puck's epic freakouts

how the Other Half lives

Yishilan and Jinjunhui are a Korean couple in their 30s. They're certainly the most likeable of all my classmates (mostly young, vagely directionless college students half-heartedly floating along the strong river current of class privilege toward a blood-stained corporate career in international business). I'm always impressed by how sweet Yishilan and Jinjunhui are to each other, even within a classroom setting. They have two kids and often speak lovingly of them as well. I always forget that heteronormative coupling and nuclear family units can exist in non-abusive ways, so they seem like a refreshing surprise... even if they, like everyone else here, constantly ask me why I don't want a boyfriend. Earlier today I biked to their home where we made dumplings and played Uno (the card game) with their two hyperactive boys for far too long.

On Wednesday they (along with other classmates) came over to my place for dinner. A Chinese-Dutch kid in my class cooked bland Dutch food ("It's not supposed to look good- it's Dutch food," he would shrug when our classmates poked nervously at his boiled lettuce-and-potato dish) and I made an eclectic meal consisting of pseudo-Mexican and vegan-Chinese-American cuisine.

I have refrained for the most part from talking about politics with these people- which is easy because our conversations are pretty limited by our lack of a common language. However, a dozen or so weak beers into the evening I ended up trying to interest the older folks and the English speakers in Korean independent media websites, Japanese noise bands and questionable propaganda put out by various political left groups throughout Asia. It turns out that Jinjunhui had been a kid when the Kwangju Massacre happened (http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=557) and still felt very emotional about it. Tears actually began welling up in Yishilan's eyes when we sang (I hummed) the tune from that student uprising, and she was also very affected by the photos of the Korean Peasants League from the Hong Kong WTO protests. I suddenly felt an affinity with the couple that I hadn't managed to cultivate with pretty much anyone else here.

It nearly broke my shriveled heart when Jinjunhui admitted that the two of them were learning Mandarin so that they could eventually open up a trade company here. Just this morning I read an article written by the Chinese Working Women's Network which really spelled out the ways that different Asian nationals exploit the working poor of neighboring countries through the system of subcontracting in manufacturing. The ultimate beneficiaries are, of course, mostly multi-national corporations from "First World" countries. The fact that Yishilan and Jinjunhui can be "conscious" or whatever yet have to/ want to participate in a economic relationship that can benefit them only if it exploits others is definitely not different than how things work in the States. There are plenty of fucked-up "progressive" landlords and bosses, and usually they're the worst to deal with. Yet I certainly don't hang out with most self-deceiving liberals in the States because I don't have many reasons to interact with them and would rather spend time with other people. Here though, amidst a landscape of privileged foreign students, Sinophiles and social climbing upper class Chinese people who think that America is great, I'm having to rediscover what it's like to try to find affinity with people that you have no affinity with.

And in that process I'm coming up again on how complicated it is to be human in this world. Just the simple fact that all of us, all of us, no matter what, are just people with names and addresses and roles to play and chances to refuse and stations that we can't deny... a basic responsibility to to each other than never gets addressed... it just is too much for me to comprehend right now. How do we even begin to relate to each other, how can we trust anyone else at all, and how is it that we're stuck in a world that's put together like this when neither of us have agreed to these rules?... And then how can anything really change in the world if we can't trust each other, if we can't relate to each other even when we have no affinity? How do we re-draw these lines when clearly we're not in the same place, but every map we know has only failed us thus far?

The sheer magnitude of things here makes everything feel that much more apocolyptic. Certainly this moment in time is being hyped as this pivotal time. All around the world there is sort of a grim acceptance that what happens to China in the next 20 years is going to hugely impact everyone, everywhere- and what happens here could result in a new degree of international acceptance that the US/ capitalist narrative of global neoliberal "democratic" capitalist development is indeed the only way for the rest of the world to proceed... and/ or the teeming peasant and worker uprisings here could fundamentally challenge it and open up new space for others to challenge it. Maybe it's just that I've swallowed the hype, but when I think about another 1,306,313,812 people (China's population) in the world driving cars/ being bosses/ being slaves/ creating a new and better world of possibilities, I am fucking overwhelmed.

On my end of things, so far being in Beijing has been something of an anthropological study of rich people and has provided me with a new angle to view how privilege operates (The variation of white supremacy that exists here is different than in the US with slightly different functions- but that's another essay entirely.) It's definitely been a mind-bending experience to affiliate primarily with the global elite. My initial emotional revulsion has fermented into a seasoned and more detached interest in my subjects as I now partake in their activities to better observe them (I'm joking, sort of, I promise). My limited research confirms the worst suspiscions I've had about the state of the human condition: That as long as there are consumer items like cars and televisions and movies to distract the rich, the rich will demand bigger SUVs and more stupid American products until we all fucking die from war and pollution. People here who are far from rich can easily see that when foreign investors come in, they get special treatment while they are here and for setting up these uncomplicated processes by which to completely suck out all the wealth from this country for years to come. By and large, the response from locals seems not to be all-out revulsion I would expect but rather curiosity and even tempered admiration for the foreign investors. It's the same in too many places, right?

Similarly, people respond to my national citizenship in surprising and embarassing ways. One person, a fruit vendor, hummed the US national anthem at me while I turned red and tried desperately to hush him. He seemed perplexed at my reaction.

"It's the soundtrack to bombs falling on Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon..." I tried to explain, finally resorting to hand gestures and "boom" noises to mimick explosions.

"Ah," he sighed, furrowing his brow for a moment. "America is like Heaven," he concluded nonetheless, gesturing to the red-orange sun behind the perpetual gray smog..

"If Heaven can only exist if there's Hell, then it's no good anyway," I responded. "Fuck Heaven."

He didn't understand me, and I couldn't understand him, so we smiled wanly at each other over a fruit stand while I fretted about the limited nature of our conversation and about what harmful dynamics might be playing out even in this small exchange.

I did not come here to hobnob with the business class, or to try to strike up friendships with random strangers with whom I have no basic affinity. Through proximity and the very basic desire for basic human contact however, I've formed fragile, tenuous relationships with some of these faceless, nameless, yet essential players in this doomed and miserable game of existence under international capitalism. It's so weird. Nineteen year-olds who willingly choose "International Marketing" as college majors and who know nothing about the world except that the service is always too slow and the bill- any bill- can always be paid. They're hideous monsters who ought to be stabbed in their sleep for the roles they're willing to play so that they can be comfortable while others (the "less fortunate") suffer. But they're also mere children, confused and desperate and also longing for some sort of meaning to all of this mess. Give these kids a gun and chances are they won't run off and murder strangers. But hand them privilege and entitlement and these same kids won't bat an eyelash hailing a cab while turning away from the old man on the street haggling tourists for spare change. They function in socially acceptable ways, are often decent people for the most part, who like to dance or cook and travel and read; they seem to accept their privileged stations in life with no trouble at all, sleep soundly with plenty, feel completely unimplicated while others die from lack.

At a outrageously hip ex-pat club last night, the Chinese-Ducth classmate of mine and I took a break from dancing. Despite the on/off impulses to slaughter and rob everyone near me, I was in good spirits, all things considering. The songs were the same US Top 40 they play at any club or party in the States I would go to (I guess I forget that Lil Kim isn't always played in a queer context), and if you managed to somehow ignore the gazillions of white man-Chinese woman couples engaged in acts of grotesque humping all along the dancefloor, one could forget this was Beijing, not San Francisco.

"They charge so much for drinks here, and if you order something but don't tip well, then forget it- you'll never get your drink," my classmate shook his head.

"Well, of course you have to tip," I snapped. "The staff doesn't get paid enough to attend to you if you don't tip."

His normally complacent demeanor wrinkled: "That's not my fault they don't get paid enough!"

I glared at him: "Well, actually, if you think about it all- it is. It's everyone's fault."

We sat uncomfortaby, avoiding looking in each other's direction while Eminem blared from the other room and behind me, a horribly ugly old white man groped his gorgeous Chinese girlfriend. She giggled and batted his hand away. Meanwhile a throng of unattarctive white frat boys hung on each others shoulders, wailing and shouting to Bon Jovi in a sweaty, panicked desperation that I suppose mimed good cheer and good ol' boy comraderie.

Earlier in the night I accompanied my bizarre group of international acquaintances- primarily Korean and Japanese stylish boys who like American R&B, and the few girls who smoke cigarettes and want to go drinking- to a total of four different bars and two restaurants. Life was like a tv show. Gaofei, a Colombian man with startling white skin, ginger-colored hair and a boyish, charming demeanor, is an aspiring businessman with (apparently) a Chinese girlfriend who does his laundry. He wins smiles from all the locals and respect from far too many people. I fucking hate him especially for his carefree false innocence. As he grinningly danced to the blasting salsa music at the festive nightclub, I thought about how shitty it was that I didn't trust any of these people I came with because of their total lack of concern with the world- and simultaneously I grow to like more and more of these kids, their strange quirks and unique personalities: Takky the spacey Japanese kid who wore sunglasses on the back of his head and was constantly clowning around, Ini the Korean girl who chain-smoked and constantly invited more people to join us.

And I thought about how if a revolution broke out right now all the people who sweep the streets with brooms made from branches, all the people who haul scrap wood and metal and fruits and vegetables to and away from the city on go-cart contraptions huffing acrid sweet-sour air, would crash through the doors past the well-stocked bar and onto the golden-lit dancefloor, mid-hand clap, overturning glass tables and then maybe our blood would run in rivulets down the gutters of the hot, wet streets where the cab drivers and bar men speak key English phrases like "cheap beer, dude." I wondered if our blood spilt, streaming down the trendy tourist zoo of SanLiTun would be a bad thing, or a good thing, or neither... and what would it mean anyway, more suffering upon more death...

Throughout the night as we sat and drank and ate, I counted the number of people who had to work in order for us to merely exist doing what we were doing: By the end of the night, I counted nearly 60. We were merely 8 people.

These students don't work at all. It's fucking unbelievable. They literally hang out ALL DAY LONG at charming outdoor patios and cafes while other people serve them food and beverages. "I'm a student," they tell me as an explanation for why they don't have jobs. I can't understand how being A Student means that somehow you don't need to work. What they mean is: "I am rich." When, at 22 or whatever, they do get jobs, they will be corporate careers in international finance and the like. These kids will never actually Work. But they will in effect own the lives of all the others who do work.

Call me naive, but being up close and amongst people who are so "nice" yet behave like complete assholes who only care about their own narrow self-interest- and for whom the world is built to serve- really eats away at the frayed edges of my hope for any kind of non-violent (I mean that as in, without gratuitous bloodbaths, prisons and other institutionalized violence) and meaningful transformation of society. I've arrived only at cross-eyed, inconculsive generalities at where this chain of death leads: None of us are fully guilty, and none of us are innocent. Anyway, who cares about guilt or innocence? It's just more weird residual Christian shit...it doesn't change anything. I don't want to operate from guilt- although having privilege in this world does imply guilt, and I think it's what so many activists and organizers and others do operate on. Maybe it's unavoidable. I don't know. Even all our talk about Accountability ultimately rests on guilt. How can you try to hold someone Accountable if they feel no sense of conscience? It's that smugness of the unaccountable that incurs those fantasies of "revolutionary bloodshed" I've inherited from who knows where (Clifford Harper anarchist woodcut illustrations and McCarthy Red Scare propaganda combined, maybe)...I suppose that's probably not Transformatively Just. All these vague ideals and honest impulses are tied in knots, no names and addresses to contextualize the tough talk...

