Navigating My Privilege while Travelling

While studying in Indonesia I had a conversation with an Indonesian student my age about something I no longer remember; it might have been where to have dinner that night. I suggested a certain food vendor “because it’s cheaper,” to make my humble budget stretch as far as possible since I was a student not earning income on this trip and since that’s what I’d always been taught growing up.

The other student was confused about why I wanted to save money. “But Canada’s a rich country,” she said. I didn’t know how to clarify without discomfort that even though I came from the global 1 percent and all its luxuries, that did not mean I could afford to spend money without a thought.

Navigating my privilege and the perspectives I carry is just as much of an ongoing journey as physically navigating the places I love to travel. I’m a young, first-generation, Asian-Canadian woman who is kind of white-passing in appearance and deeply Westernized in mindset. I speak excellent English, have a university education and had working class parents. I’m able-bodied and have no accessibility challenges, and I was fortunate to have had a reasonably stable upbringing (I’m happy with how it went overall).

With these social statuses I’m not inherently defaulted with as much power and respect as straight, middle- and upper-class white men, who are the most privileged demographic, but I still have much structural privilege within the world population.

The Indonesian student was not just my classmate because even though we attended different classes at the same school, she was one of several bilingual students hired to be translators for my cohort of English-speaking students for our fieldwork interviews with locals. I viewed our working relationship with layers of lenses which included the clear lens of her working hard to achieve English fluency and taking on a decent-paying translator job to help pay for her schooling.

But there was also the grey lens of knowing that my language was, via British colonization and later American cultural hegemony, the lingua franca that every hopeful student had to learn if they wanted to partake in the dealings of world business and power. And yet it wasn’t even my native tongue because up until my birth centuries of my ancestors had grown up speaking Filipino languages.

In her surprise that I wanted to eat at a cheaper food vendor despite coming from a rich country like Canada, I experienced how tiers of privilege between different countries and between socioeconomic classes within a country could intersect into a complicated contradiction where I was both rich and budget-conscious. My internal conflict about my Canadian self and my Indonesian classmate commenting whether to eat cheaper food in her developing country made me think of the global haves and have-nots. It led to me thinking of the developing world serving unfairly compensated trade or labour to the developed world via structural inequities like factory sweatshops to produce cheap goods for export or outsourcing of landfills and pollutive industries.

I don’t remember how I responded to my Indonesian classmate’s question. I think I mumbled something about wanting to save money for the next meal after that.

I don’t have an one-size-fits-all answer for how to feel and how to act when confronted with how much or how little privilege you have when you encounter people and observe situations. Every instance is a case-by-case basis that invites an assessment of what factors make me think and act in that moment in time. Every conversation is one that requires empathy to try see where they’re coming from with their different lived experience.