The Bends in the Road

Since I started traveling when I was eighteen, I have taught myself to take the paths where the road bends and twists,  the non-touristic areas, or so to speak, the road less traveled, where I believe the real people are. Earlier in my traveling years, I ran into these bends because I took the wrong bus and ended up somewhere off my magical travel map, but have found in them the kind of stories my peripatetic soul desires. In Rio de Janeiro, when I was twenty, I ended up in a street that would eventually inspire my first novel. The images I found–the dark alleys, the big windows, the hang-around-do-nothing men, the street kids–are as vivid in my mind and heart as the first encounter. Also, as recent as three years ago, my most important memory of the street of Rio de Janeiro were street vendors up and about so early in the morning as the competition got stiff while the hours lingered. There was this older man selling a floor cleaning product while he demonstrated dirty vs. clean by using his product on a few household parts (floor wood, tile, etc. ). He did that with so much candor, it made me wonder if he ever tired of showing the passersby (many simply overwhelmed by the human traffic) the before and after.  Culture watching is what I enjoy most in traveling, and I do that with a direct glance, not from the corner of my eyes, as most tourists would, especially when the delight over false realities start to wane, and the homeless in the corner become visible again.   In my point of view, the homeless is always there.   I see people before I see the glitter.

And so I skirted the Hollywood glitter all together, and left with not one picture for Facebook of me in front of the notorious sign on a mountaintop. Instead, I spent much time walking Broadway, this seedy strip reminiscent of pre-gentrified Manhattan Times Square. Interestingly, I was consumed by sheer excitement. Every day, I ate at the Central Market and the Mexican dives on Broadway, contemplating on the demographic shift that is about to hit this country in a few years. I watch people get lost in their work, many very young Mexicans who obviously should be in school. I was strangely feeling that they, unlike their counterparts on the East Coast who are the children of immigrants, don’t have any sense of entitlement to work and life. There is a deep sense of belonging in the world of work, even in menial jobs, bereft completely of attitude that come from a sense of privilege that one is better than one’s job. In New York City, nastiness and lack of courtesy seem to be a job description. I keep wondering about this bottom-of-the-pyramid jobs that nobody wants, and that every Tea Party bagger claims be taken from the regular Joes. Why do we see the same brown faces behind those counters? What do they know about the seemingly 20th century American ethic that is now lost in many of us?

The State of the American Dream

On the Metro, announcements are made in two languages, which many conservative Americans who subscribe to the America=English tradition will frown upon. During my stay, I heard (and probably spoke) more Spanish than English, most likely a testament to location than anything else (although, it is also possible that it is the norm of the city). Certainly, it is portentous of what is about to hit this country—a majority Latino population whose first language at home is not English, a community of people who possess a rather different take on the American Dream.

For someone like me—who majored in Latin American Studies, a Spanish speaker, and an educator in the Latino community—the latinization of America is simply exciting. I honestly feel more at home in this community than in my own, much of which is due to my choice of work and my own proclivity to humble lifestyles. I also went to San Francisco recently and was bombarded with old Filipino ways, where pomp is the song and dance. For many of us Filipinos who immigrate to the U.S., the American Dream is as simple as the idea of “growing big,” be they in houses, number of SUVs, or the number of parties thrown in year. Because of our instant advantage over other immigrants in English, we don’t really struggle as much in America and have done quite well mainstreaming on America’s superhighway. True, a lot of it is from hard work. True as well, there is nothing wrong with having three bedrooms per head or four plasma TVs, but we now know in this climate of foreclosures that the number of rooms in one house will not a happy person make.  Four plasma TVs will not give anyone a different view of racialized America.

Similarly, compared to other immigrant literary communities, there are many first generation immigrant Filipino writers like myself who manage to publish books in the U.S. Unfortunately, most Filipinos I know, including my relatives, are not impressed with my literary credentials, although they are all convinced that Harvard was a good move. We do love brands, and Harvard is one, albeit better if a law or medical degree. This may also be the reason why there are almost no Filipinos in my social justice work. You can’t wear or flaunt activism. The Cesar Chavez types were long gone in history. Sorry, Bulosan, what struggle? Sadly, it is this very sense of struggle that is absent in the lives of many young Filipino-Americans, as if their sense of comfort is a biological twin. It is a question that I ask myself when I hear of children of immigrants , these second generation Americans, who were given everything, except a sense of purpose in life: when and how did we lose the dream? 

