Research Hypertext Proposal

There's this bubble I live in. It's a bubble that shelters me from hardships such as poverty, cold nights, and starvation. I know there are millions of people who don't live in a bubble like I do. Sometimes I want to pop the bubble, just to see what they see, feel what they feel. I'm scared of leaving my bubble, but I feel like if I don't I won't be able to be a better person.

Occasionally, my bubble clears up, and I can see clearly the outside. When I go to big cities, I see what's happening, and it scares me. Every time I go to China, I see these hard working people. They stand outside vending their products, waiting for people to come buy so they could survive and not go to bed hungry.

I propose my research hypertext to be about those people. Those people who stand in the sweltering sun all day pushing a cart to carry people in, those people who sweat profusely as they carry a box of fruits and vegetables, yelling over and over again, “Fresh fruit here!”, those people who scramble for cover as soon as they see a police around, because they don't have a seller's permit, nor the ability to get one. There are so many people in China. It's just a number on a piece of paper, but when you actually go and see, it seems like there's so much more.

With that many people, competition is higher. Jobs are harder to find. People are forced to work ridiculously low wages. Many times when I was visiting China, I would think to myself, “How do they survive on that little?” I would try to calculate how much they were making, and how much they had to use on food and shelter and other things.

The amount would always be unequal. So how do they do it? How do they live, working and knowing they won't getting anywhere? They just have a rocky road. It doesn't lead anywhere, except for eventual death. There's no success. How do they do it?