Andrea Yang '06

At the heart of American legal services is advocacy, the act of giving voice to those who are often marginalized as “others” for their poverty, their race, and even their sex. Greater Boston Legal Services (GBLS) in Boston, Massachusetts, acts as a medium through which the narratives of these voiceless individuals bleed into the non-marginalized world. Its advocacy efforts call attention to the socially marginalized, insisting on their presence and the necessity of legal aid and reform. Through public policy and education, GBLS aims to promote and defend the legal and civil rights of the poor.

I have spent much of my summer absorbing individuals’ stories, whether through perusing their case files or listening to them in person. In many ways, my internship has been a haunting blitzkrieg into the inner lives of individuals, offering me an uncomfortably intimate glimpse into the darker sides of employment, immigration, and family issues. Privy to ugly accounts of discrimination, corruption, and abuse, I have in response attempted to translate my shock and anger through various forms of advocacy. Through interpreting, I have helped clients communicate with attorneys. Through writing, I have drafted a newspaper article and hearing testimonies. Through public speaking, I have helped lobby at the State House, and participated in a community picket.

The process of becoming familiar with clients through legal services was, in many ways, quicker and more intense than getting to know people in an everyday context. At times, I have felt artificially intimate with clients by knowing about their medical, educational, and employment histories before meeting them in person, or rapidly learning about such sensitive information through a cathartic intake session or phone call. Because I had no personal ties to them, often clients freely discussed what troubled them. In response, I unexpectedly found myself more open-minded in listening; I made fewer judgments about their character and motivations. Instead, I focused on strategies to better their situations. In the sense that I felt we had more open dialogue, these relationships formed through legal services have felt more genuine than artificial. This observation has made me rethink what advocacy entails. I have a suspicion that listening more often and openly is a crucial step in giving voice more thoughtfully and accurately.

Working primarily with Chinese immigrants in GBLS’s Asian Outreach Unit (AOU) has lent a spin on the idea of giving voice. With limited proficiency in English, AOU clients are voiceless in an alternate sense, often requiring interpretation and translation services. In addition to helping AOU attorneys conduct weekly intakes in Mandarin at outreach sites in Chinatown, on several occasions I acted as an interpreter for the Volunteer Lawyers Project in Downtown Crossing.

At the beginning of the summer, I hoped my conversational skills in Mandarin would expand to encompass legal and technical diction. They did! (I can now discuss one’s immigration status, divorce options, or personal assets.) But more interestingly, I began to realize that precision did not necessarily guarantee clarity. In other words, despite all the legal jargon that I learned, too often it meant little to clients who, for example, recognized “Massachusetts health insurance” not by its literal translation, but rather, by relevant image evoking phrases (“bai ka,” or “white card”). Oddly enough, I was thus forced to articulate myself more clearly through non-legal vocabulary.

Nonetheless, I have come to value precision in interpretation. Having curbed my initial tendency to simplify what clients had to say by summarizing their information, I eventually grew comfortable with assuming the “I” when interpreting. Because I was to interpret word for word, the client’s “I” became my “I”; her husband became my husband; her problem became my problem. In assuming her position by acting as her voice, I felt closer to understanding her situation and perspective by interpreting as precisely as possible. Writing as a means of advocacy was personally rewarding, because my efforts in researching laws, distilling information, and brainstorming potential solutions resulted in tangible products of empowerment. Toward the end of my internship, I wrote an article entitled “Overcoming Language Barriers for Immigrants: Requesting and Receiving Language Assistance from Federally-Assisted Programs.” This article presented common caveats in current interpretation and translation services in federally-assisted programs, and the need for more efficient and accurate language assistance. On the grounds that federally funded programs should not discriminate against national origin under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I argued that to deny adequate language assistance was implicitly a method of discrimination.

In crafting this article, I supplemented my online research with actual instances faced by AOU clients. Some clients, for example, could not appeal court orders, because they could not understand the English in which the order was written. Others had been unable to communicate with judges at court hearings, because they received interpreters who spoke different, and thus incomprehensible, dialects. By emphasizing that limited-English proficient individuals were entitled to appropriate language assistance, I hoped to empower these individuals, and to heighten service providers’ awareness of the situation. My article was submitted to Singtao newspaper, based in Chinatown, for potential publication.