But then the opposite of guilt is privileged self-involvement, and it's too easy for entitled people who deny their stake in systems of oppression to merely act out their privilege on all sorts of stages of their own devising. For the activist-inclined, privilege can the ability to be able to declare the renunciation of privilege that can't ever actually be shed. So I've got no answers here, nope.

Ultimately I can admit that I know that the venom and vengeance and outrage don't make things right; neither do "alternative living" avoidance strategies or New Age hippie "change your outlook" shit... But all that just leaves the despair and resulting helplessness of watching this barely concealed violence pass for normal everyday life. Mix in an amount of only slightly-watered down Hope and you get a rabid contempt for the most obvious perpetrators, somewhat obscuring the complicated reality of how oppression and violence manifest and play out. Allow me to drag out the platitudes again: We are all implicated, and we are all in this together... I know it's true, but why does it sound like a threat, feel like an excuse?

who sleeps tonight ( or, more tourism in the PRC)

1am: Beijing is mostly vacant and shrouded in an ominous and picturesque mist. it transforms light into matter, oxygen into smog. i went to a metal show tonight. it was pretty much all locals, many macho boys, a few girls. the bands sang in Chinese except for one notable anthemic song with a chorus consisting mainly of the words "Fuck You!"

i found this article (below) this evening. everywhere i've been there is construction happening, seemingly at all hours of the day and night. sparks from welders and saws fly, and in the corners browned workers (no bleach-infused beauty products for them!) squat between right angles, eating from metal dishes, looking exhausted. most of the construction workers here are migrants from the rural areas. since work is assigned by the government, it is techinically illegal for people in rural areas to leave and to seek employment independently someplace else. however, because the rural economy is collapsing under the weight of unregulated international trade, people living in poverty have no choice but to look for jobs in the cities. since these workers aren't recognized as legit, they have no rights and are constantly exploited. often, people will work for months and then not get paid. in such a situation the worker just has to bite it; they have no recourse since their labor is considered to be "illegal." yet the entire economy- and all this rapid development (much of it to show-off for the 2008 fucking Olympics)- depends on this kind of labor. sound familiar??

as wealth accumulates for the selected few in places like Beijing, poverty becomes more apparent and pronounced. old men begging for change can be found most places- people here tell me that this wasn't the case just several years ago.

Rural migrant worker sets himself on fire on Tiananmen Square

A rural migrant worker set himself on fire on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on 20 July reportedly due to unpaid wages.

Wang Cong'an, a 53-year-old native of Jiangsu province in eastern China, doused himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze in the middle of this popular tourist destination at 8:44 AM on Thursday, according to the Agence France-presse which quoted a faxed statement from the local police.

"He performed the self-immolation over a financial dispute with a construction company in Yuanan County, Hubei province," the statement said.

Security guards on the square quickly put out the flames and rushed the man to hospital, according to the statement. It said Wang remained in hospital but was not in critical condition.

According to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, Wang was seriously burned.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted police information as saying that Wang came to Beijing to call on higher authorities for help in getting his unpaid wages.

Sources: Agence France-presse (21 July 2006), SCMP.com (21 July 2006)

oh, i should mention that no one i know here has heard of this incident. the news was full of the usual sappy stories about the importance of education and a bald little girl whose life has been changed now that she has a wig to wear.

haikus from the deep end digital land

text messages from Handle-

7/21:
Hilarious weird.
Tv broadcast
huge euro
wooden ship
called
gotheburg
sailing into
guangzhou w
sweden king
queen blonde
once invader
now welcomed
red carpet

7/22:
Met tutor at
Mc Donalds and learn
cantonese then
taught her
english like
poverty draft
or universal
healthcare

sunday: beauty, shit and failure

the most beautiful thing in the world might be biking home after a rainstorm, watching my front wheel part the puddles like a sea god at leisure, following car horn blasts and wavy neon reflections and merging with dozens of bipedals on wheels. people looking as old as time haul huge wagons piled with styrofoam, car parts, frayed rope, birds in cages, watermelons... and men smartly dresed in crisp shirts, pleated pants buzz by on mopeds while others steer shiny new golf carts. permed-hair young men ride two to a bike, as do most folks... sparkly sequined high femmes with small heels, holding ruffly umbrellas pedal their mothers and brothers and kids on back racks, don't bat an eye darting straight out in front of rows of grumpy, coughing buses.

i like this habit people have of singing out loud while riding. the potholes in the roads collect Beijing street rain-soup, soaks my pant legs, introduces grit between my toes. weaving my way between zooming cars, carrying frozen dumplings and mangoes, dodging old men riding lawnmowers on the sidewalks- this is a Beijing i am growing to love.

which is only fair because other times i feel absolutely strangled by the weight of thousands of years of dynasties of monarchy, patriarchy and authoritarianism- and suffocated by how this sort of "tradition" fuses with the capitalist brushfire here. today i met with one of the Marxist students from last week- we had lunch together. mostly she showed me around the campus and talked about school. all of the young people from here i've met so far seem very studious and conservative. at my language school i'm amongst mostly 18-22 year olds. i guffaw at how different their goals seem to be than mine when i was 20, being a passionate fool, making grand mistakes all the time but at least trying to live and fight and understand what the fuck is happening. watching these kids all march toward some bleak middle-class future of corporate servitude until the world finally collapses is pretty fucking depressing. if by now everyone is desensitized to war, death, prisons, slavery and ecollogical collapse, does no one give a flying fuck about danger, passion, risk and romance either? is it really all about advancing your own stupid status in life and only caring about your stupid goddamn family?

i know it's all more complicated than that. but the world is actually on fire and it's that fact- that from Lebanon to New York and Mexico and certainly here in China, people are faced with more imminent and dire situations than perhaps ever before... that's what makes it so fucking impossible to understand how we just keep doing this bullshit, learning "Business Mandarin" and stabbing each other in the throats for some illusion of security and comfort that can be yanked away by our rulers whenever they choose, or when the world is depleted of natural resources.

people ask me what i do and i keep trying to find the Chinese phrase equivalent to "fuck-up." i really hate these weird middle-class Chinese values of overachieving. all this "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" shit and "become successful." if there is no imminent social movement and complete transformation of everything, if that's just not going to happen- then it all makes me want to fail in dramatic, self-indulgent ways.

i meet so many other foreigners at school (mostly Koreans and Japanese folks) who ask me about "America." they usually have statements on-hand like: "America is great! Everyone is very nice there." my impression is that most of these kids are middle-class and have swallowed the idea that capitalist development is good for their futures. they get really stressed out when i say that America is a continent, and that i love the land and the people who struggle for justice there but fucking hate what the US represents. my whole class fidgeted in strained silence when i freaked out and protested that the teacher was teaching us the Chinese words for the names of North American corporations. we're a Beginner class, which means we know how to say like 4 different things. now 25% of what we can talk about are the names of corporations.

"Wa-Uh-Mar." "Ma-don-lao." "Xing-ba-ke." the class chanted. it was like an Adbusters nightmare.

it's so convoluted because this idea of "America" represents personal freedom to a lot of people here. it's so fucking gross that the US has successfully marketed this idea of democracy as being equivalent to and dependent on neoliberal free trade.

"how do you say 'imperialism'?" i asked and was duly ignored. it's ironic that here i am in this "Communist" country, not being able to get my language teacher to teach me the word for 'imperialist'- the ultimate multi-purpose Maoist descriptor word.

Returned

I had lunch with the University Marxist Society today. They are a very likeable bunch. "I don't think they would execute us if they take power," I jokingly text-messaged an anarchist friend of mine who is in Guangzhou right now.

The Marxists cut to the chase. After the initial unavoidable bit where everyone here guffaws at the fact that I am Chinese but can't speak Chinese because I'm fifth generation in the US, they went right to it:

"Tell us about the American Left."

Eight pairs of eyes fix on me expectanty. The clatter of dishes in the restaurant fills the silence at the table. I take a deep breath.

So here I am in Beijing. It's weird to even type: "I'm in Beijing." Three words can't possibly cover where I am and how it is that I am here.

I'm in Beijing. I'm a "returned Chinese," as the literal translation goes- but how can I return to a place I've never been to? No one here even thinks that I'm Chinese. Their astounded faces contort when I tell them.

"Why can't you speak Chinese then?"

"You're very dark-skinned for a Chinese," women shake their heads in disapproval. All the moisturizing lotions sold here have bleach in them. Beauty standards (along with hiring practices and everything else) are incredibly, bizarrely, unapogetically, and very frankly white supremacist.

Returned Chinese. "I feel more like a defective product- a 'returned Chinese,' not a returning Chinese," I remarked, half-laughing, to Handle on the phone yesterday.

"Maybe I'm not Chinese. Growing up in the US, without Chinese language and culture (whatever that is)- maybe I'm not actually Chinese at all. But it's complicated, right? Race and ethnicity are social constructions, and that's very clear to me. In the US, we're Other, and so it becomes imperative for us to name ourselves. Growing up in the US we are racialized as 'Chinese' (or generically Asian)- so that awareness forms our identities in addition to however we might actually identify as 'being Chinese,' whatever that might mean."

"So I grew up having to answer to all things perceived as Chinese. I had to 'represent the race' in art class in elementary school, on the streets of the Bronx neighborhood where I lived, and later on, I was often 'the Asian' amongst both people of color and white people during political discussions and meetings or whatever."

"So it's not surprising that Chinese Americans, faced with real and imagined shared histories as 'Chinese people in the US' or 'Overseas Chinese' or whatever, try to understand ourselves and our place in the world as 'Chinese people,' since for better or for worse, that's what we've inherited and we have to understand it in order to change things."

Bah. I'm weird in the States, and I'm weird here. In a way my alienation- old friend- is even comforting. I find myself listening to music I haven't even thought of since high school.

The Marxists were very interested in comparing notes. We talked about the labor movements in our respective countries. There are no independent unions at all in China. There are even very few NGOs. They were curious about the hotel workers' strikes in San Francisco, since a mutual friend of ours (who is from San Francisco but also lived here for a year) was working for Local 2 as an organizer. We talked about how globalization is driving down wages for workers here, especially women who work in factories, and people who have been displaced from farming and other rural work. All the usual stuff.

More later- I'm off go running before the rain hits.

The Time to Act is Now: Immigrants Strike in Oakland

By Puck Lo and Xan West

This is a movement best symbolized by the endless procession of strollers, pushed by students, teachers, and workers. As the sun blazed in the brilliant blue sky overhead seemingly shade-less East Oakland, car horns blared deafening approval all along International Boulevard while ubiquitous Mexico and US flags fluttered. Students and workers, parents and children—boycotting school and work and clad in crisp white t-shirts—trekked the arduous nine mile hike from 98th St and International Blvd. to the Federal Building in downtown Oakland at 14th and Broadway.

The May 1st economic boycott was initially called for by immigrant rights groups and community organizations. Spanish-language media outlets widely publicized a broad call for a boycott supporting immigrant rights. The rapid growth of an immigrant social movement only continues to gain momentum at a rate that surprises everyone—including the very organizations and individuals who had originally called for marches to oppose various legislative bills that would criminalize undocumented migrant workers. The May 1st wildcat strike falls on the heels of several of these mobilizations that during the past month have turned out more than a million people who have flooded the streets, demanding better working conditions and human rights for undocumented workers.

