The Atlanta Shooting Part 2: The Red Flag Flying Here

In part 2 of our analysis of the Atlanta shooting we zoom out to look at how the history of capitalist development in East Asia drove migrant workers to their deaths in a spa half a world away.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Yep, it's it could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart and some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans.
Welcome to the show. Today are guests fresh off their
new hit movie by Paramount Garrison Davis. Uh and and yeah,

(00:32):
what what what I'm doing? Like a like a thing,
Chris Garrison. Garrison's lost the thread? Why don't you pick
it up? I also have lost the thread? So here's
a new one. This has been very confusing for two
of an episode, absolutely baffling. Look, you want things to
not be confusing, you have somebody else introduce your podcast.

(00:54):
That's just the way it goes noted. Yeah, so what what?
Welcome to part two of the Atlantis Shooting. Um, we
are back with actually less Atlanta this time, but more shooting.
Oh good, Sorry, this is a very absurd. Really we've

(01:20):
found ourselves, Dear God, just a normal day at work.
Oh take it away, Chris, you got this, You got this.
We believe in you. There's there's a tendency, I think
among Asian American writers where when we get confronted with
what are you know, considered quote unquote Asian American stories,

(01:44):
there's almost inevitably and autobiographical pivot that happens like at
some points in the piece. Um May Jong, the author
of the Vanity Fair piece I mentioned last episodes, that's
been a major source for both these episodes. It doesn't
her piece, so do, I mean like dozens and does
and dozens of as American writers who are you know,
much more accomplished and talented than I am, and like,

(02:06):
I get it. I I don't blame them for it.
I think it's a powerful way to anchor a story
and understand the story. And I also think that it's
why we miss like half of the story that we
when we talk about things, because you know, the the
the audio autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the

(02:27):
scope into looking at just sort of the US. And
this story and the story of Asian Americans in general,
isn't just a story about sort of a minority in
the US or about American imperialism. It's about Asia itself,
and here especially it's about China and Korea, to lesser
cent Japan. And you know, the histories of these places

(02:50):
have as much to do with why the people who
died in Atlanta were in those rooms on that day
as Christian purity culture does. And you know, by by
bym actually looking at this, we we got to introduce
another key player in this horror show who only sort
of appeared change intially in part one, which is capitalism.
Because capitalism is about to show up and make just

(03:12):
all of this monumentally worse. Yeah. It's kind of like
Steven Seagal in that way. Yeah, I think more much
more active than Steven Seagal, but barely move yea. Capitalism
unfortunately moves at an incredibly relentless space. Yeah, Capitalism's knees
are an incredible shape. Yeah. So and and and this, this,

(03:35):
this brings us back to Atlanta itself. Now. Yo Fong
died a hero in the final moments of her life.
As shots rang across Young Zation massage, she motioned for
Marcus Leone, still half naked on the massage table, to
stay still and wait for her to walk in front
of him before he died behind the massage table by

(03:56):
covering Leon's movement as she opened the door, She sacrificed
her life to save the life of a man she'd
met just minutes before. Her award, in typical American fashion,
was a bullet in the head. It took six days
for her family in China to realize that she had
been killed. By village custom, the remains of an unmarried
woman who left the village could not re enter it

(04:16):
to be buried. Her body thus lay unclaimed in a
morgue for nineteen days before she was buried in the
land of her killer at a funeral's attended entirely by strangers.
Marcus Leone, the man Fong sacrificed her life to save,
was forced to return to work at FedEx just three
days after surviving the massacre. The sound of the packages
he dropped on his delivery runs sounded like gunshots. He

(04:39):
quit soon after. There is no justice in this world,
only an unending parade of horror, the details of which
are somehow each worse than the last. And it is Yeah,
this is I think what I wanted to sort of
what I wanted to talk about this episode, which is
that like, it's not just that there was a shooting,

(05:03):
it's that each element of why everyone is there is
its own successive horror story, and the conditions that produced
this horror or not, you know, they're not just two
conditions that produce robaderan long They're not just the conditions
that produced to shoot her. They're the conditions that produced

(05:25):
Dai Fung, who spent almost her entire life as a
miket workers, supporting a family whose most pressing concern was
attempting to marry her off. And and I think it's
worth tracing out these conditions and how they developed. Because
a twelve year old girl drops out of middle school
to work at a factory fifty miles away and that
eventually is gunned down by an American racist is not

(05:46):
how the future of Asia was supposed to go. Like,
you know, I don't have much love and imagine not Yeah,
it's like I don't have much love for Maw. But
I don't think if you showed Maw this, he would
be like, oh my god, this is the future that
I wanted for my people. Like this, things have gone
very badly wrong. And I think to understand how we

