Tourist

“Excuse me, but are you from Asia?” the African-American guy sitting next to me at the lunch table asks with a confused look on his face.

“Haha, no I just speak a little bit of Karen, their language.”

“Oh. I was gonna say. You didn’t look like you were Asian. What is that?”

“Mung bean sprouts,” I say popping one of the crunchy little white shoots into my mouth, “Do you want to try one?”

“Nah…well…I suppose I oughta try just one,” he says, putting down his bag of Doritos. He picks up one of the little plants and looks at it as though it is an alien larva before taking a bite. “Mmm. Alright. I have never had anything like that before.”

“Right now the best food is in the woods,” Eh Kaw chimes in, “green briars.”

“Say what?”

“Green briar shoots: the young tips of the thorny plants in the woods that are coming in right now. They are a tender and a little bit sour. Very good,” I explain.

A bowl of young sweet gum leaves and green briar shoots makes its way down from the other end of the table for the man to try.

“Nah… I think I am ok.”

“You sure?” Eh Kaw asks, “At least try the green briar.”

“OK,” he says, nibbling on one of the shoots, “Hey, not bad! Thanks.”

RINGARINGARINGARINGARING! Everyone stands up and prepares to return to the floor.

The chicken plant is a strange patchwork of tight-knit cultures. Karen friends are often eager to share with me the several words of Spanish, Kiswahili, or BVE colloquialisms they acquired during their labor in the meatpacking plants of Georgia. Employees maintain the most ardent allegiance to their own group, yet many practice a glib comraderie that transcends those boundaries.

Perhaps the strangest thing about my sojourn at the chicken plant to my co-workers was my seeming membership in a group visually not my own. Everyone has their niche and for many it is their cultural niche that secures their employment at the plant in the first place. I arrived as a participant-observer of sorts, which was not unapparent to my co-workers. I arrived unable to blend into my group, unable to lose the attention attracted by my individuality.

I framed employment at the chicken plant as an experiment in solidarity, an intentional move out of love for my Karen brothers and sisters, and certainly a new experience. Yet participating in this new milieu necessitated seeking a sense of belonging. I in fact relied as a recipient on the solidarity of my Karen friends with their younger white brother.

I often hear of mistreatment by black and Latino co-workers and witnessed first hand several incidents in which black and Latino workers would interact congenially with one another or me as a white man and then turn around and issue caustic treatment to internationals. My black supervisors were also not hesitant to treat me rudely, established in their position of superiority. Feeling drawn into membership in the Karen community at the chicken plant, I myself began to feel some of the disdain my friends have expressed to me for their black and Latino co-workers because of mistreatment.

My educational and cultural background trained me to regard racism as a folly of the ignorant, yet stepping out of my “white-as-anethnic” sensibility it becomes a real demon to contend. When your own individuality is dissipated by membership in a close-knit cultural body, it is not reasonable to regard consistent mistreatment by others belonging to another cultural body as individual aberrations. There is indeed a culture of abuse. Yet to regard all people with a particular physical appearance as culprits in said culture would also be in error. This is the error of racism: failure to discriminate between distinctive cultures.

Is it ethical for me to consider “joining the tribe?” Is this a failure to discriminate between my experience of comfortable affluence and the refugee experience of the Karen? Certainly there is a gargantuan gap to be acknowledged here, a seemingly irreconcilable void, yet to regard it as essential is this same failure, which deems cultures as absolute. Our memory is always available to the mediation of new experience. This is our essential human freedom—the invitation to the path of salvation (healing).

I can never truly know the plight of the Karen because I have the freedom to leave. My foray into the working class was insulated by the fact that my termination was of little consequence to my quality of life. But even when a tourist comes across fertile ground, he must criticize the conditioned impulse to capture it in a snapshot and return to the rocky soil where produce comes in on trucks and gets sold in supermarkets. As ludicrous as it may seem, he must consider the possibility of throwing away his passport and planting some seeds just to see what germinates.

In wake of the sudden end of my employment at the chicken plant, Naw Say invites me to follow her to pick strawberries for a local farmer in the evening. We drive up a dirt road to the gate and she gets out to open it. I drive into a verdant enclave of trees and shrubs where we are greeted by two smiling faces. “Ha luh ghay?” the man tries.

“Uhh, Ha luh a ghay” Naw Say replies, laughing in appreciation.

He hands us each a stack of shallow boxes and we follow him down the hill to the strawberry patch.

“Where is Pa Saw Paw today?” he asks.

“She had to stay at home with her kids, so I came in her place,” I tell him.

“Well thanks for coming to help.”