In East Oakland, many storefronts were closed for the day. Although some shop owners chose to shut down in order to demonstrate solidarity with the immigrant march and economic strike, others closed out of sheer logistics: Without the Latino participation that buoys the East Oakland economy, staying open during the boycott could result in lost revenue. However, in the absence of regular commerce, the streets and sidewalks were far from desolate; Oakland teemed with pride and celebration. Estimates made by the Oakland Police concede that at least 6,000 people passed through the Latino stronghold, Fruitvale, during the peak of the march.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, police there estimated that 400,000 people inundated the city streets during May Day. The San Jose Mercury News reported that 100,000 people were out in San Jose. In San Francisco, more than 50,000 people lined the walls between Justin Herman Plaza and Civic Center.

Elsewhere in the world outside the US, May 1st, or May Day, is celebrated annually as International Worker’s Day. The origins of the holiday date back to 1886, when labor strikes fighting for the eight-hour workday culminated in police riots in Chicago. Eight of the main anarchist labor organizers—most of whom were immigrant workers themselves, from Germany—were eventually sentenced to death, charged with a subsequent bombing. These anarchist organizers became known as the Haymarket Martyrs, and celebration of their cause has catalyzed social movements and revolutionaries since.

The fact that in 2006 the controversial immigrant economic boycott calling for “No Work, No School, No Buying, No Selling” falls on this charged holiday, seems to be no coincidence. Yet, while both mainstream English-language media accounts and official leaders of ethnic minority communities decry the boycott as too controversial, East Oakland and other major immigrant hubs abound with immigrants and supporters who vocalize little patience for those movement “leaders” and business unions who have publicly opposed the economic boycott, claiming that “the time isn’t right” for militant direct action such as a strike. Overwhelmingly, both marchers and onlookers expressed unequivocal support for the boycott, also called “A Day Without an Immigrant.”

“The strike and boycott are just the beginning,” one man, an immigrant from Mexico who watched the procession from outside Walgreens drugstore, insists. “What is important is that the youth are getting together. That’s the real future of this movement.”

According to Business Week, the nation's 7.2 million undocumented immigrant workers make up 24% of all farm workers, 17% of maintenance workers, and 9% of employees in production occupations.

Sixth grade student striker Patricia, of Elmhurst Elementary School, grins. She is wrapped in a Mexican flag, with a napping infant strapped to her chest. She walks quickly and purposefully alongside two other Elmhurst student strikers and an older woman who pushes a baby carriage. Her family and her teachers support her participation in the strike.

“We can plan another walk-out,” she declares confidently. “Whatever is next, we’ll be there.”

Entire schools were out on the streets in support of the boycott. Principal Susan Harmon from the Growing Children School in East Oakland steered rows of children across a street, flustered but unmistakably proud. “We’re in school, but all of us are in the march,” she notes. “It’s barbaric to talk about sending people home. Students and parents are extremely supportive of our march. School is open, but many of the kids are out today. We have 150 kids, ages 5 through 12, half Latino, half African-American. We all march.”

Speculating about the response of the larger community to the massive student and teacher walk-outs, Principal Harmon surmises, “Judging from this march, the support is spectacular. This is the most well-organized march that I’ve ever seen.”

Despite the mayhem of constantly wailing traffic horns and the heat of the noonday sun, the march was orderly. There were no apparent sponsoring organizations.

“I heard about this march on Myspace.com,” one sixth grade student striker shrugs, smiling.

Many echo that Spanish-language radio and television stations have been instrumental in publicizing and rallying support for the strike as well as furthering this burgeoning grassroots social movement.

“Are there organizations working on this? I don’t know. But there is organizing,” Veronica insists. She left her job in Stockton, where she lives, to come participate in the immigrant strike. “My brother is out in Stockton, marching there. Everybody’s organizing. We talk to each other.”

Nearby, on a corner, two African-American women and three young girls stand on the side of International Blvd. and watch the march, clapping and cheering. “We live right down the street,” one of the women points.

“I think the protests are brilliant,” one of the girls, a Woodland Elementary fifth grade student, pronounces dramatically. “I think they should do another one for gas because they raising it and raising it…” She indicates the rising prices with sweeping arm gestures, beaming.

Are immigrant struggles connected to other struggles? One of the women nods emphatically: “I think they’re all the same rights. The issues are wages, jobs, equality and discrimination. They’re marching for all of us.”

A second woman, her arms around another young girl, chimes in: “Usually people don’t say nothing except in their houses, but now people are saying what they actually feel, outside. They’re showing everybody else out on the street that the economy can’t make it without immigrant labor.”

In response to the mainstream English media and the labor and movement “leaders” who claim that the strike is divisive, or that the time isn’t right, she rolls her eyes.

”They can kiss ass,” she shrugs, smirking. “We need to have more stuff like this. This is not over.”

“It’s like saying during the times of slavery, people say ‘It’s not the time to free the slaves.’ Those are human beings. It’s always right to give human being their human rights,” says Rosalinda, a Chairperson at University of California at Santa Cruz.

Similarly, Karen, a Chabot College student who heard about the march from a local church, agrees. “When is the ‘right time’ then? After the law [sending undocumented workers back to their home countries] is passed? If we let the government get away with this law, then what are they going to do next? Who are they going to go after next?”

Ana, a department store worker who took the day off, reminds us that just last week the Bureau of Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement (ICE) raided several sites in Latino neighborhoods throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I witnessed the sweep at Costco in San Leandro last Monday,” Ana recalls. “They shut the doors and were harassing everybody for documents. That’s not a rumor; I was there. The ICE say they’re not, but I saw them. They took around 60 people away, including babies from their mothers. I also saw some [ICE] at day labor sites on High Street when I was driving by there.”

Since April 20, at least 2,000 undocumented workers in 26 different states have been taken from their workplaces and arrested by the Department of Homeland Security and local police. More than 275 have already been deported to Mexico.

Sheila, an Oakland resident and Mexican immigrant, marched with her sons, aged seven and nine years old. All of them are on strike from school.

“I think the time to act is now,” she concludes. “We’ve been waiting for so long. I’ve seen a lot of unity—not only among Spanish speaking people, but Chinese, Korean, all the immigrants. This struggle isn’t only for us, it’s for everybody.”

Canto, No Llores: Immigrants Demand Justice in San Francisco

By Inez Sunwoo and Puck Lo

Friday night: The rain pelted the almost-empty streets of San Francisco in torrents. Outside the federal building some twenty people huddled in a circle beneath umbrellas and a makeshift tent created by a tarp and some poles.

Canto, no llores, the crowd sang quietly, steadily. Underneath orange-glowing streetlights, one acoustic guitarist plays while the steady pounding of rain on plastic accompanies the chorus. The song ends, and one woman rises from her plastic seat abruptly. She shouts a song request, and as the rest of the crowd begins to sing the woman pulls one spectator out of her seat, and the two begin to dance. Soon, the cheers and handclaps emanating from underneath the tarp rival the crescendo of the intensifying rain, punctuated by the occasional splash of the automobiles driving by on the slick, empty streets. As the two women dance, others share umbrellas and blankets, blinking raindrops from their eyes and singing softly. A row of teenagers lean against a concrete wall, their faces etched dramatically by shadows cast by floodlights that line the sidewalk.

Behind them the San Francisco Federal Building, now dark, looms ominously beyond the “tent city” comprised of fifteen small nylon domes that flank the large tarp makeshift shelter. The tents are lined up single-file alongside the street, cordoned off from traffic with wispy plastic tape. One police squad car is parked conspicuously nearby with its headlights on. Its presence, along with the now-silent federal building, are potent reminders of the purpose for this drenched but high-spirited assembly.

Since Tuesday, March 21, between twenty and fifty people at a time have been participating in a hunger strike and occupation directly outside the Federal Building. The hunger strike to oppose HR 4437, also known as the Sensenbrenner bill, was called by the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition and Deporte de la Migra and kicked off with a spirited rally led by Dolores Huerta, co-founder and secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers. The final day of the seven-day hunger strike was scheduled to coincide with the arrival of thousands of immigrant military resisters who oppose the war in Iraq. They left from Tijuana and marched 271-miles to San Francisco.

HR 4437 was proposed by Senator Spector (R-PA) and Representative Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It passed by the Senate on March 27th. The bill criminalizes all undocumented persons in the US, citing “Unlawful presence” as an aggravated felony. Opponents of the bill say that it would create formidable challenges for potential and existing immigrants. It would also force labor organizers, educators, lawyers and community service providers to report their clients, workers, families, and friends to INS officials.

The Giant Awakens

During this week of actions against HR4437, we have seen the largest demonstrations for immigrant justice in the history of this country. According to some hunger strikers and their supporters, the strike and encampment is one way that those who are impacted are taking direct action against what many claim is racist legislation and scapegoating of especially working class immigrants of color. “We fast in solidarity with those who hunger for justice and an end to imperialism and war all across the world,” one striker declared.

Several strikers explain that their presence outside the federal building is a grim reminder that millions of people go hungry every day due to US policies that drive global neo-liberalism. “We have the privilege to choose not to eat, unlike our brothers and sisters who die at the Mexico/US border every day,” Cesar Cruz, one hunger striker, shakes his head, noting the contradiction. Since 1994, with the further militarization of the Mexico-US border under the bill Operation Gatekeeper, on average one person dies every day while trying to cross the border.

“My mom said that when she came over here she didn’t eat for three days in the desert and she had to walk, without water,” Jackie Mendez, a young woman whose family fled from civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s, recounts. “If she could do that then I can go without food for seven days.”

From Non-Compliance to Active Resistance

Professionals, students, and city officials are now among the ranks of those who are forced to organize non-compliant civil disobedience in order to fight the passing of HR4437. One teacher from East Oakland explains that he is on strike because “this bill says that my students are criminals. My students are young leaders and organizers, not criminals!”

According to Wayne Wang, another striker, “We are a symbol to the movement to unify with one another.” Earlier in the week Asian immigrant janitors with the Service Employees International Union moved their dispatch hiring hall to the hunger strike site in order to demonstrate their solidarity.

In 1989, in response to increasing amounts of federal policies that scapegoat immigrants, San Francisco officials, with prodding from their constituencies, declared itself a “sanctuary city”—meaning that in theory, laws would shield immigrants from having to corroborate with federal immigration investigations.

Striker Patricia Nunoz explains, “I’ve been seeing folks with armbands saying ‘no INS snitching, no INS snitches.’ A sanctuary movement on a grassroots level is possible and should be the next step.”

Another student striker put it, “by using civil disobedience, we refuse to internalize xenophobic attacks. We make choices to either follow laws or to rebel against them.” Many students have made their choice, as is evinced by the presence of several hunger strikers from San Francisco State University. Meanwhile in Los Angeles County, over 25,000 students from have walked out of schools in opposition to the bill.

Ultimately the strength of sanctuary laws is dependent on grassroots enforcement and consistent organizing. Cynthia, a striker who organizes with MEChA, exhorts: “Every day police walk around the Mission profiling and harassing fruit vendors. If we, as a grassroots movement, were to really uphold the sanctuary laws then the police would not be allowed to do this.”

