I said this all the time but never wrote it down.
"Money ruins friendship.”
I have firsthand experience of this truth.
When we were in Vietnam, we were poor. My mother was an artist, a single mother of three, and an art professor. Rice was rationed daily to keep us alive. The simple meal was a small bunch of water spinach, two pieces of tofu, and a few grams of fatty pork belly cuts.
We were poor, but my mother had a lot of kind, good friends who always helped out with either money or extra food.
However, some bad friends took advantage of my family situation to profit from it.
I remembered there were “friends” who came to the house and asked my mother to produce art, clay relief sculpture samples of her works for sale. With the hope of making more money for the family, she spent a lot of time producing these sample artworks. They took the artworks and left, never coming back to follow up with the money as promised.
My mother was an artist. She was poor but generous. She knew that she got scammed. She laughed, calling herself stupid, and put it off. Sometimes she met these friends on the street; they ignored each other like strangers.
These were not her real friends. They were her transactional whoever she happened to cross paths with in her life.
My mother always told me that money will ruin friendship and relationships.
Her Godson, who we took in when he was a homeless architecture student, became a successful architect later and scammed us out of money when he was hired to build my mother’s first and only house. After that project, he left and was nowhere to be found when we needed him.
I witnessed how poor artists like my mother were; I decided that I would not be an artist. I studied English to hope for a better job opportunity. I studied English and became good at it. I went to night English classes 5 nights per week until I got a job with Vietnam Airlines.
When I went to college, I had already made some money tutoring small children in English. The money helped me not ask my mother for money anymore.
In college, I hung out with two friends. We spent a lot of time together. We were compatible. We laughed. We always sat together in class. We were an inseparable trio.
Their families were not rich but were not as poor as mine. I knew that they were much better off than me.
After the USSR collapsed, speaking English had become trendy and opened more opportunities for jobs. These two friends used to study Russian. They were not good at English. So they asked me to tutor English for a fee. I named my price, the same money I get paid for tutoring the small children.
After a few days of silence, one wrote me a letter ( I still have the letter with me today ) that both of them could not afford the price, and they were shocked that I named the price. They thought they would get a much better discount because we were “ best friends”.
I was shocked. I was speechless. I was disappointed. I went silent. I felt betrayed.
The friendship took a turn that would never be the same after that letter.
I remembered my mother’s saying: money ruins friendship. I did not say anything to these two. I suck it up. I promised myself I would never let money interfere with the relationship anymore.
I kept my promise until much later; I moved to the US. I had become an artist at US Davis and hung out with a friend who loved my art. She loved both the aesthetic and concept of my art.
She was a professor at US Davis. She came to my MFA studio all the time. We hung out. We talked about art. She went to my house and became close with the whole family. I gave her some of my important art for free because she was my friend.
One of them was my first big drawing of Boat drawing, from my series of 10 years of research and drawing about Vietnamese boat people.
One of her friends from Boston wanted to buy another big drawing for $ 2.500.
Because I trusted my Davis friend, I agreed to sell that drawing in instalments. My mother scolded me for how stupid I was. She admitted to me that she was stupid, but she never sold her art in instalments.
It took that Boston lady 10 years to pay off the drawing !!!!
Every year I had to send her an email to remind the payment or “ please return the drawing”. She would say no, she cannot return the drawing because “ it is a very important piece of art”. Sometimes she sent me a postcard saying this year her parents' house got flooded and she could not pay.
I got so impatient and exhausted. I could not keep up and just forgot about it. Until I went up to Seattle, she emailed me again to ask for the new address so she could continue to pay. Finally, she did pay it off.
I got mad at my David friend. I cut off talking with her for a while because of this installment business. We still hang out when we can, but I would say no whenever a Davis friend gave me a “business” proposal to sell my art.
Last week, one of my friends who lives in Hawaii texted me the story below.
The Hawaii friend loves art. She loves my art, and again I always give my art to her for free. She used to be an art dealer, so she understands artist/selling art, and art ownership. She insisted that she could buy one of my paintings. The sale was $700, I remember. She is proud of her ownership of my painting. She always showed off her wall with my art among other artists' pieces that she purchased.
Last month, she posted images of my art and another art image that she bought from another artist friend to share how artists use beautiful art to convey human suffering.
Whenever she posts my art on her blog, she shared to me.
Genuinely, I am happy and grateful that I have a friend who appreciates my art.
But another artist friend said that the Hawaii friend has to pay her $ 50 for copyright.
My Hawaii friend was shocked. She had already bought the artwork, and her blog was not for profit.
They gently and politely texted back and forth, focusing on what was right and wrong and the artist's copyright, and finally my Hawaii friend got exhausted. She took another artist's image down.
Like me before, my Hawaii friend was hurt. She was disappointed. She was in grief and loss over a 10-year-long friendship for $50.
To sum up, a real friend would never ruin a true friendship for $50.
Again, I repeated my mother’s saying to my Hawaii friend: "Money ruins friendship."
I added, $50 is too cheap to end a decade-long friendship, but a reasonable amount for her to realize that person is not her friend, but a transactional entity who just happened to cross paths with her in life.
