Asian Workers Stories, An anthology

A Review

Harry Targ

Edited by Luka Lei Zhang, Hardball Press, 2025.

 “My efforts to contribute to the aspirations of the working class began with writing novels about hospital workers….(In)the majority of stories that were published in books or aired in movies or on television, the heroes were doctors  or psychiatrists....The service workers who maintained the institution and provided most of the services were either absent from the plot, window dressing or foils for the professional classes.” (Tim Sheard, “Insurgent Publishing for the Resistance,” Hard Ball Press, https://hardballpress.com

I’ll be ever’where-wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat. I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there…An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build-why, I’ll be there. (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Penguin edition, 1992, 419).

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good…Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood (Woody Guthrie. "Woodysez")  https://www.woodyguthrie.org).

The editor of this volume, Luka Lei Zhang, opens with an “editor’s note” that appropriately celebrates the collection of short stories and essays and the press which brought the collection to us:

This book stands as a testament to a collaborate endeavor rooted in the working-class milieu, encompassing the contributors of writers, translators, editors, graphic designers, and the publishing house, Hard Ball Press. It represents a concerted effort to forge a bond among contemporary worker writers within the Asian context, fostering a collective platform that unites their literary pursuits and talents.

And later: Each story represents a tapestry of experiences deeply rooted in distinct communities and is intricately connected to broader social and political contexts.

I have been taught to read novels or book length essays. It is through the novel genre that the reader, I thought, could vicariously experience and empathize with the characters.

Also, I might add, I was educated to read novels that prioritized the angst of isolated individuals, or family dramas, in the context of “the human condition.” Great literature did not portray characters as workers. This for me only began to change as I became exposed to the great tradition of proletarian literature. But my bias against the short story or short essay continued.

Then I picked up Asian Workers. The first fictionalized vignette is of a migrant worker communicating with his wife across countries from his worker location to his home country as she is about to deliver their new child. That last phone conversation does not happen for reasons that I will not divulge. It was a devastating story.

In four pages this short story captured for me the tragedy of migrant labor, the pain and suffering that workers experience just so they and their families can survive economically.

Story after story (near the end of the volume there are some essays) describes the extraordinary exploitation of immigrant labor, being underpaid, forced to give sexual favors, day after day indignities suffered by day laborers and domestic master/servant relations, and how the political economy of hired labor and its agents recruit and move labor from one country and another.

After reading this volume I felt I understood more about migrant labor than all the academic essays I had written or read on the subject. And, again, I felt the power of these vignettes, a few as short as three to five pages, the way I felt years ago reading The Grapes of Wrath.

Along with the vivid character of the narratives from the standpoint of the super-exploited these were stories written by and from the perspective of Asian workers; from Singapore, Bangladesh, India, Laos, Thai, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. They were often recruited for labor in the Middle East. A few stories highlighted the salience of ethnic diversity among workers in communities.

In the end, Asian Workers is a wonderful read. These  stories and essays would serve well as accessible texts in classes and study groups on workers, on class, on class and ethnicity, on class, gender, and race and on the global political economy of labor.

Hard Ball Press should be commended for publishing documentaries and fiction about workers. The Press is continuing the tradition that was impactful in the days of proletarian literature.