2024
My parents worked as assembly line laborers for their entire careers. They worked night shifts, overtime, and holidays. They wouldn't take a job unless it had overtime possibilities – everyone knew that was where the real money was made! As a child, I had no idea what they were even making until we visited their factories one day and they passed around their products: tiny, colorful electronic components with metal wires on both sides.
Their work lives seemed divorced from our family life except when my dad brought home sculptures that he had fashioned from wire, or my mom drew a connection between the fineness of embroidery and the tiny objects at work, or complained about her eyes going as she knitted under dim light. They also brought home books. To keep their jobs, they had to study whenever their production changed. As technology developed, the volumes got bigger and bigger, their testing more frequent. The lines between skilled and unskilled labor blurred for me as their expertise grew. My dad’s workshop slowly filled with tools and curious objects. I borrowed his tools to take apart a hair dryer that wasn't working or make motorized boats with my brother. When I left for college, my dad gave me a pair of pliers and snippers, the handles were my favorite color of pool blue.
Gardening filled in the gaps of their income and gave them access to fruits and vegetables that reminded them of home. It created a different timescale that didn’t require them to clock in. It asked for an awareness of the weather, a remembrance of last year’s harvest and failures, and a patience to push past the present. Refugee time was pushed down and away. The pain that they experienced was buried in the grind of hourly wage work, caring for a family, but it lingered and surfaced when work waned. All of the sudden, it reappeared as if it happened yesterday, hijacking the present.
The bitter melon is a beautiful ugly vegetable that doesn’t see time in a linear fashion. When it takes off, it is relentless, violent, and awe-inspiring in its speed and volume of growth. When I see a bitter melon growing in a garden, I feel at home. The first plant that I grew on my own were morning glories, which grow long tendrils and delicate blooms, only lasting a day. One day, my son Khải came home with a morning glory plant from school. The blooms, still delicate, still lasting only one day. The plant remembers this one thing.
Their work transitioned as the years went by. Components became circuit boards which became CPU’s. Most assembly line work like theirs moved overseas while the knowledge industry began to take over the United States in the late 90’s into the 2000’s. Now, living in California, I meet more and more refugees who share the same stories. I wonder how much of our technology industry was built on the invisible labor, trauma and radical hope of this community. What traces of their experiences and expertise can we see in these components? How does the labor of racialized bodies continue to be rendered invisible and devalued as unskilled, uncreative, and unintellectual? What other rhymes can we hear when we tune into the right frequencies?