The genesis for “The chicken hangers” comes from a personal crisis. I didn’t know whether I wanted to finish my Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin or go full-bore into freelance writing, something I had been toying with for three years. When I got a grant through UT’s L.B.J. School of Public Affairs in 2003, to research Latino immigration in Deep South poultry plants, I decided to put the crisis on hold and spend a summer living, writing, breathing, and eating poultry.

The dense smell of chickens getting slaughtered and processed lingers in the humid Mississippi air in small towns like Collins and Laurel, where poultry plants dominate the local economy. It’s a strange smell — something like a cross between hot chocolate and road kill. When I think back about the time I spent in and around those chicken plants, it’s that smell that I remember most. Proust has his tea-dipped madeleine, I have my Peco Foods chicken plant in Bay Springs, Mississippi.

Under the terms of the grant, I was to document the rapid transformation of Mississippi from a biracial state to a place where Latinos had displaced African Americans in the lowest-paying jobs. It’s a familiar story, but in Mississippi, those low-paying jobs were especially bad. The jobs that went to Latinos were in catfish farms and poultry plants:  dangerous and filthy jobs where workers sometimes didn’t get paid. Employers in the poultry industry play cat-and-mouse games with the workers; they know the workers are undocumented but allow them to use fake drivers’ licenses and Social Security cards until the workers start unionizing or demanding higher wages. Employers will suddenly discover that the ID the worker used to get the job was fake. Then, it’s out the door.

I’m proud of “The chicken hangers” because it documents these practices without sensationalizing anything. I was living among the chicken workers at the same time Fast Food Nation was causing a national stir, and I wanted to resist some of the melodrama epitomized by that book. After all, the workers didn’t want anyone to boycott the poultry producers; we all ate the same chicken they killed, de-boned, and packaged.

A lot of academics — myself included — dream about writing for an audience other than a handful of specialists, while a lot of journalists dream about writing complex and nuanced stories that do more than report “the facts.” Researching and writing “The chicken hangers” was, in this regard, the best of both worlds.

Still, publishing the article in InTheFray didn’t make me any friends, and, in fact, destroyed many of the relationships I had established while researching it. Even some of the people who come off as sympathetic — the union reps and workers — were not happy about having their stories published. On the other hand, my academic credentials scored me plant tours and long interviews from poultry industry executives.  “I’m a graduate student researcher,” I’d say, hoping it would sound innocuous.

These people probably felt betrayed by the story, since I never said I was also a journalist. Even the non-profit organization that sponsored my stay in Mississippi was nonplussed about the story, since it adversely affected the organizing efforts of some of immigrants’ rights groups.

None of this bothers me in the slightest. “The chicken hangers” reveals a side of the so-called “illegal immigration” debate that is rarely featured in the media. I tried to humanize a group of people who are dehumanized — sometimes even by people with good intentions. Many protestant churches in the South, for example, embrace these workers and help them get on their feet. These churches think of themselves as a better force for social good than the government, but, in the end, they see the mostly Catholic immigrants as possible converts to evangelical Christianity. It was a bleak picture for Latinos in the South, and I hear it’s only gotten worse in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

After writing “The chicken hangers”, I moved to Paris and started work on my dissertation. The project didn’t solve my crisis, but it did put it in perspective. After all, I could be hanging chickens in Mississippi.

Russell Cobb

On a suffocating afternoon in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, a group of 15 young men turn a dusty corner and descend upon the Yangoseen Water Pump I. Ten others, who had been napping under a tree, wake to the sound of the men’s arrival. It is not the perfect way to start a revolution, but it will have to do. What transpires in this dusty lot is part family reunion, and part political rally. It is also history: A group of young men attempting to transcend their meager economic existence to take control of their destinies, if only for a few minutes. The groups greet each other with handshakes amidst the noise of broadcasts coming in over the pocket-sized AM/FM radios that seem to be ever-present in Burkina Faso.

These young men are water pushers, delivering water to the many houses built without indoor plumbing. Watching these teenagers, it’s hard to picture them doing anything other than this work. Their uniform consists of ripped jeans, flat-as-a-pancake flip-flops, and t-shirts with the sleeves cut off. Their bodies are hardened from lugging water over pot-holed roads and uneven courtyards in a barrique, a 55-gallon drum turned sideways and placed on two (often wobbly) wheels.

Youssef Ouedraogo and Hamidiou Sandwidi call the meeting to order. They are two of oldest, most respected pushers in the adjoining Dapoya neighborhood. They are also exact opposites. Tall and lanky, 23-year-old Youssef is known around the neighborhood as Capitaine Américain, because he wears T-shirts emblazoned with American patriotic themes, and his red, white, and blue barrique can be seen flying a 14-star Betsy Ross-style flag that a friend purchased in a dollar store in the United States.

Hamidou, in his late 30s, is shorter and quiet, and works under the name Le Gouverneur. He has been pushing since 1983, when a load brought in 12 cents. Today, pushers charge 40 cents per load. This is the point of the meeting: the 40-cent fee has been in place for the past seven years. Isn’t it time that the pushers charged a bit more?  

Capitaine Américain does most of the talking. He’s got sheets of paper in his hand (written by Le Gouverneur) that explain the proposed 10-cent price increase, slated to go into effect tomorrow. He reads a little of it, but the papers are mainly meant for the local radio stations. Capitaine Américain proposes putting the matter to a vote, but is held off by the concerns of the pushers — “How will our customers react? Aren’t these the same customers who break windows at gas stations when the price of fuel rises? Aren’t these the same customers who burn tires in the street when the price of bread goes up?” These are honest questions, and Capitaine Américain knows it.

If all area pushers simultaneously raise their prices, the Capitaine asserts, customers will have no choice but to pay up. By the looks of it, the pushers are not yet convinced. They ask more questions, this time in harsh, aggressive tones: “What happens if the customers reject our price? What happens if they go elsewhere to for their water?”

To some of the pushers, this is beginning to sound like a pipe dream.

Capitaine Américain’s barrique is up front with its patriotism.

Pushing a union

I met Capitaine Américain standing in front of the U.S. embassy. He was patiently asking to see someone inside about getting another U.S. flag. His khaki uniform, colored for desert warfare and adorned with American flags, fell over him like a large dress. Behind him stood four young body guards who, when they spotted me, jumped to attention and majestically unrolled a Tommy Hilfiger bath towel containing the image of an American flag. They held the towel/flag in place while Capitaine Américain looked at me, tightened the beret on his head, and offered a very formal salute.  

“So, someone stole your flag?” asked the guard at the gate. “Yes,” Capitaine Américain explained, wearily. “He is known as ‘Osama bin Laden’ and he stole my flag because he hates Americans like me. I am an American. I am Capitaine Américain.” At this, he was politely told to go home.  

Back at the water pump, Capitaine Américain and Le Gouverneur receive similar treatment: Twenty-five men, hundreds of flailing gestures, and enough shouts to wake the entire neighborhood out of its afternoon slumber. There are very few nice words spoken about the price increase. Their faces all say the same thing: It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

Water pushers live in fear, Le Gouverneur tells me, and that’s part of the problem. Every day, hundreds of people abandon their homes in Burkina Faso’s countryside and set their sights on the bright lights of Ouagadougou — the Promised Land! When they arrive, they seldom find much hope or redemption. Instead, it’s only Ouagadougou, the sprawling, dusty capital of the world’s third poorest country, where under-educated and low-skilled workers need not apply.  

There are jobs in Ouagadougou, but they can only be found in the informal sector: an underground economy of low-wage service or sales positions that barely provide a living wage. These jobs remain outside the legal realm of the state, keeping the thousands of water pushers, street vendors, and parking lot attendants unprotected by Burkina Faso’s generous labor laws that guarantee paid holidays, sick leave, and protection from dismissal.

All of the water pushers were newcomers, at one point. Now, they fear that the latest crop of newcomers will walk off with their customers by undercutting their prices, offering the same services at rock-bottom prices. Customers leverage these age-old worries to drive down the price of labor, leaving the pushers with nothing.

A few younger pushers at the pump tire of the political talk and retire to a foosball table. Capitaine Américain quickly joins the game, and Le Gouverneur makes his way over to personally address Yangossen’s head water pusher. Le Gouverneur speaks in low, hushed tones, almost forcing his listeners to lean in as he speaks. The two look over the press release, and the older pusher summons a few others. Then, something strange begins to happen. As more pushers speak to the leader, the mood of the crowd shifts. People are soon speaking positively about the increase. It’s as if the bitter argument had been purely for show. After more talk, everyone gives their thumbs-up to the increase. A cheer breaks out among the crowd.

We walk back out to the blinding sun, our crowd swelled a little. Only five more pumps remain.

Pushing and suffering

Who says the informal sector is really that bad? Ask Le Gouverneur. Like every other water pusher, he pays 50 cents a day to rent his barrique. On top of that, he must reimburse the local water company 12 cents for each load of water drawn from the public pump. An average day consists of between five and seven deliveries, which earns Le Gouverneur about $1.40 (after costs). This amounts to just enough to buy breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with a bit left over to send his family in the village.  

His earnings won’t pay many bills — especially if he gets injured while steering his unstable barrique down the unpaved streets, or if one of his cuts becomes seriously infected. “All we do is push water and suffer,” says Le Gouverneur. “You can’t eat with that.”

Still, the informal economy is on the march. Africa’s sputtering commercial sector and shrinking state apparatus lead the International Labour Office to predict that the informal economy will create 90 percent of new jobs on the continent. This unprotected economy is already responsible for more than three-quarters of the non-agriculture jobs in Africa, and more than 60 percent of its urban employment.

We all stand at the next pump, Yangossen II, which lies at the edge of a wide road lined with low-slung houses and a few semi-permanent kiosks that contain small businesses. The neighborhood, Yangossen, is named after a word in the Mossi language (Burkina Faso’s predominant ethnic group) for welder, since metal workers traditionally inhabited this part of town. Metal shops, constructing anything from agricultural tools to school desks to large art pieces, still occupy many buildings here, their stock often spilling out into the street.

Across from the pump there is an earthen mosque, and a few old men in long, white robes sit against the building, reading the newspaper. We all look on as Le Gouverneur speaks to the pump’s lead water pusher, who wears a baseball cap low over his eyes and reclines in a small chair, a radio sitting in his lap. As the Muezzin summons Muslims to prayer, the two mosque speakers crackle with a low, throaty “Allah u Akbar, Allah u Akbar.” The old men fold their newspapers, get up, and go inside.

Le Gouverneur continues his plea. An older woman approaches the group and begins to lecture the idle pushers. “It’s going to start raining soon and nobody is going to buy water anyway, so why would you raise the price?” she asks, indignant. A chunky girl of six or seven years, wearing only underwear, begins harassing Capitaine Américain. “Capitain, Capitain,” she calls. He smiles and gives her a few cents, which she takes before running off.

By the time the prayer is over, the old men are once again reading their newspapers, and the pusher in the baseball cap nods. He mutters something to those sitting next to him, and Le Gouverneur grins. Things are definitely looking up, and a small cheer rings out. “This is just like the Americans: fighting for what is right,” says Capitaine Américain, walking to the next pump. “Cool.”

The African dream

The American dream is that anyone who works hard enough will be justly rewarded. In Africa, the dream is to travel beyond your borders to find good work and riches. This dream is especially powerful in Burkina Faso, a country that is not blessed with many resources. At one point, claims popular opinion, the country’s greatest export was its workers.  

For decades, the Cote d’Ivoire, just to the south of Burkina Faso, was the most popular destination of Burkinabé workers. Packed with thousands of acres of cocoa, banana, and rubber plantations, hundreds of miles of coastline, nearly 50,000 French expatriates, and pragmatic political leadership, the Cote d’Ivoire held the crown of West Africa’s economic engine. It attracted millions of émigrés trying their luck in its rural areas and teeming urban centers like Abidjan, the commercial capital. Before the civil war began there, nearly one quarter of Cote d’Ivoire’s population were immigrants, and half of those immigrants came from Burkina Faso.

It was in Abidjan that Capitaine Américain was born, and was raised with the knowledge that he had to leave Burkina Faso for a better life. His father had immigrated there as a young man, rose through the ranks to become the assistant to the manager of the Treichville market — an endless, chaotic, sprawling bazaar. As proof of his financial success, his father eventually took three wives, and Youssef was the second child born to the first. His blanket of prosperity was pulled out from under him at the age of 10. His mother and father died in an automobile accident, and he was sent to live in central Burkina Faso, where he spent his time tending cattle and attempting to avoid his uncle’s frequent beatings. He lasted two years before running away to Ouagadougou.

He doesn’t talk much about those times, living alone, sleeping on the streets of Dapoya. He first made ends meet by selling cigarettes and lottery tickets in front of bars in the neighborhood, and traveled the city selling shirts and music cassettes. He also tended cattle for a while, transporting a herd down to Ghana on foot.

Six years ago, he was accepted by members of the Dapoya water pushers, where he was allowed to rent a barrique and begin pushing for himself. A friend helped him move into an apartment, where he still lives with his younger brother. It doesn’t offer much for his oversized personality, but the place is neat and organized. The apartment is teeming with American paraphernalia, like the flags that ring the television set that is run on battery power. The Tommy Hilfiger towel hangs proudly on the wall. He will gladly show you pictures of the days before his large flag was stolen. Mostly, the apartment is notable for what it does not reveal. How did Youssef Ouedraogo, runaway, morph into Capitaine Américain?

Last stand

Let it be known that Ouagadougou’s ubiquitous art sellers — dealers in batiks, statues and other forms of folk art — are official members of the informal economy. Let it also be known that a certain art dealer next to the Sankaria I pump can be thoroughly annoying. Flying high after one more “yes” vote at the pump in the Nioksin district, we made our way through a large market area, weaving through hundreds of idling trucks waiting to be filled with sacks of rice and millet. We were about to descend upon the Sankaria I pump until a tall man cut through the group and stopped me in the middle of the road, demanding that I accompany him to his shop to buy some art. Typically large and aggressive, these salesmen beg your pardon, and then require you to just look at their beautiful wares. You don’t have to buy — just look, for the pleasure of your eyes.

I tried to pass him, but the grotesque fanny pack hanging under his shirt blocked me. From afar, I glimpsed Capitaine Américain and Le Gouverneur beginning their arguments. The art dealer was pointing me in the direction of his shop, and I watched the Sankaria’s lead pusher interrupt Le Gouverneur by holding his hand in front of his face. For the pleasure of your eyes, my friend. But my eyes don’t have any money. You know, I don’t make very much money, myself. I could only watch from a distance as Capitaine Américain tried to interject before a few pushers with thick necks began to mock him.

By the time I escaped from the vendor, I heard the head pusher impatiently explain to Capitaine Américain that a lack of houses near this pump forces pushers to charge a mere 150 West African francs (30 cents) a load — far less than the going rate. This puts any increase out of reach. Capitaine Américain was openly agitated, talking loudly and gesturing wildly. Le Gouverneur, who had walked away and turned his back to the small group, pleaded with them to reconsider. Nothing came of any of it.