(06:07):
got to this hell, we need to go back to
another hell, which is the beginning of the Korean War.
And you know what, we've talked about the effects that
the Korean War had on Korean women in the last episode.
But I think there's a few other things that are
worth emphasizing here, one of which is that the absolute
devastation that the war wrought on North and South Korea

(06:29):
is incalculable. I mean, the effects of this is still
felt to this day. It was a utterly devastating war. Um.
But it also has sort of more subtle effects on
the sort of politics and economics of of the region

(06:50):
because what one of the you know, one of the
very important things about this war is that the US
is fighting in East Asia, and this means that the
US is going to eve an enormous army in South Korea,
which has its own military and sort of political and
economic consequences. And you know, those troops are still there
to this day, like technically fighting a war which has

(07:12):
never formally ended. And you know, we'll come back a
bit to this later. But this has a enormous application
for the entire region. Um. I've I've talked on bastards
for about like you know, about so many effects this has.
But you know, Korea and later Vietnam are a major
like the wars the US fights there are a major

(07:33):
factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees you know,
enormous U S investment as part of this attempt to
like shorten American supply lines by exporting their military industrial
complex to East Asia. You know, we talked about the
Japanese ankle with this, but South Korea is likewise industrialized
American capital for you know, pretty much the same reason. Um,
you know, and and and this goes on to the
extent that like Korean troops like fight on the side

(07:57):
of the US in Vietnam, and you know, in South
Korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal military
asset for the US war machine in the East. Now,
the thing I think, and I think I think that
part of it, like is understood decently well because you know,
if you if you if if you do if you
like you know literally anything about this region. You've you've

(08:17):
seen the effects of this stuff. But the part of
it I think is less understood is that in China,
this the war has a similar effect, which is that
communist leadership fights this war right, and it immediately becomes
clear to them that there is a looping possibility they're
gonna have to fight the US again. And if they're
gonna have to fight the US again, they need an

(08:37):
actual sort of modern industrial base to fight a war
against the US, and this, you know, this leads to
sort of militarization industrization, and you you get a look
at two very different kinds of state led developments, uh,
which I'm going to call state led development corruption and
state state led development socialism question mark, which sort of

(09:02):
which sort of play out in China and Korea. UM.
And you know, I think it's it's it's worth actually
talking about this because both of these systems are essentially
going to collapse, and when they do, they are going
to send an enormous number of people, both in China
and Korea, you know, spreading, spreading across the world seeking

(09:22):
like any kind of sort of economic salvation. And a
lot of the people who are killed in Atlanta are
in Atlanta because of these because of these crises. Yes. So.
So the first of these is the chapel system in Korea,
which is sort of informally established by the dictator Park
Junky is like the core of his plan for economic development,

(09:44):
and it generates a number of extremely powerful family owned
megan conglomerates with intimate ties to the state and these
sort of various political factions, and these conglomerates which control
just vast sections of the Korean economy. I like, like
like two this day, Samsung, which is the largest the
remaining Chabels, Like I think I think they're they're total

(10:06):
percentage of the GDP of Korea's like sevent cent or something.
It's like, it's it's absolutely absurd. Jesus, Yeah, like and
and and and like and the thing is that you know,
and it's sort of it's amazingly about this is that,
like the chabels are much weaker than the used to
be UM for reasons that we will get to in

(10:27):
a bit. And you know, when when when they're founded,
when they're sort of at the height of their powers
they have, you know, they're they're they're established with three goals. Um.
There's an attempt to develop the economy. I you know,
there's an attempt to sort of the fuel there'sn'tpt to
sort of fuel the American and South Korean war machines.

(10:47):
And the third thing I'm trying to do is to
make a lot of people in the government and their
allies indescribably rich. And it works sort of amazingly, which
is a weird thing to say about development regime started
by military edtatorship but they have. They have an enormous
amount of mill of American capital military aid, and like

(11:11):
they do successfully develop, they kill and enormous sumber of
people in the process, but you know they do it.
On on the other side, you have Chinese state light
developments and this is also about economic development and fueling
the military. But you know, the goal here is to
create an economic base for socialism and this does not work. Um.