The Economics of Hypocrisy

Salvador Cordon is a San Francisco resident and a psychologist who was forced to leave his home country, El Salvador, after getting shot during the war. Tonight he is acting as “security” for the encampment.

Cordon mulls: “What we’ve seen this past week is incredible. Although fighting for rights is new among the most recent immigrants, historically immigrants have always been a major part of social movements in the US: farmworkers, hotel and restaurant workers—immigrants have played a significant role in labor movements here and have always fought for their own rights.”

Cordon and others point to US military interventions and US-sponsored economic reforms as major causes of forced migration from rural areas and “global South” countries to economic centers in urban areas and the “global North.”

“During the civil war in the 1980s the US was providing over a million dollars a day in military aid to the Salvadoran government who was killing the people. Hundreds of thousands of El Salvadorans came here in the 1980s fleeing the civil war that was supported by the US. Since then the US has been a main advocate for neoliberal reform, which has killed agriculture in our country—the main means of life for the peasantry. Now we have the maquilas, so there isn’t a need for a high level of education in the workforce, and people don’t own or work their land. People don’t have good salaries. It’s all part of the plan for ‘economic reform’ that was imposed on El Salvador by the US. Nowadays the main export from El Salvador is people. Many of us have come the US. We became part of the social movements here.”

The Mendez sisters are also quick to point out that while US foreign policies drive people out of their home countries, US domestic laws deny basic labor and human rights to undocumented immigrants while US businesses simultaneously rely on them as sources of cheap labor.

“My auntie came here in the early 1980s when the war started in my country, El Salvador. They were running from the destruction that the war caused. There were no jobs,” Rebecca Mendez explains matter-of-factly.

“Most undocumented workers don’t get paid the full minimum wage, so it really benefits [US businesses] to keep workers undocumented so they can be more exploitable. But undocumented workers have to pay taxes and Social Security.”

Striker Maria Marroquin, an organizer with the Mountain View Day Laborer Center, breaks it down: “The reason people are migrating here is because of globalization. We need to come together as a global movement to respond to this.”

Underneath the tarp, the music has stopped, and people are packing up for the night and ducking into their tents. Only a small circle of people remain, quietly talking.

“I want my people to be free. This is a land of immigrants; everyone here is an immigrant unless you’re an indigenous person,” Jose, a strike supporter and student at East Oakland Community High School, states simply, staring off into the rain.

“People of color are becoming a majority in certain areas of the US,” Enrique Morales, Mission district resident and supporter, declares. “We’re getting educated, and that is a threat to the government and system that is racist. It threatens them that we might take over institutions or build our own. This bill is trying to keep us down.”

Morales’ family also immigrated to San Francisco from El Salvador and struggled for years to get documentation. “Immigration is a global issue. We should recognize that putting borders up on the planet Earth isn’t going to change the fact that people are going to keep migrating. This country has a history of immigration that goes back to the days of indigenous tribes. That’s not going to stop. The reality is we are the economy. We create jobs, and we provide labor. It’s very hypocritical that the very people who benefit most from our labor are the ones who want to pass laws like this one.”

However, Cruz insists, “Ultimately it’s not about stopping immigration. Because if we actually want the immigrants to go, who’s going to be out on the fields? Who’s going to be doing all the jobs that Americans don’t want to do? We don’t actually want to kick out immigrants, we just want to scapegoat immigrants and keep them vulnerable.”

What will life be like after HR4437?

Morales looks up, surprised. “We’re going to keep doing what we’ve always done for the past 500 years and before that—we’re going to keep on surviving and moving! We’ve got to understand: they can put up as many fences as they want, but it doesn’t matter, somebody’s going to dig a hole. As long as people are hungry and need to get here, they’re going to get here. It’s unstoppable. We’re fighting for power, and we’re going to continue to fight.”

Home is What You Fight For

It is midnight. I am posessed by these ideas of Home.

I just finished watching "BOOM! The Sound of Eviction," a documentary about the short lived but cataclysmic dot-com economic "boom" in San Francisco--and the displacement caused by the resulting gentrification. The filmmakers aptly tackled the monumental subject of "gentrification" by focusing on the struggles of the Mission District and portrayed this city during its most recent, vicious throes of class war.

Maybe it's only because I have no uncomplicated version of Home to fall back on, no nuclear famiy unit in some simple Hometown to return to, no package-deal Culture handed down to consult- but I can't help but wonder that for those of us on the margins anyway, if home only exists in struggle.

Because the forces that impel us to migrate are more often than not reflections of economic and political orders that seek only to maintain capitalism and concentrate power and wealth, our homes are unstable at best. The average American (whatever that is), I heard, moves seven times in a lifetime. One can be sure too that the statistic wasn't assuming that the "average American" was a low-income or non-status worker.

Maybe it's obvious that home, like culture, is a process that is made and re-made constantly, and that its creation and enactment can either reproduce or refute dominant oppressive institutions. Children can learn to be homophobic. Or not. A working-class family can seek home in a rental unit in a neighborhood that has been denied basic resources like jobs or access to food. Yet that illusion of home can be shattered and its inhabitants dispersed by hardship, eviction or imprisonment. But a tenant who is able to fight against eviction with her neighbors creates community (even if she is eventually evicted)- a more permanent home that is forged in solidarity and that directly opposes and challenges the sort of fucked-up social order that shuffles around, criminalizes and disposes people without money while barricading the elites inside fortresses named gated "communities."

My friend Klee came up from Northern Arizona the other week to prepare for the process of filing an appeal at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. He has been organizing for years with tribal nations and environmental groups to fight against the expansion of a ski resort on a mountain held sacred by many native people. The ski resort, Arizona Snowbowl, wants to use wastewater to make snow. Earlier in January a US District Court in Arizona ruled against Native peoples, siding with the ski resort developers.

This latest violation by Snowbowl, carrying the weight of countless other land thefts from Native peoples during the turid history of the past 500 years of genocide, has triggered many Native groups in the area to resolve that they will not accept this latest desecration. The tensions of colonization, first set in place by conquistadors, then US military forces and Westward moving settlers, only increase.

"The most active opponent of Snowbowl are the youth who've organized at the high schools." Klee showed me video footage that the Youth of the Peaks- mostly girls between twelve and seventeen years of age- had shot and loaded into his computer by themselves.

Flagstaff, Arizona is a small, quasi-liberal, rather smug, intensely racist college town and tourist destination nestled 7,000 feet high in some of the most majestic mountains I've ever seen. The mountain that Snowbowl wants to pollute is one of those you can see from the center of town where I used to table-dive leftover pastries in my crust glory days. I remember getting off work at the catering place I worked at for a few weeks there, and walking home past disgusting rich white people dining on sidewalk patios of upscale restaurants, laughing nervously while insistently ignoring the destitute, usually Native men who tried to sell them beadwork from the street.

I was trying to imagine the looks of horror on the faces of the dining yuppies and tourists when I watched the video footage that kids from Youth of the Peaks had taken of a protest march they did. There were maybe thirty to fifty youth, with Klee and another older person up front, drumming and singing. The youth wore camoflague, some had tied bandanas around their faces, Native Youth Movement style. The procession marched past the quaint little shops that the tourists and liberals loved so much, and into the street.

Klee was obviously delighted just watching the footage. "Look, they're so great. These two girls, they're opposite in temperment so they balance each other perfectly. Look, they're on the steps of the City Hall here. They were so awesome, super fierce. They were like, 'We're not afraid of the police. Bring it on.'"

The camera panned to giggling girls and boys in the greenish glow of night-vision. They youth held posters inscribed with what was obviously their favorite slogan indicting Snowbowl's proposed snowmaking scheme: "Hell No, Yellow Snow!"

"They're sooo young!" I couldn't help but exclaim. "They're adorable."

"Yeah. Imagine the police going to the high school the following day, ripping down all the flyers hung up having to do with Snowbowl or Youth of the Peaks, and interrogating these same kids," Klee continued.

"Oh, here's the banner that the press and the police later made a huge deal about," he pointed to a banner bearing the words "Youth of the Peaks." The "a" in Peaks was circled in an anarchy sign. "It's actually really fucking bad. The mainstream media reported on the police raid of the high school by trying to insinuate that Youth of the Peaks were targeted because 'eco-terrorists' are being picked up by Feds all over the place."

"So essentially whatever happens with the lawsuit, and no matter how opposition to the ski resort reacts and organizes, the police and media are setting the stage so that these kids- or anyone else who aligns themselves with them- can be labeled as an 'eco-terrorist' and picked up by the Feds," I slowly realized. "Fuck."

Klee nodded solemnly.

The appeal date will be set soon for sometime in February, in San Francisco. People from the Bay Area should go if they can.

More information:

Critical Resistance Radio interviewed Klee and someone from Youth of the Peaks. Listen here at http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?show=14, under the "Friday, January 27th" listing.

Also:

www.savethepeaks.org
www.savethepeaks.org/youth
www.arizona.indymedia.org

Going Postal, Being Gay

The event at my work tonight was "Going Postal: Workplace Rage and Public Shootings as Post-Industrial Rebellions." The book is by Mark Ames. He's some American expat living in Russia. He kept advocating for the assasination of the President. He went overtime and refused to acknowlege my wild gesticulations that were meant to indicate to him that his time was up. The running joke between me and my co-worker became that we were going to "go postal" if the damn event went on any longer.

The audience was kind of intense. Mostly the crowd were men who looked middle aged and older. I have no idea how they heard about the event. Interestingly, the crowd was more racially diverse than the events at the bookstore usually seem to be. Everyone appeared to have come straight from their 9-to-5's to this event entitled "Going Postal." Kind of intense.

Ames' whole argument is interesting, yet I cringe any time white people especially try to make glib comparisons between anything and African slavery in the US. Ames compares public murders like school shootings and workplace killings in the US to slave rebellions, trying to imply that in both situations (which I can't help but feel the need to emphasize exist in vastly different contexts) the acts of violence are perceived by the public as isolated acts of individuals breaking down emotionally- but that actually the fundamental problem is the system that creates the behavior, not the behavior itself. For instance, slavery was the problem, not slave rebellions. Likewise, Ames argues, the real problem in society today isn't random acts of murder; it's the economy that requires that the majority of people be powerless and poor.

At one point in the middle of his lecture one Black woman proclaimed: "Thank you for being a white man who makes sense," doing that unnerving thing where one of the few people of color in the room advocates for some white dude by speaking "on the behalf of the race." Yikes.

Ames, in turn, received the compliment in stride, unblinking, explaining that he had, actually, lived in Kentucky for a year while researching the book. (What the fuck is that supposed to prove??)

When I finally got them all to leave, after announcing several times: "We have time for ONE more question," and "We are actually closed now. Please bring your purchases to the front counter," my co-worker put on Motorhead, and I cranked it up, hoping that it would encourage people to go away quickly.

As I rang up one older white man's purchases- a $1.95 remainder book by Thoreau, and two old school Anarchism and Marxism books with bad cover art, he kind of winked at me and leered: "Nice selection."

I was caught off-guard and had no idea what he meant. Then I thought: Oh, I work in a bookstore. He means books. Still, something about the way he said it made me feel gross, like he had told me, "Nice rack" or something.

"Um, thanks," I muttered.

"What is this, Motorhead?"

