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Donations, The First Year

2021 was my first year with a full-time, steady source of employment, and money that accumulates instead of going right back into tuition and living expenses.

Having identified as an Effective Altruist (EA)((If you’ve never heard of Effective Altruism before, I recommend this introduction.)) for the better part of a decade, one thing I was looking to the most from this was the ability to finally make a substantial difference through the unit of caring.

For someone who’s identified as an Effective Altruist for the better part of a decade though, it was embarrassingly easy for sentiment to get my goat.

Where We Gave

My girlfriend and I donated ~10% of our combined post-tax income, as stipulated by the Giving What We Can pledge. However, we failed to donate it all to effective charities, so it can’t really be said that we uh actually fulfilled the terms of the pledge. Thankfully I am very neurotic about not breaking any oaths so I have prepared for this moment by never actually officially signing up for the pledge, despite having identified as an effective altruist for zzzzzzz.

Here is where it went:

40% to global health initiatives via the RCForward Global Health Fund.((As a Canadian, RCForward is the only solution I’ve found to donate to many Givewell approved charities and still get tax receipts.))

15% to environmental advocacy via the RCForward Climate Change Fund.

15% to Spectrum, Kitchener-Waterloo’s queer community space. They do a lot of cool stuff and maintain a very active calendar of events.

15% to A Better Tent City, a cheap, no-barrier alternative to shelters in Kitchener. Instead of doing the shelter model where they turn everyone out during the day and then accept them back at night using a first-come-first serve basis (which is bad since demand outnumbers supply so there’s no sense of security for any shelter users), ABTC serves a more permanent community by giving them tiny homes to live in.

15% to the KWCF Immigration Partnership Fund for Immigrant and Refugee Initiatives, to support programs and initiatives for Afghan refugees starting their new life in Waterloo Region.

On Donating Locally

To be honest, I’m still not really sure if doing what was basically a 50/50 split between effective and local charities was the right move. It’s definitely something I want to think through in more detail before this year’s donations.

What we donated to local charities combined would be enough to save the lives of like two children if we donated it to a Givewell recommended global health charity, and I wouldn’t expect it to have that sort of impact here – although I think the value to local donations might be higher than you’d expect. I might write a post about this later.

I think you can definitely argue that donating to local charities could be put in the same bucket as, like, signing up for local pottery classes (some fun, some stimulation of the local economy), or heck maybe even home decor (beautifying your immediate area entirely for your own benefit) – something you do for warm fuzzies more than you do because it’s the right thing to do.

On the other hand, I do think that having a sense of rootedness in where you live is virtuous (and a pretty big force multiplier in doing stuff that’s good), and I genuinely do think that local charities are neglected and can be very powerful.

Getting My Goat

Stuff about local/effective donations aside, I think my local charities were honestly pretty terribly chosen and motivated entirely by my lame monkey emotions. Spectrum because I’m gay and I attended some events that they hosted, and I had a really good time. ABTC because I work with people who are on the project and it seems cool. The refugee fund because I was following their story in local papers and they did a good job tugging on my heartstrings.

I mean look I did look into everyone’s annual reports and make sure that they’re legit, and in the case of the refugees I ended up donating to my second choice since the first was literally in the middle of a money laundering scandal, but I basically made up the categories out of whole cloth since I didn’t have a super rigorous idea of what I wanted to do.

I also didn’t donate to what I think is equivocally the best and also most neglected charity in the region, because I thought it would be awkward since I work there (I work there because I researched nonprofits in the region to apply to jobs at and this seemed like very obviously the best one), which is honestly a pretty terrible reason. Especially since it’s actually very easy to donate anonymously, but to be fair I only realized this after we did all our donations.

I will state though for the record that the donor wall didn’t actually factor into my decision making process at all. That was just a joke I swear.

Tentative Plan for 2022

Aggressive/Risky: Donate 10% of income to effective charities in global health and environmental advocacy, in something like a 70/30 split. Definitely pay attention to new environmental projects. Treat local donations as a separate budget category that pulls from our spending money, and donate only to the one I like. Executing this means risking not doing any local donations.

Moderate/Safe: Donate 10% of income in a 70/20/10 split for global health, environmental advocacy, and local organizations respectively. I think this is what I actually want to do, rationally, monkey emotions aside. Peter Singer still wouldn’t Officially Recognize Me As A Good Person if I go this route, but I think about this in terms of harm reduction – the more I enjoy the giving process, the more likely I am going to do continue to do it in following years. Ensuring that the experience of donating remains pleasant for me is how I ensure that the world gets donations from me for the rest of my life, and if that means local charities get a cut, it’s still better than if my monkey emotions start rioting and I stop donating in 5 years when my earning power is higher.