(11:33):
There there there's number of complicated reasons for this. The
simplest one is that China just doesn't get the kind
of investment technology transfer South Korea gets until like way later. Um.
But the other really important element of this for this
story is about the urban world divide. And this is
another thing I've talked about Bastards like on I've talked
about on Bastards a bit, but I think it's worth

(11:55):
going into the details a little bit because otherwise a
lot of the stuff that's going to happen that is,
you know, the the part of the story that is
directly sending twelve year olds off to a factory and
Shenzen like don't make any sense without it. So to

(12:17):
make a very complicated and shifting set of economic programs
like as simple as possible. Um, Chinese industrial policy dread
what's sort of called the socialist period is about extracting
grain from the countryside and fuelly and funneling get into
urban industrial developments and you know, to get it, to
get it, like understanding of what we're talking about here.
So the CCP is essentially deliberately under developing the countryside

(12:40):
in favor of developing cities. And this is this is
exposed to state policy. UM. From from nineteen of the
Chinese population is doing agricultural labor, but agriculture receives less
than ten percent of state investments over the same period.
So they are like really really really incredibly not funneling
any resources back into into rural areas. Yeah, I mean,

(13:05):
is there a degree to that? Is their degree of
that that is maybe related to like I know in
the USS are a lot of the early left wing
resistance to the Soviet regime came from rural areas. Um,
is there anything to do with that, Like, is it
kind of a desire to avoid developing these places that

(13:26):
are less controllable? No? And this is this is the
sort of interesting about China, is that. I mean, Okay,
so the CCP originally has an urban base, but they
managed to get their retire urban base killed. So this
is this is this is the cause of like like this,
this is this is one of the reasons for the
sound of Soviet split. Like this is basically like selling

(13:49):
in Trotsky or bickering, and their bickering gets like a
million Chinese communist killed, and that means that you know,
this this this is this is where the sort of
rise of Mao comes in because Mao is as a
peasant organizer, and once the entire World Party is dead,
it's like, well, okay, so now we have a peasant
base and they have they actually have a really they
have they have like a basically unprecedented level of of

(14:10):
sort of buy in from the countryside. But the problem
is that the party just isn't interested in world development
because the thing that they want is they want to
be able to develop military power and they want to
be able to develop like heavy industry, and those aren't
things that they think you can do in the countryside.
And so their strategy is just to just i mean
just literally it's just pure grain extraction from the countryside

(14:33):
and then using that to feel industrial development, which they're
doing for I mean, largely ideological reasons, but it also
does have to do with the fact that China, like
like people people talk a lot about how like, you know,
the communist revolution in Russia happens and like the least
developed country in Europe, and it's like, yeah, but like
Russia had like several times more industrial capacity in Russian

(14:57):
Revolution than China does after the war. So this is
a country that is like a complete economic backwater. And
so you know this, this is this is part of
what they're doing. I thought, it doesn't it doesn't work.
And you know, I actually mentioned that there's one other
thing that they're doing here, which is that so they're
based in the peasantry is fairly solid. But the other

(15:21):
thing they have to use this grain budget for is
to buy off this like incredibly bilitant working class that
they've inherited, because these people are on strike like constantly,
and this is this is this is a really serious
problem for the CCP. And so they you know, they
have all these wealthare programs, they have all of this
sort of these resources that they're they're paying they're putting
into sort of buying off this class. And the result

(15:43):
of this is you have just incredible rural poverty because
like one of one of the things that happens here
is I guess, I guess you call the benefits, but
things like there's like housing, education, like medical care. This
stuff is all distributed like through your work and through
your household registration. And so you know, if if if

(16:03):
you're someone who has a job in the countryside, you're
the resources that you're getting are are also from the countryside,
and that means that you have just these like awful
underfooted services, your benefits are terrible, and even if you
can somehow get a job in the city, which is
really hard because China also has these like really intense
internal like immigration restrictions, so like if you're like in

(16:24):
another province that you're not supposed to be, like you
you will get deported back to your home province. There's
all these are these really tight controls, and this means
that like if you're in a rural area, like your
livelihood is tied to your family unit in a way
that's like not happening anywhere near as intensely in the cities.
And when I say your livelihood is tied to your

(16:45):
family unit, what I mean is that like other than
this like brief like token attempt they make to socialize
like housework, reproductive labor in the greatly forward men in
the state are just like higherly dependent on uncompensated housework
and production by women, which yeah, it's not just a

(17:07):
China thing. Yeah, I mean yeah, it's like okay, it's like,
oh hey, this sounds like your modern system and like, yes,
this is true. Um. But on the other hand, the
socialists like ideologically are claiming to be better from this.
So I'm holding them through their own standards and giving
them just liked on this because this is like yeah,
I mean, like I think this is really one of

(17:29):
like you know, okay, so they failed to end capitalism,
but I think if if you look at like what
is the other great failure of the Chinese Revolution, it's
that they never dealt with the patriarchy. And this means
like you know what, when when Mao is saying stuff
about like women hold up half the sky, like what
what he actually means is that like women's labor is
holding up like seventy percent of the budget and they're
getting like twenty percent of the pay. And this this

(17:54):
is extremely important for reasons that we will get to
in a second, because it turns out if your entire
economy is based on patriarchy, really bad things start happening
in terms of your gender politics, which is a thing
that has never has literally never happened in any other regime.
But we should not at all take any lessons from
this about how her own economy works. It's great, It's

