With two young children, Deng Guimian had not planned on going back to work. That changed after her husband was arrested while investigating labor abuses at Chinese suppliers for the brand of Ivanka Trump, US President Donald Trump’s daughter.
Now the 36-year-old mom works the overnight shift at a karaoke parlor and stays in a dorm nearby. She gets just three days off a month to see her kids.
“They seem accustomed to not having their mom,” Deng said of her seven-year-old daughter, Chen Chen, and four-year-old son, Bo Bo.
Photo: AP
She flashed an uneasy smile.
Ivanka Trump has sought to bring an aura of female empowerment to her lifestyle brand and spoken out for women’s rights from her post at the White House, but her legacy has been less than empowering for at least one woman in China.
In May, Deng’s husband, Hua Haifeng, and two of his colleagues were accused of illegally using secret recording devices and thrown in jail while investigating factories that made shoes for Ivanka Trump’s brand. The group that they were working for, a New York non-profit called China Labor Watch, obtained evidence of forced overtime and pay as low as US$1 an hour, as well as a video of a manager berating a worker for apparently arranging shoes in the wrong order.
“If I see them f---ing messed up again,” the manager yells, “I’ll beat you right here.”
Another worker was left with blood dripping from his head after a manager hit him with the sharp end of a high heeled shoe, three eyewitnesses said.
The Huajian Group, which runs the factories where the abuses allegedly occurred, has called the charges “completely not true to the facts.”
The investigators were released after 30 days, but the bail conditions — restrictions on travel, regular meetings with the police — have made it difficult for Hua to find work.
Hua was ordered not to speak to the media and declined to comment for this story.
Ivanka Trump, who still owns but no longer closely manages her namesake brand, has remained silent about human rights issues within her brand’s supply chain — and labor conditions in China, where tons of her products are made and a generation of women like Deng has left their children to go work.
“As a public figure, she has the ability and resources to not only work on labor conditions at her own brand’s factories, but also to help improve labor conditions of the global supply chain as a whole,” China Labor Watch founder Li Qiang said. “However, she did not use her influence to do these things.”
Trump’s brand and spokesman declined to comment for this story, but in her bestseller, **Women Who Work**, Trump spoke about her commitment to improving “the lives of countless women and girls” and acknowledged that her father’s presidential campaign gave her “an unprecedented opportunity to advocate for change.”
Her daughter, Arabella, who is one year younger than Chen Chen, has also been an inspiration.
“When I think about the opportunities Arabella will have available to her in the United States, compared with some of the 600 million girls growing up in developing countries, I’m even more inspired to make a difference,” she wrote.
Arabella and her two little brothers are her “greatest passion,” Ivanka Trump wrote. “I’m the first person they see in the morning and the last to give kisses at night.”
Meanwhile, Deng has traded life with her kids for a mirrored room at a karaoke parlor, where she sells drinks and snacks on the 6pm to 2am shift. She spends her days in a dormitory, where she and a coworker share a bed with a Snoopy headboard. Room and board are free, but she makes less than 2,000 yuan (US$317) a month. It is not enough.
Neighbors in their small, hardscrabble town on the outskirts of Xiangyang, in central China’s Hubei Province, seem convinced that Hua sold state secrets to the US, Deng said.
The family worries that Hua could get plucked up by police any day and vanish from their lives again, but Deng said she has no regrets.
“Maybe he’s not such a big, important person,” she said. “But every time he helps a worker resolve a problem, put yourself in that person’s position. Personally, I think it’s a very meaningful thing to do.”
Her children have become more subdued since their father’s time in jail, Deng said.
“The shadow is that when they don’t see their father, they keep calling him,” she said.
Bo Bo has grown reasonable beyond his years.
“He’s such a small child, but when he talks he seems just like an adult,” Deng said, while Chen Chen tends to follow her dad around. “My daughter has never asked about what happened, but I can sense she knows many things.”
On a recent Sunday off, Deng’s children wandered in and out of the kitchen as she cooked. Their house is so cold everyone keeps their coats on inside. At 5pm, when it was time for Deng to go back to work, Bo Bo darted around his mom. Chen Chen sat at a small table nearby, coloring.
“Do you want to see mama off?” Deng said to her daughter.
“No,” Chen Chen said.
Deng tried again: “Come on, what’s wrong? You’re not happy?”
Chen Chen stared at her pink marker.
Finally, Deng had to go. She mussed her son’s hair as they walked out into the last light of day. Bo Bo closed the big metal gate after his mom. Chen Chen kept coloring.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not