Reading these first four chapters of “Sewing Women” evoked emotions inside of me, just as strong as the connections I immediately made with the stories that were presented.
I, like my classmates, found it very interesting to read about how the way that the Chinese factories were run differed from the way that the Korean factories were run. I was able to sympathize with both their respective choices in who to hire as workers. On the one hand, as in the Chinese-run factories, working in an environment populated entirely by your own race or culture is very comfortable and eases the stress of work life. Everyone knows the same language, can share the same stories, and have similar lifestyles, which all make it easy for each other to not only communicate verbally, but also to communicate in the general sense of understanding each other and each other’s difficulties.
On the other hand, the Korean factories’ decisions to hire Hispanic workers to do the work, rather than people of their own race, also came to me as very sensible and reasonable. This fosters an interaction between people of different cultures, which is always a useful tool, especially in a country in which interactions among ethnic groups is inevitable and unavoidable. In addition, understanding the plights of others also paves way for understanding their culture and recognizing that in the end, they are not all that different from one’s own culture. Likewise, though, the racial difference also makes for a more professional environment, in which personal and individual problems do not interfere with work. The less comfortable you feel in an environment, the more likely that rules will be better enforced. For some reason, I feel that this may be an underlying explanation as to why the Hispanic workers had a higher wage than the Chinese workers.
What I found most interesting, however, was that these traditions seem to still continue even today. Though my own experiences may not be enough to make the following generalizations, I think that the observations unto themselves are enough to prove a point. More often than not, when I go into stores that are run by Chinese owners, the workers are also Chinese. In contrast to this, my cousin currently works part time at a beauty shop, at which all the managers are Korean; however, they do not hire any Korean workers. Moreover, one woman who works with my cousin is in America alone, working to support her family back in her native country, just as the Hispanic workers did. I found these parallels to be very striking and hard to overlook. This goes to show that history does, in fact, repeat itself, just in different forms and shapes.
Overall, however, the workers in both the Chinese factories and Korean factories each came with their own package of hurdles and struggles that they had to face and overcome. The varying work environment did not take away from that experience.
– Nadera Rahman