I kind of stared at him, confused, and nodded. Then he decided not to buy two of the books, but he took a really unnecessarily long time contemplating it, asking me to put them on hold, blahblahblah, and I was already fairly grumpy because I was supposed by now to be out of the store and on the train heading home, but the damn event had run late and there were still tons of people in the store hovering around the self-important author guy who had all these super-radical, antagonistic things to say about politics in the US but who was just evading everything of possible political relevance by hiding out as an American expat overseas...

And then the man who stood in front of me on the other side of the counter grinned condescendingly at me and slurred: "Now don't go postal on me or anything...huh huh..."

I couldn't quite bear to look at him.

"Don't hate me because I'm poor! Huh huh..."

What I really wanted to tell him was: "There are a number of reasons you're pissing me off, but your 'poverty' is definitely not one of them."

But the theme of the last bookstore collective meeting had been: "Let's Be Nicer to the Customers." Someone had even suggested that we should run ads in the local weeklies with public apologies (in cartoon form) for our perceived lack of customer service skills during the last 35 years. The theme of 2006, she proposed, could be: "We're Sorry. We're Different Now. We Love Our Customers."

Sigh. What was that about capitalism inducing rage?

In other news: I took an online Gayness test and came up as 66% Gay. "Open minded between the sheets and a little bit butch on the streets." I'm not even kidding.

celestial cycles, mortality, loss, and regeneration

i left hong kong on thursday. a troupe of protesters, post-protest, escorted me to the bus that would take me to the airport. with an accompaniment of drums and even a chant of "bye bye puck!" i left town feeling uncharacteristically shy.

when i got back to oakland i heard the news: Birjinder, a person i had just seen in Hong Kong and who was on the Asian American delegation from the Bay Area, had died mysteriously and suddenly.

retrospectively we try to piece together shards of memory, wishing that the scattered bits of shared experiences we might have had could somehow fill the void that envelops us when we realize the loss of a friend, an acquaintance, a fellow person. how can it be that there will be no Birjinder? he was just here! our minds, stuck in linear progression, implode from the pressure of trying to make sense of "not any more." images of every clueless interaction we've ever had together spin in our minds. in the end what makes memory?

"this is the electrical converter that Birjinder remembered to bring back from Hong Kong," colin explained, pulling out the small plastic object from his pocket. "it's the sort of thing i would have never remembered. i told him to bring it so that when my mother goes back to malaysia she could take it. the last time i saw him, on friday, at the rally outside the hong kong trade and economic office, he gave it to me first thing."

stella passed around photos. birjinder looking straight into the camera, smiling, one face in a row of faces of the bay area delegation riding the subway after a long day of marches and demos. everyone in ridiculous matching t-shirts. they are somehow entirely able to pull off the matching t-shirts- with grace, even.

we listen to his last interview online. his pride at the delegation he came with. the hypocricy of the wto meeting process. three minutes of sound, and then the slow-moving blue circle hits the end of the line on the white computer screen. silence.

what do we get to leave behind? and perhaps more importantly, what do we do for each other while we are still around?

with heightened awareness of our own mortality we selfishly fill our lungs with air and wonder: what next?

i spent the plane ride home finishing the historical fiction novel based on the life of john brown, the pre-civil war, white, uber-religious, yankee abolitionist who smuggled escaped slaves into canada, consuulted with harriet tubman and frederick douglass, fought bloody guerrilla battles against pro-slavery whites, and ultimately, seized a southern armory with the intent to spark insurrections all throughout the south as well as arm all the slaves so they would slaughter their captors.

but no prairie fire of insurrection began. john brown was murdered by pro-slavery whites after holding harper's ferry for almost a day because reinforcements never arrived.

i'm twenty-five years old. i'm more or less and atheist, and i've been born into a culture of killing, war, and denial that requires the oppression and subsequent death of millions in order to perpetuate itself. every time another dies in these conditions, it only exacerbates the enormity of how fucked-up everything is.

this morning kapila and i went to this vigil that was put on by mostly african-american church groups. the vigil called for a human chain to encircle the perimeter of the area in east oakland known as "the killing zone." it's the area with the highest concentration of killings here, and those involved are mostly black folks and others of color. it's a pretty depressing local example illustrating the ways that structural oppressions like white supremacy and capitalism create conditions in people's lives that only keep on reproducing oppression and death. it's simple genocide.

the rain poured down. from the killing zone christians said their prayers. i blinked rain out of my eyes. 2006, here we come.

a year ago i moved into this house.

my housemate lisa had just been gifted with a bizarre weathervane bedecked with monkeys sitting atop palm fronds. orange "coconuts" completed the set-up. it was a yard decoration of the garden gnome variety. she stuck the thing into the soil outside the front of the house.

"we'll see how long it is before someone takes it," she said dismissively.

my friend morgan was visiting from philly. he asked a lot of questions about the weathervane. i wasn't able to answer many of them, except that:

a.) the weathervane more or less arrived at the house when i did, and
b.) we were all placing bets as to how long it would take before random vandals offed it

after some thought, morgan pronounced: "well, you'd better hope that nothing happens to it, since your fate seems to be inextricably tied up with its."

"morgan!" i chided. "what the fuck! you've cursed me!"

he shurgged matter-of-factly.

one year later and i'm still here. during a few troubled times throughout the year i've nerbously and completely illogically checked to see that the weathervane, now casually referred to as the "monkey luau," was still intact. incidentally, it always was.

when i arrived home, after a long, long flight on which i was suspiciously overfed, roger broke to me the news: a coconut had been stolen from the monkey luau weathervane.

"i was a little worried when i saw it," he confessed. "i hoped you would make it home okay."

i have made it home okay.

and now we prepare for a night of aliveness in the land of the living. my head is spinning. does it make sense? no.

but in the end, what does make sense besides the ways that we live and how we treat each other?

thanks to all my friends. the ones who make me glad to be back. and the ones elsewhere who always inspire me. in remembering birj and everyone else who dies too soon, let's make this all count.

xxoo
-p-

My Duty, as an American Asshole: Fistfights, Choosing Sides and International Solidarity

Two more days left in Hong Kong. Just got back from a rooftop party, in celebration of the release (with bail) of the fourteen WTO protesters who are being charged with Unlawful Assembly- which, unbelievably, could result in five year prison sentences for them all. Their trial is being put off while the prosecution "gathers evidence." Prior to the party there was a long meeting at which Hong Kong folks brainstormed strategies to support the accused. Eleven of the accused are Koreans from the Korean Peasant's League and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions; one is a Chinese mainlander who was randomly visiting family for the holidays and got swept up; another is a Taiwanese university student; and then there is one Japanese man who works for an NGO.

In support of the defendants there have been already a number of solidarity actions since the fourteen were released on the 24th. The Taiwanese student has had a lot of support from the university he attends. In San Francisco folks from the WT-No Asian-American delegation held a 30-person rally outside the Hong Kong Economic and Trade office, demanding from the representatives there that all charges be dropped against all WTO protesters. Most exciting though is a 500-worker solidarity strike at a factory in South Korea.

Here in Hong Kong on stupid Christmas Day we too had a solidarity rally- this one outside Sogo, the same upscale, enormous eyesore of an oversized department store by where the Korean folks had held several of their public outreach rallies and candlelight gatherings. But the difference of course is that when the KPL and KCTU had rallies there were easily at least 200 of them, with props like candles and really decent drummers- while "our" rally was a tappedy-tap-tap water bottle/ bucket drum muffled cacophony of a dozen raggedy twenty-something-year-olds, the strains from our one bullhorn easily lost entirely amidst an endless outpour of shoppers who hadn't even stopped shopping on the one day of the year during which I thought even the most hardcore of shoppers were supposed to be satiated with their new toys for at least a full twelve hours.

I'm really terrible at participating in rallies. Of course, I do it- it doesn't make sense not to go, especially in my current temporary jobless and schedule-free condition. But I absolutely detest chanting (unless it is done within a giant, fiery mob). I'm still working through the arrogance and misanthropy of my high school punk rock years. I try really hard to love people (no, really, I'm not being sarcastic) rather than hate them. And considering that I'm from the US and went to high school in some of the more miserable, apathetic suburbs I've ever seen, I've got my work cut out for me. So I do my best to hang out with people who are awesome, and I try to avoid situations where I can slide into those familiar feelings where I despise huge groups of strangers and feel vastly superior to them due to ephemeral lifestyle choices.

Critical Mass is a good example of this annoying activist dynamic that I'm trying to grow beyond. Years ago as a teenager it used to feel empowering and fun to ride a bicycle among throngs of fellow cyclists, grinning and flipping off motorists while running red lights to the soundtrack of angry, blaring horns. But over time the chants started to grate on me:

"Whose streets? OUR STREETS!"

I understand that the chant is supposed to challenge notions of private property and public space, as well as demand that streets (and all public space) should ultimately be for people, not just for zooming around in automobiles or for vying commercial interests to "develop." But the "politics" (or rather, the lack of them) of Critical Masses, or "bicycle culture" too often tends to be self-obsessed, holier-than-thou, focused entirely on the importance on individual "choices" and exhalting the usually white, middle-class enviro liberals and lefties who choose not to drive cars while completely ignoring huge overarching, structural power imbalances such as race, class, or gender that (in my opinion anyway) is at the heart of the oil wars that Critical Mass activists will sometimes vaguely claim as a pet cause.

Anyway, I was right in the middle of the hugest Critical Mass ride I'd ever been on (10,000 people is an estimate I've heard) during the Republican National Convention protests in New York City during the summer of 2004, when it suddenly occurred to me how much I despised Critical Mass. A row of tow-headed jock boys were shouting at Black people in cars, their faces contorted as they raised their bikes over their heads in what supposedly should have been menacing but only really seemed bratty. The ride, demographically, could've been the same as that of the state of Idaho.

"WHOSE STREET?" they hollered- but it sounded more like a whimper. "OUR STREET!"

The people in cars layed on their horns wearily.

"Go the fuck home," one African-American woman told us. "We're not Republicans."

"Whose world?" I wondered, suddenly totally annoyed. "Their [tow-headed bike boys] fucking world."

The point of this long rambly side-story, of course, is to explain that the extremely surface-level demographics of people who I used to despise in my teenage years- categorizations of people such as "comsumers" and "car drivers," for instance, was a pretty useless way to try to understand how oppression operates in the world, and only served to make me really self-righteous about all my perceived "choices" on matters of relatively little significance such as my diet and my preferred forms of transport.

The bottom line is that I try not to dehumanize people who are "mainstream" and who do things like shop at malls on Christmas...but at the same time it's really hard for me not to react with immense resentment and disgust at rich people who seem like they don't give a fuck about anything except themselves. In those situations it's totally logical to hate those people, but hate like that is bad for the soul and actually fairly useless anyway.

A simple solution for me would be to not camp outside a bougeouis mall in the financial district on Christmas Day, and certainly not to attempt handing out flyers to glazed-eyed shoppers about the devastating effects of free trade and capitalism on the lives of poor people, Third World people, farmers, and migrants.

"This is a recipe for absolute ineffectiveness and utter depression if I've ever seen one," I half-joked to one of the kids who tap-tapped on a water bottle using a set of plastic chopsticks.