The Car Ride Home

[Epistemic effort: a dreamy recollection of some events that occurred on April 29th, 2019]

It’s late April. My school term has ended, but I have two weeks before my internship starts in another city, and my dad is driving my back home to hang out for a while in the meantime. As is tradition for I suspect possibly a lot of CBCs like me, the best of Teresa Teng, a 70s Taiwanese superstar, is being blasted at full volume inside the car.

“I think I first heard these songs when I was the age that your brother is now,” he tells me, for the first time. Henry is finishing up 10th grade right now. He’s gone nocturnal in recent years and is just beginning to think about summer jobs and what university he wants to go to. “It was the first time I’ve heard music that wasn’t communist propaganda. I immediately fell in love with her.”

I mull this around in my head, integrating this tidbit into the rest of what I know about his childhood.

Falling in someone without seeing their face, but because of their voice and because of what they were singing sounds. Sounds romantic, sounds pure, sounds like something that isn’t possible now.

“So did every boy I knew who listened to any of her songs,” he continued. He’s in a chatty mood, which I always enjoy. “I would always feel a little guilty listening to her though, because I was committing a crime. Her songs were banned on the mainland; it was illegal to enjoy something so bourgeoisie.”

It’s sad to think about, what it would be like to live in a society where romantic love was considered decadent and sinful. To me, Teresa wasn’t really singing about anything that was like, Rich Kids of Instagram worthy. She was singing about the soft, tender feelings that emerge when you do something like waiting for a boy to return to you. Is my distinction of the two just a sign that I’ve lived too long in the Decadent West?

After a few more songs where I ponder this, I resume the conversation. “Dad, if her songs were illegal, how did you get a hold of them in the first place?”

I admit, I was kind of imagining a literal black market, a nightly enterprise operating from the hours of midnight to 3am, with sketchy vendors in darkened stalls hawking their ill-gotten wares under the moonlight. Even as I generated the image I felt a little silly, and yet-

“I recorded it from a friend,” he told me. I deflated a little bit, but he didn’t notice. “My parents bought me a cassette player for ninety bucks, because English classes began in middle school. We used this tape called ‘900 English phrases’ to practice diction.”

He goes on, already knowing what question I was going to ask next. “Ninety bucks would be what your granddad and grandma makes in a month, combined. But there weren’t a lot of expenses then, either. The apartment we lived in was collectively owned, so rent was five dollars a month.”

I try to think of how much that is in terms that are useful to me, but then realized that that would get depressing real fast and stopped.

“So I would go buy some blank cassettes, and go to a friend who already had some songs, and get them to play it, and record it onto my own tapes to take home.”

“How was, uh, how was the quality?”

“Ha! Utter crap. The chain of recording could have been 20 people deep for all I know. The genuine tapes were rare; you’d need to be a fairly high up bureaucrat to get it across the border.”

I listen to the crystal clear recording that we have on with a newfound appreciation. “When did you finally hear it the way that it was meant to sound?”

“By the time I got to university, there were vendors selling tapes that were advertised as being recorded from an original recording, but the quality was still kind of bad. I don’t think I listened to a genuine recording until after I started working. I would have been older than you are now.”

I try to imagine what it would be like to hear something with crystal clarity for the first time, after 10 years of waiting. The album ends, and loops back to the first song. We drove on, appreciating the music.

Immigrant Threnody

I hope your winter holidays went okay, it was kind of a mixed bag for me to be honest. I was looking to hanging out with my parents but my mom’s shitty boss has basically told her at the end of every work day (meaning days that she worked, including weekends) that she has to come in on the next because she booked her for some patients then and there is a lot of money to be made when people realise that their un-roll-overable insurance is about to expire and so she’s been doing 10-12 hour shifts every single day since the 20th (it is the 1st) despite the fact that she’s asked for a week off for the hols. Her boss just keeps pressuring her into giving up more and more of her time and she doesn’t really have a choice here. She has told me that this is probably not going to continue into February, like I should be happy to hear that she’s only going to get exploited this heavily for another entire month at most. And hey, at least she managed to take today off finally since it was new years and she spent it with some of her friends playing cards and loudly arguing about poker strategy which is something that she really enjoys so you see it’s not all bad.

I’m really angry about this but for two separate reasons. The first is very straightforward; it’s just really frustrating and heartbreaking for me to see that her reality is so different from mine and because she’s working at a Chinese clinic and for a Chinese boss in the Chinese community none of the labour laws that we have will protect her. I guess I kind of naively thought that you get to escape this kind of shit if you’re making well above minimum wage. She just shrugs it off with some casual racism(?) like, “oh you know, my boss can’t help it, she’s from [specific Chinese province] and people from that province are all misers who get angry if they think they’re leaving money on the table, she will never forgive me for doing that to her” etc etc. Like what the fuck do I do here, I tell her that this seems terribly wrong and she just looks at me like I’m a little kid who doesn’t understand how the world works, and honestly that’s kind of fair because her world and mine are so different. She tells me that this year it’s especially bad because the other employee there is on maternity leave so next year it’ll be easier, but come on guys what’s obviously going to happen is that the boss is going to work both of them this hard next year. There’s going to be money left on the table if she doesn’t.