(18:15):
completely fine. The other thing that we need to talk
about is the CCPs just utter full scale war against

(18:36):
urban workers. And this is not the kind of like
abstract class war that you hear Left is talking about
all the time. That's you know about like wages, unionization
and so forth. Like this is an actual war that
is resolved by the by just the p l A,
the Chinese army just butchering the Chinese working class. And
this comes to a head and the Cultural Revolution, and

(18:56):
you know, I have I have a whole rant about
the Culture Revolution that I will do time that's not now.
But the short version of it is that one of
the things that happens in the Culture Revolution is that
the CCP crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and
they kill a million people like from from from from Yeah,

(19:17):
I mean it's like it's really it's really slick. Comparing
it like to the scale of like the great anti
communist purges, like this is I think, I think it's
actually more. I think it's a million people. I think
it's more people than than Sue Hardo killed. It's like
there you go, see there's some left right unity. Yeah,

(19:39):
it's well, I mean Mount maw undisputed greatest anti communists
has the highest number of Communism kills. Well, I don't know.
Let's let's I mean, Joseph Stalin's in that running. That's true.
You've got to You've got to. You've got a couple
of Titans battling it out here. Yeah, it's it's it's
a definitely, it's it's it's a difficult choice. But yeah,
I mean like they are like like this is is

(20:00):
literally fighting a war against against certain workers. And like
this is even by like the mid seventies, there are
there are moments where the army is sending like tens
of thousands of work since a thousands of troops like
in the cities to break up strike waves. And this
is this is an enormous problem for the CCP. You know, Okay,
like it's anorways problem for them politically because it turns
out that being a communist party and then the thing

(20:22):
that you're doing all of the time is sending soldiers
to shoot workers is really bad for your political system ideologically. Well, okay,
that's your opinion. Yeah it does. It doesn't go great
for them. And and the the other problem they have is, uh,
you know this, this creates this like this incredible miilituization

(20:45):
of society and this legion s tegnation and there's all
this corruption that's happening. But the other problem is like, okay,
so if you're like a cadre like planner, right, and
there's always people on strike, you needed to not be
on strike because you need them to produce stuff for
your like central planning productions, ed rules, and so all
all of these like cadre planners start being like, okay,
these workers keep going on strike, like where where can

(21:07):
we get labor that won't do this? And they start
looking at the countryside and they start going like beard stroke,
can we send this over here? And meanwhile, like the
actual world, like real lights are fed up with just
being treated like shit and they start decollectivizing their farms
because Okay, there's a lot of reasons why they're doing this,

(21:29):
but they essentially start forming these things that become called
town and village enterprises, which are these like the civil's
explanation of it is that they basically start for forming
capitalist companies and trying to make money. But the ownership
structures are a bit different because they're like, you know,
it'll be like a village, right, and like the village
like technically collectively owns this like company that makes tires

(21:50):
or something, right, and this is where you start getting
markets coming back in China. And the CCP looks at this,
it goes like, yeah, sure this is fine. Uh the
this this won't stop our communism thing because we're having
budget shortfalls right now and if we let someone else
do this work, we don't have to pay for it.
And these so these town of village enterprises are called

(22:13):
tv s. Like mostly what they're doing is they're like
selling parts and stuff to like these giants. State owned enterprises,
which are you know, your state own enterprises are things
that are building like bikes, like tractors or refrigerators, so
they're like you know, they're selling them like wheels or
like refrigerator parts. And this is this is the thing
that becomes the core of the Chinese economy, particularly in

(22:36):
Dario Fung's home province of Guandong, because Gando is really unique,
well okay, really unique province, I guess is the thing
you can say about literally every province, but Gwendong is
particularly unique in this period because it's right next to
Hong Kong. And this means that, I mean there's always

(22:57):
been sort of like capital kind of through really shady
black markets and like people passing each other like notes
under dinner tables and extra like all all of the
weird like diplomacy stuff that like like Kissinger and Nixon
get up to is happening through these like weird back
channels that a lot of which are running through Hong Kong.
That there's a lot of stuff that's been sort of

(23:17):
running through there. And when this stuff starts to happen,
um you uh, Gwendong gets these special economic zones and
this becomes sort of the prototype for China's like eventual
sort of capitalist centric like export development model. Um Gwendong
is like they're they're literally there, They're they're they're they're

(23:39):
taking like form capital from Hong Kong, and they're using
it to produce good for the market. And this is
the world that Dano Fong and Shout Jitan grow up in. Um.
It's a world where on the one hand, there's enormous
economic growth, but on the other hand, like all of
the safety nets that Chinese socialism have put in place
are just like being completely destroyed, and everyone is once

(24:02):
again dependent on wages to survive. And it's also an
incredibly deeply patriarchal world, you know, and we've seen this
already right with Dion Fung's village, just like refusing to
bury her body because she's not married. And you know,
this is this is something that's only gotten worse as

