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HOW WE MAKE IT: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community

Tin Aye Zine

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4. Align the Body to Noise -by Cynthia Ling Lee Handwritten text on a watercolor background. The text reads: “align the body to noise / You encounter a grating sound over which you have no control: a leaf-blower, construction, baby crying next door. / Turn off any additional sounds (podcast, music). Let the sound enter your body. Breathe deeply and steadily as you dance to the sound, exploring its texture, rhythm and timbre. / When silence arrives, relish it.”]

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Folding Stories as Medicine “This is not a story to pass on” or Telling during “Not Tellable times”[1]

In Ceremony, 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” (1977, 2). Storytelling in its healing capacity is linked with ritual, a poetic component of a “multigeneric ceremony designed to bring about bodily change through the power of language” (Hegele 2017). Laguna/Sioux scholar and literary critic Paula Gunn Allen describes such “medicine stories” as “ceremonial narratives that produce ‘mythic’ (metaphysical) states of consciousness and/or conditions” (1986, 72).

BurmAmerica, the working title of my transnational ethnographic research project focused on Burmese diasporas in the United States and foodways, has led to my tracking the devastating impact of COVID-19 among resettled refugees from Burma/Myanmar.[2] Sharing an ethical orientation with my earlier COVID-related video project (with Russell Jeung and Valerie Soe) Transformative Hope: Religious Responses of Asian American Elders to Racism (2022), BurmAmerica practices a deep listening to stories of loss, struggle, and resistance embedded in the reproductive labor economy of food processing. While Transformative Hope offers a audiovisual archive of the talk-stories of religious elders, the following set of meditations experimentally enfolds the testimonies of refugee survivors who lost family members to COVID-19 with my own reflections as an Asian/American feminist listener invested in connecting BurmAmerica to deep structures of US settler colonialism and capitalist extraction from the brown undercommons.

In 2021, I concluded my inaugural survey of Asian American 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:
… my mother, who worked for JBS for twelve 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 sixty-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. (San Twin 2020)

In May 2022, I revisited San Twin’s powerful 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 hold.

September 2022: Meditations on Bones, Ancestors, and Land

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. Like other Asian Americans, our origins and loyalties are repeatedly under interrogation 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 serial migrants who have been displaced for decades or generations.

My grandparents left China in the early twentieth century: searching for economic opportunities and fleeing Communist upheaval and revolutionary chaos. Both my parents were born and educated in British Burma, but the three of us and other family members migrated from Rangoon after the 1962 post-independence military coup, when being Chinese became a disadvantage and hazard, and as the United States opened an immigration window to recruit professionals from Asia in 1965. My parents returned to Myanmar (Burma’s postcolonial moniker) in 1993 to gather my paternal grandmother’s remains. They exhumed and carried her bones to be re-buried alongside my paternal grandfather in California, where most of our extended clan reside. Although my parents and I hail from across the Pacific Ocean, we are simultaneously recent immigrants to the United States and naturalized citizens. Yet my ancestors’ bones too are part of this land and the stories of California.[3]

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 San Twin (Vittek 2021). Born in Burma, Tin Aye had worked with the Karen Women’s Organization and the Burmese Women’s Union (Vittek 2021). As an advocate for human and women’s rights, she was forced to flee from her home in the 1990s while pregnant with her first child. Like many displaced peoples from Myanmar, Tin Aye ended up in a Thai borderland refugee camp for fifteen years, where she married and gave birth to two children. Subsisting on donated rice and beans, without plumbing or electricity in a bamboo hut, Tin Aye cleaned houses, washed clothes, and looked after pigs to earn money. When her family of four left Southeast Asia in 2007 with the assistance of a sponsoring agency, they first resettled in 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.[4] She regularly made the sixty-four-mile commute from Denver by carpooling with other Karen immigrant workers since she could not drive. Tin Aye’s family eventually moved to Greeley: a rural, working-class, white/EuroAmerican and Chicano town, built on dreams of utopian agriculture and known for its food processing factories—beet and meat—and little else.[5]

In 2009, Greeley had the highest poverty rate among Colorado's largest cities with 21.7 percent living 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 meatpacking plant tested positive for COVID, along with 5 corporate employees. Although Tin Aye had worked for JBS for 12 years, her family could not afford a headstone, despite the inadequate funeral settlement offered by the company. In June, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7 organized a well-publicized memorial for 6 deceased union members across the street from the JB factory (see photo above in header). 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. "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 mark the premature death and grave of their beloved matriarch (ABC Denver7 2021).

