Reproductive Freedom Tour

The eldest child in her family, Anna Le, who is Chinese American, bears the brunt of the work at home to enable her mother to work in the factory. In the evenings, she sees her mother come home exhausted and abused. “In my mom's factory,” she says, “they don't store excess material away from the workroom, they keep it all in one room with the workers even though the dye in the fabric is toxic and can damage their lungs. My mom comes home coughing and with back problems.” Anna says she is tired of the expectation that she should be silent about the injustice in her life just because she is an Asian woman. “There are stereotypes,” she says with an edge of anger in her voice, “that Asian women have flexible fingers and don't complain...Well I don't have flexible fingers, and I complain a lot.”

To their credit, so do the other young women standing beside her, Sally Saeteun, 15, Meuy Saeph- anh, 16, and Gen Saephan, 15. They are working to break the silence about the experiences of low-income Asian refugee women and to take a leadership role in fighting for change—only they are not stopping with the sweatshop. In a few minutes the caravan takes off again. Next stop: the Oakland welfare office. “Welcome,” says Gen, “to the life of an Asian girl in Oakland.”

What is happening today is a tour of the city, but with a twist. The tour guides are leaders in HOPE, a community organizing and leadership development project for low-income Southeast Asian and Chinese girls, ages 14-18 in East Oakland, a project of Asians and Pacific Islanders (API) for Reproductive Health. The six sites on the route, including the welfare office, Oakland High, and the IES medical incinerator, represent spaces that young Asian women must navigate in order to survive.

Oakland is home to a huge API population. Southeast Asians alone make up the second largest ethnic group on welfare in Alameda County. Of the larger API community, half speak limited or no English, 35 percent of youth live in poverty, and 16 percent are not enrolled, not attending, or have dropped out of school.

With their mothers in sweatshops and their fathers working multiple jobs, many young Asian women have to take care of younger siblings, cook and clean for their families, miss school to accompany their parents to medical appointments and the welfare office, and pay the bills and taxes because their parents do not speak English. “It is hard,” says Anna, “my mother comes home late. I have no time to talk to her about what is happening in my life. I have to be the big person.”

“The strain is tremendous,” says HOPE coordinator Neelam Pathikonda “and there are few spaces where girls can express the challenges they face and give each other support. HOPE is one place where they can.” Says Gen, “Asian girls are supposed to be quiet and afraid. HOPE taught us that we can be ourselves, open up and say things.”

For HOPE, fighting for reproductive freedom means confronting the myriad of forces—economic, environmental, and cultural—that prevent women from having control over their bodies and the power to make healthy choices. HOPE creates a safe forum for girls to talk about such issues as sexual harassment, teen pregnancy, and relationships but then broadens the discussion to explore how environmental, racial, economic, and political forces affect a woman's reproductive health and overall well being.

“HOPE girls tackle the big questions,” says Pathikonda, like “why are our families here in the U.S. and why are we poor?” It is out of these conversations that the idea of the tour was born, as a way to share their insights and educate the larger community.

To prepare for the tour the girls researched their communities. They looked up statistics on the Internet about Oakland schools, visited campuses, and did a comparative analysis of Piedmont and Oakland High School. They interviewed their mothers and grandmothers about the war in Vietnam, surveyed over 200 students in their schools about sexual harassment, policing, and health care access, and talked to experts about the hazards of the IES medical incinerator in their neighborhood. They talked to community-based organizations liked PUEBLO, People United for a Better Oakland, Californians for Justice, and Let's Get Free to get information about the issues they deal with. The result is a blend of personal stories and statistical information presented in a booklet and in a three-hour tour of the city.

In front of the Oakland welfare office, Sally criticizes the U.S. government: “The Americans recruited my grandfather and dad to fight on their side in the Vietnam War. Then when they gave up on the war we had to flee our country or be killed. We came here because we had no choice. The U.S. says it will help us to get on our feet but really it wants us to work for them again, this time in America's low-wage jobs.”

For Meuy, this office is a familiar place. Like many children from low-income, non-English speaking families, she has come here frequently to translate for her mother because, although it is legally required that the office provide translation, it never does.

A family of three gets a welfare check of $565 per month. Rent for a two-bedroom at fair market value is $775. In addition, the family cap law, which denies benefits to children who are born after a mother begins receiving benefits, impacts even families where both parents are working several jobs. “Sometimes,” says Sally, “only half of the family can eat.”

On the way to Oakland High we pass the Grocery Outlet on 27th and Broadway, where the girls' families go, along with other welfare recipients, to buy food. Food, that is, that other supermarkets catering to middle class customers have deemed too old and taken off their shelves for re-sale to outlet stores where low-income people shop. At Grocery Outlet there are seldom any fresh vegetables or fruits. Mostly packaged foods with low nutritional value.     

When we pull up to Oakland High School, HOPE leaders pass out pictures of Piedmont High School. A few miles north, Piedmont High, which looks more like a college campus than a high school, boasts its own outdoor amphitheater, an expansive library, a room devoted to college prep, and plenty of computers with internet access. Its student body, which is 75 percent white, enjoys a wealth of resources that Oakland High students can only dream of, with predictable results, 83 percent of PH graduates are eligible for the UC-CSU system.

Oakland High, which is 95 percent students of color (55 percent Asian) and situated next to a free way on-ramp, is a different picture altogether. Classes are crowded, books are dated, and computers scarce. Bars, fences, and chains hem in every exit while the bathrooms lack basic things like doors on the stalls, soap in the dispensers, and toilet paper. HOPE leaders describe arguing with teachers to win even a few lessons on Asian history—this in classrooms where over half of the students are Asian. Their sex education classes don't teach them about their bodies, contraceptives, or sexual harassment. Then there is the racial profiling that students of color confront.

Asian students are often tracked out of higher level classes and into English Language Deficiency (ELD),  for no reason other than they are Asian. Gen explains that teachers are supposed to administer a test to determine placement but many do not. “In middle-school I didn't talk much in class so even though I was getting As and Bs they placed me in ELD,” says Sally. “I had never been in ELD, not in elementary or middle school,” explains Meuy. “Then, this last year of high school, they put me there.” ELD classes do not count for college English requirements. Predictably, only 3 percent of Oakland High graduates are eligible for the UC-CSU system.

HOPE argues that high schools like this are an important part of a larger system that tracks Asian women onto a road of scarce resources and disempowerment.

Last stop, California's only commercial medical waste incinerator run by IES (Integrated Environmental Systems). Located in a low-income East Oakland neighborhood, the IES incinerator, which runs 24 hours a day and burns everything from syringes and gloves to body parts, emits toxic chemicals including dioxin, mercury, and other carcinogens and has been cited by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for 250 violations since 1990. There is technology that reduces emissions but, according to HOPE and other community groups that have staged protests over the past year, IES refuses to stop incinerating medical waste.     

Identifying what they want and sharing this information with others was a big part of the tour. The next step is figuring out how to get it. The members of the HOPE Project will continue to give Reproductive Freedom Tours this summer in the hopes of educating community members and giving voice to the struggles of Southeast Asian refugee girls in Oakland.  Z

Vanessa Daniel is a freelance writer and researcher for the Applied Research Center in Oakland. For more about APIRH: 510-434-7901 ext.304.