by Sheila Heti
SOPHAL
Wearing black-and-white cotton paisley pajamas.
I was born in Prey Veng [a poor rice-farming province on Cambodia’s eastern border]. My parents were farmers, but they died around sixteen years ago. I also used to work in the rice fields before starting as a construction worker. After I got married and had my first child, I quit my job at the construction site because I thought working at a garment factory would be easier. First I sewed seams for warm jackets. It was really hard to learn to sew seams. I couldn’t do it in a straight line in the pattern that was needed, and I would come too far in or too far outside the line. When I did that, I would always get blamed.
My husband is still a construction worker, and we have two sons, aged sixteen and thirteen. I want my kids to have a better life than me, so I had my older son quit school and enroll in a training course for television repair. The younger son is in grade 7. I would never allow my children to work at a garment factory. I am just working there because I have no other option. I have no idea what my future will be like—not just my own future, but all my colleagues’ futures—because we’re exposed to lots of chemicals where we work, and we don’t make enough money to buy nutritious food. We don’t eat for health, just to fill our stomachs.
I have been at the factory for two years. I work from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., Monday to Friday, and 7 to 4 on Saturday, and make around $119 or $120 per month including overtime pay. Until the union was created, we worked until 6 p.m. on Saturdays. We have two lines where the garment workers sit to sew seams and each line has around twenty seats with sewing machines. In between the two lines there is a long table, and they put piles of fabric and jeans for us to sew seams on the table. There are two of these double lines, with around eighty to a hundred workers sitting around each table. It’s really hot, because there will be 1,500 garment workers inside these big halls. Most of the workers need to wear long sleeves, because there are always fibers in the air. If they land on our skin, it makes us incredibly itchy.
The work is really boring, but I have to make a living, so I have to sew seams every day. I make jeans for Gap, Levi’s, and a company called ATM. Even though I work at a factory that produces jeans, I don’t like wearing khao kaboy [“cowboy pants”]. Usually when I’m at home I like dressing this way [in cotton pajamas], because it’s cooler and the fabric is soft. Mostly I buy clothes that are sold along the street, because I don’t have the money to afford expensive ones. Sometimes they set up the umbrellas in front of garment factories. Because we don’t have the money, we don’t think a lot about the style of the clothes. We just try to find something. Generally, the kaohaov krom chhat [“clothes under the umbrella”] cost around 10,000 riel [$2.50] for one shirt or sometimes one pair of pants, and they’re all very bright colors. I really love soft colors, they’re more attractive, but the kinds of clothes that have nice colors are expensive. Here’s an example of the clothes I bought under the chhat. This kind of fabric makes you cool.
Did you buy this shirt because it says Chanel? That’s a well-known brand in Europe.
I never knew this Chanel. I cannot read, so I don’t care what it means, personally. I’m never interested in brands. The most important thing for us is the price. If it’s cheap, we buy it. I think the others are not different from me and would have the same thought: If it’s cheap, we don’t care about the brand. Actually, even though it arrives with the name of a brand on it, the fabric is not good and that’s why it is cheap.
When I’m sewing seams, I always think that these jeans must be very expensive, they cost at least $40 to $50 per pair, and I’m wondering how those people afford those expensive jeans while my salary is so small. I sometimes wonder how I could ever afford them. They look beautiful, and I think how beautiful I would be if I wore them. Once I met an official from a clothing company and they told me that the jeans they wore cost $120. Sometimes we feel like our hearts hurt, because the Chinese staffers and superiors at our factories will tease us. They’ll say that our salary is not worth a pair of their shoes.
VANTHA
Wearing jeans, a black knitted sweater with rhinestones on the front, a purple-and-white scarf, and a large black flower-shaped hair scrunchie.
I entered garment factories more than ten years ago. Soon it will be my eleven-year anniversary. I first came to Phnom Penh from my home in Svay Rieng [a poor border province] in 1993. I decided to come because our family was very poor. I had eight siblings, but my dad couldn’t afford to treat us well and we always had to borrow rice from our neighbors so we could eat. I first started working at a factory that made flour for bread. It was very dusty and smoky there, and my health was getting bad, so finally I decided to quit my job there and jump to a garment factory.
First I started sewing T-shirts and warm jackets, the kind that have a zipper in front. For T-shirts it was kind of like short- and long-sleeved shirts, but with split ends at the bottom. Now I work at a jeans factory, and my job is doing what we call double-sewing. My unit is called the final processing unit, meaning that we sew designs on the pockets of jeans and reinforce certain areas of the pants so they don’t rip. You can see this kind of sewing I do here (points to a yellow reinforced stitch on the side of my jeans). My group works longer hours than other units at the factory, usually twelve hours per day. Sometimes I can make $130 or $140 per month since we work more than other units, but if we’re sick, then there is no money. Whenever we get sick, we always borrow from our landlords. The most sick leave we are ever granted is two days. Even then, we have to bring a doctor’s note proving we are getting medical treatment. It’s not easy to prove this, so usually our wages get deducted.
