There were six years between the publication of “Going Home” and Ku’s previous book about Filipino laborers in Taiwan, “Our Stories: Migration and Labor in Taiwan.” In bringing the field of action to the homeland of the migrant workers, the author has given Taiwan readers a more complete portrayal of the real lives of Vietnamese laborers. “This book is a valuable record, and it is very heartwarming to all Vietnamese here in Taiwan,” said Peter Nguyen, a priest of Vietnamese ancestry and founder of the Vietnamese Migrant Workers and Brides Office.
With two consecutive books having won prizes, most readers are aware that Ku’s creativity is sourced from her status as a senior participant in social movements. It is difficult for young readers—given how diversified social movements are in contemporary Taiwan, and the fact that taking to the streets in protest is today a kind of badge of youth—to imagine the determination required of the people like Ku and her generation. The social movements in which they participated made strict demands on them. Yet, unintentionally, this experience shaped her writing and gave it a unique appeal.
Sprouting with the Wild Lily Student Movement
At the time of the Wild Lily Student Movement, back in 1990, Ku was a student at Fu Jen Catholic University who served as one of the university’s interschool representatives. After graduation, she opted to get in on the ground floor, participating in the Committee for Action on Labor Legislation, one of the most important workers’ organizations in post-martial law Taiwan. Ku worked closely with colleagues such as the famous labor leader Cheng Tsun-chi; Lai Hsiang-lin, now commissioner of Taipei City Government’s Department of Labor; and Wu Yung-yi, who led workers to lie across railway tracks in public protest at their factories closing without warning and back pay.
Colleagues likes these demanded that intellectuals cut their teeth in frontline unions, undergoing a series of trials to sharpen their wits and learn to live side-by-side with workers in their struggle for their rights. This path, which it has been said requires a tremendous ability to endure loneliness and isolation, meant that Ku’s creative writing career has been completely the opposite of most writers. But it is also the main reason why she is able to see things from such a humanitarian viewpoint, to understand the complexity and subtlety in human nature, and to present works so rich in realistic detail.
“I didn’t first decide to be a writer or reporter, and then go out and interview migrant workers and then write up their stories,” Ku said. “It was simply that inside the social movements, we were side-by-side with so many people who had experienced moving or emotional stories, and if those of us in the movement didn’t write these stories, who would?” Making a documentary record is for Ku part of her social responsibility, so writing books is inextricably related to her organizational work.
In fact, she said that the motivation in 2008 for her to write her first work “Our Stories” was that the “prize money was NT$400,000 [US$12,703], which could pay office rent for the Taiwan International Workers Association for a whole year.” Every night after getting off work at 10 o’clock, she would start to write. Sometimes she wrote until three in the morning, even though the next day she still had to go to the office on time to handle migrant worker affairs. It turns out that the habits of self-discipline and structure she had learned the hard way in the labor movement were precisely the qualities she needed to write lengthy books.
Structural injustice inlaid in the stories of individuals
“Ku is very efficient, very adept in her job, and also a very sensitive and intuitive person,” said Lai Hsiang-lin, who persuaded the citizens of Taipei to elect her, by a wide margin, as commissioner of the Department of Labor on the strength of her union movement credentials. Having worked with Ku for nearly 20 years, Lai said her colleague “has tremendous empathy with people. Some people who get involved in social movements in fact don’t want to hear the disadvantaged complain, and eventually they become annoyed or standoffish after listening to the weak tell their stories. But Ku genuinely wants to hear these stories, to be there side-by-side with people. That’s why she went all the way to Vietnam with returning migrant workers. She sees the injustices of the system as inlaid into the stories of individual people, then she takes these stories and transforms them into words.”
The first book Ku wrote—the one that won NT$400,000 and solved financial problems for her labor organization—was a groundbreaking literary work in Taiwan with a central theme recording the lives of migrant workers. Ku said that she is a “young girl in the literary circle,” because her only previous experience was to edit the school newspaper when in high school. Yet, with no previous literary experience, she has won prize after prize with her writings on the previously neglected labor movement. These have included The China Times Literary Award, Taipei Literature Award and The China Times Kaijuan Good Book Award. Her books are characterized by a light, easy-to-read style deeply infused with emotion, capturing the difficulties and sorrows of migrant workers who come to Taiwan from various lands, as well as their moments of happiness and humor amid hardship. Renowned Taiwan film director Hou Hsiao-hsien said he often finds himself red-eyed with tears when reading Ku’s books, yet goes over them again and again and cannot put them down.
“When I finished ‘Our Stories,’ even then I had a general idea that I would write ‘Going Home,’ by following up the stories of migrant laborers after their return home,” Ku said. Migrant laborers in Taiwan come from all over Southeast Asia, but Vietnam, rapidly transforming from a socialist country to a capitalist one, especially piqued her interest.
For young people in Southeast Asia, “Going abroad to work is a search for a better future, it is both an opportunity and an adventure,” Ku said. She wants to change the typical way some people in Taiwan view migrant workers—“disadvantaged, linguistically incapacitated”—and replace this image with one of courage and working as hard as they can to make a go of it within structural limitations. Though most end up not being financially successful, they are transnational explorers.
During the six years between books, Ku’s career in the labor movement underwent a major transformation. Different activists had varying views about the path the movement should take. There was a formal split into the People’s Democratic Front and Raging Citizens Act Now groups. This caused her to temporarily pull back from the coal face of labor activism and she took a side job teaching. “If there had been no organizational splintering and collapse, maybe I would never have had the time to write a book like ‘Going Home,’ which has a very complex set of personages and sequence of events.”
Serving as a bridge, reducing ego to the minimum
“When writing I will always think, ‘right now, what am I writing for?’” Ku is constantly framing the collective of the working class against the ego of the writer. The end result is what the critic Tang Nuo describes as “reducing herself to the minimum” as a defining feature of her writing. This makes the task of writing correspondingly more demanding for her than for the typical writer.
Fortunately for readers in Taiwan, even as she continued to question herself and grope her way forward, Ku never stopped traveling back and forth between Taiwan and Vietnam to write and record. Of course, at the same time she also helped migrant workers get their passports back from labor brokerage companies, drive female workers between shelters, assist in getting unpaid wages from employers, and even helping a wife in Vietnam get herbal medicine to her faraway husband.
After accumulating a wealth of stories from migrant workers, Ku still wavered over her writing. “The first time I went to Vietnam, I wrote more than 100,000 characters, but later I ended up discarding virtually all of that.” Fearing that she was using a Taiwan viewpoint to misunderstand Vietnam as different and exotic, Ku borrowed and read many books, giving herself a crash course in the economy, history and politics of Vietnam. She even asked Lou Yi-wen, an adjunct assistant professor of Chinese at National Tsing Hua University, to read over her book and make sure she had not grossly misrepresented Vietnam. Only then did the 200,000-Chinese character “Going Home” get published.
“The bottom line is that if contemporary history is only a record of the high and mighty, and there are no records of working people, I just wouldn’t be able to live with that,” Ku said. Looking back on the 20 years of her youth spent standing shoulder-to-shoulder with laborers, Ku continues to contemplate the future direction for the labor movement and also thinks about leaving a true and vivid picture of workers under the grand historic framework of mainstream economic development and changes in political regimes. What she is writing is priceless documentation of the history of migrant labor in the early 21st century.
[by Ho Hsin-chieh / tr. by Phil Newell]