Information Gaps and Coordinate Gaps

When we talk about an “information gap”, we usually mean that you know something I do not, or that you follow different media from the ones I follow. That kind of gap is fairly easy to understand, and sometimes fairly easy to close. You tell me what you know, I look into it, and the information itself can gradually be brought into alignment. But lately I have increasingly felt that another kind of difference is not simply an information gap. The information is already there. We may all be looking at the same thing, yet read it very differently.

A few days ago, I wrote about parents whose children have settled overseas, and whether they should move to their children's country to live together and spend their retirement there. As I wrote, I naturally started doing the sums. How far would the parents' Chinese pensions go after conversion into US or Australian dollars? What would they do about healthcare? If they could not yet access the full range of healthcare and retirement benefits, how much would private insurance cost each year? Add housing, transport and food, and what would the total come to? These are practical questions, because I was mainly thinking of ordinary middle-class families, or families somewhat better off than the average middle-class household but still short of so-called financial freedom. For these families, exchange rates, prices and health insurance all require serious consideration.

But as I wrote, another thought occurred to me. What if a different group of people were reading this — people who had already achieved so-called financial freedom? How much purchasing power they lose when converting renminbi into Australian dollars, how much higher local prices are than in China, or whether private health insurance costs a few thousand or tens of thousands more each year might not present much of a problem. If their child lives in Sydney, they can buy a home in Sydney too. They can choose whichever healthcare service seems most suitable. These things still have a price, but the prices are no longer enough to determine their decisions. Such a reader might wonder why the author keeps calculating all these costs. Looking at the same figures, one person sees retirement expenses that must be carefully worked out, while another may see only a few relatively insignificant outgoings. The information has not changed, nor have the numbers. They simply carry different weight in different people's lives. That is a difference in coordinates.

Today I saw a very interesting Hong Kong street interview. A young woman was randomly stopping passers-by to chat. One man she happened to stop was later recognised by people online as Kwok Wing-hung, nicknamed “Shanghai Boy”, a well-known underworld figure and crime boss. What made it interesting was precisely that she clearly had no idea who he was. She continued asking the questions she would ordinarily ask any passer-by. What industry did he work in? For most people, that is easy to answer — finance, IT, hospitality or trade. A few seconds would do. Kwok paused, then said only, rather vaguely, that he had worked in many industries.

She then asked when he had earned his first million. That made the exchange even more interesting. For a young street-interview creator, “your first million” can readily seem like a major milestone. When did you make your first substantial sum? How did you go from nothing to a million? These are natural questions within that frame of reference. Yet the man before her had a complicated history in the underworld. His life over the past few decades was probably not divided into stages marked by numbers such as “the first million”. The interview therefore creates a curious sense of mismatch. Her questions were not wrong; she was asking them quite seriously. Kwok also understood every word. They were standing on the same Hong Kong street, no more than a metre or two apart, speaking the same language, but the rulers in their heads were different. The interesting point goes beyond her not knowing who Kwok Wing-hung was. Even if someone had told her his name beforehand, without much understanding of another kind of life and experience, the questions that first came to mind would probably still come from the life she knew. What someone asks can sometimes reveal where they stand.

The third example is Shenzhen. I lived there for many years and have always liked the city. I have visited many places in China, and if I had to choose my favourite Chinese cities, Beijing and Shenzhen would probably still come first. Shenzhen in particular has always felt young, energetic and fast-changing to me, with a sense of continually moving forwards. But on reflection, the words “living in Shenzhen” can describe two entirely different lives.

Take someone who is well off and successful in business. In the morning, he takes the lift from his home to the underground car park, where his driver is already waiting. The car is air-conditioned. He travels from the residential basement to the office building's basement, then takes another lift straight to his office. He spends most of the day in temperature-controlled surroundings. Of course he knows that Shenzhen's summer temperatures are above thirty degrees; the weather forecast on his phone tells him every day. Yet he may spend less than ten minutes actually standing outdoors. His office might be high in a skyscraper, overlooking mountains or the sea. On a clear day, through a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, he can see Shenzhen Bay, rows of towers, and the city's silhouette in sunlight or the evening glow. Meeting clients that night might mean another luxury hotel or restaurant. The car stops at the entrance, he steps inside, and there are air conditioning, lights, quiet corridors and an elegant lobby once again. This, too, is the real Shenzhen.

