Damon Wiliams: All right, we're doing it. We are back in the lab. We are here with One Million Experiments, and I am so excited. We have a special round table edition, more or less, of One Million Experiments here. We got a bunch of collaborators in the lab. Eva, what's up? You are here. We are doing it. Who we got with us?
Eva Nagao: Hey, Damon. So good to be part of the main event today.
Damon: Blurp
Eva: Sound effects added afterward. You guys are going to get all the good sound effects. Don't worry. Today, in the studio, we have Shuxuan from the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. We're bringing JM, who-- Just Google, JM Wong, and you will see all of their body of work on the internet, but we're going to focus a little bit on what's been going on with Mutual Aid, with Cassandra, with Free Them All, and the COVID-19 Mutual Aid project, which JM has worked on as well. JM's going to bring a little bit of insight too, about their work specifically doing inside-outside organizing with the API CAG family.
Damon: We have a tradition here that grounds us in the conversation, and we could take it as like a little buffet that we could all pick at, but it's a two-part question centered around time. Define time, how you will. That can be this day, this hour, this lifetime, this season. In this time, how is the world treating you and how are you treating the world?
Shuxuan Zhou: I can go. Today is my child's first day in kindergarten.
Damon: Congratulations. [laughs]
Shuxuan: They have been very nervous and also excited about today and me too. I think the time witnessing and also feeling my kid's strong feelings, how they express it in an apologetic way, for me is always beautiful moments. I feel connected with the world. I would say, at this moment, the world has been treating me well.
Eva: Until they come home from school. No, I'm just kidding. Cassandra, how is the world treating you today?
Cassandra Butlet: I would say today, it's good. I feel like when I think about time these days, I think about it in COVID and non-COVID time. I don't know. It just feels like a Groundhog Day kind of situation, but the world, I must have been putting out some real good energy because the world gave me great things over the last couple of years. Even though we were in a pandemic, I had a grandchild born, my daughter got married. I got another grandbaby on the way. My husband was released from prison. I got married, all the stuff. I feel like today is great. Every day for a while has been pretty great.
Eva: JM's going to come in and be like, "I'm having a terrible day." [laughs]
JM Wong: I'm always emo and dramatic, so right on. The world is treating me with sunshine, as you can see. Yes, Seattle's really beautiful in the summers. Also with reminders of death and loss because that happens in this era. I think I'm reminded of just how precious life is and to give gratitude for what we do have and living and loving in that manner.
Eva: I brought you all to the table because your work is so interconnected in location and experience and what you all have gone through, together and separately over these past couple of years. Maybe we can start with you, Shuxuan. MPOP is an organization that started in 2018 and has been around for a minute before the pandemic. What brought you to the work? What needs were you seeing in your community that you wanted to address? What is the world that MPOP is trying to build with the work that you do?
I think that all of the work that we are talking today is about taking care of each other. How does MPOP take care of each other?
Shuxuan: Well, it's a big question. I think for me, coming to the work at MPOP, one part of it is I want to find a community for myself. I want to find a community that has a vision of thinking about how we can live outside the state-sanctioned violence and capitalism. It has been lonely to live in the US as an adult migrant. I came in from a working-class family in China.
When I came here, I started thinking about how I can organize with working class here in the US and then Chinese migrants become a natural community that I want to plug myself in. Before I started talking about how MPOP's vision of taking care of each other, I feel like when I am in MPOP, I feel I have been taking care of, just by in proximity with other organizers. We have such a loving and caring team. MPOP has the best team. Also, the workers who are a lot of in the age of my-- actually my auntie or my mom's generation. They treat me with dumplings. That's kind of relationship is the one I feel I've been taking care of being in MPOP community.
Then circle back to MPOP's mission, one part of it is thinking about Asian migrant massage workers, and sex workers. They're actually taking care of the community. They're doing care work and they taking care of people's body and mind, but unfortunately, a lot of times, they are not taken care of by, for example, they are not considered as healthcare workers.
During COVID, they are not the first to get all the COVID support. Then, a lot of times the Asian communities who see respectability politics as a major strategy in organizing often throw massage and sex workers under the bus. That's one way for MPOP to think about, "We want to take care of each other, everybody in the community, including people who provide care for others." Supporting massage workers is one way of me contributing to a lot of movements out there, trying to take care of each other.