“Sure. I am happy to be here. This place is beautiful.”

“Yeah. We really lucked out. What kind of work do you do?”

“Well I worked at the chicken plant in Athens for one month, but I just got fired for being too slow.”

“That’s a hard place to work,” he says.

Words like “solidarity,” “intentional,” and “downward mobility” swirl about my brain, but I cannot seem to put them together in a sentence to show that I have a college degree, so that he will recognize that I am not actually a low-class worker. Solidarity undoes itself when it is approached as a purpose unto itself. Buried beneath my shame is the only wealth I have.

“So pick only the berries that are completely ripe…No yellow or white,” he instructs me. Naw Say is already a quarter of the way down her first row as I begin searching under the first plant.

Eggs

I plunge my hands into another green plastic tub of nuggets and pull up with pieces of chicken  hanging from my fingers like fleshy rosary beads. I fling the product back down into the tub in disgust. No yellow dot for this one. I pull a hold tag out and scrawl “CUT THROUGH” in all capital letters. I am on a crusade against strung-together nuggets. My supervisor told us that the customers are complaining about this, so we are to tag any tub we find with more than two connected pieces. I make it my mission to save the reputation of the chicken plant and impress my supervisor with my high standards and unrestrained holds. I carefully mark another tally on the hold log, trying to save the white paper from the raw chicken goop on my glove.

“YOU’RE TAGGING EVERYTHING MAN!” yells one of the runners, angrily pulling the tub I tagged off of the line.

“IF IT LOOKS BAD, I TAG IT. I AM JUST TRYING TO DO MY JOB!” I reply. I want to say something to him about how this whole place is built on taking advantage of people and the way to subvert that is not through carelessness but obedience, but all he seems concerned about is the extra work I am creating for him by placing so many holds. One of the unanticipated effects of this is the extra work I create for myself: a steady stream of rejected tubs coming back for rechecks, keeping the line backed up at DSI 5. My co-worker, Roberto, appears suddenly beside me and begins pulling product to weigh at my station.

“HILDA TOLD ME TO TAKE OVER LINE FIVE HERE. SHE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU IN THE OFFICE.”

I take off my gloves and walk up the steps of the foot bridge over the conveyor, through the series of plastic flaps, past a giant crate of discarded chicken dyed pastel blue, and into the QA office. I am relieved to have a break from the constant work of the line, where my brain was struggling to keep up with my hands, but unnerved by my assistant supervisor’s sudden interest in talking with me. Most days she does not even reply to the “Good morning” I greet her with in the office at the start of the day. Most of my questions regarding work or the location of needed supplies are typically met with a rude response implying that I should have already known the answer to my own question. I walk into the office where she is making more hold tags.

“Roberto said you wanted to talk to me?”

Without looking up from her work she says, “Go back to the line. I will come and get you. Just stay off of line 5.”

Caught in the familiar gap between obedience and initiative, neither of which are sustainable traits in this place, I return to the line in frustration. DSI 1 is the only unoccupied station, where there is only one tub awaiting inspection. I stir the product, weigh thirty fillets, affix my yellow dot, and slide it onto the line. I lean against the counter, waiting anxiously for my assistant supervisor or another tub to inspect.

Hilda strolls out onto the floor. After five or so minutes of socializing with fellow supervisors, she calls me with her hand. She maintains her usual morbid silence as she leads me back to the office. When we arrive, she tells me to sign in my pen and thermometer and watches impatiently as I do so.

“Follow me,” she says. We cross the production floor again and exit to the front part of the building where we turn into the human resources office. Hilda escorts me to a room where my supervisor and one of the human resources personnel sit waiting for me.

“As you know, the first forty-five days are a probationary period. It seems as though you are not a good fit for the QA position, so we are going to have to let you go… I am going to need your ID card. Your supervisor will clock you out,” the man in human resources tells me in a practiced voice. I turn to my supervisor, remembering the many times I asked him for feedback to no avail.

“Can I ask why?”

“Well, speed. The line was always getting backed up. I got called out to the floor five times because of you! And you failed to fill out the weight histogram correctly.”

By this time everyone is on lunch break and so I go into the cafeteria, but cannot bring myself to sit down to lunch just yet, so I go into the bathroom, shut myself in a stall, and surprise myself as I fill the toilet bowl with tissues full of snot and tears. It hurts getting fired, even from such dismal work.

The next day was supposed to be my first mandatory Saturday overtime in my month-long career at the chicken plant. Instead, I take my usual morning stroll to the Comer Farmer’s Market where Corey tells me Baw Baw has been trying to call me because her stomach hurts. Knowing she is nearing nine months, I walk quickly over to her house, knock on the door and walk in. Baw Baw stands in the living room clutching her belly.