His mind may also be occupied with quite different concerns. Where should the company go next? How should this year's strategy change? Which market should it enter next year? What should its plans for the next three or five years look like? For him, Shenzhen's thirty-five-degree heat is often just a number on his phone screen. The crowds, humidity and cooking fumes in the streets may be only a few dozen floors below, yet they rarely reach his body or enter the questions he is considering that day.

Now consider someone else. He leaves an urban village or a neighbourhood a little further away in the morning, walks for a while, then squeezes onto a bus or metro train. After leaving the metro station, he still has another ten or fifteen minutes to walk in the sun. For him, thirty-five degrees in a Shenzhen summer is not a number on a weather forecast. It is the wave of heat hitting his face as he emerges from the station, the back of his shirt becoming wet before he has walked very far, and the hot, damp pavement beneath his shoes. Walking through the streets at midday, he smells traffic exhaust, cooking fumes from roadside restaurants, and the distinctive dampness of a southern Chinese city. His concerns are concrete too. Can he catch the next train? Will the client sign this afternoon? When is this month's rent due? Is today's trip really worth making? This is Shenzhen as well.

More interesting still, these two people may work in the same area — perhaps both in Futian, perhaps both in Nanshan, or even in the same office building. One drives straight into the underground car park and takes the lift to the thirtieth floor. The other walks from the metro station along the pavement and enters through the ground-floor lobby. One looks out over mountains, the sea and Shenzhen's skyline from dozens of floors up, thinking about the company's strategy for the coming years. The other hurries through the sun on the street below, wondering whether that afternoon's deal will come through. Physically, they are very close. They may enter and leave the same building every day, or occasionally stop at the same traffic light, one inside a car and the other outside. They may have lived this way for years. One travels underground and the other at street level; one enters the building from the car park and the other comes out of the metro station. They move around near each other every day, yet may never truly have met. What they see, hear, smell and physically experience, even what occupies their minds each day, can be very different. They share the same physical location, yet their lived experience may place them in two parallel worlds that are close together and rarely intersect.

Looking back at the term “information gap”, I feel it still leaves something out. Information gaps can sometimes be filled. If you do not know who Kwok Wing-hung is, I can tell you. If you do not know what health insurance costs in Australia, you can look it up. If you do not know how hot Shenzhen is in July, a weather forecast can tell you accurately that it is thirty-five degrees today. All of this is information. But even after the information is supplied, we may still see different sides of the same thing. A financially independent person and an ordinary middle-class family do not feel the same way about the same retirement expense. Even if the young Hong Kong interviewer knows that the man before her is called Kwok Wing-hung, what she thinks worth asking and where she begins will still be shaped by her own experience. The person in a temperature-controlled car knows perfectly well that Shenzhen is thirty-five degrees today. But those “thirty-five degrees” do not bear on him in the same way as they do on someone who has just left the metro and must walk another fifteen minutes in the sun.

So, beyond an information gap, I think there is another kind of difference we might call a “coordinate gap”. If this happens among people living in the same city, it happens all the more among people living in different cities or countries. We naturally imagine places we have never visited and lives we have never experienced, filling in the missing parts in our minds. Yet the material we use to fill those gaps is usually drawn from what we have seen before.

Of course, this is not a claim that one kind of life is more real, or that one way of living should become the standard by which we judge others. Comfortable circumstances do not make someone further removed from reality, and hardship does not automatically give someone greater understanding. What a person may really need is some breadth of perspective. Discussing a company's strategy for the next three to five years in a high-rise office calls for one scale of judgement. Going downstairs and seeing someone working to secure a deal in thirty-five-degree heat calls for another. In an investment decision, ten thousand yuan may be a very small figure within the overall project. When helping an ordinary family consider retirement, the same ten thousand yuan may directly affect the final choice. In different situations and from different positions, people naturally make different trade-offs. There is no need to choose one scale and use it to measure every person and every situation.

Someone who has achieved financial freedom, or who holds a senior position and controls considerable resources, may regularly visit luxury hotels and look out over mountains or the sea from a high-rise office. If they can still keep in mind lives they rarely experience first-hand any more, an old Chinese saying seems fitting here: “With every bowl of porridge and every meal, remember the effort behind it; with every thread and strand, remember the labour and resources it took.” The reverse is also true. Someone whose circumstances are currently modest, whose days revolve around the metro, rent and household necessities, need not confine the world they can imagine to those things simply because that is what they see around them.

An information gap can be narrowed by adding information. A coordinate gap is not so simple. Nobody can live everyone's life at once. But we can at least give our judgement some range, recognising that in different situations and positions, and when facing different people and questions, we sometimes need to change the ruler we use.