Be Money Aware

Money in the wild

People around me wear bracelets for wealth luck. We buy lottery tickets and blind boxes in shopping malls. We pay for digital clothes, receive investment scams by text and keep songs about fortune on repeat. We move between renminbi, Singapore dollars, Hong Kong dollars, crypto and shares, calculating exchange rates in our heads and discovering, again and again, that the same thing costs something different on the other side of a border.

Once, at the beginning of a difficult move, I had to find a friend with renminbi so I could pay a deposit. In that moment money was not an abstract store of value. It was a route through a specific relationship, currency and deadline. Having value and being able to mobilise it were not the same thing.

A seed for good fortune

A friend once ate a pile of salak fruit, chose one seed that looked right, tied it into a small charm and took it to the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple in Bugis. He lit incense and asked for good luck before giving it to me across a dinner table.

The object was worth almost nothing. Yet it carried time, care, belief and a wish that luck might travel with me. Away from home, so many hopes have nowhere obvious to live. A small object can give them a body.

That gift made me think about value differently. We were not children waiting to be pleased by something sweet. We had both travelled far and learned different ways to survive. Still, we were willing to treat a seed seriously, as if attention and good fortune could be stored inside it and passed from one person to another.

Money crosses more than one world

In southern China, temples, ancestral halls and shops for ritual goods make the movement visible. Paper money is sent to ancestors. A fulfilled wish is repaid through incense or a donation. A red packet carries money, but it also carries blessing, hierarchy, intimacy and obligation.

Older generations overseas can hold these practices even more tightly. Someone once told me that people who travelled very far worry their ancestors may no longer remember them. Money, offerings and ritual become ways of keeping a route open between places, generations and worlds.

For people in motion, money can be currency and protection at the same time. We move abroad to make money, but clearly not only to make money. We are also trying to create enough structure, mobility and luck to live.

A tilted world

Money also reveals who gets to set the terms. Some people accumulate savings. Some can mobilise institutions, relationships and other people's attention. Some preserve the ability to move quickly, while others spend a lifetime trying to reach the centre of a system whose rules were written elsewhere.

Living across places has made these differences harder for me to ignore. Stability can look like discipline from one position and exclusion from another. Risk can look irresponsible to someone protected by a system and necessary to someone standing outside it.

I am interested in money because it makes the tilt of the world visible. Capital is never only an amount. It is access, permission, timing, language and the power to decide which forms of value count.

More than making money

We talk about making money as if the objective were obvious. But perhaps what many of us want is the capacity to change states: to leave, stay, care for someone, take a risk, withstand disorder or begin again.

So I want to ask more than, “How much money do I have?” I want to ask: what can what I have connect? What can it make possible? Where can it take me, and with whom can I share the risk?

The first step is not earning. The first step is imagining money again.