Stinky Tofu

Every morning I walk from the women's shelter facility to work. On the beginning of my walk the buildings are tall pretty apartment buildings and convenience stores. In a bit, I take the back way into a long alley of gravel where semi-fenced off to my right, there are tall wild grasses. The beginnings of the smell of something rotting starts at that point. For about 5 minutes I travel this way, until I reach the mounds of trash, the remains of a demolition project that just never got cleaned up. Rusty chains, yellow asbestos looking stuff, shattered wood, and of course, people's discarded bottle over here...food remains over there, all lie waiting to be discovered by a trash truck.

At this juncture, the trash meets a putrid, waste-laden sewage creek from which the stench of rotting plant and animal matter cling to the humid air, filling one's lungs to the point of pure disgust. The photo does the smell no justice. A rocky cement paved ledge about 1-1.5 feet wide lies next to the creek. I remember the first time a survivor showed me how to get to work. A large bag over my shoulder I had thought, "This is a joke right?" Thankfully, this part of the walk, the offensive creek and cement ledge is only all of 1 min or so and every so many feet the path decreases to half the size and I cling to the posts jutting out to prevent falling in the creek with the tiny fish eating pond sludge.

When I reach the end of this, I have to hop the creek by a gnarly tree. Someone put down two weak slabs of plywood-looking-feeling concrete for a makeshift bridge. I keep wondering when and if this will give one day under my weight, sending me into the creek I fear and loathe. The creek is on the backside of the office, so once I pass the 4 ft crossing I'm on solid land and at my place of work.

Every day I'm reminded how mixed up life is, how precarious things really are. The sludge creek leads to a place of refuge, the VMWBO office, where Tan has lived for over one month because the stress of working 13 hrs a day in a tile factory, 6 days a week, lifting heavy construction materials overwhelmed him. One day he got into a fight with another worker, a physical fight. His employer refused to pay him and then fired him. Tan came to Taiwan for several reasons. Of course one of them was to send money back home, but he also, at age 22, saw TW as a ticket out of the depressing conditions in VN and his dysfunctional family. For him, an older son in the family, it is his responsibility to help the family survive. His parents grow food on a small plot of land in front of their tenement in a rural part of north VN. He suffers a large scar that turned into a keloid on his upper arm because a machine cut out a large chunk of his arm. Two years ago Tan paid $8000 to some man who showed up in his village one day talking about a country with work and money. He didn't even know where Taiwan was. I'm astounded by the number of traffickers, often the same cultural background as those they traffic, selling their own. What does it mean when we sell our own?

Tan doesn't know how he will find work to pay off the rest of his debt. I think hard about the fact that in the U.S. he and his family might have had other choices. I think about all the American college students who are getting an education for their debt, while Tan is being human trafficked for his.

The sludge creek reminds me that outside the walls of the shelter, VNese are treated like 3rd class citizens. It stinks. It stinks stronger than any decomposing matter. But the creek also reminds me of the balance between the dark and the light, because in the midst of the human rights violations committed in TW, there are people like the shelter staff and caring folks in the states who are doing their part to fight for basic decency and justice. I guess it's like Stinky Tofu, a Taiwanese delight. Darkness and light, stinky and delicious, do dances around each other. I can't lie though, that creek smells like shit.



*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.
**Photo: 2 works of art made by women in the detention center. On the left, a more optimistic view. On the right, a depiction of a detainee's self-portrait of her sadness. Buon means sad VNese. The woman on the right mentioned repeatedly how ugly her drawing was. I told her I thought it was very, very special. She has been in the DC for 5 months.