The more I read about situations that commonly confront disadvantaged people, the angrier I felt that such information was not plastered all over major newspapers, pop culture magazines, and media advertisements. Through researching proposed legislation and case studies documented by the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) about temporary workers, I learned about several challenges they face, due to a lack of information about their jobs. For example, many workers who sought jobs through temporary job placement agencies were consistently uninformed about pay rates, potential work hazards, the duration and nature of assignments, and even their designated work sites. Learning that temporary agencies were not yet required by law to provide such basic information upon hiring workers really shocked me – especially upon realizing that this loophole endangered workers’ personal safety, and prevented workers from refusing unanticipated work or collecting promised wages.

As an alternate way of giving voice to temporary workers and their advocates, drafting various testimonies in support of proposed legislation pushed toward legislative reform. In support of an Act Establishing a Temporary Worker’s Right to Know (MA Senate Bill 1101), I drafted two testimonies: one on behalf of the executive director at CPA, and another on behalf of a temporary worker, who felt he had been mistreated by his boss. Though I wrote both testimonies in the first person, writing the testimony on behalf of CPA’s executive director felt more impersonal. Despite the fact that it was a compilation of temporary workers’ stories collected through CPA intakes, I wrote it twice removed: I was the executive director’s voice, which in turn voiced the workers’ stories. Writing the other testimony, on the other hand, felt more intimate, for I more directly crafted the worker’s narrative.

Interestingly, I found writing the worker’s testimony far more difficult, precisely because of its relatively subjective nature. In addition to the facts of his case, I was to include his frustration and sense of powerlessness. I struggled with questions of representation: how could I most accurately convey his emotions? Should I dramatize the rhetoric with the goal of moving the Joint Committee on Commerce and Labor? Should I adopt the writing style of a temporary worker, presumably with less elegant prose? What assumptions was I thus making about the worker’s writing abilities and his aims? I realized and worried about the extent of control that I had over the worker’s narrative, and the ease of manipulation for the purposes of advancing the proposed bill.

In an attempt to avoid misrepresentation, I met with the worker to review “his” testimony, word for word, to ensure that this document requiring his signature was as accurate as possible. When he signed the testimony willingly, pride initially rushed through me: I had helped to give him a voice. Moments later though, he expressed that he did not feel empowered. So what if his story was now documented? He still couldn’t collect the pay withheld by his boss, because he lacked his boss’ name and contact information. I reemphasized that his testimony would support a proposed bill aimed to prevent his situation from repeating. Yet the realization that the solution was, indeed, so far off in the future, not even to be guaranteed – and that there was little I could do for him concretely and immediately – deflated my earlier sense of mini-triumph.

Attending the hearing in which these testimonies were presented, however, restored some of my faith that even if the proposed legislation did not pass, at least these voices were being heard by people in the community. Members of the Commerce and Labor Committee sat at the front of the room. Workers and their advocates filled the benches, spilling into a sea of people that stood alongside the walls. Of those who gave testimonies at the front of the room, some were advocates; others were actual workers, many of whom struggled with English in their delivery. The body heat of the masses stifled the air, but in no way curbed people’s energy, as workers applauded and cheered loudly after a testimony from their group was given. I was particularly moved by a moment in which one advocate spoke on behalf of the Latino workers. These workers wore purple t-shirts and stood silently in the back of the room, each person holding a piece of paper with his/her name on it. The name tags marked the individual identities which comprised the group, and the flood of purple shirts accentuated the workers’ unity in purpose, as vocalized through their advocate’s testimony. Their silence underscored their lack of voice due to language and social barriers, but it came across as a statement of resolve and presence, rather than of submission and non-existence. Whether the Committee members nodded in response to the testimony out of genuine sympathy or out of perfunctory habit, I felt that, at the very least, several groups and their advocates came together to affirm one another’s cause, forming an empowering collage of perspectives that resonated throughout the room.

Interpreting, reading, and writing comprised the bulk of my internship, but on separate occasions, I had the chance to lobby at the State House for paid sick days, and to partake in a community picket for workers’ rights. In retrospect, I feel that I stumbled into these two scenes, as I learned about them only a few hours in advance, and decided rather whimsically to attend. Since I had no experience in either lobbying or picketing, I went to both events with the aim to observe. I failed to anticipate that my presence at both events would lead to my participation.

Prior to lobbying at the State House, I had always thought that workers in the United States had the right to paid sick days. Thus I was so surprised to realize that almost half of full-time, private sector workers had none, and that the figures were even worse for low-wage workers (three in four), and part-timers (five in six). It seemed so unreasonable that some parents lost their jobs for taking care of sick children; or sick children sent themselves to school because they worried about their parents’ job security; or sick employees, by not staying at home, exposed those around them to their illnesses.

