Whereas the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) con-ceives of human beings, regardless of their gender, race, religion, or national-ity, as the primary bearers of human rights, Renata Salecl contends that the nondiscrimination principle requires “active forgetfulness” to disregard the history of the conception of human rights and its subject as such, and thus the universal ideas of human rights “are in themselves empty” (164).13 The abstraction inherited in human rights discourse, a disembodied and disem-bedded subject when put into legal practice, often creates a “fundamental and irresolvable tension between national sovereignty and human rights discourse” that calls for further elaboration and expansion (Yeatman 1511).
The shift from “the narrative of the declaration of human rights as natural endowments with that one of the production of human rights as fully polit-ical and historpolit-ical constructions,” as Riccardo Baldissone asserts, “opens towards the production, claim and exercise of further rights” and suggests that “all human beings are acknowledged not simply as bearers, but as producers of human rights” (93).14 The emphasis on seeing human subjects as “narrative beings” and “authors” of human rights couples individual agen-cy with narration and creativity, reorienting the claim to rights as a positive act of production and ramification rather than an affirmation of aggression and violation (Baldissone 92; Gregg 87). The production approach allows a rethinking of how literature negotiates, configures, normalizes, and poten-tially challenges human rights.
The literary shift from the bearers to the producers of human rights takes a distinctive form in Southeast Asian migrant writing in Taiwan. Ever since the publication of “Run Away,” a short piece on the unequal treatment of labor migrants and the labor movement in Taiwan that won the China Times Liter-ary Award for literLiter-ary reportage in 2005, Ku Yu-ling’s stories of Southeast Asian migrant workers have often been categorized as literary reportage. Ku’s engagement with the genre of literary reportage highlights what has been at stake in the knowledge production of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan. “I could not bring myself to treat these workers and their life stories
as part of a sterile thesis that often relegates them as a mere index like A310 or C409,” and “I cannot imagine de-contextualizing their stories and their lives by reducing them into a few lines of observation, analysis, and conclusion,” Ku writes in the postscript of the English translation of Women, henceforth re-ferred to as Our Stories (327). Her concerns about institutional violence prac-ticed against labor migrants and their subjugation to the dominant discourse illustrate how the existing framework of representation fails to treat them as full human beings. Unlike most life writing by Southeast Asian migrant work-ers, such as the texts included in Escape, whose characters/narrators appear to be only victims of workplace violence and fugitives who are always already deprived of basic human rights, Ku’s stories of labor migrants with personal histories parcel out their struggles for agency in a disenabling social context.
By interweaving literary reportage with stories of individual development as an operating technique to unravel the stories of migrant workers in both Our Stories and Huijia (henceforth referred to as Return Home), Ku’s narratives enable a reading of situated subjectivity that explores the conflicts between the private and the public, the individual and the nation-state.
A mixture of oral history, reportage, and ethnography, Ku’s stories are concerned about the interplay of the domestic and the foreign and the locking relationship between global capitalism and dehumanization in inter-Asia labor migration. In Our Stories, Ku asks her readers to rethink and redefine the linguistic, social, and cultural boundaries that differentiate for-eign workers from Taiwanese people by appealing to shared experiences of migration, both domestic and international, and the dream of socioeconom-ic mobility. The interwoven narratives of Ku’s parents (an interethnsocioeconom-ic mar-riage between a mainland Chinese man who immigrated to Taiwan after 1945 and a Taiwanese woman whose family has settled on the island for several generations) and an interracial marriage (between a Taiwanese fac-tory worker and a Philippine migrant laborer) represented in Our Stories, for instance, illuminate shared histories of poverty, displacement, and migration between foreign workers and Taiwanese people. While Our Stories explores the lives and ongoing struggles of Philippine migrant workers in Taiwan, Return Home explores the promises and shadows of migration for Vietnam-ese workers after their stay in Taiwan. The text narrates the challenges await-ing returnees and traces their life changes over a span of four years between Ku’s two trips to Vietnam in 2009 and 2013. Imbricating accounts of life overseas and at home, Return Home shows how inter-Asia labor migration unsettles a progressive narrative of mobility and development. The juxtapo-sition of Our Stories and Return Home, a seemingly full circle of departure and arrival, encapsulates the disenabling effects of labor migration.
