Introducing: The Hustle

Hi listeners, this is Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX Productions. Thanks for joining us for Monumental. We'd like to introduce you to another podcast you might enjoy. It's called The Hustle from Feet in Two Worlds. The episode we're sharing today begins with a monument that represents a violent chapter from the American West.

the Rock Springs Massacre. On september second, eighteen eighty five, white mobs in Rock Springs, Wyoming murdered twenty eight Chinese coal miners. They wounded fifteen more, and then looted and burned Rock Springs, Chinatown. This episode reveals a forgotten history of private industry weaponizing white workers against Chinese workers, and the government failing to stop the violence. You'll hear from three descendants of the massacre, as well as Chinese Americans in Rock Springs today.

This is one of the stories you'll hear on The Hustle, a podcast series about how immigrants are navigating a changing economy today and throughout history. Over seven episodes, The Hustle explores questions like How are different generations of immigrants dealing with economic change? What are the ways immigrants are shaping American industry? What strategies have they used to advocate for better working conditions? And what roles did immigrants play in the labor movement?

To find out more about the series, go to fi2w.org. And now here's the hustle.

From Feedin' Two Worlds, this is the Hustle, a show about how immigrants are navigating economy. I'm shocked it's a Many important sectors of U.S. industry depend on immigrant labor, like the farmers who pick our vegetables or the dairy workers in the Midwest. As ongoing deportations continue to threaten the livelihoods of immigrant workers. US, the reduction in immigrant workers may threaten our freedom. Built in the world. Immigrant labor is essential to our country's.

Yet, U.S. politicians and lobbyists often regard immigrant workers as disposable. They negotiate border policy to bring in cheaper immigrants. Need it, then they lobby against immigrant workers to keep them vulnerable to poor working conditions and wage theft. It's an old story, actually one that we've seen play out before. For example, if you've traveled by train between Nevada and California.

You've experienced what was originally the Transcontinental Railroad, built in the 1860s. Fast forward over a hundred years, and hundreds of miles of the original track are still in service today, transporting freight across the country. Chinese immigrants were responsible for building large portions of the railway, digging the land and excavating the tunnels.

These Chinese workers didn't just disappear when the railroad was completed, they stayed in these towns, opening restaurants, stores, and laundries and mining coal. Their work fueled the locomotives and the frontier. The coal mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming was especially impacted by the pressure of the first time. Harrison B. Gosh, wait oh hang on. Cross the

In the heart of Rock Springs, Wyoming, there's a rock. A rock with a plaque on it. It's rusted brown. A small pile of snow has collected on top of it. The rock is sitting awkwardly between a parking lot and a busy intersection. You have to watch your back as you get out to see it to make sure you don't get hit by a car. Oh here it is. There's a bunch of snow on it. Damn, let me let me dust off wow. Okay. Lower Han Lung Leo chin. Yi, Si, Yan, Liu, Sun, Tseng

I came all the way from New York not to see this rock, but to read the names carved on it. There are 28 Chinese men listed on this rock. In the eighteen eighties, these men came all the way from China to work in the mines. They'd work six days a week to dig up coal to fuel the trains running along the transcontinental railroad. A company called Union Pacific ran the railroad. This route that went through Rock Springs was designed to connect Iowa to Utah.

To find out more about the rock and these names, I went to speak to Aidan Brady, over at the Sweetwater County Museum. It was twenty minutes from downtown Rock Springs. I want to know more about these Chinese workers. How did they get here? I want to ask Aidan what this journey even looked like. For a lot of these people, they're basically gonna get on a boat. That boat is going to arrive on one of the coasts, and they're probably then going to take a train to here.

Aiden has long dark hair, and every question I'm asking him seems to be picking a different side of his brain. He tells me how the miners were paid back then. If they're Chinese, they're gonna make a little bit less than their compatriots. Those white counterparts were white miners, many of whom were immigrants themselves from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, and England.

Union Pacific paid the Chinese miners by the amount of coal they were able to dig up. Chinese miners were paid between one dollar seventy three and two dollars a day, while white miners were paid two dollars fifty to three dollars a day. The workers would spend hours in the mines, breathing in coal dust. When they resurfaced, they were met with the bitter and unforgiving winter Wyoming wind.