(24:24):
the sort of as the eighties where're on you get
into their form period. You have simultaneous you have the
one child policy, which is this incredibly draconian state and
forced destruction of bodily autonomy, and it also serves this
really horrific role in devalue in girls because girls act
as having less economic value than boys. And so you

(24:46):
get all these things where like you get these you
get targeted like gender targeted abortions. They're these masterializations that happen,
and yeah, it's this just enormous patriarchal engine and it sucks.
And there's also there's a return to fusitionism as well,
because like, and this is one of the things is
like the most infuriating about this because like like of

(25:07):
like what the original Chinese Revolution was about was like, hey,
Confucianism sucks. Like this, this incredible like reactionary patriarchal ideology
is in fact bad. And then like forty years in
there like hold on, wait, what if we bring this
ship back? And it is it is it is extremely bad,

(25:30):
and you know, and it serves as a sort of
like like this pacifying picture archical ideology that they're using
to sort of hold the family unit together because the
family unit are like so there's a lot of the
firms in this period they're just like owned by families, right,
and you know, you you there's there's a lot of
sort of similarities here between if you look at your like,
you know, you're you're sort of like right wing like

(25:52):
culturally Christian like small business owner families, and you look
at this and it's like, uh, we've we've we've read
developed the wheel here we we have once again created
the patriarchal death engine. Ga who it's it's great, it's yeah.
And this this is basically this is the world that

(26:19):
Daniel fog Like grows up in. And this is the
period where the old urban working class is just hammered
to pieces so that the state and capital could just
gorge itself as well for benefits, and the new Chinese
working class is born, and this migrant working class, it's vanguard.

(26:40):
Are these women who are given to imperatives by their families,
and these these these imperatives are given I mean literally
Dayong fang like, Dayo fang Like directly and I think
indirectly to um shout git on well because like with
Dayong Like, we literally have the quotes of this right
like she she has told by her family get married

(27:01):
and find a job and shout shitan gets married off
at twenty but a middle school fong like drops out
of school and just goes to work in a factory
in Shenzen, and this like, these are the women who
built modern China like these are these are literally these

(27:22):
are the people who turned shens In from a tiny
rural town into a world class manufacturing cub that is
literally larger than any city in North America. And I
mean this happens in the span of like a couple
of decades, and they get jack shipped for it, like
the wages they are working for, Like Daland Fong's brother

(27:42):
is working on rubber rubber plantation. He's making five dollars
a month. And you know, in Dion Fong's case, like
the other thing she's dealing with is literally these constant
demands for a family to get married, and Fong just refuses.
They try to do it as a young adult. She
just goes no. And they try to to try to
get like when she's like three, like they bring her
back to a village and her like pick a husband.

(28:02):
She just goes no. And she just like they they
keep showing your guys gypsy coming like no. And you
know what she does instead is charter her own path
by managing to secure a visa to the US where
and this this, this is so Diaoe Phongs like is
a market worker for ages. And eventually I think, like

(28:24):
she wasn't sixteen, she loose to the US to support
her family. Again from Afar, there's there's only there's one
more piece of macroeconomics I mean to talk about before
we can follow Dione Pong to the massage parlor, and

(28:47):
this one is going to get, like everyone else, to
the scene of this massacre. So what when we last
left our Korean corruption chapels, business business is booming, and
in the early nineties, business is like even more booming.
It is this is this is the best I've ever
done economically. And the reason is the best I've ever
done economically is because is by in large part because

(29:11):
of the thing that I am just perpetually cursed by
when I do research for this show, which is the
plaza of courts um. I've talked about this before, but
I will once again do a brief summary of this,
which is that so in the nineties, as people probably
are aware of the U s the US manufacturing economy
is dying. And this is a real problem for Reagan
because everyone's like Reagan, why does the economy suck? And

(29:35):
his solution to this is just basically at gunpoint, forcing
Japan and West Germany to like let the US d
value its currency relative to the end of the Deutsche mark.
And it's like, Okay, this is a this is a
boring technocratic thing. But the thing it actually does is
if if your currency is weaker than another currency, it's
easier for you to like sell them to have an

(29:55):
export economy and sell them stuff. And this sets off
just like an incredibly catastrophic chain of events where the
US manufacturing actually comes back because you know, hey, hey,
look the dollars the dollars week and now we can
produce it again. But it just, you know it, it
combines with this like structural weakness Japan's economy, Japan's economies diplodes,

(30:18):
and Japan goes okay, funk it. How do we keep
the economy going without manufacturing sector? And their solution is
invest in other countries and do real estate speculation. And
you know, okay, so obviously nothing bad ever happens happens
when you do real estate speculation. And the Japanese economy
was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later. Um.

