Eric Tang’s “Unsettled”, shows that Cambodian refugees being treated unfairly and put in the hyper ghetto is an important literature that shows that the resettlement in the camps was not the solution for a better living standard. This is the denial of human rights against Cambodians in the US or is not that different from the Khmer Rouge. In this paper, I will argue about there are not that much difference in treatment inside the settlement camp and the Khmer Rouge. First, the reason that Cambodians came to the US is protection. They became refugees because they fled Cambodia which at the time Cambodia is being ruled by the Khmer Rouge, which have done unspeakable horrific acts to the people of Cambodia (genocide). “Responding to the subsequent
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Her story describes her forced marriage to Heng under the Khmer Rouge regime, her life in the refugee camps, and resettlement in the Bronx in 1986. Crucial to this telling is the concept of “refugee temporality,” Tang’s notion that across all these circumstances there is no turning point, no freedom, but rather a familiar ongoing sense of entrapment that Ra resists through continual movement. Chapter 2 focuses on housing, following Ra and her family as they move through a series of appalling unheated, substandard apartments. Chapter 3 analyzes Ra’s family’s dependence on and resistance to the welfare system, especially after the changes to the system in 1996. Here Tang draws on his own engagement with the community by working with the Young Leaders Project to resist these …show more content…
Instead Ra and others choose homebased, sweatshop production, what Tang in chapter 5 calls “the sweatshops of the neo plantation.” Here Tang makes the good point that discussions of “global cities” or the “third worlding” of US cities usually focus on ethnic enclaves and miss the global sweatshop workers of the hyper ghetto. Finally, chapter 6, “Motherhood,” focuses on the destruction of family by the combined social service and criminal justice systems. Ra, in striking out at a man she perceives as threatening her daughter, is convicted of assault. Then, after saying in a counselling session that she had hit her child, she is restricted from access to her youngest son. Tang analyzes the violence of the hyper ghetto as gendered, where Black women are cast as deviants, criminals, and “bad mothers.” Cambodian women do not suffer quite the same casting but are subjected to a different form of racist gendering the need to be saved from their own backward culture. In the conclusion, Ra is injured in a traffic accident, becomes eligible for Supplemental Security Income (a federal income supplement), and is finally relieved of the stress of needing multiple forms of
Her story describes her forced marriage to Heng under the Khmer Rouge regime, her life in the refugee camps, and resettlement in the Bronx in 1986. Crucial to this telling is the concept of “refugee temporality,” Tang’s notion that across all these circumstances there is no turning point, no freedom, but rather a familiar ongoing sense of entrapment that Ra resists through continual movement. Chapter 2 focuses on housing, following Ra and her family as they move through a series of appalling unheated, substandard apartments. Chapter 3 analyzes Ra’s family’s dependence on and resistance to the welfare system, especially after the changes to the system in 1996. Here Tang draws on his own engagement with the community by working with the Young Leaders Project to resist these …show more content…
Instead Ra and others choose homebased, sweatshop production, what Tang in chapter 5 calls “the sweatshops of the neo plantation.” Here Tang makes the good point that discussions of “global cities” or the “third worlding” of US cities usually focus on ethnic enclaves and miss the global sweatshop workers of the hyper ghetto. Finally, chapter 6, “Motherhood,” focuses on the destruction of family by the combined social service and criminal justice systems. Ra, in striking out at a man she perceives as threatening her daughter, is convicted of assault. Then, after saying in a counselling session that she had hit her child, she is restricted from access to her youngest son. Tang analyzes the violence of the hyper ghetto as gendered, where Black women are cast as deviants, criminals, and “bad mothers.” Cambodian women do not suffer quite the same casting but are subjected to a different form of racist gendering the need to be saved from their own backward culture. In the conclusion, Ra is injured in a traffic accident, becomes eligible for Supplemental Security Income (a federal income supplement), and is finally relieved of the stress of needing multiple forms of