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Thanks to Jan Brewer, we are all Arizona.  The fascist machine that she’s created has been on my mind a lot lately. I am a staunch protester of SB 1070 that took effect on Thursday, but I didn’t expect it to be delivered to my doorstep in the same week, a reminder perhaps of how quickly the essence of this fascist machine can travel and put into practice by those with very narrow minds.

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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Once upon a time in America, factories were the bedrock of industrialization.   During World War 2, the women who worked in military-bound steel factories revolutionalized how we viewed workforce and women.   America, since then, has never been the same. 

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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