I found the struggle and the dream in the faces of Mexicans in LA, the target of the emerging American fascism. While the rest of us, many immigrants as well, watch with disengagement in one of four plasma TVs, the horrors of legislative bills against this demographic, they continue to do what they need to survive, work, work despite everything, work at all cost.

There is a lot of work to be done in the Latino community, to make sure they don’t become complacent drones in the future. The next generations need to understand that work is a privilege, not the benefit of an American passport. However, the educational system is failing many of these kids. They have the lowest college involvement and the highest in the high school drop-out rate. Latinos are here to stay, and most Americans don’t know what problems are going to face them in the near future if these issues are not dealt with now. While in the hotels, I had conversations with the women who cleaned the rooms. I asked them about their education, if they are learning English at all. They said, No, and were confused by my question. I wanted to find out whether these big hotels are investing in them, the entry-level workforce, in their education. They are all caught in dead-end jobs, many grow old pushing a cart full of dirty linen. One of them, Maria was an older woman, the other, Reina, was much younger, both will probably carve the same working paths in their lives, one which didn’t involved assimilation into the America culture via English. For both, the American Dream lies in their English-speaking children, if they make it at all. These are the very children who have now begun shaping new cultural paradigms in the U.S. In fact, New York City has been experiencing a Mexican baby boom. In many ways, for which I am thankful, the Mexican work ethnic impresses me so. If you ever get to travel in the wee hours on the New York subway, you will notice what type of New Yorkers are the first to get out to work, or the last to go home; more often than not, they are the Mexicans.

Tenemos Alegria

My last breakfast at the Grand Central Market brought me the pleasure of hearing these words from an old man who was showing some appreciation of the busboys: “Tenemos Alegria.” It was such a simple moment to punctuate this state of happiness I have been feeling during my past two weeks of cultural exploration and rumination. For the past year, I have been wondering about my work trajectory. I went to Harvard to start an organization, and have not fully created one. Since I came back to Manhattan, I have lost parts of myself, as I slowly get sucked into the world of mundane privilege once again. I have always been one to dismiss safety nets, yet I have allowed mine to grow even bigger in the past year. I have even considered “safe” jobs that bring in a lot of money. Fortunately, the one that I got which begins soon is neither safe nor income-heavy. I am back in the nexus of Adult Literacy, Immigration, and Social Justice. It will be an opportunity to also begin working on my new initiative, We Speak America. The latino community in LA gave me the much needed mileage and inspiration, a sense that one can still commit to American service and be appreciated.

How luxurious indeed to catch a glimpse of the American future. There is no denying that the latinization of America will breed fascists. We see them everywhere now, the likes of Jan Brewer and Glenn Beck who pander to the American fear of a brown take-over will only gather strengths in the years to come. But there will be power in numbers. And there is no stopping The United States of Latin America. America, authentically brown, will reemerge in its true form.

Related Readings: A Mexican Baby Boom in New York Shows the Strength of a New Immigrant Group, Latinos will be part of new U.S. “majority” sooner than predicted, Latino Children: A Majority Are U.S.-Born Offspring of Immigrants, Most U.S. Hispanic Kids Have Immigrant Parents

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On Monday, I decided to do my laundry early in the evening.   I usually do it late at night, around 9pm, so I don’t have to run into the residents of the building.  To do laundry, I had to go through the front door (one doorman) and the elevator (another doorman) to be taken to the basement.    During the day, the laundry room is full of brown people, all maids of the white people who live in my building.   After a few times of being asked by the brown maids where I worked, I decided to stop going there during the day.   I live in an all-white-resident building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  As the only brown person in my building, I have been mistaken for a delivery boy by newly-hired white doormen (they’re all white), and have not been let into the building until the another doorman confirmed that I lived here.   Once they found out that I actually lived here and had no pizza to deliver, they became extremely gracious, as they should be.   The laundry room is next to the exit of the parking garage.    At 5:45pm, I was happily stocking the washer with my clothes, when a woman, who so resembled Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, suddenly appeared at the door and condescendingly confronted me with, “WHAT APARTMENT ARE YOU IN?”    Shocked, I actually answered her, and she left.  Just like that. 

