Sweatshop

I'll keep this short, unlike the novel I wrote yesterday. I am tired. The heat kept me awake, but also my guest, who was talking on the computer 3 in the morning. I need to talk to him about that. It's very hot in my apartment. The irony is that there's an 80-lb air conditioner still sitting in its box by the door. I simply have no time to open it.

I didn't have time last night to take care of the AC. I hardly had time to cook for the week and eat some dinner. I went to kungfu after work. It was an oven in there. Some men were sweating so much that their kungfu suit (or whatever you call it) was soaked entirely and sticking to their skin. Gross.

The elevator wasn't working, so I had to walk up the stairs, for the first time. When I passed the second floor I saw through the door that it was a sewing factory. A Chinese woman was putting things in order, standing among mountains of cloth. I didn't think any clothing factories still existed in New York. Even sweatshops couldn't compete with the sweatshops of Mexico and Indonesia, or, for that matter, China.

Then I spent the next two seconds remembering my childhood in the sweatshop. I wasn't really working, though my confused memory suggests that I at least helped. It was illegal to have minors in a factory, but then again, the factory was illegal in more ways than you can count. I remember the spindles, the sewing machines, and of course, the mountains of cloth waiting to be transformed into clothes. I remember the smell, which was the same here, on the second floor. I remember the sounds of the spinning machines, the presses, and people all talking as loosely and angrily as my Mother, the person who dragged us there because she couldn't watch us at home without working. I remember my little baby sister was there too, toward the end of my high school when I no longer wanted to have anything to do with the so-called family. The factory wasn't a fun place. It wasn't a horrible place, but it wasn't fun. Nothing to do, pretty boring.I remember my mother complaining often about how she was cheated of her wages. She wasn't an illegal resident, but there was no way for her to pursue an employer who skipped town with the workers' wages. I remember one time she even tried to write a defamation note to whatever authority exposing the illegal nature of such and such factory.

I realize I have forgotten about the sewing factory as a part of my growing up in this city, as much as I have forgotten that there were roaches here, there was suffering in many corners of this city of thousands of bars and restaurants and trendy clothes and fancy cars, and tango.

Slowly, living in New York, I am remembering the things that I thought were gone, disappeared with the new face of a city I really didn't know, only pretended to know so I could tell people I was a New Yorker. There was an article on the Times about how the weekend ridership on subways was actually increasing to nearly that of the weekdays. It attributed this phenomenon partly to safety of a city that wasn't there before. True, I would not have ridden the subway past 11PM. The train back home went through the bad bad neighborhoods that are now more expensive to live in than New Haven, have more trendy shops and galleries and restaurants. Now I go home at 4 in the morning and the 7 train is packed, the same 7 train that brought me out of Jackson Heights where the Colombian drug cartels operated while I was busy visiting my best friend and waiting for her attention.

Every now and then I saw those old subway trains with the corrugated exterior. I think the E-train is the only I have seen like that, though most of them were now the modern kind that has robot announcing the next stop. When I see those trains, I wonder where the graffitis are. There were so many graffitis on the trains I took to school, including the inside. I wonder where the heroine addict was that I saw one morning in my sleepy mode to school. Dead? A writer? Politician, of course. Or perhaps found God.

I have been here for about two months. I haven't thought much about my past here, as you can tell from the kinds of blog entries I write, most of which are about some girl or another. I guess that's good, in a way. Why let painful memories drag you down. But perhaps part of growing new roots back in the old pot is about searching the places of the roots left behind.

Besides, I thought plenty about how girls were torturing me already when I was going to high school in New York. That's never news….