WITHIN DAYS OF OUR ARRIVAL IN FORT SMITH, MY father was out looking for a job, and he quickly discovered that the only jobs available to an illiterate Asian refugee were jobs involving manual labor. Many of the first-wave refugees, who had arrived in Fort Smith back in 1975, were former military officers or government officials who were skilled and educated; they found it easier than later arrivals to find jobs and adjust to life in America. A third of them had completed high school, and a sixth had even attended college; almost two-thirds of them could already speak English, and that made it much easier to find employment. Unfortunately there were no job openings in America for “military officer” or “government official,” so former generals often found themselves working as janitors or waiters. The rare few who actually qualified for white-collar jobs found it impossible to advance beyond an entry-level position because they were automatically assumed to have “poor communication skills” or “lack of leadership potential.” It was a phenomenon that came to be known as the “bamboo ceiling.”
In Vietnam my father had been the COO of a multimillion-dollar rice-milling, shipping, and commodities trading empire; in America his first job was fabricating fiberglass at the minimum wage of $2.90 an hour, which brought home a paycheck of about $90 per week. He endured that job for three months, working through the winter in an unheated warehouse, making go-cart seats and fiberglass water tanks without heavy clothing to keep him warm. He wore a respirator to protect his lungs, but nothing protected his exposed flesh, and every night he came home tormented by the invisible glass fibers embedded in his skin.
After those three months he took a job working in residential construction, which increased his salary to $4.50 an hour. The term residential construction is misleading; in reality my father’s job was to do any menial task that did not require the skills and union membership of a carpenter—such as sweeping floors, hauling lumber and pipe, and breaking up concrete with a jackhammer.
In the evenings my father would walk to a nearby adult education center that taught ESL classes. He met lots of other Asians there who were trying to improve their prospects by learning the English language, and they kept telling my father that if he really wanted to get ahead in America, he would need more than just night school courses—he would need to go to a real college and get a real degree. He knew they were right, but that was easier said than done. My father had a wife and eight children to support, and he was too busy getting by to have time to get ahead.
He found his next job through an employment agency—at Ball Plastics, a now-defunct factory that molded plastic panels for refrigerator interiors. The move to Ball Plastics meant another increase in pay—from $4.50 to $6.50 per hour this time. He worked the swing shift from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m.; but when he worked overtime, he often didn’t get home until 3:00 a.m.—and he worked overtime whenever it was offered because overtime paid time and a half. His job at Ball Plastics paid more money, but having to work the swing shift meant my father would no longer be able to take ESL classes in the evening. That put a permanent end to his adult education.
The jobs my father chose had nothing to do with his abilities and interests, and they had nothing at all to do with a career path or a sense of personal fulfillment. He worked to provide for his family, and he chose each job by the paycheck it would provide and nothing more. He was always scouting for a better job, and when he heard about a job that paid almost $9.00 an hour, he jumped at it without even asking what the job was. It turned out to be the last job he would ever take. On my father’s birthday in 1983, he stepped up to an assembly line at Rheem Air Conditioning, and twenty-three years and two months later, the factory bell rang, and he picked up his lunch pail and went home.
Rheem manufactured residential and commercial heating and air-conditioning units, and it was one of the five biggest employers in Fort Smith. The factory employed more than a thousand workers, and along with the Whirlpool plant on the edge of town, it was considered the best factory job you could get. My father had no seniority when he first started at Rheem, so every morning he just walked into the factory and waited for a supervisor to tell him what he would be doing that day. Sometimes he worked a press, feeding large sheets of metal into a machine that was powerful enough not only to stamp out parts but also to remove fingers. Sometimes he worked on an assembly line, piecing together the various parts that make the condenser coils for air-conditioning units. When there was no other job available, he swept floors or cleaned machines or even worked as a janitor.
The factory was hot, and it didn’t help that my father started work in mid-July, when the temperatures in Fort Smith often topped ninety-five degrees with humidity to match. Ironically, Rheem Air Conditioning was not air-conditioned; a factory that manufactured devices to cool other people let its own employees sweat. To get to the assembly line, my father had to walk past a long row of air-conditioned offices inside the building where the managers worked. Each office had a large picture window that looked out over the factory, and as my father walked by, he could see the managers sitting behind their desks in their sweat-free dress shirts and colorful silk ties. He loved the days when his job on the assembly line put him near one of those offices because every time the office door opened, he could feel a brief rush of cool air.
The job was demanding, and the hours were exhausting; but one of the hardest things for my father was the isolation. The factory was cavernous, and it was so loud that conversation was impossible—and even if it had been possible, Rheem did not allow its employees to talk on the job. There was a good reason for that rule: the machines were dangerous, and conversation was distracting; there had been more than one serious job-related injury there. My father once had to be hospitalized when a four-ton forklift backed into him, and on another occasion he almost had his hands amputated by a malfunctioning press.