(30:40):
But this this is a series of effects. One of
them is that the Korean shables, you know, those those
companies that are doing like literally the best business I've
ever done. The reason they're doing this is because of
Japanese credit and the fact that like there's more complicated
currency bullshit going. But basically, like the value the value

(31:01):
of the Korean currency was pegged to the dollar, and
so when the dollar's value decreased, uh, the wand also decreased.
And so you know this, this this gives Korea like
a big manufacturing competitive manufacturing edge. But then you know,
Japan goes under and they start to lose credit, and
then the US and does the reverse Plaza Chords where
they just reverse the thing that they did before, and

(31:23):
so now the dollar is incredibly strong again. Every other
currency is really weak well due to it. And this
just like this just obliterates like every economy in East Asia,
like they all just implode. Thailand goes under, and most
of these countries that have never recovered, like Thailand particular,
like the I mean South Korea kind of does, but

(31:43):
it's basically the only one. All the rest of the
economies are just obliterated. And you know this, this is
this is the Asian economic crisis, and you know, saddled
with like enormous debts and declining profits, like these tables
started collapsing left and right, and South Korea just is
just on the edge of bankruptcy and right on Q
the I m F shows up and makes everything worse

(32:06):
because yeah, it's great, it's the I m F. They yeah,
they do, they do normal I m F stuff, and they,
you know, they impose a bunch of austerity measures. And
this just this annihilates the Korean middle class. Like it's
just it just gets obliterated. This is this, this is
just a death knell, and it it also has you know,
it has a lot of effects. But one of the
other ones is the Korean labor movements is really severely

(32:28):
damaged by just all the economic devastates that's happening around them.
And the product of this is just a sort of
rural poverty drives Dayong Fong and Ugon from their villages.
The economic collapse drives Kian Jung Kim Grant, who's one
of the other people who died in this shooting from

(32:51):
Korea to the US. And this is something that this
is there's there's something about the US here. Well, okay,
something about the US is that it's economy is incredibly strong,
and the dollar is incredibly strong, and even people who
come to the US for other reasons that the two
of the women who end up here like are here

(33:12):
basically because they buried someone. And but even that, you know,
they like there's a couple of people like they marry
someone and they break up and divorces them, but they
stay in the U s and they stay in the
US because like the median American income is like three
times the median American income in China and that's like now,
and so you know, and the combination of that and

(33:33):
the strength of the American the American dollars sort of
it brings. It brings the brave, the desperate, and just
the love struck to our shorees. Um. Now, if you
remember LCS Hernande's Ortiz, Who's who's the man that long
like shot while he was on his knees begging for

(33:55):
his life. Um, Hernando's Ortiz boy is in that mall
because she was wiring money home to his family in Guatemala.
And you know, we could do another entire story here
about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company and these the
US baccus and genocides. But I think the thing about

(34:16):
this story is that every atrocity is tied to every
other atrocity, you know, and it creates this web of
death that we sort of you know, we we euphemistically
call it capitalism or society or reality. And the survivors
of this are just flung from meat grinder to meet grinder,
desperately looking for a new life a new country, and

(34:39):
you know they get there in the country just buries
them instead. Yongfang was also you know, constantly sending money
home to her family when she arrives in the US.
She and she's supporting like ten members of her family
off of a salary. That is like I mean, like
she supporting to members her family off of the salary
that you get from massage work rich. Yeah, I think

(35:02):
that this is like like again, I think something that
people don't understand about the US is that like, yeah,
American wages are low, but the dollar is so strong
that even like like like small amounts of money that
you can send, like small amounts of money in dollars
you can send back home have this enormous economic impact.
And there is there is an enormous like an absolutely

(35:23):
enormous sort of network of of immigrants in the US
who are here basically to work in the center business
is back home, and this is I mean, this is
like this is an enormous part of just how the
economy the Philippines works because of yeah, a bunch of
the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the marcos Is did. Um. Yeah,

(35:44):
And you know, for for Asian women in particular, once
they get here, they're often drawn to spot work because
and there's there's a lot of reasons we'll get into
in a second, but these spas, the spas are in
some sense like a microcost of the US, Like the
pay is good, and the people doing the work often

(36:04):
like prefer it to other jobs that are accessible to immigrants. Well, okay,
they're accessible to immgrants with their levels of political and
economic capital and social connections, which is usually really not
that large. But the problem is, you know, as as
with everything in the US, it's also often dangerous, like
the particular kind of sort of exposure and performance of

(36:25):
femininity that you need to do. This leaves these workers
incredibly vulnerable to stockers, and you know, they face sort
of constant like racial massages abuse. Um Butterfly, which is
a Toronto based sex worker group, released a report that
said that half of all massage parlor workers reported some
kind of threat to their safety at work. Jesus, Yeah,

