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Menace Too Society

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  10 minutes (2,378 words)

It’s taken two years for #MeToo to wake up France, but at least it did. The country appears to finally see the men it has created, which is more than can be said of North America, trapped in the cancel culture stage, calling out everyone except itself. That lack of self-awareness is easy to miss, though. There’s a lot of wokeness floating around these parts — we even have a “woke” princess, although Meghan Markle’s self-appointed royal defection alone could never really loosen the monarchy’s grip on Britain. And for all the hand-wringing by Hollywood stars over diversity, there is once again an established structure above them that resists the change they represent, one that inevitably rears its head in heavily white male awards seasons. France appears to know this now, but only because it was told so by a woman it nearly destroyed.

“I’m really angry, but the issue isn’t so much me, how I survive this or not,” French actress Adèle Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I want to talk about an abuse which is unfortunately commonplace, and attack the system of silence and collusion behind it which makes it possible.” The 31-year-old Portrait of a Lady on Fire star was talking about her alleged abuse from the ages of 12 to 15 at the hands of her first film director, Christophe Ruggia, who was in his 30s at the time. In a follow-up sit-down interview with the same site, Haenel emphasized that she wasn’t canceling anyone; this wasn’t about censoring individuals, but about calling attention to an entrenched society-wide ill and the culture that upholds it. It was this depersonalization that seemed to free up France to reflect, something still largely missing from U.S. conversations — from #MeToo to inclusivity in entertainment to royal affairs — that are all rooted in a foundational hierarchy the entire population is complicit in preserving. “When we come up against the control of the patriarchy,” explained Haenel, “we talk about it as though it were from the outside, whereas it’s from the inside.”

* * *

Barely a week into the new year, two of the most celebrated members of the most prestigious institution in the U.K. turned their backs on it. On January 8, the Sussex Instagram account dropped a shot of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with 195 words that defied centuries of British tradition. “After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution,” it read. “We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent.” The announcement, which also stated the couple plans to split its time between the U.K. and North America, came not long after the airing of an emotional ITV documentary in which Markle admitted, “I never thought that this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.” Anyone who watched her say that, who saw the same defeat in her face that they saw in Princess Diana’s decades prior, who saw Harry’s frustration at the thought that it could all happen again, who saw the royal family barely ripple in response to Prince Andrew’s association with a registered sex offender, would not only understand this separation, but expect nothing less. How else to exercise your opposition to a patriarchal empire than to forsake its number one emblem?

But the media took it personally — it was a door slammed and shut tight in the face of their badgering, which had become as much of a presence as the royals themselves, a constant reminder of British society’s supplication at the feet of an outdated overlord. Piers Morgan expressed his preference for the old prince, the fratty drunk who cosplayed a Nazi, amid reports that Madame Tussaud’s had swiftly relocated the royal couple’s wax figures from its esteemed collection. The local response reeked of personal injury, as though the duo had turned its nose up at the greatest gift the country had to offer, rather than what they actually did: kicked off a long-awaited internal confrontation with the colonial inheritance of a populace that insists on running on its fumes. As Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, told NPR, “Instead of taking this as an opportunity for introspection as to what is it about the upper strata of British society that is hostile for a person of color like Meghan Markle, what we’re seeing now is the British media just lashing out again and blaming everyone except themselves.” “Everyone” being “non-aristocratic, non-white interlopers,” which is to say, the people who actually populate Britain. 

If Prince Harry is the future, Prince William is the past, and it’s fitting that he not only presides over the kingdom (or will, one day) but its version of the Oscars. The day before his brother’s adios, the BAFTAs announced that for the seventh year in a row, no women were nominated for best director, and in addition, all 20 of the acting nominees were white. In an internal letter, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ chief executive Amanda Berry and film committee chair Marc Samuelson called the lack of diversity “frustrating and deeply disappointing,” as though it were entirely out of their hands. Yet the 8,000-member committee is chaired by Pippa Harris, who cofounded a production company with Sam Mendes nearly two decades ago, which may explain why 1917, the war epic Mendes directed and coproduced with Harris, was the only nominee for both best film and best British film. This sort of insularity may be unspoken but it is not inactive, it has repercussions for which films are funded and how they are marketed and ultimately rewarded. 

“BAFTA can’t tell the studios and the production companies who they should hire and whose stories should get told,” Samuelson told Variety, deflecting the blame. But the academy’s site claims it discovers and nurtures new talent and has a mission that includes diversity and inclusion, so why does its most recent Breakthrough Brits list appear to be three quarters white? As former BAFTA winner Steve McQueen observed, there were plenty of British women and people of color who did exceptional work in film this year — in movies like In Fabric, The Souvenir, Queen & Slim, and Us — and were nonetheless overlooked, implying a more deeply ingrained exclusion, the sort that permeates British society beyond its film industry and keeps the country from actually perceiving non-white, non-male stories as legitimate art. Snubbed Harriet star Cynthia Erivo confessed to Extra TV that she actually turned down an invitation to sing at the BAFTAs, evoking Markle’s absences from a growing number of royal engagements. “It felt like it was calling on me as an entertainer,” Erivo said, “as opposed to a person who was a part of the world of film.”

