Fifteen Years in America – Chapter 6: The Saga of Fighting Against Oppression at Work – Introduction

This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story originally written by my dad in Chinese. For more of my dad’s narrative see the category marked Fifteen Years in America. If you can read Chinese you can read the original at my dad’s Yahoo blog. He is currently working on chapter 9. Enjoy!

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After I attended Kapiolani Community College for a year, I started thinking about getting a job that is related to my major of accounting.   As I have mentioned before, American employers always want to employ someone with experience, so it is especially tough to find that first job related to your field.  This is the reason why many people want to go to the most famous colleges because students from these schools have an easier time finding the first job.  However, after you have worked at a job and collected experience, employers would look at what you have done and what you can do for them instead of where you graduated.  So now when friends in China ask me which American school their kids should attend, I would tell them that if they have the money and skills they should go to the most prestigious schools.  However, if they can’t get into the best, they shouldn’t be discouraged, because college lasts for only four years, and the road of life is very very long, and a college degree will not determine their entire destiny in life.

After I learned some accounting basics in America, I was determined to find a job related to accounting.  Since I didn’t have any experience, I emphasized that I had a 4.0 GPA, but this first off campus job was still very difficult to find.  After trying for a while, I found a job as a cashier at a store in the famous Ala Moana Shopping Center.  The store was owned by a Japanese American woman and I worked there for about four months.  However, I have to honestly say that these four months were the darkest and most unfair days I have ever experienced in America.  These days made me truly experience the ugly side of capitalism that was taught in China’s Marxism classes.  This capitalist that hired me forced me to work very heavy labor, overtime, and refused to pay.

“Where there is oppression, there will be resistance.”  I think this Japanese American woman underestimated international students from China.  She thought that we were uneducated, and that she could easily control immigrants from China, Vietnam, and other “third world nations” because none of us spoke English well.   She didn’t think that Chinese students my age were educated with the message of revolution since we experienced the Cultural Revolution.  She didn’t know that we were taught the message of, “there is endless fun in fighting with the sky, there is endless fun in fighting with the ground, and there is endless fun in fighting with class enemies”.  The most important thing is that in China I have had some education in law, and I knew that what she did was not only unfair and cruel but also broke the law.  Even though my English was horrible at that time and I couldn’t express myself well, I managed to team up with another student she hired and fought with her in court.  Even though this happened more than a decade ago, I still get angry when I think about it.  Recently I went back to China and heard on the news that a foreign capitalist was beating Chinese workers, and that also made me very angry.  I thought that this type of abuse rarely happens in a capitalist country like America, but now how could a socialist nation like China let it happen?  This chapter will detail my story of fighting against oppression.

To be continued!

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