Thanks to my netbook and wifi, I had access to my Facebook account and managed to post the incident as it happened.   I usually stay in the laundry room until I finish, and spend my time doing some work on my netbook while I wait.   I really should thank countless of you who responded to my public outcry with very supportive statements.   I would find out within that hour that the hapless Jan Brewer of the Upper East Side was actually in a “position of power.”    The doorman who witnessed the incident was just as angry and was more than happy to give me the real name of this woman.   I was thinking, if such were the types to sit at the decision-making table in places like this, it comes as no surprise that there were no doormen-of-color in this building.  

I was very furious that evening.   I still remember her inimical gaze, the kind that rips into your soul.  It was also the second time it happened to me in my building.  I regret not having insulted her back, but what would that accomplish? I realized the reason why I decided to do my laundry late at night was because I really didn’t want to encounter another racial incident and ruin my day.   I have developed coping mechanisms to survive this filthy rich white neighborhood I have lived in for over ten years.    People wonder how I got here or what I’m doing here.   I am obviously not one of these people.   I tell them simply, I have relatives around the block.   Yes, there are Filipinos on the Upper East Side.   Yes, I am one of them.  In fact, I spend so much time walking around here, I am probably a landmark, like the rusty lamp post in the corner. 

Racial Profiling

Let’s talk about racial profiling.   If I were a blond man doing my laundry on Monday, the Jan Brewer of the Upper East Side would think twice before violating me with such a highly-charged question.  She would think twice, thrice, or may not even ask.  She might even ask the doorman who I was first.   She might even think I was cute.   Or I might even take my shirt off for her and flex.   She might even stutter while she asked me.   Or she might just walk past me and assume I was a friend of one of the residents of my building, while muttering to herself, whoa, who was that? Whoa!   Yet no, since I was brown, just like the women who cleaned their houses during the day, she just had to stop and find out where I WORKED.   Yes, she didn’t think I lived here.   She thought I worked here.   She wanted to know my affiliation in the building by the apartment number I gave her.  And now that she knew that I worked for Apartment # _, DANGER was lifted off her shoulder.   Danger meaning, Me.

And such is the nature of racial profiling.

When Mexicans in Arizona are stopped by the police, who according to the real Jan Brewer of Arizona should be given the power to harrass, interrogate, and then arrest, only one assumption is made about them:  these dangerous people don’t belong there.   Because the Jan Brewer’s minions have already been blessed to propagate  “if you’re brown, you must be illegal,”  racial profiling has now been, to put it simply, institutionalized and systematized.   And if you’re indeed one of the Mexicans who live there (remember, you NEED to look like a Mexican migrant), you need to save yourself the trouble and get out.

Diversity is in the Heart

I love America.   I love the diversity of this country.   I came from quite a homogeneous culture, with slight regional differences.  But we basically resemble each other and ate the same food.    I have lived in New York most of my life now, so any hint of homogeneity has faded in my brain (and tongue).  I thrive in highly diverse environments.   I choose it for work.   I get restless when I work in an all black situation, or all white, or even, like in my last job, all-Filipino (teachers).   When I was in San Francisco recently, I experienced culture shock because I only saw Filipinos for five days.   It is so cliche to call New York the microcosm of the world, but it truly is.   It is such a mesh of culture, that the melting pot has been taken to another level, just like this Mexican restaurant where I was the other night that was run by a family of Palestinians.  Where do you find that?

Today, on the train in Manhattan, I gave directions in Spanish to some tourists who wanted to go to Wall Street.   They probably assumed I was Latino.    Being asked in Spanish by lost Latinos in New York is part of my quotidian existence.    I love the idea that as a Filipino immigrant, I can assume many roles.    Where else can this happen?  In Arizona, I would have to carry an ID every single day, because I would certainly get stopped for looking like a Mexican migrant worker.   I wonder what the police would think if I flashed them my Harvard student ID. 

