Women workers and their sad love affairs
Sharing a room
The phenomenon of unmarried couples sharing rooms has become common among workers in industrial and export processing zones (IZ) in the greater HCM City area. It’s an unavoidable fact when young people live far from home, starved for affection and in poor living conditions.
The owner of some boarding houses near an industrial zone in Binh Duong province says that worker couples often share rooms saying they are husband and wife. Whenever they say goodbye to each other or quarrel, however, the room owners or their neighbours know that they are not married, but living together on a trial basis.
Many sad stories have resulted from such love affairs.
P and K were workers at the Amata Industrial Zone in Dong Nai province. After they knew each other for a short time, they shared a room. When K became pregnant several months later, P disappeared. Painfully betrayed, K committed suicide in the hired room.
Many female workers have abortions; that’s bad enough, but even worse, there have been cases when workers have abandoned their newborn babies.
One day about a year ago, the people around the Viet Huong Industrial Zone were shocked when a worker who packed her baby in a black plastic bag and left it in a dustbin. Luckily, a boarding house owner discovered and adopted the baby.
Recently, a worker in an industrial zone in Binh Duong delivered a child in a grassy plot near her room and left the baby there. Again, a boarding house owner found out the baby but, after a night in the open air, the baby died of exposure.
Lonely children
At 8.30pm, three kids were still at a private kindergarten in Binh Duong province. From time to time they cast anxious looks at the door, waiting for their mothers.
Binh, the kindergarten’s owner, said these children always look very sad because they know they lack one of their parents.
In Binh’s kindergarten, there is a little girl named Trang. Her father is a worker at the Binh Duong 2 industrial zone. Trang’s parents divorced when Trang was less than one year old. Her mother took the baby to Hue to sell to another woman. Luckily, Trang’s maternal grandmother discovered the affair and asked her dad to come to Hue to redeem her. Since then, Trang has lived with her father in Binh Duong.
Sometimes Trang asks the kindergarten’s owner: “Are you afraid of ghosts? If you fear ghosts, please come sleep with me. I am really afraid when I sleep alone.”
Ha, Binh’s neighbor, said that last year she took care of five or six babies whose mothers work at nearby industrial zones. Most of them are illegitimate. When the fathers leave, the mothers must bring up the children alone.
At last at 9.30 pm, the last baby at Binh’s kindergarten was picked up.
A rare love story
Duat and Thu.
At 4.30 pm, Duat is waiting in his wheelchair at the gate of the Year 2000 Co. in the Linh Trung 1 Export Processing Zone, watching for his wife. Duat’s wife, Thu, hurries toward him on her bicycle, not wanting to keep her husband waiting.
Some workers helped lift Duat onto Thu’s bike. Every day, Thu takes her husband from their hired room to their factories.
Duat is the only child in his family who was affected by his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the war. Duat works in the Linh Trung 1 Export Processing Zone while Thu is a worker in the Binh Duong Industrial Zone, three kilometers away.
Duat was losing his faith in life until he met Thu. He can’t walk, but every night he asked his friend to carry him to Thu’s inn just to see her face. After a period of time, Thu became Duat’s girlfriend.
When they decided to get married, Duat’s parents doubted that Thu could love an AO victim like their son. They advised him to not get married but live alone because “nobody wants to marry a disabled man”.
By 5.30 pm, after a hard day of work, the small room of the newly-married couple near the Binh Duong IZ was full of laughter. They had some distinguished guests - Thu’s parents and her nephew.
Thu hadn’t yet told Duat that she had lost her job because her company didn’t have new orders and was reducing its workforce.