“My baby brother is coming!” Blay Blay says.

“Ya gaw na ta blu blaw leeeh. Na ta paw phone ba ma nu leh—I called you many times already! Why didn’t you answer?” she asks.

“Did you call Sue already?”

“Uhh. Ya te aw he luh a na ree ta hsee ta kaw, bah hsa ya hso ga moh Wisdom ga oh pleh hsoo nya—Yes, I told her to come at 10:30, but I think Wisdom will be born very soon.”

I quickly call Sue at Jubilee and tell her to come now to take Baw Baw to the hospital as I prepare to watch the other four kids and try to get in touch with Hei Nay Htoo at the chicken plant. Russ and Christina at Jubilee volunteer to watch the kids so that I can take Hei Nay Htoo to the hospital. I agree to take over watching the kids Sunday morning until their parents get back from the hospital.

Wisdom Yoha Htoo is born 8 pounds, 11 ounces on Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 10:58 AM at Athens Regional with no complications. Hei Nay Htoo and I arrive shortly after the birth. I am then sent on a mission to find rice and Mama noodles.

The next morning I drop scrambled eggs into hot oil and watch the yellow mixture puff up as it fries. I place the fried eggs on the table with rice, Sriracha, sliced fruit, and five plates. Wonderful, Blay Blay, Hae Tha Blay, Ga Pu, and I sit down on the floor around the table to eat breakfast as we wait for Wisdom to come home.

The Secret

The bell rings continuously for a minute to ensure that absolutely everyone knows their precious fifteen-minute break is almost over. We stand up and file out into the crowded hallway leading to the production floor. I retrieve my smock from the hook and hustle between machines to my station where five seventy-pound tubs of product have already accumulated on each side of the computer terminal, awaiting my inspection. I slowly ease back into the rhythm of scooping handfuls of fillets, depositing them on the counter, weighing them piece-by-piece, and quickly tossing them back into the tub after the weight registers in the spreadsheet.

“YOU NEED TO PICK UP THE SPEED A LITTLE BIT, OK?” my supervisor surprises me from behind over the rumble of the sizers. “THIS AFTERNOON WILL BE YOUR FIRST TEST WITH ONLY THREE PEOPLE ON THE LINE. WE’LL SEE IF YOU CAN DO IT!”

I reprogram the computer for the next variety of fillets and quickly scoop a larger handful of fillets, hoping I can save some time on having to pull the sample of thirty pieces multiple times. As I lift the gloppy pile, two fillets slip from my grasp and fall on the floor. I place the rest on the table and begin recording the weights in the computer stretching the smaller pieces out to check that they fit the template. I toss the already weighed pieces into the tub with haste sending several sliding off the edge of the counter.

“EXCUSE ME!” a voice calls. It is one of the line supervisors. “DID YOU DO THAT?” she asks accusingly, pointing to the fillets on the floor.

“YES…”

“I JUST CLEANED THIS AREA! BE CAREFUL! THE CEO IS COMING HERE TOMORROW AND I KNOW HE DOES NOT WANT TO SEE THAT!”

“OK. I WILL.”

Tesfaye comes over with the ice cart and with his grabber retrieves each fillet that I dropped from the floor and places it neatly on top of the ice.

“GOOD MORNING, ZAC! HOW ARE YOU?”

“I AM FINE! HOW ARE YOU, TESFAYE?”

“GOOD!”

“HAVE YOU WORKED HERE A LONG TIME?”

“ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF. IT IS MY FIRST JOB IN AMERICA!  I LIKE IT!”

He smiles at me as he drags the cart off to the wash station. The rollers on either side of me are again full with tubs for me to inspect. The line runner arrives with two more tubs on his cart and glares at me as I grab a handful of nuggets to weigh. We are supposed to inspect thirty pieces per lot. A lot can include one to three tubs according to our discretion. The assistant line supervisor from the other side leans over to me and says,

“THE SECRET TO THIS JOB IS KEEPING YOUR OWN SECRET. YOU CAN’T DO IT HOW THEY TELL YOU.”

I laugh as he gestures to indicate that I should just place stickers on all the tubs to keep the line moving. He slides the tubs I have already marked with my yellow “Q.A. Inspected” sticker onto the conveyor for me, nodding his head towards the uninspected tubs.

“C’MON MAN. IT IS ALMOST YOUR BREAK AND THERE IS A LOT OF CHICKEN HERE!”

I do a hasty sift through each tub, affix my yellow dot to the tags, and walk away for my lunch break a minute late.

