—————————— DAD AND I SAT ACROSS FROM EACH other in two generic, squeaky rolling chairs in his office. Mom was on a consulting call with one of her nonprofit clients that morning and suggested Dad and I spend some quality time together, especially since my new favorite activity was taking place in a couple hours: a rally.
Poster sheets covered the walls, each filled with bulleted lists and circled words like Root Causes and Mobilizing and Feminist Lens? A couple of smudgy windows looked out toward Wilshire and let in a blue-tinted morning light. Piles of books sent to him from lefty small presses sat in little towers on his desk, on topics like socialism in 1930s Chicago, the bracero program and migration history, and pan-Asian solidarity in nineteenth-century Hawaii. The office was, in short, just like every lefty space I’d been to in New York. Organizers couldn’t resist writing big ideas on paper then drawing arrows between them, or keeping piles of books that might inform their work if only they had time to read.
I told him about Liang being let off with probation.
Dad shook his head. “This criminal justice system,” he sighed. “It must be a blow. Not to mention the family.”
I nodded, thinking of the video of Aunt T bursting out of the courtroom that day, yelling at the reporters, Akai Gurley’s life did not matter! Black lives don’t matter! Pointing down at the floor as if to say, Take this for your papers.
Dad gazed a little above and behind me, measuring what he wanted to say. “You know,” he said, “we use this organizing tool called a power analysis. I thought it might be helpful for you in thinking through the next steps.”
“Don’t you need to prep for the rally?”
“I can wing it.”
“Sure,” I said. Here, maybe, was something I could bring back to Tiff and Ash from my supercool activist parents.
Dad stood up and stuck a fresh poster sheet on the wall. He wrote POWER ANALYSIS at the top in block letters, then drew a rectangle, which he divided in half vertically. His marker made quick strokes, like a practiced artist sketching. Along the left axis he wrote the numbers one through ten in ascending order; at the top of the left side he drew a plus sign; a negative sign on the right:
POWER ANALYSIS
| + | - |
| 10 | |
| 9 | |
| 8 | |
| 7 | |
| 6 | |
| 5 | |
| 4 | |
| 3 | |
| 2 | |
| 1 |
“Now,” he said, “the goal is to understand the situation you’re facing, so you can see the most effective places to put pressure.”
I was suddenly back in the weekly “family meetings” we had when I was a kid. The three of us would sit around the table and talk about what I’d later learn to call the basics of social reproduction. Reed thinks it’s not fair that he has to go to bed before his favorite shows are on. Scribble, scribble. We have a few options: record the show for later, or Reed accepts he’ll be tired the next day. Or, What’s a fairer way to organize chores around the house? Dad scribbled a bubble chart with dishes, floors, and bathrooms and started writing our initials next to each. To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities, he chimed. It took me a full decade to realize that was Marx. My entire life was an experiment in communal praxis, and somehow my parents were surprised I’d ended up in activism.
“The way it works,” continued Dad, “is you lay out all of the different players on this grid according to how much power they have in the situation, from one to ten and how much they’re for or against you, left to right.”
I laughed. “Which side are you on?”
Dad nodded enthusiastically. “You know, that’s a labor song from the Kentucky miners’ strike.” Nothing energized him like labor history. “Then Pete Seeger recorded it. Now it’s being appropriated by everyone, including your movement.”
“Yeah, the joke’s on us—BLM is actually appropriating a white lefty anthem.”
Dad sighed. “That wasn’t a criticism. Organizing is all about learning from other movements, even if they’re white. So,” Dad tapped the sheet of paper, “who are the players?”
“The NYPD.”
“And what’s been their response?”
“The police chief is ‘Broken Windows’ Bratton.” Ash had held a teach-in where she walked us through Giuliani’s brilliant idea to have cops solve all the problems of a neighborhood by giving them impunity to ticket and arrest for the smallest infractions. “He doesn’t even want body camera footage released—god forbid they not be able to cover up for each other.”
“Okay, so let’s say they have a seven for power, and are pretty far against.” Dad placed a dot far to the right of the grid, up high, and wrote NYPD. “Who are your allies?”
“CAAAV is backing us. You know, the grassroots Asian American organization. And they’re part of a whole police reform coalition.”
“Good. So they’re very supportive, far to the left. And how much power do they have?”
“In relation to the NYPD? Yeah.”
“So.” Dad put a dot far to the left, at the three mark.
We continued on: the mayor; the media; the conservative Chinese Americans; Black Lives Matter chapters; progressive Asian American groups. My energy sank as the points piled onto the paper. Yes, the Times had mentioned us, but only in paragraph twelve of its coverage of the pro-Liang protests: they loved shots of conservative Asians protesting, because media loves nothing more than nonwhite people being racist. The mayor probably hadn’t heard of us.
Even some progressive groups were reluctant to come out because the details of the case were too messy: the gun discharge may have been accidental, unlike in Eric Garner’s or Michael Brown’s cases; it was at night, in a stairwell without video footage; and, of course, it just so happened that the only cop to be indicted, in all the scores of recent cases across the country, was the lone Asian.
