Garments

Sitting in a smokey eatery too small for me to stand up straight in, over vegetable dishes and half eaten naan, I apologized to my friend Laura. “I really let my emotions get the best of me,” I was saying. “I didn't realize that was going to happen. I hope I didn't freak you out or anything.” With a nod of understanding, I could tell she fully understood. She said that she had somewhat similar reactions upon her first visit to a location of her Fulbright research topic for the year: the garment industry.  I was embarrassed. Talk about 'not being yourself'. That day I had shut down; stopped talking; snapped in irrational hostility if I did, or perhaps soft and dismally, indecisively, and in a limbo-like disbelieving haze; avoiding eye contact; wet eyes; a confused face; a lost expression.

I had agreed, somewhat on a whim, to go on a Friday with Laura and a traveler staying with us interested in seeing a garment factory. I hadn't really thought about doing that before, but the opportunity presented itself and I saw no reason not to go. I felt eerie inside the moment our car got near; abject slum gave way to a fortress; the muddy, garbage-laden road buzzing with snot-nosed half-clothed children led to a massive iron gate fortified with high concrete walls topped with spiral barbed wire. The factory itself had amenities I was pleased to see: semblance of a fire-safety system, lots of space, a cloth testing laboratory, a small childcare center, a sound order. I was mesmerized by the way they cut the cloth – several people at once working on a six inch stack of a hundred layers, masks and iron gloves for protection, guiding sturdy vertical electric saws, buzzing through paper patterns that were drawn on top of the stack. The quality check in the next room was busy feeding cloth through a rotating display machine so they could label every imperfection that was noticeable. It had come from China. It was being processed there, and then was to be shipped to JC Penny's throughout the US. Quite a global endeavor. Then the next floor – a high-ceilinged warehouse-style assembly line-like arrangement with hundreds of people repeating their one step duty over and over and over again. The order was staggering. Activity everywhere, uncountable people. I followed a line of seated workers, glancing at their work as if I were some task-master. Morbid associations of Schindler's list-style factory line-up crossed my mind. No one looked at me. The proud white man, looking over your shoulder, as if scrutinizing. But, must do nothing but keep working, working, working. Stay in the rhythm; keep productivity high. Sew the pocket here. Stamp the metal button here. Fold and sew, cut and stitch, down the line, one step, one step, one step at a time. It must be somewhat mind-numbingly meditative, the rhythm, the same thing, over and over again for hours on end. Each sewing machine was specially-designed for that one worker's task. Each fit perfectly in a long line up of dozens of steps. The design, the planning, the communication for the set-up, the order, the perfection.

How did they know what to do? How does this happen? How can I build a precision-labyrinth of so many steps from across the world? As questions flew around in my head, I reached the end of the line. There they were, the madras shorts. One pair, another, and another, every few seconds. I stared at the pair hung up to label the work being done on that line. Other people would see at that pair. Not the Bangladeshi consumer. I've never seen anything like that here. But how is that possible? There are so many here! Such production, but no sales. The chief export, number two in the world (right after China), such a massive industry, but they will go right into boxes. Quality-checked and neatly organized, sterile-style tightly packed boxes will leave the factory fortress, be carried on those exclusive 'emergency export' trucks to the Chittagong port - an elusive and strictly forbidden area. Some ship will carry these across the world's oceans, contact with no one. Somehow then the next eyes that see them belong to a child enjoying a soft pretzel, a group of slightly hung-over teenagers who don't have anything better to do on a weekend than browse through a mall, a soccer mom eyeing another item on a birthday list. The 'Made in Bangladesh' print on the tag, however, doesn't get much attention, a distracted glance at best, promptly disregarded by the accustomed habit of seeing that every item for sale is made in some foreign country. Doesn't really matter. Is this on sale today? …

