Editor’s note: Kathy Nguyen recounts a Vietnamese refugee family’s exploitation by a nameless sponsor, detailing coerced labour, rage, and inherited memory across resettlement landscapes. It condemns capitalism as predatory, sustained by dispossession and silence, while honouring survival resistance. An earlier version of this essay appeared in the print edition of The F-Word Magazine; this is its first online publication.

[ESSAY] “Sweating Labour, Angry Tears” by Kathy Nguyen

In 2021, when the American economy slowly reopened after the world barely survived the dystopian ruinations caused by the pandemic, I chauffeured Má to one of her appointments in Fayetteville. Forty-six years later, she still calls the city of Fayetteville home, never fully leaving it, even while travelling and staying elsewhere.

There was something about the frozen weather slowly transitioning into cool spring scenery along the drive that prompted her to point towards the window and say, “Your father, chị hai” (your firstborn daughter, a sister I never met, who tragically passed away as a child) “and me used to temporarily live there with that terrible man, our first sponsor, shortly after we left Fort Chaffee.”

Her eyes remained fixed on a direction I was unable to follow as her voice carried a more contained anger than usual while she summarised how abusive he had been to the family. Somewhere along that road, lined with street names I neither know nor care to remember, I remained quiet. I simply pressed the accelerator, driving onwards through the geography of Má’s memories, because I can only navigate recognisable landscapes and surroundings. They are more deeply ingrained in my memory than names, some unchanged, some perhaps renamed over the years. I still cannot recall the precise location, but I do remember the expansive, barren field, as though the former resident had demolished the house in order to uproot himself elsewhere, relocating a geographical past that only a few would remember with him. Or perhaps he simply chose to forget his own cruelty.

Refugee sponsors were required to provide temporary shelter and essential necessities at the outset. Gradually, refugees were expected to transition and assimilate independently into the community, searching for permanent employment and eventually settling as residents. That was what you and Má were led to believe as you both left Fort Chaffee and entered the sponsor’s home.

Your first sponsor is nameless and faceless to me, which feels unnerving, knowing that he is one among a sea of nameless, faceless others like him. Only later did I understand how he leveraged his position as an American citizen and sponsor to exploit you for labour, abusing a unilaterally perceived power that he believed he wielded over you.

Má cannot remember his name, does not want to remember it, refuses to let herself remember it, or refuses to repeat it. The adjective “evil” rolls off her tongue like an intense, acidic aftertaste that coils with bitterness she refuses to experience again after the first time. She claims you would probably have remembered his name, because you once remembered everything. You held onto every microscopic detail, refusing to release it once it was placed in your grasp. You only let go when you were forced to, when you could no longer bear the accumulating weight of those memories in the end.

What little she remembers of him includes his profession: a professor, a recently divorced man living alone.

The nameless sponsor housed you and Má for several months. Immediately after moving in, his house, located somewhere in what was once considered rural Fayetteville, became a site of relentless labour. Má remembers how he made you mow his grass and retrieve drinking water for his three to five cows. Most waking hours were spent with you, or sometimes Má, cleaning, dusting, sweeping, and rearranging the entire house. Má recalls how you were constantly working, your body automated for labour, never given time to exhale. She remembers how the sponsor would deliberately throw the house into disarray so that he could command and watch Má clean and reorganise it again. While you worked outside, he expected Má to do the laundry, his and his daughter’s, and to fold it. His daughter would sit or stand beside Má like a supervisor, instructing her on how to fold the clothes properly.

In the mornings, you completed his list of tasks. At night, you rode your bicycle, one he had purchased for twenty-two dollars for you to use, but which you were required to pay him back for, as he made it clear that it was not a gift. It was a rental bicycle, strictly for transporting yourself to the Pancake House. Your labour was your own, but he owned your wages.

The sponsor secured you a dishwasher position with an hourly wage of $1.75. You worked the third shift, leaving his house at seven or eight in the evening and not returning until five the following morning.

When he felt generous, he would drive you to the Pancake House, but he was unwilling to collect you afterwards. You relied on the kindness of your co-workers to drive you back to his house, unable to thank them in words. On other days, you forced your body to make the journey alone.

