was bright orange and shaped like a jelly bean. It had tinted windows my mother didn’t need. We drove out in the quiet, no radio on, the car’s headlights leading us into the dark. I had the window down because I wanted the cold air to wake me.
I didn’t know what kind of job my mother had signed us up for, dressed like this at one in the morning. I had heard from a friend that there are always jobs at the hog farm, for those who can handle it. You can clean the shit from the floor, or clean the hogs when they’re still alive, just before they put them out on the line. Or you can rub the male ones to get them excited to mate. I didn’t want that to be my job and hoped my mother hadn’t signed me up for anything like that. But a job is a job, and even one like that, you could still have your dignity.
MY FIRST DAY on the job wasn’t a good one. I did everything wrong. What I was asked to do didn’t turn out to be so easy.
Me and my mother were the only women. There were about fifteen men, and they were all Lao like us. We were what people called us—nice. I had seen these men before at the card parties my mother went to. She cooked meals with their wives in the kitchen. When we all sat down to eat on those nights, everyone would talk about their work, their bosses, how hard it was back home, how they all came to the country we live in now—but no one cried or talked sad. They all laughed. The sadder the story, the louder the laughter. Always a competition. You’d try to one-up the person who’d come before you with an even more tragic story and a louder laugh. But no one was laughing here. Every face was serious.
Out in the field, my mother put on something like a headlamp—small, with a red light—that freed up her hands. She took out the soup cans with the rice in them and handed one to me. I followed her and tried to do what she did. To begin, she scanned the field and picked a spot far from the other workers. They talked, she said, and the sound of their talk kept their worm count low.
Then she squatted and placed the soup can on the ground near her ankle. When she moved forward, she’d also move the can so it was always within reach, shadowing her. We were supposed to wear gloves, but my mother didn’t. She said you got a better grip this way. After each pick I watched her dip her hands into the soup can and rub the tips of her fingers in the uncooked rice. That was how she kept her fingers dry. She told me her hands were always cold, but she had to keep them the same temperature as the worms otherwise they could feel the heat of her hands and slip away before she got close to them.
As she crept along, she pulled worms out of the cool earth with her bare hands and dropped them into the Styrofoam cups that were attached to her lower legs with a scrunchie. Everyone had their own way of attaching the cups to themselves. Some tied them to their legs with cloth or rubber bands; others had sewn pockets onto the bottoms of their pants. Inside the cups were a few strands of fresh grass so the first pick of worms had a bit of cushion and wouldn’t land so hard. It also gave the worms something familiar to feel, so they wouldn’t panic and squirm around, injuring themselves. In half an hour, my mother had gone back and forth across the field four times and had already dumped eight Styrofoam cups into a large Styrofoam box, next to which was a man in charge, keeping count of her harvest.
At first, I forgot my can of uncooked rice as I moved along the line and let the slime build up on my hands, making it difficult for me to hold on to anything. I wasted time looking for the can in the field and forgot where exactly I had last picked. I didn’t stay bent down and close to the earth. Every time I picked, I stood up, and by the time I got my fingers back to the ground again, all the