The group walked off, heads down. Half a block away, a few younger pushers violently turned back and started back towards the pump. They huffed at Sankaria’s pushers, forcing others to rush back and restrain them. Capitaine Américain was incensed. “They’ll have to respect the boundaries between neighborhoods,” he said of the pushers at Sankaria I. “They can’t cross the line and sell water for 150. That’s taking away our food.” What happens if Sankaria pushers will not respect the boundaries? “There will be combat.”

The pushers at the next pump are waiting for us. They are all young and aggressive. Groups of three or four chase each other around, punching and kicking. Others harass the young women walking by. Capitaine Américain is still too angry to talk; Le Gouverneur finds few people willing to listen.

“It’s not easy, working this hard,” says Idrissa, another pusher, between fights. “You can’t find enough money for food.” He is 21 years old, and began pushing water six months ago. “I’ll be doing this for the next three to four years.”  

Capitaine Américain entered the tent that covered the pump. Pushers crowded in, jockeying for position. Voices boomed, but Capitaine Américain’s was the loudest. It was the same debate as before. Pushers work too hard to get paid so little, he’d say, which elicited a great cheer. Multiple discussions broke out for a few minutes before people began laughing and clapping, signaling their ratification of the price increase. Finally, Capitaine Américain emerged from the tent with an older pusher in a grey cutoff shirt, grabbed his hand, and shook it. The older pusher pointed at Idrissa who, with the least seniority, had to chip in for the radio advertisement. “He’ll help pay,” he said. The other pushers stopped running around as Le Gouverneur approached Idrissa, who placed his hands in his pocket and turned it inside out, indicating he was empty. “The other one,” asked Le Gouverneur. Idrissa gave his boss a distressed look, but the head pusher repeated the command. He pulled out a wad of coins and glumly handed over the equivalent of 50 cents.

52 States of America

That left only two pumps, and they were pushovers. Looking back, Sankaria I proved to be the only hurdle to the water pushers’ first raise in seven years. Most pushers, as Le Gouverneur and Capitaine Américain had predicted, were only too happy to go along with the plan.  

Nearly as impressive, the customers had only mild reactions when the price increase went into effect. Most grumbled, but everyone was resigned to paying a bit more. This, of course, didn’t stop people from trying to sweet-talk their way into a deal. “I have been like a mother to you, so you should charge me 200 [the equivalent of 40 cents],” a woman pleaded with Capitaine Américain. He smiled. “If I do that, Le Gouverneur will find out and he’ll be all over me.”

For Capitaine Américain, the euphoria over the price increase only lasted a few weeks. By then, the rains began to fall more frequently and customers cut back their water deliveries. He was already starting on his next project: to get a visa to the United States. I should have guessed it all along, with his dropped hints, and his complaints about life in Burkina Faso. His friends made the first overtures (“He’s so American, it scares me,” someone said), but one day he finally broached the subject himself. He showed me his new tattoo, for which he had paid a fortune. It had the name of his latest girlfriend next to a large American flag, and the words: “U.S.A. — 52 States.” I was angry about the money he had spent. As for the visa, I told him I couldn’t promise anything. There just isn’t a big market for water pushers in those 52 states. He took it in stride, letting me know that he won’t give up just yet. “I am American; I need to be doing better,” he told me. “That much is clear.”

A final salute.

In The Fray Contributor

Pretty in Pink: Sahar Zawam’s prom dress was a baby pink confection with a white underskirt and matching pink shawl, bought from Kids’ World on Church Avenue.

Palwasha Khan sits on the bottom corner of her bed while her cousin stands behind her, spritzing, combing, and curling Palwasha’s hair, scolding loudly each time the teenager moves to answer her phone. Palwasha and her sister’s beds are strewn with shawls, salwar kameezs, hair dryers, hairspray bottles, make-up kits, cell phones, handbags, and pink and purple Pokémon lunch boxes full of gold bangles and necklaces. On the TV, a Bollywood movie — Yes Boss — is playing on mute but everyone is familiar with the story, a complicated love triangle in which an ad exec unhappily woos the girl he loves for his boss. On the wall by the door, stickers describe the primary teachings of Islam: “Who is Mohammad?”, “What is the Quran?”, “What was the effect of Islam on the world?” The girls’ mother walks in and out of the room every so often, checking on her daughters’ progress, which is way too slow.

It’s pre-prom madness Muslima style…

Brooklyn blues

The first time Sahar Zawam realized that being Muslim could make a dent in her social life was when she realized she wouldn’t be able to attend her high school prom.

That particularly American rite of passage was off-limits to the Egyptian-American teenager studying at Midwood High School because Islam forbids its female followers from removing their headscarves or wearing revealing clothes in front of men other than family members.

A lot of Muslim girls at Midwood High, which caters to a large Pakistani and Arab population, were facing the same dilemma. But rather than break the dictates of their religion for the sake of a party — even if it was their prom — last year, two Midwood seniors decided to organize a prom exclusively for Muslim girls.

Abitssam Moflehi, a Yemeni-American, and Farrah Abuzahria, a Palestinian-American, had heard about Islamic proms being held in Dearborn, Michigan. If Muslim girls could party in Michigan, why not in Brooklyn, they asked themselves.

The two seniors rented a small hall in Midwood and sold tickets to Muslim girls (Muslimas) they knew at $15 a head. They promoted the event not only at Midwood High but also in other neighborhood schools, and in mosques and youth centers. Girls who were going told other girls about it and, very quickly, word got around.

On the day of the prom, almost 80 girls showed up at Widdi Hall, coming from all over the Midwood area and beyond.

“The girls were unbelievable!” Sahar recalls. “You know, before they get inside the hall, they still have to wear the hijab. So these girls walk in with their black hijabs, they walk in, and they were like whoosh!” Sahar mimes a girl dramatically pulling apart the edges of her all-concealing, black drapes to reveal the dazzling gown she is wearing inside.

“It was like these girls had never had a party in their whole lives. You should have seen the smiles on these girls’ faces. They were so happy!

That was last year, 2004.

This year, Sahar was president of the Midwood High School Islamic Society and a senior to boot, so responsibility for organizing the 2005 Islamic Girls Prom fell on her shoulders.

Salwa Zawam (left) models the figure-hugging leopard fur print dress she wore to the prom while her younger sister, Noha (right), shows off her Black and pink floral print dress. Their seven-year-old sister, Zainab (center), wears a scarlet two-piece outfit she would have worn to the prom if she had been allowed to attend. Zainab now says that she never wanted to go but her older sisters remember her crying at home because she wasn’t going to the party with them.

Making-up is hard to do

The morning of the prom, the two Pakistani sisters, Palwasha and Sabah Khan, rush to Midwood High to pick up their report cards, then go shopping for hair spray and other accessories, returning home at one — having skipped lunch — to start getting dressed.

The sisters have decided to wear matching salwar kameezs — a traditional Pakistani outfit consisting of loose pants and a knee-length, matching tunic on top — made of translucent black chiffon with flowers embroidered in gold thread all over the bodice.

But an hour and a half later — only an hour before they are supposed to be arranging chairs and blowing up balloons in Widdi Hall, the venue for the prom once again — Palwasha is still having her hair done.

Sabah hasn’t even changed yet. She and her friend, Aisha, are still straightening their hair while Aisha’s cousin, Mishi, is in the adjacent bedroom, working on the computer.

Another Midwood girl, Anam, arrives, dolled up in a tight-fitting sheath with a blue-and-gold diagonal stripe design. Over it, she is wearing a gold knit jacket. Her false nails have been painted a copper sulphate blue to match her bright blue eyeshadow and bright blue sandals. Anam has come from having her hair done at a nearby Chinese salon but doesn’t like the results. (She’d wanted her hair swept up but the hairdresser did it down. She’d wanted fancy but the hairdresser did simple.) She has come to Palwasha’s for moral support and hairstyling advice.

Just then, Mishi walks in, having changed into her prom dress: a simple silk salwar kameez in blue. But she hates it. “I look like a married person!” she wails, looking ready to burst into tears. Anam rushes to console her, forgetting her own predicament. “It’s okay because your face is pretty,” she tells Mishi and herds her back to the bathroom to jazz up the outfit.

More friends turn up at the door and through it all, Palwasha’s cell phone rings constantly with girlfriends calling to ask for last minute advice about what to wear. One girl calls from Canal Street where she is still looking for the perfect dress. Another calls for a second opinion on her selection, and Palwasha asks back: “Which shoes are you wearing? The fashionable ones?”

By four o’clock, the girls are nowhere close to being ready for the prom that is supposed to be starting now. They stand in a row, the first girl fixing the second girl’s dress with pins, while the second girl straightens a third girl’s hair. Palwasha’s hair is not yet finished; she’s been moving around and answering her cell phone so often that her cousin hasn’t finished setting her curls.

An hour late, (from left) Sabah, Irum, and Palwasha rush to get to the prom.

Get the party started

Over at Widdi Hall, the venue for the prom, a steady stream of Muslim girls are being dropped off by their parents, only to find that the main doors to the hall locked.

Worried phone calls to Sahar Zawam reveal that the party’s main organizer is still at home, frantically getting ready herself.

Sahar and four of her younger sisters arrive half an hour late at four thirty and get to work, setting up tables for the trays of food they have brought with them, bringing down the stereo system from the upstairs office, and arranging a corner of the room for photo-taking.

Sahar has roped in her entire family to help with preparations. Her restaurant-owner father has been cooking since seven this morning, making macaroni-and-cheese, fried chicken cutlets, barbecued ribs, salad, jerk chicken, and fried rice for the party. Sahar’s mother has been ferrying her daughter to and from the bakery and supermarket all day, buying a large rectangular cake with the words “Muslima Prom of 2005” written in icing.

Chairs are pushed to the sides to clear the central floor space for dancing. Tables and more chairs are set up along the ends of the room for people to sit and eat.

As the hall is being readied, more girls arrive, including Palwasha and Sabah Khan who have finished dressing at last.

As they enter, the girls nearest the door turn to check out the newcomers. For a few seconds, there is a pause as each side tries to recognize the other without the usual scarves they wear in school. Then realization dawns and the screaming and hugging starts.

Girls who see each other only once a year at the prom reunite like long-lost lovers in a Bollywood movie. One girl who studied at Midwood until 11th grade and then moved to Boston with her family, has returned to New York City solely for the prom. A girl from upstate New York who found out about the prom during a mosque camp in Brooklyn two days earlier, had her father drive her three hours from home so she could attend. Girls whose friends and cousins attended the prom last year, turn up this year to see what all the hoo-ha was about. Two girls attending a Palestinian baby shower being held in the adjacent hall hear the commotion and decide to switch parties, buying their tickets at the door.

Almost 75 girls are inside Widdi Hall tonight: Pakistanis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Palestinians, Kosovars, Puerto Rican and African-American girls who have converted to Islam, Bangladeshis, Turks, and Afghanis. The entire female Muslim world is represented in this small hall in Brooklyn tonight, wearing every color imaginable (though pink seems to be the hot favorite).

Papa, don’t preach

Outside the main hall, in the small lobby area that is the only way in, Nureen Abuzahria, a hefty Palestinian mother of five with a thick Brooklyn accent, sits and watches the door, making sure that only those people who are supposed to gain entry.

Nureen was the chaperone-cum-watchman at last year’s prom as well, and she agreed to fill that role again this year since three of her daughters are attending the party.

Muslim parents have a reputation of being very protective of their daughters but Nureen fully supports the party. “This party is something to let off steam,” she tells me in between spoonfuls of fried rice and three different types of chicken curry. “The girls do here what they can’t anywhere else. Instead of going into the bedroom and dancing in front of the mirror, they can dance here.”

Tanzeen Rahman, a 10th grader at Midwood High whose parents emigrated from Bangladesh, takes a break from the wild dancing going on inside the hall, pleading two left feet, and sits with me in the lobby for a while. Tanzeen, in a deep red sari with a gold border, explains it like this: “I wear a hijab, see? And no one gets to see my hair. And all the girls who do show their hair, and put on make-up, they look all pretty. This prom gives me a chance to actually feel like a girl. I can do up my hair and feel pretty.”

Tanzeen plans on attending both proms — Islamic and American — in her senior year though she prefers the former. “Even though there aren’t guys to dance with here, it’s even better, you know what I mean? You get to be yourself. You get to have fun with your girlfriends.” But Tanzeen still wants to attend her American prom. She sees it as a chance to say goodbye to her entire class, not just her Muslim girlfriends. She considers her parents more liberal than most and is confident that they will let her attend the American prom.

But other parents are more wary. Some refused to give their daughters permission to attend even the Islamic prom, although this is the second year that the prom is being organized. A few mothers drop by the hall unannounced while the party is in full swing to make sure that there really are no boys around. Nureen interrupts her dinner to meet them at the door and explain that no men will be allowed to enter the hall on her watch.

When they finally realize what the party is all about, some mothers are overwhelmed. One mother hugs Sahar repeatedly, saying, “I can’t believe you would think of something like this. Thank you so much! Thank you for giving this opportunity to my daughter.”

Because the night

Not only religion prevents these Muslim girls, mostly from working class backgrounds, from attending their school’s American prom. Financial factors are another reason.

“The [prom] at Midwood High School, you had to pay $125 for the ticket because they took them to the Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan,” Sahar tells me afterwards. “Girls were spending $400 for their dress not to mention $100 for the nails and makeup and hair. And the limos! $150 for the limos. I had girlfriends coming back after the day of their prom and when I asked them about it, they said they spent over $1,500.”

Sahar and her sisters spent less than $150 each for their dresses, shoes, and other accessories. Add to that the $15 ticket price, and you get less than $200 for a night to remember. (No girl arrived in a limo.) Both Muslim girls (and boys) find it difficult asking their parents to foot a $1500 bill for a party that many Muslims find rather licentious.

Many Muslim students in Midwood did not attend their school’s graduation ceremony because it cost too much as well. According to Sahar, tickets for the Midwood High School graduation cost $120.

So halfway through the Islamic Prom, after most of the girls have arrived and most of the photos have been taken, and the afternoon Asr prayer observed, Sahar announces over the microphone that there will be a graduation ceremony for all the seniors who missed their schools’ function. She calls the seniors on stage one at a time to loud applause, much catcalling and even a few tears. She gives each one a gift box, and then makes them wear the Midwood High cap and gown (no matter which school they come from) while a Polaroid photo is taken.

After that, the party starts in earnest. A pile of discarded shoes — sandals, slippers, and heels — forms in a corner of the hall. “The heels, they were not working,” Sahar tells me. Hairpins are discarded as stylized dos are pulled back into simple ponytails. Fancy shawls and jackets are cast aside. Make-up is washed away by perspiration as the girls shake, wiggle, and boogie non-stop.

Everyone has brought their favorite dance CDs with them and is bombarding the two DJs — Sahar’s twin sisters — with requests. The twins have devised a system where they play two songs from each ethnic/national group until they run through all represented groups, and then start all over again. So there are two Egyptian songs, then two Spanish songs, two English songs, two Bhangra songs, and so on, while everyone is on the floor bopping away.
    
They form a large circle in the middle of the dance floor and when, say, an Urdu or Hindi song comes on, the Pakistani girls go to the middle of the circle and start swaying their hips and clapping their hands in time with the music. Everyone watches for a while, and then they jump in, creating variations of the steps they have just seen. When they can’t manage that, they dance to an inner beat. Two girls start doing the Macarena and pretty soon, the entire hall is following their moves even though a Middle Eastern pop song is playing on the music system. Later, while everyone else is dancing to a Bollywood hit, the two girls start dancing the tango, their locked hands pointing forward as they cut through the crowd, going from one end of the hall to the other.