Today, that Pancake House is known as Village Inn. Sometimes, I take Má there for a free slice of pie on Wednesdays. On those days, her eyes drift from the plate to the window, settling on spaces that might appear conspicuous to me but are nothing to her. Nothing holds her attention except unshared memories and untold stories.

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Má tells me that you never complained. You worked quietly, forcing your body to endure the physical labour you imposed upon it, until your muscles twitched under an accumulated burden of stress and tears. Work functioned as a subsidy for shelter and the barest essentials of survival. Má believes there was contempt within you somewhere, but you buried it, ignoring it as a means of surviving for the time being.

Your income went towards groceries at a nearby IGA. You were finally able to buy food and cook dishes you preferred, flavours that reminded you of Việt Nam, even though they differed considerably from what your tongue was accustomed to. This easing into placation marked a beginning. Eight to ten dollars’ worth of weekly groceries was enough to sustain you.

Your body no longer fully belonged to you.

When the sponsor was absent from the house, he still expected you to remain committed as an underpaid employee and to perform physical labour for him. Your body no longer fully belonged to you, as all your waking energy was expended for his gain.

When he was not at home, the water was shut off, depriving you and Má of access to basic necessities. He told you both that he had a private well built somewhere on his property, but Má was never able to find it. Whenever he left the house, he would leave Má two small white buckets of water, one for cooking rice and washing her hands, the other barely sufficient for her and chị hai to drink from. This was the only water available to her for several hours. She forced herself and chị hai not to use the bathroom, fearing that the water would run out, as she never knew when he would return. He knew how to weaponise time, knew how to control it, knowing that Má had to wait for him for provisional sustenance.

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During some of those days, when staying was contingent upon completing strenuous tasks, Má remembers how you finally released your suppressed anger. While you were outside mowing his land yet again, the sponsor invited friends and family to his house for a barbeque. Má remained indoors, confined to the small room he had allocated to the family. Then chị hai weakly latched onto Má’s right arm, her nose red and runny, her body feverish.

Temporarily staying in a host home without the ability to communicate properly with one another deeply agitated Má. Because he was present that day, she took chị hai outside to where his family had gathered and attempted to get his attention, repeatedly pointing to chị hai’s head, hoping he would understand that she had a fever. His face was blank, Má recalls, and he continued to stand silently in front of her before turning his attention back to grilling chicken.

When he finally spoke to Má, he ordered her to clean the yard, instructing her to pick up every visible crumb and piece of rubbish.

He relented and eventually took chị hai to a doctor. Upon returning home, however, he escalated the situation, still refusing to allow Má to care for her and instead insisting that she complete her chores. Má refused, gathered chị hai, who was crying, and walked back to the room.

Má describes how months’ worth of stress and worry enveloped her body in a heat that felt explosive. She embraced it, reacting by crying and screaming at him for ignoring a child’s health. He responded by wrenching chị hai from her arms, storming into the room where you, Má, and chị hai stayed, and throwing her onto the bed, all while continuing to demand that Má clean the yard. To intimidate her, he violently knocked things around the house, creating his own destruction while holding Má responsible for the resulting wreckage. The normally quiet tension that shrouded the house shattered, and chị hai wailed even louder.

Má continued screaming at him in Vietnamese about his indifference to a sick child and his expectation that she work while her daughter was ill and crying incessantly. He screamed orders back in her face. Reactively, she began throwing small, non-breakable objects onto the floor, matching his volume with a sonorous cadence.

Má then ran outside and called for you. She finally witnessed you screaming at him after months of silent labour and unvoiced endurance. Her ears absorbed the harsh tempo of Vietnamese and English words hurled back and forth in furious exchange. You screamed at him about being forced into labour, while he shouted everything and nothing in English, words and phrases you could not understand. Whatever he said dissolved into a linguistic pastiche that meant nothing to you.

Má admits that had he not violently thrown chị hai onto the bed, she would not have been so outraged, nor would the situation have escalated that day. She believes she would have submitted herself to quiet endurance, like you, working in silence until the end, avoiding confrontation while continuing to live under suffocating tension.