I am single. This was a choice. Because I am from a poor family, I was afraid that if I decided to get married, my husband wouldn’t be a nice person, and I wouldn’t be able to help my parents anymore. In the past, I used to send $10 or $20 to my parents in my home province, but lately I’ve been giving my money to help my brother, who was in a traffic accident during Pchum Ben [the Festival of the Dead]. He was impaled by a piece of iron.
The black sweater on my body now was bought under the umbrella, and it cost $5. The jeans were given to me by my niece, and she also gave me this scarf when she noticed I don’t have nice clothes, so she wanted to help out. We never really decide to go shopping for new clothes, but when we get free time we might see clothes being sold under the umbrella along the street and in the spur of the moment decide to buy it. Sometimes, if I am interested in the style but don’t have money in my pocket, I stop to bargain the price. Luckily, clothes krom chhat are cheaper than the same quality of fabric at a shop, like some might cost 15,000 riel [$3.75] in a shop, but krom chhat they charge us only 10,000 riel [$2.50]. Sometimes I might only have 10,000 riel in my pocket, but a shirt or something will be so nice that I’ll just pay for the shirt and not buy food. Everyone loves good material and nice things to wear, and sometimes we workers really want to buy expensive or interesting styles, but we cannot afford it because we have small salaries, plus we need to adapt to the environment at the factory, which is very hot. We need the material that makes us coolest. I can wear this sweater today because it’s my day off.
Even after working in factories for so many years, I have no savings. Nothing! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a garment factory. I dream of having my own business. I would sell noodle soup. But I can’t afford it right now. Every month, I find that I don’t have enough money to put any away for savings. That’s why I stick with the factory.
LEAP
Wearing a bright pink top with ruffles down the front and gathered sleeves, and a skirt printed with butterflies and strewn with glitter.
I started working when I was twenty-two years old, and now I am thirty-five. Because we were poor and my family had only a small plot of land for doing rice farming, and especially because I was single and had no husband to feed me, I left my home province.
Since then, I have jumped from one factory to an
other. Now I’m at a factory producing underwear and bras, where I have worked for just over four months. I work between eight and ten hours a day at a factory owned by Koreans. It produces underwear for export, but I don’t know the brand of bras I make since I can only read Khmer. I just know it is expensive, since it’s a world brand name. I’m in charge of sewing a row of double stitches on the underside of the bras, like the bottom part of the cup. I make around $110 each month, which is my salary plus overtime.
I’m a widow. My husband passed away about three months ago and left me behind with two daughters. They stay with my mother in my home province, Kompong Thom. Of course it’s not a happy life being separated from my kids, but I have to have a job to make money to send home and support them. I rarely meet them in person, but I talk to them on the phone a lot. The last time I saw them it was during Water Festival [about four months ago]. I go home in a tourist van [a twelve-seat van crammed with twenty or more passengers—a common means of rural transportation].
Farming rice is physically more difficult than garment work, and it can be uncertain, but at the end of the rice harvest we usually have some stock left over. As a garment worker, we have a secure long-term job, but it doesn’t seem to make life better—there’s not enough left over at the end of the month to save. Being here, everything is money. My salary goes to utility fees, accommodation, and transportation to the factory. After all my spending, I can usually send my family only 60,000 or 70,000 riel per month [$15 to $17.50]. I don’t have a bank account, so I send it through a taxi driver, who charges 5,000 riel [$1.25] to take the money to Kompong Thom. The worst is that I have to live separate from my children. But I can’t go back yet. I want to have money to buy a plot of land first. I just want to get a little savings so I can get back home with my family and my children and buy a small plot of farmland and rely on farming to feed my children.
My own everyday clothes I buy from street markets or krom chhat—I sometimes joke and call them “clothes on the ground,” because even though they’re under the umbrella, they’re piled up on the ground. They usually sell them in this area on the weekend only, since on workdays we’re too busy and nobody would buy them. When I go shopping, I don’t prefer any design or style, but I look for cheap clothes that are not sexy. I mean, I want them to cover my entire body. I want decent clothes. I am a Khmer woman, and it doesn’t look good to show off my top or my bottom, my chest or my hips.
My clothes are simple. I have around ten shirts, including T-shirts, and around five pairs of pants. I have three skirts. My favorite and most expensive outfit is the one I’m wearing today. I love the style of the ruffle on my shirt, and the bright color. It cost 8,000 riel [$2.00]. My skirt cost 10,000 riel [$2.50] and I got it at the market in Kompong Thom. I was attracted by the sparkles near the hip and the butterflies. My other clothes are just ordinary fabric with no specific sparkling materials.