“Each one shows their cultural dance,” Nureen says, as everyone joins hands and forms a big circle to start learning the steps of a Palestinian folk dance. Tap your right foot twice, then kick forward, while bending your knees slightly. Keep doing that as the circle turns to the right with each kick. “But guess which dance they all know? The American dancing! The hip-hop! Usher comes on and they all know what to do! It joins them together. God bless America!”

“Every night, in my dreams…”

As the clock strikes eleven, it is finally time to wrap up the party. The hall has only been booked until ten; the girls are already an hour late in closing.

But when Sahar announces that the prom has to end, a furor breaks out. “One more song! Just one more song!” the girls shout.

But when the DJs give in and play one last song — a Hindi number — the Arabs start shouting, “That’s not fair! You have to play one Arab song as well!” And so the DJs have to put on an Arab number.

Then the Turks start complaining.

Eventually Sahar’s mother steps in. She walks over to the hi-fi and pulls out the plug. “That’s it!” she says. “The party’s over!”

The girls start calling their parents to come pick them up.

But even without the music, some girls don’t want the night to end. Salwa, another of Sahar’s sisters, starts singing the theme song from the movie, Titanic, “Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you…” and soon other girls are singing along and slow-dancing to the lyrics.

When the new school year starts, Salwa will be President of Midwood High’s Islamic Society and therefore the organizer of the 2006 Islamic Girls Prom while her big sister attends Pace University in downtown Manhattan.

“Next year, hopefully, we’re going to have almost double the number of girls,” Salwa says, dreaming aloud. “We’re going to have to find a bigger hall.”

Expand it beyond Brooklyn, one girl suggests. Someone else suggests a grander venue. Maybe the Waldorf. More sponsors for the party. Maybe Mayor Bloomberg.

If not the mayor then at least the school principal. Salwa plans on asking Midwood High School’s principal, Steve Zwisohn, and other high school principals within the area, to help sponsor next year’s prom. “What’s the difference between us and everyone else who gets to have a prom?” she asks. “We work as hard in school. We have 90 and above averages in school. We all passed our Regents [state exams]; we’re all good people; we all do community service. What’s the difference between us and them?”

But school sponsorship comes with restrictions. The girls would need security officers, signed letters of permission from parents, and additional chaperones: all conditions that Principal Zwisohn says must be met before the school can sponsor a student party. So maybe there won’t be any school sponsorship. Maybe instead the girls will ask local Muslim businesses to help defray some of the costs.

“It would be so cool to look back on this one day,” muses Sahar, thinking of future Islamic proms years from now. “Like, oh my god, we started with 70 people and now, it’s 3,000. It would be so cool.”

Outside the ballroom, after all the girls have left, the Zawam sisters pile into their mother’s car for the drive home. They relive the night during the drive back, arguing about who danced the best, laughing at how girls didn’t recognize each other without their scarves, sharing which part of the party was their favorite. As they reminisce, they massage feet aching from too much dancing.  

At home, their father is waiting up to ask, “How was the food?”

The girls reassure him. The food was so good there was none left behind — people ate seconds and thirds and packed more to take home.

Then throwing off their fancy dresses and jewelry, but without bothering to remove make-up and hairpins and false nails, the girls collapse into bed. Their once-a-year Cinderella night is over; they will be back to wearing hijabs tomorrow.

Anju Mary Paul

Morton drives an inconspicuous silver minivan while tracking down criminals.

Constable Lisa Morton knocked on the door of an unassuming Calgary home after receiving the report of a break-and-enter. She was greeted by an elderly religious Jewish woman wearing a wig who, after allowing Morton to enter, informed her, “You’ll have coffee.”

“No, no thanks,” Morton replied. “I’ll just get to work.”

“Fine,” the woman said. “You’ll have tea.”

There’s no sense in arguing with an older woman who has made up her mind. While her cup of tea was being readied, Morton went to check out the window where the burglar got in. She wanted to use a fingerprinting dust that would stain the walls but checked first to make sure it was okay with the homeowner. The woman reacted as if the question were ridiculous.

“Whaddaya think, I can’t paint it?” she said.

Sure enough, the dust turned up the burglar’s sweaty handprint on the semi-gloss paint. The window he’d climbed through was so high that he’d had to hoist himself up to get in, leaving evidence behind. The burglar obviously didn’t know much about the Identification section of the Calgary Crime Scenes Unit, where Morton has worked for the last three years.

“He was toast,” Morton recalls.

She managed to lift four fingerprints from the inside of the windowsill. The prints turned out to be in the police database, since their owner had been involved in previous criminal activity. Morton recognized the name attached to the prints, and the burglar was arrested soon after.

But first, Morton followed her hostess into the kitchen where she drank her mandatory and well-deserved tea.

Morton gets ready to hit the road in search of a criminal.

All in a day’s work

Lisa Morton has been a Calgary police officer for 10 years, and has belonged to the Crime Scenes Unit for the last three.

Her day is dictated by the laptop, and by a police radio hooked up to her unmarked minivan. The radio squawks and crackles reports of recovered stolen cars and other crime scenes from officers, and from Morton’s partner, who drives a separate car.

The Identification section where Morton works is responsible for checking out murder scenes by examining body positioning, extrapolating the direction of bullets based on wounds and point of entry, and finding evidence that would say nothing to an untrained eye, but that, to her, speaks volumes.

“I’m really good at figuring out what caused certain types of blood splatter,” Morton says, conjuring a hypothetical crime scene on a nearby wall with a wave of her hands. “Like, for example, the guy had to be standing here and shot from this angle for his blood to spray this way.”

On a slow day, Morton will head to one of the police service’s giant storage lockers for recovered stolen cars, and will spend hours going over a car with a flashlight. She’s looking for evidence and fingerprints on metal, glass, and plastic so that a suspect can be connected to the theft, and charged.

It’s possible to drive past her, completely unaware that she’s a cop. The silver minivan that Morton drives makes it easy to mistake her for a soccer mom.

She dresses in plain clothes, which she finds more practical than her uniform because “I’m less likely to rip the back of my stretch pants when I’m crawling on my hands and knees.”

She wears no makeup, and has an outdoorsy, no-nonsense look about her. Darkening roots peek out of her ash-blonde hair, which falls down the back of her black Calgary Police windbreaker.

Morton keeps her van heater on low. It’s no wonder, since the woman seems to create enough heat of her own. She’s a talker who waves around her hands and arms to illustrate her every point. Her enthusiasm might get her mistaken for a rookie who has yet to become jaded. It’s hard to believe that this woman will ever become cynical about her job.

While Morton says, repeatedly, that she’s a cop before anything else, she relishes the more specialized nature of her current position with Ident (Identification section), puzzling out the who, what, where, when, and why of crime scenes.

“My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy,” she admits. “I’ll sit there for hours and try to puzzle out [a crime scene] and I think it’s fun.”

Morton dusts a beer can for fingerprints.

The glamour of garbage digging

The Calgary Police Crime Scene Unit is no CSI: Miami or CSI: New York. The TV shows’ high tech machinery identify the culprit and victim while officers sip on chai lattes and toss around theories. Their world is a far cry from real life.

Instead, the fingerprinting lab smells and looks more like a high school photography room, with a vinegar tang of chemicals, smudged, worn countertops, and cement floors.

Morton and her colleagues make do with the limited resources they have. Morton winks when explaining, “Both boys and girls use the same powder room here.” The “powder room” contains the dark magnetic fingerprint powder recognizable from TV, a couple of small feather dusters, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and a garbage bag full of pop and beer cans.

Morton whips out a can from a garbage bin and proceeds to demonstrate how to dust for prints.

“You’d be amazed at the prints we can lift from cans, chip bags, chocolate bar wrappers,” she says. “Stuff people throw into the back of a car that they’ve stolen or are in while out committing another crime.”

The lab also includes two rooms with humidifiers that work in conjunction with certain chemicals, and are used to lift prints off special materials like cardboard or plastic.

One of the humidifiers is the size of a fridge. That’s overkill if you’re trying to lift a print from an object as small as a knife. For such smaller items, a police officer rigged up a second humidifier out of a cardboard box, cut a door in the side and used a pop can to hold the chemicals. “We use what’s handy,” Morton explains.

Next is the dry room. This room resembles a garage more than anything else. Any evidence that comes in wet or blood-soaked is stored in a locker in the dry room to ensure that it isn’t tampered with.

Morton smiles at a joke Bourassa made while relaxing in the Medical Examiner’s office.

Bodies, bone-saws, and ball-busters

A frequent stop for Morton is the Calgary medical examiner’s office, which suffers the indignity of being constantly mistaken for the post office across the street.

Out of all the offices on Morton’s daily rounds — including the personal desks at the police department downtown — the medical examiner’s looks the most welcoming, despite the dead body lying exposed on a gurney.

Morton plops herself down in the office space directly across from the corpse and, in full view of the autopsy equipment, starts talking with some of the medical examiners. Here, there are computers present, and all the equipment looks shiny and new. The facilities are brightly lit, warm, and smell like Glade air freshener.

But the fresh sweet smell fades when a round electric bone-saw (about the size of a fist and 10 times as loud as a dentist’s drill) starts whirring nearby, operated by one of the medical examiners. The hot, smoky smell of the drill on tooth and bone fills the air.

Morton and Kendra Bourassa, a technician, ignore the drill and remain seated in the office while chatting, their conversation shifting from the birth of a colleague’s baby to exactly how old you have to be before you’re considered a ‘cougar’ (an older woman who chases younger men). Bourassa ups the estrogen level in the room a notch and describes the time she had to castrate a body during an autopsy while a couple of male police officers watched.

“The guys said ‘we saw the way you handled that guy’s balls and we’re gonna call you the ball-buster,” Bourassa laughs.

A woman may not have to be a ball-buster to survive in law enforcement but it doesn’t hurt to be tough or have a sense of humor. Although the ratio of men to women in the medical examiner’s office is about equal, there are definitely more male cops in Ident than female. Morton says she has never been at a disadvantage.

It may help that Morton is physically imposing at 5’10” and about 210 pounds — a stature that counterbalances her bouncy nature. She’s an approachable police officer who also looks like she can take down the bad guys. Morton gleefully tells the tale of when she got a tip from a resident about a stolen car, back when she was a beat cop. Morton found the car along with the thief at a gas station, and confronted him alone.

“He sorta took a look at me and realized I was alone.”

Not at all threatened by a lone female police officer, the suspect allowed Morton to pat him down with his back turned to her and his hands on the hood of the car.

“As I was patting him down, I kept talking so he wouldn’t hear me reach for my cuffs. I had them on him so fast he had no idea what had happened.”

Morton cuffed the suspect in a single move, a technique all officers are taught during training. On the way to the police station, the suspect tried to strike up a conversation with her from the back seat.

“You’re a big girl, eh?” he asked Morton.

“Yup.”

“You work out?”

“Yeah, you kind of have to for my job.”

“You must be a farm girl.”

“Yup.” (Morton lives far from Calgary’s white-collar bustle with her boyfriend, another police officer. They own three horses and 10 cows.)

Thinking she wasn’t watching him, the suspect tried to take some drugs, including a capsule of hemp oil. The two proceeded to get into what Morton calls a “tussle,” ending with Morton’s foot stomped down on the suspect’s neck.

“The adrenaline is pumping and the stuff you’re capable of is pretty incredible,” Morton explains. “But you crash right after. I remember shaking because my energy dropped so low. So I had a Coke to bring it back up.”

Crimes and misdemeanors

Morton’s rural private life stands in sharp contrast to her career investigating city crime, but with her strong physical presence and her infectious enthusiasm, it all seems to work for her.

When she first started working as a cop, she and her partner answered a frantic call from a mother whose son was slashing his wrists. When they arrived at the scene, they both agreed that Morton should talk to the boy. The boy’s father had left home when he was young, and it was more likely he would respond to a woman’s authority.
  
After another suicide attempt and a second call from the mother, Morton went back to talk with the boy. This time the boy confided that his father, and a friend of the father’s, had sexually abused him when he went to visit. Based on the boy’s testimony, the father was arrested and charged.

Ten years later, Morton ran into the same boy after her partner pulled him over for speeding. Remembering, Morton shakes her head in wonder. “The fact that this kid was still alive was pretty amazing,” she recalls. “That I was able to reach him and have an impact on his life, wow.”

But she still gave the kid a ticket.

In The Fray Contributor

‘Hkun Pa-O’ is in Burmese lettering on the author’s bag.

By early evening, the vendors in Chiang Mai’s night bazaar are already chatting amongst themselves, their words and laughter floating back and forth between the crowds. Their covered metal stalls were wheeled out in the afternoon, and now they line both sides of the wide sidewalks; imprisoning us all in the still air of this makeshift corridor. The path is only two tourists wide, forcing sweaty strangers to squeeze and bump past each other. The confines of the stalls selling souvenir t-shirts, pillow covers, candle holders, and Diesel jeans extend for blocks, broken only occasionally by the glass fronts of air-conditioned shops like Boots and Swensen’s, or by the wide entrances leading to more shops within covered plazas.

My mission here is focused. I have perfected the look that says “save your breath, I’m not buying,” without being overly diffident or rude. At least, that’s what I like I think. I try to weave my way through with the grace of a seasoned expat, but am thwarted at every step. First a young tourist creates a bottleneck as she stands in the path, trying to squeeze in and out of a T-shirt one size too small. Next, a group of French people huddle around a calculator, haggling over the cost of a blanket. A compassionate stranger stands aside so I can pass in the other lane, but I soon become blocked by an old couple who refuse to walk single file. Shoulder to shoulder, they move at a snail’s pace. I think evil thoughts behind their backs.

Most of the shoppers pay no heed to the vendors, inching and pushing along, studying the goods, they don’t make eye contact until they are ready to bargain. Perhaps they are afraid of triggering an onslaught of sales tactics. But the vendors here are not so pushy. Some of them doze off in their chairs. They seem to be in their own world, but I can see that they notice the shoppers. I feel special when they remember me, and smile in recognition. I can hear their words following me, quiet comments and curious glances that fly ahead to catch someone else’s attention.

A man catches my eye and asks a now familiar question, “Where’d you get your bag?” The man is blind in one eye, and has a big smile; I’ve had this conversation with him more than once. “A gift from a student,” I tell him. He asks where I am from, what I do. Others who’ve stopped me before say nothing more, their curiosity guarded and their faces inscrutable.

I never ask questions in return. Simple questions could reveal topics unsafe for discussion, and I am reluctant to put them on the spot. Still, I know why my bag catches their eyes. It is like any other hill-tribe bag around here, but it is the Burmese lettering that people notice. It was a heartfelt farewell gift from Hkun Sai, a former student. The simple white letters spell out his clan name, “Pa-O.” From Burma’s Shan state, the Pa-O is one of the country’s smallest ethnic groups, and the one at the greatest risk of losing its culture to the encroachments of civil war. I don’t know how exactly the vendors can tell my bag is from Shan state, but they can. Some of the men volunteer with visible pride the information that Shan state is theirs. I wonder if they are disappointed when I tell them the bag was a gift, that I have never been to Burma.