We looked up at the finished chart, where a cluster of dots had gathered at the lower left—very much with us, and with little power—while another cluster formed at the upper right—totally against us, with lots of power. My stomach lurched, as if I were on that paper being tipped farther and farther away from power. I wanted to reach out and shake the grid, to redistribute all the dots leftward.
“Well. This is depressing,” I said.
“It’s not meant to be,” said Dad encouragingly, studying the grid like a painting at a museum.
“Was this the point, to show me that these grassroots organizations going up against the courts, the mayor, the police department are bound to fail?”
“Not at all. The next step is to see where you can change the grid: either increase your power or decrease the power of the opposition,” he gestured in the air above the chart. “Or, maybe, convince some of them to join you.”
“We’ll write a nice letter to Bratton and ask him to quit his job and consult with us on defunding the police.”
“No, but you could, say, do a media campaign to pressure him to put Liang on probation.”
“You don’t believe that’ll work.”
His eyes shifted. “It is a difficult case.”
I stood up and walked around the room and looked more closely at the other sheets of paper. I saw this same exercise with other campaigns—saw how, to Dad, this was just one in a thousand happening across the country and how, in his view, it was not the best case, or even a promising one, to spark a mass movement.
I remembered the day in third grade that I came home from school spouting that I wanted to write about Rosa Parks, the first to sit against bus segregation. No, Dad corrected me, though he admired Parks, she wasn’t the first—the NAACP waited until they had the right case in this respectable, middle-aged woman; furthermore, the way the bus boycotts were taught watered down the influence of both leftist politics and Gandhian satyagraha in order to Mickey Mouse–ify King and Parks and other leaders. My nine-year-old brain broke to reconcile what I was being taught by my well-meaning teacher—white, obviously—and my father, and I wondered whether listening to one would get me in trouble with the other. Some children were told about Santa Claus; I was disillusioned of my movement histories.
“Well, that’s the point of being young, isn’t it?” I said, trying to get ahead of Dad. “To do something difficult, maybe impossible. That’s how movements start.”
“Of course. Your mother and I were like that, too.”
“But you don’t want that for me.”
Dad plopped in his chair, which squealed like a crushed mouse. “We want you to do what feels meaningful. And, at the same time, there were some things, looking back, that we would’ve done differently.”
I sat across from him. “That you would’ve done differently.” I repeated, enunciating the vague words, like tapping on a box to guess what was inside. “Like, less radical.”
“It’s one thing to be reading Gramsci and Mao when you’re twenty and have nothing to lose.” Dad spoke as if he weren’t talking about himself and Mom but some hypothetical young person in the seventies. “It’s another to go into the world and actually move people.”
“Hide your politics so the system accepts you.”
Dad sighed and I could feel that I was slowly rubbing away his cool front—immature, maybe, but effective.
“Of course I wish the world were different,” he said. “Of course I’d love to see a democratic socialist state in America. But what we’ve learned, in this time since the seventies, is how brutally this country treats anyone associated with the word communist.”
The word came into the room and, as if it carried an electrical current, charged the air. Communist. The old specter still had the power to spook.
“Okay, pause,” I said. “All these years, when you were referring to your ‘movement days,’ you actually meant ‘communist days.’”
Dad sucked in air and I saw it was true. A rush of memories came back like restored photographs. Dad had allowed me any sneaker brand except for Nike, reminding me they were made in sweatshops by kids younger than me. I grew up going to Dodgers games but was forbidden from ordering Dodger Dogs because of Farmer John’s dispute with the United Food and Commercial Workers. I saw now that this was more than union politics: Dad was constantly calculating how much to insert his radical past into parenting a child under late capitalism, walking a line between full-on consumerism and raising me at a cultish remove from the bourgie norms of my friends.
“Can we acknowledge for a moment”—I stammered, plucking the first injustice that came to mind—“I can’t believe you let me spend my high school years as an Obama liberal!”
Dad burst into laughter and I saw that this was a little self-centered of me. But I finally understood why they’d always spoken about my organizing with that tinge of condescension.
“What,” said Dad, “we were supposed to tell you what hardcore revolutionaries would be doing instead of canvassing for Obama?”
“Something like that.”
Dad laughed again. “Reed. As a parent, you watch your child go through a lot of phases. Astronauts, Power Rangers, skateboarding, classic rock. Some stick, but most of them you outgrow.”
“So,” I said, blushing, “you and Mom were just biding your time until I woke up to how basic my moderate Democrat opinions were.”
Dad’s lips thinned into an if-that’s-how-you-want-to-see-it smile.
I leapt up again, agitated, and looked at the poster sheets as if trying to find a way to turn this around. I paused, linking Dad’s past to the history I knew. “Wait, did you know, like, Grace Lee Boggs?”
Dad sighed. “Not really. There were a lot of different cadres around then.”
“The Panthers?”
“Former Panthers.”
“That’s cool!” I exclaimed.
Dad’s shrugged. “A lot of that history is romanticized.”
I felt protective of this new knowledge. “Because this ‘radical thing’ is always just a phase.”