Ku’s deployment of the genre of literary reportage shows not only her in-vestment in the struggles of labor migrants as a social activist but also her vision of literature as a medium to construe a form of human rights claims
and social justice that hinges not necessarily on the liberal subject but on a social collective. The development of the genre of literary reportage has long been associated with the history of social and political movements in Taiwan since the 1930s, particularly with left-wing politics, even though it was not until the lifting of martial law on Taiwan proper in 1987 that literary reportage began to flourish and play an important role in social and political mobiliza-tion.15 The leftist writer Chen Ying-zhen, who has helped popularize the genre by publishing the journal Renjian (Human World), has remarked that literary reportage should “observe the people, life, labor, environment, and social hist-ory of Taiwan from the perspective of the marginalized” and should “record, witness, and critique from that observation” (qtd. in Shiu 22). Ku’s focus on the struggles of labor migrants in Taiwan and her detailed descriptions of their life experiences in Our Stories and Return Home echo Chen’s concerns for the underprivileged and for social inequality. Yet her choice to make mi-grant workers her writing subjects extends beyond Chen’s emphasis on “Tai-wan de ren” (Tai“Tai-wanese people, defined by nationality), and it is through multiple forms of marginality (including citizenship, race, and class) that Ku offers social critiques of local migrant labor policies and global capitalism.
The convergence of multiple identities in Ku’s writing reconfigures the subject-object relationship in literary reportage and enables new social for-mations. Ku has repeatedly claimed, “I’ve lived with, fought with, and borne uncertainty with these people [migrant workers] in the last twenty years of my life,” and “my writing does not go through the whole process of inter-viewing people, going to remote areas, and bringing stories back, which is often involved in literary reportage” (“My Labor Movement”). Her idiosyn-cratic approach to migrant workers’ narratives, which she identifies as “being there” (wo zai chang), shows her long-term engagement in activism and her efforts to write migrant workers into being (“My Labor Movement”). Ku deploys both a third-person subjective narration with the narrator as the implied author and a first-person narration that tells her personal stories. As Ku writes herself in the narratives, she revises the convention of literary re-portage in Taiwan—the use of a singular point of view.16 Her presence in the narratives recreates her sense of “being there” in the struggles of labor mi-grants in everyday life and in social movements. Ku’s interlaced narrative voices show her awareness of her own embeddedness in making the experi-ences of migrant workers visible. Her texts’ hybrid narrative modes not only suggest the impossibility of sustaining the binary of objective and subjective reporting but also break the boundaries of class, race, culture, and national-ity that Ku’s stories intend to critique.
Ku’s experimental reportage provides a different framework to under-stand the relationship between personal suffering and public sharing. Con-sider for instance Ku’s narration of Vina in Our Stories, where Ku uses third-person narration to describe why Vina has to give up the college
edu-cation she has dreamed for and work as a caregiver in Taiwan at the age of eighteen. Ku concludes her objective description of Vina’s development and work experience, particularly Vina’s intense relations with her employers, with the following sentence: “Why does the legal system allow people to behave like beasts and force workers to be slaves?” (Women 148; translation mine).17 Here the authorial voice functions as a social commentary that re-orients the readers’ interpretations of and responses to Vina’s suffering, de-nouncing the institutional violence that implicates both employers and migrant workers. The formal structure of the third-person narrator, a sur-rogate witness, in literary reportage mediates and reroutes the victim-wit-ness relationship in Ku’s stories of exploitation. Such intervention disrupts an easy identification between the character and the readers and unsettles a humanitarian reading practice built on sympathy and compassion. Ku’s nar-rator is the figure of a social activist who demands institutional change, not sentimental identification with the abused and the exploited.18 The triangu-lar relationship between the characters, the narrator, and the readers trans-forms the narrative space from the personal to the political. Unlike the runaways’ confessions collected in Escape, which appeal to the readers’
understanding of their conundrum and thus return the telling to inter-personal reconciliations, Ku’s narratives create a discursive space that allows for multiple forms of identification, mobilization, and alliance.
