Title: Asian Workers Stories
Author: ZHANG, Luka Lei (ed.)
Publisher: Brooklyn, NY: Hard Ball Press, 2024
Working class stories are often pigeonholed as low-quality narratives about gritty reality or even worse, collectively labelled as a leftist propaganda. Asian Workers Stories challenges such perception. It is an anthology of 11 pieces of fiction and 5 pieces of non-fiction by Asian workers about their diverse lives, dreams, and hopes.
In the historical landscape of Asian modern literature, progressive authors wrote stories that highlight the economic hardship of the working people, class inequality, and the tension between different social classes. For example, the 1929 short story “Kani Kosen” 蟹工船 (“The Crab Cannery Ship”) by Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二describes the horrible working conditions of crab cannery workers in Hokkaido (Japan). By giving voices to marginalized communities, these stories serve as a chronicle of struggles against social and economic inequality.
In colonized Southeast Asia, progressive authors attended to the social injustices experienced by native working populations due to the industrialization processes under Western high imperialism in the region (1890s-1930s). For example, the 1906 novel Banaag at Sikat (Radiance and Sunrise) by the union-activist Lope K. Santos contains a plain-spoken message of social agitation which illustrates “the struggle between progress and reaction, exploiters and exploited, capital and labor” (Mojares 1998: 224) in the early years of American rule. The 1929 short story “Răng con chó của nhà tư sản” (“The Teeth of an Upper-Class Family’s Dog”) by the realist author Nguyễn Công Hoan illustrates the economic and social injustices experienced by lower-class Vietnamese under the French colonial rule. The 1930 novella Masih koerang berat? (Still not heavy?) by Roli-’ah (a pseudonym) describes the long working hours in a grocery store in Bandung (Java) under a “devilish bloodsucking owner”; this instigated workers to demand an 8-hour workday – the first global modern campaign for labor rights that found its way in the colony as part of the native workers’ resistances against factory discipline.
As the impacts of the Great Depression hit the colonies, native authors reacted to the grim reality of the struggling colonial capitalism by dramatizing the depleted lives of the working people and their resistance, despite the tightening nature of political oppression (including stringent censorship) in the late colonial period (see Yamamoto 2019; Keo 2021). The 1936 novel Giông tố (Storm) by Vũ Trọng Phụng clearly reflects the author’s “hatred of class privilege and obsessive concern with the relationship between colonial capitalism and the deterioration of sexual morality” in French Indochina (Zinoman 2003: 128). The 1937 novella Merah (Red) by the Sino-Malay author Liem Khing Hoo 林慶和 recounts the story of a prijaji-turned-union activist who detested the capitalist greed of his fiancée’s father, a cigarette factory boss, and resented the colonial state apparatus as he ended up being exiled to Digoel, the colonial gulag. Vi Huyền Đắc’s 1939 play Kim tiền (Metallic Money) dramatizes the story of a ruthless coal mine owner who in the end was brutally killed by the striking workers – and hence, the colonial secret police banned it to be staged (Nguyen 2016: 33). By challenging the oppressive structures of economic imperialism, these stories serve both as an emancipating medium for organizing native workers, and as a powerful tool for advocacy to claim their rights.
Writing in this dual tradition of struggle and advocacy, contemporary working-class authors in Asia, as presented in Asian Workers Stories, reflect the vicissitudes of labor migration, flexible labor market, and social vulnerability – which are the inevitable consequences of “Compress Development” (Whittaker et al., 2020), i.e. the development path taken by many Asian countries that brings a rapid pace of economic development yet offers narrow and piecemeal social protection programs.
Issues in inter-Asia labor migration – ranging from recruitment, job placement, working conditions, and social supports for migrants – are well reflected in many stories in this anthology. Both Zakir Hossain Khokan and Md Mukul Hossine in their short stories, “Rain” and “Ship Phobia” respectively, tell the tragic stories of male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. Based on his decade-long experiences and observations as a Bangladeshi worker in Singapore, Md Sharif Uddin in his short essay, “Stranger Life in Singapore,” describes the “subhuman lives” of migrant workers in the country. These stories underscore Singapore’s migrant worker policy in welcoming male Bangladeshi workers on fixed-term employment contracts to maintain a steady supply of “cheap” labor for the country’s labor-intensive sectors, especially in the marine and construction sectors. The use of low-wage temporary migrant workers suits both the contingent needs of the industries and the surveillance power of the state that deny them accessing long-term residence rights and citizenship, within the framework of the country’s authoritarian capitalism.
