Speaker 1: Yep, it's it could happen here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: falling apart and some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Today are guests fresh off their
Speaker 1: new hit movie by Paramount Garrison Davis. Uh and and yeah,
Speaker 1: what what what I'm doing? Like a like a thing,
Speaker 1: Chris Garrison. Garrison's lost the thread? Why don't you pick
Speaker 1: it up? I also have lost the thread? So here's
Speaker 1: a new one. This has been very confusing for two
Speaker 1: of an episode, absolutely baffling. Look, you want things to
Speaker 1: not be confusing, you have somebody else introduce your podcast.
Speaker 1: That's just the way it goes noted. Yeah, so what what?
Speaker 1: Welcome to part two of the Atlantis Shooting. Um, we
Speaker 1: are back with actually less Atlanta this time, but more shooting.
Speaker 1: Oh good, Sorry, this is a very absurd. Really we've
Speaker 1: found ourselves, Dear God, just a normal day at work.
Speaker 1: Oh take it away, Chris, you got this, You got this.
Speaker 1: We believe in you. There's there's a tendency, I think
Speaker 1: among Asian American writers where when we get confronted with
Speaker 1: what are you know, considered quote unquote Asian American stories,
Speaker 1: there's almost inevitably and autobiographical pivot that happens like at
Speaker 1: some points in the piece. Um May Jong, the author
Speaker 1: of the Vanity Fair piece I mentioned last episodes, that's
Speaker 1: been a major source for both these episodes. It doesn't
Speaker 1: her piece, so do, I mean like dozens and does
Speaker 1: and dozens of as American writers who are you know,
Speaker 1: much more accomplished and talented than I am, and like,
Speaker 1: I get it. I I don't blame them for it.
Speaker 1: I think it's a powerful way to anchor a story
Speaker 1: and understand the story. And I also think that it's
Speaker 1: why we miss like half of the story that we
Speaker 1: when we talk about things, because you know, the the
Speaker 1: the audio autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the
Speaker 1: scope into looking at just sort of the US. And
Speaker 1: this story and the story of Asian Americans in general,
Speaker 1: isn't just a story about sort of a minority in
Speaker 1: the US or about American imperialism. It's about Asia itself,
Speaker 1: and here especially it's about China and Korea, to lesser
Speaker 1: cent Japan. And you know, the histories of these places
Speaker 1: have as much to do with why the people who
Speaker 1: died in Atlanta were in those rooms on that day
Speaker 1: as Christian purity culture does. And you know, by by
Speaker 1: bym actually looking at this, we we got to introduce
Speaker 1: another key player in this horror show who only sort
Speaker 1: of appeared change intially in part one, which is capitalism.
Speaker 1: Because capitalism is about to show up and make just
Speaker 1: all of this monumentally worse. Yeah. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: Steven Seagal in that way. Yeah, I think more much
Speaker 1: more active than Steven Seagal, but barely move yea. Capitalism
Speaker 1: unfortunately moves at an incredibly relentless space. Yeah, Capitalism's knees
Speaker 1: are an incredible shape. Yeah. So and and and this, this,
Speaker 1: this brings us back to Atlanta itself. Now. Yo Fong
Speaker 1: died a hero in the final moments of her life.
Speaker 1: As shots rang across Young Zation massage, she motioned for
Speaker 1: Marcus Leone, still half naked on the massage table, to
Speaker 1: stay still and wait for her to walk in front
Speaker 1: of him before he died behind the massage table by
Speaker 1: covering Leon's movement as she opened the door, She sacrificed
Speaker 1: her life to save the life of a man she'd
Speaker 1: met just minutes before. Her award, in typical American fashion,
Speaker 1: was a bullet in the head. It took six days
Speaker 1: for her family in China to realize that she had
Speaker 1: been killed. By village custom, the remains of an unmarried
Speaker 1: woman who left the village could not re enter it
Speaker 1: to be buried. Her body thus lay unclaimed in a
Speaker 1: morgue for nineteen days before she was buried in the
Speaker 1: land of her killer at a funeral's attended entirely by strangers.
Speaker 1: Marcus Leone, the man Fong sacrificed her life to save,
Speaker 1: was forced to return to work at FedEx just three
Speaker 1: days after surviving the massacre. The sound of the packages
Speaker 1: he dropped on his delivery runs sounded like gunshots. He
Speaker 1: quit soon after. There is no justice in this world,
Speaker 1: only an unending parade of horror, the details of which
Speaker 1: are somehow each worse than the last. And it is Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is I think what I wanted to sort of
Speaker 1: what I wanted to talk about this episode, which is
Speaker 1: that like, it's not just that there was a shooting,
Speaker 1: it's that each element of why everyone is there is
Speaker 1: its own successive horror story, and the conditions that produced
Speaker 1: this horror or not, you know, they're not just two
Speaker 1: conditions that produce robaderan long They're not just the conditions
Speaker 1: that produced to shoot her. They're the conditions that produced
Speaker 1: Dai Fung, who spent almost her entire life as a
Speaker 1: miket workers, supporting a family whose most pressing concern was
Speaker 1: attempting to marry her off. And and I think it's
Speaker 1: worth tracing out these conditions and how they developed. Because
Speaker 1: a twelve year old girl drops out of middle school
Speaker 1: to work at a factory fifty miles away and that
Speaker 1: eventually is gunned down by an American racist is not
Speaker 1: how the future of Asia was supposed to go. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't have much love and imagine not Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I don't have much love for Maw. But
Speaker 1: I don't think if you showed Maw this, he would
Speaker 1: be like, oh my god, this is the future that
Speaker 1: I wanted for my people. Like this, things have gone
Speaker 1: very badly wrong. And I think to understand how we
Speaker 1: got to this hell, we need to go back to
Speaker 1: another hell, which is the beginning of the Korean War.
Speaker 1: And you know what, we've talked about the effects that
Speaker 1: the Korean War had on Korean women in the last episode.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a few other things that are
Speaker 1: worth emphasizing here, one of which is that the absolute
Speaker 1: devastation that the war wrought on North and South Korea
Speaker 1: is incalculable. I mean, the effects of this is still
Speaker 1: felt to this day. It was a utterly devastating war. Um.