As Ku’s narrative voice disrupts forms of humanitarian reading that pri-oritize the readers’ agency, her incorporation of the fragmented stories of migrant workers’ individual growth further opens up the possibility of mak-ing labor migrants the producers of human rights. Ku’s use of developmental narratives as a frame to tell the experiences of labor migrants highlights the tension between the individual and the nation-state underlying the myth of labor migration. Depicted in certain discourses as national heroes, Southeast Asian migrant workers in labor-exporting countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia bring home remittances that help sustain their countries’ economies.19 Yet those remittance heroes, who call home only to
“tell them the good things and send them gifts,” “have nowhere or no one to turn to” in difficulty, as Joy and Vina point out (Ku, Our Stories 142). The discrepancy between personal experience and public discourse shown in Joy’s and Vina’s comments suggests how the master narrative of labor migra-tion fails to tell a story of identificamigra-tion and consolidamigra-tion and instead tells one of alienation both at home and abroad. In Return Home, the unfinished project of modernizing homes—including fully equipped bathrooms with-out water and sewage and new refrigerators withwith-out electricity—becomes a way to figure the difference between house and home. Ku’s description of newly built houses with modern facilities in contrast with the difficulties in reconnecting with family members after returning underlies what has been missing in the grand narrative of overseas workers as national heroes.
The myth of migration and the awareness of compromised rights enable Southeast Asian migrant workers to imagine an alternative community in Ku’s narratives. The twenty-two-year-old Vina does not go back to the Phil-ippines and attend college as her father wishes; instead, she learns to organ-ize overseas Filipino workers to speak for the politically oppressed at home and to fight against injustice. “Living and working overseas as a migrant worker has opened up a whole new world for her. Unexpectedly, she em-barked upon a different life path from what she expected when she was still in the Philippines” (Ku, Our Stories 176). Vina’s developmental narrative cannot be contained by the master narrative of individual growth and eco-nomic development delineated by the Philippine nation-state; nor does her story conform to an enduring narrative of exploitation. Her displacement allows her to understand the contradictions embedded in the discourse of industrial modernization and to further challenge its dehumanizing forces.
The twists of individual development rearticulate what it means to be human. “Vina’s dreams are wandering between borders,” Ku writes; “she may remain active in the indigenous people’s movement even after her re-turn. Or perhaps, she may move to another country after Taiwan, to con-tinue the Filipino migrant workers’ struggle elsewhere” (Our Stories 202).
The narrator’s speculation about Vina’s future and her vision of Vina as a transnational social activist break the division between fiction and reality underlying the convention of literary reportage, and invite the readers to take part in a form of imagining that refutes a humanitarian reading of sympathetic identification.20 Meanwhile, in Return Home, the Vietnamese worker Kim Yên, who was seriously injured in a car accident when she worked in Taiwan, refuses to let her disability define who she is and starts to fight against oppression in her homeland. Ku’s insistence on seeing Vina’s and Kim’s resistance to being incorporated in the grand narrative of labor migration enables the articulation of alternative futurities. The claim to have the right to “dream” about the social collective good and to place that right above the realization of economic rights subverts the integration of the in-dividual and the nation-state, undergirding the notion of development, fic-tional and real. Ku’s texts thereby ask readers to acknowledge migrant workers’ agency to determine and assign new content to human rights—the right to imagine and invent alternative social formations.
Taken together, Ku’s narratives of migrant workers’ formation in Our Stories and Return Home challenge and renegotiate the ways in which the rights to development are narrowly understood in the economic sense and are appropriated by the state as biopolitical technologies of governance.21 The friction between the individual and the state opens up the possibility of a different understanding of modernity in Asia, an understanding that “prob-lematizes a Cold War version of positivist epistemology—a positivism whose
modernity and authority is linked to rapid industrialization, and its atten-dant values and structures of feeling,” as Amie Parry observes in her reading of Our Stories (178). The labor migrants’ becoming in Ku’s narratives regis-ters more of their intervention in reshaping the dehumanizing forces of global capitalism than their subjugation. The stories foresee the growth of a social collective “wandering between borders” in all forms (Ku, Our Stories 202), including the lines that divide the readers from the migrant workers and the social activist and writer, Ku Yu-ling. Such border crossing initiates opportunities to build transnational social movement networks and reenvi-sion what constitutes human rights and humanity.