(36:46):
it's it's workplace is both incredibly dangerous. And then you know,
and when when when when we're saying like threat to
their workplace, that doesn't that's not even like, that's not
even counting the police. And if you've read anything about this,
you'll read people saying things like massage parlors faced constant
police raids, and this is true, but if anything, it

(37:06):
understands how bad it actually is because like Asian massage
parlors are subjected to two different kinds of police rates.
That just happened constantly. Um, I'm gonna read a thing
from BuzzFeed. Yeah, it's it's great, it's it's really fun
from three thousand six of people arrested for unauthorized practice
of a profession for any job requiring a license in

(37:27):
New York. We're Asian and nine scent where women. According
to data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice
Services and our prostitution is a misdemeanor defense Unauthorized practice
of a profession, which is the charge that covers unlicensed massage,
along with roles like veterinary medicine engineering, is a felony
that carries higher penalty, including up to four years of

(37:47):
jail time. Now I'm no expert, but that's sure does
sound like racism of that misogyny, because like, yeah, there's
an argument to me like if you're if you're moonlighting
as a bridge engineer and are not qualified, Yes, maybe
that's they're really just calling me out on on the
pod just right right in the garrison. We've agreed not

(38:11):
to talk about all of those people who died when
that bridge collapse that you built in Florida, on that
university campus. The thing of value was lost. No, it
was Florida. Like that's why, that's why the d A
is not coming after you. Yeah, u s government not
pressing charges. It's Florida. Mm hmm. So okay, back to

(38:36):
back to back to the racism. It's like, okay, so,
so you you have these raids that are like literally
only like targeted against Asian massage workers and then on
top and so that that's type one. And the second
type of raid is that the other thing that happens
at these places constantly are are these anti prostitution and

(38:56):
anti trafficking raids. And I'm putting both of those in
ormal quotations. You know, this is okay, I'm gonna gonna
go on a side tangent rant here, which is that like, Okay,
so like every single person who does reporting on this,
and I don't know if this is like a journalistic
standards thing, but like even the good reporting on this,
they like almost always have like a section that says, I, oh,

(39:20):
the the Georgia like Georgia's like resources on sex trafficking
says that, uh salon Asian salons are a place where
there's a bunch of sex trafficking. And it's like m hm,
really like this this this is what you're putting in
your article about a bunch of people getting murdered by

(39:41):
a racist dude, Like this is the thing that that
you're gonna put in here, and you know and like
this this is sort of like all of that stuff
that I talked about, like last episode about Robert Aaron Long,
like all of your gratification and the racism and the
horror phobia and that like mixture of like desire and
low thing like the cops have this. Like also the

(40:03):
journalists who are writing about this have this stuff, and
the the people who don't are sort of like picking
up on on the sort of like abbeyant racism. So
you get all this coverage that's just focused on like
trying to figure out if there was sex work going
on here. And you know, and like I talked about
last episode, like this is really dangerous because exposing people,

(40:24):
exposing these sites the police investigation means you get more
of these stings. And you know, like we we we
mentioned at the beginning that uh Da Young Fung like
no no one she knew showed up to her funeral.
And the reason that no one she knew showed up
to her funeral is that no one wanted to be
at a place where they could potentially be cops so
they wouldn't be deported. Right, How could anyone who knew

(40:47):
her come to her funeral because that would be well
and her her brother wanted to come, but the like
travel to the US was expensive enough. He was just like, yeah,
we can't do this. And you know, and like and
I that these these anti trafficking, anti prostitution raids are

(41:13):
so common that two of the Atlanta victims have been
arrested as part of raids like before this, and even
though both of them are innocent. Uh Sum Chung Park
was convicted of criminal trust passing anyways, again, which is
like one of the most insane things I've ever heard
in my life, because she was arrested at the place
where she worked and they convicted her of criminal trust passing.

(41:36):
Because this entire system is made up of just like
Robert are and long levels of racism, but they have
they have a legal outlet to do it so they
don't have to just go murder people and and sometimes
they still do. Yeah, definitely, yeah. I mean we talked
about very generous with that sometimes, Garrison. Yeah, I mean

(41:57):
there there there, there's a really horrific story of that.
There was there was a Chinese sex worker who the
NYPD like repeatedly attempted to force her at gunpoint to
have sex with them, and she refused and they so
and you know, because because she refused, the NYPD kept
doing raids on her, and eventually she died because she

(42:18):
jumped out a window trying to escape one of the raids. God,
because these people are just literal monsters. Um. Yeah, and
you know, Sung Chun Park like, she's convicted of criminal
trustpassing and she gets, you know, the sort of particular
American humiliation of being forced to wear an ankle monitor
that you have to pay for around your house while
being under house arrest. And I've I've talked about this