Eva: JM, could you talk a little bit how you came to the work since I'd love to hear about how you all have taken care of each other in this work, how you came and if there's any differences there and what brought you to MPOP?
JM Wong: Yes. My mom is a masseuse back home. Was a masseuse, she's old right now, but she used to be. A lot of my childhood memories was growing up in a beauty salon/massage parlor. When I was a teenager, it's a different country, my family's in Malaysia, Singapore, and coming to the US, I think, as a Asian migrant with a lot of privileges, came with a scholarship to go to a fancy school. Then I stayed after.
I think the question of how do you find home as a guest on… and honor the legacy history of racial violence and joy and resilience here on these lands as a Asian person and not feed into all the bullshit that our communities have been fed internationally. I think that has been a big drive for me in search of queer working working-class resistance and connections globally.
The work with MPOP really came about-- One of my jobs, my paid job, is I'm a nurse. I'm a nurse at a hospital, and I was doing occupational health work, so worker health stuff. I was tapped into worker organizing back in China, where there has been a major crackdown on labor organizing in China in the last few years. Before that, there were really thriving labor organizing work that you can't talk about openly because of state repression, but that was just thriving, really powerful belly of the beast organizing led by workers in American-European companies, speaking of Apple. A lot of these major tech companies that profit and extract labor from Asia.
Just learning about the way they organize, and thinking, "Why is the story of, in this case, Chinese migration to the US shaped by rich wealthy Chinese man?" I'm not denying that's a part of the story, but that's not the only story.
Thinking on massage workers, what is the story of Chinese-American history? If we track the experiences of workers who were part of the cultural revolution, part of these huge speaking of experiments, these were huge experiments on a global scale with a lot to lose and people were part of that. Obviously, different people have different experiences out of that. The verdict depends on where you stay in history will all come up with different verdicts on that, but people lost their jobs when China opened their doors to neoliberalism capitalism, and then moved south to working in factories and then came and worked in massage parlors.
Where is that story in our legacy? Why do we not lift up the lives and struggles of ordinary Asian people? Why is it that we are all teams with this model minority myth? Which I think is low-key, and I know this might get me burned, but is low key already boring story. Is boring. It doesn't tell the whole story of the community. It's a really state-driven top-down narrative of the diversity and breadth of experiences. I can ramble on and on about this, but there's so much to say on how much that was international foreign policy tool used during anti-communist period in the US and broadcast it internationally that like, "Hey, come here and you will have a place in the racial hierarchy, as long as you buy into anti-Blackness and all the bullshit that White supremacy has to offer.
That was the propaganda. People bought into it. I'm acutely aware of that, but that doesn't give the entire picture. In 2018, I was interning for a group called API Chaya. This was a anti-violence organization based in Chinatown-International District in Seattle. It was in preparation of raids that were going to happen in the area of massage parlors. I think API Chaya was dope, and they hired me on to do outreach with massage parlor workers because majority of the workers are Chinese speaking.
The project started then, and then reformed that own thing after the internship ended and to think about how do we support Asian migrant massage workers, sex workers, coming from an occupational health perspective, which sounds boring, but really it's thinking about health holistically. Thinking of work as an important component of health because, oftentimes, this is my other rant on public health, is that work is being compartmentalized and separated from our ideas of health. Then meeting folks--
Shuxuan and I have a relationship from before and meeting other Asian-Americans and specifically folks who spoke Chinese to do outreach and connect with the workers. It's been really powerful to have a space to connect with these Chinese aunties and uncles. I think there's a cultural thing with, it sounds terrible, but the way we communicate love and relationship is not always very sweet and kind and gentle, but food is always present.
Shuxuan was a big part of making sure folks were vaccinated at a time when none of a lot of public health efforts did not really think about who are-- Iguess this is a separate thing too, just how so much of the relationship to communities mediated through nonprofits. Sanctioned by the city that sanctioned by the institution. They may have certain connections to certain groups of people, but really, like when you unleash the creative power relationship, energy of regular people who love each other, that's way deeper than what any institutional nonprofit can do.
I feel like that's how MPOP was able to do vaccine outreach. We're having conversations about safety to think about alternative to 911, but talking about race and US, which is not what we study when we take the citizenship test, they don't tell you about native genocide and slavery, it's slow but I feel like we have a really powerful team to work with.