My mind drifted back to Bangladesh. I was back in the factory with the hundreds of dedicated ant-like workers. Snipping, sewing, stamping, folding away – mindless moments. Robotic work 6 days a week dawn until dusk. A 50 dollar pay check per month. Any one of those workers would have probably said they were thankful for it, no doubt. I stared longer at the hanging pair of US fashion in this Bangladesh factory. How? How? Two worlds collided in my head. I associated the US with order, punctuality, state-of-the-art means. Bangladesh outrightly defied this with its disorganization, political strife, infuriating traffic, time-guzzling bureaucracy, and reactionary maneuvers instead of pre-planned proactivity. Somehow these worlds overlapped in a way that suddenly was so tangible: the madras shorts were right in front of me. And just as suddenly, I realized how much I didn't grasp. It's easy to think you understand the way things work when you go about your days becoming more and more familiar with the same environment. Then I realized, like opening a door and shining a flashlight aimlessly into a massive pitch black room, there are an innumerable amount of questions I didn't know the answers to. How was all this coordinated from across the globe? How is this even possible? Where did all of this machinery actually come from? What were the lives like of these workers? How did they really feel about their work? Is this right? Why is this so hidden? What would happen if more Westerners were able to be exposed to an environment like this? What else am I missing here? What about the other hundreds of factories in this city that I've never seen? Are they like this? What about any other product? Any other thing that I've seen “Made in China” written on? How do all of these things get everywhere? Don't those ships move so slowly across those endless oceans?

Is it safe to work here?

The day before, I had just visited the factory that had recently burned down. A shell of a building, the interior charred and black with thick cloth ashes covering huge sections of the floor. The folding metal sliding gates in the stairwells: closed by guards who told the workers there was actually nothing to be worried about. But there was. What was it like when hundreds of people on a factory floor suddenly realize the floor beneath them is churning in flames? What was it like when they all realized they were locked in and couldn't escape? What was it like for those people who broke through the metal bars on one of the windows, having to choose between the intensifying furnace behind you and the pavement in front of you, 9 stories down? How searingly hot it must have been to force them all to jump to their deaths? What was it like to be burned alive, to become an unrecognizable heap of black charred flesh, only your teeth marking you as having been a person once? What was it like for your family to find you like that, or not find you at all? What was it like for them to have so many unanswered questions? Was this really intentional? Where was the factory owner? Did he really have someone burn the factory down to collect insurance money? Would he really get more compensation for every worker lost? Why were they locked in? Was this a deliberate incineration of between 300-1200 lives? Were the other 5 smaller fires at garment factories this month also planned, or were they flukes, the product of negligent safety standards? What was it like for the families, that woman I talked to on the street outside who said her daughter was one of the victims, to have no answers, to be lost in despair and aimless anger, nothing to hold onto other than the dejectedness from knowing that your child was incinerated alive for no reason, for a preventable reason, or worse yet, because someone wanted money.

The madras shorts stared back at me. I looked down at a woman sewing the logo on each pair, then the guy behind her, my age. No one had glanced at me. The Bangladeshi warmth and curiosity and staring and smiles and annoying but harmless questions were not meant for a task-master place like this. This didn't feel like Bangladesh, but it was. It actually was. To reconcile this, I had to admit that Bangladesh was not just a road-side tea stall conversation, its unique mix of time-to-time annoyances but general carefreeness and warm-heartedness. It was also a very important but very disenfranchised and under-privileged player in a very big, very influential, but poorly visible global framework. In a web of interconnectedness that we actually were all a part of but rarely whole-heartedly attempt to conceive. And only more questions come, more questions, an ever-widening picture.

I was glad I got around to apologizing (albeit several weeks later) for being so self-absorbed in confusion - the pained, unwelcoming look on my face the whole day. Fortunately at that time over our meal that evening it was much more comfortable to revisit the notions and questions that that experience had unleashed. As I wrapped up my explanation, I became aware of Laura nodding in her agreeing attentiveness. “Yeah, yes, absolutely. Stuff like that is hard to articulate.” Then, not missing a beat, as if there were no doubt, “I hope you wrote that down. I don't know if you blog or something, but you need to write that down."