At the museum, Aiden told me why he thought these miners would subject themselves to such conditions. It's worth remembering that there's a bunch of things to take into consideration of Imperial China in the late nineteenth century. The first being that if you were a peasant, it was a really miserable experience. And so it is not strange to a lot of people in that idea that

You just need to get your family, your people, whatever, out, make money and bring it back. Chinese miners were subjected to worse labor conditions and were paid less than their white counterparts. With the influx of Chinese workers accepting work for this lower pay, Union Pacific saw an opportunity to cut everyone's pay, including the white miners.

White miners weren't happy with these newcomers. It's weird they don't speak your language. Most of these people couldn't even read your language if they tried, and most won't even try. By the way, Aiden is talking about the white workers' perspective and how they felt toward the Chinese workers. I can imagine the Chinese workers felt similarly with the white miners not understanding Chinese. After all, no one spoke or wrote their language either. No one even tried.

Maybe if the two groups had been able to speak the same language, they would have understood their common interests. But as it was, the white workers saw the Chinese workers as a threat. What they see is a group of people potentially coming. making that money worthless because you were working for significantly less than I am. The white miners wanted to organize and strike against Union Pacific.

Specifically, they looked towards the Knights of Labor, one of the largest labor unions founded in eighteen sixty nine in Philadelphia. The union was known for their stand on collective bargaining and for empowering workers to strike. As such, the white miners formed a union chapter of the Knights of Labour in Rock Springs. Their demands were higher pay, and to eliminate the company's requirement that miners must buy food, clothes, and tools at its overpriced stores.

But the Knights of Labor purposely excluded Chinese workers from membership, seeing them as competition rather than allies.

By exploiting both the white workers and Chinese workers, Union Pacific pitted two groups against each other. At the end of the summer of 1885, there were about 150 white miners and 300 Chinese miners in Rock Springs. And on September second, eighteen eighty-five, the two groups came to blows. That argument started with shouting, but soon the white miners escalated the fight.

One white miner struck a Chinese miner with a pickaxe to the head. White miners severely beat six Chinese miners. The white foreman broke up the fight, and the white miners went home, but not to cool their tempers. Instead, they rallied a hundred more men and even got some women to join in. They armed themselves with guns, hatchets, and pigs. And then they returned to the Chinese workers. Within uh thirty minutes or so, they start shooting.

Half of the white mob moved into Chinatown. The others went to a bridge by the railroad tracks. They began brutally murdering the Chinese miners, bludgeoning, stabbing, and shooting them as they fled the streets. Chinatown had nearly fifty homes, as well as businesses like laundromats, restaurants and hotels, all places where the white mob pulled Chinese miners out to lynch them. Stores with intricate red and gold painted facades sold porcelain, herbal medicines, and pottery.

But the white miners did not care. They burned it all down. Remember that rock at the beginning of my trip? In twenty sixteen it was installed by the city of Rock Springs and the Rock Springs Historical Museum. There's twenty-eight names on the rock. They're the names of those men murdered in the massacre a hundred forty years ago.

Back in the county museum, I saw a photo of an empty field with just dry weeds and dirt mounds. Aidan told me what that photo depicted. That wasteland is what used to be Rock Springs Chinatown. Standing in the museum, looking at the photo of an empty field, was when Aiden told me how the massacre, from the jump, has been reclaimed.

renarrativized and retold by white descendants and even by the US and Chinese governments. There were various groups who were essentially claiming that it was the Chinese's fault in the first place. That it was the Chinese who set fire to their own homes, that it was the Chinese who were drumming up this angry support, and usually blaming the Chinese government. Starting in the 1870s, there were many violent attacks by white workers against Chinese laborers and their communities.

In eighteen seventy one, white mobs in Los Angeles lynched at least one hundred seventy-eight Chinese men and boys. The same year of the Rock Springs Massacre, a white mob burned down the Chinatown in Tacoma, Washington, and expelled two hundred Chinese residents. These racist attitudes and competing labor interests culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two. It was a federal law that barred new workers and Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S.

Given all this context, I can see how certain bystanders, historians, and white workers blame the Chinese or invalidate the Rock Springs massacre as a whole. But I also see how the voices of Chinese workers have been excluded from the official record. In fact, on the current Union Pacific website, when you type in Chinese Massacre or Rock Springs Massacre, no results come up.