He acted as though he didn't hear me. Maybe he didn't. I shrugged and, trying to be a good sport, took a gulp of air and ducked back into the rush, head-on into eyes that didn't see me, hundreds and thousands of heteronormative pair-groups of heads with new wave hairdos and manicured hands gripping shiny shopping bags, fast-moving feet encased in high-fashion moon boots that nearly trampled my own soiled shoes. When I emerged again I was spun around on the other side of the pedestrian walkway, breathless and clutching my stack of papers with that Weakerthans song playing in my head. Oh, ridiculous...

A bunch of the kids here really like drum circles. I stand off to the side awkwardly and sort of nod my head to the most consistent beat of of the lot. I was doing just that when this hideous old white man lumbered up to us.

"If you don't shut the fuck up in one second I'm gonna stick my foot up your goddamn asses!" he said in English by way of an introduction.

Extreme antagonism and angst had been brewing in me for two long hours of paper-pushing, appealing to the "ethics" of humanoids who appeared (from my extremely limited contact with them) to be absolutely soulless, disinterested automatons en route to the next shallow transaction. I sprung into immediate attack like a rattlesnake that had been waiting all its life for this.

"I fucking dare you to try!" I snarled and stuck up my middle fingers.

The old man got right up in my face. I couldn't believe how antagonistic he was, coming up like this to this totally mellow, unobstructive, good-natured bunch of kids whose bucket-drumming couldn't even be heard fifty feet away.

"Girl, you better put those fingers away or I'll deck you in the face. My human rights are being violated! I can't sleep!" the sorry fuck howled.

"Go ahead an lay one goddamn finger on me. I fucking dare you," I responded. I seriously considered socking him. But it's not nice to punch old people, I reminded myself- even if they're absolutely nasty, vile, uber-entitled, American expats living in Hong Kong.

The old man and I continued our stand-off, which culminated with him spitting at me:

"Why don't you just go home!"

Something snapped. I had heard this particular insult countless times before, in countless fistfights.

"I AM HOME, MOTHERFUCKER!!! YOU go the fuck home!"

I said it before I even thought it. And immediately after I said it I felt like I was lying. I looked around at all the seated drumming kids (who had stopped drumming) whom I couldn't communicate a decent sentence to because I spoke no Cantonese. I looked up at all the unfamiliar buildings and the continuing gridlock of shopping foot traffic, all these Asian faces staring back at my own Asian face. I shrugged.

"YOU GO HOME," I repeated.

And he left, grumbling. I was left standing awkwardly. I sat down and glanced around, smiled wanly, trying to gauge the reaction of the kids. Most of them avoided looking at me, like they weren't sure how to react. Oh, fucking great, I thought. But what could I say? It was just something that I had to do.

One of them, Ah Wei, a super charming gay boy (the only openly gay male I've met here so far), told me something like how I shouldn't let people like that get to me. "He's just an asshole, don't let him get you angry," he said mildly.

I did a double-take. "Ah Wei, let me tell you: You know I'm an American? Well, that man- he's also an American, and so he's my problem. Especially here. It's like my obligation- and my right- to have to deal with him. It's just what I have to do."

Ah Wei seemed to understand, but he was still visibly troubled. He explained that he was worried mostly that the white man would call the cops. But thankfully, no cops did show up. I resumed my awkward post, half-heartedly tapping on a signpost with one chopstick until my friend whom I was meeting finally showed up.

Later, Ah Yip, another of the Hong Kong activist kids who witnessed the whole charade, described my goofy stand-off as "brave and strong." I was totally shocked. I felt unexpectedly validated, too. But let me say clearly, for the record, that I didn't- and don't- at all feel brave and strong for antoganizing and threatening an elderly man (shitbag though he was), but I certainly think that the entire exchange is funny as hell.

another december 24

stayed up all night talking about nuclear annihilation. woke up and the toilet was clogged. now i'm listening to the washing machine, plus weird punkrock. tonight i will wander the streets and think in circles.

Solstice. Jail. Midnight Buses Going Nowhere.

I woke up outside the Kwuntong Courthouse, facing an oncoming stream of traffic, disapproving stares and bold gawks from seated bus passegers, heads turned back as the vehicle pulled away from the curb. Trash blew into my face. I can't say that I really was asleep to begin with, but definitely my sense of relief that came from finally not being cold, plus my cultivated ability to shut out any perceived danger by hiding in my sleeping bag ("if i can't see it, it's not there") was so immense that the effect was similar to sleep.

But "sleep" didn't last for long: I opened my eyes and peeked out of my sleeping bag to see everyone around me- the remaining 6 or 7 of the Korean delegation- folding up their blankets.

"It's time. Get up," a woman told me, diving down to pick up stray pieces of trash and stuffing them into a plastic bag.

The court hearing for the remaining 14 anti-WTO prisoners was scheduled for 10am. The sun was out, but the courthouse, sidewalk, and the various highways that surrounded us were shrouded in looming shadows cast by the towering apartment buildings all around.

Last night at 2am Kat and I sat on the front seats on the second level of a bus. From our majestic vantage point we barreled through red stoplights leaving behind the dense downtown and hurtling through a freeway underpass. When we emerged we were completely surrounded by inky black water and sky, framed by curved, slanted strips of white and gray concrete and soaring, solitary structures of fluorescent-lit and minimalist, institutional architecture. Narrow, steep staircases cut into the otherwise flat walls that barricaded the highway from the compounds of buildings. Multi-tiered car ports, illuminated in a headache-inducing eerie white glare, sheltered shiny empty cars at rest like sleeping demons recharging on an alien spaceship.

"These are The Estates. I think most people in Hong Kong live here," Kat nearly whispered as the bus sped through the night. "They have the same names as the jails- I know this now from the day we did legal support."

In a roadside cement ravine, an old man held a walking stick made of a forked branch. He shook it at us as we passed.

"This is weird, eh? We're headed for the end of the world."

We had missed our stop. The bus driver, a small, round man wearing red, shouted at us in angry tenor. As the bus sped away from us, leaving us in the middle of the massive, heavily barricaded, completely empty road, the faces of the riders turned toward us, spooky and gray, eyes full of menace.

"Zombies."

We shuddered and ran across the street, hopping the barricades. This was the first area of Hong Kong I'd seen that wasn't densely populated with bustling streets flanked with shops and restaurants stacked on top of each other. This area was desolate and wide, except for the identical towering estates with their grim, stainless steel gates, neurotic little landscaped lots and spindly rows of palm trees. The remaining space between roads were blanketed with closed malls with lights turned off.

We missed several buses before finally catching the right one. Fruit venders were setting up when we walked up toward the courthouse.

Three dudes sauntered over to us, talking fast, clearly grateful for our arrival. One of them took Kat's hand. She bantered politely but withdrew. (I'm always astiounded by how polite other people can be about these sorts of things.) As I scouted for a place to put my pack and sleeping bag down, the boys (probably in their mid to late twenties) directed us to a heavily congested area full of faceless mummy bags. Later I learned that one particular dude was telling Kat that we should all sleep together to stay warmer. At the time, even without understanding his words, I could read his intent and set up clear on the other side of the courthouse doors. But as I unrolled my bag, more male faces looked up at me. I sighed. I had actually forgotten to prepare myself for "basecamp" gender dynamics. But luckily, nothing came of it (before I split this morning, anyway).

Kat got a call, and we took off across the street toward the Shell station. Mark, a young goth kid who lives here ("I don't know anyone else who likes th emusic I listen to," he once confessed) ran toward us, feathered hair bouncing, wearing a faux-fur striped coat and pointy tipped boots.

"This is a secret where we are going. You must keep this a secret."

Off an alleyway was a nook with tiled walls and ceilings, an overhead light. Ah Yip, who I know as the really, really quiet, serious-faced kid with the ponytail and baseball cap, sat strumming a guitar. On one of the protest days, when we were all killing time before a march by making banners, I remember Ah Yip illustrating a scowling, menacing, jagged-tooth protester with a fist raised underneath the text: "Target WTO." Upon closer inspection I realized that the caricature was meant to be him: the drawn figure wore his red sweatshirt, black-rimmed glasses and the baseball hat. He smiled at us sweetly as we walked up.

I flashed back to being fourteen-years-old again as we sat, me cold as usual underneath my scarf and hat, and the boys passed the guitar back and forth as the sky changed hue in accordance with the dawn.

"What do you think Mao did wrong? What would you have done?" Yip asks Kat to translate to me in all seriousness.

Two of the three dude-guys from the courthouse had wandered over by now. One of them, I was surprised to discover, was a walking Cantonese-English political terminology dictionary.

"Decentralization is crucial," he and his friend declared back and forth, in varying amounts of both languages.

I felt so old. I kept thinking: "Oh, youth. To have the time to do this!"

It's been interesting and frustrating not being able to communicate well with the people around me. And then there's just trying to figure out what to do after WTO week. Hunger strikes and courthouse vigils don't feel meaningful to me as a participant in this situation. For two hours this morning I sat awkwardly on a stained ledge next to the glass doors while people streamed in and out and to the side of me, a few remaining farmers and two of the quasi-sleazy, big-talking-political boys from the night before embarked on a series of bows and lone photographers snapped occasional shots. One wingnutty older man in a camoflague jacket approached me with several newspapers I couldn't read. I took one because I wasn't sure how to say no, while he pointed to a stamped emblem of Queen Victoria on a folded up piece of paper, singing some song.

"What is your name? My name is Bruce Lee. Hah!" he cackled.

Kat and the rest of the kids were asleep on the other side of the doors. The court hearing had been pushed back to 2:30pm. It was 10am. I suddenly realized how purposeless I was as an individual, and my tenous connection to the farmers was through the group of kids who stayed up all night and slept in late while traffic hustled by. I shook my head. It was time to leave.

A long transit home and a clean kitchen later, I am ready to pull it together, figure out what happen s/ed in court and update the Target WTO website.

Oh, and Happy Solstice, everyone.

Fall Out

Is it over?

It's never over.

But the WTO meeting ended with a partial negotiation around GATS, conditional on the US and EU ending agriculture subsidies by 2013. I really wasn't prepared for the possibility that summit wouldn't completely collapse. And after the exhilarating night on Saturday, fueled by constant updates about the talks stagnating inside the convention center, I almost expected victory- at least partial victory. While I always knew on some level that spending less than a week of running around in the streets couldn't possibly actually, fully "succeed" in creating lasting and meaningful change that could possibly undo capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy--it still stung like hell to think about the farmers having to suffer this defeat on top being in jail.

It was so fucking powerful to see how people who are among those who most suffer from neoliberalism were organizing against and attacking oppressive institutions (on so many different levels, directly and abstractly), even building a goddamn movement that recognizes and identifies the exact, specific mechanics of the systems that destroy their lives. Farmers, fisherfolk, sex workers and migrant workers from all over Asia and the "Third World" spoke eloquently and fiercely against the Agreement on Agriculture, the Global Agreement on Trades and Services, on shit I don't even fully understand after reading more than a fair share of boring policy articles. And now, after so clearly giving so much of themselves to risk everything in order to demand justice and the right to exist- after all that a handful of WTO ministers are still able, with a stroke of a pen, to sentence entire populations to death and slavery. Meanwhile, we get arrested and criminalized while the US drops bombs and operates modern-day concentration camps and plantations to keep the underclass desperate and disorganized. Protesters get labeled "violent." Fuck.