The smiling vendor who always stops me is one of those men. He asks if I know about Shan state. When I answer yes, he gives a silent nod; I like to think it is one of approval. I am the one left with curiosity, about his life, his past, his injury, but I continue on my mission. I quickly cross the street, waving off the tuk-tuk drivers, pass a monotony of souvenirs. I head towards a glass case full of sparkling silver. There is a group of women in immaculate black burqas choosing their purchases with confidence. I peer around them politely, looking for Nang Nang’s familiar round face.

I met Nang Nang and Hkun Sai, classmates, when I first came to Chiang Mai last August. My arrival here was random and hurried. With a rapidly expiring Australian student visa, I had neither the funds nor the desire to return home. I had the general goal of building a career in human rights, particularly with refugees, but no job prospects. With two weeks to spare, I purchased a one way ticket to Thailand and sent an application off to the Burma Volunteers Program, hoping for a three month placement that would provide room and board. When they offered me a two-month paying gig at the School for Shan State Youth Nationalities, I didn’t have to think too hard. I set off for Chiang Mai, armed only with a contact number, and having never heard of Shan state.

The School for Shan State Nationalities Youth (SSSNY) was founded almost four years ago by Nang Charm Tong, a 24 year-old Shan woman and activist, who also founded the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN). The school provides post-secondary training to students of any ethnicity from Shan state, and they work to promote individuals’ right to an education.
Their location is not public, and for safety, the students are mainly confined to the school for the duration of the term.

There were 22 students when I arrived 7 months into the term. Most of them were younger than my own 26 years, and had names it took me a month to remember. Hkun Sai, at 33, was the oldest. He was the most outspoken about an individual’s right to their own culture and language. Although confident in his opinions, his inability to make a direct statement often borders on a stutter. He loves dancing, in the traditional style with dainty steps and graceful hand movements, even to his classmates’ bouncy pop music. He would sometimes express frustration that he wasn’t allowed to wear his traditional longyi, or Burmese style sarong; it might have aroused suspicion among the neighbors.

Nang Nang, 18, is ethnic Shan, and is one of three girls who went on to work in the night bazaar. She is cheerful, but often had to be coaxed to speak out in class. Like all the girls, though, she freely joined in arguments about women’s rights. Pan Pan, who is ethnic Karen, also went to work in the same shop. Recently turned 18, Pan Pan appears dainty and girly, but has no compunctions about stating her mind. Once when she spotted me in the night bazaar, she ran after me down the street to give me a hug and tell me she misses me so much she can’t stand it. Nu Lat, also Shan, was the youngest in the class, at 17. She’s confident, but not as gregarious as Pan Pan. She too went to work in the night bazaar, selling clothes.

Along a sidewalk of the night bazaar, vendors rest under cover from the rain.

When a refugee is not a refugee

Shan is the largest state in Burma, bordering the north of Thailand and the southwest of China. At least half of its 8 million people are Shan, but there are also Karen, Kachin, Mon, Wa and Lahu, and Pa-O. Its history as a nation is not well documented, and is often overshadowed by Burma’s. The state became a British protectorate in 1887, two years after Burma became a British colony. Between 1942 and 1945 the Japanese invaded with the aid of the Burma Independence Army. The British regained control after the Burmese forces switched sides. Shan leaders met with General Aung San of Burma and signed the Panglong Accord in 1947, whereby they agreed to join the Union of Burma when it gained independence the following year. In return, Shan state was given the right to secede after 10 years. After Aung San was assassinated, no government of Burma since has recognized the constitutional clause which grants Shan state the right to independence.

Burmese troops entered Shan state in 1952 and declared martial law, ostensibly to fight Chinese Kuomintang forces there. According to the Burmese junta, General Ne Win seized control of the government in 1962 amid the chaos of civil war. According to Shan sources, civil war broke out after Ne Win’s military staged their coup and tore up the constitution.  In the new constitution, there was no secession clause. Socialist Burma became a unitary state; Shan leaders and the royal family went into exile.

Since 1962, Shan state has been home base to no less than three major armed resistance forces at any given time, as well as smaller forces with shifting allegiances. With mergers and splinters, armies have changed names and changed leaders. At present, the Shan State Army (SSA) has formed the strongest resistance to the junta. It is one of the last groups to refuse a cease-fire agreement with the government.

In return, the people of Shan state have faced the greatest retaliation. Since 1996, more than 300,000 people have been forcibly relocated, their villages burned and surrounded by landmines or armed guards. Some of my students can no longer return to their homes. SWAN’s 2002 report, “License to Rape,” details over 175 incidents of rape and assault involving 625 girls and women. Perpetrated by Burmese forces over a 5-year period, 145 rapes were committed by commanding officers, and only one rapist was ever punished.

That the Junta uses forced labor is common knowledge. Firsthand accounts given to the Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF) reveal that men, women, and children alike are forced to work as military porters; they are often used as human minesweepers. The evidence points to a military campaign targeting civilians. With no where else to turn, people flee over the border to Thailand.

The Thai government limits refugee status to those who are “fleeing fighting.” The Shan are excluded from this definition. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has stated that the Shan are “cousins” who can easily integrate into Thai society, and do not need humanitarian aid. Without legal rights or protection, they are left vulnerable. In April, 500 Shan were given temporary refuge inside the Thai border after their camp near an SSA base was shelled. In May, after the Thai Government announced a crackdown on illegal immigrants, the 500 were ordered to return. Although they were given a month to move, the army immediately began blockading their supplies coming from the Burmese side. Of the 500, half are orphans.

There are official refugee camps along the border for Karen and Karenni, which are supported by international non-governmental organizations. Groups like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees cannot access the Shan because they have no legal recognition as “persons of concern.” Those Shan in unofficial camps along the border, estimated to be over 5,000, receive support and aid from grassroots organizations like SWAN, SHRF and the Shan State Army. The SHRF estimates there are more than 200,000 Shan seeking refuge in Thailand.

Although safer, life in Thailand is not easy. Many Shan work as fruit-pickers, often living with their families on the edges of the longan, mango, or strawberry orchards. If they are lucky, their children may attend classes taught by “barefoot teachers,” volunteers from NGOs or the SSA who teach secretly in the fields.  Although they can register as guest workers and obtain permits, this offers little protection from harsh working conditions. Agricultural workers are exposed to dangerous pesticides; factory workers are exposed to paint and chemical fumes. Many employers deduct the cost of the permit from wages already below minimum wage. Most families must live on much less than $100 a month, not enough for both food and rent in Thailand.

From a friend’s guest-house in the centre of Chiang Mai, we can see two families living on the open concrete floors of a building under construction. He’s been told the families are Thai, and will live in the subsidized housing when it is complete. I think they are Shan with no where else to go.

When a foreigner is not a foreigner

After their school term ended, many of my students returned to working for their own organizations, conducting research and human rights documentation. A few went on to further training. Of the three, Nang Nang is the only one who stayed at the night bazaar. Pan Pan, who loves languages and wants more than anything to study abroad, is now studying French. When I visit Nang Nang at work she is happy to see me, escaping from the dreary bored faces behind the counter to greet me with a hug and an exclamation of  “Ahh! Teacher!” There are a few other women working at the small shop front but I rarely see her chatting with them. A few of them are Shan as well. In my brief conversation with one girl, she plainly told me I’d gotten fat. Sometimes Nang Nang complains about gossips, but she doesn’t give details.

Nang Nang came to Thailand with her family when she was 16. When she first arrived, she worked briefly in construction and then at a restaurant. She says the job at the night bazaar is her favorite, but it hardly seems like much of a choice to me. As her teacher, I tried my best to convince her to attend a program for training in human rights education. She turned it down. Without any financial resources, she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to find another job as good she has. Her pay is around $100 a month plus commission, working 70 hours a week. It’s a sum paltry by my standards, but fair in local terms. Most migrant workers get paid half as much for doing twice the work of their Thai counterparts and this employer, at least, pays everyone the same.

When I interview Nang Nang about work, Pong, also 18, comes along to help translate. Pong, a classmate, attended a journalism training course after the School for Shan State and now works as an environmental journalist. They both tell me that their favorite thing about the night bazaar is the people from many different countries. They prefer being around foreigners, they say, because Thai people often look down on them. Migrant workers have become a stepping stone for the quickly rising middle class here, providing cheap labor for construction booms, and servants for Thai homes.

For Pong, the worst thing about the night bazaar is the strange men who catcall her; for Nang Nang, it is the fear of immigration agents. They operate undercover, single men shopping on their own, and when they hear the telltale signs of an accent, they ask to see IDs and work permits. Nang Nang has an ID and a permit which she recently paid a month’s wages to obtain. But it makes no difference, she is still illegal. The law restricts migrant workers to menial service and construction work, retail is off limits.  

Nang Nang has yet to be carded, though, and it seems her employer has paid the more important “fee” which makes agents skip this shop. Allegedly, the unofficial fine when caught is 10,000 baht, which is more than $250. The official fine is three months in jail, a fine, and deportation. In an unofficial deportation, one is simply dropped on the other side of the border. More fees and bribes can be paid to get back across again.  In official deportations, individuals are put on a plane and handed over to Burmese government officials. Leaving Burma without authorization is a crime punishable by a year or more in prison.

Neither Nang Nang nor Pong can give me an idea of how many Shan are working at the night bazaar; they tell me that they hear “many many people speaking Burmese.” That everyone is forced to learn and use Burmese in school breeds resentment among many, and a general reluctance to speak it at all. Nonetheless, it is often the only common language available. Nang Nang and Pong, however, do not talk with the other workers they hear speaking Burmese. If there is a sense of solidarity and community among the Shan in Thailand, it is not aired in the public markets of Chiang Mai. Blending in and keeping a low profile is key to surviving as an illegal immigrant, and this is easiest done alone.

When Nang Nang and I chat in front of her work, she always holds my hand. She is more generous in her affection than I am. When I first visited her at work, she told me laughingly about her co-workers’ shock that I had actually come to see her. I know it gives her some satisfaction then, to be seen holding my hand. I haven’t told her that it also brings me no small amount of joy. We make a strange image, standing there, hands clasped, between a trinket shop and CD rack, the crowd swarming around us. We stand on two sides of a divide: tourist, educated, white on one side; local, uneducated, poor on the other. I can see people looking at us oddly, some trying harder to hide it than others.

What makes me smile, is knowing what they cannot see — that the divide between us is not so great. With my students, I am their teacher and their friend; never the farang, or foreigner, that I will always be in Thailand. We share a certain camaraderie, being outsiders in a foreign land. Truth be told, they will tell anyone who will listen about Shan state and Burma. They speak matter-of-factly about the tragedies that are occurring there. If they do not share their personal stories with me, it is probably because I have never asked. I don’t really want to know. I can’t change their pasts, and I think they can handle it better than I could. Of what is going on in their hearts, I get only tiny glimpses, in wistful faces when they tell me of their homes, or in eyes tearing up at the mention of a father.

Before I leave Nang Nang at work, she tells me that Nu Lat has returned from her trip to Bangkok. She worries about her, but is envious that Nu Lat travels so freely, with no apparent fear of being caught. I tell her about Pan Pan studying French, but she seems uninterested. I wonder if they’ve had a falling out, but don’t ask. I also mention Hkun Sai, who is now living at a refugee camp while he applies for resettlement in the United States. We hug good-bye, and I promise to see her again soon. She steps back behind the counter and I step back into the flow of tourists, looking for my first opportunity to escape between the stalls and into the open air of the street.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Shan Herald Agency for News
URL: http://www.shanland.org

Shan Women’s Action Network
URL: http://www.shanwomen.org

TOPICS > SHAN

The Shan in Thailand: A Case of Protection and Assistance Failure
Written 06/22/2004 by Refugees International
URL: http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/972/?mission=1724

In The Fray Contributor

Almost every store along the stretch of Coney Island Avenue that runs through Midwood is Pakistani. From the Khoobsurat Beauty Salon for women, to the K. Prince Barber Shop for men. Then comes Zoha Money Transmitter, where you can exchange your Pakistani rupees for U.S. dollars or vice versa. Subhan Sweets and Tikka Restaurant is a good place to buy a cup of freshly brewed, milky, cardamom-flavored chai but not coffee.

The first sentences Ayesha ever typed into a computer were: “My name is Ayesha ayobe. I am 21 age.”

Over time, in bits and pieces, she told me more about herself:

“I come from Lahore, Pakistan one year.”
“My father work in chicken burger restaurant. My mother no work.”
“My brother Abdul 17 work in grocery store. My next brother Mohammad is 13 age in sixth grade. My next brother Usama is 5 age. He stay home with my mother.”
“My sister Aleena 16 no go school.”
“I no want to marry. No shaadi; single good!”
“I like America.”

There are Muslim women who come to America, live here for years, raise children and grandchildren, and never learn more than a few words of English. There are Muslim women who end up knowing no other woman (let alone man) in this country who is not a family friend or relative. I met Ayesha when I was looking for these women.

At first, I assumed Ayesha satisfied all of my easy categorizations about Muslim women. I saw her as representative of the many young Muslim women who come to America in their late teens and early 20s, too old to enroll in public school and be introduced, through American classmates and teachers, to American ways of life. As a result, they remain trapped at home, waiting to be married off by their families.

I eventually learned that Ayesha was not the stereotypical Muslim woman I had imagined: veiled, docile, and submissive. She clandestinely rebelled against the restrictive world her parents wanted her to live in, making secret forays to the life outside. That is why I have changed her name and those of others in her story: to protect Ayesha from the repercussions that will undoubtedly follow if the truth were to get out within her orthodox community.

But Ayesha also rebelled against the walls that I tried setting up around her, in my attempt to maintain a “proper” reporter/subject distance. And that is why I am no longer in contact with her.  

“You are my best friend!”

I met Ayesha at her very first computer class, held on a cold February day at an immigrant outreach organization in the Midwood stretch of Brooklyn. Three times a week, half a dozen women in headscarves — some recently arrived from Pakistan, others from Bangladesh, Yemen and Morocco — turned up at the organization’s office to learn basic computer skills.

At the start of that first class, the instructor asked his all-female, all-non-English-speaking, all-Muslim audience to log into their computers by typing in the password, OPTO. Ayesha didn’t know what a password was so she just sat in her place: a short, stocky, square-jawed woman dressed in a beige headscarf and faux leopard fur coat. Sitting behind Ayesha, I sensed her confusion and told her in English that she needed to type out the word “OPTO” into the computer.

She didn’t move and continued to stare at the computer screen in front of her.

I told her roughly the same thing in Hindi. “Computer meh O-P-T-O likho,” and then she got it.

Once logged on, Ayesha turned around in her seat and told me in Urdu that she was “bahooth khushi,” very happy, to have met me.

Later that same day, she told me, “Aap tho mera best friend hai!” You are my best friend!

“I am go to school.”

Besides studying the computer, Ayesha also took English as a Second Language classes at the community center. During her ESL lessons, Ayesha was always volunteering to read out loud or answer a question, and she completed the simple in-class exercises with only minimal mistakes.

“Make sentences with the words car, bird and school,” the instructor would write on the chalkboard.

And Ayesha would write:
“I have car.”
“I like a bird.”
“I am go to school.”