Speaker 1: But it also has sort of more subtle effects on
Speaker 1: the sort of politics and economics of of the region
Speaker 1: because what one of the you know, one of the
Speaker 1: very important things about this war is that the US
Speaker 1: is fighting in East Asia, and this means that the
Speaker 1: US is going to eve an enormous army in South Korea,
Speaker 1: which has its own military and sort of political and
Speaker 1: economic consequences. And you know, those troops are still there
Speaker 1: to this day, like technically fighting a war which has
Speaker 1: never formally ended. And you know, we'll come back a
Speaker 1: bit to this later. But this has a enormous application
Speaker 1: for the entire region. Um. I've I've talked on bastards
Speaker 1: for about like you know, about so many effects this has.
Speaker 1: But you know, Korea and later Vietnam are a major
Speaker 1: like the wars the US fights there are a major
Speaker 1: factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees you know,
Speaker 1: enormous U S investment as part of this attempt to
Speaker 1: like shorten American supply lines by exporting their military industrial
Speaker 1: complex to East Asia. You know, we talked about the
Speaker 1: Japanese ankle with this, but South Korea is likewise industrialized
Speaker 1: American capital for you know, pretty much the same reason. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and this goes on to the
Speaker 1: extent that like Korean troops like fight on the side
Speaker 1: of the US in Vietnam, and you know, in South
Speaker 1: Korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal military
Speaker 1: asset for the US war machine in the East. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing I think, and I think I think that
Speaker 1: part of it, like is understood decently well because you know,
Speaker 1: if you if you if if you do if you
Speaker 1: like you know literally anything about this region. You've you've
Speaker 1: seen the effects of this stuff. But the part of
Speaker 1: it I think is less understood is that in China,
Speaker 1: this the war has a similar effect, which is that
Speaker 1: communist leadership fights this war right, and it immediately becomes
Speaker 1: clear to them that there is a looping possibility they're
Speaker 1: gonna have to fight the US again. And if they're
Speaker 1: gonna have to fight the US again, they need an
Speaker 1: actual sort of modern industrial base to fight a war
Speaker 1: against the US, and this, you know, this leads to
Speaker 1: sort of militarization industrization, and you you get a look
Speaker 1: at two very different kinds of state led developments, uh,
Speaker 1: which I'm going to call state led development corruption and
Speaker 1: state state led development socialism question mark, which sort of
Speaker 1: which sort of play out in China and Korea. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think it's it's it's worth actually
Speaker 1: talking about this because both of these systems are essentially
Speaker 1: going to collapse, and when they do, they are going
Speaker 1: to send an enormous number of people, both in China
Speaker 1: and Korea, you know, spreading, spreading across the world seeking
Speaker 1: like any kind of sort of economic salvation. And a
Speaker 1: lot of the people who are killed in Atlanta are
Speaker 1: in Atlanta because of these because of these crises. Yes. So.
Speaker 1: So the first of these is the chapel system in Korea,
Speaker 1: which is sort of informally established by the dictator Park
Speaker 1: Junky is like the core of his plan for economic development,
Speaker 1: and it generates a number of extremely powerful family owned
Speaker 1: megan conglomerates with intimate ties to the state and these
Speaker 1: sort of various political factions, and these conglomerates which control
Speaker 1: just vast sections of the Korean economy. I like, like
Speaker 1: like two this day, Samsung, which is the largest the
Speaker 1: remaining Chabels, Like I think I think they're they're total
Speaker 1: percentage of the GDP of Korea's like sevent cent or something.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's it's absolutely absurd. Jesus, Yeah, like and
Speaker 1: and and and like and the thing is that you know,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of it's amazingly about this is that,
Speaker 1: like the chabels are much weaker than the used to
Speaker 1: be UM for reasons that we will get to in
Speaker 1: a bit. And you know, when when when they're founded,
Speaker 1: when they're sort of at the height of their powers
Speaker 1: they have, you know, they're they're they're established with three goals. Um.
Speaker 1: There's an attempt to develop the economy. I you know,
Speaker 1: there's an attempt to sort of the fuel there'sn'tpt to
Speaker 1: sort of fuel the American and South Korean war machines.
Speaker 1: And the third thing I'm trying to do is to
Speaker 1: make a lot of people in the government and their
Speaker 1: allies indescribably rich. And it works sort of amazingly, which
Speaker 1: is a weird thing to say about development regime started
Speaker 1: by military edtatorship but they have. They have an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of mill of American capital military aid, and like
Speaker 1: they do successfully develop, they kill and enormous sumber of
Speaker 1: people in the process, but you know they do it.
Speaker 1: On on the other side, you have Chinese state light
Speaker 1: developments and this is also about economic development and fueling
Speaker 1: the military. But you know, the goal here is to
Speaker 1: create an economic base for socialism and this does not work. Um.
Speaker 1: There there there's number of complicated reasons for this. The
Speaker 1: simplest one is that China just doesn't get the kind
Speaker 1: of investment technology transfer South Korea gets until like way later. Um.
Speaker 1: But the other really important element of this for this
Speaker 1: story is about the urban world divide. And this is
Speaker 1: another thing I've talked about Bastards like on I've talked
Speaker 1: about on Bastards a bit, but I think it's worth
Speaker 1: going into the details a little bit because otherwise a
Speaker 1: lot of the stuff that's going to happen that is,
Speaker 1: you know, the the part of the story that is
Speaker 1: directly sending twelve year olds off to a factory and
Speaker 1: Shenzen like don't make any sense without it. So to
Speaker 1: make a very complicated and shifting set of economic programs
Speaker 1: like as simple as possible. Um, Chinese industrial policy dread
Speaker 1: what's sort of called the socialist period is about extracting
Speaker 1: grain from the countryside and fuelly and funneling get into
Speaker 1: urban industrial developments and you know, to get it, to
Speaker 1: get it, like understanding of what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: So the CCP is essentially deliberately under developing the countryside
Speaker 1: in favor of developing cities. And this is this is
Speaker 1: exposed to state policy. UM. From from nineteen of the
Speaker 1: Chinese population is doing agricultural labor, but agriculture receives less
Speaker 1: than ten percent of state investments over the same period.