My employment at the chicken plant is padded by financial security and an unacknowledged college degree, which allow me to frame it as a short-lived sojourn. Yet for most of my Karen friends and I would speculate the vast majority of the hourly workers here, this is far from a new experience. It is the means by which their families are surviving in this twisted economy. The first forty-five workdays are a probationary period, a time wrought with anguish for someone who relies on this income to make rent. The company can let you go at any time unless your performance meets their standards, throw you away under the counter to be dyed blue and discarded.

I return to my post for a moment to re-sheath my hands and then off to check the wash stations where all product that makes contact with the floor is sent to be cleaned with water treated with some special chemical for sanitizing chicken. New tubs appear on the rollers as I walk off towards the far corner of the production floor. I pick up the washed chicken and move it to an adjacent tub as I glance at it for dirt or hairs. I count ten pieces then reach up for the clipboard to indicate that the washer properly cleaned the product for this hour.

“ZAC,” a voice calmly interrupts. I turn to see the USDA lady whom I met in the morning staring straight at me.

“YOU ONLY CHECKED ONE SIDE OF THE FIRST SEVEN PIECES! I WATCHED YOU! I AM GOING TO HAVE TO TELL YOUR SUPERVISOR ABOUT THAT.”

Before I can say anything she walks off towards the QA office. My hands shake as I pull another ten pieces and check them thoroughly. The assistant QA supervisor comes out to scold me.

“EVERYTIME YOU CHECK THE WASH STATIONS, YOU NEED TO CHECK TEN PIECES! THE USDA LADY JUST CAME BACK AND TOLD ME YOU ONLY CHECKED THREE PIECES! RANDY IS NOT GOING TO BE HAPPY WHEN HE HEARS ABOUT THIS IN THE MORNING!”

Trembling with worry, I finish the last hour of work mindlessly weighing nuggets, unsure whether tomorrow will be my last day. I surprise myself with the realness of the fear, my attachment to the position. My presence here no longer feels to be an experiment in subversion, but my actual life.

If I focus my attention on what could be, my eyes close to the beauty in present circumstances and the very way to “what could be” functionally closes. Beauty arises from charming fear and gratitude into coalescence. Fear, volatile as it may be, keeps me attuned to mystery. It is an invitation to the practice of gratitude. On this dynamic path to contentment, everything is pregnant with possibility.

I emerge into the warm afternoon through the turnstile and hop in the passenger seat of Hei Nay Htoo’s van in the parking lot. My muscles sink into the car seat, giving thanks that they are no longer required to maintain my frame standing erect. Sweat pours under my sweatshirt and long underwear as my body adjusts to the new climate of Northeast Georgia spring. I watch the giant fans outside the plant whirl above an intricate buttress of pipes as we pull away. I am now a denizen of this strange cathedral.

Quality

“NO SPITTING ON RESTROOM FLOOR,” a sign declares in all capital letters from the wall. I search awkwardly for the lever to turn on the water in the long trough sink as seasoned workers hurry about the bathroom on their break. The man next to me gestures down below and I finally see a pedal which I lean into with my knee and send scalding water cascading from the faucet and splashing onto my sweatshirt.

I yank open the bathroom door and walk out into the cafeteria. The lunch line is off to the right and vending machines line the far left wall. The long sidewalls are covered with small gray lockers. Long fold out tables with bench seats fill the center of the room in rows of two. It is as though I am walking out of the smoky bathroom of my high school back into the crowded cafeteria. I feel as though I need to have a pass to prove that I am allowed to be here. I glance nervously among the tables and breathe a sigh of relief as Eh Kaw waves me over to the Karen table where there are already many Tupperware containers of curry spread out between bowls of rice.

It is my first day as a Quality Assurance Technician at the chicken plant, which is mostly spent watching the others quickly weigh random samples of “product” and place holds on seventy pound tubs of chicken nuggets which contain too many pieces several grams too heavy or connected together by fat or cartilage. “The most important thing is speed,” my supervisor tells me as he sits me down in his office to read company and department policies to me, after which I am to initial off on several items on a list.

Quality assurance as it turns out is mostly a matter of quickly collecting data to keep “product” moving along the line. While I am required to stick my sheathed hands and arms into the tubs and stir around to look for foreign material, mostly my purpose is to ensure the homogeneity of fillets and nuggets to keep Chick-fil-A and Zaxby’s from making too many complaints. I am to report any defects, or signs that the product originated in a living creature: cartilage, excess skin, fat, bloodspots, or worst of all, bone.