Awards as a whole are representative of industry-wide limitations, which, as ever, are tied to the dominance of a particular group in the larger society. The Oscars, dating back to the ’20s and established to garner positive publicity for Hollywood (while extinguishing its unions), seem to persist in the belief that that is tied to white male supremacy. I probably don’t have to tell you the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just elected another middle-aged white man as its head (David Rubin) and has a member base that is 84 percent white and 68 percent male. And that’s an improvement after April Reign’s viral 2016 #OscarsSoWhite outcry. “It’s not about saying who is snubbed and who should have been nominated,” Reign told The Huffington Post at the time, “it’s about opening the discussion more on how the decisions were made, who was cast and who tells the story behind the camera.” And yet the response, as always, has been tokenism — one black nominee here, an Asian one there, a one-for-one reaction to cancel culture which provides momentary relief but no real evolution. The individual successes of Moonlight and Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman and even Parasite, not to mention Spike Lee being named the first ever black Cannes jury head, can’t ultimately undo more than 100 years of white male paternalism. The Oscar nominations this year, dominated by four movies that are very pale and very violent — Joker, 1917, The Irishman, and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood — encapsulate the real soul of Hollywood and the society in which it was forged. It is no mistake that, as The Atlantic outlined, the ceremony neglects “domestic narratives, and stories told by women and people of color.” Harvey Weinstein, who turned awards campaigning into a brutalist art form while allegedly brutalizing women behind the scenes, may no longer be the Oscars’ figurehead, but his imprint endures.

À propos, Les Misérables, a gritty drama about a bunch of men facing off with a bunch of other men (oh, and some boys too) in a poor neighborhood in Paris, was the French submission to this year’s Oscars instead of Haenel’s critically preferred film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a lush period romance about two women in love. It was that film’s director, Céline Sciamma, for whom Haenel returned to acting in 2007 with White Lilies (and with whom she had a romance off-camera) years after her experience with Ruggia drove her from the industry. Though she opened up to Sciamma about being sexually abused, Haenel didn’t go public until she was firmly established with two Césars (the French Academy Award equivalent) to bolster her legitimacy — she knew that otherwise society, French and otherwise, sides with men. “Even if it is difficult to fight against the balance of power set out from early adolescence, and against the man-woman relationship of dominance, the social balance of power has been inversed,” Haenel told Mediapart in November. “I am today socially powerful, whereas [Ruggia] has simply become diminished.” This was a crucial but deemphasised aspect of the shift in America which took place after a slew of A-list white actresses — women who were held up by society and thus listened to — accused Weinstein of abuse, a shift which did not take place after a slew of lesser known women, many of them women of color, accused Bill Cosby. (That the latter is black no doubt also played into the country’s lingering racist belief that all black men are latent criminals, so obviously he was a predator, right?) With none of these longstanding prejudices addressed, however, they risk being repeated, as the system which permitted these men to abuse their power prevails.

“What do we all have as collective responsibility for that to happen. That’s what we’re talking about,” Haenel said in her sit-down interview. “Monsters don’t exist. It’s our society, it’s us, it’s our friends, it’s our fathers. We’re not here to eliminate them, we’re here to change them.” This approach is in direct opposition to how #MeToo has been unraveling in the U.S., where names of accused men — Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Matt Lauer, R. Kelly, Louis C.K., Weinstein — loom so large on the marquees that they conveniently block out reality: that they were shaped by America, a place that gives golden handshakes to abusers, barely takes them to trial for their alleged actions, and sometimes even cheers them on. It’s not that women here have not been saying the same thing as Haenel, it just seems to be that their message is lost in the cacophony of proliferating high-profile cases themselves. Haenel’s resonance sources from not only the relative anomaly of a French woman of her stature making such claims, but also the fact that she is so much more famous than her alleged perpetrator and that her age at the time makes it a clear instance of abuse. Perhaps it also has to do with her disclosure coming amidst the ongoing yellow vests movement, which has primed France’s citizens to call for all manner of accountability.  

Haenel’s alleged abuser has since been charged with sexual aggression against a minor, though she initially refused to go through the justice system, which she saw as part of a deeper systemic bias that resulted in her abuse. UniFrance, which promotes French films internationally, has openly backed the actress and is in the process of creating a charter to protect actors, and, in a historic move, the French Society of Film Directors dropped Ruggia, its former copresident. Meanwhile, Gabriel Matzneff is also being investigated following the publication of a memoir by Vanessa Springora in which the publishing head describes her teen sexual encounters with the then-50-something-year-old French writer who has always been open about his affinity for underage girls and boys. And the same country that supported Roman Polanski in the aftermath of child sexual assault allegations several years ago is now protesting him in the wake of Haenel’s disclosure. As she said when asked about the Oscar-winning filmmaker on Mediapart, “the debate around Polanski is not limited to Polanski and his monstrosity, but implicates the whole of society.” The French media calls Haenel’s #MeToo story a turning point, one which highlights not the individual — even she expressed regret that it fell on one man — but on a society which believes victimization is in any way excusable. 