Eva: One of the things that we're trying to do with 1 million experiments is really talk about some of the big picture ideas of how we get this work done, but the nitty gritty stuff too. Your talk, Shuxuan, about joy, your talk JM about coming home, I'm wondering if you can share what is the magic that you have created with MPOP that generates that feeling of home and joy for your members?
I know that, my work with CCWPs, I don't know what the recipe is yet, but that's why we keep coming back. It's potlucks, it's meal trains. It's having aunties and being an aunty and I'm just wondering if you all can help me articulate how MPOP does it, because I'm really not sure how we do it, but I feel like it's this recipe that I really want the world to share. I think that, especially when you're talking about inside-outside relationships, you're talking about populations that are so highly criminalized on a day-to-day basis where people are really, really fighting tooth and nail day-to-day, like how we can go into such heavy work with such joy and lightness sometimes.
Shuxuan: I don't know if we have fixed recipe. When I learn cooking from my family, a lot of time, we just keep trying different taste. I think that's how MPOP has been doing, really being very creative. We tried a lot of different things like hot pot or giving out gifts, candies, fruit, and homemade stuff, or self-defense training in which a worker spent 30 minutes argue with us saying this is useless. So many times, we're like, "This did not work." Even after that, the embarrassed moments, we're like, that was cute and we can laugh at it now afterwards. I think just the mentality of keep trying different things and trying to figure out what is the thing that the workers also find valuable and the organizers also feel like is fit with our mission.
I have to say the time might be the recipe. When it started in 2018 and when I joined in 2019, there were a lot of times when we knock on the door of massage parlors, and the workers were like, "Sorry, I'm busy. I don't want to talk to you. I don't know why you are here." Then during COVID, doing direct support of finding where to get testing, where to get the vaccine, and then masks, and just share some information. Now we have a group to later doing more training, like activity with dim sum. Obviously, everybody loves dim sum.
Too, at this moment, the workers will say, "You just need to have a space and we will make dumplings. We can all eat together." The time, and also the commitment to build a relationship, I thought like that's the recipe that I don't know if they worked or because they're staying hopeful.
JM Wong: Yes. I can chime in here. I think the two quotes that come up for me, one is attention is the beginning of devotion, and I think, in MPOP, there is a lot of attention that's placed, even in the small things of how like this dim sum breakfast plate, it's really cute, and it conveys love. The other quote that stands out for me is, I think it's a Kahlil Gibran quote, and its work is love made visible.
How do we show our love in that work? We are responding in moments of intense grief. In MPOP, we had the visual right after the shootings, that was such a powerful expression of community. Then in Free Them All, we did some healing conversations in the beginning when we were first encountering, just like the intensity of the pandemic for our loved ones inside, just to have spaces where you can release and acknowledge that grief and have that be transformed into other feelings that come up and to have people who care about each other enough to want to sustain that joy and sustain that small moment of uplift.
Just creativity and then showing up for one another but not being afraid of the heaviness. Not that toxic positivity. Joy, but a joy that's like, yes, this is the ebb and flow of the work and life.
Damon: You reference Free Them All, and I want to bring Cassandra into the conversation. We dance around in this show One Million Experiments clunky science class metaphors. One of them is the hypothesis. The notion of, when the experiment started or when the project started of Free Them All, what was it in response to, and what was the hypothesis or the projection of what was to come of that work? Then we can work backwards from there of where the results have led us.
Cassandra: I think what really sparked it is when COVID hit, we didn't know. Nobody knew anything. We didn't know out here. What we do know is that medical care inside of the department of corrections is treacherous pre-COVID. They don't care for the human beings that are in their care. When we out here were afraid for our lives and we didn't have answers, then we knew that the fear must have been way worse, and especially for folks who have loved ones inside, it was like, communication was slowly cut off.
It went from like, "All right, we're going to pull back programming, and then we're going to pull back visitation." Then it's just like a facility-wide shutdown in a way where folks are not being able to access phones as often. Not only did we not know, and they didn't know, but we couldn't communicate.