Speaker 1: So they are like really really really incredibly not funneling
Speaker 1: any resources back into into rural areas. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: is there a degree to that? Is their degree of
Speaker 1: that that is maybe related to like I know in
Speaker 1: the USS are a lot of the early left wing
Speaker 1: resistance to the Soviet regime came from rural areas. Um,
Speaker 1: is there anything to do with that, Like, is it
Speaker 1: kind of a desire to avoid developing these places that
Speaker 1: are less controllable? No? And this is this is the
Speaker 1: sort of interesting about China, is that. I mean, Okay,
Speaker 1: so the CCP originally has an urban base, but they
Speaker 1: managed to get their retire urban base killed. So this
Speaker 1: is this is this is the cause of like like this,
Speaker 1: this is this is one of the reasons for the
Speaker 1: sound of Soviet split. Like this is basically like selling
Speaker 1: in Trotsky or bickering, and their bickering gets like a
Speaker 1: million Chinese communist killed, and that means that you know,
Speaker 1: this this this is this is where the sort of
Speaker 1: rise of Mao comes in because Mao is as a
Speaker 1: peasant organizer, and once the entire World Party is dead,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, okay, so now we have a peasant
Speaker 1: base and they have they actually have a really they
Speaker 1: have they have like a basically unprecedented level of of
Speaker 1: sort of buy in from the countryside. But the problem
Speaker 1: is that the party just isn't interested in world development
Speaker 1: because the thing that they want is they want to
Speaker 1: be able to develop military power and they want to
Speaker 1: be able to develop like heavy industry, and those aren't
Speaker 1: things that they think you can do in the countryside.
Speaker 1: And so their strategy is just to just i mean
Speaker 1: just literally it's just pure grain extraction from the countryside
Speaker 1: and then using that to feel industrial development, which they're
Speaker 1: doing for I mean, largely ideological reasons, but it also
Speaker 1: does have to do with the fact that China, like
Speaker 1: like people people talk a lot about how like, you know,
Speaker 1: the communist revolution in Russia happens and like the least
Speaker 1: developed country in Europe, and it's like, yeah, but like
Speaker 1: Russia had like several times more industrial capacity in Russian
Speaker 1: Revolution than China does after the war. So this is
Speaker 1: a country that is like a complete economic backwater. And
Speaker 1: so you know this, this is this is part of
Speaker 1: what they're doing. I thought, it doesn't it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And you know, I actually mentioned that there's one other
Speaker 1: thing that they're doing here, which is that so they're
Speaker 1: based in the peasantry is fairly solid. But the other
Speaker 1: thing they have to use this grain budget for is
Speaker 1: to buy off this like incredibly bilitant working class that
Speaker 1: they've inherited, because these people are on strike like constantly,
Speaker 1: and this is this is this is a really serious
Speaker 1: problem for the CCP. And so they you know, they
Speaker 1: have all these wealthare programs, they have all of this
Speaker 1: sort of these resources that they're they're paying they're putting
Speaker 1: into sort of buying off this class. And the result
Speaker 1: of this is you have just incredible rural poverty because
Speaker 1: like one of one of the things that happens here
Speaker 1: is I guess, I guess you call the benefits, but
Speaker 1: things like there's like housing, education, like medical care. This
Speaker 1: stuff is all distributed like through your work and through
Speaker 1: your household registration. And so you know, if if if
Speaker 1: you're someone who has a job in the countryside, you're
Speaker 1: the resources that you're getting are are also from the countryside,
Speaker 1: and that means that you have just these like awful
Speaker 1: underfooted services, your benefits are terrible, and even if you
Speaker 1: can somehow get a job in the city, which is
Speaker 1: really hard because China also has these like really intense
Speaker 1: internal like immigration restrictions, so like if you're like in
Speaker 1: another province that you're not supposed to be, like you
Speaker 1: you will get deported back to your home province. There's
Speaker 1: all these are these really tight controls, and this means
Speaker 1: that like if you're in a rural area, like your
Speaker 1: livelihood is tied to your family unit in a way
Speaker 1: that's like not happening anywhere near as intensely in the cities.
Speaker 1: And when I say your livelihood is tied to your
Speaker 1: family unit, what I mean is that like other than
Speaker 1: this like brief like token attempt they make to socialize
Speaker 1: like housework, reproductive labor in the greatly forward men in
Speaker 1: the state are just like higherly dependent on uncompensated housework
Speaker 1: and production by women, which yeah, it's not just a
Speaker 1: China thing. Yeah, I mean yeah, it's like okay, it's like,
Speaker 1: oh hey, this sounds like your modern system and like, yes,
Speaker 1: this is true. Um. But on the other hand, the
Speaker 1: socialists like ideologically are claiming to be better from this.
Speaker 1: So I'm holding them through their own standards and giving
Speaker 1: them just liked on this because this is like yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like I think this is really one of
Speaker 1: like you know, okay, so they failed to end capitalism,
Speaker 1: but I think if if you look at like what
Speaker 1: is the other great failure of the Chinese Revolution, it's
Speaker 1: that they never dealt with the patriarchy. And this means
Speaker 1: like you know what, when when Mao is saying stuff
Speaker 1: about like women hold up half the sky, like what
Speaker 1: what he actually means is that like women's labor is
Speaker 1: holding up like seventy percent of the budget and they're
Speaker 1: getting like twenty percent of the pay. And this this
Speaker 1: is extremely important for reasons that we will get to
Speaker 1: in a second, because it turns out if your entire
Speaker 1: economy is based on patriarchy, really bad things start happening
Speaker 1: in terms of your gender politics, which is a thing
Speaker 1: that has never has literally never happened in any other regime.
