A Sweatshop of a Different Sort

For a few news cycles on the world’s television sets, it was one lurid piece of real estate.

The El Monte apartment building-turned-sweatshop--where the Feds recently liberated 72 Thai nationals--is hardly sinister, only another unprepossessing hunk of working-class urban architecture, tolerable-looking enough on videotape that a few poor people in Thailand may have been set to thinking, “Heck, if that’s servitude, I’ll take it.” Once the building’s secret was revealed, the vice mayor of El Monte remarked: “A lot of people weren’t aware what was going on. When you look at it, it looks like a condominium.”

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Look at another neighborhood, set on the placid and prosperous fringes of Los Angeles County.

There are no apartment buildings here. This is as R-1 as it gets, large houses 20 and 25 years old, worth $200,000 or $250,000 on the assessor’s books, built of bisque stucco and broad clapboard; the lawns are wide, the houses set well back from hot sidewalks that are empty except for the gardeners.

In one of these houses, a young woman lives. She, like the family she lives with, comes from a country not in the Western Hemisphere.

The woman is not a relative. She is not a guest. She is a kind of indentured servant, and has been for years. What her immigration status is, even she may not know. Her passport is kept locked up, and her mail is screened. She sleeps on the floor in the dining room. She is not paid a wage. Even if she had money, she is terrified of going out because the family has warned her that if she leaves the house, the bad men who swarm America’s streets will get her.

All this neighbors came to know only in recent months from the young woman’s fleeting visits and swift whispers when her employers were at work.

Some of the women in the neighborhood--busy, compassionate women, mothers and grandmothers--were horrified when they figured it out. Here was a white-collar professional couple living in late 20th-Century California--with a virtual slave.

Yet in this same late 20th-Century California, where every supermarket is a souk of international flavors and every park is a whirligig of languages, we are schooled to tolerance, private and public. A Vietnamese family in Carson is not charged with child abuse after it is explained that the marks on their son are from cao gio , “coining,” a folk remedy for a headache. A Mexican woman in Los Angeles avoids jail time for biting her teen-age son and beating him with a spoon to punish him for stealing--accepted discipline in Mexico.

Understandably, then, the first question the neighbor women asked themselves was not, What should we do, but, Should we do anything at all?

“It’s like, ‘Is this PC?’ ” said one. “Do I have any right to say anything? Because in her country. . . .”

In her country, another neighbor learned from a friend who had lived there, a class system makes such a thing possible, even common, when a young woman is taken in by a prosperous family after she is abandoned or orphaned.

She is not hungry, she is not beaten. She is simply not free. When one of the children of the family showed her off to friends as “our slave,” she wept, but did not complain. Perhaps she wants help, but she wants much more to go home “nicely,” without fuss, and soon, soon.

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One neighbor’s living room is shady and rose-colored, the wallpaper cool and flowered, the blinds closed against the day’s heat. But there is still heat; it is generated by the woman who lives in this house, by her anger, and this moral quagmire.

Over recent months, she has been a recipient of the young woman’s timid confidences, almost always prefaced by, “I just have a minute, they don’t know I’m gone.”

“I call it servitude. It irks me, right here under our nose in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. . . . That’s bringing something to the U.S. that I don’t think they should be bringing. That insults me, it insults my country.”

The homeowner doesn’t share her anger with the bewildered young woman, but: “There’s a problem here in Southern California. Unless it affects my pocketbook or me personally, I’m not going to get involved. And maybe it’s more in the middle-class neighborhoods too than in the less affluent ones.”

We have not named this young woman here, nor her neighbors, nor her neighborhood. One reason is so as not to get her in trouble; as she has told the women who befriended her, she wants to leave soon, and “nicely.”

The other is to shake out our own complacency like a rumpled bedspread. To name the neighborhood exempts every other neighborhood from scrutiny.

Since those Thai workers were freed, since I visited the young woman’s neighborhood, I have given closer looks and closer thought to my own, to a garment shop I see on my way to work. It is curious that its windows are barred not only on the first floor, the shop floor, but on the second, which looks like an apartment, and where the breeze beats the white curtains against the bars like trapped butterflies.