> At age nine, Jensen, despite not being able to speak English, was sent by his parents to live in the United States.[15] He and his older brother moved in 1973 to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, escaping widespread social unrest in Thailand.[16] Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,[16] mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school.[17] In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions.[18]
> When he was 10 years old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory.[17] Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm.[18] Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English"[17] and was frequently bullied and beaten.[19] In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis,[b] joined the swimming team,[21] and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14.[22] He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars,"[22] how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.[17] In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".[22]
Child labor is super common around these parts, especially on family farms. I grew up working on my family's tobacco farm just like pretty much everyone else. My uncle was even nice enough one summer to give me $20 a week for weeding and bug removal from a 5 acre farm. I thought it was so much money. I remember saving up to buy those bargain bin "300 Games" type CDs at Walmart.
I personally think it's fine for children to work on their family's business as long as it doesn't impact their schooling or normal childhood activities. It is a fine line to walk, I don't believe I missed out on anything like after school activities, but that was largely because there aren't too many of those opportunities deep in the mountains in Kentucky. I say it's a fine line, because it's easy to see a scenario where children are put to work in, say a family restaurant, and prevented from doing after school activities like sports or clubs, and miss out on part of the well rounding of an education.
I certainly don't support children working for third parties that then profit off of their labor. In those cases, there is no way to align the incentives to protect the child.
Bruce Wayne was rich. Those fancy suits and cars aren't cheap.
Tony Stark was rich. Fancy robot tech isn't cheap.
It takes money to actually do anything. Super Hero stories about rich people. We idolize making a difference with the money.
In the UK we don't tend to idolise the rich so much. Not to say it doesn't happen, but in popular culture positive depictions tend to be limited to period portrayals of idealised aristocracy (and even then it's rarely shown as heroic), with contemporary wealth usually treated as a dubious virtue.
Probably rooted in the 'self made man', 'rugged individualism'. Go West to make your fortune. We forget the US is pretty young, and still has a lot of culture based on colonizing the west, taming the wilderness to find your riches.