* * *

“It’s possible for society to act differently,” Haenel said. “It’s better for everyone, firstly for the victims but even for the torturers to look themselves in the face. That’s what being human is. It’s not about crushing people and trying to gain power, it’s about questioning yourself and accepting the multi-dimensional side of what a human being is. That’s how we build high society.” Up until this point we have been primarily concerned with identifying the bad seeds and having them punished and even removed, without really wrestling with the environment in which they have grown — doing that means facing ourselves as well. We name names and call out institutions — like Hollywood awards and the British royal family — and then what? What remains is the same system that produced these individuals, these same individuals simply establishing new institutions with the same foundations. Identifying what’s wrong doesn’t tell us what’s right. It wasn’t until Haenel was introduced to a filmmaking crew that was entirely female, that listened to her and supported her, that she could identify not just what shouldn’t be, but what should. “What society do we want?” she asked. “It’s about that too.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

China’s Communist Government Has a Strong Hold on Chinese Corporations

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JD.com is the largest e-commerce company in China. In Communist China, it’s not enough for large companies like JD.com to be profitable — they must serve the goals of the Communist Party and benefit the country as a whole. For The New Yorker, details the clever ways that the company uses rural villages’ existing social networks to recruit new customers and employees, which has allowed it to improve Chinese life and possibly help slow the exodus to cities by giving villagers an incentive to remain in the countryside.

For the country’s leading tycoons, keeping in the government’s good graces is a well-established habit. During our conversation, Liu repeatedly spoke of company strategy in terms of deeper ambitions for the country as a whole, framing economic advancement as a civic virtue. A thirty-year economic miracle was not enough in itself, he said; one also had to “lead society in the right direction and bring in positive energy.” “Positive energy” is a phrase much used by President Xi Jinping, and my conversation with Liu took place less than two weeks after the Chinese Communist Party’s Nineteenth National Congress, which had signaled a tightening of Xi’s grip on the country. It has become evident that, compared with his predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, Xi demands more direct and explicit fealty from corporate titans. Recently, he stipulated that all publicly listed companies must establish a Party branch in the workplace.

Ryan Manuel, a political scientist at the University of Hong Kong, told me that, until recently, there was a cautious symbiosis between the government and Chinese tech giants, an outgrowth of forms of Internet supervision dating back to the early nineties, when the Web first came to China. But Xi, Manuel said, is now “putting the onus of censorship on the companies themselves, and dealing with them the way he managed his anti-corruption campaign.” The message is clear: as long as executives follow the Party line and police their own organizations, companies will be given permission to thrive, and championed as evidence of China’s soft power. But if there are transgressions the Party will target company leaders, even people as famous as Liu or Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma—or Wu Xiaohui, the billionaire C.E.O. of Anbang, one of the largest insurers in the country, who, in May, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after being convicted of fraud and embezzlement. Manuel said that, in such cases, the charges are frequently opaque—“corruption,” “ideological failings”—but the fates of the company and of its top executives are sealed.

As a result, the recent public utterances of business leaders have displayed a new caution, coupled with an extravagant eagerness to demonstrate loyalty to the Party. A couple of weeks after I met Liu, he was named the head of a poor village south of Beijing, and he quickly unveiled a five-year plan to increase its wealth tenfold. Last year, he made a remarkable announcement on TV. “Our country can realize the dream of Communism in our generation,” he said. “All companies will belong to the state.”

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In Defense of Boris the Russki

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Ayşegül Savas | Longreads | January 2020 | 10 minutes (2,603 words)

Recently while running, I listened to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch on audiobook. It was recommended to me because of my interest in suspenseful novels and books about art.

An hour into listening, I was puzzled by the book’s two-dimensional characters and unbelievable plot twists. Back from a run, I read that although the book had won the Pulitzer Prize, there’d been some controversy surrounding the award. Francine Prose drew attention to Tartt’s lazy clichés. James Wood described the book as a children’s story. The Paris Review, London Review of Books, and Sunday Times had similar things to say.

Several chapters later, I realized that none of the criticisms had objected to the book’s racism. After another search, I was relieved to see that one article on Salon questioned the book’s “wishful portrayal of people of color,” all of whom played the part of loving, docile servants. The writer carefully dissected these characters, revealing the “banal multicultural textbook” fantasy of an old world with its antique paintings and selfless servants, which continually looked away from real racial dynamics.

But by the end of the article, the writer had still not mentioned, in her meticulous study of racial blind spots as they applied to peripheral characters, the racism at the book’s very center, in the character of the Russian Boris who is the protagonist’s nemesis and best friend.

I’m especially surprised that this had gone entirely unnoticed in the U.S ever since the book’s publication in 2013, even though literary conversations of the past decade have often simultaneously been conversations about identity.
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Leadership Academy

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Victor Yang | Longreads | January 2020 | 16 minutes (4,128 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

To my mother; Wendy; and all my teachers

I locked my rickety bike in Boston Common. My dress clothes were stained with sweat. In the park’s public bathrooms, I maneuvered my armpits against the hand dryer. A block over, I shivered in the conference room’s AC.

“Tell me about yourself,” asked the woman across the table. I told her about my family. My father’s mother was killed in a fight with her neighbors in rural China. My mother still struggled forming a sentence in correct English. For the past decade, she had been making $14 per hour as a lab tech and cleaner.

“Her fight is my fight,” I said. “It is the fight of all the workers in your union.” My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour. The year after I came on staff, we would win a contract to bring them up to $20 per hour.

