AT&T, a Factory Job and Me

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
October 8, 2023

A few days ago, there were two workers sitting on my front lawn. They looked like they were waiting for me.

“Do you live here?” one of them asked.

I said I did.

“We’re putting in cable lines for your neighbor and wanted to dig a small trench on the side of your fence. We tried knocking on your door earlier, but no one answered. We could’ve entered your property, but didn’t want to without your permission.”

“That’s illegal.”

They said nothing.

At this point, I stared at their clothing, which weren’t uniforms. I looked at their work truck, which was unmarked. I asked them who they worked for.

“AT&T.”

I said, “No. You don’t have my permission.”

“Oh, that’s fine. Your neighbor gave us permission to dig on their side of the fence then.”

My neighbors have lived next door to me for 20 years. And we talk. (We even went to the Suga concert together.) While I don’t pretend to know their thoughts about every single thing, I know they would never give their consent to some random unidentified workers to dig on their property.

I told these men, “No they didn’t.” (I would later find out that they had told the same story to my neighbor. They told her that I had given them permission to dig around in my yard. Mind you, I wasn’t even home then.)

Long story short: my neighbor was about to text me when she saw me pull into my garage. We both asking questions they wouldn’t answer: Where’s your work permit? Where’s your company ID? Where’s any documentation from AT&T that they hired you to do this job? Where’s the permission from the city to essentially eminent domain our property for the benefit of a private business?

He answered my friend with more lies.

But to me, he said, “I’m not talking to you.”

Anyhow, that was fine because then I talked at him, told him to get off our properties. As for my friend? He kept spewing his B.S., which resulted in…my friend calling the police. So, I hope he enjoyed talking to them.

My neighbor would later confirm that how he treated her versus me didn’t escape her notice. To her, he at least attempted to be civil. To me, he showed contempt because, to him, I didn’t matter.

The workers were Hispanic. I am Korean. My neighbor is white. Do I think this played a part in how things went down? Absolutely.

The summer after my freshman year in college, I couldn’t get a job.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I should be looking for a job while I was still in school. By the time I started summer break, every job I applied for had already been filled by students whose schools had gotten out earlier.

There was one job, though. It was working on the assembly line at a factory not far from home. The only reason they had a vacancy was because my friend, who went to a different college, had worked there for a few weeks. She hated it and quit, but gave me the heads up.

I was pretty sure my parents wouldn’t want me working in a factory. After all, they had emigrated from Korea to the United States to give us a better life. Surely, a factory wasn’t what they had in mind for their youngest child.

I was taken aback when my parents said I should jump at the opportunity.

Realizing that they wanted me to take the job, I pointed out that I might have to work the night shift.

Fine, they said. I could drive myself or my father would drive me.

My job was to assemble and test windshield wipers. On my first day — which was a month after the rest of the college girls had started — our foreman asked one of the full-time employees to show me the ropes. I felt horrible for her that her production was slowed down because she had to show me how to do the job. I wasn’t a fast learner and was amazed at how quickly she could sort, assemble and test the machinery.

Watching me give it a shot, she pointed out that I could earn more money if I got more parts done each day. Honestly? That didn’t make me work any faster, because I was always worried that I’d get my fingers or hand stuck in some of the machines.

The other girls attended local state schools in the area. I attended a private university. We all got along and rolled our eyes at the disgusting men who’d smack their lips, leer at us and say things to us like, “All that meat and no potatoes.” Shut the fuck up, losers!

There was a full-time employee who was in charge of micromanaging our little division. Maria was a pretty Mexican woman, maybe in her mid-20s. I never really noticed it at the time, but she never looked at or talked to me, unless it was to point out that I had made a mistake. That was fine. I was busy doing a mental countdown every day of when I could leave my shift.

As the weeks wore on, I saw her wardrobe changing to match that of the blonde college girls in her charge. She started wearing madras, Lacoste™️ shirts and deck shoes. She pulled back her hair into high ponytails adorned with scrunchies.

One Thursday, she excitedly invited all the girls over to her house for a sleepover. There’d be pizza and sodas, and she was going to rent some movies for them to watch.

I say them, because I wasn’t invited. I found out about it when one of the other girls asked why I wasn’t going. Maria had told the group that I couldn’t come because I was busy.

On Friday, Maria came up to me and said, “Oh, I know you know about my sleepover. You can come, too. I just didn’t think you’d want to.”

Actually, I didn’t want to. Even then, I liked to separate my private life with work. Plus, a friend and I had tickets for a concert. (We ended up being invited to an aftershow party with the band. We had a ton of fun!)

Before each of the girls went back to school, they brought in treats to share with the people on our shift. Because my school was on a different schedule, I didn’t quit until a month after they did.

On my last day, the woman who had showed me the ropes on my first day passed out the cupcakes I had baked for everyone. She proudly announced to everyone that “her little Jae” was studying to become a lawyer at the University of Chicago.

Maria’s mouth dropped. She came running over to hug me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a college girl?!”

I don’t know this for a fact. But I’m pretty sure this is true. Maria saw me as a dark-skinned minority, like herself. Aligning herself to me wouldn’t help her step up in social status. To her — and probably to many people — I was just another immigrant working in a factory, and that’s all that I would ever be. To her, she saw no value in me. Maybe my ethnic otherness reminded her too much of herself.

My mother worked in a factory for most of her life. Had she married later and remained in Korea, she most likely would’ve become a pharmacist. But that’s not what was in the stars for her.

When we came to the U.S., my bright, beautiful mother who spoke English with an accent, worked her fingers to the bone assembling complicated pieces. Because she was smart and learned quickly, the engineers and draftsmen would give her their drawings to decipher and piece together.

She worked full-time and overtime for decades. She was rarely home on Saturdays because she was at work. She didn’t attend my sister’s college graduation, because she had just started a new job that paid a lot more money than she had been receiving previously and she didn’t want to jeopardize her position by asking for an unpaid day off so soon.

It was primarily my mother’s factory earnings that paid for my fancy, university education. But she was happy to let people think that it was my father’s salary that paid for everything, because he had the respectable office job.

My mother never wanted me to tell people she worked in a factory. It wasn’t a classy job, she said. No matter how many times we told her that her success story is something to be proud of, especially in America, she didn’t want us to make a big fuss about it.

I don’t think that my story is unique. So many immigrant children grow up quickly watching their parents struggle to make decent lives for themselves in this country that wasn’t paved in gold after all.

I thought of all of this after I digested the conversation with the pushy workers the other day. My neighbor was so pissed off on my behalf, and I was both grateful for her encouragement and embarrassed that she saw me get treated that way.

I know there will be people who think, “Oh boo hoo. Two incidents don’t prove anything.” And you’re absolutely correct. I just wish those had been the only two incidents.