It's not easy to get into a boat with three people you don't know and go rowing off toward your destiny. If someone said, "Hey, get into this boat, it's going to change your life," would you do it? That's the trickery of being young. You figure, what the hell. I've never done this before. You've got time. Youth's supposed to have adventures. Even when there're folks who come rowing back from that trip and tell you what could happen or even warn you to turn around, you think you'll make your own mistakes but not those. But they never tell you everything. The past is always saved in someone's ego, so the really complicated and difficult things can only be known by living them out yourself. When it's all said and done, you too will save the hardest stuff inside your knowing ego. And you won't do it out of meanness, or duplicity, or vanity, but maybe because you just forget and get tired, because you've got to be an elder with a certain distance that they call wisdom, or because they never ask you anyway.

The fifth day of the takeover would be dawning in a few hours. The feeling of excitement and purpose was palpable everywhere. How many times in your life do you feel that kind of power, the sort that unifies a people in collective pride and knowing? This time, you and your people get to choose. It's not an idle feeling, but one that you pursue in various forms, like singing the same song or cheering the same team or praying to the same spirit. A connective wave carries you to the same infinite space, and you feel more alive than you ever felt.

For some people, this life begins with an interest in philosophy. Never mind that they don't know exactly what philosophy is; they just think it's something that can be figured out in the mind, like a twirling star that's an idea that blossoms into a grand explosion. Depending, that explosion might be a revelation or a revolution. Something inside the mind tells you that your thinking can be powerful. But then, the thinking has got to be put into practice, and how many middle-class activists checked into factories to find out what it's like to work? Even though this may have been a rite of passage, the truth is, really not many.[...]

[...] So yes, technically, Ria could sew; socially, she could organize; and theoretically, Ria could think political economics: Marx and C.L.R.James, to be specific; she did her MA thesis on the Haitian revolution.

Of course, this information was scratched from her resume, and the manager, who couldn't tell the difference between a Japanese and a Chinese, gave her the job because he thought if she could speak English, she could be an interpreter. What did he know? His factory had forty seamstresses, three cutters, and three packers, all Chinese. By the time he figured out that Ria couldn't speak Chinese, she had convinced two other college students to join up who could speak Chinese, and they were agitating for a higher pay scale and better benefits. Once, they got almost all forty seamstresses to go to a union meeting of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. But that was once. The Chinese ladies humored the students and went back to work.

Mrs. Lee explained things to Ria. "Union or no union, it's all the same. You got to get paid by the piece. Sew faster. Make more money."

Mo watcher her fingers flip and turn, pause and push, backtrack and cut, the artistry of the craft spinning up the same article again and again and again. "You're killing yourself, Ria," he said again.

"Look how cute." She held up a pair of baby overalls. "Mo, listen, I love this work. I love what we're doing. You should see the women when they come in in the morning. They're beautiful. It's so different from when we began. I'm living for that. I can't let it fail."