Asian Workers Stories

REVIEW FROM PARAGRAFO JOURNAL

The literary canon of recent centuries was created by keeping at a distance almost everything that was not written by an elite – not necessarily economic, but certainly cultural, with access to already canonical readings, schooling and at least some conditions for the exercise of writing. The exception, reserved for literary studies and institutionalized only with Romanticism, allowed certain forms of oral literature, the romance novel and other so-called popular forms to be approached, but always maintaining a “safe distance”. Only as the 20th century advanced, when disciplinary boundaries began to show signs of rupture in an attempt to perceive the world in a more complete (and complex) way, did this approach prove to be insufficient.

Quickly going through the discussion of apocalyptic and integrated theories that Umberto Eco promoted and the theories and counter-theories that followed him, there is no need to ostracize so-called canonical authors and books, but it will be worth recognizing that theirs is a world where salons frequented mainly by white, educated men, Europeans or generously exported, on the ride of some grand undertaking, to lands occupied in other parts of the globe. Of course, in some of these points, other canons already existed, older or grander, and just think about the territory we call China today, but if we don't even bring these into consideration as often as we should, what opening do we have left to other horizons?

If there is no opening, we already know, there are those who force the gates. Asian Workers Stories, an anthology of texts organized and edited by Luka Lei Zhang for Hardball Press, has this potential. The texts gathered here are by authors from many origins in this vast territory that is Asia, from China to Indonesia, passing through Bangladesh, Singapore, Thailand or the Philippines. The styles vary, from intense realism to metaphor, from the narration of ancient stories brought to the present to the painful record of everyday life and dreams. The settings also vary, between factories, agricultural fields, houses that will never belong to the person writing, roads or other roads that are traveled in search of something that never seems to be consummated.

Between fiction and non-fiction, there are narratives that impress with the delicacy of the language in permanent confrontation with what it describes, as in the story “The Grave”, by Hamiruddin Middya. Others, especially those set in factories, such as “A Night on Sun Island”, by Wan Huashan, impose a rhythm that accompanies the repetition of tasks, cutting it off, suddenly, with the tragic and disorganized density that runs deep in the thoughts of those who narrate.

In non-fiction, daily stories such as that of Md Sharif Uddin, in “Stranger Life in Singapore”, stand out, illustrative of permanent despair, but also of the way in which these lives that take place in overcrowded and unhealthy dormitories where they only go out for the intense and poorly paid workday, they are the basis that sustains cities so often presented as exemplary (Singapore, in this case, which is not the only case).

Not all narratives are extraordinary in the way they structure and work with language, something to be expected in any anthology made up of several authors, but even in these cases, like in Wiset Sanmano's story, with an almost childlike innocence in the outcome, the voice who takes the floor in a field where it would be impossible not to hear it is still powerful.

What unites these texts and gives them coherence when grouped in this way are the living conditions of the characters (real or fictional), the rights that are denied to them on a daily basis, and the fact that these conditions are the guarantee of the functioning of a world system – of which we, those who read these texts from a distance, now gathered in a volume that we can buy from one of the major online retailers, are also beneficiaries, with greater or lesser awareness of it.

It also unites them, this assumed gesture of taking the floor, claiming speech and writing and giving them a place in this global space that we have stopped calling polis. In this unity, which fully justifies an anthology, it is, however, diversity that is necessary. Faced with the complexity of the characters and their psychological characterizations, the twists and turns of some plots and above all the multiple ways of using language, rich in polysemy, discursive modes and historical, cultural and social references, the reading of this book cannot be held hostage by any classificatory enthusiasm that organizes the texts into a sociological category and ignores that not only do they have an intrinsic literary value, but this value is part of the context in which they were born.

The reality of labor exploitation of workers, migrants or not, is not new, of course, and is not restricted to Asia. However, this global awareness shared by millions who are forced to abandon their home territories in order to survive, forcibly entering a system of intensive exploitation that begins with its own, extending to natural and structural resources, whose depletion and destruction intensify the need for more people to abandon the places where they live in order to survive. It's a rigged wheel of fortune, always leaving those who were already fleeing these places we call the global South upside down. That this shared consciousness is assumed in the first person and transformed into literature is something new in recent years. Therefore, if the reality that originates these texts is not structurally new, its contours are, in a certain way. The migration of people fleeing the devastation caused by the climate crisis, wars and extreme poverty (often a consequence of the climate and war conflicts, although not exclusively) is, on a scale that today we know is something new, and everything indicates that it will tend to intensify. It will not make sense, therefore, to compare these texts with others whose reality and context of production are miles away. But if such an exercise contributes to their health, dignity and often their lives in European factories in the 19th century, these workers who take the floor in each of the texts in Asian Workers Stories also seem to have little to lose beyond their chains.

Paragrafo, SARA FIGUEIREDO COSTA