Sweatshops in Paradise: A True Story of Slavery in Modern America

Copyright © 2012 by Virginia Lynn Sudbury

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5377-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5378-7 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5379-4 (dj)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/20/2012

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter One—Trouble Brewing

Chapter Two—Justice Is Blind—Get Out Of Her Way

Chapter Three—A Very Curious Girl

Chapter Four—It’s Not The Third World, But We Can See It From Here

Chapter Five—Speak Truth To Power

Chapter Six—Walking Spanish

Chapter Seven—Not Waving But Drowning

Chapter Eight—It’s Chinatown, Jake

Chapter Nine—Feeling Heaven Slipping

Chapter Ten—Your Story’s Touching But It Sounds Like A Lie

Chapter Eleven—I Am The Mouth, Screaming

Chapter Twelve—Unfettered And Alive

Chapter Thirteen—Keep Swimming

Epilogue—The Sos Hepl Letter

For Dung and Nga, with great affection

Courage is not a man with a gun in his hand. It’s knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

PREFACE

I wrote Sweatshops in Paradise because you need to know this happened. I can write this story because I was the lead attorney for and friend to these garment factory workers. I lived and watched and argued these facts before the High Court of American Samoa.

I did not write this story because I am exceptionally brilliant. When this case came to my law office, I was lucky enough to have bright legal lights illuminate the way.

Trafficking in people is a continuing, hateful, and enticingly lucrative endeavor. It occurs all over the world. It is alive in our fields and in our cities and possibly where we get a pedicure. It happened, in this story, in 2000 in an American territory. Make no mistake: slavery does not wear its cruelty on its face. It is oozing and convincing, and its price is right. It is not visible, as it once was. It is, nonetheless, the same abhorrent blight on our world.

You need to know this happened.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although I wrote this book, I am in no way solely responsible for the success of the lawsuit; I am merely the mouthy scribe. I would like to thank,

first and foremost, the Vietnamese and Chinese workers, who are the heroes;

Bill and Jane Hyman and the Concerned Citizen’s Coalition, and Rob Stipp and the Seafarer’s Center, for their very visible support and for teaching the workers English;

the Samoa News and most especially Lewis Wolman, for their coverage and his astute and insightful observations, which remain true after these many years;

Adeline and Dale Jones, for obvious reasons;

John Enright, and Katheen Kolhoff, for the quote It’s not the third world, but we can see it from here;

Michael Barcott, for pointing out that Tutuila was really Chinatown, Jake, and for complimenting me for not turning white to black;

the Fund for Investigative Journalism, for their grant and for their belief in this book;

Stanley Togikawa, of the Southern Baptist Convention in Hawaii, for being a tireless force in helping the workers when they got to Hawaii and placing them in homes throughout the United States;

Justice Lyle Richmond, for keeping his calm demeanor, integrity, and sense of humor throughout;

Joseph Grover Rees and Lan Dai Nguyen, for their intellectual insight and personal encouragement;

Heather Margaret and her family for their optimism and medical knowledge;

Maureen and Lionel Riley, for reminding me that the world was bigger than the island of Tutuila;

Melissa Barclay, for teaching me mahjong at a time I needed to be aware of clicking tiles and twittering birds;

Marty Duchnak, for reminding me of consistency and irreverence;

Susan Lynn French, Robert Moossy, and Lou deBaca, for righting a great wrong;

Petita To’aiti’iti, David Wagner, Jonathan Lane, and Mark Ude, for their efforts in preparing the workers for trial;

Barry Rose, Jennifer Joneson, and Steven Ford, for their thankless initial efforts for the workers;

David and Michelle Vargas, for teaching me how the legal world works;

Kathleen and Fisaga Kolhoff, for helping to start U’una’i and reminding me constantly of its worth, and for showing me what resolution and persistence look like in real life;

Catherine Buchanan, for believing in us and distracting me and making me laugh so hard I fell on the floor and realized I could be sane;

Scott and Alefa McPhee, for their humor, joyful attitudes, and constant evenness;

my dad, who told me to keep my head down;

my mom, who encouraged me to swim upstream;

Christa, who taught me a person could be unruffled and level throughout calamity;

my sister, Patty Ann, who lets me call her at three a.m. and never gets mad, reminds me that I am on the right path, is my constant cheerleader, and is the treasure of my heart;

and Rob, my breath and joy.

PROLOGUE

Rob and I left Mexican waters for the South Pacific in April 1995. We had been living and sailing in the Sea of Cortez, Baja, California, for the past six years. We sailed there from our home in Venice Beach, California, and lived aboard our sweet engineless sailboat Scout, a twenty-five-foot Pacific Seacraft. She was little but she was wiry.

We wanted to do a long ocean passage in Scout, so we decided to try the five-thousand-mile sail across the Pacific Ocean from Baja, Mexico, through French Polynesia and the Tuamotus, and on to the harbor of Pago Pago, on the island of Tutuila, American Samoa. We headed for Pago Pago because it was a territory of the United States and we could legally work. We had managed to keep the wolf from the door in Mexico by doing myriad activities, including boat deliveries and maintenance work, making rain sticks and beaded jewelry, writing, and running charters for the Moorings Bareboat Charter Company. We needed something new.

Scout was one of the strongest and best-built pocket cruisers in the world. Actually, at twenty-five feet she was probably too small to be considered a pocket cruiser; she was more a watch-pocket cruiser.

