NWSA Women of Color Caucus Frontiers Student Essay Award
Wei Si Nic Yiu, Loyola Marymount University
Work Smart, Not Hard: Chinese Women Massage Workers’ Lessons of Quietly Messing with Work
"In a world that so often seeks to erase the labor, the voices, and contributions of working-class migrant women of color, this recognition is a profound affirmation of my research collaborators and their tactics of quiet resistance.
My work, which delves into the gendered and racialized labor of massage through the lens of Asian massage workers, is a testament to the brilliant community of migrant Chinese women that guided me. Migrant Chinese women who worked in the massage industry are uniquely situated at the center of multiple overlapping transnational struggles — the carceral immigration regime, state violence, racial capitalism, sexism, and economic instability. Thus, their knowledge is sharpened by their lived experiences of navigating multiple structures that seek to criminalize them. This essay is a small offering of an archive of migrant workers’ unruly oppositional tactics.
As of now, the migrant Chinese women I write with are experiencing the carceral nature of the U.S. immigration regime, and their tactics are a crucial intervention to the systems that seek to erase, undermine, and criminalize them and their labor. The migrant Chinese women in this essay taught me that resistance is not always public; sometimes, it is strategically quiet, allowing one to withdraw from systems that were never built for you subversively. It is in this spirit that my next project, entitled “Traveling Up North: Deservingness, Self-Deportation, and Chinese Women’s Resistance,” follows these migrant Chinese women, tracing their self-deportation practices as constrained and coerced decisions produced under extraordinary circumstances to reclaim their autonomy and futures.
This award fuels my commitment to continue writing about women of color workers, particularly those who are working-class and migrant, to document their brilliance and honor their world-making vision. Thank you for seeing this work, for valuing it, and for helping to amplify its message. The struggle continues, but so does our community."
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