Sociologist Ada Cheng learns a surprising lesson about resistance while studying human rights violations in Hong Kong.

Ada Cheng is a professor-turned storyteller, improviser, and stand-up comic. She was a tenured professor in sociology at DePaul University for 15 years. She resigned from her position to pursue theater and performance full time in 2016. She is a one-time Moth storyslam winner, a presenter at the National Storytelling Conference, and a runner-up at Chicago’s Bughouse Square Debates. She has been featured at storytelling shows in Chicago and Atlanta. She has also told stories at The Moth in Chicago, New York, Denver, and Detroit. Her book, Standing Up: From Renegade Professor to Middle-Aged Comic, published in December 2016 by Difference Press, aims at encouraging people, particularly mid-lifers, to embrace fear about uncertainty and to pursue their passion and dream. Her motto: Make your life the best story you tell. Check out her website www.renegadeadacheng.com for more information.

This story originally aired on April 21, 2017.

Story Transcript

Recently, I have seen two extreme attitudes for science. On one hand, this administration reinforces a hostile climate and culture against science. On the other hand, I have seen people put science on pedestal and idolize it as if it were the solutions for our problems. So I think it’s important for us to keep in mind that science and scientists are cultural products. We are shaped by the context within which we exist.

So I’m a trained sociologist and I want to use my research experience to show how science is not neutral and it is influenced by various factors including the researcher’s identity, world view, and presuppositions. In other words, who we are shapes how we produce and the exact scholarship and research we produce.

So after I received my master’s degree in 1994, I received a fellowship from Human Rights Watch here. It’s an organization right here in New York. I proposed to do research on the human rights violations against migrant women domestic workers. I’m not sure if people are familiar with that part of the history because since the 1980s and 1990s many women from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand they would migrate to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan to work as live-in domestics.

So when I left Taiwan in 1991 there were already many Filipina women working there. And they would usually linger at a church on Sundays. That really triggered my interest because, as a feminist, I was very curious and interested in learning… particularly [about] the relationship between the female employers and the domestics. And I also was very interested in learning what their experiences were like as foreigners in Taiwan.

When I was in the United States for the three years there were a lot of human rights reports about the various human rights violations against them emotional, psychological, physical and sexual abuse. So Human Rights Watch Asia viewed this as a very timely proposal and accepted me as a fellow.

So I arrived in Hong Kong in 1995 and I immediately went to the local shelters to interview these women. My task was to understand the abuse against them. So these women were staying at the shelters because they managed to leave their employers and they all had conflicts or experienced some form of abuse. For example, they were cursed and yelled, they were hit, slapped and beaten. They were deprived of food. They were not given proper accommodation and they were forced to work for long hours. Some of them were forbidden to leave their house.

So my questions focused on these aspects. And I will ask questions like, “So what happened between you and your employers?” “What did employers do to you?” “How did the employers treat you?”

So within a very short time I was able to interview more than fifty women. In addition to interviews, I was also able to review some of the court documents to corroborate their stories. So with these questions I gained tremendous insights into how they were victimized and how they were victims.

So here’s the thing. I came into this research believing they were victims. So my questions focused on this and the data I got confirmed that. So the stories I was going to tell about these women were stories of extreme helplessness and stories of victimhood.

That all changed when one day I interviewed a Sri Lanka woman at the shelter. She, through the interpreter, said she was waiting to find an employer because she just won her court case. She told me that for the several months when she was working with her employers her employers would only pay her one-third of the total wage that she was supposed to be paid. And they would force her to sign the receipts and force her to acknowledge that she received the full pay. So when she refused they taunted her, they threatened that they were going to send her back to Sri Lanka.

And these women oftentimes paid a lot of money to just go to other countries to work as domestic workers. So for fear of her own safety and she really wanted to and needed to earn money so she decided to sign. But instead of signing her name, she signed the exact amount that she received in her own language without her employers understanding it.

At that moment I realized I just missed something very important. In my own intent to capture these women as victims I never saw them as agents capable of resistance. In the west, we tend to think of resistance simply as marches, protests and sittings. But these public displays of disobedience and defiance may not be accessible to all. So for these women their resistance took subtle and covert forms. Forms that may not be recognized and acknowledged by scholars but were very essential to their survival.

So after that I expanded my research to the church grounds, to streets where many of these women gather. And I included women who were still with their employers with or without ambivalence and I started to ask questions. “So tell me, what did you do in response?” “What did you say in response?” “What did you do in private in response?” “What did you do in public in response?” “What did you tell your friends?” “What did you say in the church?”

And it turns out women used very different strategies for resistance. For example, they would laugh at their employer’s English. Hong Kong they don’t speak English there. And then they would try to teach their employers a thing or two about the language. Or when they were instructed to clean the house a particular way, they will clean it in their own way the final result is a clean house. Who cares?

And the church is the vital place where they were critical and criticized their employer’s sexism, racism, castecism and xenophobia.

So here’s the thing. These women were not passive victims. They were not completely helpless and hopeless. Through these questions I was able to see their agency. And I realized as a feminist, in my own passion as a feminist to understand and in some way to save these women pushed me to put them on a pedestal of victimhood. And it is still my own reflection and introspection that I was able to redesign my research and to ask different kind of questions so at the end the stories I told were not either/or. They were not. I painted them neither as all powerful agents with all the choices in the world nor as passive victims without any choices.

So this is the important thing about science and what I’m afraid of under the current context. What I want to show with my experience is that science and the research we produce is a process of construction and interpretation. And who we are shapes our world view, the questions, how we frame the questions, the questions we ask, the data, how we interpret the data and the conclusion that we draw.

Detachment is a myth. Neutrality is gained through reflection and introspection, not through a denial of one’s own embeddedness. Thank you.