Differently Abled Iraqis in America: On the 16th Anniversary

Sixteen years have passed since America (along with other countries) decided to topple Saddam Hussein and institute their own sectarian-colored government in Iraq. The U.S. move to disband the Iraqi military has also been the primary reason for the rise of armed sectarian conflict in Iraq. This post is a commemoration and acknowledgment of U.S. culpability. It hopes to center the lives of Iraqi people who still bear witness to the evolving events of militarism and imperialism. 

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Today while I was on the 101 bus venturing from Malden to Medford, I saw three Latino men discussing the motherland (pais) fervently in Spanish.  All wore fashionable hats as well as similar clothes. When two of them left the bus at one point, the remaining one joined the male bus driver and switched to converse in English. He remembered his homeland nostalgically as a place where he did not need to pay for juice or fruit. He also recounted how his hard-earned money in the U.S. could enable him to own property in the motherland. They both lamented the disappearance of a nearby Papa Gino's Pizza. The man bragged about his work and salary to the bus driver and wondered "how can someone earn without working?" He soon left after this statement and the driver wished him a good day.

First, I was struck by the capitalist contradiction in which his labor and remittances will contribute to the capitalization of his motherland, which I guess would also wipe out the practice of receiving free juice. Second, I was annoyed by his ableist understanding of survival, which is prevalent among Chinese immigrants as well. The second part took a while for me to digest and verbalize.

Today was also another class with Prof. Kamran Rastegar where we discussed the connections between colonialism and trauma. While the latter's definition has been criticized by some as Eurocentric, I found trauma as a useful concept to understand my own circumstances as well as the Iraqi friends I made in Louisville. One important intervention made by people caught in political events is that trauma is often ongoing. For my experience, the ideal "safe space" for processing trauma is often (sadly) only found in America or Western Europe, since lives of those in such places are placed at a higher value. Many places in Iraq continue to suffer under conflict and private security companies profit from the current scenario.

For many Iraqis, even after they enter the U.S., their trauma often cannot be addressed due to their racialized subaltern statuses. One of the Iraqi friends I met in Louisville, "A," struggles with the ongoing effects of trauma and the same ableist situations as told by the man I heard on the bus today. "A" believed that only work could secure himself a respectable livelihood in America. On the other hand, he also witnessed the demise of Iraqi men who do not become a middle-class family man, either due to their class position (lack of resources for marrying and/or supporting a partner) or due to their estrangement from American society. One of his former friends resisted wage labor and continued to live as a homeless person in Louisville. This former friend's existence calls to question the possibility of rehabilitating people traumatized by American imperialism. Similar to the man on the bus, "A" also acknowledges that "nothing is free in America," yet he also has a certain pride in his ability to work.

from : @johnnyrodgersis

22 hour
Y, a former mercernary and non-Arab Iraqi, found me as an ideal person to discuss his encounters with the American military-industrial complex. He acknowledged his privilege associated with his contribution to the (ever-changing) objectives of American presence in Iraq and how that helped him disabuse any Islamophobic biases from white people in America. He also demonstrated some conflicted feelings over his acts of killing, whether for political or economic gains. His trauma affected him in a negative way. Yet his trauma was not as obviously manifested as trauma of other Iraqis, or me, for that matter.

Others who did not contribute to America's military project had more ambivalent feelings toward their "new" life in America. Many did not relate to their opportunities in America in the same functionalist way as Y did. M, another non-Arab Iraqi, for example, did not adhere to masculine norms of either American or Iraqi standards and did not have the same impetus to integrate into American society as Y. M, as a receiver of unemployment benefits, was seen as less masculine in both Iraqi and American contexts than Y. Thus while America and its capitalism economy is structurally ableist and prefers immigrants with ableist bodies, the need to appear as ableist and available for work also depends on the subjectivity and masculine ideals of each person. Rutgers scholar Dr. Amir Moosavi has also argued that ideals of martyrdom (Shaheed) can be found in literary expressions as well as experiences of Iraqi and Iranian people during and after the Iran-Iraq war. These differences are important for people who wish to decenter white masculinity.

