S
ince the late 1980s, the increased presence of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan has made visible strategies the local government has taken to counter labor shortages and sustain economic viability in the global market. Expressly, in 1989, Taiwan began importing Southeast Asian migrant workers for national infrastructure projects. This “opening up” of Taiwanese labor markets intersected with growing corporate demands for cheap, low-skilled workers; five years later, in 1992, the Taiwanese govern-ment passed the Employgovern-ment Service Act, which extended the regulated importation of Southeast Asian migrant labor into the private sector. As of February 2018, there were 676,875 Southeast Asian migrants (2.9 percent of Taiwan’s total population) working in manufacturing and service industries (specifically domestic work and caregiving); these workers hail mainly from Indonesia (38 percent), Vietnam (31 percent), the Philippines (22 percent), and Thailand (9 percent) (Ministry of Labor).Taiwan’s migrant worker policy, as labor studies scholar Liu Mei-chun notes, is designed to create unequal power dynamics between local employ-ers and foreign low-skilled workemploy-ers as a means of “stabiliz[ing] relations of production” and weakening local labor unions (77), making apparent struc-tural discriminations against foreign blue-collar workers. Notwithstanding some revision, the restrictions on transfers between employers and the max-imum duration of stay for low-skilled foreign workers have accordingly sub-jugated Southeast Asian migrant laborers to exploitation.1 The brokerage system, which adds to migrant workers’ financial difficulty, makes this group particularly vulnerable to human rights violations.2 Unpaid overtime, no
days off, hazardous working conditions, abuses, sexual assaults, and restric-tions on individual freedom of movement and other basic rights are com-mon predicaments. In addition to exploitation in the workplace, Southeast Asian migrant workers are doubly excluded in Taiwan’s nationalist politics because of their race and class; they do not enjoy the rights of local workers and, unlike high-skill foreign workers, they can never become citizens (Tseng 32–46). Under such circumstances, running away and seeking illegal employment become at times the only alternatives to defy unjust regulations.
Situated adjacent this neoliberal imaginary, the call for rethinking mi-grant workers’ rights in Taiwan cannot be understood simply as isolated human rights abuses and as a matter of local redistribution of social justice;
instead, these rights considerations are inextricably linked to a concomitant effect of global capitalism. Transnational migration has brought a new chal-lenge to the actualization of humanity due to the increased discrepancies that exist between citizen and noncitizen rights.3 Southeast Asian labor mi-gration exemplifies the “inhuman conditions” of global capitalism and the insufficiency of human rights discourse to fully achieve humanity in the age of globalization since “humanity is generated by inhuman techniques”
(Cheah 230). The paradox, which Pheng Cheah explicates by showing how the humanity of Philippine migrant workers is generated by a set of compet-ing inhumane biotechnologies from both labor-exportcompet-ing and labor-receiv-ing countries, highlights the maklabor-receiv-ing of the subject of human rights as a by-product of individual and political struggles. The imbrication of the human and the inhuman elucidates the exploitative nature of the new glob-al division of labor and enables us to understand human rights not in the celebratory mode of progress and democracy but in the form of “intermi-nable political negotiations” and “resistance” to the dehumanizing force of global capitalism (Cheah 264, 265).
Crucial to the difficult invention and articulation of migrant workers as the subject of human rights is the social imaginary of what constitutes hu-manity in the Taiwanese context. In tracing the social formation of human rights in the Western tradition, Lynn Hunt has argued that “new kinds of reading (and viewing and listening) created new individual experiences (em-pathy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights)” (62). Her reading of epistolary novels in relation to the in-vention of human rights shows the significant position literature plays in rights articulation and comprehension. At the juncture of migration, human rights, and globalization, the capacity to empathize with Southeast Asian migrant workers and further advocate for institutional reforms is the key to challenging inequality embedded in the uneven socioeconomic development within and modernization of Asian countries. Such capacities presage a set of connected questions: How does literature in Taiwan imagine and articu-late labor migrants as human beings? How does literary work reshape human
rights discourses at the local level and make the inhumanity of global capi-talism visible? Last, but certainly not least, how might literature enable new social relations to Southeast Asian migrant workers that do not necessarily reproduce the racial hierarchies of the world economic order?
This chapter attempts to answer these questions through a comparative reading of literary works by both Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan and Ku Yu-ling, an award-winning Taiwanese writer. My juxtaposition of two different modes of authorship is guided by questions concerning who has the right to speak and is driven by the consideration of how such articulations enable a two-part evaluation of human subjects (as legible figures) and human rights (in a local context). Lucie Cheng, former director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and founding editor of 4-Way Voice, a newspaper for Southeast Asian migrant workers and immigrants in Taiwan, maintains that ethnic media is essential to the realization of “liberating humanism” and
“multiculturalism” in Taiwan (130). Her emphasis on equal access to public media for minority groups like (im)migrants accentuates the role of represen-tations in shaping social relations between people of different languages and cultures and construes articulation as active political engagement. Corres-pondingly, life writing by Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan, in-cluding pieces in Tao: Women de baodao, tamen de lao (Escape: Our island, their prison), offers insights into the migrants’ experiences and their visions of human rights. Yet the right to speak does not promise equality and social justice; as Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter point out, “as often as cultural forms make human suffering visible they distort perceptions in ways that make it possible to disenfranchise and abuse others” (8).
My reading of Southeast Asian migrant narratives, predicated on the ways in which literary forms enable and disenable social inclusion, speaks to the conflicting forces of oppression and liberation in cultural representations pertaining to human rights; to that end, I examine the literary birth of Southeast Asian migrant workers as human subjects in Taiwan. Situating Southeast Asian migrant narratives produced in Taiwan via globalization, I approach this burgeoning ethnic literature from a transnational perspective that foregrounds its points of intervention in the production of basic human rights for inter-Asia migrant workers and militates against a singular read-ing of such work as national literature. In doread-ing so, I accentuate the under-lying tension between citizenship and human rights in these stories; this tension undergirds a characterization of Southeast Asian migrant writing as counternarratives that challenge the dominant representation of labor mi-grants as purely economic beings. This chapter’s analysis opens with a con-sideration of a twenty-six-letter column collection by Southeast Asian migrant workers (published in 2012 under the collective identity of Taopao wailao, or “runaway migrant workers”) entitled Tao: Women de baodao, tamen de lao (henceforth referred to as Escape). I explore how labor migrants
appropriate the language of slavery to describe their experiences and the limits of such narrative strategies. I propose that such figurations of slavery and accounts of suffering circumscribe the agency of migrant workers.
The chapter then turns to Ku Yu-ling’s two acclaimed books on Southeast Asian migrant workers, Women (2008; published in English as Our Stories in 2011) and Huijia (Return Home, 2014), with a focus on her narrative style in the tradition of literary reportage, a genre to which the books belong. My reading of Ku’s stories shows that the narrative form she employs engages intensively with the question of social justice and alternative development.
This attentiveness to literary forms extends from McClennen and Slaughter’s emphasis on the interlocking relation between cultural forms and human rights, especially their argument that “much of the imaginative and social work that literature does is . . . done through the forms of stories that enable forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, and forms of justice”
(11). The juxtaposition of two forms of narrative—readers’ letters and literary reportage—demonstrates the laboring and paradoxical process of writing mi-grant workers into being. When the local law in Taiwan is complicit with the uneven world economic order and indifferent to structural exploitation, how literary production in Taiwan discloses such inhumane conditions and imag-ines alternative futures is crucial to bridge the gap “between the imagination of human rights and the state of their practice” (McClennen and Slaughter 4).