Rob and I had bought her in 1987 from a sailor named Peggy, and we realized early on that boats are live things that—like most live things—thrive on attention and care. Rob spent almost every day aboard and completely renovated Scout’s interior. He tore out her old dining table and used it to build the galley, which consisted of a one-burner brass propane stove, a teak drawer, a large brass bucket for the sink, and a brass hand pump for water. We bought new foam cushions and re-covered them in beautiful material.

We had only the one drawer aboard, so I spent lots of time pulling it in and out and deciding what would go inside. It slid well in Mexico but later swelled and got sticky in the tropics. I built a walnut spice rack (with close adult supervision). Robbie built a new dining table in butcher block with raised edges. He set scores of teeny rubies in the tabletop in the shape of the stars of the Northern Hemisphere in July so I would not forget them when we crossed the equator to the Southern Hemisphere. He hand carved beautiful teak latches for the closet and as holders for various tools. We had a Maxfield Parrish print framed in brass and put on the bulkhead wall—we had only a teeny bit of wall space and chose that print with great deliberation. The print is called Stars and is done in shades of blues and features a woman sitting on a rock next to the sea, gazing up at a starry sky. It evoked a sense of peace and wonder, and over the ten years we lived aboard Scout, we never tired of looking at it.

Scout flew dark tanbark sails and a black-and-red spinnaker when the winds weren’t pounding. Her primary working sail was a huge tanbark genoa. Her hull was dark blue, and her shape was that of a North Sea fishing dory, pointed at both ends. Her tiller stretched out far over the point of her stern and attached to her enormous rudder, which curved gracefully along the lines of her stern, reaching into the water. A magic woman named Susan had painted her name on her stern quarters: "Scout" written with a hand pointing to her bow. Susan had also painted little smoke puffs coming from the exhaust port, since we had pulled her engine. On her bow Scout bore two eyes for seeing reefs and hidden dangers; Susan painted those below her waterline so she would see what Robbie and I couldn’t.

Her beam was eight feet, and she drew three feet six inches fully loaded. She provided a far more comfortable ride at sea than many of the larger sailboats Robbie and I had delivered during our years in Mexico. She rode like a cork on the water.

The forepeak was spacious; we slept comfortably, even underway. Perhaps better underway—the sound of the ocean rushing past Scout’s hull and the tapping of the brine shrimp is a lulling music that I can still call up now. Being curled up in the leeward side of the forepeak was like being in a cradle. The only bad thing about sleeping underway was that one was inevitably sleeping alone; a cardinal rule aboard Scout was that a watch was always and without fail maintained while underway. The other rule was that while underway, we never, ever went out into the cockpit or up on deck without wearing our safety harness. I think these ranked right up there with for better and for worse.

On late starry night watches, though, I would lean over Scout’s teak rails with my chin on her bulwarks, trail my fingers though the water as we sailed, and wonder what was down below all that blue-black wet. The great Pacific held layers of life and energy, and we were floating over that luminous universe. The water went down so far underneath us, it was impossible not to take some succor from the vastness and age and currently soft hold.

It sounds ridiculously manly to say that we sailed the Pacific because she was there, although in fact that is largely true. Perhaps that is why we undertake journeys—because they offer themselves up to us. We have no idea what they will hold or whether we’ll succeed or even if we’re really prepared—none at all.

CHAPTER ONE—TROUBLE BREWING

I believe it all started when Renee’s dog committed suicide. It was in December 1999, around the first day of summer in Pago Pago, island of Tutuila, Territory of American Samoa.

The deceased, Midnight, had been an irritable big black dog with enormous teeth who was given to terrorizing passersby, me especially. Our law office was in an old house up the hill in the village of Fagatogo, and we had to pass Renee’s house—and hence, Midnight—several times a day just to get to and from our office. I generally ran past that house at top speed; Rob just laughed and carried rocks. Finally, Renee decided something had to be done and secured Midnight to a stair railing with a long leash. One morning, rather than face a future that had him tied forever to the back steps, Midnight hurled himself off the top step and hanged himself. Renee’s family, being a stalwart and realistic bunch, were not entirely undone. I later heard they got some kitties.

It probably wasn’t the suicide, per se. It was like the winds changing, and the fact that once a girl sees a dead enemy dog hanging by its neck on her way to work, she knows that just about anything can happen.

Virginia, can a woman get a divorce if her husband won’t let her? Grace, our secretary, wanted to know. Rob and I had just come into the office after walking up the hill and thinking of Midnight dangling from Renee’s back steps. Her question got my mind off the death theme.

Our law office boasted a small (in number) but fiercely loyal Samoan staff. Grace, a mild, twenty-something mother with a soft New Zealand accent, was our secretary and receptionist and translator. She was the invaluable one who remembered faces and stories and helped me most. She tried to bring me coffee, but I dissuaded her with talk of feminist political correctness; when I brought her coffee, she was appalled. She wore the traditional muumuu or puletasi and had dark, curly hair. She had lived in New Zealand for her growing-up years. Many islanders had lived in New Zealand or Australia or had people there.

Our investigator was a kind, good-natured young Samoan man named Petita. He was taller than six feet two inches and weighed about 350 pounds. He had dark hair and a ready smile, and he would have walked through fire for Rob. He was one of the most loyal employees we’d ever known—not to mention one of the strongest. When we moved our office from Fagatogo to Nu’uuli, we rented the upstairs in a large