Folding Stories as Medicine
In Ceremony (1977), Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko describes stories as “…all we have, you see,/ all we have to fight off/ illness and death./ You don’t have anything / if you don’t have the stories” (2). Exploring the transformative and therapeutic implications of storywork, literary and medical humanities scholar Arden Hegele writes,
Storytelling in its healing capacity is inextricably linked with ritual, a poetic component of a multigeneric ceremony designed to bring about bodily change through the power of language. The Laguna/Sioux writer Paula Gunn Allen describes such “medicine stories” as “ceremonial narratives that produce ‘mythic’ (metaphysical) states of consciousness and/or conditions.”
Hegele recaps how narrative medicine has become a “bona fide” sub-speciality “that aims to enhance healthcare through effective communication between caregivers, doctors, nurses, family members, and patients.” Citing Rita Charon’s books Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006) and Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (2017), she elaborates on how narrative medicine involves the “skills of recognizing, absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by the stories of illness” (4). Narrative medicine encompasses open-ended methods of inquiry, self-reflection, and mindful attunement; it requires that medical practitioners attend to patients’ stories with sensitivity, patience, and care, while also examining their own narrative competence: “your capacity to receive, interpret, co-constuct, and bear witness to the stories your patients bring you.”
BurmAmerica is the title I’ve adopted for a transnational ethnographic research project focused on Burmese diasporas in the United States, their foodways, and interracial encounters. One component of this resesarch involves tracking the devastating impact of COVID-19 among resettled refugees from Burma/Myanmar. Sharing the ethical orientation of Transformative Hope: Religious Responses of Asian American Elders to Racism, BurmAmerica practices a deep listening to the stories of loss, struggle, and resistance embedded in the reproductive labor economy of food processing. While Transformative Hope offers a video archive of the talk stories of religious elders, the following selection of meditations experimentally enfolds the testimonies of refugee survivors who have witnessed the loss of family members during COVID-1D with the reflections of an Asian/American feminist listener invested in connecting BurmAmerica to deep structures of U.S. settler-colonialism and capitalist extraction from the brown undercommons.
In late 2021, I concluded my inaugural survey of BurmAmerican foodways by quoting an extended jeremiad from San Twin, a BurmAmerican grocery worker who lost her mother Tin Aye to corporate cruelty and COVID-19 in March 2020:
JBS denies it did anything wrong, but my mother, who worked for JBS for 12 years, was almost certainly exposed to COVID-19 in the Greeley [Colorado] meat packing plant, where she worked long, hard hours to keep America’s grocery stores well-stocked [sic], and an endless supply of meat available for summer grilling . . . .
It made me sick to hear OSHA only fined JBS $15,615, the maximum allowed. That’s less than $3,000 per death. My mom’s life is only worth $2,230?
My mom was a healthy 60-year old working woman with no preexisting conditions . . . Then one day at work, she started showing symptoms . . . . the on-site clinic at JBS . . . told her it was just a common cold . . . and sent her right back on the floor . . . . she asked her supervisor if she could . . . go to the bathroom. He told her no. And my proud, beautiful, hard working mother urinated on herself. Soaked in urine, she put her head down and kept working. And all the while, the virus was wreaking havoc on her body.
You wouldn’t have heard this story. After all, she was just a refugee-turned-meatpacker ....
I don’t enjoy telling our story. It hurts to remember. But the most painful thing is going over all the what ifs? If JBS had closed earlier. Or cleaned the plant more thoroughly. Or gave the meatpackers personal protective equipment immediately. Tin Aye, my mom, didn’t matter nearly as much as the bottom line . . . .
My mom was a meatpacker. It’s the kind of job where you come home dirty every night, dead tired. It’ll never make you rich, or bring you glory. But it’s the kind of job America was built on, the hard work of everyday people. My little brother is a Marine, deployed overseas. He’s willing to risk his life for his country. My mom never should have been forced to risk hers, especially for a company that doesn’t care about its people.
In May 2022, I revisited San Twin’s powerful October 2020 op-ed and Tin Aye’s story during a zine-making session led by Marina Peterson, using the process of cutting, rubbing, and gluing paper to enfold a BurmAmerican daughter’s courageous words and tender analysis of her mother’s death into a tactile object that others in HWMI could literally hold.
September 2022 Meditations on bones, ancestors, and the land
Within Native epistemologies, knowledge is based in interdependence and comes from the land: “Indigenous knowledge is fundamentally relational, linked to the land, language and the intergenerational transmission of songs, ceremonies, protocols, and ways of life,” explain Margo Greenwood and Nicole Marie Lindsay.
For immigrants from Burma/Myanmar and refugees from Southeast Asia, our claims to “America” or endeavors toward geopolitical belonging within the United States are often fraught. As with virtually every other Asian American, our origins and loyalties are repeatedly under interrogation, marked by contestation, and riven with precarity. Yet, the desire to make a home in the United States and to lay claim to the sociopolitical privileges of citizenship remains a deep-seated aspiration for many who are serial migrants and have been displaced for decades or generations.