Another case that prompted my thoughts on this subject was the 《和陌生人说话》 interview with former mercenary Bai Xiaobao. One can watch the interview here on Youtube. Originally from a formerly semi-rural background, he achieved middle class status by risking his life in post-2003 Iraq. He leveraged the idea of necropolitics and capitalism to his advantage by serving four years (2012-2016) as a mercenary.

("Necropolitics is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die.")

Mr. Bai lived precariously along with other non-white mercernaries and prepared for his likely death: he wrote his mother's name as the recipient of the 4,000,000RMB life insurance. bought property near his hometown in China. He reflected how his worldview expanded after his encounter with Beijing and the internet where men discussed mercernary opportunities. Yet my question prompted by experiences of migration and globalization is that Bai Xiaobao's radical reassassessment of his life being more "valuable" in monetary terms in Iraq than in China. While he harmonizes his life choices by promoting China's society as stable and safe in comparison to Iraq, his acts of migration and re-telling can be subversive to China's state project.

Y similarly considered the idea of returning as a mercenary to earn money rather than play it safe with wage labor in the U.S. While ableism allows for some forms of labor, mercenary labor in Iraq has a logic that rejects the state's power of determining life and death. The Chinese and American government continue to profit from migrants in various forms, the former mostly of domestic migrants and the later being mostly migrants of color. Yet the biopolitics of ableism also relies on the idea that one necessarily appreciates one's body beyond all renumeration. If the concern of migrants are predominantly "who will take care of me when I am old," the mercenary (from subaltern backgrounds) has resolved this "money" problem with their own body.

Many of others follow the state logic that they will either die of natural death or state punishment and/or fail the stringent requirements for serving on mercenary forces. The bodies of these people often have to perform labor in order for their survival in America, despite that many aspects of their homeland had been destroyed by war and imperialism. Others, such as South Asian laborers, are exploited as well in Iraq. See: Documents Reveal Details of Labor Trafficking by #KBR Subcontractor in #Iraq.

Due to this reality of the people I know, I am very despondent. There should be more ways in the U.S. that addresse trauma without predicating on the assumption that the person will recover, since recovery is often centered around labor productivity. Centering the trauma of Iraqis should not require more labor from Iraqis, since it is the U.S. that created the dislocation in the first place. Yet there are also other participants in the post-2003 conflict, such as Bai Xiaobao, which complicate the politics of trauma and imperialism.


Further reading:

Achille Mbembe. 2003. Necropolitics.

Antonella Ceccagno. 2017. City making and global labor regimes : Chinese immigrants and Italy's fast fashion industry

Amir Moosavi. 2015. “How to Write Death: Disenchanting Martyrdom in two Novels of the Iran-Iraq War.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 35.

David Isenberg. 2009. Shadow force : private security contractors in Iraq. 

Gracia Liu-Farrer. 2011. Labor migration from China to Japan : international students, transnational migrants. 

Scott Fitzsimmons. 2017. Private Security Companies during the Iraq War: Military performance and the use of deadly force 

Ulrich Petersohn. 2013. The Effectiveness of Contracted Coalitions: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. 

Yun Gao. 2010. Concealed chains : labour exploitation and Chinese migrants in Europe.  

Working in a Louisville Supermarket

This year in February, I learned that I was accepted to a graduate institution and from then on I knew where I would live and do for the next five years. In the last few months of 2016, however, I was living on a week-by-week basis and had no long term plan. I have finally found the time to write about those days.[1]

A Chinese activist and intellectual in pre-communist China expressed the frustration, "Why am I not yet part of the working class?" He was speaking from a position of privilege, yet wanted to be in solidarity with the working class. Fortunately or unfortunately, graduate students and adjunct teachers are becoming increasingly a precarious social class; some have already become the working class and no longer need to ask that question. Yet even before I became a graduate student, I was already part of the retail working class.

I wanted to use Drake's song "Started from the Bottom" as the title, but that would have been too facetious. I actually descended to the "bottom" and worked my way up. This blog is about the experience at the "bottom." In 2016 October, due to unforeseen circumstances, I was living with some friends who were also quite precarious--one was a refugee living off benefits, and the other two were ex-refugees working as wage-laborers for 14.5$/hour and 14$/hour respectively. We were living in Shelby Park, a disreputable part of Louisville, known for violence.