I don't knoe: Maybe we had some effect. I know that the talks were certainly not a shining victory. I know that building movements that get smarter, more organized, militant and creative are what will ultimately tip the scales--not a protest, no matter how epic the protest may seem. Still, I can't help but feel pretty down about the state of the world right now.

At least all the Koreans (the majority of those who had been arrested) are now out except for 11 of them who are being charged with Unlawful Assembly and possibly more. It's been nearly a full 48 hours since the mass arrests; in Hong Kong prisoners have to either be charged or released after that amount of time.

Spent the day at the Hong Kong People's Alliance office, a large room with a "media center" in one half that exists only because the South Korean video team more or less squatted it; and the "legal center" in the other half. There were only two phone lines that the "legal support team" could use.

The situation was nightmarish. It would have been comical if there was any room for humor. But it's hard to laugh when you're faced with a situation in which 800-900 people have been arrested. They speak at least five different languages and most of them haven't been provided with translators. The situation I walked into was one where I was briefed, upon my arrival: "We've had absolutely no contact with people inside. We have no real idea who is still in jail, what their names and nationalities are, and where they're being held. The lawyers don't know much more than we do."

Unbelievably, no list of the arrestees existed that we were aware of. We didn't know what jails- or how many different jails- the detainees had been taken to. Out of the 800 or so still detained, we had a 40-person list of names and (some) locations. It had taken all of yesterday to compile even that partial list.

HKPA, although it has consistently been posturing and self-promoting themselves as "the organizers" here, did not set up any infrastructure at all for dealing with the inevitable legal fallout that accompanies massive mobilizations such as WTO summit protests.

So here we were: five people (none of whom, as far as I could ascertain have ever done considerable legal support in a comparable situation before); two telephones ringing off the hook; primarily English speakers (don't ask how that happened!) fielding calls in at least three other languages, faced with the impossible task of trying to locate detainees when we don't have their names, or the correct spellings of their names (which was actually quite a significant hurdle when dealing with police bureaucracy). Worst still, the detained were constantly being shuttled around in buses, held in random parking lots because the jails were too full--or they were held in high security detention centers where only lawyers (when provided with the correct spellings of names of prisoners) could visit.

Precious few representatives from any of the groups of people who got arrested provided us with names of even those from their particular delegation who were arrested. Yet the witch of a HKPA spokesperson had assured all the various groups that "we," the ad-hoc, all-volunteer legal support team would send lawyers to each jail.

By the end of today we had accounted for at least 23 different jails at which the 900 protesters had been split up between. There weren't nearly enough volunteer lawyers to go around to them all. Also, even if we could find a lawyer willing to go, the jails typically wouldn't allow lawyers to see prisoners unless they had an the exact name for the person they were seeking to visit (again, the spelling problem). AND then, since we didn't even have a complete list of all those who had been arrested in the first place, we CERTAINLY did not have any idea of which people were in what jail.

What a fucking mess.

I spent hours calling random contact numbers and asking: "Any updates on releases? Do you have a list of names yet? Nationalities? Or numbers?"

Mostly the answers I received (after repeating my question 6 or 7 times) were "No, nothing's changed; we don't have any names; there are 30 Koreans and 3 Thais."

There is nothing more frustrating and simultaneously impossible to walk away from than situations like these ones where the impossible is being demanded, and there is so little it feels like you can actually do.

Unexpectedly our night actually ended early. We heard that most everyone would be released. It turned out that the Korean folks were under the umbrella of Via Campesina, who was sort of keeping tabs on them and would pretty much, more or less, take care of the logistics of meeting them and shuttling them where they needed to go. Amazingly, we didn't hear about this very important piece of information until almost 8pm--hours (more than 24 hours for some people) after we had been pulling our hair out trying to coordinate the impossible, with almost no information or resources.

Gak.

Now it's 2:30am. I'm on this fucked up schedule where I expect to run around all day and then stay up all night, writing about what happened all day.

It's going to be really weird transitioning out of this. Weirder still to realize that I only have 9 days left here before I go back to the Bay. Sigh. As stressful and whacked out as this, I can't say I don't absolutely love it.

Let me say that I really need encouragement from people in the Bay Area right now in order to make it seem at all like a reasonable idea to go "home." So let me know if you want me to come back at all. Because right now I'm really wondering why I would. And, just to put it out there, Philly, now is a good time to make a case for my "return." And, shit, anyone, anywhere else--I'm open to suggestion.

yrs,
p.

Lapsing into CrimethInc on The Day After

When the moment finally explodes like overripe fruit, you will be caught unprepared, soaked in pepper spray, your camera broken. You will be grumpy and trying to get home, but you won't have the one set of keys that you're sharing with five other people--and the fucking cellphone doesn't work on this side of the Pacific. And of course, of course you've lost all of the crew you've been running with. So you will have nothing but your heartbeat, adrenaline, and bad, bad poetry like residual CrimethInc slogans flittering uselessly through your head like fruitflies.

Fully cynical after a zillion goddamn rallies and staged marches with the same old chants, props and gimmicks, I found myself completely engaged and engulfed in a seemingly endless sea of people, running at full speed into a massive intersection, hollering at the top of my lungs "Down, down USA!" like it was the newest, smartest, most important thing I could ever say to anyone. Surrounded by ten thousand strangers whom individually, over the week, I've grown to recognize in crowds. Some, like the Korean farmers, have graciously shared their food with me and rekindled my love for not just struggle but the people behind it. Now, surreally, I tore through the streets temporarily empty of cars and commerce, among a horde of the farmers. They drummed beats that could raise and slay demons. I kept shaking my head in amazement. They're "just" farmers, I remember. Not self-proclaimed guerrila artist vanguards, public relations consultants, military strategists, nor acclaimed musicians. "Just ordinary people." It sure raises the bar for the rest of us on what it means to be "ordinary people."

The farmers light something on fire and charge the police line with it. The police retreat, visibly nervous and unprepared. We pick up bamboo sticks, wooden blocks and flagpoles on the road and slam into the riot shields again. We drag away the barricades and run with them into the police, this time actually dispersing them. The crowd roars.

Earlier today at the barricades by the protest cage the cops stood near the top of a huge iron gate, decimating us with water cannons that pumped something the press distinguished from familiar old pepper spray by ominously titling it "water with a chemical that causes burning." (They soaked and broke my camera too. The fuckers.) Now the cops were backing up in fright. I'm screaming and cheering like everyone else. The giant mob breaks into several groups and each smaller group (of at least 100-200 people each) and peeled off in different directions. I stick with the group of Korean farmers who wielded the flaming thing. There are also some Via Campesina folks, with their flags. We sprint down a street.

In front of the giant Immigration Tower the Korean drummers are pounding on their instruments with such focused ferocity and passion that all I can remember is that slogan from way back when:

We will celebrate the death of your institutions with such fierce dancing.

I hate how the mere phrase "drumming and dancing" conjures images of hippies. The Korean farmers drum and dance like tornado-catchers, demon slayers, firecrackers.

And then, they just have such good fucking style.

"All together now!" one red-faced farmer who had been drumming shouted into the crowd, motioning for us to repeat. We had all been running. It was right after a confrontation with the police. Now we were in a new intersection, surrounded by Hong Kong onlookers.

"ALL TOGETHER NOW!" the crowd shouted back.

"Hong Kong citizens!"

"HONG KONG CITIZENS!"

"Nice to meet you!"

"NICE TO MEET YOU!"

When the cops close in on us on both sides we run into some shopping mall courtyard, and a showdown ensued. We pull handfuls and clumps of pointsetta debris out of the manicured marble raised-bed decorative garden and chuck them at police, watching the soil slide down the plexiglass in front of their helmeted faces. I curse my pathetic throwing arm. The police open fire with tear gas cannisters. We kick them back but some explode and then in the uber-dramatic, choking fog that makes protest pictures so spectacular we are choking and crying, hunched over. Every time I get tear gassed I think afterward: "Oh, that really wasn't so bad." But every time it happens all I think is: "Oh god, I'm dying."

After a gasping, wheezing, stumbling retreat into some other decorative foliage I emerge on the street that we would end up occupying for the next five hours. Of course, I never know these things in advance. So every moment following is crystallized in total confusion and over-the-top profundity as we eat together, try to communicate across languages, and watch the police advance and retreat, cocking their guns at us (loaded with rubber bullets, we hear), then pulling back.

A gaggle of hundreds of Hong Kong locals watched us from the sidelines with interest and some enthusiasm. They stood beyond the security fences and from above, in one of the overhead walkways that are so common here. Later on I learned that the intersection that we were holding was a major thoroughfare and that we were a mere block and a half away from the convention center. The walkway above us from which people (a faceless huddle of people shapes) watched us was same walkway the delegates used to get to their hotels and to do some shopping at the ritzy malls.

"WE LOVE HONG KONG!" the farmers roared from their seated positions in rows on the ground. Unbelievably, they made a heart shape by curving their arms above their heads with hands pointed down.

"DOWN, DOWN WTO!"

The night was bitterly cold- like the weather in the Bay Area, the days are warm if you stand in direct sunlight, but the nights get chilly enough that if you're caught outside with just your day clothes on you'll be fairly miserable. We all shivered in still-drying clothes as the wind howled through the intersection.

"As you know, it is very cold tonight. But it is a beautiful night tonight because of the solidarity here," one woman announced through a small sound system to the rows and rows of us. There were over 1,000 of us. We lay down and stretched our hands in the air. I looked up to see my one white-gloved hand (Kat had the other one), and the sky, segmented by tall buildings. In my peripheral vision I could see dozens of other outstretched hands reaching for the sky.

The next hours were a haze. I saw not one person make a move to leave the intersection. We did more street party dancing. The Koreans brought out the ol' American flag with the skulls instead of the stripes--the one that has "Fuck!" written on it. Always a crowd pleaser, people boogied down, stomping on it until it was nearly destroyed. I thought I would get hypothermia from my wet clothes; but then someone gave me a jacket, and eventually, to my utter amazement, my Carhartts dried. We listened through countless speeches made by faceless (from my position anyway) speakers. Their emotion-filled, disembodied voices reverberated through the intersection in Korean, English, and Cantonese, suspending us in the present, forcing us to focus on why we were here--and not on the police who beat their shields in horrible unison as they assumed their formations and prepared to attack us.

I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that although "our" lives (as Korean farmers, Thai migrant workers, American-born-Chinese activists) were so impossibly different and no doubt our struggles are as well, that for this night we all shared these strange, volatile moments. As we held the moment and the space together, I reflected on how improbable the whole situation was really, and I remembered why I come to these things, long after I have grown sick of one-dimensional protest slogans and get irritable moving slowly in crowds.

These giant summits and demos, in addition to whatever else they do, bring out the very best of what it can mean to be human- and the very worst of what we're capable of: these oppressive institutions that humans have created. All of these aspects are magnified a million times and play out simultaneously, at a head-spinning pace. We slow-moving individual mortals are left confounded, triumphant, awkwardly trying to make sense of how we can have the greatest effect possible while all of our hopes, fears, and dreams are encapsulated in every late night plan, street fight, boring concensus meeting, act of reckless passion. The pressure is on for us to assume roles that feel appropriate to the level of urgency that exists, directly proportional to the looming potential of disaster that would definitely result from inaction. Sure that pressure exists every day, but rarely do we have the opportunity- or the will- to actually demand from ourselves the full range of compassion, boldness, and action that we are capable of. I know that it takes examples such as the migrant workers here--many of whom have sacrificed their tenuous livelihoods as domestic workers in order to perserve and organize in the face of unbelievable oppression--to remind me what actually makes sense in the world and why I do want to live.