I don’t wear the bras I sew, I just buy the cheap ones from krom chhat. I pay around 2,500 riel for a bra [60 cents]. It’s new but not a quality bra. The bras I sew and the ones I wear are quite different. I sew my bras very carefully and the stitches are very tiny and strong with good-quality thread. But the bra I wear is very bad quality and the thread is not double-stitched. It’s sewn with larger stitches. Because I sew every day, I know that the quality is totally different.
While I am sewing bras, I often think about whether or not I could ever wear a bra like the ones I make. The bras I make are very beautiful with a variety of quality fabric and I sew them very well. The fabric is good, it’s so soft, and it will make the person who wears it feel cool and comfortable. I used to think that if I could have one quality and beautiful bra like I make, I would be really happy and I would be very beautiful. But it’s impossible. These bras are for export, and the price of one of the bras I make is almost equal to my salary. While working, I hold the bra up in front of my face, then I ask myself who is the woman who will wear the bra I am sewing. I also wonder how the women in those countries are so rich and lucky to wear these expensive bras while the person who makes that bra just wears a very cheap one bought from the pile of clothes on the ground under the umbrella. So I feel jealous.
PROJECT
WEAR AREAS | JILL MARGO
1 One of my high school bullies—Stacey—used to call me “cow lips.” I’ve since been told that I have “blow-job lips” and that my bottom lip looks like it’s been “possessed by Angelina Jolie.” What did Stacey mean? Cows don’t even look like they have lips. I just searched Facebook and found her there. She dyes her hair blond and straightens it now.
2 I have Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease that attacks the thyroid. The thyroid gland has two conelike wings. People call it the “butterfly gland.” It’s my dark beast.
3 I miss being strong. I used to box and had big guns. It wasn’t uncommon for me to pick up my friends for fun, especially if I’d had a few drinks. If someone admired the hardness and flex of my biceps, I’d say, “I’m a bad man, but I’m pretty,” which is like what Muhammad Ali used to say.
4 When I was a kid, people told me I could be a hand model. This was back in the day of those Palmolive commercials where a woman would flaunt her hands and say, “Madge, I soaked in it!” Around that time, I started biting my nails.
5 I have a toe that’s shorter and stubbier than its twin on the left foot. I don’t know if I was born with it or, more likely, if it’s a result of kicking a wall when I was twenty-two and furious at my then boyfriend for spending our rent money on pot.
PROJECT
POSTURING | LEANNE SHAPTON featuring ZOSIA MAMET
Poses from fashion media. Photographs by Gus Powell
ZOSIA MAMET, SEPTEMBER 2013
VOGUE PARIS, JUNE 1975
PEOPLE, MARCH 1980
AQUATIC WORLD, MAY 1974
BLACK BEAUTY, NOVEMBER 2013
BUST, OCTOBER 2013
CHEAP DATE, SUMMER 2004
VOGUE ITALIA, APRIL 2000
THE GENTLEWOMAN, SPRING 2010
COLORS, WINTER 1991
COUNTRY LIFE, MARCH 2011
ELLE QUÉBEC, MAY 2011
VOGUE, OCTOBER 1952
FRANK, MARCH 1999
GQ, OCTOBER 1992
GRAZIA, MARCH 2012
HOLIDAY, APRIL 1963
HARPER’S BAZAAR, SEPTEMBER 2005
LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL, MAY 1963
HARPER’S BAZAAR UK, SEPTEMBER 2008
HEALTH, OCTOBER 2013
i-D MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2010
J.CREW CATALOG, AUGUST 2013
VERY, DECEMBER 1988
VOGUE, OCTOBER 1930
TEEN VOGUE, NOVEMBER 2013
MOTION PICTURE, JUNE 1967
VOGUE, DECEMBER 1973
HARPER’S BAZAAR, MARCH 2009
LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL, JUNE 1950
VERMONT COUNTRY STORE CATALOG, FALL 2013
CREATURES OF COMFORT WEBSITE, 2013
VOGUE, JUNE 1988
DAZED & CONFUSED, SEPTEMBER 2003
VOGUE, JULY 1952
HELLO, DECEMBER 2011
VOGUE PARIS, AUGUST 1971
WOMAN WITHIN CATALOG, FALL 2013
ZEIT MAGAZIN, JANUARY 2011
JACQUES, WINTER 2010
GLAMOUR, AUGUST 1968
VOGUE ITALIA, DECEMBER 2003
i-D MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2010
PURPLE, NOVEMBER 2004
TATLER, MARCH 2013
VOGUE, OCTOBER 1952
VOGUE UK, MAY 1996
VOGUE PARIS, MAY 2009
APHRODITE OF KNIDOS, 4TH CENTURY B.C.
VOGUE PARIS, DECEMBER 2007
SHAPE, NOVEMBER 2013
COLLECTION
BENEDICTE PINSET’s white canvas sneakers
ON DRESSING
MOTHER, DAUGHTER, MUSTACHE
CHRISTEN CLIFFORD