Out of spite, and perhaps fully aware that you and Má would challenge his sponsorship power and authority, he evicted the family from his house. He forcibly moved you into an old, dilapidated motel already inhabited by displaced families and monstrously sized cockroaches crawling across rooms stained with water damage. The rent was twenty-five dollars a week. He paid for the first week, then abandoned you, Má, and chị hai without looking back, discarding you as a triptych of expendables. You were expected to survive in America on your own because you dared to challenge his authority and abusive exploitation.

The shadowy inner workings of white capitalistic infrastructure are predicated upon undocumented labour.

Does this not sound familiar? The shadowy inner workings of white capitalistic infrastructure are predicated upon undocumented labour, yet those who perform it are demonised for working and for wanting recognition as equal humans rather than as perpetually moving automatons stripped of humanity.

An exile into the sea had already fractured you and Má into a liminal, stateless existence, with chị hai born into a war that rendered her stateless from birth. Coerced eviction further displaced you, making you homeless in a country that did not allow you to adapt and instead sought to forcibly impose nationalistic assimilatory values upon you.

You continued to pedal your bicycle to the Pancake House. When nights turned bitterly cold and rooftops whitened with overnight frost, when the season hardened into full winter, you still pedalled there, focused on earning a paycheque to meet the weekly motel rent. You never missed a shift. You could not afford to.

Not long after your forced relocation to the motel, you reunited with an acquaintance who had been hosted by a kind and understanding sponsor. Má is unsure why your nameless sponsor contacted this acquaintance, making what amounted to a confessional call, admitting that he had left you, Má, and chị hai in a motel after what he described as an unresolved argument. That day, you met several American sponsors from a church, all of whom treated you, Má, and chị hai with respect and kindness that you have never forgotten and that Má still remembers vividly. One of your later sponsors was so disturbed by your former sponsor’s conduct that they contacted the church organisation to report how exploitative, oppressive, and unlivable your previous conditions had been.

You and Má never learned what ultimately happened to the first nameless sponsor. Má recalls hearing that someone reported him to the church and its organisation and that a meeting was held. She wonders whether he was barred from sponsorship, aware that whispered accusations, audible enough to be repeated beyond a congregation, can spread and quietly dismantle a person’s standing. What followed, and what consequences he faced, remain unknown.

Somewhere along that long drive, as my foot eased onto the brake, slowing just enough for Má to point towards several buildings, she told me that the motel you were forced to stay in once stood there. It had occupied land since purchased and transformed into a cluster of disconnected buildings. It had been an uninhabitable structure, steeped in disrepair and decay. Today, I see a series of interconnected buildings, a corporate mechanism that neither begins nor ends there. It continues to expand, gradually forming a capitalistic assemblage that links itself to distant corporate towers and institutions.

Capitalism, more precisely white American capitalism, is a predatory system reliant upon unpaid and underpaid labour. It exploits refugees newly resettled into a political order that weaponises their bodies and physical capacities for ideological and economic gain, while simultaneously denying them full recognition as human beings.

^{Image via.}

^{How to cite: Nguyen, Kathy. “Sweating Labour, Angry Tears.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 Jan. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/01/23/sweating-labour.}

Kathy Nguyen received her PhD in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Gender Studies at Metro State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her works have appeared in Gulf Coast, Drunk Monkeys, Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices, which is a 2022 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Anthologies, Food of My People: The Exile Book of Anthology Series, diaCRITICS, Kartika Review, FIVE:2:ONE, Fearsome Critters, which was selected as the Editors’ Choice for Top Contributor in Hybrid Work, The Activist History Review, and elsewhere. She was a former Short Fiction Section Co-Editor at CRAFT Literary. She is interested in the political origins, renderings, and the poetic yet nostalgic stagnations of  pre-1975 nhạc vàng. Broadly, in her writing, she is interested in further exploring the precarious hierarchical structure of language and its connection to people living in an indefinite threshold that oscillates between translatable and untranslatable words. Her chapbook Nonfluent Bodies, Switchable Tongues is forthcoming. [All contributions by Kathy Nguyen.]