Jan Brewer is Everywhere

Jan, Jan, Jan.   How holy do you think art thou?   I don’t know what goes through the brains of these people who think they are better than others because of their color.    In the time of Obama, the Jan Brewers of America seem to be coming out of their holes, and making their “holiness” a public spectacle.   In Obama’s blackness, they find a reason to turn their bigotry into a public platform, after all, they “voted” for a black man.   The down economy is their excuse to make accusations against the brown universe, and “post-racial” America is their forum to speak out.  For the Jan Brewers, this is not about race.  It can’t be.  Not with a black president.   In one of my job interviews, the non-profit Jan Brewer just couldn’t resist asking me, Where are you from? while his male counterpart ripped my resume apart and punctuated the ripping with, When did you leave Argentina?  nary a blink (Yes, I studied there, but I am not from there, you racist idiot).   They were both very comfortable with highly directed (and illegal) ethnic questions that had no bearing with the job.  For these types, I make sure I wrote “Filipino” as one of the languages I speak on my resume.   I am not sure Che Guevarra’s relatives spoke that language.    Indeed, I, a brown immigrant man, have many coping mechanisms and am well-equipped to deal with these circumstances, or so I thought.   Unfortunately, the Jan Brewers are quickly multiplying, with new strategies in the blame game.

The Jan Brewers are nervous.   They are afraid the brown people are taking over the country.  They are afraid that Spanish will become the lingua franca.   And all of us will be watching Univision and not CNN, and eat rice and beans.   They are afraid that sitcoms like Friends, Seinfeld, or Sex and the City, all set in New York, will have brown lead characters in it.  And all the hospital shows will have Filipino and Jamaican Nurses.   Ah, they don’t exist.  After all, New York City has no brown people.   None (except in my building.)

America’s face is changing.   Jan Brewer is very afraid.   Because she is very afraid, she needs to make sure that racial profiling becomes the law of the land, so we can send all the Mexicans back where they belong.   (Yes, Texas.)  

As the country diversifies and as racism permeates the brown universe, Jan Brewer will take on new identities.  In the future, the Jan Brewers will no longer be white and blond.  She will be black, latino, or worse, Filipino.  That’s how viruses spread.   We have already seen them, but that is for another blog entry.

Related Reading: Alto Arizona,  Alto Arizona Art Campaign, Wordstrike: Writers Against SB 1070,  New York Times Coverage of SB 1070, Videos of protest against SB1070 from Puente, New with Nezua (interesting mock ICE checkpoint), Vivir Latino Coverage, Racism Review Archive on Mexican Americans,

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Fast forward fifty years, this country is still teeming with factories and factory workers.   They are no longer the same people that precipitated the industrial revolution.  Many of them are immigrants, legal or otherwise, from other countries who have no choice but to work in these “sweatshops” because of their lack of language skills and work experience.

When we first came to this country, my mother also worked in a factory, a carpet factory, an experience that would prove to be short-lived as my warrior-mother had no tolerance for oppressive cultures.   She eventually found a way out.   However, many women, for various reasons, don’t ever get out of these work situations.   The whole debate about immigration also touches on the kind of jobs that immigrants take and allegedly native-born Americans don’t want.   Many of my students over the years also work in such factories.   It seems that in America today, if you are an unskilled immigrant and lacks language proficiency, factory work will be part of your American rite of passage.

The Sweatshop Teacher

For almost ten years of my working life, I spent my Sundays in Brooklyn Chinatown, teaching Survival English to sweatshop workers. I was invited to teach by a co-worker and good friend who also once worked in the sweatshops. At the time, I had only organized in immigrant communities and did not really have any experience teaching.   But I thought I’d give it a shot. 

Through my human rights work, I was familiar with the oppressive environments that poor people experienced in the otherwise very wealthy city of New York.  Human Rights organizing, after all, was my full time job, one which extended outside my paid hours.   It was the nineties, and activism was at its height in New York City, a possible byproduct of the Reagan years.   For me, it was a decade of self-expression and exploration, as I was searching for a place in the world, and was finding my new America to be full of contradictions.   It was also around the same time when I met a very close and small network of writer friends who were very concerned about the position of Asian American literature in the larger American literary space.    So to speak, my plate was full, but still, I woke up early on Sundays to travel by the N train to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which on weekends, was a test on patience.

Brooklyn Chinatown is the younger sister of the notorious Manhattan Chinatown by lightyears.  At the time, the Chinatown in Brooklyn seemed like one big secret; nobody knew it was there except the Chinese community that lived around it.   The teachers and students would gather in a public high school.    I didn’t attend a U.S. high school, much less a public one; suffice to say, it was an eye-opener for me.    All my students were Chinese, mostly mothers.   Sometimes they would come with their children, especially on registration day.    As it turned out, the children were the cultural translators, a big responsibility for young people. 