Speaker 1: But we should not at all take any lessons from
Speaker 1: this about how her own economy works. It's great, It's
Speaker 1: completely fine. The other thing that we need to talk
Speaker 1: about is the CCPs just utter full scale war against
Speaker 1: urban workers. And this is not the kind of like
Speaker 1: abstract class war that you hear Left is talking about
Speaker 1: all the time. That's you know about like wages, unionization
Speaker 1: and so forth. Like this is an actual war that
Speaker 1: is resolved by the by just the p l A,
Speaker 1: the Chinese army just butchering the Chinese working class. And
Speaker 1: this comes to a head and the Cultural Revolution, and
Speaker 1: you know, I have I have a whole rant about
Speaker 1: the Culture Revolution that I will do time that's not now.
Speaker 1: But the short version of it is that one of
Speaker 1: the things that happens in the Culture Revolution is that
Speaker 1: the CCP crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and
Speaker 1: they kill a million people like from from from from Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like it's really it's really slick. Comparing
Speaker 1: it like to the scale of like the great anti
Speaker 1: communist purges, like this is I think, I think it's
Speaker 1: actually more. I think it's a million people. I think
Speaker 1: it's more people than than Sue Hardo killed. It's like
Speaker 1: there you go, see there's some left right unity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's well, I mean Mount maw undisputed greatest anti communists
Speaker 1: has the highest number of Communism kills. Well, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Let's let's I mean, Joseph Stalin's in that running. That's true.
Speaker 1: You've got to You've got to. You've got a couple
Speaker 1: of Titans battling it out here. Yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a definitely, it's it's it's a difficult choice. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean like they are like like this is is
Speaker 1: literally fighting a war against against certain workers. And like
Speaker 1: this is even by like the mid seventies, there are
Speaker 1: there are moments where the army is sending like tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of work since a thousands of troops like
Speaker 1: in the cities to break up strike waves. And this
Speaker 1: is this is an enormous problem for the CCP. You know, Okay,
Speaker 1: like it's anorways problem for them politically because it turns
Speaker 1: out that being a communist party and then the thing
Speaker 1: that you're doing all of the time is sending soldiers
Speaker 1: to shoot workers is really bad for your political system ideologically. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: that's your opinion. Yeah it does. It doesn't go great
Speaker 1: for them. And and the the other problem they have is, uh,
Speaker 1: you know this, this creates this like this incredible miilituization
Speaker 1: of society and this legion s tegnation and there's all
Speaker 1: this corruption that's happening. But the other problem is like, okay,
Speaker 1: so if you're like a cadre like planner, right, and
Speaker 1: there's always people on strike, you needed to not be
Speaker 1: on strike because you need them to produce stuff for
Speaker 1: your like central planning productions, ed rules, and so all
Speaker 1: all of these like cadre planners start being like, okay,
Speaker 1: these workers keep going on strike, like where where can
Speaker 1: we get labor that won't do this? And they start
Speaker 1: looking at the countryside and they start going like beard stroke,
Speaker 1: can we send this over here? And meanwhile, like the
Speaker 1: actual world, like real lights are fed up with just
Speaker 1: being treated like shit and they start decollectivizing their farms
Speaker 1: because Okay, there's a lot of reasons why they're doing this,
Speaker 1: but they essentially start forming these things that become called
Speaker 1: town and village enterprises, which are these like the civil's
Speaker 1: explanation of it is that they basically start for forming
Speaker 1: capitalist companies and trying to make money. But the ownership
Speaker 1: structures are a bit different because they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: it'll be like a village, right, and like the village
Speaker 1: like technically collectively owns this like company that makes tires
Speaker 1: or something, right, and this is where you start getting
Speaker 1: markets coming back in China. And the CCP looks at this,
Speaker 1: it goes like, yeah, sure this is fine. Uh the
Speaker 1: this this won't stop our communism thing because we're having
Speaker 1: budget shortfalls right now and if we let someone else
Speaker 1: do this work, we don't have to pay for it.
Speaker 1: And these so these town of village enterprises are called
Speaker 1: tv s. Like mostly what they're doing is they're like
Speaker 1: selling parts and stuff to like these giants. State owned enterprises,
Speaker 1: which are you know, your state own enterprises are things
Speaker 1: that are building like bikes, like tractors or refrigerators, so
Speaker 1: they're like you know, they're selling them like wheels or
Speaker 1: like refrigerator parts. And this is this is the thing
Speaker 1: that becomes the core of the Chinese economy, particularly in
Speaker 1: Dario Fung's home province of Guandong, because Gando is really unique,
Speaker 1: well okay, really unique province, I guess is the thing
Speaker 1: you can say about literally every province, but Gwendong is
Speaker 1: particularly unique in this period because it's right next to
Speaker 1: Hong Kong. And this means that, I mean there's always
Speaker 1: been sort of like capital kind of through really shady
Speaker 1: black markets and like people passing each other like notes
Speaker 1: under dinner tables and extra like all all of the
Speaker 1: weird like diplomacy stuff that like like Kissinger and Nixon
Speaker 1: get up to is happening through these like weird back
Speaker 1: channels that a lot of which are running through Hong Kong.
Speaker 1: That there's a lot of stuff that's been sort of
Speaker 1: running through there. And when this stuff starts to happen,
Speaker 1: um you uh, Gwendong gets these special economic zones and
Speaker 1: this becomes sort of the prototype for China's like eventual
Speaker 1: sort of capitalist centric like export development model. Um Gwendong
Speaker 1: is like they're they're literally there, They're they're they're they're
Speaker 1: taking like form capital from Hong Kong, and they're using
Speaker 1: it to produce good for the market. And this is
Speaker 1: the world that Dano Fong and Shout Jitan grow up in. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a world where on the one hand, there's enormous
Speaker 1: economic growth, but on the other hand, like all of
Speaker 1: the safety nets that Chinese socialism have put in place
Speaker 1: are just like being completely destroyed, and everyone is once
Speaker 1: again dependent on wages to survive. And it's also an
Speaker 1: incredibly deeply patriarchal world, you know, and we've seen this
Speaker 1: already right with Dion Fung's village, just like refusing to
Speaker 1: bury her body because she's not married. And you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is something that's only gotten worse as
Speaker 1: the sort of as the eighties where're on you get
Speaker 1: into their form period. You have simultaneous you have the
Speaker 1: one child policy, which is this incredibly draconian state and
Speaker 1: forced destruction of bodily autonomy, and it also serves this
Speaker 1: really horrific role in devalue in girls because girls act
Speaker 1: as having less economic value than boys. And so you
Speaker 1: get all these things where like you get these you
Speaker 1: get targeted like gender targeted abortions. They're these masterializations that happen,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's this just enormous patriarchal engine and it sucks.
