Tag: Journalism

Mari, A Free-Range Mexican Nanny in Hong Kong—And Other Comparable Characters—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

An impressionistic watercolor by Marta Camarena: Barbara Fischkin and her first-born son in the plaza in front of of her young family’s rented home in the Plaza de los Arcangeles, in San Angel, Mexico City

Part One: Before Mari Saved Us

This is the back story: Maria Angeles Garcia, known to us as “Mari,” was a godsend to our family. In part two, which I plan to publish in May, readers will find out more about how this young, single mother from a small village in northern Mexico moved with us to, of all places, Hong Kong.

That move was in 1989. A few years earlier Mari had left her children with relatives with plans to earn money as a domestic worker in la capital, Mexico City—and then return home to give her family a better life. Eventually she came to work for us. Within a year, my husband was notified he would be transferred to Hong Kong. We asked Mari if she would come with us for a short while. We never expected her to say yes. But she did.

Mari grew up hearing both Spanish and an indigenous language. In Hong Kong, most people speak English and Cantonese. Regardless of geography, the underlying job wouldn’t change. When I was working as a journalist, from a home office or out doing interviews, I needed a nanny to take my first-born toddler son on small excursions. I didn’t want him locked behind the walls of our palatial home. I wanted him out and about, playing with neighborhood kids and savoring the bright colored flowers. I wanted him to suck oranges Mari picked right off the tree and to enjoy the aroma of elote— corn—roasting on sidewalk barbeques.

 Mari knew that in Hong Kong, things would change. She mustered the courage, the fortitude and a free-range sensibility to spend a few months with us in Asia. She could have easily found another position in Mexico City. But she was intent on doing her job and frankly wanted to make sure our family, especially the child, transitioned safely.

After watching Mari in action, I knew so much more about assessing and hiring good household help. Typically, I did a good job. This chapter, though, is about the ones who came before Mari. Some had their moments of glory. Most get lost in her shadow. Read more »

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

How The American Way Traveled By Car

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

The photograph shows the corner of a room where an unmade bed stands, the headboard occupying most of the left half of the image. One the bed are newspapers and pillows. From the center of the photo, a number of images of cars and trucks, cutout from magazines and newspapers, emanate in roughly a triangular shape. The wall is unpainted insulation board.
Rothstein, Arthur. Room in which migratory agricultural workers sleep. Camden County, New Jersey. October 1938. Photograph. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Click source URL for enlargement: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/518bdec0-b97b-0138-ebbc-059ac310b610. See footnote [1] below for information about the title of the photograph.
Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurricane, now known as The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. It had blown by New Jersey, a bit out to sea, but still whipped the coast with hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The state’s tomato crops were ruined, and angry winds and downpours had bitten a chunk out of the apple harvest. Potatoes, at least, nestled snugly under clotted soil, protected from the winds.

In October 1938, 23-year-old Arthur Rothstein drove the roads on assignment to document the lives of the nation as part of his job in the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This time, his assignment was New Jersey, and in Monmouth County he was interested in where potato-picking migrants slept, usually in shacks near the fields they worked. He took lots of pictures of ramshackle buildings—ones you would easily assess as barely habitable: a leaning frame taped together with tar paper, a “silo shed” that sheltered fourteen migrant workers, a “barracks” with hinged wooden flaps to cover windows—in fact merely unscreened openings, one dangling laundry to dry. Rothstein, like his colleagues at the FSA during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, documented the need for the government programs. Squalid housing matched the dirt and brutal labor of migrants, many of them cast into their situations by the disaster of the Great Depression.

Amidst such architectural photographs, one sticks out. Actually it is one of a pair of photographs, both taken indoors of sleeping quarters—no one would comfortably call them “bedrooms.” One shows a narrow unmade bed near a window shabbily curtained with a frayed and loosely hung blanket. In the other one, more tightly framed, the image draws close enough to reveal a carved headboard, a rumpled newspaper open to a full-page ad for Coca-Cola (“Take the high road to refreshment“) and other papers pushed to the corner of the bed. Neatly cut pictures of luxury cars from newspaper advertisements decorate the flimsy particle board wall that served as meagre insulation.[1]

When I saw the picture with the cars, I noticed a change in visual tone. The image felt hopeful. Read more »

Monday, October 16, 2023

When I Worked for Fox News

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

I once wrote a political column for Fox News. My point of view was liberal and at times decidedly leftist.

This is true-true and not fake news.

The notorious Fox was then a media baby, albeit an enormous one. At its American launch in 1997, it already had 17 million cable subscribers. Millions of Americans looking for a conservative alternative to CNN and company.

Two years later I was hired, as a freelancer, to write an opinion column for a nascent website: Fox News Online. Back then, the television screen ruled. The website was an experiment, to see if the Internet was real. I was told I could opine as I wished, as long as the facts backed me up and I was not libelous or incoherent. A cartoonist was assigned to illustrate my words.

When I was first approached about writing this, I thought it was a practical joke. A dear friend and former newspaper colleague showed up one morning in our family backyard and told me to stop calling her every morning with my take on national and world events. “Write it,” she said. “I will pay you. Two hundred bucks a column once a week. Eight hundred a month.”  Not a lot for Fox News, even then. But I needed the money. Needing money is one of my hobbies. Read more »