Everything for everyone, p.11
Everything for Everyone, page 11
Abdelhadi: How did they react?
Liu: They … thought I was a monster. Like their daughter had been slowly taken and replaced by someone they didn’t understand. I know they felt that way because that’s what my mom yelled at me. She said I was a demon. They had never really heard me when I said I didn’t care about making it to Guangxi, that I didn’t think there was any reason to think things would be better there, that I always thought we should stay and fight out whatever was going on. So, when I kept saying no, they went into where our stuff was and they packed it all up. Then they came back in and said, “It’s time to go.” Again, I said, “No.” They stayed the night instead of leaving, and in the morning they tried again. Again, I said, “No.” They tried to convince me. I was too big at this point for them to force me to come. “Don’t you want to go home to Guangxi?” they said. I said, “What home? I’ve never been there and you’re crazy to think that whatever is happening here isn’t happening there. You don’t even know anyone there anymore.” Then they left.
Abdelhadi: Did you go with them?
Liu: No, they left without me.
Abdelhadi: [Long pause.] You were pretty alienated from them by then. [Long pause.] What happened to them?
Liu: I don’t know.
Abdelhadi: Oh.
Liu: I never saw them again. We never spoke.
Abdelhadi: I’m sorry.
Liu: Yeah.
Abdelhadi: You didn’t have phones?
Liu: We barely had food.
Abdelhadi: Right, sorry. So, what did you do?
Liu: I stayed. The confrontation went forward with the manager. Of course, it got really violent. The manager tried to stave us off, but then he gave up the owners’ whereabouts. They lived in this gated community, we couldn’t get in. They had their own army. We went back to the manager. Dragged him back to the factory, he gave us whatever money was there. But he still didn’t, uh, survive. Got knifed. We destroyed all the machines and torched the management offices. Meanwhile the riots were burning down a lot of the city around us.
Abdelhadi: Were there many other factory occupations?
Liu: Tons of them. All over the city. We went to a couple of assemblies of other occupied factories. But huge divides there too. Like between people who wanted to keep their plants working, a lot of these old workers who had been around forever, some who were proud of their skills or what they made or something, and those of us who thought it was all bullshit. I had been living behind fences in prisons my whole life, and the factory was another fence, another prison. A lot of people had done what we did and destroyed it all.
Abdelhadi: What happened next at your … former factory?
Liu: About half the people who had been living in the factory housing left. The rest of us felt a bit lost. We ended up pairing with this occupied apartment building near the factory. These chaps that lived there had all been working for a company with a few factories that made random shit—hair ties, toys, stuff like that. When the factories were shutting down, instead of splitting apart and going to look for food and jobs all over the place, they stayed together. They had been working on connecting with food depots, farms outside the city, and had a whole plan about how they were going to feed everyone in the Binjiang.
Abdelhadi: Binjiang?
Liu: Just the area of Hangzhou we were in. An old government name. The robotics factory was in a subdistrict, Xixing. But we spent a lot of time connecting to people all around Binjiang and that’s sort of how we were starting to think of ourselves.… So, these chaps at the apartment building. We adopted their model, or they taught us how they went about things. They wanted the group to be cohesive, so they also set up meetings to talk shit out and they started thinking through what else they could arrange together. They did a lot of skill sharing—people who had done community gardens started presenting to the group, and they started planting things, thinking through how to do that systematically and all that. At first, mostly people got together for meetings and skill sharing, but then eventually people got together just for fun too, to watch a movie or to read something together. Some of the elders noticed that a lot of the younger folk had really disrupted educations—some people could barely read or write. So miniature schools got set up too, adults would trade off on various jobs.
Abdelhadi: What was your role?
Liu: At first, I was on cleaning duty. I liked that. I liked getting things clean and ready for everyone. Then with time, I got tired of that, so I switched to food. Then I got bored again and moved to sewing and mending. I think I was always restless. I think living in the camps and then in the factory housing left me with this very deep resentment about work, and it took me some time to learn other ways of relating to tasks. It all kinda worked out so that chaps were doing what they wanted to do. It was so different than the factory, but it took a while for that to sink in for me.… Like, we knew in the factory we would starve if we didn’t work. But now there was no job that no one was unwilling to do. No job was worth more than another. But I had always hated work so much, there was a clash inside me. I bounced around a lot from job to job. I was into carpentry at some point, made some lovely furniture, mostly beds. Then I moved into communications as other communes popped up and we started to build with folks from around the city and even other cities, eventually, once trains were restored.
Abdelhadi: Were you—
Liu: I still hoped to find my parents. That’s why I got into comms. I had this one picture of them from when they were married. Ridiculous of course, because they didn’t even look like that anymore when we parted. But I would circulate it, on the off chance.
Abdelhadi: No luck though, huh?
Liu: Yeah. It’s okay. I had family in the commune, the elders, my unit mates, a pairing. But yeah, it makes me sad that we never said goodbye, at least. Slowly, I started grieving my parents.