My first day is relatively easy and I question the suggestion made by the representative from human resources during the classroom orientation the previous week, that you take a couple of over-the-counter painkillers before work everyday for your first week. The second day, however, I am to report at the regular time and so I carpool with my Karen friends in Comer already working at the plant. A silver SUV pulls up outside the house at 6:35 am the next morning, roughly ten minutes after Eh Kaw knocks on my door to wake me up.

I sip on my thermos of tea as we cruise down 72 towards Athens in the darkness before dawn. The headlights illuminate a large tractor-trailer stacked high with cages in the lane adjacent to us. Gloomy white shapes squirm inside the squatty cages and feathers rush in the headwind. We are caravanning from Comer together with our product.

Quality can never be evaluated by adherence to a particular model, because quality exists only relative to particularity. If you eat the same identical piece of chicken every day for lunch, eventually the distinctions of “good” or “bad” lose their meaning because no experience is unique. There is only one experience: chicken. The chicken plant is the industrialization of our oblivion. Without the mindfulness with which to actually make distinctions between experiences, we become the all-white meat fillet that fills our belly. As we genetically engineer ourselves into machines, we make our world into a place where consciousness is a scary thought. What is the purpose of all of these people working in a cold and noisy factory under fluorescent lights to produce low-quality food to fatten the drive-thru patron? What are people for?

When my great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Germany they were poor working class people living in Baltimore city. My great-grandfather established a bakery in his new country and this was the means by which he supported his family. After my grandmother completed the 8^th grade, she went to work in her father’s bakery also. As the story told many times at her funeral in January goes, this is where she met my grandfather, who kept coming back for doughnuts. This is my most recent relative whom I have heard of employed in the work of food production.

We encounter low quality when we are unable to conceive of the existence of multiple realities: rich and poor, delicious and bland, life and death. Our memory becomes bleached by monoculture. As my psychiatrist recently reminded me, “Depression is not good for you. There have been studies showing links between depression and all kinds of health problems, especially memory loss.”  The symptoms are perhaps a sign of the disease.

My second day I begin working alongside one of the other technicians who kindly teaches me all of the different tasks and tricks associated with the job. Tub after tub of chicken comes on the rollers to be processed. My lower back begins to ache from standing and pushing the tubs as 4:15 PM approaches. The lines show no sign of stopping. The product continues to appear without notification from anyone as to what time the machines will be shut off and the birds will be finished so that we can go home for the day.

I am faced with the challenge of remembering the distinctions between the days of my toil, of countering the temptation to classify my new work as monotony and follow this to its logical conclusion of meaninglessness. I must frame my new position as an act of anamnesis for my middle class mind to accept it. If I am to pursue quality I have to counter my journalistic judgment of the chicken plant. To find joy to in my work I search for a melody for a line from the morning psalm so that I can sing it to myself as I work. I will sing of your salvation! I will sing of your salvation! The chicken plant is an absurd venue in which to sing of God’s healing, but it is precisely for this reason that there is quality to be found here amidst the roaring portion sizers, plastic tubs of raw poultry, and wet concrete floors.

Disappear

“Have you been here before?” the woman asks from behind the desk.

I look around the office nervously. Sterile tables and chairs float like islands on the expanse of green carpet. The security guard glances up at me from his desk at the back of the room.

“No. Well… not for myself,” I say, remembering my trip here last year with Hei Nay Htoo and Tha Htaw. Blay Blay and Ga Pu were in tow since Baw Baw was still working at another poultry plant. We had to make a stop halfway to Athens because Blay Blay got carsick all over himself.

“Fill this out to complete your registration,” she says handing me a pen and packet of forms.

I sit down at one of the many empty tables and begin filling in my contact information on the top of the generic form. I hesitate at the line for college or university education. Cautiously I scrawl out, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, check the box indicating that I graduated, and then write in my major: Religious Studies, hoping this compensates for having a bachelor’s degree in the first place. I find comfort in the thought that I am only at the Georgia Department of Labor, and know the person with whom I am meeting.

A short black woman comes out from the office area and calls my name with a thick West African accent. I hardly recognize her, but know this must be Sola, so I get up to greet her. She smiles at me and asks jovially:

“So how come this time you are here for yourself? You are looking for a job?”

“I just moved in with Eh Kaw in Comer and am looking for a job at the poultry plant,” I say as I follow her into her office in the back.

“Did he start there already?”

“Yeah. I think they wanted him in H.R. but he insisted on working as a wing cutter on the line.”