Our goal was to equip these sweatshop workers with enough work-related English so that they could advocate for themselves in their sweatshops.    Although I began this blog with an image of the American factory during World War 2, I invite you to reconsider that romantic image and replace it with more harrowing ones, for such was the reality of sweatshop life in New York City.    No Rosie the Riveter in Chinatown.  The hours were often very long.   They got paid by piece, as opposed to by hour.  That means if their job was to put holes on buttons, they got paid per button.  In fact, if you asked them what kind of job they had, they would tell you very specific parts of a piece of clothing: the hem, the buttons, the sleeves, etc.    Nevertheless, my classroom was always full of students.  They got early on Sunday even if they had worked the day before and went to class to learn English.

It was my introduction to a career that I have held since:  Adult Literacy Education (ALE).    English was urgent.  What they learned in class on Sunday proved to be useful for Monday.   Sometimes, they would bring forms to class, government forms, so that we could look at them and study the words.   They asked me questions about the forms that their own children couldn’t translate.   I was deeply moved by what these children have to do for their sweatshop mothers.   I couldn’t understand how anyone that age could translate a legal document, but I knew there was no other choice.

The Children of the Sweatshop Workers

There were many things that their limited English proficiency couldn’t not bridge.    These were the ones I was most curious about.  I wanted to know exactly what happened at home, or during the week that I didn’t see them.   Who were taking care of the kids, how were they doing in school?  Although I grew up in a rather similar situation in Manila, my family always had a host of extended family members who were always there.   I never really felt alone.   And I also attended a private Catholic school that made sure I wasn’t alone.    For these children of Chinatown, it would have been a totally different experience.

Sometimes my students wouldn’t show up in class.   When they came the Sunday after, they would tell me where they had been:  “Go to Con-necticah,” or “Go to Mas-sachuseh.”   They would take the Chinatown buses to these places, and they would do this on a regular basis.   At the time, my naivete made me wonder why anyone would travel that far to play Mahjong. 

At the end of the year, the program would have a holiday party for everyone.   It was a highly elaborate gathering of Chinese foodfest and performances that included the whole family, especially the children.   Some of them were college age and would come wearing their respective school sweatshirts.   It finally dawned on me why the mothers were going to Connecticut and Massachusetts.   They were visiting their kids at MIT, Harvard, and Yale.    It would have been so easy to just tell me “My kid goes to Harvard” like any proud parent would, but perhaps they didn’t completely grasp the value of such a brand. 

The American Dream

A week ago, I had a pleasure of introducing a writer I have known for ten years at the Asian American Writers Workshop.   She came back to New York City from Amsterdam for a book tour of her mega-first novel, Girl in Translation.   I met her when I published her work in my anthology, The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City, a book that marked the 100 year presence of Asians in NYC.    What I didn’t know about Jean Kwok, the author, was that her mother was a sweatshop worker and she herself spent many years in one.   Of course, that Jean went to Harvard was no longer a big surprise, or the fact that she has written a book about the experience.

When Jean presented her wonderful book to a youngish audience at the workshop, my disparate worlds of activism, teaching, and literature merged into a full circle.    My friends and I organized the Asian American Writers Workshop around the same time that I was teaching at the sweatshops.  To hear Jean’s side of the story brought me back many years.  Finally, here was a book that I would have loved to have read with my students in Chinatown.   I remember using the text for Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, because it was the only Chinese American book that dealt with authentic Chinese American experience that didn’t happen in a beauty parlor (e.g. The Joy Luck Club).   But even Bone was not reflective enough of the Chinatown experience.  

When Jean Kwok signed my copy of her novel, Girl in Translation, she unknowingly gave me the key to a world that for so many years I had longed to know more about.    Those were determining years of my young life, when I, an immigrant myself,  came face to face with a world that literally changed the direction of my working life. The dreams of those Chinatown mothers became mine.

Related Reading:  Jean Kwok’s book, Brooklyn Chinatown, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Rosie the Riveter, Women in War Jobs – Rosie the Riveter (Ad Council), Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Angry Asian Man Blog,

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The Philippines has a shorter educational system than the U.S., so many of us finish high school relatively young. In my class alone, the youngest was fifteen. Most of us had never worked, and wouldn’t have to think about it until college, or after college, if there was work, that is. In my case, I had to leave the country. And life, the new American life, would change just about everything.

