Not Someone Else's Laborer
An event, and an excerpt from The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival
Hi readers,
I’m excited to let you know about an online event I’m participating in on Tuesday: A conversation with author Lisa M. Hamilton about her new book, The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival. The event is being hosted by New America, where Lisa and I were both fellows. You can sign up to join online here.
I’m thrilled to be speaking with Lisa about her extraordinary new book, which is the richly-told story of Ia, a refugee woman from Laos, who through sheer grit and determination makes her way to California and starts a life as a rice farmer. It’s a story with strong feminist overtones, and it’s a compelling look at all the ways in which human beings keep each other small — and sometimes, the ways in which we manage to grow larger than we could have imagined.
Below is an excerpt from The Hungry Season. And I hope you can join Lisa and me in conversation on Tuesday.
xx Jill
Ia was not cut out to be someone else’s farm laborer. She didn’t mind the work itself—it was piecework, and her innate hunger for money fueled her to pick briskly up one row and down the next. What broke her was the disrespect. Some farmers didn’t even offer water to drink. After one particularly enraging day of being told to haul heavy buckets of tomatoes from one end of a field to another and then, because of the manager’s mistake, back again, she blew up at her employer in a tirade about decency and left the field, vowing never to hire herself out again.
That fall, she enrolled in adult school. No social studies or great books—this was education tailored to get non-English-speaking students speaking enough of the language to enter the blue-collar workforce. As a result of federal and then state welfare reforms, Ia was told she was required to attend school in order to continue receiving public assistance. She welcomed the mandate. At last she would be in class, learn some English, perhaps even advance into employment that held more dignity than picking other people’s fruit.
It was 1997 and her tenth child, Lou, was five months old. He refused the bottle, so that first night of adult school she tucked him under her coat and took a seat in the classroom with him concealed against her breast. Inevitably, he cried out. The teacher stopped the lesson and turned to face the pupils, bewildered. When the woman asked what the noise was, Ia sheepishly unzipped her coat to reveal the infant, nursing. The teacher escorted her out of the classroom apologetically, promising that she would explain Ia’s situation to the caseworker and have her excused from school. Ia, without the English to object or explain or cry out in defeat, said nothing. It was her first and last day of school ever.
The following spring, real opportunity came. An auntie named Chang asked Ia if she wanted to grow rice on some land that her brother was renting out. Ia immediately replied yes, even though it made no sense. In Fresno, rice was cheap and plentiful—Ia bought it in fifty-pound bags and ate it twelve months of the year. She didn’t intend to sell her crop, and yet growing it for her own consumption would never be cost-effective. Indeed, in order to finance it, she would have to swallow her pride and spend weeks picking beans for someone else. Here, though, numbers went out the window. What enticed her was the rice itself. Growing her own meant that for the first time since Laos she would have mov nplej tshiab, something no amount of money could buy.
Traditionally, mov nplej tshiab refers to the first serving of rice eaten from a new crop. The name, roughly pronounced “mon blay chia,” means essentially “fresh rice.” But so much is lost in translation. In a country where staple foods never come just picked from a field, where calories are abundant regardless of the season, the idea of rice being fresh has little significance. In Laos, though, every year Ia’s family and so many others watched carefully as their stores of rice dwindled over the winter and spring. In the best years, it lasted all the way until the new crop came in. In most years, though, sometime in summer they faced the hungry season: when their rice had run out and they were reduced to filling their bellies with cassava and corn, foods normally reserved for livestock.
To hasten the end of those hollow days, they would make the new rice crop accessible just a little bit sooner by picking some of it still green. The grains would be full but not yet fully developed, much of the sugar inside still waiting to be converted into starch. To make this emergency ration palatable, they would toast it over a fire. What happened next was like a divine gift. As the green rice browned, it would release a blanket of aromas, first earthy, then sweet and buttery. Next, cooked in water, the rice released a new palette, nutty and warm.
It was the alchemy of necessity: all their wanting transformed into splendor. Ia, as a child, savored the one meal of mov nplej tshiab she ate each year. Everyone did.
Before anyone could eat the mov nplej tshiab, a separate meal was prepared. A chicken was killed, if there was one to be had. Tiny cups were filled with rice wine. A mound of fresh rice was roasted until it popped open and the fragrance inside exploded out, as if ringing a bell to the spirit world. The male head of the household would call to the spirits of the deceased, that line of men and women who had led the family before him, to come satisfy their own hunger. In exchange, the living requested protection and guidance through to the next harvest. Bless us through the coming year, the man before the altar would say, so that we can have another prosperous season and feed you like this once again. It was an infinite exchange, going backward to when the deceased themselves offered rice to their forefathers, going forward to when this man leading this family would be fed in the afterlife by his sons and their sons.
By this point in the day the children would be tugging on their mothers’ legs, impatient for the rice whose smell had by now filled the dark home and wafted through its thatch walls into the world outside. Men would eat first, then women and children. After perhaps months of living off corn mush, the mov nplej tshiab gave them sustenance. With its inimitable toasted flavor, it gave them succulence. And it also gave them something beyond food. As the fresh rice passed between the lips of the living, it was confirmation that they had made it, that they would last another year. It was at once a celebration of renewal and proof of sheer survival.
By the time Auntie Chang approached Ia with an offer to farm, it had been years since Ia had lacked rice. But she had not had mov nplej tshiab for decades—since before they arrived in Fresno, since before all these children and all these years devoted to making sure they had clothes and meat, at least a little bit, every day. Ia had not had mov nplej tshiab since she was a child herself, since before they fled Sa Na Oua during the rainy season of 1978, leaving their rice crop behind them in the field. So when Auntie Chang asked if she would like to grow rice out in the dull fields of Sanger, southeast of the city, Ia was surprised and confused—didn’t even know rice could be grown there—but she said yes without another thought.
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Because Ia couldn’t afford the whole farm herself, she split it up with some other women. Each fifty-yard row cost $10 to rent for the season. The other women took five rows apiece; Ia took ten. In April they planted seed given to them by Auntie Chang, and nearly every day clear into September they met at the farm to work their crops.They all knew how to grow rice, but none knew exactly how to grow rice here. They compared strategies and eyed one another’s plants as they grew. Energized by the unspoken competition, Ia weeded her rows voraciously.
When the rice finally matured, the women sweated through milling it the way they had in Laos, rigging a traditional wooden mortar out of railroad ties and part of an old telephone pole. The final product cooked out to be soggy and somewhat bland. Disappointing, but for Ia it didn’t matter. The reward had already come, spread over months of simply being at the farm, together with the other women, instead of locked away in a cramped apartment with too many children and too little money. On their plots of rice the women had belonging, connection, ownership. They had purpose.