Ayesha was, in fact, one of the better students. Unlike the other women in her class, Ayesha had studied until 12th grade in Lahore and had learned to read and write a modicum of English.

With computers — because she didn’t have one at home, had never used one — Ayesha was more diffident. But she was also impatient to learn more. (All the women were.) She became angry with herself whenever she made a mistake. She would go, “Oh!” in frustration and smack her forehead with the palm of her hand or rest her head on the top of the keyboard. And whenever she got fed up, she had no qualms saying so to the instructor. She’d switch off her computer monitor, stand up, and announce simply, “I go.”

When she wasn’t in class, Ayesha would be busy with household chores and other tasks. “This weekend, I am cooking, I go to shopping at Bobby’s Store, I go to work,” she would say when asked to list her weekend activities.

Ayesha’s work involved conducting Quran classes in the homes of many of the Pakistani women in the neighborhood. Last time I checked, she had seven students. Other days, she would visit her friend Sana’s apartment on Newkirk Avenue.

Within a week of knowing her, I decided that Ayesha’s was the story I wanted to write.

I started actively courting her in order to ingratiate myself into her good books. I played down my Indian roots in case she was an India-bashing Pakistani nationalist. I didn’t mention that I was Christian. I brushed up on my Hindi. I taught her how to use the Shift and Backspace keys on the computer. I translated unfamiliar English words into Urdu for her.

It was hard not to admire Ayesha’s determination to ease what was surely a difficult adjusting process coming from Pakistan to the United States, and I wanted to help wherever I could.

I had gone through a similar ordeal when, at the age of five, I had left India with my family to move to Scotland. My older sister and I were the only Indians in our all-white Edinburgh public school. My sister, who already knew some English, had thrived; I, who could not speak a word of English, had been terrified. Not knowing how to handle a knife and fork in the school canteen, being teased by older students in the girls’ toilet, getting lost inside the school and being too afraid to ask for directions: everything was a nightmare.

As a fellow immigrant, I wanted to help Ayesha and if doing so meant that I was simultaneously helping myself get a story out of her, so much the better. It meant that my disinterested reporter status would be eroded slightly as I became chummier with Ayesha but I thought I had our relationship under control.

The following week in the middle of computer class, Ayesha turned around and told me, “Today, you come my house.”

Ayesha loves watching Bollywood flicks. Her current favorite movie is Raaz, a psychological thriller that also includes some steamy song-and-dance routines between the hero and heroine.

“There’s a special word: fob.”

To reach Ayesha’s apartment building from the community center, you have to travel a few bus stops up Coney Island Avenue.

Inside bus B68, it was standing room only. Russian grandmothers holding tight to their shopping bags brushed shoulders with Chinese mothers carrying infants on their laps. Together with old Hispanic men and one young Hasidic man, they occupied the seats in front. The back of the bus was filled with African American schoolchildren chatting and laughing loudly.

Ayesha, her younger sister Aleena, and I were the only South Asians onboard. We stood in the aisle — the surreptitious focus of 20 pairs of eyes — and I wondered if everyone assumed I was Muslim the way Ayesha and Aleena in their headscarves obviously were. I felt the urge to distance myself from the two girls.

The truth? Ayesha embarrassed me. Not because of her religion or her nationality but because of her lack of fashion sense.

In my interviews with first- and second-generation immigrant children in Midwood, time and again, the isolation a newcomer child faces when he has not yet learned how to blend into mainstream culture was raised. The teasing comes not just from white or black kids but also from other immigrant children. “There’s a special word people use: fob,” Reshmi Nair, the American-born daughter of Indian immigrant parents, explained to me. A fob was someone “fresh off the boat”, an outsider, not yet “with it”, and therefore very uncool.

Assimilation — the goal of any child who wants a peaceful school experience — meant dressing a particular way, speaking a particular way, knowing what to talk about. I’d learnt that lesson the hard way in Scotland and I’d spent the years since making sure I would never be identified as an outsider again.

Then along comes Ayesha with her monstrous leopard fur coat, her lack of English conversation, and her lack of New Yorker disaffection on public transportation, screaming out her fob status. As a topic she fascinated me, but as a person, she was not someone I wanted to be associated with. I had reverted to a high school hierarchy where the “cool” kids did not want to mix with the “uncool” kids.

And why did Ayesha want to associate with me? Was it really just a simple case of friendship-at-first-sight? Or did she too subscribe to the same high school mentality where, by hanging out with ‘cool’ me and my designer wool coat, she would become more like me?

“In Pakistan, it is very dirty.”

Ayesha’s apartment was in a brick-fronted building that fronted Coney Island Avenue. We entered a dimly lit hallway that had paint-splattered walls and empty paint cans abandoned by the chipped wooden staircase. What little light there was in the corridor managed to come through dirt-encased windows in the stairwell. There was dust everywhere.

The girls’ home on the second floor was tiny for a family of seven. The front door opened into the central kitchen-cum-dining-cum-living room from which two bedrooms led off. Queen-size mattresses rested on the floors of both bedrooms and in the corner of the living room. One of the bedroom mattresses was for the parents and the youngest son Usama, another for the two girls, and the living room mattress for the two older boys. Clothes hung on twine strung across one of the bedrooms.

An English language textbook in Urdu was sitting on the dining table when I entered. (I learned later that Ayesha’s mother used it to teach herself English.) In a glass-fronted cupboard against a wall, various mismatched plates and crockery were stacked. Inside, I spotted a set of Corelle plates. The ones with the brown butterfly motif around the edge. The same ones my mother has back in India. Every upper middle class Indian housewife, who has visited the United States or has relatives here, owns at least one of these Corelle plates. Did the same rule apply to Pakistani housewives, I wondered. If yes, then this would mean that back in Pakistan, Ayesha’s mother would now be considered middle class.

I asked Ayesha’s mother if she liked the United States and she nodded her head vigorously.
“Pakistan meh, bahooth gundhi hai,” she said. In Pakistan, it is very dirty.
Recalling India’s slums and could understand why a person would want to escape that life. Ayesha’s Brooklyn apartment, while overcrowded and ramshackle, was at least clean.

With familiar South Asian hospitality, Ayesha’s mother insisted that I sit down and do nothing while she and her daughters prepared lunch. A Danish butter cookie tin filled with dough and another tin of wheat flour appeared and she started to roll flat the dough into chapattis, the round wheaten bread common to Pakistan and North India. Ayesha cooked the bread over an open flame on the stove and when they were done, stacked them onto a plate and rubbed butter on them. Leftover curries — channa (chickpea), vegetable-and-potato, and beef — from the day before were heated up in the microwave. The curries joined a plate of cucumber slices sprinkled with lemon juice, and a bottle of mango pickle.

As the food was being prepared, I played with Ayesha’s brother, Usama, still in his pajamas at 1:30 p.m. Usama wordlessly showed me his plastic lizard, his helicopter with only one of its blades remaining, and his rubber monster mask. He showed me photos from his last birthday, his first in the United States. The photos had been taken in the apartment and showed Usama and his family, all dressed up in their finest, standing stiffly before the camera, all slightly out of focus and misaligned.

“Why doesn’t Aleena go to school, Aunty?”

Ayesha had removed her coat and sweater, as soon as she stepped into the apartment, losing bulk as she did so. Next she removed her headscarf, letting her hair loose. It was a shock to see Ayesha’s hair, so long that the ends brushed the top of her wide hips. And her face, now that it was no longer framed by her scarf, looked softer and less masculine.

Everything about Ayesha changed once she was home. All her hesitation dropped away and her oldest-child confidence came rushing to the fore. As she spoke to her mother about her day, her voice took on the assurance that comes from talking in your mother tongue to someone who understands you completely. There was even a hint of bossiness in her tone as she ordered her sister Aleena to wash the dishes and lay the table.

Aleena was as shy and withdrawn inside the apartment as she was outside. She hardly spoke, whether in English or Urdu. She could write “My name is Aleena” on her own. They were about the only English words she seemed to know. She once wrote in my notebook – “im 16 years olD. I live in BrooKLyn.” – but only after I spelt out each word for her. In ESL class, she never completed (let alone understood) any of the exercises she was assigned; her sister did them for her when the teacher wasn’t looking.

I had once asked Aleena if she wanted to attend school in America but she shook her head, whispered no, and smiled guiltily at me.

In the apartment, I broached the topic once more.

“Why isn’t Aleena going to school, Aunty?” I asked the girls’ mother in Hindi, fully expecting a harangue against the loose morals fostered by the American public school system. And what use would an education be for a girl who was going to become a housewife anyway? But she nodded her head vigorously at my question and replied that yes, Aleena should be going to school but didn’t want to.

Aleena smiled guiltily once again. Suddenly, the situation seemed more about a young girl frightened by the prospect of change, rather than overbearing parents refusing to give their daughter the benefit of an education.

Ayesha added that it was difficult to talk to the school officials and asked if I would go with her to the school one day.

For a split second I hesitated, worried once again about journalistic detachment and the dangers of getting too involved with my subject. But then I said, yes, of course I’d go.

Ayesha’s new computer takes pride of place in the central kitchen-cum-dining-cum-living-cum-bedroom. Each month, as the family makes a little bit more money, new appliances fill up the apartment: a blender, a DVD player, a printer.

“Why you no come COPO?”

That was when the tide started to turn. From my shadowing Ayesha, it became Ayesha hounding me. It was no longer clear who had chosen whom, and who was the project.

When I didn’t show up for ESL or computer class, Ayesha would call me on my cell phone to ask what had happened.

Over weekends, she would call me using her boyfriend Yusof’s cell phone. Yusof, a 20-something Pakistani janitor working in Manhattan, was Ayesha’s third boyfriend. She would tell her mother that she was going to work, then met up with Yusof instead. Sometimes he would take her on the Q to downtown Manhattan for an afternoon in the city.

Ayesha would call to tell me that she was in Manhattan with Yusof. There was an unspoken suggestion that I should meet up with the two of them. We never did but I knew that if I continued to visit her in Brooklyn, it would only be a matter of time before I would have to invite her to my Greenwich Village apartment in return. Then Ayesha would have gained entree into my world.

A few weeks later, Ayesha called me again to tell me that her family had bought a computer and asked for help setting it up. Unfortunately their “new” computer turned out to be not so new and had no accompanying software or dial-up service. But Ayesha wanted to email. Email Yusof, I imagined. I explained what she would need to do before that could happen.

Then Ayesha asked if I could help her sixth-grader brother with his homework. So I stayed a while longer, going through Mohammad’s assignments with him. As I finally prepared to leave, Ayesha asked me to come again soon to have tea with her family. I couldn’t say no.

Somehow or other, Ayesha had taken over our reporter-subject relationship and revised the terms of our engagement. She had made herself a fixture in my life rather than a once-a-week anthropological experiment. She wanted me to become her computer technician, interpreter of official letters, Manhattan tour guide, and teacher. As she’d said from the beginning: her best friend.

I started avoiding her calls. When she did catch me unawares, I made up excuses as to why I was no longer attending the computer and ESL classes or visiting her home.

Yusof started calling me too, even when Ayesha wasn’t with him. I avoided his calls as well. When he finally got through, he told me that he and Ayesha were no longer an item. She had been double-dating and he had broken up with her as a result.

The next time I talked with Ayesha, I learnt that her new boyfriend (of a month) was the owner of a CD shop in Midwood, a 30-something Pakistani named Firoz. Firoz was a catch but once again, her parents didn’t know about her latest boyfriend. When her parents went out, leaving Ayesha at home alone, she would sneak Firoz into the apartment. She gave Firoz my cell phone number and had him call me from his shop, inviting me to come over for free CDs. I pleaded overwork and lack of time to avoid going down.

Eventually, Ayesha got the message and stopped calling.

Looking back now, I understand that Ayesha was trying to use me to reach out and grab at her version of American life: freedom, fun, learning, and independence. To me, living in America meant looking like an American. But for all my designer clothes, I think Ayesha’s idea of America was better than mine.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

South Asian Women’s Organizations in the United States
URL:http://www.sawnet.org/orgns/#Pakistan

Anju Mary Paul

Giovanca performs a dance number to a Spanish-language song. (Elizabeth Gawne)

Though Andreas Villazane, 22, was his high school’s prom king — its first Hispanic prom king, in fact — the night wasn’t quite complete.

“I didn’t go to prom with my boyfriend because I was afraid of what people would think,” he says, touching the collar of his coral dress shirt. He looks up and smiles. “We couldn’t go to prom together, so we got to do it tonight.”

Villazane sits at a confetti-spangled table behind a bevy of red and black balloons, taking a breather from the dancing at Noche de Arcoiris (Night of the Rainbow), a queer youth prom held in Pilsen, Chicago’s largest Mexican American neighborhood. Behind him, in the Mexican Fine Arts Museum’s West Wing, the few wallflowers watch the crowd from the sidelines. Fledgling drag queens test their heels on the dance floor, from time to time touching the ends of their hair. A girl in a red salsa dress, grinning, elbows a male friend towards a tall, dapper boy in a fedora, and a slightly older white lesbian couple, one in a suit, the other wearing a midnight-blue gown, grin sheepishly at the boys grinding on the dance floor. Two girls share a tender kiss.

The event is hosted by WRTE 90.5 FM’s Homofrecuencia, the country’s only Spanish-language queer youth radio show, as a reclaimation of the beloved and benighted high school ritual. It is, to the best of their knowledge, the first time a queer prom has been held in Chicago outside of the North Side’s Boystown, Chicagoland’s mostly-white gay mecca. “That’s part of the point,” says Homofrecuencia producer Tania Unzueta,. “We want to create a safe space for us within our own communities. We want to be who we are, where we live.”  Unzueta says the invisibility of Latinos in the queer community inflicts a crisis of identity on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and quuer Latino youth. “It implies this dichotomy,” she sighs, “that gay means white, and Latina means heterosexual. If youth can’t see gays within the Latina community, and Latinas within the gay community, it affects their image of themselves.”

Rafa and Giovanca, the newly crowned Noche de Arcoiris’ prom king and queen, mug for the camera. (Elizabeth Gawne)

Between songs — mostly top-40 hip-hop and dancepop, with a dash of salsa — Unzueta goads promgoers to sign up to compete as prom king or queen. “Gender doesn’t matter!” she adds. “Sign up for whichever one you want.”  Later, as the contestants strut and dance onstage, one of the kings-to-be seductively strips off his tie, and suggestively begins to unbutton his shirt. “No, no!” shouts Jorge Valdivia, WRTE’s general manager — but he’s laughing through the reprimand. “We want to keep doing this prom!”  

About half the dance’s attendees are high school students or recent graduates; the others, older queer singles or couples seeking to revisit, and reimagine, their own high school proms. Alicia Vega is a board member of Amigas Latinas, a Chicago-area group for Latina lesbians founded in 1995 that was instrumental in promoting and supporting the event. She looks in wonder on the starry-eyed couples entwined on the dance floor. “I’m genuinely amazed that these youth are able to come out at such a young age,” she marvels, her dark eyes twinkling. “I couldn’t imagine taking a girlfriend to prom.” Vega didn’t come out until college, and didn’t meet other Latina lesbians until she encountered Amigas Latinas.