After many jobhunting tryouts (one of which was with my own mother, at MacDonalds), I found a job on Wall Street, now the center of a global recession blame game. The woman who interviewed me, Martha, was the Manager, who told me months later that I reminder her of her son. In short, I charmed her, this white woman who thought I looked like her son. If you were an FOB (fresh off the boat), you wouldn’t pay too much attention to such flattery. First of all, you would be paycheck-focused. Nothing else mattered, not what Martha said, nor what her son looked like. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be working for Martha, but for her boss, a golden aged virago with a voice that could rattle a dormant earthquake fault. Let’s call her Cruella de Ville, 80s version, this way I wouldn’t have to describe her, because in fact, she looked very much like that cartoon, minus the dogs and the black and white color theme (or you can also age Merryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada and get a good image of this woman).

We had our own building on Wall Street. It was a seven-story building with a garden on the rooftop that was being kept by Cruella’s scantily-clad young gardeners (yup, I noticed). My desk was at the center of the floor, directly overlooking Cruella’s big oriental-inspired office, and was surrounded by glass windowed clerical offices.  My morning task was to open Cruella’s mail, sort them, and hand her the ones with checks. I was being trained by two women, one black and one white. I would find out later, in my complete naivete about ethnicity, that this “white woman” was Colombian. I only knew of Colombia from watching Miss Universe for years. I had no idea how they really looked like. But our Miss Colombia never admitted to being Colombian. In fact, her last name was Garcia, which she spuriously pronounced as “Gar-sha.” It was the eighties, and her Garsha hair was as high as a hairsprayed mane could get. She grew up on Long Island, the land of self-denial, if you get the drift. The other woman was black, a very dark skinned one at that. She was pregnant and was about to be promoted to the first floor. In that building, the first floor was the penthouse. That was where all the white men were. That was where the “computers” were. Those were the last years of electric typewriters, but we still had them. In fact, on my floor, there was a whole room of typists, and across from them, proofreaders. I, a self-taught 70 wpm Executive Assistant, sat at a desk in the middle of it all.

My first few weeks were calm. I was given a tour of the whole building from the ground up. I was, after all, the assistant of the Vice President, an itinerant gofer on leather shoes. The first floor was reserved for executive positions, mostly white men, and their colored minions (one of whom was the newly promoted black woman). That floor was always closed. Always. Like some big secret ritual was happening there . The third floor was the lunch room, with a small wall-attached TV that played daily soap operas. All the women would go to lunch at exactly the time when their favorite soap was on. They would eat their ethnic food and completely immerse themselves in the lives of the characters on the 17 inch TV.  They would have conversations about them as if they were cousins or neighbors.  The fourth floor was Accounting, home to a Filipino family. I was on the Fifth with Cruella and her clerks. The Sixth was an underrenovated floor that housed three people, two of whom were overweight. There was one restroom on that floor. One lazy afternoon, after Cruella kept calling that floor and nobody would answer, she sent me upstairs to investigate. I found the two obese white employees coming out of a tryst, the restroom, at the same time (the male, zipping his fly), with one message for me, Don’t say anything to anyone. I never did, until now.

Compared to the towering architecture around us, we were a miniature. But it was always mesmerizing to watch the rest of Wall Street from our cafeteria window. I had not know then how different we were from the rest of Wall Street. I had no concept of immigration, race, or ethnicity. I had no idea that all the ethnics coming out of the train would all end up in my building.

And this made this Wall Street firm most interesting, at least in retrospect; most of the employees were immigrants. The countries: Philippines, India, Guyana, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and the Republic of the Bronx. For them, I was just one of them. For me, it was all strange; and I was in it for the experience. I had nothing to compare it with. I had no idea what the next day would bring. And of course, there was always the clueless Long Island hairspray girl named Garsha.

