When I started at the company, I was trained by this Vietnamese guy who was like me in that he was older and smaller than most of the other welders. He taught me grudgingly, and in gestures, smacking my hand when I made an error in programming the path of the automatic welder. “You make much trouble!” he would say, reprogramming with motions so fast I couldn’t follow.
I got to be pretty good at running the machine. Once Mr. Nguyen decided I wasn’t going to screw it up too badly, he started teaching me other stuff—how to use a come-along, how to lift pieces of plate with leverage instead of brute force.
We started eating lunch together, sitting on the half-welded boxcar sides. He had teenage children and a couple of toddlers at home. His oldest was starting to run with a gang and lose interest in school. “I want him to do well,” he said, “but my English is not good enough to help him with his studies.”
Our station was close to an overhead door through which forklifts brought materials in and out of the shop. In the winter, snow and strong winds would pour through the door as soon as it was opened. Mr. Nguyen and I had the flu, but we were supporting families and couldn’t afford to take time off. We made a deal. Whoever had a temperature under 100° in the morning did the heavy lifting. The other programmed, standing at the control panel, feverish, shivering, and gulping tea.
We met up with other sufferers at breaks, trading antihistamines, cough suppressants, and analgesics. Mr. Nguyen got pneumonia and was hospitalized for a week. While he was gone I built side after side by myself. It was so cold that I would crawl up onto the work at lunch time and lie down on the steel plate between freshly made welds, falling asleep in the radiated warmth.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that workers over 45 are unemployed an average of 22 weeks as opposed to 16 weeks for younger workers. I have a B.A. and am going back to grad school. Mr. Nguyen has broken English and a wealth of knowledge specialized to a job that doesn’t exist.
