In 2000, the United Nations passed the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplement-ing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.
The internationally accepted and recognized definition of human trafficking sustains how the human is recognized, while the eventfulness of policies and experiences of abuse are wrapped in a discourse and practice that reproduce how subjects are tethered to dualities. The testimonial narratives of traffick-ing subjects are part of the discourse and practice that further whose stories matter and whose events speak to a public. Therefore, while laws and events of abuse are perceived to be eventful in antitrafficking narratives, by paying attention to uneventfulness, the mundane, and the normal, how language matters is made apparent.
To close, I end with the story of Sonny, whose journey bridges the con-texts explored in this chapter of Asia, Samoa, and Hawaii as connected to the continental United States. Sonny was a fisherman from Indonesia who was contracted to work for two years in Hawaii. Sonny’s journey led him from Indonesia to Australia to Fiji and then to American Samoa, where he board-ed a fishing ship that eventually enablboard-ed his travels to San Francisco and indigenous lands of the Ohlone and Miwok, among other tribes who peopled the region. Sonny’s story was depicted on public radio on January 15, 2014, in a story entitled “Human Trafficking: A Fisherman’s Story” (Day). Sonny’s experience of being defrauded began after he arrived in American Samoa.
After a couple of weeks of waiting without food in American Samoa, he finally boarded a ship that was not the one named in his contract. Sonny experienced a variety of rights violations, including food deprivation, the taking of identifying papers (legal documents), long work hours from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. every day, and a hazardous work environment that led to a damaged finger. If he left and broke his contract, he would face a $1,000 fine—four months of wages. Although he feared the consequences, Sonny fled his employers when the ship docked in San Francisco. From Indonesia to the islands in the Pacific and eventually the Americas, Sonny’s journey reflects the physical transnational linkages of geographies, politics, and economies that produce a tethered subjectivity in human rights framings of
violations such as human trafficking. As fair-trade and slave-free goods are a central aspect of the twenty-first-century human rights endeavor to abolish what has been colloquially referred to as “modern-day slavery,” the site of Asia-Pacific as a violator regularly makes headline news. Since 2000, story after story has captured the trafficking of Indonesians and other Southeast Asians in the Thai fishing industry (Fault Lines; Htusan and Mason).
But Sonny, like the employees of the Daewoosa factory and Global Hor-izons, is also a socially dead subject, whose resurrection is through victim-hood, vulnerability as a noncitizen subject, and the illegal means through which he jumped ship to leave his trafficking experience. He is also eventful only as a trafficking story—no other aspects of his story are visible. There-fore, Sonny is tethered to dualities surrounding victimhood, legality, and citizenship. How does one untether the subjectivities that produce Sonny, the workers of the Daewoosa factory and Global Horizons, and the many other incidents that connect Asia across the Pacific to the United States?
There is a seemingly insignificant moment in Sonny’s testimonial: his refusal to tell his story in English. In the radio interview, the listener hears Sonny’s voice through an interpreter but also his voice echoing in the back-ground. A hum of voices, from Sonny to interpreter to the interviewer, col-lectively narrates Sonny’s story. Sonny’s refusal to speak in English is captured by the narrator: “Though he speaks English, he wants to make sure all of the details are right” (Day). The details can be right only in Sonny’s native language, and through the translation the listener is held at a distance from Sonny. The listener trusts the female voice translating Sonny’s experi-ences. The listener hears Sonny occasionally slip into English. For example, when asked how much he was paid as a fisherman in Indonesia, Sonny speaks in Indonesian, and the interpreter states, “About one-hundred fifty dollars, every month.” The listener hears Sonny echo after the translator in English, “Every month.” At this moment, the listener is reminded of his abil-ity to speak in English and his refusal to be interviewed entirely in English.
Sonny forces the listener to experience what Maria Lugones has referred to as “faithful witnessing”—witnessing on the side of those who are oppressed.
Sonny’s commitment to being interviewed in Indonesian forces the listener to hear his story in Indonesian, his native language—to hear the listener’s own limitations and to reconcile how a story about “rights” cannot always be done through Western frames, in English. As Sonny inhabits the eventful-ness of being trafficked, he describes the mundane details of what it was like to fish, how he loves fish, and his reunification with his daughter. While it matters that he has a work visa and is on a path toward citizenship, where he is able to apply for his green card, this information is not narrated through Sonny. Instead, the interviewer, who also serves as the narrator, describes his recovery of his humanity through legal status. This is not to say that legal relief does not enable recognition; rather, as long as the denial of recognition
and rights is reserved for those who lack citizenship, it will also be a preoc-cupation in antitrafficking endeavors. Sonny’s voice, which is marked by slippages between Indonesian and English, underscores a desire to move beyond a simple the trafficking story where Sonny was reunited with his daughter. Accordingly, “the ship’s captain was never prosecuted—and Son-ny’s not interested in pursuing it. He now works in a liquor store in San Francisco where he makes $13 an hour, with no plans at all to return to sea”
(Day). Whereas assumptions of rights, justice, and prosecution have been deeply tied together in antitrafficking discourse, Sonny rejects these assump-tions, even though his interview began with his reflection on the fishing industry: “I like it, being a fisherman. . . . I especially like fishes. And the income is pretty good.” No matter how much he liked it, Sonny found his economic survival taking him elsewhere, and the appeals to live beyond a trafficking story simply mean living a life beyond it.
Ongoing U.S. colonialities in American Samoa, Hawaii, and California are all too often met with silence in human rights discourse. The context of California and indigeneity is invisible in how trafficking is circulated. Cali-fornia and the United States have a legacy of abuse that normalized slavery during the antebellum period. In California, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was passed in 1850, but “protection” was a misno-mer. Through the language of protection, the United States held indigenous children in servitude until the age of thirty (Anderson; Johnston-Dodds).
A tethered subjectivity is the consequence of modern colonial economic systems that sustain categorical constructions and visions of the colonial state. Current transnational economies depend on the furtherance of a teth-ered subjectivity that reifies how trafficking subjects are witnessed through dualities surrounding victimhood/criminality, citizen/noncitizen, and ille-gal/legal. Ritually hacking the process of witnessing tethered subjectivities means grappling with invisibility and the paradox surrounding how subjects are bound. In human rights endeavors, one must contend with the paradox of the advocates of human rights (the Global North) who also in their en-deavor to speak to rights violations normalize another kind of rights viola-tion—settler-colonial presence in the Asia-Pacific region as well as in the continental United States. How one witnesses human rights violations is through a resurrection of the socially dead for the living as a human rights spectacle as “other.” To untether subjectivities requires not merely new po-sitionalities but rather enacting new ways of witnessing rights violations.
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my warmest appreciation to Guy Beauregard, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, and Hsiu-Chuan Lee for their incredibly generous feedback that helped further the deep analysis in this chapter. In addition, I am
grate-ful to the audience members who engaged with my piece at the Association for Asian American Studies and copanelists Guy Beauregard and Chris Pat-terson, where we continued to engage in the subjects of human rights from Taiwan to Florida. And thank you to Hediana Utarti, Susan French, and members of the Freedom Network USA; your work on the ground in a strug-gle for a more just and human-rights-possible world is inspiring.
NOTES
1. The four farms are Mac Farms of Hawaii, Kauai Coffee Company, Kelena Farms and Captain Cook Coffee Company.
2. Mac Farms of Hawaii will pay $1.6 million, Kelena Farms will pay $275,000, Captain Cook Coffee Company will pay $100,000, and Kauai Coffee Company will pay
$425,000, according to settlement agreements.
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