Made In Cambodia

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Fashion

The [undergraduate dissertation] I read [before I did my research] was about people in Sri Lanka and England whose lives were connected through the tea trade [Wrathmell 2003 link]. It was amazing. It was so real, reading about the people she had gone and visited. You could imagine being there. It scared me quite a lot, actually. I thought, ‘could I do this?’ ‘Could I actually go somewhere and do this?’ (Source: Clare in Allsop et al 2010, p.7).

In Cambodia, I was treated as the rich western white-skinned girl. People thought I was too young to be travelling on my own. People would say, ‘Your parents are OK with you coming out here? Are you from a good family?’ When we visited a compound where some of the factory workers lived, it attracted almost the whole village. And there was this one lady who asked, ‘Could I come back to England with you? Could I be your servant?’ And I was like ‘Oh my God! We don’t have servants. I do my own washing. I clean my own house.’ And she just couldn’t understand it at all. It was seriously bizarre (Source: Clare in Allsop et al 2010, p.12).

…sometimes I couldn’t keep it in. I was so close to tears that it was obvious to everyone there. There was this guy who lived in this tiny house with his wife and daughter. His wife also worked in a garment factory. He came across and wanted to interrogate me about what I’d found out. Like, ‘How much do people get paid here?’ I did my best to answer his questions. We spoke through a translator and used very basic English. He started telling me about how he worked in his factory’s ironing department and sometimes had to work from seven in the morning until three the next afternoon. He told me that they got a little package of rice to keep them going through the night. Then he said that sometimes he’d be so tired he’d iron over his hand. And he was smiling when he said it. His daughter was running around outside. She was peering in at me and my friend. She was so intrigued by us. And then he told me that he can’t afford to send her to school. It was just so real. The initial aim of my research was to identify the people in Cambodia who had made my t-shirt. But it turned out more that I was identifying with them. That turned out to be a big theme in my dissertation (Source: Clare in Allsop et al 2010, p.13-14).

[My dissertation] was totally ‘biased’. But then, hopefully, the people marking it can understand that ‘bias’ because I was there, experiencing those things. What I said was backed up by everything I saw. That’s why I think what I think. It’s situated knowledge. You don’t have to like it. Just read it. (Source: Clare in Allsop et al 2010, p.16).