The closest thing is a press release in 2015, celebrating Chinese contributions to the Transcontinental Railroad. It paints Chinese miners and immigrants as hard workers, but fails to mention anything about a massacre. When the dominant culture shapes historical narratives, whose stories are remembered? Whose are forgotten? From Aiden, I walked to the back corner of the exhibit. A 17 minute video recapping what was labeled.

In nineteen twenty five, the last of the Rock Springs Chinese miners, now old men, were given a farewell dinner by the United Mine Workers of America and the Union Pacific Coal Company. The Chinese workers in the video were dressed in a mix of Western formal attire and elaborate traditional Chinese garments. The video seemed to be painting a happy ending, a cultural exchange. As I left, I had this sinking feeling at the bottom of my stomach. I felt like the video wasn't telling me everything.

I hope some food would get that sinking feeling out of my stomach. Downtown Rock Springs is full of fast food, but many locals looking for something else to eat go to the many Chinese restaurants off of Sunset Drive. I decided to stop for lunch at the wonderful house Chinese restaurant. The place had this teal blue exterior. The interior was full of photos of the owner's family and loyal customers.

This place reminded me a lot of my family's old Chinese restaurant in Chelsea, Michigan, Chinese Tonight. This was before my time, but my parents told me stories of the place, so I grew up knowing all about it. Chinese Tonight was famous for almond chicken, serving egg fucking with extra gravy after Sunday services, and occasionally feeding the groups of deer hunters, fresh off of a trip into the woods.

Here in Wyoming, almond chicken isn't as big, but there is a regional Chinese American specialty, a dish called chili meat. It's big chunks of ground beef stewed in a tomato sauce with peppers and onions. I wanted to speak with the owner about her chili meat and to see if she was willing to talk about the town's history, but as I asked, she tensed up. She told me she was too busy serving the other customers before walking across the restaurant to the only other diner there.

For dinner, I drove to another restaurant down the road. This one was called Loose Dining Redefined. I couldn't exactly pinpoint why it was called Redefined. I don't know why Lou needed a rebrand. Anyway, the restaurant was across from a gas station, so a lot of folks would fill up their gas and then roll into the restaurant greeted by a cozy wooden dining room.

In Rock Springs fashion, I ordered chili meat once again. This time I was able to speak to someone, a young man whose family owns the restaurant. He didn't want to share his name, so we'll call him Danny. I asked Danny, what was it like growing up Asian in Rock Springs? I never comprehended that I was someone who was different. Like my siblings who were they're my half siblings, but they're I just call them my siblings.

They're all white. And I remember they were like, You're Asian I was like, No, I don't know what that means, like I don't understand. And I thought they were talking about my religion and I go, No, I'm Catholic So Danny went on not realizing exactly how he was different. Until the day I walked into a library and some kid my age called me a shank. Danny told me other members of his family experienced this kind of racism. He told me a story about when his father was young.

The neighbors had caught his father's pet bird. And they tore off his head in front of him. And those so those same neighbors, the white kid told my father, My dad kills people like you. I was shocked to hear this kind of barefaced threat out loud. I wondered if Danny knew about the violent history of this town too. Specifically, since Danny was a senior in high school, I was really curious to hear whether or not he learned about the massacre at school.

He told me he did, but only part of the story. It was never brought up that they were massacred because of their race. They never brought up that these people were Chinese and they were massacred because they had a white man's job. Before I left, I asked Danny about the monument. You know, the rock. It's in between two bars and unfortunately drunk people will usually urinate all over it. So even today uh people are still disrespecting the history behind that.

After speaking with Danny and hearing about people peeing all over the rock, I felt even more of that sinking feeling in my stomach. The same one I felt when leaving the museum, and now his family's restaurant.

Growing up, I had always heard of the fond memories my family had owning Chinese Tonight. The 80s and 90s were huge for Michigan. The Pistons had just won their NBA title, the auto industry was at an all-time high, and almond chicken was selling like hotcakes at Chinese Tonight. But as the automotive industry moved to Japan, the customers came less often. Just a few years earlier in 1982 in Highland Park, Michigan, two white autoworkers of a nearby Chrysler plant beat a Chinese American man.

