The laughter is coming from the clearing where the wagons are being loaded with cut cane. A group of Chinese men are gathered there, taunting some Filipino “Sakada” workers carrying heavy loads of cane stalks across their shoulders. Don’t know how the Sakadas take it. If it were me, yeah, I would have shut them up a long time ago. But Koji gives me the eye, reminding me to be careful. He has been cutting cane for almost three years and he tells me to stay alert, to watch everything and remain quiet and cautious while working, tells me who I can trust and who I can’t.

“Nothing is as simple as it looks, eh,” Koji reminds me. “Trouble can follow you like a shadow, so you need to watch your back, yeah, keep one step ahead.”

Koji has the ability to ignore it all, while I see the lies and injustices add up. In the fields every day, I hear the Sakada workers whispering their grievances. “They came to our homeland with lies and promises of work and a better life. No schooling, no matter, they say, put your X right there. Is this a better life? Once we arrived from the Philippines, they gave us da dirtiest, most backbreaking work—burning, clearing, and loading da cane onto railcars, ten hours a day, six days a week. Lucky if we receive ninety cents a day!” I look up to see a luna a row away from us. “No talking in the fields!” he yells, snapping his whip. They want us to lick their boots just like the way they have to bow down to the managers and the managers to the owner. I know what the plantation owners are doing. The bastards. They deliberately keep us separated when we’re off the fields so we can’t form any alliances. If the Japanese workers strike, the owners pay more to the Chinese and Filipino workers to take their place. I don’t like how they pit us against each other. I don’t like it at all.

Still, I listen to Koji and we usually steer clear of the fights between the different groups of workers, or with some of the lunas who wield their power with brutal beatings to quash our wills, keep us under their thumbs. They’re cruel to be cruel, I say; the smells of fear and blood are what they jack off to.

We steer clear for as long as we can until we can’t anymore.