Garsha’s dream was to work on the first floor. She would come to work wearing a tightfitting dress that accentuated her breasts and her butt. She was about to get married and replace her Garsha last name with an Italian one, which profoundly excited her. Her hair would reach the ceiling. She was a goodlooking woman unwittingly diminished by her ethnic self-denial. She would do anything to get through the day, including hiding checks in the drawers that she couldn’t finish processing. Those checks were commercial paper and Treasury Bills checks. For the life of me, I had no idea what they were for. All I knew they were supposed to be handed to Cruella. What did I know? It was my first job. I didn’t even know Almond Joy was a chocolate bar. I would find that out after another secretary asked me to get her one, and my pride precluded me from inquiring deeper. I came back with my cup of coffee and a question: What is Almond Joy? Of course, after being called “stupid,” I had my first exposure to the world of obesity and American snacks. 

Garsha would soon find herself in big trouble. Cruella knew the ins and outs of the building, of desks, and of every nook and cranny of her office and everyone else’s around her. One day, she threw a fit upon discovering Garsha’s secret treasures: weeks-old Treasury Bills and Commercial Paper (I suspect that she went through people’s desks when everybody was gone).  I had never seen a white woman so angry in my life. I had never known facial wrinkles could get more, er, wrinkled.    She called Garsha and me to the office and started screaming at both of us. The veins, oh the turgid veins on her dear neck.  I thought they would explode on my new Bloomingdale’s outfit. Garsha parried the accusations by kicking my leg, trying to keep my mouth shut. So I did (I was already humanitarian). Yet, there was one person who knew the truth: Martha. Remember Martha? She was the one who thought I looked like her son.

Oh the solicitous Martha, with a Spanish last name, I remember now. In a closed meeting, the woman defended me and ransacked the poor career out of Garsha. But you see, during the time, I was already applying to go to college. Not that I didn’t care, but since I didn’t have any other work experience to compare it with, I was going with the flow, a constant flow of screaming, irascible, and high blood pressure-bound Cruella. I don’t remember what happened to Garsha after that, but I do know that soon after, I had my own assistant.

Every now and then, we would get a visit from the newly-promoted secretary from the first floor. She spat when she talked. You would rather not look at her. She and her husband went to the Carribean for a vacation, and she flaunted her tan afterwards. The typists had a ball on her, because according to them, she was too dark to even think she could get a tan (these were black people making fun of her). It was my first year in America, and my first exposure to race. I didn’t even know when to laugh, or why I should laugh at these jokes. All I cared about was what I wore to work.

I thought about this today, because a friend from that era has recently emailed me. She found me on the Internet. She is Filipino, too, and perhaps the first one I have met in this country. She is a victim of the recession, which we know now had its roots on Wall Street.  Because of the Filipino family who worked in accounting, we outnumbered the other ethnics in that company. I often wondered why.   When Martha’s son visited, she introduced him to me. It was only then that I realized that her Spanish last name was Filipin0. Her son didn’t look like her at all, and most likely took after her estranged Filipino husband. And no, for the grace of god, he didn’t look like me either.

Wall Street taught me many things about life in this country. I think now that it must have profoundly affected me that I had continued to work with immigrants since. What I learned from being there a year was not about Commercial Paper or Treasury Bills or CDs or Investments, but the daily struggles of the people who make the system work. Unfortunately, many of them recruited into this system were not being made aware of the internal mechanics of such system. Months after I left, I found out from my informant that the Securities and Exchange Commission had come in and shut down the firm. Stories flew about the company not having enough assets and how the president was physically dragged out of the building. Who would have known? They were all perfunctory paper shufflers, more worried about spell checks and typing errors than obviating the arrival of the Feds over liquid assets.  Most of all, they were all immigrants.  I wonder about the hiring now, whether it was purposeful.  Was there an assumption about immigrant workers, their loyalty, their naivete, or their ability to feign indifference inorder to keep a much needed cash flow?   The ones who might have known the real goings-on were behind closed door on the first floor.  We didn’t even know their names; we hardly saw them.   But at the time, it was all behind me.  I was about to embark on a new world–college–and nothing else mattered but what was ahead.  There was much to look forward to in my teenage years, including among other things, getting a whole collection of this new hot artist named Madonna.

Related Reading:  Don’t Cry for Wall Street, Awake, Wall Street, With SEC charges, Goldman Sachs’s reputation is tarnished, You’re Welcome, Wall Street, Wall Street: Is It Good to Apologize for Greed?, No More Deceit: Strictly Regulate Wall Street, Financial Reform at a Crossroads,

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