Abdelhadi: What did that look like?
Liu: At first, I was just so angry and sulky at the time. I was really mostly by myself. I didn’t have anyone to direct this anger at. I was so happy to be with other people when I joined the commune, but I also realized I didn’t know how to relate to people, how to share space. I had a lot of conflict. It was always the same pattern, I’d get really close to someone, want to spend all our time together, and then they’d do one small thing that annoyed me or that I felt meant they weren’t as committed to me as I was to them. Then I would withdraw completely. Punish them with silence and distance.
Abdelhadi: Definitely a familiar trauma response!
Liu: Yeah, at some point, one of the elders pulled me aside and said, you need to talk to someone. And I didn’t know what they meant. But they said come see me tomorrow morning at the garden. There was a little area with benches under the fruit trees, it was very peaceful there. I met them there, and they said: tell me your story. And I told it. It turned out they’d been reading all these psychoanalysis and psychology books and sort of training themselves to play that role. So, they were a sort of therapist for me, and that’s how I got into trauma healing. They also sent me to the meditations. I had never joined any of the meditation groups. But they said it was a must, so I went. Over time, I started to feel better.
Abdelhadi: I imagine, given how many people had been displaced and how many families had been split apart, that a lot of people were struggling with the same things you were.
Liu: Absolutely. My growth was connected to some broader changes in the Binjiang Commune. Gradually, we were moving to playing this particular role in the city, like as a … refugee center. Very early on, like soon after we destroyed the machines, Xinyi started advocating that the factory be a refuge. It went along with some of the ideas of the chaps in the apartment building, but it went deeper, like it became a spiritual thing for Xinyi. She said we had to welcome everyone, we had to bring together the broken people, we had to care for whoever needed it. We had to be a refuge. We all became really compelled by this idea. A refuge. A safe place where people could come make a home. None of the kids my age, or Xinyi’s age, had ever had anything like that. Our parents had always told us it was somewhere else, but Xinyi said we had to build it right there for ourselves.
Abdelhadi: Where there many refugees?
Liu: Initially, just hungry workers from around the city. But things were blowing up all over China. It was a full civil war by then. The CCP ended up leveling whole cities, and the hunger crisis was massive. I think nearly a third of the population was displaced at some point of the war. So much accumulated trauma, from the war, the crises leading up to it, everything. A lot of people were like me, completely shut down and angry and reactive to everything. I was growing, healing, and our commune was more and more figuring out how to take care of people too. We took care of who we could, usually hosting about two or three hundred people at a time. A few would stay permanently, but many were with us for a few weeks or months before heading to their home provinces. Eventually, I became part of the individual treatment council for Binjiang. That’s what led me to New York.
Abdelhadi: How so?
Liu: As things were settling down in China, we heard it was getting intense in North America. Our factory, remember, was all these diasporic Chinese, people who had been born elsewhere and moved back and were working in captivity to pay off their debts until the insurrection. A lot of us were born in the US. We started trying to connect to Chinese American communities and ended up having these daily strategy and care conversations with activists in Flushing, Queens. Queens was fragmenting then, this was around 2050 or 2051. The [US] Army was occupying NYC and putting a lot of people in camps. But the Army’s presence in Queens was really uneven; they controlled the freeways but had decided the borough wasn’t a strategic priority. Queens had become all these different isolated fiefdoms, like every weird little group or community took over a few blocks at a time and set up checkpoints. We heard a lot about it. Most of the activists, organizers, and community leaders from Flushing ended up in a military camp in Flushing Meadows. Lots of people were being detained, interrogated, and released. The neighborhood was filled with people who had spent a few days or a few weeks in the camp. So, it was just an enormous amount of trauma. I decided I wanted to help them in Flushing, more than our daily calls.
Abdelhadi: What did you do?
Liu: We put together a delegation of trauma healers and assembly facilitators. We found someone still doing flights from Shanghai to New York, and found ourselves packed in with a cargo hold of high-end military electronics bound for US military intelligence. It was a lot more comfortable than my first trip across the Pacific. This time we had a toilet, plenty of food, everyone in their own bed! The pilot smuggled us out of the plane at LaGuardia, and we all made it to Flushing without incident.
Abdelhadi: Did you arrive before the military pullout?
Liu: A few weeks before, yes! So, everything dramatically opened up at that point. Falasheng had its public debut as a commune and became a leading force in reconnecting neighborhoods in Queens. We set up a trauma recovery center at Falasheng, and the commune soon became a hub of refugee resettlement. The military was losing steadily down south, and then eventually in the Midwest. Thousands of people were fleeing the front lines of the fighting, and hundreds of them ended up spending time in Flushing hosted by the commune there. We brought some of the skills we had learned in Hangzhou, working with displaced people. I’m incredibly proud of the work we are doing.