Speaker 1: And there's also there's a return to fusitionism as well,
Speaker 1: because like, and this is one of the things is
Speaker 1: like the most infuriating about this because like like of
Speaker 1: like what the original Chinese Revolution was about was like, hey,
Speaker 1: Confucianism sucks. Like this, this incredible like reactionary patriarchal ideology
Speaker 1: is in fact bad. And then like forty years in
Speaker 1: there like hold on, wait, what if we bring this
Speaker 1: ship back? And it is it is it is extremely bad,
Speaker 1: and you know, and it serves as a sort of
Speaker 1: like like this pacifying picture archical ideology that they're using
Speaker 1: to sort of hold the family unit together because the
Speaker 1: family unit are like so there's a lot of the
Speaker 1: firms in this period they're just like owned by families, right,
Speaker 1: and you know, you you there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: sort of similarities here between if you look at your like,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're sort of like right wing like
Speaker 1: culturally Christian like small business owner families, and you look
Speaker 1: at this and it's like, uh, we've we've we've read
Speaker 1: developed the wheel here we we have once again created
Speaker 1: the patriarchal death engine. Ga who it's it's great, it's yeah.
Speaker 1: And this this is basically this is the world that
Speaker 1: Daniel fog Like grows up in. And this is the
Speaker 1: period where the old urban working class is just hammered
Speaker 1: to pieces so that the state and capital could just
Speaker 1: gorge itself as well for benefits, and the new Chinese
Speaker 1: working class is born, and this migrant working class, it's vanguard.
Speaker 1: Are these women who are given to imperatives by their families,
Speaker 1: and these these these imperatives are given I mean literally
Speaker 1: Dayong fang like, Dayo fang Like directly and I think
Speaker 1: indirectly to um shout git on well because like with
Speaker 1: Dayong Like, we literally have the quotes of this right
Speaker 1: like she she has told by her family get married
Speaker 1: and find a job and shout shitan gets married off
Speaker 1: at twenty but a middle school fong like drops out
Speaker 1: of school and just goes to work in a factory
Speaker 1: in Shenzen, and this like, these are the women who
Speaker 1: built modern China like these are these are literally these
Speaker 1: are the people who turned shens In from a tiny
Speaker 1: rural town into a world class manufacturing cub that is
Speaker 1: literally larger than any city in North America. And I
Speaker 1: mean this happens in the span of like a couple
Speaker 1: of decades, and they get jack shipped for it, like
Speaker 1: the wages they are working for, Like Daland Fong's brother
Speaker 1: is working on rubber rubber plantation. He's making five dollars
Speaker 1: a month. And you know, in Dion Fong's case, like
Speaker 1: the other thing she's dealing with is literally these constant
Speaker 1: demands for a family to get married, and Fong just refuses.
Speaker 1: They try to do it as a young adult. She
Speaker 1: just goes no. And they try to to try to
Speaker 1: get like when she's like three, like they bring her
Speaker 1: back to a village and her like pick a husband.
Speaker 1: She just goes no. And she just like they they
Speaker 1: keep showing your guys gypsy coming like no. And you
Speaker 1: know what she does instead is charter her own path
Speaker 1: by managing to secure a visa to the US where
Speaker 1: and this this, this is so Diaoe Phongs like is
Speaker 1: a market worker for ages. And eventually I think, like
Speaker 1: she wasn't sixteen, she loose to the US to support
Speaker 1: her family. Again from Afar, there's there's only there's one
Speaker 1: more piece of macroeconomics I mean to talk about before
Speaker 1: we can follow Dione Pong to the massage parlor, and
Speaker 1: this one is going to get, like everyone else, to
Speaker 1: the scene of this massacre. So what when we last
Speaker 1: left our Korean corruption chapels, business business is booming, and
Speaker 1: in the early nineties, business is like even more booming.
Speaker 1: It is this is this is the best I've ever
Speaker 1: done economically. And the reason is the best I've ever
Speaker 1: done economically is because is by in large part because
Speaker 1: of the thing that I am just perpetually cursed by
Speaker 1: when I do research for this show, which is the
Speaker 1: plaza of courts um. I've talked about this before, but
Speaker 1: I will once again do a brief summary of this,
Speaker 1: which is that so in the nineties, as people probably
Speaker 1: are aware of the U s the US manufacturing economy
Speaker 1: is dying. And this is a real problem for Reagan
Speaker 1: because everyone's like Reagan, why does the economy suck? And
Speaker 1: his solution to this is just basically at gunpoint, forcing
Speaker 1: Japan and West Germany to like let the US d
Speaker 1: value its currency relative to the end of the Deutsche mark.
Speaker 1: And it's like, Okay, this is a this is a
Speaker 1: boring technocratic thing. But the thing it actually does is
Speaker 1: if if your currency is weaker than another currency, it's
Speaker 1: easier for you to like sell them to have an
Speaker 1: export economy and sell them stuff. And this sets off
Speaker 1: just like an incredibly catastrophic chain of events where the
Speaker 1: US manufacturing actually comes back because you know, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: look the dollars the dollars week and now we can
Speaker 1: produce it again. But it just, you know it, it
Speaker 1: combines with this like structural weakness Japan's economy, Japan's economies diplodes,
Speaker 1: and Japan goes okay, funk it. How do we keep
Speaker 1: the economy going without manufacturing sector? And their solution is
Speaker 1: invest in other countries and do real estate speculation. And
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so obviously nothing bad ever happens happens
Speaker 1: when you do real estate speculation. And the Japanese economy
Speaker 1: was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later. Um.