Art in the neighborhood. "Building Something Bigger than Ourselves Together."

Luckily for us, everyone was able-bodied and healthy and generally we got along quite well. I was very upset with an unsuccessful Pakistan visa application for a history conference in Lahore, and felt that the embassy was destroying my future of becoming an academic. One of the friends, Yaseen, would comfort me and say, "We make the money. It's not the money making us." And I said, "Yeah，I write the f****** paper, not the embassy." Sometimes we cooked together, went to the club together, drank together, or watched TV together. Sometimes we talked about Iraqi politics, or joked about going to Tennessee on a whim (--it hasn't happened).

I lived there without working at a job for a few weeks, and later decided to find a job. I applied to Chipotle, a falafel shop, a packaging factory, and finally at an ethnic supermarket. I landed the ethnic supermarket job for 8$ / hour and also thought it was best for me to move out of the house. I pissed my mom off by using her credit card to rent a place at an Airbnb for a month. She confronted me and asked me, why I couldn't save money instead and stay with her? I said I needed time and space to apply to graduate school. She did not cancel the payment but swore to me that it was the last time she will pay for anything. So I went into the supermarket job with a "no-more-bridges-left-to-burn" mentality.

The woman who hired me has a very nice nickname--"Red." She asked me to call her Ah-Red, which does not indicate seniority even though she is a mother of two. She is from southern China and walks like a ball of fire. She speaks to Sun, the other cashier receptionist, in a Cantonese dialect; Sun calls her Big Sister Red. Her can-do spirit solves all the problems one could have in a supermarket. If someone needed to return something and get money back on their card, I would ask Red or Sun to help me. If anything needed to be fixed, Red would be up on that case. Red also knew the old customers and would talk to them when she was available.

When I first met her on a Monday, she was the only person at the check-out counter. She first said she would train me the next day. But when I went on Tuesday, I directly started on the job. It was very hectic as Thanksgiving was approaching and generally only two lines were open. The job needed someone who could recognize the myriad different types of Asian vegetables. I can't say I am much better than the average Asian American, since I did not eat that much variety growing up, but at least I could read the half-Chinese menu on the check-out monitor.

These vegetables were easy to check out because they already had barcodes. They were pre-packaged by Red's father, who also works at the supermarket but mostly behind the scenes. He also cooks lunch for us. Around 2pm, Red would bring her lunch to the front and tell us to eat in a very welcoming way. Lunch was served in the dingy storage section. When I ate, I sat between the office, where we would punch our hour cards, and the men's bathroom.

Highlight of the day

Red's father was definitely a good cook but sometimes didn't have vegetarian options. He was very insistent on me eating enough and I even ate meat in front of him. Later he was not happy with my association with the Iraqi friends, and became very distant from me.

Sun made this for me when Red and her father took Tuesday off.

The other Latino workers sat with each other when they had lunch. One guy, San Diego, was very nice and sometimes he would drive me home. San Diego doesn't like rap music and took care of unpacking the food items and placing them onto shelves. It seemed that he knew the products like the back of his hand and could even "read" Chinese packages. I did not have much interaction with the other Latino workers, besides checking out goods for them when they bought dinner from the supermarket, but I was generally fond of them. One of them would use the tips he earned from packaging fish for customers. One father and son who worked behind the fish counter were new from Honduras. Red would sometimes give them derogatory nicknames that she used for her own book-keeping.

The supermarket boss was a man from the north and would come in every now and then to check on things, including the CCTV camera. He had an issue with me reading my kindle at work. He said I should go roam around the stacks and learn the name of the groceries if I had time. Once his wife came to the store and deliberately blocked up the whole cashier lane because she could not decide on which goods she wanted to buy. Red took time to try and find exactly what the boss's wife wanted. I thought it was her way of showing her importance. 

