From Sheyang with love

[I]“Some were brought to work in garment factories. Others arrived in the CNMI, only to find that there was no job waiting for them, and were forced to find unpalatable means to work off their bondage debt.” – Sen. Daniel Inouye (Hawaii) in a speech backing S. 2739 as quoted in Saturday’s Saipan Tribune.[/I]

Senator Inouye told no lie. Just how well he understands the ways Saipan garment factory workers “find unpalatable means to work of their bondage debt” is probably more than just idle speculation. Having been neighbor to his campaign headquarters in downtown Honolulu during the 1998 U.S. Senate reelection campaign while I was working as a planner for WorkHawaii, the city’s workforce development program, I learned that there was normally a high level of integrity in the Senator’s pronouncements. This telling serves to confirm the Senator’s assertion.

The scene is familiar enough for those who have eyes to see. About a dozen often gaudily mascara’ed ladies, in their Sunday fineries and pointed heels, alight from three or four vehicles, scamper to a private dining room in one of downtown Garapan’s eateries, and line up to be a commercial item of choice by visiting tourists seeking company for the night. And as quickly as they appear, they swiftly disappear as well, with not a few nursing battered self-esteem and cheapened sense of self-worth for not being chosen to provide the visiting guests’ evening entertainment. On introspection, others bemoan the path they had taken; others craftily manage to compartmentalize their lives so that the means of livelihood becomes nothing but a business transaction without ramifications or consequence to their social and familial relations.

The above scene is so common and frequent that one gets the notion that it is a tolerated practice by Saipan’s finest, whether in vehicle patrol or while pounding the concrete in their designated pedestrian routes.

From a brief sojourn in Sheyang, Jiangsu Province in China almost two weeks ago, I brought with me some clothes and jewelry from a mother for her daughter who had come to Saipan to work at one of the garment industry’s factories. Sheyang prides herself as the center of the textile industry in China, and it has been a recruiting ground for personnel to staff various garment industry locations around the world.

This daughter was recruited by a family friend who was herself reputed to be on Saipan working in one of the garment factories. The recruiter did come to work with one of the garment factories earlier but quickly graduated into the evening entertainment industry when she was not rehired after the termination of her one-year contract. It normally took 410 days of labor at $3.05/hr. to earn enough gross income to begin settling indebtedness, mostly incurred among loved ones and close friends back home. Failure to pay up after a period is a considerable loss of face. This recruiter decided that her own superiors were making money out of the revolving turnstile of workers, so she went into recruiting workers also, graduating them into the entertainment industry, herself included. Her friend’s daughter was one of her recruits.

The employment was simply enough. For a fee, a cooperating development corporation employs a contract worker as a commercial cleaner or as a waitress, with conniving paper pushers elsewhere. The employee is then farmed out to one of the garment factories who were only too happy to have more than an indentured compliant employee. In the economic downturn in Asia that began with the collapse of the Thai Baht in 1997, the Saipan garment industries began a spiral downspin into declining orders. With the continues supply of willing recruits paying up front the requisite fees, earlier recruits, without benefit of rights from labor laws, found themselves holding a huge bundle of indebtedness, and out into the streets of Saipan to fend for themselves.

This particular daughter, after a year, was introduced by her recruiter early on to earn extra mullah from kneading the tired flesh of tourists who pay for the services of a masseuse. Massage parlors were only too eager to engage such available workers to a three-month apprentice service to learn the state of the art. Apprentices also provide cheap, and often, maintenance-free labor. After the prescribed three months, the trainee turns into a certified practitioner and paid 10 percent ($5 of the normal $50/hr.) of the charge. They may also start providing additional sensual services appropriate to consenting adults in private quarters.

This daughter did, and she has since joined the ranks of those who scurry out of sedans driven by well-dressed pimps and mama-sans, to curry favors to those willing to pay for illicit services in this soft underbelly of the island’s visitors industry.

While managing the Marianas Resource Center of the United Methodist Church in Oleai five years ago, we hosted five garment factory workers awaiting the resolution of their labor case against their employer, and one of the guests occasionally dressed up on the weekends to “join her friends at a party.” No one, of course, was fooled. We were, however, clear that the efforts she put in was not commensurate to the income she was deriving, given the layer of middle-persons involved. The other three learned the lesson well and after their labor case was adjudicated and allowed transfer to another factory, they took entrepreneurial initiatives to conduct their own nocturnal enterprises.

The fifth one went back to Tanapag and rented herself a 6-by-12-foot room for the exorbitant price of $250/mo. where she and three other girls bunked the rest of the contract year, enduring the accompanying grief after three break-ins and the lose of their valuables, and the constant harassment of panhandlers threatening harm if not given coffee money. It was this fifth guest, Jiang of Jiangsu, who would return home to her husband and 7-year-old son, who would help host my recent visit to Sheyang in the river plains by the Chang Jiang, and get me familiar to some of the travails of her fellow co-workers who ventured their lives in the garment factories of Saipan. Of the five, she was the only one who returned.

The other four are somewhere else, perhaps, no longer indebted and may have even squirreled enough to start paying for a house for their families, but they seem to have appropriated the language of “bad luck,” so common in Chinese mythology, and are unwilling to bring that bad luck back home to their loved ones. Theirs is a crisis of “face” not only as seen by others but as confronted everyday in the mirror of their bathrooms and their souls.

Now, the squeamish among us, as was the case of the Victorian Christians in the congregation (from various nationalities and culture), would question whether the sanctuary we provided to the workers only exacerbated the latency of their later endeavors. I had to remind them of the counsel of one of our blunt church member who worked for the Foreign Service and was fond of saying, “there are more prostitutes in suburban bedrooms than there are in the streets of any Hometown USA,” her point being that the practice of offering sexual favors in exchange of financial security under the umbrella of marriage is as old as ancient civilization itself. The patina of moralism practiced in many quarters, had also been applied more to the lower working class than to the more refined practitioners in the more rarefied atmosphere of boardrooms and resort clubs. Witness the perverse adulation accorded our young lass that occasioned the downfall of Governor Spitzer of New York!

Now, back to the mother in Sheyang, and her daughter in the streets of Garapan. The mother wanted to visit her daughter who she thinks has financially prospered parlaying the deftness of her hands and fingers in the operation of sewing machines, oblivious of the fact that the same deftness has since served the more sensual requirements of strangers and customers. The daughter has since developed a neatly compartmentalized existence in her mind. A rather nondescript but pleasant young lady in the afternoon, she turns into a manly driven hold-no-prisoner determined barker ala a stock broker on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange, sure that the commodity she is hawking at 29 has but a 2-yr. remaining market value, and she must hassle to build her nest egg while eluding the authorities, placating her handlers, and hiding the details of her new career from Mom, her husband, and her son back in Sheyang.

Jiang asked that I prevail on Mom not to make the visit now, but to do it later, perhaps, in the winter when she can enjoy the tropical weather best away from the Siberian winds of the plains. Putting on the face of my tertiary level of integrity, I did manage to ingrain in the mother a hope for a future visit, which I know has hardly a prospect of ever happening.