Escape, Our Stories, and Return Home have articulated the dynamics between texts and readers to forge new social relations and collectively his-toricize incongruities between labor migration, globalization, and human rights. As an emerging ethnic literature in Taiwan, Southeast Asian migrant narratives, which cannot be narrowly defined by the writer’s ethnicity alone, have become a site of convergence to rethink boundaries in all forms and to envision new social imaginaries. These texts cannot right what has been vio-lated and retrieve what has been lost along the way for labor migrants. What they can do is to tell seemingly sporadic and incoherent stories of individual formation to register moments of transformation and consolidation and thereby envision new possibilities for social change. When read together, these texts challenge readers to actively engage in such alternative social imaginaries and disentangle Taiwan’s racial (re)formation from the global division of labor and the world economic order. The double development of a suffering person in need of protection (in Escape) and a migrant subject in hopes of charting his or her own life trajectory (in Our Stories and Return Home) does not envision the articulation and actualization of human rights in a singular form. It instead evokes two different sets of power dynamics between the giver and the recipient of human rights. The possibility of “lib-erating” foreign workers from enslavement by appealing to antitrafficking campaigns and abiding by global and regional human rights laws without unsettling preexisting social, economic, and racial inequalities in the Tai-wanese context foreshadows the intimate relationship between human rights regimes and global capitalism. It is in the shadow of such intimacy that the right to envision alternative social collectives, locally and globally, shows what it means to be human.
NOTES
1. On discrimination against foreign blue-collar workers in the Employment Service Act, see D. Liu 614–25; Ku, “Bojiao” 95–105; Ma 97–101; Hsia 336–349.
2. For a critique of the brokerage system, see Lan, “Legal Servitude.” For Taiwan’s labor migration policy and human rights violation, see Sun.
3. Sociologist Alison Brysk defines the gap between citizen and human rights as a
“citizenship gap”—“a lack of political mechanisms to ensure individual membership,
power holders’ accountability, and respect for human rights in a globalizing world sys-tem” (246). The systematic exploitation of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan through discriminatory migration policy depends on the “citizenship gap” to generate national economic development.
4. This chapter generally follows the Hanyu Pinyin system used in academia in the United States. In some cases, the Wade-Giles system is used in the transcription of Taiwanese names if those names are commonly known in this form.
5. Zhu notes that words like “runaway, slave, adventure, drifting, criminal, and falling into” keep popping up in Escape (14). Those keywords explicitly show the con-trast between freedom and incarceration, connecting the workers’ experiences to that of forced labor.
6. In the discussion on policy reforms—for example, Taiwan’s proposed Long-Term Care Services Act—the term bloody forced labor (xuehan nugong) is used to emphasize the systematic exploitation of migrant workers in Taiwan.
7. I do not suggest that such “outside” support and intervention are unnecessary.
I am instead concerned about the advice from the annual human rights reports issued by the U.S. Department of State and the local government’s subsequent action to engage with U.S. antitrafficking propaganda, which often result in local law enforcement.
8. See Lan, Global Cinderellas 50–58.
9. Here I borrow Joseph Slaughter and Jennifer Wenzel’s idea about the division between the private and the public in the epistolary novel and letter writing.
10. The implementation of antitrafficking law in Taiwan, heavily influenced by U.S. antitrafficking law, has focused on forced prostitution, as Ku Yu-ling and Cheng Keng-liang show, even as the exploitation of migrant workers also constitutes a viola-tion of antitrafficking law.
11. See K. Cheng 98–103; Zheng.
12. For antitrafficking campaigns and the hierarchy of human rights in Taiwan, see K. Cheng 90–100.
13. See Moore for a critique of a disembodied subject.
14. On individual narration and human rights, see Ward 3–5; Slaughter, Human Rights 1–44.
15. For the link between social movements and literary reportage, see Shiu 10–29.
16. Both C. Lin’s and Shiu’s studies of the history of reportage in Taiwan suggest that there is a bifurcation of subjective/objective narrative modes.
16. Both C. Lin’s and Shiu’s studies of the history of reportage in Taiwan suggest that there is a bifurcation of subjective/objective narrative modes.