With other Latinas, she says, “there’s an automatic connection. There’s a lot of cultural issues we share, particularly involving family.”  That most Latinos are  Catholic plays a large part in their experience of homophobia and heterosexism, as do cultural expectations surrounding marriage and children. “It’s like that in Hispanic culture,” comments Helen Guerrero, a Northeastern Illinois University freshman. “Parents think your purpose is to have a job, get married, and have children. Especially if they’re religious.”  Unzueta adds, however, “some parents don’t understand that being a lesbian doesn’t mean you don’t want children. Then again, they don’t understand that if you’re a woman” — straight or gay — “you may not want them either.”  These combined pressures make “school and home … very different worlds,” she says. Even Jose, a high school junior whose mother is lesbian, is out to friends but not to his family. “It hasn’t really come up,” he says quietly.

Onstage, amid students’ hooting and cheers, Valdivia and Unzeuta finally select a prom king and queen: Rafa, a slim boy with a winsome smile, and Giovanca, a dazzling drag queen with round, doll-like eyes. Valdivia places a purple tinsel crown on each of their heads, grinning. Earlier, Giovanca performed not one, but two drag numbers in the evening’s show, which also featured the hip-hop moves of the Chicago Gay Youth Center dance troupe, a performance by Andres de los Santos, the Midwest’s only Spanish-performing drag king, and the brief heartfelt remarks of Carlos Tortelero, director of the Mexican Fine Arts Museum. “This is always your home, remember that, okay?” Tortelero says. An unassuming man with warm blue eyes, he made the rounds of the room during the prom’s catered Mexican dinner, shaking the hands of everyone in sight. Giovanca remained the crowd’s undisputed favorite, however: Flaunting sculpted legs, flawless lip-synching and flashy dance moves, she, too, rounded the room, taunting and flirting with men and women alike.

Giovanca, out of drag, is Victor Gomez, a Homofrecuencia radio contributor and host. Gomez nonchalantly strips off a slinky red dress and sleek brown wig as we talk backstage before the event. “There aren’t enough resources for queer youth in Pilsen,” he remarks. “There aren’t places where they can meet each other, support each other. When you have to go outside your community to get that, it seems unfair. The North Side isn’t always somewhere you fit in.”

Arreguian and Guerrero met and began dating at their Catholic high school. (Emily Alpert)

Guerrero echoes his comments. “Around here there isn’t really much for anyone who’s into the same sex,” she says, pushing her dark curls back behind her ears. She adjusts a dainty string of pearls over the neckline of her black lace dress. “You don’t meet anyone unless someone introduces you to them.”  She’s accompanied by her girlfriend, high school junior Yolanda Arreguian, who she met at her Catholic high school. I ask her how she knew her girlfriend was gay. She narrows her eyes satirically, and gestures demonstratively to Arreguian, who wears a dress shirt and tie, her hair short and spiky. Short of butch/stud visibility, word of mouth is the main way queer community is built in students’ high schools, particularly those where conservative or religious students have prevented the formation of gay-straight alliances.

“I’m the only openly gay student in my high school,” says Arreguian. Behind her glasses, hers is a direct and candid gaze. “I don’t care who knows, and I like being out.” At her Catholic high school, Arreguian actively organizes masses and attends religious events. “I might not agree with what Catholicism says about homosexuality, but I haven’t lost my faith,” she contends.

Over a massive cake, frosted with Homofrecuencia’s inverted-triangle logo, I marvel to Unzueta at the confidence of Arreguian and the other youth I’ve met. She nods, but reminds me that these teens “are comfortable being here to begin with. There’re others we still need to reach, who think they’re the only gay Latina people in the world.”  In contrast to Guerrero and Arreguian, who say “weird stares” are the worst they endure at their Catholic high school, other students have suffered unremitting taunting and threats at their schools. Some have dropped out.

I ask Arreguian how she developed the confidence to be an active, openly gay student at her high school. “I figure that being Latina alone gives you so many stereotypes,” she begins. “There’s stereotypes about being Hispanic, about women, about gay people, and I break all those stereotypes. I’m a Latina getting an education. I’m a girl getting ahead in life. I’m a tomboy and I’m proud of it.”  She grins. “I like telling people about it, because so many stereotypes can be broken by us.”

Guerrero taps her arm, ready to return to the dance floor. “And I think the fact that I can come out here with my girlfriend and not have everyone’s eyes on me is wonderful,” she adds, before Guerrero pulls her away from the table to dance.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Amigas Latinas
URL: http://www.amigaslatinas.org/

Boystown.com
URL: http://www.boystownchicago.com/

Homofrecuencia
URL: http://www.wrte.org/homofrecuencia/

In The Fray Contributor

The perfect couple on a spring break cruise in  March 2004. Photo snapped by Lindsey’s mom, who considers Todd her “adopted son.”

I met Todd on a curb outside a Target store. When I heard a high-pitched squeal reminiscent of sixth grader, I instantly knew I found a friend. It was all part of Michigan State University’s freshman orientation. They welcomed us with shopping bargains; I came home with a catch.

When Todd, my friend Danielle, and I exchanged phone numbers on the bus ride back, I knew Todd wouldn’t call Danielle; he would call me. Unlike Danielle, Todd and I both knew our exchanges weren’t a regular pick-up attempt. He called that weekend.

Todd was born and raised in Chassell, Michigan. You’ve probably never heard of Chassell because it’s located so far north in the upper peninsula of Michigan that Todd could basically reside in Wisconsin. Although Todd doesn’t have a yooper (the name by which downstate Michiganders refer to Upper Peninsula dwellers) accent for some odd reason, when he’s feeling festive, he will whip out his impersonation of an average yooper’s slang: “Aaaaayyyy, let’s go in da howuuuse.” His hometown is so small that Todd graduated with 23 people, including himself, and had to drive an extra 20 minutes every morning to get to the closest school that had a pool for swimming practice.

“They don’t like anyone who’s not like them,” Todd says of his family. “White, middle-class Americans.”

I imagine the conservative and religious Sauvola clan embracing me, fawning over the perfect daughter-in-law, except for the fact I’m gay.

Why don’t they have straight rallies?

Although fast friends, Todd and I took two months to come out to each other. Our discomfort showed in our hesitation at attending the annual Gay Pride rally held directly across from my apartment  complex. Despite a little skepticism — “Do they have straight rallies?” we’d asked each other — we walked over.

There were men in leather g-strings, protestors outside the fenced area screaming we were all going to hell, and the two of us— confused, new to the scene, and somewhat bothered by the fact that there were 3-year-olds present.

Quickly, however, we came to appreciate the sense of unity a Pride rally can provide. Everyone there was either LGBT, or accepting of our lifestyle, and damn, it felt good.

Michigan State has come a long way when one considers that 50 years earlier, rather than gay pride rallies, two massive purges took place on campus, in dorms where Todd and I might have lived. Police ransacked gay persons’ homes, arrested them, and forced them out of college.

Witnesses told of friends who were handcuffed and taken in for lie detector tests to determine their sexuality — as well as their future careers. Two professors were “excused” from their teaching responsibilities, while nearly 30 men were harassed or contacted by the police.

Today the campus, like much of America, has changed. According to Michigan’s Triangle Foundation, voting statistics from the 2004 election show MSU’s campus town of East Lansing as one of only two cities in Michigan that voted for equal gay rights on marriage. Despite this seeming embrace of acceptance, the history of both the city and university reflects a continuing struggle of the kind of repression Todd and I still face on an almost daily basis.

During the 1990s, when Todd and I were mere 8-year-olds, not even thinking about boys or girls, MSU assembled a task force on LGBT issues. Between 1990 and 1992, the task force dug through old campus newspapers and personal accounts — a total of 100 people, middle-class folk, gay, straight, old, young, faculty, staff, and students, offering their private thoughts and experiences — to unearth a history of what happened on MSU’s large midwestern university from the ‘30s through the present.

In the 1930s, MSU’s campus (then Michigan State College) had nothinglike the amount of tolerance it has today. In fact, if you were gay, you guarded your secret and kept a watchful eye out for any undercover surveillance. According to the task force report, the closest establishment to same-sex bars back then was the Black and Tan Club on Shiawassee Street in Lansing. The B and T Club was not a gay institution, but something equally risky — a place where black and white people danced together, and where, emboldened by this barrier crossing, the occasional homosexual person would show up. The gay revolution, however, didn’t begin to appear until the 1950s.

In that era, despite the hatred toward gays, there was still hope for a place of their own, the task force reports, and two bars opened thei doors to the homosexual public. The Quick Bar, and later, Woodward, gave small groups a place to go, and more began to follow. These bars not only gave gay people a place to relax, and socialize, such as Spiral — the hippest gay bar in downtown Lansing — does for Todd and me, but they also allowed LGBT folk to open up and meet other people like themselves. The task force reports that after the bars opened, groups of people would meet in their homes and have private parties, expanding their gay networks.

Coming to terms

My own upbringing mirrors the slow adjustment of MSU and the state of Michigan because it has taken me years to accept my own sexuality.

I was born in Flint, Michigan, notoriously known for its run-down General Motors plant, Michael Moore, and the forever deteriorating image of the city since the car factory shut down. My parents, both GM employees, relocated when I was in fourth grade from Burton, Flint’s nastier sister city, to Grand Blanc, a ritzy, well-off city that’s known for the annual Buick Open — a golf extravaganza Tiger Woods and other pros play in. I went to Goodrich Area Schools, situated a few miles up the road from my home, in the middle of acres of corn fields. Corn isn’t really exciting, and neither was Goodrich.

It’s been hard for me to open up and be myself. In sixth grade I already knew something was “wrong” with me when I fell asleep dreaming of a female criminal whom I, the undercover agent, was supposed to hunt down and cuff. I found her in a corner in an abandoned warehouse, and all I could fixate on in my dream was her breasts. At the time, I didn’t really know what homosexuality was, so I told myself it would be alright. I would be alright.

Right I was about my sexuality; wrong I was about it being alright. After dating a dopey gothic boy almost my entire my freshman year of high school, I started to date a girl. I met her in the hallway one afternoon after lunch period. I had heard rumors she was gay. She was a year younger than me, and even our first conversation flooded with flirting. She told me, “The rumor’s true,” and walked away, telling me she’d see me later.

We kept our relationship secret from most of the school, but everyone pretty much knew we were dating. When you live amongst the corn, the corn has ears, and those ears pick up small bits of talk all day long. We never faced any hatred, however; Goodrich was pretty laid back. But, on the other hand, I felt I was separating myself from my family. I had to come clean with my mom, my confidant, so I wrote a page-long letter dishing everything to her — my relationship, my feelings for women, my fear she would reject me. I left it on the table, and slept between bumps and knocks in the house, constantly waking with the lump in my throat suggesting that my mother was at my door.

The next morning was the worst of my life. My mom cried, told me it would be alright, told me not to lie to her anymore, and told me a lot of other do’s and don’ts. She said we would get through the awkward stage, as long as I didn’t lie to her about dating people.

The last part didn’t take. I continued to lie to everyone at home, then in college until my sophomore year. But that was before I met Emily.

Emily came along months after Todd. In fact, when I first laid eyes on Emily, it was Todd who listened to my lovelorn descriptions of her. He was my personal relationship advisor, giving me the nod or shake of the head when cute or interesting ladies walked down the street. In my eyes, Emily was perfect — quiet, reserved, fashionable, and edgy. There was an aspect to Emily that was so mysterious, I couldn’t help but want more.

After Emily’s roommate, Katie, and I paired up for a project in history class, my interest was piqued. Katie constantly bitched and moaned about how irresponsible Emily unplugged her alarm clock at least once a week. I laughed and wondered how someone could deal with such a jerk, but after Emily and I started going out, I didn’t mind the alarm clock being unplugged every now and then.

Throughout all of this, Todd was by my side, slipping homemade cards featuring dancing butterflies under my door whenever love’s roller coaster took a dip.

It was during that freshman year when, down in the dumps and seeking an escape from MSU life, Todd and I headed out to the only 18-and-over joint that was also gay-friendly — Spiral Video and Dance Bar. We ventured out alone, and ended up at a table with another couple. They bought us tequila shots for the rest of the night and we danced in a foursome on the sweat-soaked floor. After being driven home drunk by the even drunker
couple, Todd and I declared Spiral would be our new home away from the dorms, and that’s where we would spend our weekends, dancing the night away.

Stolen pride

Emily, Todd, and Spiral were part of my coming out. Life on campus also allowed me to grasp my gay roots. Everyone was so liberal and open; there were signs hanging in dorms for meetings with other gay students, and the people I came out to never dropped their jaws in disbelief. I am so thankful I wasn’t on MSU’s campus during the 1960s, when life wasn’t a root beer float with whipped topping.

Fortysomeodd years ago was the breaking point for both homosexual people and campus administrators. Before then, there was no reference to homosexuality or gay arrests in any police report, on or off campus. But in the decade famous for its massive protests of the Vietnam War, it was evident gay people were gaining a voice and the police were clearly on guard. In 1960, “homosexual activity” was added as a category for complaints through MSU’s Department of Public Safety. Within a year after the category was added, nearly a dozen complaints and six arrests were made for what police referred to as“people engaged in or attempting to procure homosexual activity.”

As arrests continued through 1962-1963, campus landmarks were renovated in hopes of altering “physical arrangements to discourage the recruiting of homosexuals.” The campus student union had its basement men’s room remodeled in hopes that gay people would stop meeting there. Yet the handfuls of hidden spots on campus where heterosexual people, such as beneath the Belmont Tower, met remained intact.

In 1969, after police raided the Stonewall Inn — a dark and dingy predominantly gay club in Greenwich Village — campus groups become electrified by the resistance put up in New York. They admired their gay brothers and sisters who resisted the police force, and they too wanted to take a step into the accepting future. It was then, after Stonewall, that a weekly discussion group for homosexuals was formed off-campus, and MSU became one of the few universities across the country to have a gay organization.

Another positive step toward acceptance happened when the Gay Liberation Movement was registered as an on-campus student organization on April 27, 1970, and following it, the MSU Radicalesbians. Not far behind was a human sexuality course, taught by Eleanor Morrison, which focused on the components of sexual orientation and had assigned readings by lesbian and gay authors. MSU was becoming more accepting.

But progress for gay people is usually followed by repression. On March 4, 1972, the Michigan Gay Confederation established and planned the first Gay Pride Week on MSU’s campus. In June 1972, the start of what was to be Gay Pride Week provoked the first confrontation between MSU administrators and the Gay Liberation Movement.

Jack Breslin, MSU’s Executive Vice President, denied the organization permission to hang a banner at one of MSU’s campus entrances.

Complaints were filed with the MSU Antidiscrimination Judicial Board on the basis of sexual discrimination. In lieu of the complaints, Breslin responded, “I honestly believe that it is well within the powers of the MSU Board of Trustees to refuse permission for activities promoting lifestyles which are clearly at odds with the general atmosphere of the university.”

Arguments ensued regarding whether homosexuals should even be allowed to file complaints with the Judicial Board, and eventually the Board of Trustees decided complaints could only be filed by gay people if they were related to job discrimination. Through all of this, the banner was still not flying, and the first Gay Pride Week had come and gone.

Finally, in 1973, on-campus gay groups were allowed their banner recognizing Gay Pride Week. Kind of. Before the week began, administrators announced that the poles were going to be removed for “maintenance reasons,” the banner’s ropes were cut, and the landmark vanished from sight.