That was really, initially, how Free Them All came together was just like the only way to prevent so many people from dying inside is to let people out. Social distancing, not real life in prison. We know they're stacking human beings inside of prisons. Social distancing from each other but also from the staff like that was not real. Access to masks and hand sanitizer, those things were also not real. Our loved ones were making masks out of coffee folders. That's what they were using for masks, and hand sanitizer was not being given out because it has alcohol in it. The things that they were telling us out here are life-saving measures they had no interest in providing. It was just like, "Let's just lock them all in their cells, shut down the compound, and not let anyone move around, and cross our fingers." That didn't work.
The push of Free Them All was like, "Let them out, let them come home, let them be in the care of their families. Let them have access to the same care that we all have access to in this world, stopping pandemic where people are dying."
Majority of folks that are inside prisons are not sentenced to death, but COVID is essentially a death sentence if you catch it inside. That was the premise initially. A lot of our actions were trying to get folks to listen and to just decrease the prison population as soon as we could. Things have transformed over the last couple of years. The governor, I think they let out 1,100 people to show that they were trying to decrease the prison population. That doesn't even touch the prison population. Most of the folks that they let out were steps away from coming out anyway. They didn't do anybody any favors, they didn't transform or save any lives.
Then the narrative they build in is like, when they let those folks out, if one person ends up back in and like, "Oh look, we can't let people out because they're going to commit crime and come back." That narrative is what they used to stop letting people out. On top of COVID, what we all saw was a world on fire. George Floyd happened and it changed the face of how things were happening in legislature and around sentencing reform over here.
At the same time, we were saying free them for health concerns, some folks were starting to hear racism is real. The combination of all of the things that were going on really created a space where Free Them All then was continuing to push, like, "Let folks come home. Let folks come home for health reasons, but also let folks come home because you've injustly incarcerated hundreds of thousands of people across this country. The reckoning is happening. It's time to let people go."
Damon: Now that really resonates. I think the conditions were parallel in many of our life, populous in this land. I have deep recollection of, when we were first beginning to understand the pandemic, a multi-thousand car caravan around the Cook County Jail that we have here in Chicago. Just that initial energy, seeing one, it reconnected and remobilized a lot of folks that were already participating and supporting and advocating for decarceral strategies to get folks out. Then there was this moment. I don't know how we can parallel.
There was this moment of-- It is in even like the state's interest to release folks from this carceral violence. There was some play with it at first, and then, especially as uprising began, then immediately, this reversal and this counterattack of, "It is not the safety of the people in there we need to be concerned of. Letting out anybody that has been branded with the mark of the state is then inherently dangerous to everyone else."
This pushed that even like-- It's amazing how they seem to be so "evidence-based" on their things, but they subvert any of the logics of how like real evidence works. It parallels to when the FBI back in late 2014, 2015 had this Ferguson effect thing that they were naming of, now that people are demonstrating against police violence, police are afraid to do their job, and now crime is up, but like the "crime stats" haven't even been produced yet. They were just talking out their ass.
Similarly, this notion of, "We haven't even had enough time to see the effect of how letting folks out can one reconnect to families, or what does it do, or what resources do we actually need to build to support folks returning." There was just this immediate claim that this is dangerous. Then almost this reversal, especially from the "liberal corners". Yes, even though I'm not in Seattle, the story you were telling, I'm just seeing Chicago streets which, one, is just a lesson because my purview doesn't really go that far Northwest. There's so many threads that have been touched on that I can have some historical reference to, but my imagination is limited geographically. I think also the way that the racialized dynamics work in your space and hearing these migrant stories and hearing this international relationship to state repression. As someone who comes from a very-- There's a lot of conversation of Black and Brown solidarity in my space and in the spaces that I'm familiar with and the way in which I think Asian community is marginalized, and race not seen as, one last air quote, "statistically significant" in the conversation.
I guess I'll throw it back to y'all of what are the solidarities that exist in this Seattle space between these different communities, that folks from outside of it and I consider myself an outsider in this context, would be ignorant to, or would not have a lot of legibility of around. JM that smile is talking to me. You got to come on in, jump in the water. [laughs]
JM Wong: Thanks so much. I would say one moment that was really deep for me, speaking of MPOP, is when we did the visual to have Black and Trans sex workers, folks from…Indigenous people speak in solidarity with the massage workers who were killed. So much of solidarity is resisting also established narratives. I think when we had the whole anti-Asian hate moment, I'm not discounting the fact that that was anti-Asian violence. I think what I was sitting with a lot was the exceptionalization of that violence.
