I’ll start my story again, this time with family. Call it filial piety. I am the daughter of a capitalist; that is to say, my mother needed money to feel safe. I don’t hold this against her. She was raised Chinese in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1950s. I don’t intend to explain this further; if you know, you know. Okay, so money keeps you safe. The problem with that paradigm is that there is never enough and never too much. Oh, the fragrant promise of capital! And all the immigrants buy in. Buy into what? The idea that we can own something that isn’t even ours to begin with.

After all, this is America, where every November is a pilgrim play, a feast, a holiday for the supermarkets to make their fortunes off of canned pumpkin. America, where not even Google can answer the only question about real estate worth asking: Who does this land belong to?