A view from one of the cash receptions

I also had to deal with the cultural differences. I counted that the customers came from at least 20 different nationalities. An Indian man once even complained very rudely about how the Latino workers didn't understand English. I defended them by saying no one else had a problem with them before. Shouting was generally the tone of the day--both for the customer and the workers. Sun once semi-yelled at another lady who has not yet mastered English: "Do you want sugar in a CANE or sugar in a CAN???" The general consumers who visited also had shorter tempers than people who would shop at a non-ethnic supermarket. One Asian American girl once shouted at me for 5 minutes about how I suck at my job because I made a mistake in calculating the change. I was very stunned and Red apologized on my behalf. Red also would complain about how some customers would bundle two spring onions and try to pass it as one bundle. Red also said that a Vietnamese lady purportedly fiddled with the scale to get more and pay less and claimed that the food was for offering to Buddha. Red joked about her: how will Buddha be able to accept this "offering?!" One customer also knowingly smuggled out a bag of rice without allowing me a chance to scan the barcode. The cultural differences were definitely a highlight but also stressful since misunderstandings could arise at any time. One time a white guy even walked in the supermarket openly carrying a gun. He was with his girlfriend and bought a lot of cute Japanese snacks. I later complained to San Diego about it and he was very used to these customers.

Sometimes I would have the more solitary job of unpacking incoming goods and labeling them for distribution. It was less stressful but it also made my head dizzy after some time. Human interaction was also missed doing this particular job. I liked observing different patterns of consumption based on the different groups of people. Many non-Asian Americans also bought ethnic food and made it themselves. It was impressive considering that they learned how to prepare it themselves. I also observed how some people hated to depart from money in the form of cash--how they would hold onto it, how they would count each bill when they paid for something very small. How much it mattered to their being and sanity.

Packages next to the medicine counter. Many non-Asian Americans also bought Chinese medicine from this supermarket

Red hanging decorations up for the new year.

I usually commuted from the Highland to the supermarket, which was next to a highway. Generally I had to change buses because the Highland is not very connected to the rest of Louisville. Sometimes the bus would stop quite some distance from the supermarket, due to the difference in routes. Then I would walk along the highway to reach the place. I arrived at 10am or 2pm or 4pm, depending on the need as well as my schedule. I would punch the card, spend my time either at the cashier, or right next to the cashier unpacking the goods, or in the stacks. Work ended at 9pm. I would count all the cash money, leave 152$ in the cashier, and hand the rest to the boss. Then I would I would punch the card, commute back on the bus, or my friend CP would pick me up and drop me off at Highland. The weekends were the busiest and Red generally expected me to take Mondays off.

Some additional highlights from an otherwise dreary job: three Iraqi boys came to buy fish one day. I showed off my Arabic by saying "zyein," which means "good." They also said "zyein" back to me. Another highlight was a woman drove 2 hours from Tennessee to the supermarket to buy food stocks for her restaurant. One final highlight was a Hispanic couple: the wife commented on my beauty in Spanish to her husband (que bonita) while her husband remained silent. I also pretended I didn't understand. Other Chinese customers would also joke with Red about my new and youthful presence. Red would say in her typical can-do tone: this place needs young people to liven it up.

I also learned about food stamps at the job and tried to apply for them myself, unsuccessfully. The boss had to sign the paper proving I was working for him. He was not happy about it, even though it did not affect him in any negative way. He said with a mean joking tone: you are just working here to apply for food stamps. I wished that were the case! I would not have balanced the books if I needed to pay for my own rent, based on the rhythm and frequency I was working on that job. But with the schedule and flexibility in contract, I could have applied for graduate schools in the mean time. And now looking back, it was the right decision for that time. I left the job in mid-December and went back for a few days in January just to get the paycheck. Red was not very sentimental when we said goodbye but she was as good as a supervisor could have been in those circumstances.

The hardest part was not being bored on the job or being tired after the job. (Sometimes I even sustained cuts from handling the  fish scales or the live crab.) It was getting myself to think in the hustling way to make it to the job, and then "de-hustling" and think about long-term graduate school plans. It was absurd that I had to believe that I could have control over my research, when I didn't even know if the next customer will yell at me or not. I also found it very difficult to relax and read anything that required some kind of intellectual investment, since I was always moving from one chore to the other.

