“Real luxury,” Lo said, “no work two whole days.”

Still not used to such luxury, Lo said she doesn’t know how to use the time, so she often just sits in her favorite chair at home or goes to a second mass at church. And because Sam’s workweek is now 40 hours, instead of the 70 he used to put in, he explained that he has time to attend to his Brooklyn garden–growing Chinese eggplant, “much better than American eggplant,” he insisted.

For several years, I have taught English, as a volunteer, to immigrants at Chinatown Manpower Project, a nonprofit organization that provides vocational training and tutoring for people of all ages. Sometimes, when I meet my students, I feel as if I’ve been handed the wrongly accused, people just released from a Devil’s Island compound who never had the chance to learn the language of their adopted country or see neighborhoods beyond their own.

One evening a week, I stand before a blackboard in an old public-school classroom, the occasional blur of a mouse disappearing behind radiators, writing down phrases and idioms. Typical conversation topics include happy memories (weddings, births of children), superstitions (it’s proper to sprinkle food at grave sites for relatives to enjoy), goals (living in a house with two bedrooms!) and first impressions of America (disappointment at bleak neighborhoods, awe at the variety of races).

When I used the word “sweatshop” and my students didn’t understand, I sat at a desk pretending to stitch at a sewing machine, pumping an imaginary pedal, mopping my brow with the drama of a silent-film star. “Sweating in a shop–or factory–as you work, getting very tired,” I explained.

“Sweatshop,” Lo said, “make sense. Meaning is correct.”

I’ve often seen wisps of steam funneling from clouded windows in old buildings in Chinatown. Now I know that within those places some of my students are hunched over sewing machines, feeding garments under bobbing needles. The faster they work the more money they make, for payment is by the piece and not the hour.

One of the first topics I cover each semester is which sites my students have visited. Lo, who has lived in New York 25 years, had been to Central Park once and never to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I used to think some students were incurious. I’ve come to realize that after 70 hours a week at a sewing machine, with pay often below minimum wage, there is no time or energy to admire a Vermeer or see the whitecaps on the Central Park Reservoir some windy Sunday afternoon.

I take my students on occasional field trips and, during a tour of midtown last September, as we were about to enter Saks Fifth Avenue, Lo bragged that she had made sample fabrics for a fashion show there. When we went inside, an aggressive perfume-company rep approached her and asked if she wanted a spritz of fragrance and the chance to purchase it and an accompanying silk scarf at a special price. But Lo didn’t understand her and laughed out of self-consciousness, whereupon the perfume rep turned to a co-worker and said, “This one hasn’t got a clue about fashion.”

After class weeks later, Lo and I stopped at a bulletin board in a hallway that displays adult-student projects. Among the items pinned to the board were shirt collars, plackets and zippers. I never knew there were four kinds of zippers–the kissing zipper, overlap, right fly and invisible. Lo ran the zipper up and down the gleaming track of one of the samples, an invisible.

“This what I used to do. I was expert,” she said with a wistfulness, certainly remembering how hard the job was, but also how it allowed her to remain in the background of American life.

“Still scared at my job at nursing home,” she admitted to me in class one day. “Too many responsibilities and nobody understand my accent.”

Over the semester, Lo remained uneasy in her nursing-home job, but never said she missed the old work of zippers and plackets and collars.