When the woman in charge of the lobbying began scheduling everyone congregated in the room to speak with house representatives, I suddenly realized that I was expected to lobby for a topic I had just learned about. How was I qualified to lobby? I didn’t really know anything beyond the issue’s surface, and besides, I couldn’t memorize the rap sheet within the next few minutes! Horrified, I sat fixed in my seat, unsure of my scheduled fate. Fortunately, I was grouped with another GBLS intern and a public interest lawyer, so neither was I alone or completely without guidance. We were to speak with two representatives. The actual lobbying itself was fairly anticlimactic. One representative had stepped out of his office, so we ended up giving an information packet to his aide. The other representative, perhaps because he had already indicated his support of the proposed act to establish paid sick days, seemed a little annoyed to hear about situations of which he was already aware. I suppose the goal of our lobbying was to sway representatives, such as this latter one, from tepid to ardent support for the act, but at least from my minute slice of the experience, I was not sure to what extent we were effective.

As for the community picket, CPA and a Latino workers’ rights organization had organized a protest against a garment factory in South Boston. This factory had a record of paying poverty wages, subjecting its workers to unhealthy work conditions, and treating workers disrespectfully. Workers had heard rumors that the company was relocating overseas, and thus were demanding at least sixty days’ prior notice of the factory’s closing date, and compensation for every day short of sixty.

When my co-workers and I arrived on the scene, some thirty people were marching in an oblong shape, wielding large home-made signs and parroting the group leaders in multilingual chants. I was moved by the sense of support amongst the group, for advocates from the Latino organization echoed the Mandarin and Cantonese chants, and the Chinese group did the same for the Spanish ones. Just as I was trying to remember my high-school Spanish to decipher a slogan, a picketer placed a heavy stick with a large poster at its end in my hands, and herded me into the group. Unable to return the stick and poster because the picketer had mingled elsewhere, I suddenly found myself marching with the others. I wish I could report that I spent the next few hours passionately chanting with the picketers, proudly waving my poster and convincing curious onlookers to join the cause. But instead, I felt incredibly self-conscious (even more so because my business casual attire was inappropriate for picketing), and I wielded my poster more as defense against the sun and news reporters’ cameras. Rather than shouting slogans, I merely mouthed them. Upon realizing my embarrassment to be caught on film or audibly chanting, I felt ashamed – for this was a worthwhile cause, and who was I to be a snob about it?

Looking back, I felt embarrassed that afternoon not because I didn’t support the cause, but rather, because I felt like an imposter. I had only a faint notion of what people were protesting when I arrived. I had never worked in a factory. I’d never even had an extended conversation with a factory worker. What if others thought that I had been immersed in factory workers’ issues and understood their perspectives well? They would have been wrong. Or alternatively, what if they saw me as an outsider who treated their picket as a game? That was never my intention.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to advocate effectively for other people. A few weeks ago, I would have said that one must completely understand the other’s perspective in order to do so. But that means that only factory workers can advocate for factory workers; that only Chinese factory workers represent the “true” Chinese factory worker experience; or, even more finely, that only female Chinese factory workers can speak for the experiences of their kind. But splitting hairs isn’t practical, and as the hearing and picket demonstrated, factory workers and group leaders of different backgrounds were able to come together with a common goal. Advocates who had not actually been in the shoes of those for whom they advocated were able to give voice compellingly. Besides, many workers could not attend the hearing or picket because they had to work. If they took time off, they would lose wages, or endanger their job security.

Perhaps advocating for the marginalized does not require one to live or simulate their lives in order to understand their perspectives. However, the attempt to understand through other means, such as through open and extended dialogue, is crucial. Equally importantly, there have to be groups of people who prioritize advocacy work so that they will devote necessary time and efforts to it. I want to be amongst these advocates.

At the beginning of the summer, I planned to confirm my interest in law through this internship, and apply to law school this upcoming fall. While I can still see myself using law school as a tool to tackle social challenges eventually, I’m not ready to apply at this time. Interning at GBLS has exposed me to more social issues than I anticipated, and I sense that this summer has only revealed the tip of the iceberg. I want to spend more time observing and learning about these problems through coursework this upcoming year, and of course, through continued direct public service at the Phillips Brooks House Association at Harvard. I want to experiment with advocacy in more forms, and so I plan to spend the year after graduation working with several NGOs in China. There, the concept of advocacy is still fairly new, and thus is fairly limited. I want to know whether change is more dramatic in its nascent stages, or perhaps in light of the Chinese government, all the more stifled. Ultimately, I intend to continue figuring out how I fit in and contribute to the larger social picture.