Speaker 1: But this this is a series of effects. One of
Speaker 1: them is that the Korean shables, you know, those those
Speaker 1: companies that are doing like literally the best business I've
Speaker 1: ever done. The reason they're doing this is because of
Speaker 1: Japanese credit and the fact that like there's more complicated
Speaker 1: currency bullshit going. But basically, like the value the value
Speaker 1: of the Korean currency was pegged to the dollar, and
Speaker 1: so when the dollar's value decreased, uh, the wand also decreased.
Speaker 1: And so you know this, this this gives Korea like
Speaker 1: a big manufacturing competitive manufacturing edge. But then you know,
Speaker 1: Japan goes under and they start to lose credit, and
Speaker 1: then the US and does the reverse Plaza Chords where
Speaker 1: they just reverse the thing that they did before, and
Speaker 1: so now the dollar is incredibly strong again. Every other
Speaker 1: currency is really weak well due to it. And this
Speaker 1: just like this just obliterates like every economy in East Asia,
Speaker 1: like they all just implode. Thailand goes under, and most
Speaker 1: of these countries that have never recovered, like Thailand particular,
Speaker 1: like the I mean South Korea kind of does, but
Speaker 1: it's basically the only one. All the rest of the
Speaker 1: economies are just obliterated. And you know this, this is
Speaker 1: this is the Asian economic crisis, and you know, saddled
Speaker 1: with like enormous debts and declining profits, like these tables
Speaker 1: started collapsing left and right, and South Korea just is
Speaker 1: just on the edge of bankruptcy and right on Q
Speaker 1: the I m F shows up and makes everything worse
Speaker 1: because yeah, it's great, it's the I m F. They yeah,
Speaker 1: they do, they do normal I m F stuff, and they,
Speaker 1: you know, they impose a bunch of austerity measures. And
Speaker 1: this just this annihilates the Korean middle class. Like it's
Speaker 1: just it just gets obliterated. This is this, this is
Speaker 1: just a death knell, and it it also has you know,
Speaker 1: it has a lot of effects. But one of the
Speaker 1: other ones is the Korean labor movements is really severely
Speaker 1: damaged by just all the economic devastates that's happening around them.
Speaker 1: And the product of this is just a sort of
Speaker 1: rural poverty drives Dayong Fong and Ugon from their villages.
Speaker 1: The economic collapse drives Kian Jung Kim Grant, who's one
Speaker 1: of the other people who died in this shooting from
Speaker 1: Korea to the US. And this is something that this
Speaker 1: is there's there's something about the US here. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: something about the US is that it's economy is incredibly strong,
Speaker 1: and the dollar is incredibly strong, and even people who
Speaker 1: come to the US for other reasons that the two
Speaker 1: of the women who end up here like are here
Speaker 1: basically because they buried someone. And but even that, you know,
Speaker 1: they like there's a couple of people like they marry
Speaker 1: someone and they break up and divorces them, but they
Speaker 1: stay in the U s and they stay in the
Speaker 1: US because like the median American income is like three
Speaker 1: times the median American income in China and that's like now,
Speaker 1: and so you know, and the combination of that and
Speaker 1: the strength of the American the American dollars sort of
Speaker 1: it brings. It brings the brave, the desperate, and just
Speaker 1: the love struck to our shorees. Um. Now, if you
Speaker 1: remember LCS Hernande's Ortiz, Who's who's the man that long
Speaker 1: like shot while he was on his knees begging for
Speaker 1: his life. Um, Hernando's Ortiz boy is in that mall
Speaker 1: because she was wiring money home to his family in Guatemala.
Speaker 1: And you know, we could do another entire story here
Speaker 1: about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company and these the
Speaker 1: US baccus and genocides. But I think the thing about
Speaker 1: this story is that every atrocity is tied to every
Speaker 1: other atrocity, you know, and it creates this web of
Speaker 1: death that we sort of you know, we we euphemistically
Speaker 1: call it capitalism or society or reality. And the survivors
Speaker 1: of this are just flung from meat grinder to meet grinder,
Speaker 1: desperately looking for a new life a new country, and
Speaker 1: you know they get there in the country just buries
Speaker 1: them instead. Yongfang was also you know, constantly sending money
Speaker 1: home to her family when she arrives in the US.
Speaker 1: She and she's supporting like ten members of her family
Speaker 1: off of a salary. That is like I mean, like
Speaker 1: she supporting to members her family off of the salary
Speaker 1: that you get from massage work rich. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that this is like like again, I think something that
Speaker 1: people don't understand about the US is that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: American wages are low, but the dollar is so strong
Speaker 1: that even like like like small amounts of money that
Speaker 1: you can send, like small amounts of money in dollars
Speaker 1: you can send back home have this enormous economic impact.
Speaker 1: And there is there is an enormous like an absolutely
Speaker 1: enormous sort of network of of immigrants in the US
Speaker 1: who are here basically to work in the center business
Speaker 1: is back home, and this is I mean, this is
Speaker 1: like this is an enormous part of just how the
Speaker 1: economy the Philippines works because of yeah, a bunch of
Speaker 1: the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the marcos Is did. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you know, for for Asian women in particular, once
Speaker 1: they get here, they're often drawn to spot work because
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of reasons we'll get into
Speaker 1: in a second, but these spas, the spas are in
Speaker 1: some sense like a microcost of the US, Like the
Speaker 1: pay is good, and the people doing the work often
Speaker 1: like prefer it to other jobs that are accessible to immigrants. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: they're accessible to immgrants with their levels of political and
Speaker 1: economic capital and social connections, which is usually really not
Speaker 1: that large. But the problem is, you know, as as
Speaker 1: with everything in the US, it's also often dangerous, like
Speaker 1: the particular kind of sort of exposure and performance of
Speaker 1: femininity that you need to do. This leaves these workers
Speaker 1: incredibly vulnerable to stockers, and you know, they face sort
Speaker 1: of constant like racial massages abuse. Um Butterfly, which is
Speaker 1: a Toronto based sex worker group, released a report that
Speaker 1: said that half of all massage parlor workers reported some
Speaker 1: kind of threat to their safety at work. Jesus, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's workplace is both incredibly dangerous. And then you know,
Speaker 1: and when when when when we're saying like threat to
Speaker 1: their workplace, that doesn't that's not even like, that's not
Speaker 1: even counting the police. And if you've read anything about this,
Speaker 1: you'll read people saying things like massage parlors faced constant
Speaker 1: police raids, and this is true, but if anything, it
Speaker 1: understands how bad it actually is because like Asian massage
Speaker 1: parlors are subjected to two different kinds of police rates.
