by
Ken Liu
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The Chinese made up a large percentage of the population of Idaho Territory in the late 1800s. They formed a vibrant community of miners, cooks, laundry operators, and gardeners that integrated well with the white communities of the mining towns. Almost all the Chinese were men seeking to make their fortune in America.
By the time many of them decided to settle in America and become Americans, anti-Chinese sentiment had swept the western half of the United States. Beginning with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a series of national laws, state laws, and court decisions forbade these men from bringing their wives into America from China and stemmed the flow of any more Chinese, men or women, from entering America. Intermarriage between whites and Chinese was not permitted by law. As a result, the bachelor communities of Chinese in the Idaho mining towns gradually dwindled until all the Chinese had died before the repeal of the Exclusion Acts during World War II.
To this day, some of the mining towns of Idaho still celebrate Chinese New Year in memory of the presence of the Chinese among them.
jesus. in the footnotes: The Chinese were 28.5 percent of the population of Idaho in 1870.
As the economy recovered, labor costs rose. There were fewer and fewer young men desperate enough to take jobs as Diggers in the Tunnel. Progress on the American side had slowed for a few years, and Japan was not doing much better. Even China seemed to run out of poor peasants who wanted this work.
Hideki Tōjō, Army Minister, came up with a solution. The Imperial Army’s pacification of the Communist rebellions supported by the Soviet Union in Manchuria and China resulted in many prisoners. They could be put to work, for free.
The prisoners were brought into the Tunnel to take the place of regular work crews. As shift supervisor, I managed them with the aid of a squad of soldiers. The prisoners were a sorry sight, chained together, naked, thin like scarecrows. They did not look like dangerous and crafty Communist bandits. I wondered sometimes how there could be so many prisoners, since the news always said that the pacification of the Communists was going well and the Communists were not much of a threat.
The man at the front of the chain was only a few meters from us, and in the remaining cone of light cast by the small opening that was left I could see his face, contorted with fright.
“Please,” he said. “Please let me through. I just stole some money. I don’t deserve to die.”
He spoke to me in Hokkien, my mother tongue. This shocked me. Was he a common criminal from back home in Formosa, and not a Chinese Communist from Manchuria?
He reached the opening and began to push away the rocks, to enlarge the opening and climb through. The corporal shouted at me to stop him. The water level was rising. Behind the man, the other chained prisoners were climbing to help him.
I lifted a heavy rock near me and smashed it down on the hands of the man grabbing onto the opening. He howled and fell back, dragging the other prisoners down with him. I heard the splash of water.
“Faster, faster!” I ordered the prisoners on our side of the collapsed tunnel. We sealed the opening, then retreated to set up more dynamite and blast down more rocks to solidify the seal.
When the work was finally done, the corporal ordered all the remaining prisoners shot, and we buried their bodies under yet more blast debris.
There was a massive prisoner uprising. They attempted to sabotage the project, but failed and instead killed themselves.
This was the corporal’s report of the incident, and I signed my name to it as well. Everyone understood that was the way to write up such reports.
I remember the face of the man begging me to stop very well. That was the face I saw in the dream last night.
dark
To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected. It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice. The vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments without use of anesthesia since anesthesia might have affected the results, and it was felt that the same would be true with the women with syphilis.
This was not the first time I had read this letter. I had seen it once before, as a little girl. It was one of my mother’s treasured possessions, and I remember asking her to explain all the faded characters to me.
“He was very proud of his literary learning,” my mother had said. “He always closed his letters with a tanka.”
By then Grandfather was well into his long slide into dementia. Often he would confuse me with my mother and call me by her name. He would also teach me how to make origami animals. His fingers were very dextrous—the legacy of being a good surgeon.
i liked this twist - i genuinely didn't see it coming - but most of all, i liked the ruminations on the legitimacy of punishment, which is something i've been thinking about a lot lately. is it right to punish someone for their past crimes if they have dementia and aren't even the same person anymore? what if they don't have dementia but have still changed?
It is not due to tactics, though, that I refer to today’s troublemakers as “radicals.” I use the word here to mean those who seek to understand and change problems at their root. As civil rights icon and organizer Ella Baker put it, to think in radical terms “means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” For really changing a society where a small elite controls most of the power and resources will not be easy. There will be a lot of resistance, and tinkering at the surface is unlikely to last. It is that understanding that drives the people I spoke to for this book, and that gives me hope that they might have an effect.
saving for the ella baker quote
The financial sector had grown exponentially in the decades leading up to the crisis—to the point where it accounted for about 40 percent of all corporate profits in the early 2000s, and rebounded from the crash to around 30 percent. And yet it was not very good at doing what it was supposed to do, which is to direct capital toward the best possible investments. Stock trading had little to do with raising money to keep businesses flowing, and more to do with fattening the pockets of the already-wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Keeping the stock price of a company high was more important to the people who ran it than keeping its factories producing or its workforce paid. A J. P. Morgan executive admitted in a 2011 letter to clients that “reductions in wages and benefits explain[ed] the majority” of the increase in profits.
Just as the TARP vote worked to get Congress’s imprimatur on public bailouts for the banks in 2008, the public’s participation in the stock market gave ideological cover to whatever the stock market did: if “the people” supported it, it must be democratic and just. Yet the public’s involvement with Wall Street, while it did grow, has always been overstated: stock ownership is concentrated at the top, with 81 percent of stocks owned by the top 10 percent, and 38 percent of stocks owned by the top 1 percent. Half of all households own no stock whatsoever. Mostly, their entanglement with finance is through debt.
Outside the Walmart in Secaucus, New Jersey, on Black Friday 2013, Harris sat down in the street, a boilermaker on one side of him, a postal worker on the other, behind a banner reading “WALMART = POVERTY.” Joining the rally were Occupy activists from New York and New Jersey; fast-food workers who had also been organizing with the Fight for $15; restaurant workers; and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra marching band. Thirteen people were arrested in front of that Walmart for civil disobedience; nearly a hundred more were arrested around the country. As the police cuffed Harris’s hands behind his back, he shot me a giant grin through the crowd.
“I’ve never felt more complete in my life,” he told me later. “I’m glad that I’m here, because now I have twenty-four hours a day, and weekends if I choose to work them, to go out and organize. And not against Walmart, but for the workers. There’s a difference, because this is not an ‘Us Against Walmart’ thing; this is ‘Walmart Against Us,’ and we’re trying our best to protect ourselves.” As for his dismissal, he shrugged, saying, “We knew that was a possibility, but we didn’t care, because change had to happen. Major change only happens as a result of someone losing something. Just like in the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. People lost their lives and were imprisoned, but all those negative things actually transitioned into positive changes.”
<3
Near the railroad, an army base, and a prison, the warehouse was a terrifying place to work. Despite the fact that she had arrived at the job along with her boyfriend, she said, her supervisor asked her out three times before her first lunch break. The packages were covered with dust—“We called it ‘China death dust,’” she said, because it left them constantly coughing—but the gloves they were given would rip and never be replaced. Without shin guards, workers would cut themselves on pallets while unloading. And all the while, the temps were pushed to get their cases-per-hour rate up in order to be considered for direct hire so they could stay on past the holidays. “You were treated like a machine,” Hoffman said.
elwood illinois distribution center (walmart)