The second reason makes me sound like a child. I’m really upset that I didn’t get to spend any time with her. There are some surface reasons for that, she works weekends so I don’t see her much when I visit during school terms. And for the last four months I was a 5 hour drive away for an internship in another city so I only managed to visit two or three times, and she was of course working then too. It seems like I haven’t been able to see her this entire year, even though she’s right there. Sometimes we call but my already bad chinese is worse on the phone so i can’t even say anything really meaningful. I should call more anyways. But I was looking forward to this break, and being able to spend time with her.

At this point I think I kind of need to spend some time talking about the microtrauma (archive) of being raised by parents who do not partake in your native culture and who don’t speak your language both in a figurative and literal sense, by parents who are trying their best to escape a cycle of abuse for you but sometimes not perfect in their execution of that. And how those two things intersect – see, they would probably object to me calling my grandparents’ child-rearing tactics abusive, because they turned out fine. They’d say that I was looking at the world through the eyes of white colonizers. They might be right. We will never see eye to eye on this topic.

So if you didn’t know this about asian parents, they have a hard time telling you that they love you after you’re old enough for pre-k. Looking back I think there were some supports that I learned to live without growing up with them that I thought was completely normal, or even rationalized as “freeing” at the time, and it wasn’t until moving out and seeing healthy interactions between my non-asian friends and their parents (I was raised in a heavily Chinese suburb and all my friends were Chinese, which meant that for the most part my parents were the ones everyone else coveted because they didn’t hit me and they were relatively chill about Bs on report cards and I never had to spend hours practising an instrument on the daily) that I realised that maybe my parents weren’t at the pinnacle of, uh, parenting. But it’s been okay, through the complete fluke of me being a giant bookworm and aspiring polymath with good research skills and also good friends on my wavelength I’ve been able to get a well-rounded childhood. And now that I’m older and financially independent I’m starting to really enjoy talking with them on relatively equal ground, getting to know them as people, and the way that their experiences have shaped them.

Here’s other things that are happening too: many people in my family have died this year and it’s the first time that I’ve had to confront the fact that my loved ones are mortal. I’m thinking about my future and how it’s not so far away, which means thinking about their future too. Being away from them for long stretches means it’s very apparent that every time I visit their hair is greyer, their wrinkles deeper, their movements fractionally slower, that the time I have with them is limited.

And I don’t know if this is a cultural thing or just because my language skills are crap, but i can’t seem to convey to them the idea that I actually want to spend time with them. Their way of showing love is through the food that they would make me and they way they keep buying me things that I mention offhand to them and how they keep my room in order and don’t even ask me to do chores anymore because they just want to make life easy for me when I visit. I know they feel deeply ashamed that they don’t have a house paid down for me for when I graduate, which is a very ridiculous thing to me. I don’t want a house, I want more of the post-dinner long talks that I have with them. Learning about them as people, finally, finally.

I brought all this up with my parents as well as I was able to in my ex-mother tongue, but I don’t think it’s something that they’re even capable of processing. My mom kept reassuring me that it’s fine and she’s not too tired from the job so I don’t have to worry about her health. I told her that had I known her only days off when I was on vacation in mexico with my boyfriend and his family then I wouldn’t have went, I only went because I thought there would be days enough left to also hang out with you. She told me to not be dumb because she just wants me to be happy and obviously I was happier in Mexico away from them doddery old folk. I told her her that no, because I’ll be seeing my boyfriend more than her next term, I would have really valued spending time with my doddery old folk instead.

There was a long pause. Then she and my dad commended me on my familial piety. Then they said that they actually didn’t expect that from me in such a large amount because they knew that I was too westernized for that and have made their peace with it long ago(???). Man, so much for not hitting me, because I was SLAPPED.

So yeah, there’s three days left before I have to move back to Waterloo for school and I’m upset because I was really looking forward to hanging out with the rents some more, which isnt looking likely. Mom told me that she would be free after the 27th- make that the 28th- well definitely by the new year- well no actually it won’t but oops we already invited guests over today so I guess we’ll just interact the next time you come home

And I feel childish for whining about my parents not giving me more attention and in the exact specific form that I want because I’m too ungrateful to appreciate what they actually do but there you have it, my mood to start off 2019. At least it can only be up from here.