(42:48):
with the journalists, but again, like there, this is an
entire system full of robber eron lungs. It's the judges,
is the prosecutors, it's the social workers, is the journalists,
it's the cops. And this is this is an incredible
level of systemic state violence that makes these already tenuous
migrant working communities even more vulnerable because you know, if

(43:09):
someone's harassing them, they can't call the cops because if
the cops show up, it's like, oh hey, this is
this is even worse than the harassments. And that's I
think where I want to want to end here today
on with things that can actually be concretely done about this.
Help spot workers and sex workers. Um, there's two proposals
that spot and sex workers have been backing, one of

(43:31):
which is just ending the licensing licensing requirement from massages
because it's it's literally only ever used to target Asian
massage workers. Yeah, that seems that seems like a good call. Yeah,
it's definitely not the law, but oh yeah yeah, getting
it's getting rid of it. Clarify there. Yeah, yeah, I
mean it's you know, like this this is my this

(43:53):
is my my, my most libertarian position is just being
against like a lot of these licensing things, because what's
next a license to make your own toaster. If it's
a thing that people just do all the time, uh,
and in fact cannot be stopped from doing under any circumstances,
then it shouldn't require a license to do like flying

(44:17):
exact garrison, like flying a plane, like performing surgery, you know, um,
like being a police officer. Just make everybody everything all licenses. Sorry,
I've lost the thread. It's okay, I mean, well I
think that the actual thread here though, is that like,
you know, okay, so like, yeah, on the one hand,

(44:38):
in theory, it is good to have licenses that, you know,
like have a way to tell who knows how to
do something and who doesn't, Right, But the thing is
that's that's not what the does. Yeah, yeah, it's and
like and the thing that the state actually does even
with licenses, like and they do this driver's licenses, Like
even even with driver's licenses, which is the thing that like, yeah,

(44:59):
like people should know how to drive before you put
them behind like the four wheel death machine, Like what
do they do with it. It's like, oh, they used
to go after a documented immigrants because the state is
just incredibly racist and that this is the thing that's
happening with with these licenses is yeah, they just they
just do racism with it. Well, it's it's why you
can't have like the common sense I would be like, okay,

(45:20):
well we're gonna have sex workers, so there should be
some sort of system to make sure that people are
getting tested for things and that basically you know certain
safety procedures or that at least people know what safety
procedures are being you know, used at the place or whatever. Um.
But what it always boils down to is, uh, this
is an excuse for police to funk with vulnerable people. Yeah.

(45:43):
The thing that this brings us to is the second proposal,
which is just decriminalizing sex work, Like, don't prosecute people
for this, don't send the cops after them, just don't
do it. Like it it only ever causes violence against
people who are already the most marginalized people. It doesn't

(46:05):
actually help against trafficking either, makes it makespend against trafficking
actually harder. People feel not able to talk about things
when they see stuff that's questionable. It's it's I'm sure
we can do more content content. Um, I'm sure we
could do more stuff about sex work in the future. Um,
but yeah, it really should be uh not a crime. Yeah,

(46:28):
And I think this is something like you know, it's it.
It reminds me a lot of like of of the
anti trends stuff where it's like, Okay, so you should
care about the stuff because you should care about trends people.
You should also care about the stuff because it affects
people who are not trans and this this is this
is this thing where these massage workers are like most
of them are not sex workers and it doesn't matter

(46:50):
at all, and it's the splash over effects are hitting
them too. And yeah, the consequence of that is eight
people are dead. Yep. Yeah, go hope your local sex
work or organizations and go hope you help your local
spot workers associations like get rid of this licensing stuff
and fight for decriminalization because this, this, this kind of

(47:15):
ship doesn't have to happen and we can. This is
something that we actually can concretely do and when that
will make an enormous number of people whose lives are
incredibly precarious enormously better. Yep. Okay, so we have already
seen before our eyes that you can do. You can

(47:36):
do things that involves safety where the police are just useless.
We we have seen we we we have seen. We
have seen Zach. But what is his name? Zack? Yeah,
Zack is his name. Yeah. Yeah, but look we we
we we we have we have yeah, he rules. We
have seen bodega Zach out with like outdoe the entire
police force, even after literally the guy called them the

(47:58):
churn himself in and Bodegas acts still got there before
they did. The entire New York Police Department n't himself
in and left his wallet and gun at the scene. Yeah,
then again, this is this is this is this is
this is a ten billion dollar police force. The thing
that the thing that they mostly do is harass homeless

(48:19):
people and sex workers. For the love of God, we
don't need them. We could, like literally one man could
do their job for them. H yeah, get get rid
of them. Okay, yeah that sounds nice. Okay, Well there
we go. We did it. Happy episode, everybody. It could

(48:46):
happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
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