Amazing good stories out there, reminds me for the thousandth time the power of a good story. I wish I had read these stories earlier, when my friend was going through PPD and before I went into labor myself. I think I was trying too hard to only read and hear stories about easy childbirth and easy motherhood, so as not to "scare" myself. But in the end I went through a desperate labor, delivery, and 2 weeks of first-time-motherhood with no playbook and a sneaking suspicion that it would never get better. Everyone said the words I hated most: "It gets better," and every time I heard that I would hear a voice in my head say, "Only if you survive that long." But here I am on the other side of those promises, just like I made it to the other side of infertility treatments, and probably the only way I made it, like most of the women whose stories I read, is by asking for and sometimes demanding help. Yeah, I pretty much made people help me, except for those who couldn't. It probably saved me and R. But we're not done yet.
I'm not sure exactly what went down, but a couple of days before I was supposed to leave Tokyo for DC, I got an email from CSWA folks about some Chinese women who had been hired through a subcontracting firm to work for a medical laundry in Japan. They eventually came out in mid-September against their company, technoclean, for stealing their wages and for exposing them to long hours of hard labor with no protection against the toxic waste resulting from the laundry. My mission was to go out and meet the women, but all I had was a Chinese article and the name of the journalist who wrote it up. For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigr...
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