Speaker 1: That just happened constantly. Um, I'm gonna read a thing
Speaker 1: from BuzzFeed. Yeah, it's it's great, it's it's really fun
Speaker 1: from three thousand six of people arrested for unauthorized practice
Speaker 1: of a profession for any job requiring a license in
Speaker 1: New York. We're Asian and nine scent where women. According
Speaker 1: to data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice
Speaker 1: Services and our prostitution is a misdemeanor defense Unauthorized practice
Speaker 1: of a profession, which is the charge that covers unlicensed massage,
Speaker 1: along with roles like veterinary medicine engineering, is a felony
Speaker 1: that carries higher penalty, including up to four years of
Speaker 1: jail time. Now I'm no expert, but that's sure does
Speaker 1: sound like racism of that misogyny, because like, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: an argument to me like if you're if you're moonlighting
Speaker 1: as a bridge engineer and are not qualified, Yes, maybe
Speaker 1: that's they're really just calling me out on on the
Speaker 1: pod just right right in the garrison. We've agreed not
Speaker 1: to talk about all of those people who died when
Speaker 1: that bridge collapse that you built in Florida, on that
Speaker 1: university campus. The thing of value was lost. No, it
Speaker 1: was Florida. Like that's why, that's why the d A
Speaker 1: is not coming after you. Yeah, u s government not
Speaker 1: pressing charges. It's Florida. Mm hmm. So okay, back to
Speaker 1: back to back to the racism. It's like, okay, so,
Speaker 1: so you you have these raids that are like literally
Speaker 1: only like targeted against Asian massage workers and then on
Speaker 1: top and so that that's type one. And the second
Speaker 1: type of raid is that the other thing that happens
Speaker 1: at these places constantly are are these anti prostitution and
Speaker 1: anti trafficking raids. And I'm putting both of those in
Speaker 1: ormal quotations. You know, this is okay, I'm gonna gonna
Speaker 1: go on a side tangent rant here, which is that like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so like every single person who does reporting on this,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if this is like a journalistic
Speaker 1: standards thing, but like even the good reporting on this,
Speaker 1: they like almost always have like a section that says, I, oh,
Speaker 1: the the Georgia like Georgia's like resources on sex trafficking
Speaker 1: says that, uh salon Asian salons are a place where
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of sex trafficking. And it's like m hm,
Speaker 1: really like this this this is what you're putting in
Speaker 1: your article about a bunch of people getting murdered by
Speaker 1: a racist dude, Like this is the thing that that
Speaker 1: you're gonna put in here, and you know and like
Speaker 1: this this is sort of like all of that stuff
Speaker 1: that I talked about, like last episode about Robert Aaron Long,
Speaker 1: like all of your gratification and the racism and the
Speaker 1: horror phobia and that like mixture of like desire and
Speaker 1: low thing like the cops have this. Like also the
Speaker 1: journalists who are writing about this have this stuff, and
Speaker 1: the the people who don't are sort of like picking
Speaker 1: up on on the sort of like abbeyant racism. So
Speaker 1: you get all this coverage that's just focused on like
Speaker 1: trying to figure out if there was sex work going
Speaker 1: on here. And you know, and like I talked about
Speaker 1: last episode, like this is really dangerous because exposing people,
Speaker 1: exposing these sites the police investigation means you get more
Speaker 1: of these stings. And you know, like we we we
Speaker 1: mentioned at the beginning that uh Da Young Fung like
Speaker 1: no no one she knew showed up to her funeral.
Speaker 1: And the reason that no one she knew showed up
Speaker 1: to her funeral is that no one wanted to be
Speaker 1: at a place where they could potentially be cops so
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be deported. Right, How could anyone who knew
Speaker 1: her come to her funeral because that would be well
Speaker 1: and her her brother wanted to come, but the like
Speaker 1: travel to the US was expensive enough. He was just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we can't do this. And you know, and like and
Speaker 1: I that these these anti trafficking, anti prostitution raids are
Speaker 1: so common that two of the Atlanta victims have been
Speaker 1: arrested as part of raids like before this, and even
Speaker 1: though both of them are innocent. Uh Sum Chung Park
Speaker 1: was convicted of criminal trust passing anyways, again, which is
Speaker 1: like one of the most insane things I've ever heard
Speaker 1: in my life, because she was arrested at the place
Speaker 1: where she worked and they convicted her of criminal trust passing.
Speaker 1: Because this entire system is made up of just like
Speaker 1: Robert are and long levels of racism, but they have
Speaker 1: they have a legal outlet to do it so they
Speaker 1: don't have to just go murder people and and sometimes
Speaker 1: they still do. Yeah, definitely, yeah. I mean we talked
Speaker 1: about very generous with that sometimes, Garrison. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: there there there, there's a really horrific story of that.