“It is very slow right now. They really are not doing very much. Maybe if you go with Eh Kaw…”

“Yeah that is what I thought I would do, but he told me to come through you because usually the people he brings are given the hardest jobs. He has seen me try to cut meat before and is pretty sure I would sever a finger if I worked as a wing cutter.”

“Well, I will do what I can, but I never know when they will come to us and ask for people. You might have to wait several months…”

She points to a stack of applications in a tray: all people waiting for work at the plant.

“Home Depot is hiring right now if you are interested in that… or since your last job was as a tutor, what about this preschool teacher position?”

Feeling discouraged about the possibility of the chicken plant I let her tell me about the other job openings in her database. A middle aged white woman comes in to the office and starts talking to Sola about some video series on job searching to show for an event at the labor department. I gradually tone out there conversation in spite of my impatience and try to imagine myself with an orange apron unloading freight from trucks.

“…And this is Zac. He worked with Jubilee Partners and now he is coming to me to look for jobs,” she says with a chuckle. I smile at her co-worker.

“What kind of job are you looking for?” she asks.

“I want to work at the chicken plant.”

“I have been telling him about other possibilities, but he wants to work there,” Sola chimes in.

“You don’t want to work there,” the woman says, “I went for a meeting there once and it… it was horrible! I knew someone who worked there once who told me they could never get the smell of dead chicken out of their car! It’s not for you.”

“Are you sure you can handle it?” Sola asks.

“Well… I want to try… So many of my friends are working there and I feel like I need to know what it is like… Eh Kaw asked it of me.”

“So you just want to experience it? How long do you want to stay there? Six years? You think it is worth you just going in there to see what it is like when there are so many people waiting for jobs there?” the woman barks at me.

“It’s not for you. It’s for… who it’s for,” Sola agrees.

Who is this dastardly group that the chicken plant is for? Most Karen certainly have a knack for butchering meat and the plant does provide necessary employment and decent wages to many much more skilled with their hands than I. However, as ragged white-feathered chickens, unable to walk if they are kept alive too long, are brought in by the filthy truckload in order to please our hungry consumer society like a demon child being suckled by the boneless breast, we must acknowledge the reality that we are all being processed.

If the chicken plant vocation is intended for anyone, it is meant for the people who have taken and eaten. We the processed meat, are called to the line. We must without hesitation hop on the conveyor to our deconstruction. James writes:

Let the brother in humble circumstances take pride in his eminence and the rich man be proud of his lowliness, for he will disappear “like the flower of the field.” When the sun comes up with its scorching heat it parches the meadow, the field flowers droop, and with that the meadow’s loveliness is gone. Just so will the rich man wither away amid his many projects.

 “If you really have it in your heart to work there we will see what we can do, but I am telling you it might be several months,” the woman says leaving the room.

Sola hands me an application.

“Make sure you omit your college degree on here. Can you fax this to me by tomorrow?”

“Yes. I will.”

The next day I return to the work of watching my niece and nephew in the morning for a few hours while Baw Baw goes to English class. Blay Blay and Ga Pu follow me outside of the K-House and I direct them to edible weeds for a wild salad.

“Blay Blay, can you pick the little umbrellas?” I ask, pointing to a patch of thriving cranesbill.

“Oh yeah!” he says, scampering towards the foliage, carefully snipping off the tops of the umbrellas and placing them in the metal bowl.

Ga Pu looks at the cranesbill with apparent disinterest and hops over to where I am picking violet.  Her eye catches a tiny lavender-colored flower, which she delicately plucks from the ground. She hits my arm forcefully, to pull my attention from the violet leaves.

“Zac! Zac!” she calls. I finally stop pulling the leaves and look to see why she is so excited. She holds the wild pansy up in the air for me to see, eyes big with wonder. I find another wild pansy growing close by and pop it in my mouth, pleasantly surprised by the subtle burst of floral wintergreen. Her brow furrows.

“Can you put the flower in the bowl?” I say, picking more pansies, in hopes that she will follow suit. Her lips curve into a smile as she places the flower in the bowl and hunts for another. With each pansy she picks, she comes over and hits my arm again, holding the single flower up as high as she can before placing it carefully in the salad.

Passing

“Oyyy!” Hei Nay Htoo yells from the passenger seat, charged with anxious energy. A large beige mound approaches on the right shoulder.

“Ghay deeahh—Is it still good?” I ask.

“Ghay deeehh—Yes!” he replies.

I quickly turn around on the next dirt driveway and pull over on the side of the road. We hop out of the car like a swat team and run behind the van. I open the back hatch. He shakes his head up and down virulently from beside the animal, calling me to come. Each grabbing a leg, we hoist the dead doe into the back of the van. “Na ga mah noh ga a tah mah gwa ba daw ta ha nya ee na ga aw da ho nya a beh—You are going to pass the driver’s test and tonight you will eat delicious venison!” I tell him as we get back in the car and zoom up 72 into Comer.

