The Atlanta Shooting Part 2: The Red Flag Flying Here

of an episode, absolutely baffling. Look, you want things to not be confusing, you have somebody else introduce your podcast. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

completely fine. The other thing that we need to talk about is the CCPs just utter full scale war against 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 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,

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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at cool zone mea dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.