Xiaowei Wang Publishes on Workers, Immigrants and the Settler Colonial State

BCNM's Xiaowei Wang recently published a beautiful essay on their mother and immigration as a part of a project for Tank Magazine.

From the essay:

During this pandemic, I have hated calling my mother. I also hate writing about my mother because of her suffering – at least what I perceive to be her suffering. Her suffering becomes easy to flatten under an American gaze: the story of a Chinese immigrant mother who works hard, suffering for her children to have a better life. She never graduated high school, is still unable to spell cauliflower correctly, has broken English despite 20 years of being in the US. I hate calling my mother, only to hear about her latest complaints about work.

She’s a cafeteria worker at a private university still open during Covid-19. The nature of the higher education system in the US is convoluted and complex, but tinged with profit-driven motives across a patchwork of non-profit and for-profit universities charging high prices for bachelor’s degree credentials. At a private university, students and their parents are customers, and as customers they need to be kept happy, given the full university experience, even in a pandemic, as a reminder that their $50,000 a year tuition is not going to waste. Part of the university experience is the environment – being on campus, wandering through the vaunted halls of knowledge, eating with friends in a dining hall while discussing the chemistry final.

Read the entire essay and check out the entire project here!