While Hei Nay Htoo goes inside and gets his I-94, I deposit the deer carcass on the ground by the front door and retrieve two bikes from the shed, setting them up on both ends of his minivan. Baw Baw looks at me like I am crazy. Hei Nay Htoo told me in the car that he had never practiced parallel parking, and so before we return to the DDS in Athens for his road test I instruct him and let him practice backing into the simulated parallel parking place between the two bicycles. Baw Baw stands on the side shouting, “Na ga taw seh beh nay—You are going to hit the bicycle!” He glares at her and proceeds to back in to the space almost perfectly two times. Baw Baw agrees to put away the bicycles and we race back to the DDS.

Six months ago, I allowed Hei Nay Htoo into the driver’s seat of my 2010 Corolla for the first time. I sat in the passenger seat trying to slowly breathe in the new car smell, intermittently barking directions at him in the simplest English I could muster as he jerked the car around the shopping center parking lot off of Memorial Drive. Since then, he purchased his own minivan and soon will have his license.

I watch from the top of the hill as Hei Nay Htoo drives methodically through the course, stopping at each stop line, backing up perfectly, mastering the three-point-turn, and gliding neatly into the parallel parking space between cones. Chills run through my squatting frame as though I am watching my own son try for his license. The van pulls out of the course and onto the highway, accelerating out of sight. I lean forward from my chest as if to follow, but remain in place, feeling abandoned. Ten minutes later, the van pulls back in to the parking lot. The two faces are both fallen and somber through the windshield.

The van slows as we ride up the ramp to merge onto the Athens loop. “Faster! Faster!” I call to him and eventually he speeds up. We continue on to Atlanta to move my bed and larger things out to Comer in the back of the van. Every once in a while, Hei Nay Htoo lets out a sigh of frustration and says something in Karen, which I do not understand. As we approach Clarkston I tell Hei Nay Htoo to stay on 78 until the exit for I-285. “This will probably be the hardest thing you have ever done. The exit comes in on the left and you have a half a mile to cross four lanes of traffic to get over to the exit for Ponce on the other side.” I am not sure if he understands, but cars are already zooming past us on our right side as the exit winds adjacent to the interstate.

“Na bleeahh—Are you scared?”

“Ya ta blee bah­—I’m not scared.”

“Nyaw nu pe gleh ta boh ee yeh ya blee ah do ma—Usually on this road I am very scared. Get over!”

I look back at the oncoming traffic. “Get over!” I call again. Before I know it we are passing into the exit and gliding up the hill to the stoplight on Ponce. I clap my hands boisterously, declaring: “YEAH! Na noh ga bahehh—You can drive!”

We fill up the back of the minivan with my bed, desk, boxes, and clothes from my room in that house on Casa Woods where I spent my past few months. Bernard and Amber moved out a few days earlier to live with Maung Soe and Kmoo Paw’s family in their apartment on North Indian Creek. By the end of the afternoon after visiting friends and seeking a seemingly unattainable closure, I am sprawled out on the floor of Lay Moo’s apartment, completely exhausted. I have the keys to the van, but Hei Nay Htoo holds out his hand. “Na mee luh ga boo thay—You can sleep in the car.”

We so easily conflate our sense of place and the order of life that we create for ourselves, with the fleeting nature of reality. Our plans, ideas, and concepts bring order to the formless void, allowing our brains to play at comprehension while the great cloud of change broods over us. We can only speculate from memory.

Solomon, when standing before the altar in the newly built temple declared, “Can it indeed be that God dwells among men on earth? If the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain you, how much less this temple which I have built!” God is a wanderer, telling tales of perpetuity. In transition, we realize that the corners in which we disguise eternity are small, and as the walls come crashing down we are forced to look that great judge death in the face and state our case.

I awaken as we roll in to a stoplight somewhere on 78. I look over at Hei Nay Htoo as a little child emerging from sleep. He meets my gaze, his brow furrowed with fatherly concern, overtaken by confusion at the strangeness of this situation. We look at each other curiously, brothers from opposite jungles, and then turn back to the road, passing endlessly into the twilight.

Ora et Labora

The kitchen emits a bright glow and the faint drum of voices emanates into the living room. My eyes squint at this unwelcome interruption to sleep. My arm extends out across the plastic mat and I push the button on the side of my phone to see the time: 3:45 AM. I elevate my upper body on my elbows to scope out the situation.

