My mother is quirky, or maybe I just don’t get her. One year, I asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Despite being mentally prepared for an answer that was painfully practical, I was still shocked to hear that Saran wrap was a top contender. When I asked her what she wanted for Mother’s Day, she told me to get better grades. When she sent her first email in 2009, she shoved the entire email into the subject, resulting something to the affect of “Hi I don’t know how to go to the next line love mom.” The summer after my junior year of high school, I nervously sat on a couch in our Shanghai home — one that she had draped in hideous floral bed sheets to defend furniture from my dog’s vicious shedding sessions. I politely asked her if any of her friends had any internship opportunities for me the summer after my junior year of high school. She quickly found one at a Taiwanese design firm called Fortune. It was also a sweatshop.
To be fair, she didn’t know it was a sweatshop. Aware of my artistic abilities, she asked her friend “in design” to find me a position. On my first day, I entered a high rise building in the west side of Shanghai, where my boss greeted me to sign my contract. “Look at yourself,” he said as he pointed to my reflection in the glass separator. I did not do so. “You are visibly Western,” he remarks. I nodded politely. After clearing his throat, he instructed me not inform anyone that I will be making four times the amount of the other “entry level” positions.
Those occupying “entry level” positions were in the floor below me. Upon realizing that my day’s worth of work could be completed in two hours, I would often finish sketching jacket designs and wander around the building and strategically photocopy my hand into forest animal shapes. On day two, I ventured to the floor beneath me, exiting from a design division of white tiles, pristinely groomed bobs and glass dividers to a sector of cement surroundings and wired entrances. Anticipating young workers my age, I found a poorly ventilated room with five female workers old enough to be my mother. There was one boy my own age, and judging from the fact that they did not have lunch with the rest of the company, I knew that they were migrant workers. I was intrigued. I quickly noticed that one of the workers had broken her pen and was visibly upset, and took it upon myself to buy her a new pen. From then on, I was accepted as a worker of the “entry level” clan — the sweatshop workers.
They bombarded me with questions that would be unthinkable by Western standards. From asking how much my primary caregiver makes to how much my tuition must cost, they marveled me, a 16-year-old foreign creature who had gotten supremely skilled at dodging uncomfortable questions. Initially, they showed me glamour shots that they had developed of their children, who lived in impoverished farming provinces back home. However, when I joined them to count and inspect buttons — a couple thousand a day — they started to offer candid comments on their plight. One lady complained that she had no access to proper nutrition and was getting fat from the cheap food she could afford. To combat this, she pulled out a Fanta bottle and informed me that she was going to start drinking “this orange juice” as a means to improve her lifestyle. Another lady told me that she missed her children back home. Since she could only afford to see them once a year during the Chinese New Year holiday, she had to find “hip city gadgets” to please them so that they do not resent her. “The pay is more than what I would be making back home farming,” she explained. “But it is not enough.” At 3.7 RMB per hour and 14 hours a day, these workers were making 8.6 U.S. dollars a day. Since they worked six days a week, that adds up to 51.6 U.S. dollars per week — for jobs that threatened their vision, provided potential back injuries and arthritis. Between counting and inspecting metal buttons for coats that they could never afford and polishing trails of zippers, these workers made mention of America. “In America,” one worker remarked, “my friend could make 24 RMB an hour. Just imagine what I could do with that money.” Upon imagining 24 RMB, or 4 American dollars per hour, these workers dreamed of owning homes, being food secure and having the luxury of living with their family. “You are so lucky,” they would tell me. “And yet you choose to help us.”
A week after I finished my internship, I received a phone call from a migrant worker. She asked for the plane ticket that I had used to return to China from my summer trip to visit Californian colleges. “If I can prove that I was out of the country,” she explained, “my landlord will lower my rent.” I was immediately struck by my privilege. By simply providing the impression that she had connections to the United States, she could increase her social capital and reap practical, monetary benefits from it. Yet when I explained that my plane ticket would have my name on it and not hers, she sighed and complained of her ignorance.
These nonsensical inhibitions, odd requests and seemingly misplaced musings — they remind me of my mother. As a Taiwanese immigrant to the United States herself, my mother is subject to constant miscommunication due to language and cultural barriers. Prior to my arrival, my sister reminisces of a time of instant noodles and food stamps. Despite having been a successful banker in Taiwan prior to immigrating, my mother worked at McDonald’s, cleaning toilets and flipping burgers, happy to help provide for our family as my father mastered his PhD program. Willing to work for lower wages, foreign workers, be it from another province or country, are perpetually disconnected from larger society in their willingness to bend over, wipe, count and repeat.
Perhaps it is with this work ethic that leads my mother to request for Saran wrap and better grades. Despite no structural or practical economic necessity to do so, she wraps and preserves furniture — much to my disgust. She is frustratingly horrid at technology, but marvels at my ability to send emails at the speed at which I do. She is constantly cut by the edges of her broken English, yet she licks her wounds in my ability to vocalize my thoughts. Even without words, she seems to echo the same sentiments of my boss.
“Look at yourself. You are visibly Western.”
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Follow Justina Huang on Twitter: @huanderwoman
