Reflections on Hillbilly Elegy

Today I finished Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance. It made me think about how much the way we see things can shape the course of our lives. So many situations can be viewed from different angles.

While I was in China accompanying my family during a hospital stay for medical tests, I chatted with some of the people there. One woman in her forties worked 16 hours a day. Apart from sleeping, all she did was work. She earned 4,000 yuan a month, with no weekends off.

Compare that with what Vance describes in the book: when he needed money, he could find a job paying $16 an hour. And from my own experience living in the U.S., working hours generally aren’t nearly that long. Working eight hours a day, five days a week would bring in roughly $2,600 a month.

He also mentions paying just $500 a month in rent for a pretty decent place. Having lived outside Silicon Valley myself, I can relate. If you don’t go out much and cook your own meals, you don’t necessarily spend that much. A $500 monthly food budget for one person can be enough, even with plenty of meat and milk.

By that calculation, you’d have about $1,600 left each month. Of course, there would be other expenses, but saving $10,000–$20,000 a year still seems possible.

For someone from rural China, that kind of life could feel like a dream.

I think a key difference is the direction things are moving. For rural Americans, life has been getting worse compared with what they had before. For rural Chinese people, life used to be so poor and so hard that even working day and night for 4,000 yuan a month—about $570—is seen as a big improvement.

When your country is in decline, and you keep comparing your life only with the past, with the people around you, or with others in your own country, it’s easy to lose hope. And once you lose hope, you can lose the motivation to keep trying—even when your actual circumstances may not be all that bad.

The poverty Vance describes feels less severe to me than the poverty people used to experience in rural China.

He also writes about how studying law at Yale gave him a different frame of reference.

I really think people should get out and see more of how others live. That feels especially relevant to people in developed Western countries. Personally, I came away feeling that a large part of the poverty among rural Americans has to do with mindset.