This is the welcome to America moment of whatever you thought was the golden mountain of the US is actually a land of racial violence. To have Black and Indigenous sex workers who experience this form of sexual racialized violence, be like, "What's happening to you is not new and we want to protect you too," I think that was a very different narrative from the mainstream liberal Asian narrative of "This is happening to us. How is this possible?"
The irony with a lot of those voices is they also hated on Asian migrant sex workers and massage parlor workers but would capitalize and benefit from the trauma and tragedy that they experience and Shuxuan here says a lot but I'm filled with rage and contempt for those forces and organizations. To have a moment of that solidarity, doing the vigilant for the workers that we connect with. To see that, I think, was really important and I think, for me, as an immigrant, I can speak English and a lot of my community can't.
To the extent that you don't speak the same language, you don't have access to the history and people, and communities of this land. People didn't have access or relationships with Black Trans women who do sex work who face similar kinds of violence. To have a moment where that connection could be made a starting point for that, it gives me some direction of how I want to keep doing the work. Cassandra and Shuxuan can speak more into this.
I think with Free Them All, the other part speaking on solidarity is I'm really inspired by the relationships of all of ones inside and how they organize across race. We get a lot of direction from folks inside on how to move with the Mutual Aid work with organizing.
Damon: Can you say what that direction looks like? Sorry to interrupt but I'm curious, some examples of that.
JM Wong: Just really seeing the struggles of each racial group as deeply connected. I think so much of DoC and the broadest state and institution is to do the divide and conquer. I've never been incarcerated and I can only imagine the way it plays out in there. The direction we get from folks inside is we are a collective and we have to unite to push back on these policies that impact all of us, and there are meaningful collaborations between different racial groups in there.
The API CAG, the Black prison of…which is the Latinx group, the native circle. They're always like, "This is us, and don't pick one apart from the other." I think we take a lot of direction from that in Free Them All's work.
Shuxuan: I do think, solidarity, it's a tough conversation in MPOP. When we think about the Asian migrant workers and to talk about cross-racial solidarity with them, considering a lot of them come to this country, do not speak English, then the Chinese language media targeting migrants, first-generation migrants are often filled with misinformation that is filled with anti-Blackness, anti-poor, anti-homeless.
When massage workers stay in their parlors almost 24 hours, seven days, and kept being fed with this information, we have a lot of tough conversation with them one-on-one arguing about this stuff. I also think that, in reality, when we think about solidarity for the purpose of abolition, the workers don't call police because they are also criminalized or they don't have language access and they're being treated badly by the police.
When they have situation that there are strangers or clients in their parlor staying there, refused to leave or ask for money, they will MPOP, they will call me and other volunteers who can speak both languages for translation or just for show up. A lot of times they just want the body to show up. This is not solidarity with consciousness, but the act of not calling police and then asking for community member to show up, for me, it's an action in solidarity.
Eva: That's why so much of One Million Experiments is talking about is how do we create those opportunities, those pathways, those stepping stones to a world where we are giving collective care. That smells like solidarity to me. I think that this comes up a lot in talking and labor organizing and in talking about solidarity with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.
Many of our actions, to me, as an abolitionist, are abolitionists actions, this refusal to call the police, this growing of community to think of alternatives of these ecosystems of collective care. That's not to put my ideology and paste that onto anyone else, but it's just to say, as an abolitionist, that's so hopeful because so many people are finding that path towards collective care in a way and divesting from police and divesting from prisons out of necessity. There's so many different layers of solidarity there. Also, just a really hopeful thing to see that we can get to the same page in a lot of different ways.
Damon: Cassandra, I'm going to come back to you now. I think there's this moment of pandemic and people being really provoked and being really concerned. Then I think there's also then been this false consciousness that we are in a post-COVID moment or a lot of that emergency, rapid response energy, at least, in context I'm aware of, have subsided a little bit back down to the mean.
I'm curious now, how the formation has shifted, grown, expanded, and particularly were there connections that were made over this, I think you call it this groundhog time of pandemic that has changed where the conversation is moving forward with our pandemic realities that weren't happening or weren't primarily part of the discourse leading in to that provocation?
