Speech on International Women's Day: Bringing Pothos to Light

By Albert Wang 26'

The following is the transcript of a speech written and delivered to the school by Albert on International Women's Day. The speech was adapted from Albert's field study notes, drafted during the summer of 2024.

Walking in Shenzhen’s urban villages is like walking in a maze. Every turn is a twist towards an unknown world, and every road a cave. Crowded buildings jostle for space, so much so that sunlight barely reaches the ground and artificial lighting is never turned off. I followed Ms. Chen through the narrow, twisting roads, lined with vendors and makeshift stalls. Then through two gates to enter one of the buildings. Then six levels of staircase to the front door. Then Ms. Chen’s home. A 7-square meter, single-room apartment with molded walls, stacked with a small wooden bunk bed and all sorts of stuff. The only empty space in the middle of the room is prominently occupied by a big white plastic tub, lying upside down, and two smaller, red ones, also upside down, around the big one. Table and chairs, those were.

I met Ms. Chen when she was sweeping the floor of a textile factory’s canteen after dinner time. Before becoming a cleaner, Ms. Chen was a garment worker at a factory in Baoan district. The factory moved to Huizhou, so she became unemployed. She received no compensation – except a pot of abandoned pothos she brought from the factory dorm. Pothos: an evergreen plant native to East Asia, tolerant of shade, drought, and nutrient-poor soil. The pot of pothos thrived under the tiny room’s tiny window, without sunlight or much attention. Pothos: stubborn bursts of green in walls of disciplined gray.

Under the shade of her pothos, I talked with Ms. Chen for four hours.

Like her pothos, Ms. Chen is resilient. Born in the decade of collective agriculture, she spent her childhood in perpetual starvation. When she turned 11, she was forced to quit school and help in the fields while her brother advanced to middle school. When her family’s lands could no longer support the growing household, she then traveled over 500 miles to become a migrant worker in Shenzhen.

She was a diligent worker, working at an exhausting position in exchange for slightly higher wage for decades, until she became so old that no other factory would employ her as a manufacturing worker. But even this particular factory moved away from Shenzhen and left her unemployed. So she found herself unemployed past retirement age, without pension because her employer exploited legal loopholes to evade sponsoring her benefit plan. So she zoomed from factory to factory, and re-employed herself at an age of 57 – with not one, but three jobs. She worked two months without a contract to prove her age doesn’t hinder her work. She succeeded. But we rarely think of people like Ms. Chen as examples of success.

Part of the reason is that Ms. Chen is one among the 300 million migrant workers in China, for whom survival means success. China’s patriarchal tradition, weak labor protection, insufficient social security, and unsound policies intersected to produce a class of low-skilled, low-income migrant workers working perpetually on the countless assembly lines. China’s Income Distribution Annual Report, 2021 quantifies that 550 million Chinese people earn monthly wages below 1k RMB, 965 million earn monthly wages below 2k RMB, and 1.328 billion earn monthly income below 5k RMB. I’m a privileged one, a tropical dracaena bathed in all the sunshine and water I need for growth. And visiting the shadowed world of those who aren’t made me feel guilty.

I’m not sure what I feel guilty for. In no way did I participate in the creation of Ms. Chen’s miseries. In fact, her life is full of resilient hope and hard work that the positive seems to overshadow the misery. Yet we live in two worlds. I’ve always taken pride in my growth, my green leaves and strong stems. But did I grow because I’m a seed, or merely because I received sunshine? My access to sunshine seems to overshadow my efforts to grow. Yet, in the most general sense, the efforts dracaena put in for growth are the same type of efforts supporting the growth of pothos. We both, in whichever ways we can, strive to bend the arc of history towards a brighter future. We grow on different lands and climates, but we are both plants. In this sense we are equal.

It is this natural equality that makes all imposed inequalities intolerable. We fight inequality and injustice because every plant is naturally a seed, deserving of sunshine and water. Dracaena should grow because it’s a seed and not because it receives sunshine. Pothos deserve to grow with sunshine because it’s a seed.

However, mainstream narratives of inequality often obscure this essential truth in oversimplifying complex social issues. It reframes a shared endeavor to respect humanity’s fundamental equality and unity into a class struggle where people fight along socioeconomic lines. It accuses dracaena for receiving sunshine and judges me guilty. It paints the story of privileged, unconscious consumers indulging in fast fashion while exploited laborers mechanically stitches garments on an assembly line, and blames the latter’s exploitation on the former’s ignorance. It turns humanity’s crusade against both exploitation and ignorance into a fight among the exploited and the ignorant. It’s a force of division, of dehumanization. It reduces individuals like Ms. Chen to dull victims of oppression and others “privileged brats” rather than recognizing our full, shared humanity. In this way, it overlooks the very reason equality and rights exist naturally – the fact that pothos or dracaena, we are both seeds.

For three weeks in my sophomore summer, I went into the world of textile workers. I realized that both “privileged” consumers and “underprivileged” workers are, at their core, humans. We both possess lives, dreams, and struggles beyond the labels assigned to us. It is for this humanity that we care, we unite, and we strive. For a more equitable and free world.