Abdelhadi: You said the vision of becoming a refuge was offered by your friend—Xinyi?
Liu: Yes, she was my age, but I learned so much from her. I really think of her as a hero of the revolution. A lot of my care and healing was done by elders, some really powerful women who also mentored me. But Xinyi really put her ideas of love and care out there, and it transformed our whole district. In a way, I think through her leadership we played an important role in a deeper, longer-term healing of East Asia, and eventually the Mid-Atlantic.
Abdelhadi: What happened to her?
Liu: She was killed. In 2048. A Chinese military missile was undetonated in the wreckage of a building, just a couple of blocks from our original factory. She was helping with cleanup and it ended up exploding. She was the only one who was killed. It was really devastating for all of us. We had this huge parade in the district, like thousands of people came out. We ended up naming our refugee center after her. There is a park in Flushing named for her too.
Abdelhadi: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for this interview. I see we’ve run out of the time you set aside. Anything else you want to share?
Liu: Nah, I think this is the most I’ve talked to anyone about my life since I started therapy. Usually, I’m the listener! It’s been a pleasure.
Abdelhadi: I appreciate you. Thanks.
6: S. ADDAMS ON THE CHURCH FATHERS OF STATEN ISLAND
Recorded on August 1, 2068, in Staten Island.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, this is M. E., and today I am talking with S. Addams for the oral history documentation project about the New York Commune. It is August 1, 2068. We are at the teenagers’ crèche of the St. George Commune in Staten Island, New York. Hello S.
S. Addams: Hello.
O’Brien: Are you from Staten Island?
Addams: Yes, I’ve been here my whole life.
O’Brien: Oh, wow. You are old enough you must have lived through the fifties, that cult.
Addams: That’s right. That cult.
O’Brien: I hope we get into all that. How about we start with your first memory?
Addams: [Pause.] My mother had a blue-and-white plaid apron. She was holding me. We were under a cherry tree. It was blooming. We were in the courtyard of the compound where I grew up. I was looking at the blue sky. She was watching the other kids play, but her arms were around me. She was so soft. It was warm, being held by her. Actually, I think it was a cold day, or cold for the spring. But it was warm being close to her. I felt her breathing. I could see the color of the apron, the sky, I could hear my sisters laughing. I felt … I guess I felt safe? I don’t know. The pink leaves of the cherry tree were falling gently. I was small. I don’t know how old, a toddler I guess.… That’s a messed-up question.
O’Brien: It is?
Addams: What if my first memory was something horrible?
O’Brien: [Pause.] Yeah, I hear you. Tell us about where we are right now.
Addams: Well, first we’re in Staten Island. [Laughs.] But more seriously, we are in the teenagers’ crèche. This is a cluster of apartments that is part of the larger complex of buildings that make up the St. George Commune. These apartments are so teenagers can get some limited autonomy from adult authority. Teenagers can come here to hang out or even move in here for periods of time. Those who move here are given more independence, but also more responsibility for making sure the place is tolerable, and making sure that everyone is mostly safe. At the very least they are responsible for making sure no one is brutalizing anyone else. The average stay, for those that choose to move here, is about four months. It gets a bit overwhelming for many, that much socializing and, well, disorganization. I’ll be frank, it’s chaotic here. Currently, the crèche has six residents, and takes up four apartments, which is this entire floor. It gets bigger or smaller depending on how many people are living here. Right now, the kids’ thing is gaming. Everyone is probably zonked out on the enormous couch they have next door.
O’Brien: What is your role?
Addams: I am the adult liaison to the crèche. It’s a tricky position. Mostly I try to get the kids to talk to me, at least enough so that I have a decent idea of their mental health. The idea of the crèche, or this one at least, is that kids can find their own limits when given the chance. A lot of kids manage that.
O’Brien: I’m interested in this topic, how kids grow up in the commune, their autonomy, how far that goes.
Addams: Yeah, it’s so important. Kids need both support and space to figure things out, and the shape of that space needs to change and grow as the kid grows. For lots of kids in the commune, their primary connections are with their immediate family unit, with all the adults who have opted in as their parents and bibis and things. But then also the commune as a whole plays a role in their upbringing. There is usually a lot of fluidity in kids being able to move back and forth between their family’s immediate suite or house, and the surrounding community of the commune. Just eating together with the whole commune for three meals a day has a giant impact in expanding the child’s social connections from early on. Dozens of people get involved in making sure the kid is coming up okay, that the dynamics with their parents are healthy, and getting involved in teaching and helping the kid in many, many different ways.
But sometimes the dynamics between the immediate parents and the kid really break down, become locked into an antagonism, and that’s where we see the crèche come in. We think of the crèche as an alternative to running away completely. The kids can step away from their parental group, find more autonomy, but still be held and supported by the commune. Sometimes kids spin out more while living here, and the relative openness of the environment here is hard for some of them. When that happens, I try to support the kid in finding a better environment.