Downward spiral

Todd and I used to joke during our freshman year that if we didn’t find partners, we’d settle down together, get married, and fake the rest of our lives. If we were straight, we’d be able to do whatever we wanted. Todd and I could kiss by campus landmarks and no one would think twice about it. We could go into lingerie stores and buy handfuls of bras and underwear for me, and the clerk wouldn’t hesitate to serve us. If waiters asked the question, “One check, or two?” and we replied, “One,” they wouldn’t smile sly grins and think to themselves, “I wonder if I can get both of them home tonight …” It happens to Emily and me all the time.

Usually, though, we can find safety from the wandering eyes and glaring stares when we go to gay bars. So, a few weekends ago, Todd, Emily, and I went to our old favorite, Spiral. We still go to Spiral after all these years because it has a New York feel in our very non-New York town. When walking in, the industrial feel of the nightclub is punched out in tall, metal chairs adorned with red velvet on the cushions. Candles burn, little lounges are filled with red velvet couches, the bathrooms have red velvet curtains instead of doors, and the overall feel is pristine and modern.

Emily and I were sitting, sipping our glass-bottled beers, when a man approached Emily to tell her she was beautiful. She smiled, thanked him and proceeded to ignore his presence. You get these creeps all the time at the gay bar — men out to woo a lesbian.
The man finagled his way into a seat next to Emily and continued to tell her she was gorgeous. I tried shooting him a no-trespassing look, letting him know I was the only one who was going to eat sushi that night. There’s nothing more frustrating than a straight person trying to convert your lover. Instead of throwing a big fuss, though, I just pulled Emily onto the dance floor.

All of a sudden, I see him again. He’s talking to Emily, and I can tell by her uneven smile that he’s still telling her she’s beautiful, still trying to get into her pants, still being a pig.

“We’ve been together for two years,” I hear. “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”

Emily’s smile is waning and my patience is growing as thin as the air on the packed dance floor. My friends, who can feel my tension, form a human wall between Emily and the man. It’s literally me, Emily, two friends, and the man trying to squirm his way into our dance circle. We’re still trying to keep our cool, dancing, but the man persists. He gives my friends the finger, picks my girlfriend up, raises her to the ceiling, and puts his face in her crotch.

I don’t remember if I shoved the guy, grabbed Emily, or if he just let her go, but we spilled off the dance floor in one fluid motion. I found Todd and his date and explained the whole situation; disbelieving, Todd and his date gallantly offered to kick the guy’s ass. I couldn’t stop thinking if Emily and I had been a straight couple, the man wouldn’t have had the nerve to so aggressively try and break us apart. I was surprised by the depth of my own anger. I hated this interloper and, if I didn’t want to be banned from my favorite gay bar, might even have entertained the idea of macing the bastard’s eyeballs.

And this is still the life we live, every day. We’re constantly battling to open ourselves up, dealing with a society that still wouldn’t mind repressing us and all the while politely doesn’t understand us. MSU has given Todd and me the chance to become who we are, and become more assertive along the way. We might not be 100 percent open, but we’re getting there.

Without the help of MSU’s understanding student population, or the Pride festivals Todd and I still venture to today, I might still be resting in the proverbial gay closet — a place where no LGBT person ever likes to hang out. And those pride festivals Todd and I used to feel weird about? We go to them every year, in as many cities as we can. Last year, Todd spent the night at my apartment, and when we woke up, the park across the river was filled with white trailers, rainbow flags, and tons of people. People just like us. We got dressed and walked over together.

This time, we stood by the fence where the protestors were and laughed at them. We ate elephant ears and strolled around the various vendors. We were happy children were there, because after all, when I have kids, I’m going to want them to see all sides of life. But most important, and closest to my heart, my girlfriend broke her pact of never showing public displays of affection and held my hand. And for the first time ever, I finally felt complete.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > RESOURCES

Michigan State University’s LGBT website
Resources, event listings and services for students, staff and others.
URL: http://lbgtc.msu.edu/

ORGANIZATIONS >

Triangle Foundation
One of Michigan’s organizations serving the LGBT and allied communities.
URL: http://www.tri.org/

In The Fray Contributor

Where young Americans are made: The 9 Ball Pool Club on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn.

“Immigrant” is a four-letter word in Brooklyn schools. Much worse than “nigger.”You can call your best friend a nigger if he says something stupid, but to call someone an immigrant is to brand him a misfit, an intruder, someone who doesn’t belong.

Brooklyn is 40 percent immigrant, according to the Newest New Yorkers report, published by New York City’s Department of City Planning in January. In Midwood, the Brooklyn neighborhood south of Prospect Park, most immigrants come from Russia, Ukraine and Pakistan. Each country is well-represented in the trash-talking that goes on at the 9 Ball Pool Club on Coney Island Avenue.

At the pool hall, the teenaged sons of all those Russian, Ukrainian and Pakistani immigrants mix with boys from everywhere else: Afghanistan, Puerto Rico, Palestine and Bangladesh. Catholics, Jews and Muslims. White, brown, and black. They start to drift in from 2 p.m. when Lasha, one of the hall’s owners, opens its doors. Usually they hang around the two San Francisco Rush 2049 video machines by the door, one kid racing his virtual car, others hanging over his shoulders and backseat driving. Lasha sits behind his counter in the far corner of the hall and listens to Russian radio. When the place fills up a little, he switches on the television suspended from a corner of the ceiling that seems to only play MTV music videos.

The All-Americans

On a blustery afternoon in January, Fat Cat and Rabbi Rooski are waiting for someone with money in his pockets to walk through the pool hall door.

Seventeen, born in the United States but with parents from Puerto Rico, Fat Cat has shoulder-length brown hair, a round face and a short, round body. His voice is like a girl’s — a soft and sibilant Hispanic whisper — but each of his eyebrows has two parallel notches shaved out of it — a well-known gang identifier. Fat Cat is an “O.G.” — an Original Gang-member — so you don’t want to try calling him a girl.

Rabbi Rooski is from Ukraine, tall with short-cropped blond hair below a backward-turned baseball cap, and a slightly pimply face. The Rabbi came to the United States nine years ago, when he was eight. His real name is Edward. “Ed-waard,” he tells me, stretching out his name in a put-on Russian accent. (He normally speaks strict New Yorker.) “My name is Ed-uaardo. I come from Uu-kraine: The mah-therland of mah-fia country.”

The two boys are looking for pool partners willing to share the cost of an hour at a table. A tall, dark-skinned boy opens the door to the hall and instantly, the Rabbi is on him. “You got any money?” he asks. The boy, startled, shakes his head and walks right out.

“I’ve got money!” 13-year-old Ahmad from Pakistan pipes up. Ahmed “talks too much shit” according to Fat Cat. He’s been playing San Francisco Rush with Geis but he’d rather shoot pool with the big boys and this afternoon, the big boys can’t afford to say no.

I chip in a couple of bucks as well and together, three cool teens and one 29-year-old reporter, the four of us have enough money — $8 — to pay Lasha for a rack of balls.

Geis who has been abandoned by Ahmed, walks over to watch our game. From Yemen, Geis arrived in the States when he was less than a year old. He’s 13, short for his age, and thin. Geis prefers Bob’s Store, a video arcade down the street on Newkirk Avenue to Lasha’s, because arcade games are a lot cheaper than pool. But Bob gets angry with kids who loiter around his place and shouts at them when they start to fool around. Lasha is a lot more relaxed about a bunch of kids hanging out at his pool hall not doing anything. He shouts at the kids to be careful with his sticks, or to stop playing when their time runs out, but they never listen.

Fat Cat (right) with his friend David outside the Newkirk Avenue subway station.

The Non-Americans

The boys call Lasha an immigrant. It doesn’t help that he wears tight-fitting, brown corduroy pants and a beige, long-sleeved, turtleneck t-shirt with a sleeveless, brown leather jacket on top. He is a heavy-built bear of a man, who arrived in the United States from Georgia three years ago and has yet to acquire an American fashion sense or accent.

“Can you be an American if you weren’t born here?” I ask the boys, just to be sure.

“No!” Fat Cat and Ahmad reply immediately in unison. “Then you’re an immigrant.” To them it’s an either/or situation — American or Immigrant — you can’t be both. (They all see themselves as American.)

“You can try,” suggests Geis, but his undertone sounds doubtful.

“Can you tell just by looking at someone if he’s an immigrant?”

“Yeah,” the boys say confidently. “It’s the way he looks, the way he speaks, and all that. His dress is different. His voice.” They point out Shanl who’s been standing on the periphery of our conversation, quietly listening.

“He’s an immigrant! For sure!” they shout, happy to have found another one.

“How can you tell?”

“Just look at him!”

Shanl retreats inside his jacket and his eyes dart between the boys and me. He wants to be an American — he tells me afterwards that he is one — but he’s wearing the wrong kind of clothes: a white-and-blue striped, cotton polo t-shirt underneath a black jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. His jeans are the wrong shade of blue and his black-and-white sneakers are a no-brand variety. The other boys are in North Face, Nike and Sean John. They talk with a Brooklyn accent: the softened T’s, the rounded vowels. Shanl, who arrived in the United States from Pakistan a year ago, has yet to master this style of talking. He rarely speaks but when he does, his voice betrays his recent arrival.

Kamal (bottom) with his “brothers” (left to right) Asif, Mike, Angel, Chris, and Louis in the basketball court of Kamal’s old primary school: PS217 in Midwood.

“So what if you was born here?”

An American teenager living in Midwood, Brooklyn needs to have seen the new Usher video and the latest Will Smith blockbuster. An American teenager needs to know the rudiments of pool and basketball and football. He must know who is in which gang — whether it’s the Crips, the Latin Kings, or that Afghani gang across the street. He’s got to know how to talk — not to parents or inquisitive female reporters — but to other kids. Talk slang, talk back, talk big. An American teenager needs to have a command of the various accents of his neighborhood so he can make fun of friends’ backgrounds. In Midwood, that means being able to fake a passable Russian accent and a bad Pakistani one.

But there are immigrant children who can do all this — who look and speak like Americans — but who refuse to call themselves American.

When Kamal Uddin, a short 17-year-old, walks into the pool hall, in his bright red jacket and his slicked down fringe, he makes it a point to shake the hand of all the boys there. He tells me each of their names and the schools they go to. He grabs Fat Cat round the neck and tells me that Puerto Rican Anthony is his cousin. Wasif, from Afghanistan, is his best friend. Then he leans close and whispers that he used to have a crush on Geis’ sister from Yemen. As soon as the words come out, he straightens and says it was rather she who had a crush on him. He says there are no cliques drawn along ethnic or racial lines in the mixed pool hall crowd. “There’s just like a brotherhood thing, you know?”

But when I ask Kamal if he thinks of himself as an American, he says no. He tells me how after September 11th, the kids in his school started calling him names because of his brown skin and his Muslim faith. They started calling him an immigrant. Kamal says he never answered back. But one day, his principal heard one of the kids teasing him in the hallway. “You know what?” the principal reprimanded the girl, “You’re not a citizen either. You’re an immigrant too. We’re all immigrants except the Native Americans.”

Since that day, Kamal has worn the badge of an immigrant with pride. And that too is a peculiarly American trait. “I was born in Bangladesh. That’s my country,” he tells me. “I can’t just come to another and say, ‘This is my country.’ Nobody can come and tell me that this is my country. So what if you was born here? You still have a background, you know? Those people who are born here, those are the people who say, ‘Yeah, I’m American straight up. American, born and raised.’ But come on, so what? You still have a background. We’re all immigrants. Speak the truth, we’re all immigrants.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > IMMIGRATION IN NEW YORK >

The Newest New Yorkers Report 2005
URL:  http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/nny.html

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Council of Peoples Organization
URL: http://www.copousa.org

Anju Mary Paul

The homecoming migrant and the author enjoyed a sweltering slow train to Shandong.

The three-wheeled wagon ground to a halt before a sprawling green and bronze field. So concluded the vehicular portion of the trip: 20 hours by rickety railcar from Shanghai to Shandong Province, several hours by bus to the city of Jilin, another few hours in a rickety van to the county of Jia Xiang, where we hitched a ride on a primitive wagon to a small village omitted from most maps.

Now, our driver took one look at the 600 meters of lumpy mud ahead of him, the result of a recent rainstorm, and told us he could go no further. My friend Hai Rong and I would make the final stretch of the migrant’s long pilgrimage to the “lao jia,” or home village, on foot.

Hai Rong, the migrant I was following home, had traveled over 1200 miles and 30 hours to arrive at the family farm — from China’s richest and most dazzling metropolis to a rural heartland that was displaying the first budding signs of Reform-Era modernization. I had come along for the ride, and was now finding myself nearly spent before we got to the front door.

Each step in the soft brown muck felt laden with anticipation. Hai Rong was exhausted, but energized by the thought of being home again after six months of working and living on her own in Shanghai. In a wrinkled white blouse and dusty black skirt, towing plastic bags of gifts and food she had purchased in the local town, the 16-year-old stepped briskly toward her destination: a simple cement compound at the end of the road. I tried to keep pace with her, but lacked her motivation as the weight of my camcorder and backpack mired me in the pasty mud.

Beaming, Hai Rong said that she had a feeling her mother hadn’t slept all night. She just knew, the same way her mother must have known that her daughter had been too excited to sleep the night before the journey. And though her mother had no way of knowing when we would arrive — our train had been delayed several hours — she appeared in the distance just as we neared the settlement. “That’s a mother’s love,” Hai Rong said.

Having traversed an immeasurable distance, the blossoming 16-year-old with a doll face and a ponytail was greeting her mother for the first time in months. The spunky peasant matriarch’s square face crinkled in wind-worn rapture.

The still farmlands of Shandong speed past the train windows.

Paying your dues, Shanghai-style

Like many other youth from the countryside, Hai Rong had left her vocational high school a few months earlier to “da gong” or work in the city — the only way for girls like her to earn a decent living and a chance at leaving the village. Lured by the freedom of living independently, she turned down her mother’s offer to pay for some basic vocational training in her hometown. The city seemed to hold better possibilities.

Once she arrived in Shanghai, Hai Rong found herself interlaced in a network of transplanted relatives. Her older brother, two cousins, and three uncles, all lived in the same part of the city, and had all left the village to pursue Shanghai’s promise of a decent living. Her uncle, a former truck driver running a struggling food distribution business from his tiny apartment, grudgingly agreed to look after her along with her other cousins, but his own financial troubles, along with his temper, made him a less-than-ideal surrogate parent.

As is often the case in urban China’s bustling migrant labor market, Hai Rong landed her first job through a relative: Her cousin set her up as a waitress at a hotpot restaurant. From there, she switched to another hotpot restaurant down the street, a flashier place with a seedy disco and private rooms for rent on the top floor. When the restaurant suddenly shut down, she became a cashier at Happy Island, an Internet and computer game bar with branches all over Shanghai.

Happy Island, unfortunately, had a shady side. Her coworkers had a habit of taking money from the register when she wasn’t looking. Frightened that the boss would blame her if he discovered money was missing, she used her own cash to make up the difference. When he eventually discovered the truth, her boss refused to let her quit and rewarded her honesty with a few days off instead. Hai Rong took this opportunity to escape the city for a while.

