Roger Saechao’s Be Green Challenge Blog2 Week2

            In the past few weeks, the weather has been raining and it has been very cold. Due to the weather being tremendously freezing, I told my partner that I needed a pair of gloves but I did not expect her to buy me a pair of gloves. The gloves were purchased from Target for only three dollars and it came with two pairs. The first pair are touch screen gloves and the second pair are finger less gloves. Two gloves for the price of the three dollars is a great deal. Although it may be cheap, the cost of labor might have been even cheaper. Based on our class lectures about garment workers being treated unfairly, the pair of gloves is a perfect example of where it was made from and how they were produced. For instance these gloves were made in China. It may have been sewed and stitched by young children. In class we saw this example in “China Blue” where the jeans sweatshops in China hires young workers and make them work twelve or more hours with very little pay and forces them to work overtime. This made me thought about how consumers are blinded by what’s going on within the global corporations. We are in this commodity chain where we see things and we want to buy it. We don’t think about where and how products are made as long as we like it or look nice.

            This week’s be green challenge, our class lecture focused on the history of the Hmong people through embroidery. There are different types of traditional textile that is embroidered by the Hmong people and each textile has a significance meaning. After watching the video about the Hmong’s history, it reminds me of the Mien people. Both ethnic group’s history through embroidery is a mirror reflection of each other. According to the reading this week, "Speaking through Cloth" Ava L. McCall stated,"Most Hmong people families lived in small villages in the mountainous areas of Laos, where they produce food, clothing, housing, and tools." This is intriguing because Mien people also live in the villages of Laos producing agriculture necessities just like the Hmong folks.Here are two different images showing the similarities of the Hmong and Mien people sewing.

Mien woman sewing

Hmong woman sewing

Sources:

McCall, Ava L. "Speaking Through Cloth: Teaching Hmong History and Culture Through Textile Arts" Reader

China Blue Dir. Micha Peled 2005

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