KIDS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
My children always thought we were poor. I never gave them enough money. This fact was particularly obvious when we were in Kuala Lumpur, where their classmates were children of families whose father was in the oil rigs. The father would be away in the oil rig, making tons of money. The mother stayed behind in the city, often bored, so bored she would go into affairs with the houseboy or driver, and the children would be given all the extra money that was laying around in the house. So if the children were getting $30 a week, my children would be getting one-third of that. You couldn’t define poverty more than that!
When we were in Nagoya, we were really hard up. The UN rules stated that 25% of our salary should go to the home country. My husband was just divorced from his first wife. She left us with debts to pay for the very nice, but very expensive, things she bought for the house. That lasted almost twelve months into our marriage. To be fair, we were still using the curtains she bought, ten years later in our other posts. And with a big family, we needed to rent a large house that ate another 25% of his salary.
So, the children were given five clothes each, for the five days that they were in school. Then they had one special clothes for Sunday Church. Only the eldest, Robbie, got new clothes. He would hand down his clothes to his brother John and his sister, Gayle. There was always a ceremony during those days when he would give his clothes to John. Kwan, their nanny from Thailand would force John to say,
“Thank you, Robbie, for giving me your clothes.”
John would often rebel at saying this to Robbie. He would say to Kwan,
“But I don’t like to get his clothes. I want new ones for myself!”
Kwan would say gently, “But John, Robbie is so nice to you. He wants you to have his clothes. You should thank him for being so generous. Now say again after me, Thank you, Robbie, for giving me your clothes.”
Kwan would not give up until John would say these dreaded words. So, eventually, John would say them to Robbie, just to finish with whole ordeal and go play outside.
Eventually, the youngest girls got new clothes. After having two sets of children wear the same clothes, inevitably, the same clothes would be too worn down to be used again for the next set of children.
Anyway, you get the point. The children were poor, they felt poor.
ROBBIE
Since the children were in American schools, the PTA told us that the children should learn their keep at home. They should do chores for them to have pocket money. Robbie, at thirteen years old, worked as a Life Guard at the School. I remember that night at the school, watching a school play, when someone interrupted the show to ask if there was a doctor in the house. A child was found floating in the pool, and would someone help? I thought of Robbie, thank God, he wasn’t on duty when it happened. It was at 7 p.m., and he was off duty at 4 p.m. That’s how I remember that Robbie worked as a life guard, for his pocket money. He also washed peoples’ cars, but that didn’t last long because the families had houseboys and drivers who would do the job better.
GAYLE
Gayle called us one time at past eight o’clock. This was the same period that Robbie was working as a Life Guard.
“Mom, you’d better pick me up from —. I think I have dengue.” She was around eleven years old, and was working as a baby sitter.
“What?” I asked, surprised. “How do you know?”
“I had dengue while I was in the Philippines, and it is the same symptoms. Pick me up quick. I have told Mrs. ___, and they are coming home from their dinner date.”
It was no surprise to me that Gayle wound up as a medical doctor. Here she was, at eleven years old, giving herself a diagnosis for her symptoms.
Hubby and I picked her up, and we brought her to government hospitals. That was an eye opener, to see the state of government hospitals in Kuala Lumpur. The sick were sprawled in the emergency room, lying bloodied and unattended. I couldn’t take it. We called the private doctor, and we brought Gayle somewhere else, more decent.
That’s how I remembered that Gayle worked as a baby sitter after school when she was eleven years old. Gayle is two years younger than Robbie.
JOHN
John didn’t work for money until he was much older. Even during the time he worked for money, it wasn’t because he needed it. It was because he was not yet accepted into a university, and he was bored at home. So he decided to teach English. We were in Korea at that time. When John came home, I eagerly asked him,
“How was it?”
He quickly answered, “That was the longest HOUR of my life.!”
ABBIE AND JEAN
We had already paid ex-wife’s debts by the time the smallest two kids were grown up. The UN also had new salary rules that enabled us keep my husband’s salary in the country we were at. They also subsidized housing, which is always a big drain on any family’s budget. So, if Abby and Jean worked, it was because they wanted to have extra pocket money.
The two girls worked as Bus Monitors. This meant that they accompanied the school bus while the bus brought all the children home. They had to make sure the children behaved well in the bus, and they brought the children to their doors.
I didn’t think this was a big deal, until one time during a lull in our conversation, Jean broke the ice by saying,
“You think that we kids are such brats. Wait till you see the children these days. They are beyond your imagination.”
I asked Jean what made her say that, and she told me that it was difficult keeping peace inside a bus. That’s when I found out that her job as a Bus Monitor wasn’t as easy as one would think it was.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
But entrepreneurship isn’t just “doing a job”. It is creating something out of a situation.
My first experience with entrepreneurship was when I was twelve years old. I was studying in an all-girl school, and I noticed that students wanted to give roses to their favorite teachers or to their “crushes”. “Crushes” were aimed at someone you admired greatly or to students who exhibited some male characteristics, and it was a temporary substitute for having crushes on a boy, until the real McCoy came around.
One of our distant relatives lived in a big mansion at the corner of our block. She had a garden full of roses. I decided to buy the roses and sell them to the girls in my school. Pretty soon, I was doing this regularly, and I was able to put away, what seemed to me at that time, a big stash of money. The gardener was surprised when he found out after several months, that I was doing this for money. He thought I was just buttering up my teachers.
ROBBIE AND HIS “TAXI”
When we were in Nairobi, Kenya, the children were all teenagers by then. I allowed them to go out to a nightclub with their friends during the weekends. They would use my car and go out together and come home together.
I noted that, every Friday afternoon, after the children came home from school, Robbie would get a lot of phone calls. The calls lasted a few seconds. He would give numbers, like “6:20”, then put down the phone. Another call would come in, and he would say another number, “6:10”. And so on and so on. This was puzzling to me.
I later found out, several months later when I noticed that my car depreciated very quickly and had the suspensions broken very fast, that Robbie was using my car as a taxi. The numbers he shouted into the phone during those numerous calls, were the times when he would pick them up. The report was that he would even have 12 teenagers into the car at one time.
By the time I found out, it was time to sell the car, and we were leaving the country already.
NEW TIMES FOR THE GRANDCHILDREN
The children have long since left the “nest”. With my frugal ways, they were able to study in good American universities. They now live their own lives and run successful careers. They don’t keep in touch with us often, because their lives are very busy. Sometimes, I see the new and expensive toys and clothes they are buying their children on Facebook, things they strongly wanted to have while they were growing up but never enjoyed while they were “poor” in my house. I wonder, if I gave them everything they wanted while they were growing up, would they have worked as hard to reach where they are now?
When my sister complains about her sons who don’t have the “killer” drive that she herself had in order to become successful in her new country, the USA, I tell her gently,
“That’s because your children’s parents were richer than your parents.”
Yes, “Necessity is the mother of invention,”……… as my mother always used to tell me.
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