselves on our society’s mobility.” It started with talking about “taste,” as I was discussing with my friend—and everyone else online lately— about that, and then they sent me this article.
So what I’ve been trying to figure out is: what class am I in? Or rather, what class is my family in? Off the top, I would respond “upper middle class,” and that’s probably statistically the fit. I mean, “middle class” is so wide… However, is there a chance we were rich? Let’s examine.
When we moved to America in the mid-Eighties, I was asked at a kindergarten lunch if my family had a million dollars. At the time, my grasp of English wasn’t very good, certainly not enough to know what a “million” was, but I replied without hesitation: yes, we do! I’m not sure what made me think this, or why I answered that way. In retrospect, we certainly did not have a million dollars. However, we had something.
Unlike the typical immigrant stories that surrounded us—specifically as immigrants from Taiwan in the Eighties—my parents didn’t come to America to study, to be an engineer, a doctor, etc. My dad was already in possession of a company, which had been bought years ago by my grandfather. The company was a woodwinds manufacturing factory, and my dad moved to the U.S. to pursue further business opportunities. (I assume, I have no idea actually and I never got to ask him.) My grandfather was a judge, I think, and he acquired the company with the help of his brother, who owned the newspaper in their hometown of Taichung. In short, my dad came to America with money.
Growing up, all of my dad’s close friends—consisting of his circle of classmates from National Taiwan University—were all very entrepreneurial, and constantly starting and shuttering different businesses. A Baskin Robbins, a shirt tie-dye company, blinds for homes, real estate, etc. During dinner parties, the men would be in one room talking business, the women in another room talking not-business. Many of those classmates, despite their educational achievements, told stories about coming to America virtually penniless and looking to make their way. My dad was the exception, I think.
As we melded into the wider Chinese-Taiwanese school community in suburban San Diego, most of our peer groups’ families did consist of engineers, doctors, small business owners, and such. I had no awareness of more or less money than anyone else, because all the people we knew mingled in the same spaces, ate at the same restaurants, drove the (exact) same cars, talked about the same things, had the same things. Everyone lived in a multi-story, three to four bedroom house with a two car garage in a tract development. Same, same, same.
Then, when we were around ten, we moved from Rancho Bernardo to Del Mar, about fifteen miles directly to the west, and closer to the ocean. There, our new house was bigger, around three thousand square feet, with a vaulted ceiling that made it seem much grander, and there was an automated gated entrance to the community. There, we spent fifth grade at a nearby middle school, where I met friends who lived in Rancho Santa Fe—a community about two miles down the street from us. The gates to that community had guards posted at each entrance, and you had to wait while they called to let you in. At one birthday party, I marveled at how there was an extra staircase in my friend’s house. Two staircases! It was also the first time I encountered a play room, dedicated solely to the kids. These houses were gigantic, the physical manifestation of more. Even then, it didn’t really occur to me that we were monetarily higher or lower than anyone around us. My new friends just had bigger houses and huger yards.
After that year, we were sent to a private school in La Jolla. At the time, it was maybe $10,000 per year tuition, and we were thrust around a different class of people. (I’m not sure using “class” here is correct. They just had more money.) The joke about our new school—as heard on the radio once day—was that kids at LCJDS studied BMWs instead of ABCs. I never experienced this though, as most of the people around us were just normal seeming and nobody had BMWs that I could see. When everyone turned sixteen and it was driving time, most everyone got a car of some sort from their parents—which in retrospect I realized was not the norm—but it was rarely an expensive one. And since it was a private school, kids were commuting from all over San Diego, which gave it more a sense of normalcy, as there were plenty of kids there who were not from outright rich rich families and neighborhoods. Note: Which would have been different perhaps if we had gone to school at public La Jolla High, where everyone would of have been from the same socioeconomic neighborhood.
Since I had very few friends in middle and high school, I can’t even recall what my friends’ parents did. My best friend at the time—really my only friend—both of his parents were emergency room doctors, and they lived up in La Costa, in a tiered house with a half-acre yard, a wide pool, and an expansive play room. I spent many sleepovers there, and they took me along on multiple family vacations, and none of it seemed that different than what our family did day-to-day—minus the exoticness of them doing white people things like eat pancakes with powdered sugar for breakfast.
And that was my peer group basically, until college. So for all my growing up, the simple fact that I didn’t really consciously think much about money, or our family’s relationship to it, indicates that clearly we were well off enough that I never had to think about it. Sometimes my dad returned home with a random new car, we took yearly vacations to ski and stuff, and I can’t recall anything not being available to us or denied due to money. I mean, I went to out-of-state college with the tuition paid for, and had no trailing post-college loans.
It wasn’t even until meeting people in college, where I met people from all over, that we even started talking about and comparing how we grew up. So we grew up in a sheltered money bubble basically. Does that mean upper middle class? Does that mean rich?
In 1985 USA, being rich meant having significant wealth, with the Forbes 400 starting around $150 million, while upper-middle-class households earned roughly $47,000+, and the wealthiest (top 10%) had net worths over $714,000, with the absolute richest seeing billions, far exceeding the median household income of about $23,620. Earning $100k was a major achievement for many, but “rich” spanned from high earners to the ultra-wealthy with immense fortunes like Sam Walton’s billions.
I don’t know how much my money my father made every year, or how the business did, because the tax records we have from that time are all over the place, and from what I understand, much of the money was funneled back into the company to keep it running, to eventually build another factory in China, etc. At the time of his death, we had second mortgages on our house, as we discovered, but that seemed somewhat normal for a businessman running a company that could be short on cash at times? I dunno!
Okay this is getting long so I’ll stop here. But for an eventual part two, I’m gonna look at college, post-college, and young and older adulthood. My mind has been on this subject for awhile and I keep spinning it around in my head. Don’t be surprised if I ask you how you (economically) grew up when I see you, and how you perceived your class.
Also I realized, as I wrote this, that none of this was really about “class,” not in the social economic sense. It was only focused on economic class, which is directly where my mind goes to when I think about the term. But that is just one part of it right? I mean, to answer the question from the top: what social class am I?
I love Costco?
The Month in Review
I’m working on a series of year end posts, about consumed things, highlight events, trip recaps, budget club review, etc. So I’ll leave with this for now: I have the hint of a hand callus on my palm. Just a hint mind you, but it’s there!
That means I’ve been going to the gym! We signed up for LA Fitness about a month ago, and I’ve been trying to go three times a week—I know I know it should be more but who has that kind of dedication! The gym is located eight minutes away, we pay fifty dollars a month, and I get in and out in about an hour and fifteen minutes. Any longer and I start to brain fry and get too bored.
My workout: I use the elliptical for twenty minutes—I can’t call it “running” Sachi said because I’m elliptical-ing—and then I wobble my way down to the machines and do either upper body or lower body using five individual machines. And then I do some core stuff on the ground, as I’ve been diagnosed with no core strength, like at all.
And then I go home feeling not much better (mentally) or pumped (physically), but at least I did it (spirit high)! So far results are unknown but this is the first physical manifestation of progress, this little callus. For those not in the know, my hands have always been incredibly soft from a lifetime of, well, doing nothing. Now those weight machine bars are making an impact, clearly! Luckily, I already bought some weight lifting gloves but maybe I won’t use them just yet… Let everyone see my progress. A baby callus!