This experience informed me a lot in terms of immigrant differences and how theories of race are utterly inadequate without taking into account of the economic circumstances. I still don't know much about Louisville and much of what I know is from that work experience. I watched Moonlight during this period of my life and working had also informed my understanding of the protagonist and his lover. I also translated the short story A Mason's Hand by Pakistani author Ali Akbar Natiq, first published in Granta, during this time. It was about a worker's journey to Saudi Arabia and his precarious experience. I would not have been so interested in it if I did not share some of the protagonist's subjectivity.

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[1]Two sources were very inspirational for my writing: one is the book Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West, and the other is "Love in the Time of Trump," a conference on queer identity and class hosted by Dr. Kareem Khubchandani.

Personal Examples of Globalization and the Migrant Worker

What do we think about when we think of immigration? Back in the 1980s and 90s, many Chinese student-immigrants with grants had to work in restaurants to make ends meet. Writer Ha Jin describes about the work in many of his novels, such as A Free Life. When you ask a Chinese student-immigrant in the U.S. nowadays, the class condition has moved up a notch and consequently affected their view of American society. I recently got into a heated debate with a Chinese IT worker in the U.S. on social media about affirmative action. She defiantly called affirmative a "fascist policy." She argued in a libertarian vein against preferential for African Americans in principle since Americans have free access to 12 years of public schooling, blind-sighted to the inequality of educational resources. I was thus alarmed by how some mainland Chinese are drawn to the rights of US citizenship without understanding the movement that created the freedom, namely the Civil Rights Movement. Aside from the lack of historical education and racial sensitivity, which I should discuss in a future post about Chinese people's views of other minorities in the U.S., this particular Chinese immigrant's positioning is definitely an upper-middle class one. She worried about her kid's education and how affirmative action could affect her child's university choice in the next decade. The Chinese students who study abroad nowadays probably have even fewer chances to interact with possibly undocumented immigrants than back in the 1990s.
My perspective of immigration is also mostly preoccupied with the influx of middle class immigrants into America. As I have mentioned in my previous post about civic awareness among mainland Chinese immigrants and U.S. immigration reform, my friends are waiting on H1B visas, which provide for immigrants with technical skills. Recently, the Canadian government decided to abolish its investment immigration program and eliminate the backlog of applications, which will also affect the future of a lot of Chinese upper-middle class. Here is a post for a few class-conscious stories of migration brought to my mind through the internet and personal experience. 
Traveling across borders means different conditions for different classes. I am definitely do not have to deal with the circumstances of the working class. Documentation and sponsorship are always important. JD, an Indian cook who dislikes MSG, travels around the world. He does not know English very well but has enjoyed living in most countries, including Cambodia and Germany. He sought my help for obtaining a Portuguese visitor’s visa in China. He had no printer or computer at his command and needed to rely on friends and acquaintances like me for advice and resources. I am simply amazed by how far JD has gone despite his lack of English skills and internet access. 
Laurie Taylor of BBC's Thinking Allowed podcast interviewed Kimberly Kay Hoang, a Boston College professor and sociologist, on her field work of sex work and international migration. Hoang’s field work focused on Vietnamese sex workers who intend to marry up to “first world” countries such as Britain and Australia. Of those who make it as brides eventually, many become the breadwinners of the family and work in jobs such as nail salons. Many would not return to Vietnam unless they have enough money to start a business. Globalization never meant much to me personally until I realized that my friend Vikash faced the same dilemma as the Vietnamese brides. He works in China in the service sector with terrible conditions, without minimum legal counsel or a union for protecting his rights. He has finally won back his passport which has been illegally held onto by his boss for four months. He misses his home in Uttarakhand, India, yet he refuses to go home empty-handed. A lot of pride is associated with leaving one’s home, which the Chinese idiom captures so well--“return to one's home (only) with silk clothes (衣锦还乡).” But what is the level upward mobility for these cross-border migrants? How many return home successfully according to their expectations? Or does their contribution only come as remittances?
The border-crossers chose the less-trodden road and are determined to bear many hardships. When one speaks of immigration reform, PACs like FWD.us try to focus it on middle class. The DREAM Act focuses it on the image of a disciplined and self-sacrificing youth. The migrant worker certainly has her own perspective of the issue and would not share either the DREAM Act version or the FWD.us version. Invoking different class experiences is important when discussing immigration, because different experiences would lead to very different conclusions.