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 town of Eaton (population ~6000). When we attended his sister’s burial in 2021, we drove through Greeley on the way to the family gravesite. Members of my partner’s family also worked in the food industry and Greeley’s sugar-processing factories, yet their roots predate the United States. He can trace his genealogy back to the 1800s when the region was still northern Mexico. When asked “when did your family come to the United States?” he replies with a version of “actually, the border crossed us.” His response underscores how the United States came to exist through the westward appropriation of territory inhabited first by Others. The lands that make up the southwestern states of Colorado and New Mexico were first stewarded by Indigenous nations such as the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute, and Lakota. Communities of Indios, mestizos, Hispanos, and Mexicans lived on, tended, and worked that land well before and as the territory was claimed by an expanding Eurocentric settler-colonial nation that enforced racial segregation well into the late twentieth century.[7]

Given how my partner and his family feel deeply rooted in this land, I reflect on how Southeast Asian refugees-as-late-settlers are incorporated into the mythical “melting pot” of the United States. Under what conditions do the stories of Burmese immigrants become visible or legible? How are BurmAmerican 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?

August 2023: The intensity of the pandemic has subsided, although COVID continues to morph and to spread through viral variants. My folding together of these Sino-Burmese and Mexican/Chicano genealogies is an invitation to “dwell in unwellness,” a form of collective witnessing and mutual care work articulated by the A/P/A Voices collective (Baik, Wong, Truong, Bae, Sharma, Sze, Manghnani, and Yoon 2022).[8] My assembling of these interracial relations and less visible intimacies endeavors to use storywork to resist the loss of memory and to “fight off illness and death” (Silko 1977, 2). My interpretive retelling of the often-overlooked stories of BurmAmerica aims to productively illuminate some dynamics of deep listening, ethical co-occupation, and transformative justice.

References

ABC Denver7. 2021.“Family of JBS Employee Who Died of COVID-19 Thanks Denver7 Viewers for Helping with Headstone.” ABC Denver7, January 26, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press.

Baik, Crystal, Diane Wong, Vivian Truong, Minju Bae, Preeti Sharma, Lena Sze, Amita Manghnani, and Mi Hyun Yoon. 2022. "To Write in Unwellness: Documenting A/P/A Voices." Journal of Asian American Studies 25 (3): 493–515.

Cumming, Anne. 2002. “Weld’s Untold Story.” Greeley Tribune, November 13, 2002.

Daly, Michael. 2020.“JBS Meat Plant Clinic Told Eighth COVID-19 Victim She Had a ‘Normal Cold,’ Daughter Says.” Daily Beast, May 19, 2020. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Goodman, Peter S. 2021. “On the Slaughterhouse Floor, Fear and Anger Remain.” New York Times, December 29, 2021.

Greeley Tribune. 2002. “Enough Is Enough.” November 25, 2002.

Harlan, Jeremy. 2020. “A Refugee and New Grandmother Was the Eighth Employee at a Colorado Meat Packing Plant to Die from Coronavirus.” CNN, May 18, 2020.

Hegele, Arden. 2017. “Indigenous Poetics and Narrative Medicine.” Synapsis Journal. October 23, 2017. Accessed August 30, 2023.

Ho, Tamara. 2021. “BurmAmerican Foodscapes: Refugee Re-settlement and Resilience.” Amerasia Journal, 47 (1): 73–95. DOI: 10.1080/00447471.2021.1992091.