My future boss nodded. “What was it like going to Harvard?” She was holding my résumé in her hands. Her smile was curious. She didn’t question my intentions, unlike two prior interviewers who pointed to my Ph.D. from Oxford. They wondered out loud if their job was a twentysomething idealist’s version of a tour stop in fighting poverty.

She hired me as an organizer for the janitors’ union. I was the son of a working-class immigrant and a graduate of two of the most elite universities in the world. I sold myself as candidates do in their stump speeches. Vote for me, and I will bring every American into the middle class. Those politicians may have graduated from Yale and Stanford, but they always mentioned family hardships. Their mother had been laid off, or their grandfather became homeless. As if the steps on the class ladder were like colors on an artist’s palette. Mix enough of them, and you can dull the shine of your Ivy League degree and the gold in your bank account. A humble gray in America’s melting pot.

We get jobs for many reasons other than pure merit: the people we know, the schools we attended, the stories we tell. I told the story of my mother’s failure.

* * *

Wendy wielded a knife with the same scary proficiency as my mother. With a plantain in the palm of her left hand, she’d flick her right wrist. Chunks fell in rapid succession from the peel into the sizzling oil. I hovered in her kitchen or just outside of it. We both wiped sweat off our brows. Her apartment boasted a view of brownstones and sidewalk cafés, but the management company had sealed the windows half shut.


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“What is it like to live in the world of the one percent?” I asked. Wendy laughed, the bulge of her belly shaking, the part of her body she called a colchón. Her mattress. Rents in Boston’s South End had climbed to $3,000 for a one-bedroom like Wendy’s. But she had government-subsidized housing. She was the only person in Boston I knew who could afford to live alone. Rent was proportional to her salary, so she only paid a few hundred a month. She didn’t make much as a part-time janitor.

My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour.

On the first shelf of her TV stand, she showed me her ceramic sandals with the fat pink thongs, watermelon slices painted an artificial red, and the miniature pigs with etched-in parentheses for noses. Each set in her collection came in twos, with little dots on top. “Salt and pepper shakers,” she explained. “We resort to simple joys as poor people, no?” I cringed. At the union, I made $50,000 a year, double my mother’s salary, and almost quadruple Wendy’s. Like all union members, she paid two percent of her salary in dues. Every last cent of my paycheck came from their pockets.

I didn’t say this. Instead, on my visits to Wendy’s house, we took turns guessing at and delighting over how little we spent on our respective outfits from Goodwill. I had been shopping at thrift stores for years because of my mother. “We’re not poor anymore,” my mother said. But she still scoured Macy’s racks for clearance deals, and I still got my clothes secondhand. Thanks to a lifetime of learning from my working-class mother, I could grow close to working-class Wendy.

* * *

My mother blamed Harvard. “They made your head too big,” she said. In her words, I was “wasting my education to help poor people.” As a kid, I promised to win enough scholarships to earn back the money she had forsaken as a stay-at-home mom. On a trip back to China when I was in fifth grade, she brandished a bestseller in the bookstore: 哈佛女, Harvard Girl. Not in her worst nightmares would I use my Harvard education to become a labor organizer.

Members of our labor union cleaned toilet bowls and office floors. Union staff like me were called organizers, charged to clean up social injustice. I worked in the union’s political division. During my time there, I led our union’s workers to become the major force behind a historic upset on the Boston City Council, electing the first-ever woman of color to a conservative seat. We won millions of dollars for affordable housing on the state ballot and passed pro-immigrant legislation in a Trump-esque city. To achieve the American Dream together, we said.

“So you’re just 造反,” my mother said. The first character is the verb to make, the second is to turn over. Together, they denote rebellion. In Chinese, it means you’re up to no good.

I want to do right by you, I wanted to tell her. Others shouldn’t have to suffer the way you have. Instead, I said, “I’m not a troublemaker.” I struggled to describe the job in my limited Mandarin. “Think of me as a teacher.”

I was a teacher. I served as the lead educator for the 18,000 workers in our union. The vast majority were Spanish-speaking janitors, many of them immigrants my mother’s age. My boss charged me with launching a yearlong education program called the Social Justice Leadership Academy. I ran workshops to educate our members on campaigns we were pursuing for economic and immigrant justice.

The first step was to recruit a cohort of 30 students. My boss gave me a name to start with. “Wendy,” she said. “She’ll do the program.” A few days later, a tall woman took a seat across from me in the same overly air-conditioned room where I had my first interview. Wendy was about my height, almost six feet. With her small-rimmed glasses and collared shirts, she could have passed as my teacher. “I just want to learn,” she said. Unlike the version of me who had sat in that same interview seat, she wasn’t claiming to want to change the world, nor rewrite a history that had befallen her mother. She didn’t harbor grand illusions.

I had been in the job for a month and was playing gatekeeper to people who had fought in the union for decades. They had gone on strike, survived civil wars, and raised kids older than me, but somehow I managed to gather up 20-some sheets of paper: 20-some students who signed contracts to attend every session. The Academy consisted of one Saturday class every month from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Many of our workers were trying to cobble together rent money and legal status. The union had answers, we told them. We were on the road to win a $15 minimum wage and laws to protect undocumented immigrants.

