By Terry Chea
SAN FRANCISCO – Amidst the whirr of sewing machines in Wong's Fashion, a contract garment company, employees listen to the sweet lyrics of Cantonese pop music through overhead loudspeakers. But the soft, feminine melodies of the love songs mingle strangely with the industrial churning that fills the cavernous workroom of this Bay Area sewing factory.
On the factory floor, the employees, who are all Asian women, work with stony-faced concentration, stitching together the rich satin fabric of Jessica McClintock evening gowns. The finished products hang in transparent plastic bags with brand-label tags on racks in the back of the warehouse. Rows of workstations, which consist of heavy metal sewing machines mounted on wooden tables with thick spools of thread, line the factory floor, each numbered 1 through 60.
Wong's Fashion is a Chinese-run contract sewing company housed in an old concrete warehouse on King Street in the industrial quarters of San Francisco. The factory is tucked away behind a chain-link fence on a quiet side street that sees little traffic and few pedestrians.
Wong
himself was not available to talk to a reporter, but a floor manager allowed
the reporter to tour the premises. A shopkeeper at the donut shop around
the corner said that Wong has run the sewing shop for many years and owns
the building. The shopkeeper often sees the Chinese seamstresses filing
into the factory early in the morning and rushing to catch the bus in
the evening. The shopkeeper is puzzled about why "these hard-working people"
are always in such a hurry and often sees them carrying dresses to work
on at home. The answers lie in the nature of such low-wage establishments,
sometimes called "sweatshops" by critics, even though this one did not
appear to be violating any labor laws.
Like Wong himself, the seamstresses at his sewing shop are mostly Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong. Some came to the United States in search of economic opportunity while others came to join family members. Wong's Fashion is one of hundreds of such contract sewing shops in the Bay Area
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