Vincent Chin. They claimed that it was because of Japanese folks like Vincent that they were out of a job. He wasn't Japanese of course, but they beat him with a baseball bat until his skull cracked open. Chin died of his injuries just a few days later.

I never asked my parents if they were afraid of things like this happening at Chinese Tonight. The most they ever told me were a few times white customers would say some racist things about MSG. But we never talked about the possibility of violence. Because at the end of the day, at Chinese Tonight, at Lou's Dining Redefined, at Wonderful House, you've got a business to run. You've got bills to pay. You've got to survive. You focus on what you can control.

So it's natural that when a customer comes in asking about your chili meat, you tell them you're busy. When they mention a massacre in your you focus on the only other customer in the restaurant. I get it.

In Rock Springs, I needed to speak to someone on the inside, someone who knew what it was like to work in the railroad industry today. So I met with Adam, who recently retired from Union Pacific. He and I got coffee. He's tall, white, and was proudly repping his University of Northern Colorado sweatshirt, where he's now working to become a teacher. I asked how he started working at Union Pacific in the first place. I just served six years in the army.

So I was thinking about getting out and my uh fiance at the time, she said, Well, my neighbor works for Union Pacific, why don't you just try to get on with them? Adam landed a job as a track laborer. And the work that he did was pretty similar to what a Chinese railroad worker would have done nearly a hundred and fifty years before him.

So we repair the track. We lay the rail, we put the ties down, we replace the ties, we put ballast where ballast needs to be to secure the track. We lift, we line it. Even if we have to swing sledgehammers to knock spikes down. Honestly, I didn't know much about Union Pacific when I started. I heard some of these stories from the local guys that worked here. On one outing, the senior track laborers took Adam out for a drive.

We were able to drive up to like some places close to the track and stuff and you can see like little cut out mine areas that had like the old mason jars and stuff like that. And they said it was real close to uh the backside of the hotel. And they would actually house everybody in that hotel. So before they went and they paid for their rooms, they called them all out and that's when they did the big massacre.

I was shocked. I didn't really want to work in Rock Springs anymore. Adam was laughing, but I could tell it was a nervous laugh. During my conversation with him, I could sense his discomfort with referring to the violence of the massacre. He kept using the word rumor, and to be honest, I felt uncomfortable saying the word massacre to him too. It felt like a taboo word, the M word.

But at the end of the day, the massacre actually happened. It wasn't a rumor, hearsay, an urban legend. And what about after the massacre? What happened to Chinatown and the people who lived in it? More after the break. As white miners burned Chinatown to the ground, the Sweetwater County Sheriff quickly boarded a train to Rock Springs. He tried to gather a group of officers to stop the violence, but he failed to rally anyone to help. Chinatown continued to burn.

Later that afternoon, Union Pacific officials and Wyoming's governor learned about the massacre and also rushed over to the scene. It was so bad that President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to maintain order. Miraculously, a small group of Chinese miners had survived. The National Guard instructed them to board a train to the nearby town of Evanston, about an hour and a half away from Rock Springs.

Once there, they were told they'd be boarding another train to take them to California, far away from the violence, to safety. But Union Pacific secretly instructed the train to come back to Rock Springs. So the terrified and traumatized workers were forced back to work in Rock Springs, the very area they had just escaped. Union Pacific made an ultimatum, declaring, quote,

Any minor white or Chinese not back at work by Monday morning, September 21st, would be fired and never hired again anywhere on the Union Pacific lines. Many miners felt they had no option but to return to work. Union Pacific had failed the Chinese workers. So had the US government. And while the actual Chinatown was no more, Congress decided to pay the Chinese government$147,000 as a reimbursement for the property lost. That would be over 4.5.

But none of that money trickled directly down to those still in the world. Let alone their descendants. The diplomat in charge of the deal, the U.S. Secretary of State, had the nerve to say this to the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Chinese immigrants segregate themselves from the rest of the residents and citizens of the United States and refuse to mingle with the mass of population.

As a consequence, race prejudice has been more excited against them. In other words, the Chinese immigrants were targeted because they were intrinsically different, foreign, and unable to assimilate. Let me say that again. No reparations for the families and descendants. It's their fault for not assimilating. No prosecution for murders.