Cassandra: I think that the way that things have shifted is just now we're a little more healing-focused. We're not post-COVID. At least, in Washington State, prisons are re-shut down again because we've got a COVID outbreak and a TB outbreak. In one specific prison out here, multiple folks have died in the last year for different medical-related things. The same suffering that was happening before COVID was a thing is continuing now and is amplified.
The thing is, is that we're all suffering differently now. We're not physically focused on suffering, but we're emotionally and mentally all exhausted. Everybody's exhausted inside, outside, we're all exhausted. I think, at least for me, with Free Them All and with organizing work, the shift has been to a healing space.
How can we not show up for each other? How can we show up for each other's families because the suffering from inside out, it's playing out with your parents, your siblings, your children. Everybody is suffering and a lot of folks are suffering in silence connected directly to incarceration. What people didn't anticipate is what JM was mentioning and the solidarity of folks inside.
The folks inside are powerful. They were powerful before COVID, before a racial reckoning was acknowledged, they were powerful. They communicate, they talk, they work as a collective, and we take instruction from them on how to move forward. It's the genius, the emotion, the love, that they move with, that continues to steer us now. How can we show up for healing for them? They're hyper-focused on their families and their children. How can we show up in community for healing for their families? That's what I would say. We're landing on healing now, and it's a long road because we're still in COVID, things are still being shut down. Healing is now till who knows when? Until prisons are burnt out. How about that?
Damon: Shame. I want to like mine a lesson or maybe a particular tactic approach to something you said. I want to go back to this notion and it ties into something that JM said of taking instruction. Less about what the instructions were or the specific ways those played out, but for folks who are listening, we actually have not gone deep enough talking about carceral violence of centering incarcerated people in communities and populations.
A lot of the experiments have been about the community and care work on the outside and how do we subvert our reliance on policing, but when we talk about abolition, we have to note that, one, the origin of abolitionist thought started with incarcerated knowledge, and the prison was the original site that then I think gave us the language to then be able to see police violence more clearly and more explicitly.
I think there are a lot of folks that can maybe be learning about their privilege position and eager to participate in solidarity work with incarcerated folks. Maybe even think that they're taking instruction, but what are some tactics you've learned or disciplines, or even ways to self-check, especially since this directly affected your family of how people who are ideologically aligned with supporting incarcerated people, actually in practice, show up in the way that is led by the survivors of this violence.
Cassandra: I think we're still learning. The biggest lesson that I took and maybe Free Them All took is that we don't have an answer on what that was like or how that works. The answer we thought we had, the way we thought we were showing up and always wrapping exactly what they wanted, was proved wrong in a time when communication was cut off.
Damon: Do you feel comfortable sharing how so? How this guy goes back to hypothesis, what you thought it was and then what was the challenge that unpacked that for you?
Cassandra: I think the biggest lesson, and I'll speak for myself, in what I saw in Free Them All is, as a person who's been supporting somebody inside for the better part of almost two decades now, my brother's been inside, I would tell you pre-COVID, before we were really diving into hitting the streets, I could speak for my brother. If you asked me a question, I would be like, "Yes, this is what he wants and this is what the collective he's working with wants" because I talk to him every day, and I am deeply involved in the organizing work that he's doing. I'm deeply connected to other folks inside.
I could say, with confidence, "Let's push forward, let's do this." There was always a checkpoint. I knew my brother was going to call every day. I could always say this is what I think you would want me to say, let me check in real quick. Well, when the call stopped or the JPay messages aren't getting through and you don't have a checkpoint and the world is literally on fire and you need to make a decision, how do you make a decision?
You don't have your checkpoint. You don't have a way to confirm that what you think to be true is true. You make your best guess, or you collectively talk to other folks impacted out here who have loved ones inside, who are doing the work and you all collectively make your best guess. It's not always right.
I think we learned that instruction always has to come from inside. Even if that means that we have to slow down our process out here, instruction always has to come from inside. It might mean some missed opportunities. It most always will mean missing out on money, which can hurt the organization down the road, but relationships are not about transactions.
Relationships are about building a base that can hold strong even if you miss that money, even if you go a couple of weeks without being able to talk to people.