Wendy attended every single session, but she was the exception. In the first year of the program, the union hall was so empty, it looked more like a warehouse than a classroom. The few windows were in an offset part of the room, facing high-rises that blocked out the sun. From the ceiling, exposed wires and strip lighting glared onto us. People rolled in hours late, if at all. I’m sick. I took an overtime shift. I have to cook for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow. I didn’t blame them. Nothing could replace time spent with family, I believed, even though I moved away from my parents 10 years prior.

Every month, I stood up and opened class in my amateur Spanish. Everyone else in the room was a native speaker. They were the ones who had snuck children across the border and battled abusive husbands. Yet I was supposed to teach them about immigrant and gender justice.

Officially, the Leadership Academy intended to equip janitors with the skills to lobby politicians, rally coworkers to action, and win campaigns for immigrant rights and economic equality. I had my own agenda, too. I wanted our union members to feel human, to learn and dream beyond their day-to-day work. It was jarring to bump into them on the job — say, at the airport on my trips out of Boston. In the terminal bathrooms, I was a vacationer with disposable income, and they were blue uniforms scrubbing toilets and pushing trash carts. In the tight aisle between the urinals and sinks, everyone rushed past them. I, too, avoided saying hi. I didn’t want to acknowledge how my workers spent their waking hours, invisible. It reminded me of seeing my own mother on the clock. In uniform, she was not the intelligent woman who raised me, but a faceless low-wage worker.

I made myself a pledge for the Leadership Academy. In my class, janitors would be teachers. I divided up the workshop content like slabs of pork, preparing word-by-word scripts for them. America’s borders exclude people based on their nationality and skin color. Sanctuary cities prohibit cooperation between immigration authorities and local police. I gave workers private lessons in the history of redlining in the U.S. and the process for bills to become law. My boss thought it’d be too much material for them to handle. But I took on the responsibility. I wanted to show that low-wage workers were capable.

I had seen my workers hold their own in political debate about Colombian politics and U.S. elections. But in front of our classroom, they stumbled over the awkward Spanish I had written for them. “Isn’t this your job?” they asked. They were janitors, and I was their teacher. School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

* * *

My mother was brilliant. When I was in middle school, she was a two-kid parent, a two-job holder, a four-course Chinese dinner cook, and a community college student taking eight classes a semester. Sometimes I’d sit next to her after school, just outside the kitchen. She could slice onions, keep her eyes on my geometry homework, and arrange car pools on the phone, all at the same time.

School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

I used to apply to jobs on my mother’s behalf. On her résumé, I dropped her degree in electrical engineering and a decade of work in the ’80s as a programmer in Beijing. On her new résumé in the New World, she read as a younger woman, if also a poorer one. She vacuumed hotel rooms; she decorated cakes; she mixed chemical solutions. Jobs that didn’t require English. Her bosses were demanding; her pay was too little. She quit. She got laid off.

English was key to her dreams in America. I didn’t help her. When she tried practicing, my hands flew up to either side of my face, like earmuffs. “You’ll never learn,” I told her. I picked up more of the language in my first few months of primary school than she would her entire life. On my trips back home as an adult, I read her Amelia Bedelia books, and she’d stare dumb at the puns before giving up. It made me imagine a rubber band tied to her tongue, pulling her back at the slightest stretch of progress.

I could have become a dedicated teacher for my mother like I did for my workers. I could have taken time off from my schooling or my job. But it was easier to write her off. It was easier to wonder if what everyone thought about my mother and her broken English and pitiful salary were true. She was brilliant and stupid. She could do anything, and she could do nothing.

* * *

Wendy didn’t believe in excuses. Once, she offered to make reminder calls for the Academy. I refused. I was getting paid for this work; she was not. She insisted, sitting down in the empty cubicle next to mine. Some of her classmates were taking their kids to the park. “So what if the weather’s nice?” she asked them on the phone. Her face was a cross between a scowl and a laugh, her chuckles like rocks tumbling off a cliff. “La lucha sigue.” The fight continues.

She pushed people, as organizers should. During discussions in the Academy, her hands made swiping gestures to interrupt the same old men gabbing on about their glory days. A few members looked up at me hopefully, but I was never brave enough to cut people off. One time Wendy got up and tapped me on the shoulder. When I shook my head, she interrupted the man herself. “We have to give room for everyone to talk,” she said as the room breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m radical,” she said, sidling up to me. “I don’t care what other people think of me.” I nodded. But her attitude wasn’t radical. It felt familiar and right. In her broken English, my mother never left a government office or customer service desk without getting her point across. I saw Wendy do the same. They were kindred spirits.

“You’re a leader of leaders,” I told Wendy. She responded with a half howl, half giggle. But I knew it to be true. She believed in the brilliance of other people, and she demanded they show it.

* * *

The next year I ran the Leadership Academy, I stopped giving them scripts. “Write your own,” I said. They looked at me with wide eyes, bewildered.

“What do I know about immigrant justice?” they asked.

“Everything,” I said.

A week later, they came to the workshop with pages of handwritten notes. “I threw up the night before,” several of them confessed. One of them gave a survey of the history of American capitalism, from Columbus in 1492 to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar post–World War II. Gladys’s explanation of historical economy was the best I had ever heard, better than any lecture from my Harvard professors.