In the context of feminization of migration, scholars have noted the steady increase in the number of female migrants in East and Southeast Asia from the late 1970s. Their voices, however, are often unheard and ignored. Asian Workers Stories offers us a window to listen to their voices and understand their lives.
Rolinda Onates Española in her short stories, “The Kind of Home” and “New Year in the Air,” Janelyn Dupingay in her “What Draws Us Home,” and Julie Ann in her essay, “A Cherished Experience,” collectively illustrate the emotional turmoil of Filipina migrant mothers, as the breadwinner in the family, who had to work abroad in Singapore and leave their children at home for the duration of their long stints. Both Indah Yosevina in “A Tinge of Farris Wheel,” and Stefani J Alvares in “The Autobiography of the Other Lady Gaga & Other Dagli from Saudi Arabia” recount stories of (Southeast Asian) migrant workers in Saudi Arabia who had to endure physical, sexual, and mental abuses on daily basis. These stories highlight the challenging conditions of many female and transgender workers, in their search for better income to support their families, who have to sacrifice their personal needs, ambitions and dreams by working overseas for many years of their lives.
As flexible labor market is forcefully implemented in many parts of factory economies in Asia in the belief that such policy will increase efficiency and create jobs, Wan Huashan’s short story, “A Night on Sun Island,” and Shengzi (a pseudonym)’s “Notes from the Factory” show us the dark side of the coin: the gruesome working conditions in the global supply chain factories of our time. They chronologize the sense of alienation caused by low-wage and long-hour work, the lack of job security and social mobility, and the erosion of personal dignity. As such, they can be read as a testimony to the dehumanization of young workers and the manufacturing of their consent under factory discipline to create a league of obedient precariat.
But workers are not passive victims. Wiset Sanmano’s short story, “Thongphun’s Prestigious Path,” and Mengyu’s essay, “My Experiences as a Domestic Worker,” showcase how characters fight to retain their self-worth despite societal forces working against them. They illustrate how workers are actively pursuing change and building alliances with other social groups to break the cycle of vulnerability. In the tradition of advocacy, these stories highlight the continuing importance of the working-class literary production as part of their collective action against exploitation.
Asian Workers Stories is a celebration of remarkable stories by working class authors as they collectively highlight social resilience, the desire for a better life, and the possibility of change. In this celebration, its editor, Zhang Luka Lei, deserves our high praise for bringing these stories to a wider audience.
Reviewed by Jafar Suryomenggolo
Chercheur associé, Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE), Paris.
Visiting Senior Lecturer, Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (ILAS), Kyoto University (2025).
References:
Keo, Phirith. 2021. Littérature et censure en milieu colonial : le cas de l’Indochine (1887-1945). Unpublished PhD thesis, Aix-Marseille University.
Liem Khing Hoo. 1937. Merah. Malang: Paragon Press. Available online: https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/163175 (accessed on January 10, 2025).
Mojares, Resil B. 1998 (1983). Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940. Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press.
Nguyễn Công Hoan. 1929. “Răng con chó của nhà tư sản”. English translation by Quan Manh Ha: 2011. “The Teeth of an Upper-Class Family’s Dog.” Cirque: A Literary Journal for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest 5: 24-26.
Nguyen, Martina Thucnhi. 2016. “French Colonial State, Vietnamese Civil Society: The League of Light [Đoàn Ánh Sáng] and Housing Reform in Hà Nội, 1937–1941.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11 (3/4): 17-57.
Roli-’ah. 1930. Masih koerang berat? Bandoeng: Boelan Poernama. Available online: https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/176087#page/1/mode/1up (accessed on January 10, 2025).
Whittaker, Hugh, et al. 2020. Compressed Development: Time and Timing in Economic and Social Development. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Yamamoto, Nobuto. 2019. Censorship in Colonial Indonesia, 1901-1942. Leiden: Brill.
Zinoman, Peter. 2003. “Hải Vân, The Storm and Vietnamese Communism in the Inter-war
Imagination,” in Southeast Asia over Three Generations: Essays Presented to Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, edited by James T. Siegel and Audrey R. Kahin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, pp. 125–143.