In Washington, they use the whole for COVID isolation. If you got COVID, you went to the hole. You don't get out when you're in the hole on a regular basis, but especially if you have COVID. What happens when the presidents of all of your collective groups and the folks that are the most active in communication are all in the hole with COVID. You have to just wait.
Damon: For your illness to be met with torture.
Cassandra: Yes. I think we're still learning is the answer I would say. I don't think we figured it out. I think we are doing our best to continue collective conversations, but again, people are exhausted. Attendance at meetings slows down, communication slows down. People need some break and a breather, but unfortunately, the carceral system doesn't really allow spaciousness for taking a break.
They don't take a break in the abuse of our loved ones. We have to just figure out how to do it. Every day, I think we learn something new, and I don't know an answer in how to do it. I think the answer I thought I had was wrong. I think the answer I have is, I'm still learning.
Damon: I think that is the answer of, how do you-- For folks listening. That's so deconditioned out of us, especially in our schooling of there is a right and wrong answer. The only way to move forward is, another air quote, "with moving forward correctly". I think just that grounding of the commitment of, "I'm here, I'm just going to move. I'm going to practice, but also I'm practicing without the answers and accepting that, not being disoriented with that," and the humility of, we always start with this notion of time of, "I have to move through time in these liberated accountable ways," I think is something that folks should receive and ground themselves in.
Eva: On the ground here, what I'm hearing in this conversation is that there's been a real reckoning with speed and movement spaces. You talk about funding, you talk about relationship building, you talk about the speed with which people take our money when they capitalize on tragedy. I hope that part of what these conversations do for people is give us some spaciousness and thinking together and thinking across movement about how we can take control of the gas pedal once in a while.
Cassandra, you just put it so well, that they're not taking a break, and that allows very, very little space for us for rest, for reflection. I've learned so much from the people that we listen to organizing inside about the attention, and about the space that we need to give relationships and collective care for each other. Hopefully, that's something that we can continue to learn.
We're running out of time, y'all. I got so many things written down that I want to ask you and we don't have to do it in this space, but I'm so glad to meet you all today.
Damon: Do you have one that you want to prioritize, as we wind down?
Eva: We've talked a little bit about the joy that's come out of these past couple of years, the utter exhaustion that's come out of these past few years. There's a reality that when you are in it together, these trials and tribulations can bring us closer and can increase solidarity. We have those opportunities, and we've heard a little bit about how you all have taken advantage of those opportunities.
I'm wondering maybe if we can just talk a little bit about the hope that some of this relationship building and some of these lessons have brought out in your work going forward. What are the next things that you all extremely excited about coming out of not a post-COVID world, but coming out of a definite period?
Cassandra: Most excited about just this continued journey of healing that I think was so long overdue and is now the focus. I have been blessed with so many incredible additional relationships in my life like very close, I won't even say friends, I'll say family, that I've gained in this fight both inside and out. I'm just excited for us to continue to build relationships and to heal together so that we land together and we land holding space for each other and continuing in that way because the actual reality is this fight is lifelong, and if you don't have folks around you that are holding you in love, you just can't survive it, so check.
Damon: Shuxuan.
Shuxuan: Yes, I'll go next. I think, for me, to stay hopeful is very project-based. I'll try to do it in next project. For MPOP, now, when I look forward is we are doing worker retreats and we are inviting the term workers where they have a lot of relationship with, and are coming to talk about our dreams of having a worker center in Chinatown-International District in Seattle and our, not dream, a plan to do political education about racial and gender politics and working-class organizing in the US, and in China with workers in next year. I'm just looking forward to this conversation and looking forward to rolling out these projects. That's the thing that bring me hope and that sustain me in this work.
Eva: That is the most organized thing I've ever heard. My hope is-- Shuxuan, I feel you so hard.
JM Wong: I guess I can go. I've been thinking a lot about hope-- Sorry, I want to circle back to the timing and speed stuff. I think part of the slowing down and taking time is the recognition and holding of the ongoing presence of suffering. Wanting to eradicate suffering immediately is what gets us really reactive, and I want to honor that also as a very human response, even if it might not be the most sustainable, and taking time also means we have to sit with that pain.
These institutions are built over centuries, and we need a lot more people, a lot more resources to be able to destroy them. I think that vision hope as an anchor into the future and thinking of the small moments when we do have fun, when we do love in a way that is pretty solid, just between Shuxuan, and myself and Cassandra, we have been through so much, really hard things in the last few years.