On paper, I taught a new group of workers each year of the Academy. But after each cohort graduated, the alumni still insisted on attending. In the third year, they demanded sessions twice a month. “If you do the work,” I told them. So they did. They ran interviews to recruit the new cohort. They organized the turnout calls Wendy and I used to do. They assigned every student a role: photographer, moderator, cleanup captain. Wendy and the other workers took over. The problem hadn’t been that they couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

* * *

“Stop biking,” Wendy ordered when I arrived at the office with shoes covered in salt and snow slush, pebbles grating the floor with each step. Like my mother, she fretted over my safety. “Only in America do rich people choose to ride bikes,” Wendy said. We chuckled at the $250 green contraption I referred to as my spouse. The union members named it my luxury car.

Biking was my one daily pleasure. For an hour or two a day, I could take my mind off of my workers who had gotten harassed, fired, and deported. I zipped between the Financial District and the Latino neighborhoods, past rear bumper lights and stalled subway cars. The city shrunk under my tires. Leg down, pedal up, an effortless momentum: the tread of my tires marked a line forward I often struggled to envision in my activist work.

The problem hadn’t been that they [my workers] couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

Wendy checked on me more than my mother. At the end of her afternoon hospital shift, she walked the few blocks between her worksite and mine. There she hovered next to my cubicle until I told her how I was doing. I’m tired. Overwhelmed. I didn’t share such feelings with my mother. “What could be so hard about your job,” my mother often asked. But Wendy didn’t judge. I showed Wendy the to-do lists I wrote on the back of deconstructed cereal boxes, the cardboard big enough to fit most of the day’s tasks. When I fell ill, she texted me every few hours. Don’t work so hard. You should take a break. Before joining the union, I used to get a cold every two years. In this job, it was every two months.

Among the Spanish expressions she taught me — bad words, slang, and proverbs included — one phrase she repeats to this day: de los buenos quedamos pocos. There are only a few of us good ones left. I nodded as I coughed. “I’m dying.” This half joke was the closest truth I gave her. Between long hours, endless meetings, and Trump’s tweets, I was drowning in discouragement.

The Academy was successful, but it didn’t feel like enough. It was only a part of my job. The part the rest of the union often overlooked. I had to joust with my colleagues to keep the room reservations and dates for workshops that my workers had scheduled months in advance. I often lost. There were always more pressing matters the union needed workers to attend to: layoffs, labor violations, and legislative votes. In my last year of the job, the union slashed the program’s budget. The implicit message: Education was good and fun, but what good were workshops if people were still going to be stuck in low-wage jobs, or worse, without any work at all?

Wendy was trying to get her GED, because her school in the Dominican Republic had yet to produce the high school diploma she earned two decades ago. “Check back later,” they said. I helped her look into high school equivalency classes in Spanish. There were none in Boston, a city of hundreds of thousands of Latinos. The closest classes a town and river away. “I don’t want to be a janitor forever,” she said.

I cringed when Wendy tripped over the easiest of English words. When she sat in the spare cubicle next to mine, her fingers pecked at the keyboard, like a chicken’s beak in slow motion. As she tried logging into her Hotmail account, I turned back to my screen to distract myself, shooting off five emails.

There’s a story I never shared with Wendy. My mother got an associate’s degree in this country. When I was in middle school, I translated her assignments from Chinese to English. No one responded to the 200-plus job applications we sent out, the extra line on her résumé never changed her job prospects. She made far less than those workers of mine who never finished middle school, as she liked to remind me. If an accredited degree didn’t do her any good, what could a ragtag Academy promise my members?

* * *

One day, two-and-a-half years into the job, I left the office after 8 p.m. and rode over to the South End. It was late April. The first flowers were popping out, the last dredges of orange-gray rays of dusk soaking the petals. As much as I dreaded it, Wendy needed to hear it from me face-to-face. “¡Ya estoy!” I yelled into her apartment buzzer. She placed a large rag on the ground of her apartment for my bike. The length of my bike was longer than the width of her hallway, so she left the door ajar. “I can’t stay long,” I told her, even though I never managed to get out of her house in less than an hour. She giggled that I had stunned yet another one of her neighbors with my Spanish. “You look handsome,” she said, even though I was in just a T-shirt and black shorts that day and most days. She handed me as many heads of broccoli and cabbage as my backpack could fit. They were leftover produce from the $2-a-bag truck that stopped every week outside her apartment building.

I interrupted her gossip about another worker: “I have to tell you. I’m leaving.” She asked me to repeat myself, her face blank. We were close on the couch, my head almost backing into the right handlebar of my bicycle. Silence followed. I didn’t want her to think that I was tired of her. That wasn’t it. I was tired of what her story meant, that someone so smart could end up with a job that society thought was for dumb people. I was tired of what I couldn’t change.

“You can’t change your moving date?” she finally asked. “I’ll buy you a ticket to leave later.” I didn’t chuckle. She wasn’t joking. Before I dragged my bike out of the doorway, she stopped me to reveal two potatoes in the palm of her hand. They were smooth and eerily white, the latest installment in her collection of salt and pepper shakers. We had a last laugh.