Ho, Tamara, and Russell Jeung (co-producers). 2022. Transformative Hope: Religious Responses of Asian American Elders to Racism (5-video series). Directed by Valerie Soe. Website: https://aparri.org/transformative-hope/. Videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@TransformativeHopeASAM. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Juhasz, Alex, and Pato Hebert. 2021. “Long Hauling.” ArtsEverywhere. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Marsh, Rebekah N. 2016. “Displaced but not without Place: Refugee and Immigrant Integration Experiences in Greeley, Colorado.“ Unpublished Master’s Thesis. University of Denver. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Miranda, Deborah. 2013. “Introduction: California Is a Story.” In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, xi–xx. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books.

Mohatt, Kevin. 2021. Image RC2TKM9Y0B3B (Photograph). Reuters. March 28, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Mohatt, Kevin. 2021. Image RC2TKM9M54CE (Photograph). Reuters. March 29, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.

Peters, Mike. 2002. “Restored History.” Greeley Tribune, November 25, 2002.

San Twin. 2020. “COVID-19 Ravaged Meat Plants: My Refugee Mother's Life is Worth More Than the Bottom Line.” (Opinion) USA Today, October 1, 2020. Accessed August 29, 2023.

Vittek, Shelby. 2021. “Tin Aye” in “Remembering the Food Workers We’ve Lost to COVID-19 Part 5” Modern Farmer, May 21, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2023.

[1]“This is not a story to pass on” is from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987, 338). “Not tellable times” is from Alex Juhasz and Pato Hebert’s “Long Hauling” conversation series (2021); see Juhasz and Hebert’s excerpt in this collection in LINGERING (1/4) at https://scalar.usc.edu/works/how-we-make-it/long-hauling.
[2] See Ho 2021 for gloss on BurmAmerica.
[3] Cf. Miranda 2013.
[4] Some early reports claim Tin Aye and San Twin arrived in Denver in 2007 (Harlan 2020; Daly 2020), while later news articles date the family’s arrival in Greeley as 2012 (Vittek 2021; Goodman 2021). At the time of writing, I am unable to verify which date is accurate.
[5] The Great Western Sugar Company (GWSC) shaped Greeley’s demographic landscape through its sugar beet factories. They first recruited German Russian workers who were segregated in poorer areas of the city. As the scions of European immigrants moved into the upper classes by purchasing their own properties, sugar companies sought cheaper labor. By 1909, GWSC began recruiting working-class Mexican Americans and undocumented Mexican nationals to work in its sugar beet fields and sugar processing factories (Marsh 2016).
[6] Second and fourth photographs are by Kevin Mohatt for Reuters, March 2021.
[7] De facto segregation and a (brown/white) color line existed throughout the US southwest. Signs declaring “No Mexicans or dogs allowed" (or “No dogs or Mexicans allowed”) were displayed in Colorado and other states up until the 1960s. Greeley schools were segregated, and those classified as “Hispanic,” Hispano, or Mexican (including veterans returning from World War II and Korea) were refused hotel and restaurant service even if sometimes they were classified on official documents as “Caucasian.” The residents of working-class neighborhoods dubbed “Spanish Colony” and “RagTown” were not allowed to sit in the front rows of Catholic churches during services (Peter 2002; Cumming 2002; Greeley Tribune 2002).
[8] “Dwelling in unwellness” and “to write in unwellness” are phrases theorized by Baik, Wong, Truong, Bae, Sharma, Sze, Manghnani, and Yoon (2022) while assembling the COVID-19 public memory project A/P/A Voices, based at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. These Asian American scholars refused “the white supremacist capitalist imperative to move on and prevail through a time marked as transient, exceptional, and threatened by a decrease in profit.” Resisting “a neoliberal temporality tethered to the marketplace,” the A/P/A Voices curatorial collective opted to foreground mutual care given how the COVID pandemic was “entangled within a much larger web of protracted crises.”