Below is a blog post from one of our 2024 Human Rights Summer Research Grant awardees, Thang Lian, who spent the summer in Michigan, researching how Chin refugees build community after being resettled in the United States.
To learn more about the Human Rights Summer Research Grant, click here.
At the beginning of the year, I did not know where my project was headed. Head brimming with complex theories about refugeehood and identity formation, my project was untethered and loosely held by flimsy theoretical strings. Returning to West Michigan and rebuilding a sense of community with the Chin refugees revealed that I had lost sight of my “why,” the reasons why I do what I do. What does it mean to center the heart of the Chin community in my research? What does “research” mean to and for the Chin community? What kinds of stories can and should be told? What does it mean to be Chin? These questions could not be answered by opening a book. These questions could not be answered by beginning at the point where neoliberal politics and human rights intersect. Rather, these questions necessitated voices—the stories of the Chin people, everyday people whose lives were (un)willingly uprooted and re-rooted elsewhere. Returning to West Michigan, to my people, was a necessary call to action that my project must be guided by others, and that I am simply a messenger because of the privileges afforded to me.
With these questions and many more dancing in my head, I did what I had always been taught: sit down and listen. With only my ears to take notes and my eyes to observe what was in front of me, I sat across from my narrators and we held a conversation—a communion on loving, grieving, and experiencing life. Listening to my narrators, I realized that theories and academic jargon provide only the seeds of my project. What my project needed and craved were stories, the stories of Chin people building lives for themselves in West Michigan. The stories of us, the things that make us Chin, must be told with our voices and words. In attempting to theorize before even taking the time to listen, I had forgotten my people, I had forgotten the genealogies I belonged to, I had forgotten the community without whom my very existence would not be possible. Research, it seems, has a way of taking humanity out of you if one is not careful and intentional.
As I began to listen, the stories wrote themselves. Chin refugees in Michigan, much like other Chin refugees resettled in the Midwest, came by way of the United Nations and sponsoring organizations like Bethany Christian Services. Many of the narrators arrived during the Great Recession of 2008 with aspirations of acquiring wealth and sending money back home. Having struggled through the journey of becoming refugees, many noted the United States to be “second only to heaven.” However, once the dust of the economic crash settled, folks faced the harsh realities of surviving. Forced to work in industries that survived the crash, Chin refugees were shipped off to work in meatpacking industries. One of the narrators described the working conditions as worse than in Myanmar, that the U.S. works its working-class like dogs. Another quit after only a few weeks because he would rather eat off the street than work in the meatpacking industry. The meatpacking industry’s ties to immigration and the exploitation of workers are neither shocking nor novel. Rather, it is intimately tied to the United States’ history of racial capitalism.
Meatpacking has historically been viewed as “unclean” and “vulgar” work, racialized and classed as work done by Black workers and (im)migrants. The narrators’ stories express this claim, describing the make-up of the packing houses as full of (im)migrants and refugees alongside working-class Black workers. In the meatpacking plants, Chin refugees began to make sense of their position in the U.S., one informed by working alongside other workers of color. One of the narrators described how similar the experiences of Sudanese refugees was to Chin refugees despite the countries being thousands of miles apart. These relationships facilitated a sense of friendship, that the shared physical labor done by both Sudanese and Chin refugees shaped their understanding of one another across racial lines. The transformation of the Chin identity in the United States is a story about labor and the everyday connections they formed with their co-workers. It is also a story about how refugeehood is inextricably tied to the United States' project of constructing a class of people to do the “dirty” and “vulgar” work to turn the wheels of empire.
Thus, as I look forward to the fall, I am excited to read literature on disability studies and death studies to make sense of what these stories mean. I am also excited to continue my conversations with my narrators.