And so I am surrounded by police lines after midnight, sitting amongst rows and rows of farmers who have come here to, as one speaker put it, "take our last stand against the WTO" because they were literally fighting to exist. And then, here I am. Some scrappy kid who stays up all night writing--perhaps to prove that I exist as well. And then our struggles for existence are so vastly different. This idea of solidarity: it feels more meaningful than anything else I've found as a way to try to deal with all the oppression and inequality in the world; yet I can't help but be concerned about the ability to throw the word around in a way that only flattens and distorts what it could signify. Because in the end, someone always gets to go home--literally and figuratively.

At 3am I managed to get out (using my NoRNC Indymedia pass, unbelievably) while the Korean farmers and some supporters (who more or less chose to stay) were arrested. Certainly the Korean farmers didn't think it would be necessary for others who had a choice, to go to jail. At least that was what one of the Korean Peasant's League leaders told a friend when she informed him that several kids from Hong Kong were choosing to be arrested with the farmers. Since I could escape, why wouldn't I? The martyr role is old and tired, and I would get even less work done if I was being detained.

Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling shitty as I walked through the lines and lines of heavily armed police who waved me past multiple barricades. The effect was surreal. Here I am, clearly a weird protester kid whose septum ring and one set of clothes are a fairly dead giveaway about my role here. I had spent the whole night and past few days running around antagonizing police whenever possible; now I was permitted to leave while the Koreans awaited arrest and maybe deportation. The reason I was permitted to leave? Clearly it was my US citizenship. It was obvious that repression would be applied on the basis of nationality in this scenario. (In the US it's usually race, right?)

Earlier in the night during the occupation, a friend of mine who maintains the Target WTO website here got a call from another friend who had heard from another person who was inside the conference.

"There's absolute chaos here!" he shouted on his end of the phone conversation. "The delegates are scared shitless. Police have locked and barricaded the front entrance. The talks are totally stagnating!"

The French and Japanese delegates had to be taken away by ferry.

Handle and I--we took a cab when we meandered through the labyrinth of barricades and police vehicles. The cab ride felt like the closing credits of a long, long, weird day. The driver played some undistinctive soft rock and we stared out the windows at the city.

Wan Chai (the conference area) was eerie and desolate. Trash--footprinted flyers and trodden flags and banners--blanketed the quiet thoroughfares. Small groups of press people with badges prominently displayed, as well as the occasional crew of drunk hipsters snapped pictures of themselves posed amidst protest debris to a backdrop of shuttered and gated storefronts. Unopened water bottles and half-eaten takeout food containers lined the footpath on Marsh Road (the bridge leading to the protest pen), as if dropped in a hurry by people who didn't expect to run off.

We arrived home to watchon tv the Korean farmers being loaded onto buses. Fucking weird.

Now it's 11pm here on Sunday. Most of the protesters who were arrested are still detained and haven't been arraigned. I'm home, "doing dispatch." That means that I posted the house telephone number on the website and called it the dispatch line. As the WTO confernce wraps up there is all sorts of contradictory information going around. The AP and Reuters have announced that the WTO delegates have come to an agreement about GATS. However, Dante, who is inside, tells me that isn't true.

"I feel like I've been watching a scary movie all day. The suspense is too much," she said.

WTO MC6, Hong Kong, Day 4: “We’re Hungry. We’re Angry.”

"Women are hungry. We are angry!"
- INNABUYOG Rural Women's Day Statement, 2005

By Puck Lo and Handle

Hong Kong, December 16- A group of Hong Kong activists declared a hunger strike that will last at least through December 18, the end date of the Sixth Ministerial World Trade Organization (WTO) conference. The strike was inspired by the Korean farmers’ procession on Thursday—when 1,000 Korean farmers and militant labor unionists performed a full-body bow every three steps.

In a press release the hunger strikers wrote: “In their steps and bows, we saw the strength in humility, the true power of a people. We thought of the rows upon rows of police barricades and the overwhelming power of the establishment that [the farmers] face just to get their voices heard. We sincerely hope that Hong Kong people will join us and support us. We hope that Hong Kong people will contribute to the life and dignity of our friends from overseas.”

Although the strikers note that their action is meant to be a show of solidarity with the farmers—not a platform on which to bargain with the WTO—they are nonetheless demanding that the restricted protest zone be opened and the police barricades removed; that the WTO opens its doors to the people outside the Convention Center and acts on their concerns; and that the WTO delegates remove the items of agriculture and fishery off the agenda.

Asian Women March Against the WTO

In the afternoon more than 250 people gathered for a Women’s March Against the World Trade Organization (WTO). The event was sponsored by several Asian women’s organizations with the intent of demonstrating that worldwide—and certainly in Asia—peasant and low-income women suffer the worst effects of poverty, insecurity and displacement caused by WTO policies that benefit multinational corporations and rich countries at the expense of the majority of the world.

At a small park from where the march began, women unfolded an enormous patchwork quilt. The quilt was a compilation of many smaller quilts that had been brought to Hong Kong by anti-WTO women’s delegations from all over Asia. Many of the quilts had been signed or drawn on by women who could not come to Hong Kong but who wished to express their solidarity to protesters. The women’s delegations had met each other at Victoria Park on Wednesday, at which time they had taught each other anti-globalizations chants in various languages, then sewed their smaller quilts together into one massive quilt. In an article on their website, the Thailand-based organization Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) described the quilt as being symbolic of the “weaving together of all our patches of resistance towards a global resistance against corporate globalization and the landlessness and poverty it has brought to women in the Asia Pacific region and around the world. “

Other organizers of the march include Filipino groups Gabriela—a national liberation movement “working to free women from all forms of economic and political oppression and discrimination” around issues of sexual violence and abuse, health and reproductive rights;” also the Asian Peasant Women's Network (APWN) and the National Federation of Peasant Women in the Philippines (AMIHAN).

Women from Mongolia, Indonesia, Cambodia—working in the sex industry, as farmers, and as college professors—held colorful, multi-lingual banners and signs. Bedecked in purple scarves bearing the words “No to WTO/ Kong Yee Sai Mau” women and other allies of women’s struggles made their way steadily past an endless onslaught of bustling traffic. The atmosphere was convivial as demonstrators sand, cheered, waved and engaged with a receptive but seemingly reserved public.

However, when a group of Hong Kong activists showed up with a sign reading “Hong Kong People Support International Demonstrators Against Unfair Trade” their enthusiasm was contagious. Locals—including an entire contingent of a dozen schoolgirls in uniform—climbed over the low barricades and joined the procession, welcomed by a roar of approval from the marchers. The women’s march concluded at the designated protest zone by early evening.

Korean Activists Target US and Korean Consulates

Meanwhile, fifty Korean trade unionists and farmers had spent the afternoon storming the US and Korean consulates in the business district this afternoon. They spraypainted “Down down WTO” and “No Bush” in red and black on the US Consulate while tearing the letters of the sign and throwing eggs at the building. In addition, several demonstrators shaved their heads as a form of protest.

The activists explained that the US-machinated WTO free trade polices force South Korea to buy rice and other agricultural products from the US, destroying the livelihoods of Korean farmers. After a scuffle with the police, the protesters marched to a park and dispersed.

Meanwhile, 100 others from the Korean anti-WTO delegation demanded entry into the South Korean consulate, brushing past security guards who would not let them through. A dozen of them sprinted through the lobby to the elevators and managed to reach the fifth floor—where the consulate office is—before security disabled the elevator. It is unclear if any of the protesters got inside the consular office.

Police arrived at 5pm to negotiate with the Korean activists in the building. They were greeted by 25 other protesters who held an impromptu sit-in in support of the Korean farmers and unionists.

“We’re South Korean citizens. We have a right to talk to our consulate,” one activist explained, demanding an apology from the Hong Kong police.

Unite States and European Union Bicker; Less Developed Countries Block

Inside the convention center, on the fourth day of the WTO ministerial conference the talks are “going backwards” according to the EU Trade Commisioner Peter Mandelson. The US and the EU blame each other for the stalled negotiations. Tension is increasing because the talks might fail. The US rebukes the EU for its refusal to cut farm tariffs, yet the US government’s huge domestic subsidies of agribusiness remain untouched. It is these subsidies that enable the US to flood the markets of smaller countries, driving down prices and making it impossible for local farmers to earn a living. Since the WTO operates by consensus, the bold announcement made today by the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) threatens to derail talks altogether. Mauritian Minister of Agriculture Arvin Boolell, a spokesperson for the ACP, announced that the group “will not accept any agreement in Hong Kong that is made at our expense.” The ACP is made up of former European colonies that rely significantly on agricultural exports. Therefore they seek protection for local sugar, cotton and banana farmers and demand continued preferential access to the EU market.

Disagreements about agricultural policies are also retarding the discussions in other areas, such as manufactured goods and services. Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) is a major source of contention. Likewise Annex C and the draft texts of GATS are highly controversial. Government officials and activists alike are concerned that the privatization of services will threaten poor people’s access to vital services such as water or healthcare. According to the South China Morning Post, the ACP drafted an alternative to Annex C but has tabled their proposal. By withdrawing their proposal from discussion, they eliminate—at least in this conference—the possibility of an agreement on services.

Pascal Lamy, the Secretary-General of the WTO has scheduled a meeting late tonight. A major goal is to have a new proposal on agriculture ready by midday tomorrow.

Trucks loaded with cinderblocks and other construction materials are now driving into the protest zone outside the Convention Center. Overnight, more barricades and fences will be going up.

Being Emo and Using Far Too Many Metaphors Involving Water

The sky was a brilliant shade of blue by the time I loaded the last photos onto the Indy bay website, sprawled out on the floor wedged between my friends, and passed out. Three short hours later, the alarm was ringing.

I heard a groan, followed by the improbable statement: “Awww…gotta get up again and go fight cops.”

I pulled the blanket over my head, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Instead I fell back asleep.

Later, one of the Hong Kong kids who was lying next to me told me: “I’ll never forget you waking up and saying ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ and going back to sleep.’”

We did get up. I clutched my 7-11 Nescafe canned coffee drink on board the double-decker tram headed for Wanchai. Unexpectedly, I find a level of comfort in holding onto those habits and identities that undoubtedly mark me to everyone as an “outsider,” a disdained “ABC”—an American-born Chinese, and a ridiculed protester at that. I suck down my imperial caffeinated beverages and don my ridiculous all-black protest gear, use forks when they’re around. Fuck it.

“We so much fit the profile,” my friend Kat laughed as we walked down one of Hong Kong’s countless busy streets. “We look exactly like WTO protesters.”

I shug. “What other profile could I possibly fit?”

The day was sunny and crisp, chillier than it has been lately. We passed endless shopping malls and business districts. Being confronted with so much capitalism and wealth (of which there is a fair amount here) has been making me feel literally nauseous and self-righteous in ways I haven’t felt since high school. Now that the initial shock of being (in some ways) part of an ethnic majority here has worn off, I am able to see class more. There’