And understandably so, people aren't satisfied with this story. Like Professor Dudley Garner, a professor of history and political science at Western Wyoming Community College. He explains what happened to Rock Springs Chinatown after all this. So the Chinatown became Union Pacific property. They leveled it out and rebuilt it. They own the property and they decide, because the Chinese population is diminished by 1912 to subdivide, parcel it out, and sell it for individual house lot.

Rock Springs Chinatown became company property, and it was literally buried for years. Part of Professor Dudley's research involves excavating and digging up some of these old lots to figure out what Rock Springs Chinatown was really like. We pull away and peel away the layers of soil so that we can get to where the people live so we can tell what they ate. what they did for a living and how they made their uh way in the world.

Dudley's team investigates through a process called augering. Imagine a slice of layered cake. And if you stick a metal pole through all the layers of frosting and cake, you're able to pull up a cross section that exposes artifacts and remnants. It included condiment bottles, the herbal medicine bottles, it included the pipes, it included spoons, forks, anything that you can imagine that a person would use or bring with them from home. But most importantly, Dudley's team tracks down descendants.

That responsibility is left to Professor Laura Ng, a historical archaeologist and assistant professor at Grinnell College. She's been working alongside Professor Gardner as the connecting bridge between history and descendants. I went looking at the census records, looking at ancestry dot com immigration records. And eventually we found four families who are directly descended from a coal miner or a Chinese merchant.

When I tried to talk with folks in town about this history and about the massacre, it caused conversations to end pretty quickly. I asked Laura how she broaches the subject with the people she finds. When I first made contact with a Chinese American descendant of Rock Springs Chinatown, I don't start with the massacre. I start with, oh, I have been researching the Rock Springs Chinatown, which is true.

and I have done a lot of research on a person that I think is your ancestor. Most of these descendants that Laura finds come from the Leo clan. That's L-E-O. This is the same last name I found etched into the Memorial Rock. Back in 1864, Union Pacific was recruiting for labor in China, with the approval of the US government. At that time, a man by the name of A Sei was the leader of the Liu clan. One of Ase's modern day descendants is Ricky Leo. I gave him a phone call.

He had grey hair and glasses, and a soulful voice that sounded distinctly of Wyoming. Ricky Leo's family stayed in Rock Springs after the massacre, and they even opened up a restaurant. It was called the New Grand Cafe. We had regulars come in, like they'd come in and drink coffee or they always came in because they enjoyed the food. And each booth had a jukebox. People just love to put their quarters in and play songs.

Aside from Ricky's family, there weren't too many other Chinese folks around. But we were mainly felt welcome because my dad was also very well known in the town and he was very well liked because he made the lunch specials at the Grand Cafe and people just loved him. Ricky's family didn't want him to work in the restaurant business.

They supported his decision to go to college in California, which led him to a very successful career as a mechanical engineer. But in twenty nineteen, Ricky, now with a family, decided to go to a railroad museum. Well into his fifties, he still did not know anything about the massacre. We went to the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah. There was a speaker uh her name was Chui Min Ho and Cui Min was talking about Asse

who was one of the Chinese leaders at the time. He was a translator and helped hire some of the Chinese immigrants to come over. Remember him? Ase, the man who was the leader of the Leo clan, Ricky's ancestors. Her talk was about that and also about the massacre. And that was the first time I learned about it,'cause growing up in Rock Springs, nobody talked about it. Professor Laura Ng also connected me to Cheryl Leo Gwyn, another descendant of the Rock Springs Massacre.

Cheryl's grandfather was an herbalist in Rock Springs, but her family eventually moved to the Pacific Northwest. She grew up with a Chinese father and a white mother. Cheryl is eighty one years old. on the call with me, she was wearing a pink pattern shirt. The Chinatown Associations did not welcome our family because my father was third generation Chinese American born in St. Louis. But what interestingly the Japanese welcomed us. So I grew up thinking I was either Japanese or white.

Unlike Ricky, who found out about the massacre as an adult at a museum, Cheryl's family did mention the history of the massacre occasionally during her childhood. My father's sister-in-law told me about being raised in Wyoming for part of her lifetime and telling Mm watching wagons come into town. and loading up the Chinese men into the wagons, they take'em out into the fields, and she'd hear gunshots and they'd bring the wagons back empty and they'd come back for more.