Last night Bi Kan No told us to go to sleep early because we would wake up at four in the morning to slice cucumbers. I assumed this was a joke, because why wouldn’t one do this the night before, or at least at a more humane hour? But sure enough, there is Bi Kan No with his machete, launching cucumber discs into an aluminum pan. With somewhat of a struggle I perch on my feet. I hear Bernard begin to stir on the floor next to me, and mumble, “What is going on?”

“Cucumbers,” I mutter.

“Ummm…”

“Good morning!” Bi Kan No calls, looking up at us momentarily from his task as we meander to the threshold of the kitchen. This day marks one year since Bi Kan No’s family arrived in the United States, and there is much to be done in preparation for the party. I pick up another machete from the counter and squat next to the bowl that Naw Dee Poe places on the floor before me. The blade slides slowly through the cucumber in my left hand and sends one rather uneven disc slipping into the bowl. My pace increases gradually as I come to consciousness and the probability of sending a shard of finger into the bowl declines.

“Pa mah tah a weh ee keh ee bah mah nu leh—Why are we doing this now?” I finally ask.

“Pa nyaw nu gheh htuh peh lwee nah ree law—We usually get up at four o’clock,” Bi Kan No replies.

I realize that he leaves early every morning for his shift at the poultry plant and feel foolish for questioning his daily rhythm. He offers a carefree smile and seems still amused by me as I struggle to retain consciousness.

After the cucumbers, apples, and Asian pears are sliced, Bi Kan No returns the massive pots sitting on the carpet mat adjacent to the kitchen one by one to the charcoal stoves outside on the back porch of their apartment. I stop slicing and pick up one of the pots, removing the lid just slightly to see what kind of meat is in each. I pick up the pork curry pot and hobble to the back door and into the cold black morning and wait for him to direct me towards the appropriate stove. The largest of the pots remaining inside contains what Bernard and I refer to as “meh teh leh tah eh a htee—goat shit soup.” When Karen people butcher a goat, meat typically goes in one pot and organs in the other, including part of the small intestine containing partially digested material, a black ooze that we watched spurt out of the intestines as they were slit open in the pot the previous evening.

I dread work at the poultry plant and the haunting thoughts of a life confined to the toil of such dismal labor, yet my soul cries out for repetitive work that will drag me out of bed early, and call me into rhythms of gratitude for the luxuries I unconsciously misuse. It was after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden that they were assigned to the tedium of manual labor. And so work is an act of repentance, a prayer to teach us gratitude for the confines of circumstances. In her book, Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris writes:

The Presbyterian pastor John Buchanan believes that passivity and indifference that make us less able to engage in vital occupations and concerns are as problematic today as intentional evil. But they are also an ancient curse. The Judeo-Christian story places it in Eden, where the primal sin involves refusing to take responsibility. Put on the spot, Adam tries to excuse himself by blaming Eve, and Eve then blames the serpent. Neither cares where the buck stops, as long as it rests with someone else. God responds to this display of sloth by sending the first people, who had been intended for the holy leisure of paradise, into a land where they must labor for their sustenance.

My eyes open again and there is light coming in the window and a middle aged woman with bad teeth who I have never met before looking curiously at me lying there on the floor. It is a little bit after seven. I wait for her to walk into the kitchen before emerging from under the blanket in my long underwear and wrapping the longyi around my waist.

The living room fills with people sitting on the floor patiently awaiting the beginning of the worship service. The pastor and the young man who will be preaching both sit on the sofa at the head of the room. One of the elders starts off with a short speech and then the congregation sings a song from the hymnal cued by the pastor. Before long they are signaling to me to sing a song.

I was honored when Bi Kan No invited Bernard and I to come over the night before and help with preparations for his one year celebration, and even more so when he asked me to offer a song for the worship service. I strum a G chord on the guitar and begin to sing:

God will make a way

When there seems to be no way

He works in ways we cannot see

He will make a way for me

Norris describes Benedectine monk David Steindl-Rast’s definition of faith as “‘an intensive listening,’ whose opposite is the acedia that recognizes life’s absurdity but chooses to remain ‘deaf to its challenges and meaning.’” I probably would not care for this upbeat catchy God song aside from the story that it emerges from and invites me into. My friend James taught me this song almost four years ago at Jubilee. James was one of my first Karen friends, but he taught me this song in English. It remains in me along with my peculiar attraction to his obscure ethnic group. God makes a way for us by overturning our work with prayer. It is by this means that cucumber slicing in a kitchen before dawn and placing chicken on a conveyor in a damp factory become paths to paradise.