To just imagine if we didn't have the pressures of White supremacy and poverty and trauma, and all that, what kind of lives could we be living? It would be really different. I think, being able to imagine that with, especially the folks were inside of, like, yes, if 90% of folks energies are put into trying to survive in this really really destructive system, if all their energy is freed up, what could be possible? That imagination and that possibility, I feel like is a way to hope and a way to navigate what is hard in the present.
Damon: I have a follow-up-- I don't want to disrupt Eva's beautiful, concluding question, but I just had a reflection that I was going to say in our conclusion. I was like, "No, I should ask you this instead of just receiving it and try to analyze it myself." One of the things I've been so intrigued by, in this conversation and what the connection of discussing the solidarity between these communities allows from your stories, and what you've told is so often when we have these conversations about violent racialized systems, the perpetrator commissioner, survivor, line gets very binary of like, "Oh, our community is surviving racial violence," or, "Oh we are participating and need to unlearn."
What I heard is, particularly in the Asian American migrant context, in protecting yourself from your racialized realities in this space, there was also so much challenge of subverting the information that's being fed, subverting this model minority, and so the having to do the both end at the same time, I feel like, to me, has to offer unique perspectives or dynamics to how all of us can learn how to create a more healthy collective society.
You spoke towards it or named it a little bit, but I just want to, in conclusion of-- in addressing the privileged relationship, but also the harmed relationship in this US context, are there things that you want to-- you don't want to be a spokesperson, but things you can offer to other communities about how addressing racialization from two directions can help us move forward collectively?
I know that was a lot and that's like a middle-of-the-conversation question. That's not a very good concluding question. I didn't want to answer it myself, which was what I was about to do, so I want to give that to y'all if you have anything to offer.
JM Wong: I'll try. Yes, I feel like I'm trying to find the answer as I'm living my life as I'm going. I think I'm really grounded in the history of this man. I think that is very important to not just to understand intellectually, but be in a relationship too, and be really humble about. Also, I want to honor and have dignity around my ancestry and the journey of my people. I think, ideally, it shouldn't be at odds. We can have dignity about who we, are and honor the structural position that we at in, but because the narratives are so dominant, it forces you one way or another. I think, for me, we need a different story. We need a global story. We need to find community that can sustain and feed into acknowledge this other alternative narrative.
We need to put in action to make it not just a story or a narrative, but to see the solidarity in action, and a quote from Hanan, which I botch, but we are not tied to the past. We create our history. We create our reality, which is not to say we're not shaped by the past. History has created the landscape we're in right now, but we do have the agency to have new openings to create our own legacy and community but that was very email.
Damon: No, that was poignant.
JM Wong: You thought, yes.
Damon: All right. I have like a million follow-ups that we could do, but I want to be respectful of y'all's time and just say, thank you. For me, as I was sitting here, I found myself doing much more listening than talking, I think, in a lot of conversations, because again, it's just the space I'm not familiar with. Hearing some of my assumptions be cracked through is something that I just really value and appreciate y'all's offering. I just want to say thank you.
Eva: I wanted to vocalize what our listeners can't see, which is what we're seeing now is we talked about hope. We talked about solidarity, and it's been so fun to be with you on this call and see people laughing and see people smiling. For me, to hold great sadness as well. In case, any of our listeners, you've missed every other episode and randomly got here with us today, one of our founders of One Million Experiments, Mariame Kaba, says that hope is a discipline.
It's something that my Google alerts tell me that people use every single day. That is what we're seeing in action today, Cassandra, and JM, and Shuxuan, it's beautiful to see you all building relationship together in this place. It's beautiful to see what comes out of all that intersectionality, and this is hope as a discipline. I know that, behind everything that we've talked about today, there are countless meetings, spreadsheets, Google Calendar. I mean--
Damon: Heartburns.
Eva: This is a hardcore organizing space today, and I appreciate you all. I know it was a lot to ask. We all ask for a lot of your time today, and I'm just so grateful to meet you. I'm saying this so that when I have a million follow-up questions in the future about the amazing work you're doing, that, hopefully, you answer my email. Thank you.
JM Wong: Thank you.
Cassandra: Thank you.
Shuxuan: Bye all.