The next session of the Academy — and my last — Wendy was absent. She had already booked a trip to see family in Philly. I didn’t expect to see her Skype face on Gladys’s phone when my members ushered me into another room, the glass windows covered with red tissue paper. Gladys had revised the workshop agenda to include a “guest speaker” part. The guest speaker was actually four smuggled bottles of champagne, one big rice cake, and a mountain of pupusas Daisy finished making at 1:00 that morning. They flashed cameras. Amanda, a Dominican grandmother in her 60s, stepped forward from the circle, in front of the yellow streamers and orange balloons. She hadn’t been politically active before we met. Over the past few years, she had inched her body from the corner of the room into the center, with sweaty pits and wide smiles. “There was something inside of me,” she said, putting her right hand on her heart, “that I didn’t know was there until I met you.” My chest swelled, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever hear such words from my mother.

In the months since, members call and WhatsApp me. They share stories of sticking up for their coworkers, demanding the sick time they deserve, and applying lessons from the Academy. Because they are trying to fill my shoes at the union, they laugh and say, “We’ll have to ride around town on bicycles.”

I left Boston to return home to my family in Kentucky. This year, I have spent more time with my mother than I have in the past decade. I wish I could tell a noble story that swept full circle: that I had gone to the union to avoid doing the work I should have done with my mother, and that I left the union to come back to her. The reality is, I returned because my parents offered me a free roof and a sunny place to write.

With time, the victories are starting to sink in. My workers remind me not of the times that our work made headlines, but the moments I felt most alive, when my workers felt most alive. Amanda wrapping her arms around my chest, or Wendy crying as she read the Spanish translation of this essay. I remember when Gladys gave her speech on the history of capitalism, or when Wilson, a soft-spoken man, presented a survey of feminism from the Middle Ages to the present, or when all of us took the train to a conference, laughing together like long-time friends. We upturned what society said about their jobs and their intelligence. We were able to 造反. Our little revolution.

From my parents’ house, I complain to Wendy. My mother and I bicker over things a world away from deportations and labor strikes: the size of the bowls I choose for our family dinner, the width of my onion slices in the pan. We fight with a ferocity every night that Wendy and I never had in her kitchen. Wendy texts me that this is just right. This is the labor of family.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez

* * *

Victor Yang is a writer, educator, and organizer. His writing has been published in Fourth GenreGulf CoastThe RumpusThe Tahoma Literary Review, and The Boston Globe. He was the 2018 Chertkov Fellow at the Blue Mountain Center. The proud son of Chinese immigrants, he has been fighting for immigrant and racial justice for a decade.

Editor: Vanessa Mártir

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Emily Bazelon, Alex Ronan, Justine Harman, Emily Harnett, and Sam Leith.

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Shadow of a Doubt

Longreads Pick

In 2011, Michael Shannon was wrongly convicted of murder, even though two jurors voted to acquit him—a result of a Louisiana law rooted in discrimination. For defendants like Shannon and the holdout jurors who believed in their innocence, it has left a bitter legacy.

Published: Jan 16, 2020
Length: 19 minutes (4,800 words)

The Disease of Deceit

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | January 2020 | 38 minutes (9,656 words)

In June, I woke to an alert from Facebook, a notification of a memory from five years ago. It was a photo of a woman in a park, leaning over, kissing the top of my dog’s head. The woman’s face was partially hidden but I immediately knew who it was — Chaya. Read more…

Whatever Happened to ______ ?

Illustration by Holly Stapleton

Anonymous | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,879 words)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”” — Emily Dickinson, 1891

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, 1929

“No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.” — George RR Martin, Feast of Crows

* * *

Years back, on a summer night in Oregon’s high desert, I was riding in a car with three other people. There were two women asleep in the backseat, leaning in opposite directions. I was in the front on the passenger’s side, and a man was driving. Somebody had put Rod Stewart’s Storyteller: The Complete Anthology, blaring and loud, on the car’s sound system, and though I wouldn’t have considered myself a fan, the heartfelt crooning was as seemingly endless and beautiful as the desert around us. We were wrapped in a velvet night, under a star-filled sky, headlights cutting through the dark. We were writers, carpooling back from a rare weekend retreat. A cool wind found its way in through a narrow slice of open window and whipped the driver’s shaggy hair into a minor frenzy. Over the sound of Rod Stewart’s mandolin, this driver scratched mosquito bites and told me about a woman writer he’d once known. “She was so talented,” he said, in admiration.

I envisioned a passive, classical sculpture of a beautiful woman being physically hoisted onto a pedestal.

“She was an awesome writer. Really, amazing.” Wistfully he added, “She got married. I’ve never seen her writing again.”

End of story.
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Happily Never After

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (1,978 words)

“And when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough …” On January 3rd, Ukrainian immigrant Ilya Kaminsky quote-tweeted his poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” after it went viral the day Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was assassinated on the order of President Donald Trump. The poem appeared in his long-awaited 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic, about a town that responds to the killing of a deaf child by itself going deaf, a parable of the present-day United States, a country that responds to its own demise (and the rest of the world’s) by blocking its ears. His tweet went up in the midst of increasing tensions between the U.S. and Iran and ahead of the death of more than 50 people in a stampede during Suleimani’s funeral procession. It went up months into bushfires ravaging New South Wales that have destroyed millions of hectares and killed roughly half a billion animals. It went up in the wake of a slew of antisemitic attacks across the country. Last Sunday, while thousands in New York marched in solidarity with the Jewish community, the Hollywood awards season kicked off in Los Angeles with the Golden Globes, and the media started gleefully tweeting about couture as though the destruction of the world had politely paused for the occasion. The timing made me think of a friend who recently asked: What if all the people who went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — tens of millions of Americans — protested instead?