Speaker 1: There was there was a Chinese sex worker who the
Speaker 1: NYPD like repeatedly attempted to force her at gunpoint to
Speaker 1: have sex with them, and she refused and they so
Speaker 1: and you know, because because she refused, the NYPD kept
Speaker 1: doing raids on her, and eventually she died because she
Speaker 1: jumped out a window trying to escape one of the raids. God,
Speaker 1: because these people are just literal monsters. Um. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, Sung Chun Park like, she's convicted of criminal
Speaker 1: trustpassing and she gets, you know, the sort of particular
Speaker 1: American humiliation of being forced to wear an ankle monitor
Speaker 1: that you have to pay for around your house while
Speaker 1: being under house arrest. And I've I've talked about this
Speaker 1: with the journalists, but again, like there, this is an
Speaker 1: entire system full of robber eron lungs. It's the judges,
Speaker 1: is the prosecutors, it's the social workers, is the journalists,
Speaker 1: it's the cops. And this is this is an incredible
Speaker 1: level of systemic state violence that makes these already tenuous
Speaker 1: migrant working communities even more vulnerable because you know, if
Speaker 1: someone's harassing them, they can't call the cops because if
Speaker 1: the cops show up, it's like, oh hey, this is
Speaker 1: this is even worse than the harassments. And that's I
Speaker 1: think where I want to want to end here today
Speaker 1: on with things that can actually be concretely done about this.
Speaker 1: Help spot workers and sex workers. Um, there's two proposals
Speaker 1: that spot and sex workers have been backing, one of
Speaker 1: which is just ending the licensing licensing requirement from massages
Speaker 1: because it's it's literally only ever used to target Asian
Speaker 1: massage workers. Yeah, that seems that seems like a good call. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely not the law, but oh yeah yeah, getting
Speaker 1: it's getting rid of it. Clarify there. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's you know, like this this is my this
Speaker 1: is my my, my most libertarian position is just being
Speaker 1: against like a lot of these licensing things, because what's
Speaker 1: next a license to make your own toaster. If it's
Speaker 1: a thing that people just do all the time, uh,
Speaker 1: and in fact cannot be stopped from doing under any circumstances,
Speaker 1: then it shouldn't require a license to do like flying
Speaker 1: exact garrison, like flying a plane, like performing surgery, you know, um,
Speaker 1: like being a police officer. Just make everybody everything all licenses. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I've lost the thread. It's okay, I mean, well I
Speaker 1: think that the actual thread here though, is that like,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so like, yeah, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: in theory, it is good to have licenses that, you know,
Speaker 1: like have a way to tell who knows how to
Speaker 1: do something and who doesn't, Right, But the thing is
Speaker 1: that's that's not what the does. Yeah, yeah, it's and
Speaker 1: like and the thing that the state actually does even
Speaker 1: with licenses, like and they do this driver's licenses, Like
Speaker 1: even even with driver's licenses, which is the thing that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like people should know how to drive before you put
Speaker 1: them behind like the four wheel death machine, Like what
Speaker 1: do they do with it. It's like, oh, they used
Speaker 1: to go after a documented immigrants because the state is
Speaker 1: just incredibly racist and that this is the thing that's
Speaker 1: happening with with these licenses is yeah, they just they
Speaker 1: just do racism with it. Well, it's it's why you
Speaker 1: can't have like the common sense I would be like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we're gonna have sex workers, so there should be
Speaker 1: some sort of system to make sure that people are
Speaker 1: getting tested for things and that basically you know certain
Speaker 1: safety procedures or that at least people know what safety
Speaker 1: procedures are being you know, used at the place or whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: But what it always boils down to is, uh, this
Speaker 1: is an excuse for police to funk with vulnerable people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing that this brings us to is the second proposal,
Speaker 1: which is just decriminalizing sex work, Like, don't prosecute people
Speaker 1: for this, don't send the cops after them, just don't
Speaker 1: do it. Like it it only ever causes violence against
Speaker 1: people who are already the most marginalized people. It doesn't
Speaker 1: actually help against trafficking either, makes it makespend against trafficking
Speaker 1: actually harder. People feel not able to talk about things
Speaker 1: when they see stuff that's questionable. It's it's I'm sure
Speaker 1: we can do more content content. Um, I'm sure we
Speaker 1: could do more stuff about sex work in the future. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it really should be uh not a crime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think this is something like you know, it's it.
Speaker 1: It reminds me a lot of like of of the
Speaker 1: anti trends stuff where it's like, Okay, so you should
Speaker 1: care about the stuff because you should care about trends people.
Speaker 1: You should also care about the stuff because it affects
Speaker 1: people who are not trans and this this is this
Speaker 1: is this thing where these massage workers are like most
Speaker 1: of them are not sex workers and it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: at all, and it's the splash over effects are hitting
Speaker 1: them too. And yeah, the consequence of that is eight
Speaker 1: people are dead. Yep. Yeah, go hope your local sex
Speaker 1: work or organizations and go hope you help your local
Speaker 1: spot workers associations like get rid of this licensing stuff
Speaker 1: and fight for decriminalization because this, this, this kind of
Speaker 1: ship doesn't have to happen and we can. This is
Speaker 1: something that we actually can concretely do and when that
Speaker 1: will make an enormous number of people whose lives are
Speaker 1: incredibly precarious enormously better. Yep. Okay, so we have already
Speaker 1: seen before our eyes that you can do. You can
Speaker 1: do things that involves safety where the police are just useless.
Speaker 1: We we have seen we we we have seen. We
Speaker 1: have seen Zach. But what is his name? Zack? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Zack is his name. Yeah. Yeah, but look we we
Speaker 1: we we we have we have yeah, he rules. We
Speaker 1: have seen bodega Zach out with like outdoe the entire
Speaker 1: police force, even after literally the guy called them the
Speaker 1: churn himself in and Bodegas acts still got there before
Speaker 1: they did. The entire New York Police Department n't himself
Speaker 1: in and left his wallet and gun at the scene. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then again, this is this is this is this is
Speaker 1: this is a ten billion dollar police force. The thing
Speaker 1: that the thing that they mostly do is harass homeless
Speaker 1: people and sex workers. For the love of God, we
Speaker 1: don't need them. We could, like literally one man could
Speaker 1: do their job for them. H yeah, get get rid
Speaker 1: of them. Okay, yeah that sounds nice. Okay, Well there
Speaker 1: we go. We did it. Happy episode, everybody. It could
Speaker 1: happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.