My family is originally from China. My grandparents left the country in the early twentieth century – either searching for new economic opportunities or fleeing Communist upheaval and revolutionary chaos. Both my parents were born and educated in British Burma, but the three of us and various other family members migrated from Rangoon (now Yangon) in the decade after the post-independence military coup of 1962, when being Chinese became a danger, a disadvantage, and a hazard, and as the United States opened its immigration windows to recruit professionals from Asia to bolster the scientific workforce. In 1993, my father and mother returned to Myanmar (Burma’s new postcolonial moniker) to gather my paternal grandmother’s remains. They exhumed and carried her bones to southern California to be re-buried alongside my paternal grandfather, overlooking the 10 Freeway (so their children and descendants could wave at them as we drove across the region). Although my parents and I hail from across the Pacific Ocean, we are simultaneously naturalized citizens and relatively recent immigrants to the United States. Yet my ancestors’ bones too are part of this land and the stories of California.
In March 2020, Tin Aye became the eighth JBS employee to die from COVID-19 in Greeley, Colorado. “She was a super woman,” opines her daughter. Born in Burma/Myanmar, Tin Aye had worked for Karen Women’s Organization and the Burmese Women’s Union advocating for human and women’s rights. As a political activist, she faced threats to her life and was forced to flee from her home in the 1990s while pregnant with her first child. Like many displaced people from Burma/Myanmar, Tin Aye ended up in a Thai borderland refugee camp for fifteen years, where she married and started a family. Subsisting on donated rice and beans, without plumbing or electricity in a bamboo hut, Tin Aye and her husband Aung Kwah Toe had two children, both born in the camp. Tin Aye cleaned houses, washed clothes, and looked after pigs to earn money. After the family left Southeast Asia in 2007 with the assistance of a sponsoring agency, they migrated to Denver, Colorado. Tin Aye, who could speak no English, found employment working the night shift at the Greeley slaughterhouse run by the world’s largest meat processing company, JBS. She regularly made the 64-mile commute from Denver to Greeley, located on the high plains of northern Colorado, by carpooling with other Karen immigrant workers since she could not drive. The family eventually resettled in Greeley: a predominantly rural, working-class, white/EuroAmerican, and Chicano/Hispano town of about 100,000 people, built on dreams of utopian agriculture and known for its food processing factories – beet and meat – and little else.
In 1869, Greeley was founded as an experimental utopian farming community "based on temperance, religion, agriculture, education and family values" by Nathan C. Meeker, a New York Tribune agricultural reporter, with the backing of editor Horace Greeley, who popularized the phrase "Go West, young man." According to the 2009 census, Greeley had the highest poverty rate among Colorado's largest cities and one in every five people in Greeley (~21.7 percent) lived below the federal poverty line. In mid-2020, Greeley became the site of the state’s second-largest novel coronavirus outbreak as 316 workers from the JBS plant tested positive for COVID, along with 5 corporate employees. Although Tin Aye had worked steadily at the JBS plant for twelve years, her family could not afford a headstone (despite the funeral settlement offered by JBS). The United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7 organized a well-publicized memorial for six deceased union members across from the JBS plant in June. After a local TV station set up a Denver7 Gives account in the family's name, online donations enabled the family to purchase a headstone in November; remaining funds went to help with the family’s mortgage and grocery bills. "The peace, the peace. I don’t know how to describe it. I think that she have a good new home," said San Twin when Tin Aye’s family could finally materially mark the premature death and grave of their beloved matriarch.
By coincidence, my partner’s parents and sister are buried nearby – a little over five miles away from Tin Aye and JBS, in the adjoining statutory town of Eaton (population ~6000). When we attended the latest burial at the family gravesite in 2021, we drove through Greeley. Members of his family also worked in the food industry and sugar processing factories, yet his roots predate the United States. He can trace his family genealogy back to the 1800s when the region was still part of northern Mexico. When asked “when did your family come to the United States?” he replies with a version of “the border crossed us.” His response underscores how the United States came to exist through the westward appropriation of territory. The lands that make up the southwestern states of Colorado and New Mexico were first stewarded by Others -- Indigenous nations (Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute, Lakota, etc.) and communities of Indios, mestizos, Hispanos, and Mexicans -- well before and as they were claimed by an expanding Eurocentric settler-colonial nation that enforced racial segregation well into the late twentieth century. Although he feels deeply rooted in this land, I reflect on how Southeast Asian refugees-as-late-settlers are incorporated into the mythical American “melting pot.” Under what conditions do the stories of Burmese immigrants become visible or legible? How are BurmAmericans’ contributions marked or re-membered within national histories and political ecologies? Can we be recognized as more than grateful model minorities and disposable cheap labor? I hope that my interpretive retelling and analysis of these often-overlooked stories of BurmAmerica might productively illuminate some of the dynamics of ethical co-occupation, deep listening, and transformative justice.