“Now’s NOT the time to live happily,” read Kaminsky’s tweet after he extended his thanks for his poetry’s dissemination. He did not squander the moment the way so many of us often do, advising instead that we “write quality journalism & spicy op-eds & protest poems, get out in the street if you’re able. We won’t live happily during another war.”

But aren’t we already? Read more…

Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief

Illustration by Courtney Kuebler

Abby Mims | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (2,959 words)

The Sephora sales girl was in her early 20s. As she took off my makeup, I was marveling at hers, not to mention her flawless, creamy skin. Her smoky eye was perfect, all layers of dark blue, grey and black, a look that whenever I attempt it is a smeary, bruised-looking mess. Her eyebrows were expertly plucked and reinforced by a Kardashian-sized amount of brow pencil, creating arcs not found in nature. Glancing around, I saw that nearly all the salesgirls’ faces contained these same elements.

“I really need something for this situation,” I said to her, drawing a circle in the air to indicate everything between my 45-year-old chin and collarbone. “This is happening.”

“Oh, no, you look great!” she said, giggling. She was sweet, but when I turned my head, and caught my profile in the well-lit mirror, it was unmistakable. It was my grandmother’s neck, it was my mother’s neck, it was my neck. It was the beginnings of a wattle, and it was happening.

I had escaped to Sephora, which is housed in the same mall I’d haunted as a teenager, during a trip home to Portland last spring. I’m sure I arrived at the store looking a bit like a ghost myself — I was visiting from California with my 4-year-old son Jamie to help my stepfather, Jim, clean out the house where I grew up. My mother had been dead for five years, and Jim had moved in with his girlfriend, and while all the packing and sorting and moving in with girlfriends was entirely the natural course of things, I wasn’t prepared. I pictured the house preserved as it had been since my mom died, which was essentially as it was when she was alive. To his credit, Jim had tried to warn me, letting me know he’d been getting rid of things and making small improvements to the house for months, but I was stunned all the same.

When Jamie and I came through the front door, our footsteps echoed into the house’s emptiness. There was only a smattering of furniture left, and nearly everything was in boxes: there wasn’t a fork or wine opener in the kitchen, let alone the ancient bandaids or nearly empty shampoo bottles that had always lived in the far corners of the bathroom cupboards. The half-dozen or so Hindu-style altars my mother kept around the house were dismantled, and nearly all her beloved books had been packed up or given away. There were no family photos left on the walls, and the flickering electronic picture frames, the ones that I’d focused on during the four long years my mother was dying, were gone. I pictured them perfectly in my mind’s eye: alternating glimpses into my awkward teen years (spiral perms, stiff, hair-sprayed bangs, clear braces, skin a shade of orange only found in tanning beds, over-plucked eyebrows), my estranged sister’s wedding and my parents’ trip to India in 2008, six months before my 63-year-old mother was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. For now, the house will be rented out, but eventually, it will be sold. Hopefully, my husband and I will be able to buy it, but that transaction will be at some murky date in the future, if ever.

All of this was amplified by the fact that the room where Jamie and I slept was my old bedroom, and some modifications aside, the same room where my mother died. We slept there because that was the one room with a bed left in it, and it felt like a hassle to move it on top of everything else. Plus, strange as it may sound, the experience wasn’t morbid. This was in part because the room looked nothing like it had in either incarnation: the walls were a different color and it was nearly empty, aside from said bed, an old dresser, a lamp and a rolled-up area rug. Also, the room contained so much more love than sadness for me because, by the end, despite how much I loved and depended on my mother, all I wanted was for her to be free. My point of view was buoyed by the fact that she had spent her career in geriatric and hospice social work and studied Eastern religions for decades. This is to say that her views on dying were far more evolved than most: she simply viewed it as another phase of life. We were also able to give her the “good death” that she wanted — at home, on her own terms, surrounded by the people she loved. This didn’t mean she was entirely at peace about dying, or didn’t lament her impending death.

“I mean, we all die, but I don’t want to miss anything,” she often said.

Instead of the quintessential grief or sadness I had expected to feel sleeping in that room with my son, I experienced an alchemy of memories that drifted between my youthful existence and her dying process. It tended to happen in the half-sleep of early morning, as Jamie and I lay together in bed. Under a corner window, we’d listened to the caw of crows, the chatter of squirrels, and the tap-tap-tap of the occasional woodpecker – all sounds that brought back my childhood. As I looked up into the gray sky through a web of spruce branches, the window became something of a portal from the past to the present for me. I realized it is a window out of which my first love, Brian, escaped, mid-coitus, on a lazy Saturday afternoon when I was 17. My parents had come home hours early. It is the window that hosted the hummingbird feeders that captivated my mother’s attention in her final months. She would often lose her train of thought when birds alighted there, her face radiating joy when they lingered, seemingly soaking up their weight in sugar water. It is the window I looked out of during my teenage years and dreamed of being anywhere else. It is the window I looked out of with a similar desire in my mid-30s, when my mother’s diagnosis came back terminal and I was sure I could not exist in the world without her.
Read more…