As a kid, Cheryl would listen to these stories like they were fiction. They felt like those old cowboy and Indian westerns she'd watch on TV. So she didn't think too deeply about them. Until she graduated with a fine arts degree from the University of Washington and she went to an artist exchange program in China. I ended up working with the Chinese government to do uh cultural exchanges and to bring

um Americans to China, particularly artists and teachers, to meet with their Chinese counterparts. So that's where I learned what it was like to be Chinese. Learning what it was like to be Chinese activated those childhood stories of the men in the wagon. She realized that the people of this culture, the culture she was finally appreciating, feeling, living, after it was dormant in her for so long, were taken out to the fields and shot.

She had no context, no detail, so she had to figure it all out on her own. When I finally connected it all, I thought, why didn't I ask more questions? So I went back to school and I took every Asian American class I could take to find out about, you know, this history. Finally, I met Chuck Leo. He and I talked over Zoom. He had salt and pepper hair, was wearing an old Nebraska sweater, and he was in his kitchen with stacks and stacks of paper in the background.

Chuck, like Adam, the veteran I spoke to in Rock Springs, decided to work for Union Pacific after serving in the Army. During his retirement, he remembered his father and grandfather worked in Rock Springs, so he decided to do a Google search of the town. I was in my sixties and I was just home one day just going through the computer and I happened to

Key on the eighteen eighty five Massacre and I go out start looking through there and I seen all these people who died and I looked up there and they they were all Leol. After thirty years of giving his time, labor and life to this company. Chuck realized he contributed to the very group that killed his ancestors.

He eventually decided to head to Rock Springs to learn more. My goal was to find out if they ever close the case. Chuck learned from a museum guide that there was a monument somewhere in town. I couldn't find it though. What I did find is a Catholic church that was kind of interesting to me and I came back and I said, I'm gonna go back and take a picture of this church. I see this big rock in front of me and I'm going, What the hell is this thing?

So I go up to the rock and that's the monument. The one commemorating all those dead Leos from his family. I asked him what he thought of the memorial. It's a fairly good sized rock. It's about five feet tall. But okay. I expect something else different, but that's when I was kinda resigned to the fact it's okay. If no one else has done anything for a hundred and some years, you know, little old me's not gonna do a damn thing. As I speak with these folks, I see older versions of Danny.

I see older versions of Asian laborers in Rock Springs, Tacoma, and even Michigan. I see them burrowing racism, burrowing a lived experience that constantly teeters between cultures. It's an internal conflict. Do you share with the next generation a cautionary tale of what a workplace can be? But by doing so, are you bringing up a taboo subject that would spur weakness in a family's history?

If you decide not to share, that generation of Asian Americans will have wondered why am I the only Asian person in this town? Why am I treated differently? Why do people only see me as a restaurant worker, a laborer, a service provider? And once you've been beaten down by those questions for years, the universe might send you to a train museum, an Asian American history class, a Google search, and you'll have to piece together the holes in your existence. Slowly and without any justice.

Before I headed off to New York, I found myself back at the Sweetwater Museum. I wanted to come back to take a few photos of the Chinese massacre exhibit. But I stumbled across a smaller exhibit featuring, out of all things, toothpaste, and this important mineral in it called Trona. Trona is refined into something called soda ash. We know it as baking soda. And billions of tons of trona in Wyoming are used to make our toothpaste, soap, and detergent.

Two Turkish manufacturing conglomerates have created a joint venture called Pacific Soda to begin mining all this trona in 2025. It's expected that over 4,000 workers will be needed to excavate, dig, and process it all. The town might have to bring in labor, maybe from overseas.

Those coming from abroad might be looking to send money home. They might build new communities and bring their own traditional clothing. Their own condiments. They might start restaurants and come up with a regional specialty. The folks in town will love the food, but will they love them? The people? For Feet in Two Worlds, I'm Harrison VJ Choi. is hosted by me, Shaka Tafara. It was edited by Feet in Two Worlds editing fellowship.

Luchik Lotus League, with additional editing by Mia Warren and Quincy Surasmith. Feet in two worlds matters. Mia Warren. Our managing editor is Quincy Sword. Our development coordinator is Alejandro Salazar Dyer. Jocelyn Gonzalez is our technical Additional engineering Fact check is by Julie Schweartert Koyazo. Theme music by Gautham Shirkeshan. Visit our website at fi.com. Thank you for listening.

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