Former employee of convicted human trafficker
|
Victims call
factory ‘slavery’
300 ex-workers say they finally
know freedom with the sentencing
of a brutal former employer
This Fourth of July will have special meaning for Quyen Nguyen, a 26-year-old human-trafficking victim from Vietnam.
Nguyen said she can truly say she is free from former employer Kil Soo Lee, a South Korean businessman who recruited men and women like her to work under slave-like conditions in an American Samoa garment factory producing clothing for major U.S. retailers.
While it's been more than four years since she left American Samoa and Lee's clutches, it wasn't until 1 1/2 weeks ago that Nguyen and fellow workers now living here can honestly say they no longer fear retaliation.
Lee, 52, convicted in U.S. District Court in the largest human-trafficking case ever prosecuted, was sentenced June 23 to 40 years in federal prison. He is appealing his conviction.
Lee had been found guilty of conspiring with others from March 1999 to November 2000 to keep 300 Vietnamese and Chinese workers, predominantly women, under involuntary servitude at Daewoosa Samoa Ltd. in Pago Pago. He threatened them with arrest, beatings and deportation. He withheld work and pay when they complained about their work conditions or refused to work because they weren't being paid or fed enough.
The first Chinese workers arrived at the factory in the summer of 1998, while 300 Vietnamese workers arrived between February 1999 and May 2000. Lee was arrested in March 2001.
The workers couldn't leave because they were required to sign a three-year contract with a $5,000 penalty for breaching the contract. Many also incurred huge debts, having to pay between $4,000 and $8,000 up front -- the equivalent of eight to 15 years of salary in Vietnam and China -- to recruiters. Many sold their homes or borrowed the money from relatives and loan sharks, using their homes as collateral. Also, Lee held on to their alien registration cards and passports, threatening them with arrest and deportation.
"He's nothing now," Nguyen said to her fellow workers and their families, who reunited recently in Manoa to celebrate what they hope is an end to an unforgettable, painful chapter in their lives.
As she feasted on pickled vegetables and spicy barbecue meat, Nguyen recalled the days in American Samoa when all Lee would allow them to eat was rice and potato soup with cabbage.
Every meal, day after day, that's all they ate, she said. Sometimes for breakfast they would get two boiled eggs. And on rare occasions they might get chicken.
When the Vietnamese New Year rolled around, "everybody cry" because all they had to eat was boiled potatoes and rice, and no meat, Nguyen said. Back home, even if they were poor, they still managed to celebrate with mochi rice cakes and an array of meat and vegetable dishes, she said.
Fellow Chinese worker Dong Ming Ju had told the court at Lee's sentencing that he was appointed by Lee to purchase food for the 300 workers, but was given no more than $300 and instructed to buy the cheapest items, to last them for three days.
Dong could afford to buy only potatoes and cabbage, and many of the workers lost weight, he said. There was never enough money to purchase meat.
Fellow workers who spoke in court wept as they described through an interpreter how they paid thousands of dollars to work in American Samoa to support their families, only to be disillusioned, and the impact their financial debts incurred on their families back home.
They talked about how they suffer from nightmares and still get emotional when they remember what happened to them and their co-workers. They cannot forget when Lee ordered an attack on workers he branded as troublemakers in November 2000, and are still haunted by images of blood spurting from fellow workers who were on the floor being struck repeatedly with PVC pipes. Nguyen lost her left eye in that attack, and now wears a prosthetic.
"It's like a movie that plays over and over again, and I cannot stop it when it happens," said Van Nguyen, no relation. "Injury to the body can be mended, but injury to the soul and mental being ... what can a doctor do to treat you?"
The workers, because they weren't getting paid, even resorted to asking for help from sympathetic Samoans, who willingly supplied bananas, papayas and coconuts for the starving workers. One of Quyen Nguyen's co-workers was bold enough to ask the Samoans for a can of tuna. "They say yes, take whatever you want, because that's for my dog," they told her friend.
Their feelings of disgust, desperation and uncertainty were depicted in drawings Van Dung Nguyen and a friend sketched with black marker on the dormitory wall near where he slept.
"When I was 21 years old, a big catastrophe struck my life when I was in Samoa -- to be a servant to the dogs and cats," he explained, referring to Lee and his pets. "We were never treated the same way as he treated his dogs and his cats," which were not chained and were petted constantly, he said. "We were treated below them."
Another drawing depicted gaunt workers behind the locked gates of Daewoosa -- referred to by workers as the Gate of Death.
Some day, Quyen Nguyen says she will tell her Hawaii-born son about what she suffered in American Samoa, but not yet. He's a typical 2-year-old who enjoys playing with the older children and is too young to understand.
But whenever she meets someone new and they ask her where she's from, she can't give a simple answer. She feels compelled to explain why she left Vietnam to work in American Samoa, why she wears a prosthetic eye and how she ended up in Hawaii.
"I tell everybody when they meet me," she says in her broken English. "I'm not ashamed. My experience -- nothing to be ashamed."
Stanley Togikawa of the Hawaii Pacific Baptist Convention was in American Samoa when he heard of Nguyen's plight and made the arrangements to get her and other workers to Hawaii.
He and the church fed, housed and found sponsors across the United States willing to take them in. They received numerous community donations of rice, food and money to help the workers with their first month's rent and deposit.
Of approximately 300 workers, roughly 200 have remained in the United States, including 23 in Hawaii, while 100 returned to Vietnam and 10 returned to China.
Those in the United States remain under T-visas, which allow victims of human trafficking to stay, with the possibility of attaining permanent status.
Many are now employed -- as fast-food workers, beauticians and heavy-equipment operators -- making hundreds of dollars more than they ever dreamed they could make back home. Some have even managed to bring family members here.
"I don't know how they make it, but they save, and everyone probably sends a couple hundred dollars a month at least to their families," said Togikawa, regarded as a father-figure to the workers. "It's amazing how they've come around; they're really doing well."
Quyen Nguyen, who married the son of her English teacher at the McCully Community School for Adults, said she hopes she can remain in Hawaii permanently.
She wants to give her son "everything" she didn't have in American Samoa, she said. "Freedom and happiness."
E-mail to City Desk
[News] [Business] [Features] [Sports] [Editorial] [Do It Electric!]
[Classified Ads] [Search] [Subscribe] [Info] [Letter to Editor]
[Feedback]