But that no-talking rule had an unforeseen effect on my father; he spoke only a few words of English, and the place where he spent most of his day denied him the opportunity to practice and learn. He was already isolated by his lack of language skills, and at Rheem it wasn’t going to get any better. When he retired twenty-three years later, his English wasn’t much better than when he first began.
He was forty-six years old when he started at Rheem, though the factory thought he was only forty-two. That was no accident. While we were still at the refugee camp back in Singapore, my father heard a rumor that older men had a harder time finding jobs in America, so when it came time to fill out his paperwork, he lied about his age. Instead of listing his birth year as 1937, he wrote down 1941, and since he had no birth certificate from Vietnam, there was nothing to contradict him. He was forty-two in Singapore, but with the stroke of a pen, he became a youthful thirty-eight. Fiberglass wasn’t the only thing my father fabricated.
But that little fabrication eventually caught up with him at Rheem. He should have been able to retire at age sixty-five, like everyone else, but according to his factory employment record, he was only sixty-one, which forced him to work four years beyond his true retirement age. He wasn’t able to retire until he was sixty-nine; my father subtracted four years to get started, but he was forced to add them back on at the end.
Many of the assembly line workers at Rheem were young men just out of high school, and some of them had dropped out before graduating. My father couldn’t relate to those younger workers, and he had a hard time understanding the older ones as well. The factory ran twenty-four hours a day, and my father was willing to work any shift he was given: the morning shift from 7:00 to 3:00, the swing shift from 3:00 to 11:00, or the night shift from 11:00 to 7:00. He took all the overtime he was offered and worked a double shift whenever it was available. He put in every hour he could to make every dollar possible, and he couldn’t understand why American workers always seemed to want time off.
My father saved every dime he could. There was a vending machine in the factory that sold Pepsis for fifty cents; but regardless of how hot it was, he never bought one because he thought it was a waste of money. The younger workers seemed to live week-to-week, grabbing their paychecks on Friday and blowing their earnings over the weekend, so every Monday it was as if they were starting over. That made no sense to my father; he was determined to succeed in America, and wasting money didn’t seem like the way to do it.
There was something else that added to my father’s isolation: the same racist attitudes he encountered everywhere he went. At the factory, though, they were worse because there he wasn’t just a foreigner moving into the house next door—he was a foreigner taking a job away from some deserving American. And he wasn’t just any foreigner; he was from Vietnam. It had been only eight years since the Vietnam War ended, and more than half of all Americans personally knew someone who had been killed or wounded in the war. I remember opening the trunk of my father’s car one day and finding an old, beat-up baseball bat—and he didn’t play baseball.
At the end of every shift, he came home smelling like machine oil, smoke, and dust, and on the days he installed insulation, my sisters had to shake the fiberglass out of his clothing. No matter what shift he worked or how late he came home, my mother always waited up for him and had something for him to eat; if it was early enough she cooked him something fresh, and when he was late she warmed up a plate of whatever she had made for our dinner that night. After eating, he often lay down on the sofa for a nap, and if my brothers and sisters and I were still awake when he came home, we were given the job of plucking his gray hairs while he slept. He paid us a penny for every ten hairs pulled, and we collected them on a little towel to keep track of what we earned. Bruce, budding entrepreneur that he was, used to pull black hairs along with the gray ones to increase his profits.
During those days at Rheem, my father used to sometimes wonder why his life had turned out the way it did. The factory served as a constant reminder of everything he had lost. In Vietnam he had been in authority over several hundred employees, and now he was forced to take orders from supervisors half his age. He knew he had the intelligence and experience to work in one of those air-conditioned offices, and he also knew he never would—but he vowed that his children would have that opportunity.
Because my father worked such long hours, I didn’t see a lot of him growing up. He wasn’t like the other dads I saw; he didn’t help me with my homework, he didn’t attend my sporting events, and he never took me hunting or fishing. He worked—that was his role, that was his responsibility, and my brothers and sisters and I understood that. I never heard my father complain about the menial jobs he was forced to take to support our family, and it was years later before my mother confided to us that he sometimes came home so depressed that he felt like crying. At the time I was too young to understand the sacrifice he was making, but I understand now, and I’m humbled by the choice he made.
To my father, America was a land of opportunity, but his family was a world of responsibility, and he was forced to choose between them. He gave up his dream of being a doctor for his family, and he gave up his education so his children could have one. Our success meant his failure; giving us a future meant giving up his own. But in a sense, my father never really did give up his dream of being a doctor.
He just passed that dream on to us.