Back from Shanghai, Hai Rong greets her mother for the first time in
months.

Escaping backwards

The night before her departure for her lao jia, Hai Rong invited me to come with her. I had heard stories about village life in China; people had told me that a city girl like myself wouldn’t be able to stand it. So I decided that the countryside would test me the same way the city had tested Hai Rong.  

My first challenge arrived by rail — the slow train to Shandong. I struggled against delirium in the heavy Sweltering air, laden with the odor of cheap cigarettes and the sweat of people packed into every square inch. Hai Rong sat quiet and composed in her white blouse and somewhat rumpled knee-high stockings.

She’d always been the more obedient child, she told me. Her mother worried less about her soaking up bad influences in the city than about her older brother, who has a more rebellious temperament. Like many other village parents, Hai Rong’s mother and father, who barely had a grade school education and never left the countryside, saw the city as both an alluring galaxy of prosperity and a nebulous black hole that threatened to swallow their children. That she would “get polluted,” Hai Rong said, was her mother’s main fear.

While Shanghai symbolized escape to her, it also served as a different kind of cage. She had no close friends, and her uncle had taken it upon himself to make sure she was not corrupted by urban life. She enraged him by going to a disco with her cousin one night. Warning her that she would “xue huai,” or pick up bad ways, in that kind of environment, he forbid her from going again.

Nonetheless, Hai Rong’s de-rustification process was inevitable; her family could curb her behavior but not her questioning mind. She told me one night as I walked with her to her worker dormitory that she had no way of communicating with her parents. They lived in a different world, she lamented. “There’s no common language.”

But when we first arrived at her village, the language barriers and parental pressures seemed to evaporate temporarily in the tranquil atmosphere. We followed her softly smiling mother through a maze of alleys overgrown with grass, through the wide wooden doorway of Hai Rong’s home into a small courtyard, where a sheet of wheat kernels dried in the sun on the cement floor.

Hai Rong’s mother told us in a thick Shandong dialect, that just before we arrived, a rainstorm had damaged the power line for the village. We would be without electricity for a few days. Thankfully the 20-hour slow-roasting train from Shanghai had prepared me well for stifling heat.

Hai Rong’s return drew a small crowd of spectators: There were a few elderly people, including her paternal grandmother, and a few children, but most people were in their 30s or 40s. Noticeably absent were people of Hai Rong’s age. Her village is typical of the Chinese countryside near booming coastal cities; children are sent away for school for as long as they have the money and the willingness to study, and then they leave home to work.

Hai Rong proudly gestured to her home’s small luxuries, for which she had a new appreciation after five months of cramped, shabby city living: the date tree at the center of her small yard, fresh grapes ripening on a bush by the entrance, and in the back, vines bearing cucumbers and beans. Everything was free, she boasted. You couldn’t even buy these beans in Shanghai markets.

Now that she was home again, Hai Rong was momentarily liberated from economic worries. In Shanghai she counted every penny and struggled to save some money for her parents. Tasting a bit of Shanghai’s wealth enhanced the bitterness of her poverty, while returning to her village made her feel rich.

In a way, she was. The main room of their home exemplified the rising standard of living among many Chinese peasants, bright and gaudily furnished with mirrors and glossy wooden furniture. A large color television was enthroned prominently on the wooden cabinet, alongside a worn-out karaoke mixer.

Hai Rong presented the gifts she had dutifully bought on the way home. To the sound of cracking lychee nuts and the sucking of ripe peaches, Hai Rong’s grandmother, aunt and mother sat with us in the living room and questioned Hai Rong about Shanghai. Was the pay good enough? What kind of work was she doing? Which was better, Shanghai or the village?

Hai Rong answered patiently. “Shanghai has its good parts and so does this place,” she answered diplomatically. But she added, “Everything is more convenient there.” (I soon had an intimate understanding of this when I discovered that the bathroom for the next few days was a brick-walled compost area behind their garden.)

She took me on a walk through a wooded hillside where she had played as a child. Every time she passed something familiar, she would ask me whether I thought it was pretty.

“It’s not as beautiful as it was before,” she said. It had changed. Or perhaps she had.

She feared that people would say she had changed for the worse. “I’m so glad they didn’t say I gained weight,” she said as we walked around the back alley toward her grandmother’s house. “I don’t know why, I’m just always worried about that.”

But Hai Rong had little to be self-conscious about; her homecoming injected a vitality into the sleepy village bereft of youth.

Her mother was motivated to cook for the first time in months. Usually, she just ate a few bowls of noodles to sustain her through the day. She saved the vegetables in the garden for when her children or husband were home. The younger generation seemed to be the only thing that propelled people to act.

Her village undulated to the rhythms of housework, the seasons, and the family. In Shanghai, by contrast, Hai Rong had entered an existence of atomized modernity. At work, she spent the day in the dimly lit anonymity of the Happy Island, watching bored urban youth while away hours playing video games or chatting online.

But in her village, the empty spaces of urban culture were replaced with empty lulls in conversations with family. She suddenly realized that she was now “not as talkative” as she was before she left; the right words eluded her. Now, when she was with her neighbors and family, she said, “I get annoyed. I don’t want to talk to them … When I respond to their questions, I feel tired, out of energy.”

“When I was younger, I was really rowdy,” she recalled, but her few months in the city had aged her, made her more aloof.

Hai Rong told me that night that she felt like there was no point in staying home for too long. She would go home in a couple of days.

That night, I glimpsed all three members of the family huddled around the bed in the living room, chatting aimlessly in the dark with a sweet intimacy that had eluded all of them for months. But the tranquility of the scene belied the fact that there would be few moments like these for the duration of their lives — maybe none. Economic realities did not permit the luxury of reunification.

A typical backyard in a village household.

Going to town

Hai Rong felt she was of little practical value around the house, since her parents, perhaps in their determination to get the children off the farm, had never taught them how to tend crops. Her presence, however, inspired her mother to get off the farm herself, at least for a day.

The next day, she and her mother pushed their small red motorcycle through half a kilometer of clay-like mud to get onto the only paved road that cut through the village. Every few meters, the two would pause, sweating in the roasting sun, and grab a stick to shove the mud out from between the spokes. I skulked behind them, ashamed yet relieved that my status as the foreign guest exempted me from this duty.

The town, the axis and commercial center around which local rural areas revolved, was typical for rural China. Old Chinese folk opera songs blasted out of storefronts advertising stereo equipment. Farmer’s carts were parked lazily on sandy crossroads hawking peaches and watermelons, clothing shops displayed glittery low-end polyester fashions, some of which were tailored for the potbellied figures of older women, others cheerily adorned with lace, cartoons, and English words for younger girls.

The contents and noise of the open storefronts and the street mingled sloppily. Sputtering motorcycles vroomed past ambling farmers. Middle-aged women, including Hai Rong’s mother, bargained fervently in the dank heat of the little shops, darkened in order to save electricity. Just behind the racks of T-shirts and lace lingerie, you could catch a glimpse of a bed, a crude stove, and a collection of empty beer bottles, shielded by a curtain.

Hai Rong asked me if I, as a bona fide city person, thought the town offered enough in terms of things to buy. She proudly said that this town basically had everything one needed. Everything except a Shanghai salary and a chance to get off the farm.

We visited Hai Rong’s old middle school, a neat white tile building, emblazoned with gold Chinese characters exhorting children to be diligent in their studies. Hai Rong was proud of her school. They had renovated the school grounds and the surrounding area so that it was even nicer than when she was a student. Even the poorer villages in China have seen notable improvements in infrastructure, schools and living conditions, partly due to government public works funding, and partly due to an influx of income earned through labor migration.

“It keeps getting better,” Hai Rong said with a smile. “I hope the next time you come, it’s even better.”

Some things in the village were getting worse, however. The main reason for the visit to the school was to meet with one of the head teachers. Hai Rong’s cousin, the eldest son of her uncle who was now working in Shanghai, had been neglecting his studies to play video games at the local computer bar, where many youth while away their afternoons in tightly packed computer cubicles.

“He’s gone bad,” said Hai Rong as her mother listened gravely to the young teacher’s warnings, delivered in peppery Shandong dialect, that the once top-ranked student was on the wrong path. “He’s been badly influenced by his father,” Hai Rong told me. The short, skinny adolescent had his father’s square, angular face, as well as his temper.

The long distances migrants journey to find a better life in the city often strain family relations, especially for men like Hai Rong’s uncle. He found another woman in Shanghai, who bore him a son. Since his first wife and two older sons found out about the affair, the household had unraveled. The mother’s life at home now consisted of “crying and wailing every day,” Hai Rong told me, and the boys, encouraged by their mother, had virtually disowned their father.

The labor migration phenomenon has atomized families across the country, and this boy’s steady downward spiral was just one indication that economic prosperity could have dark implications for China’s rural communities. “If I were him,” said Hai Rong, “I’d be the same. I’d hate [my father] too.”

Gazing at the campus abuzz with youthful vitality and ripe innocence, Hai Rong was nostalgic for her school days, before she had encountered the threatening urban world, before she discovered the “chou shi“ or “ugly matters” that marred her uncle’s family.

She ran into an old friend, who had been held back instead of advancing to the vocational upper middle school, as Hai Rong had. Hai Rong admired her friend because she was still in school. “But actually, she might admire me,” she reflected, because so many village children dream of finding steady jobs in big cities. If she had felt that her advice would have been valued, Hai Rong probably would have warned the youth that their idealism was at least partially misplaced. But when a teenager’s options in life are either a city of possibilities, both good and bad, or a flat tract of dirt to which her family has been chained for generations, the act of leaving the village is not so much the pursuit of an ideal as it is a quest to survive.

Hai Rong undergoes re-rustification.

Sweet duplicity

The oil bubbled and snarled in the wok. Hai Rong, her mother and I stood in a crude stone room with a small stove. We were making the main dish of the evening — tang gao, or sugar cakes. Hai Rong was eager to show me that you didn’t have to spend money to be able to taste these fritters of sugar, flour, and air — a coarse but cheap and satisfying treat that could be made from just a bag of sugar and dough.

Hai Rong’s mother kneaded and twisted the dough in the darkness as dusk began to close over the fields. She taught me how to drizzle my palm with a few drops of precious oil, and press a lump of dough with my fingers until I formed a small cup to house a teaspoon of sugar. The lump was then patted flat and deep fried into fuzzy patties of golden sweetness. It was a child’s treat for a grown-up daughter thinking of home.

The recipe, like Hai Rong’s lao jia as a whole, was simple. The city bumpkin’s complexities, on the other hand, were outgrowing the place. She bore the impact of the urban environment like a tender bruise. Her impatience and disdain for the country life were evident in her complaints that the people in the village were of a low class, or “suzhi,” or when she expressed her disappointment at how her uncle, whom everyone used to admire for making something of himself in the city, had brought shame upon his family. The realization that people divide themselves when moving between city and village, the discovery of duplicity inherent in Chinese migrant identity, is enough to cast shadows over a girl’s spirit.

Learning how to lie was a baptism of sorts for Hai Rong. One of the first pieces of advice her cousin gave her when she came to Shanghai was never to tell anyone you were there to find work — “da gong de.” Any indication that you were fresh off the farm was a green light for ravenous con men and other shady types who preyed on country kids with half-full pockets. So at the beginning of our journey, riding in the cab on the way to the Shanghai train station, she had replied with a quick “yes” when the driver asked us if we were students taking a holiday.

The habit of giving false answers, which she had come to think of as a game of sorts, followed her home. When we boarded the bus that took us back to the village, one of the bus attendants asked her where she lived. She then led the bus company worker on a 20-minute chase in which she dodged every question about her town and the location of her village, shaking her head and saying “I don’t know” when he asked if she knew how to get home.

I had never thought of being able to tell the truth about my identity as an indulgence, but in Hai Rong’s world, it was. As long as she was a migrant worker, her background would be at best a burden and at worst a mark of shame; to be mistaken for someone else was a relief for her, a temporary escape.

Hai Rong pushes the family’s only means of transportation through the mud on
the way to town.

City bound

The train car rocked gently as it throttled through the darkness.

For the return trip, we had bought tickets for the fast train, mainly at my spoiled American behest, since I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach another day-long cattle-car ride. Of course, even the “fast train” would take about ten hours, and we were too late to get seats — a more popular train often means standing room only.

Hai Rong and I were joined at Shandong train station by her second uncle, who, having returned briefly to his village to tend to farm work, was headed back to Shanghai to continue his job collecting recyclable trash on a bicycle cart. After some searching, we staked out a florescent-lit smoking alcove between train cars, setting up a small camp on our bulky luggage and dining on hard-boiled eggs and fresh-picked peaches.

Like the train we rode out of Shanghai, this one was packed with migrants, mostly lanky men in their 20s or 30s, all returning to city life, and to their city selves. To pass the time strangers chattered about where they were headed and what line of work had brought them there. The men standing next to us were part of a construction team bound for Jiangsu Province, one of countless work teams that were fueling China’s warp-speed development with migrant sweat.

The tracks stretched through the slick, rainy night, delivering the workers to their destinations, where, buoyed by wilting memories of lao jia, they would toil for another month, another year, until they earned enough to take them home to their children in the village.

But for younger migrants like Hai Rong, the goal of earning money in the city is not as clear. There is no feeling of urgency in facilitating the circulation of human and financial capital between the two worlds. There is only the somewhat aimless sense that working in the city is the only path they can take.

Hai Rong perhaps faced even starker challenges than did migrants with families to support, because her struggle was less obvious and went beyond economic subsistence. The harshness of both the village and the city had imbued her with an insatiable determination just to keep going. But without a clear path laid out before her and other young migrants like her, she was straining to attain stability and dignity in a tumultuous metropolis that seemed eager to derail her.

As the train doors opened on our destination, the peace and the sedate comforts of rural life — which elicited both frustration and nostalgia from its itinerant youth — were scattered in the cool haze of a city dawn.

The reporting for this article took place in the summer of 2004 during the author’s year-long research fellowship on internal migrants in urban China.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

PLACES> SHANGHAI AND RURAL CHINA>

Shanghai official website
URL: http://www.shanghai.gov.cn

Shanghai: Street Life/Night Life, photographed by Howard W. French
URL: http://www.howardwfrench.com/photos/Shanghai-day-to-day

Michelle Chen, “Shanghai After Dark,” Jinx Magazine
URL: http://www.jinxmagazine.com/shanghai.html

Craig Troianello, “The China Challenge: Life in a farming village,”
Yakima Herald-Republic
URL: http://www.yakimaherald.com/newsfeatures/china/china23.php

TOPICS> RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION IN CHINA>

“China’s Economic Reforms Likely to Increase Internal Migration,” Population Reference Bureau
URL: http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=6755

Jim Yardley, “In the Chinese countryside, fractured families,” New York Times
URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/20/news/china.html

TOPICS> CHINESE MIGRANT WOMEN>

Tamara Jacka, “‘My Life as a Migrant Worker’: Women in Rural-Urban Migration in Contemporary China”
URL: http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue4/tamara_intro.html

Zhang Ye, “Hope for China’s Migrant Women Workers,” China Business Review, May/June 2002
URL: http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0205/ye.html

Michelle Chen