“It’s more than a phase,” Dad said, still with his infuriating calm. “Our politics back then still inform us. They shaped us. And, at the same time, the revolution didn’t come. So we had to figure out what else to do.”
“Socialists over thirty have no head?”
“I never believed that. The eighties weren’t exactly a good climate for leftist politics. There were other things, but”—he paused and reconsidered—“we needed real jobs.”
“You didn’t have jobs?”
His face closed, giving him time to recalibrate, a talent that won him every poker game throughout my childhood. After I whined and threw a fit a few too many times, he started to go easy on me, but I always knew when he did.
Someone knocked on the door. A young staffer stuck her head in, carrying a pile of flyers and a walkie-talkie. “Oh my god,” she said when we made eye contact. “You look just like your dad.”
I gave her my best smile. “Thanks? I get that a lot.”
“You even sound like him!”
“Just what Reed wants to hear,” said Dad. “Time to go?”
* * *
We walked with Dad’s coworkers through downtown L.A., the old urban core full of neobaroque and art deco stone buildings abandoned by white flight, then filled in by greasy-spoon diners and clothing stores that had signs only en español. Now, it was turning bourgie again with hipster bars and galleries selling inscrutable, ugly paintings for thirty thousand dollars.
We came upon scaffolding for one of the many new construction projects, and the group veered into the street. Blue tarps and worn camping tents filled the shadowed area underneath, and it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing: a homeless encampment. This was the homeless crisis I’d heard so much about, right in the middle of gentrification. I couldn’t stop myself from staring as we passed, at the life made from shopping carts used as wardrobes, cardboard laid down as flooring.
I wanted to murmur to Dad that it was no wonder he’d been a communist, but I didn’t want to out him in front of his colleagues.
Broadway opened onto the wide plaza in front of city hall, where a few hundred other union members were gathering. The staffers around me started to join the chant as they approached—El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido!—a basic fluency in Spanish being required for any organizer in L.A. They wore their union T-shirts, all in bold, childish hues of blue and purple and red. Mom’s voice rang in my head, Does being progressive mean you have to dress like shit? They held picket signs proclaiming, FIGHT FOR 15!
I squinted to look up at city hall, that weird chimera: a white tower crowned by a gray ziggurat like a silly party hat. The organizers had set up a podium on the broad steps, where Occupy had put up a good fight until the LAPD swept them away. Dad walked up the steps to meet the expert handshakes of a couple local politicians, easy to spot with their nice suits and lapel pins. The union officials, on the other hand, had pulled their locals’ shirts over their button-ups, communicating that they had power but were using it on behalf of the people.
I wandered over to the edge of the crowd as Dad lined up with the speakers.
A group near the steps pounded on overturned white buckets, giving the event a frantic beat. An old white lefty with a gray ponytail approached me, his eyes cloudy from years of LSD. He handed me a socialist newspaper and offered a fist bump and a “Right on, brother.” I thanked him, curled up the paper, and stuffed it in my back pocket.
Dad stepped up to the podium and started the union clap. The crowd put down their picket signs and brought their palms together in a slow, steady rhythm, gradually increasing in tempo until we burst into applause and cheers.
“Brothers and sisters,” Dad yelled, the classic union intro. He was in his rally persona: not the quiet person from the dinner table but the fighter. His eyes narrowed and his arms swung in big arcs. “We believe in the dignity of all work. We rely on workers to prepare our food, to care for our families, to make our clothes. And yet millions of Californians can’t feed their own families on the wages they’re given. Is that fair?” The crowd gamely cried No! in unison. “Is that just?” Another No!
Dad made his pitch for the fifteen-dollar minimum wage and then introduced the speakers. Politicians went first, because they had to leave for other events as soon as possible, then a few union presidents, mixed in with a couple rank-and-file members to give the rally emotional appeal.
It seemed a modest demand, considering the obscene wage gap of current American capitalism. Then I pictured Dad’s Post-its and the stack of mean little dots—corporate boards, Republicans in the state assembly, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, even small business owners—opposing the increase. But the campaign was totally sympathetic and had a clear ask, unlike certain others we’d been talking about.
This was how Dad had transformed his past: his pragmatism was its own kind of ideology. It would take someone way off the deep end of the Left to deny that a few bucks an hour would help working people live. I snapped a photo on my phone and posted it to Twitter.
The crowd began to break up and Dad talked to a couple of reporters. I squatted on the steps and read my socialist newspaper, which reminded me that even though Occupy had ended, the 99 percent was an unstoppable tsunami, ready to crash into the financial system.
Dad came and found me.
“Good job, Dad,” I said.
“Thanks, Reed.”
That was it—he wasn’t the person on the podium anymore. We walked toward Little Tokyo, literally in the shadow of city hall, toward Suehiro’s. It was the unofficial spot after every downtown rally because hungry lefties liked getting big plates of down-home Japanese food for cheap. And like Mom, Dad didn’t let the Japanese colonizers’ history stop him from enjoying their food.
A pile of picket signs had already gathered inside the door. The bright union shirts were huddled all around the light wood tables buzzing about the morning’s rally and the next action. Dad and I sat down at a small table toward the back, near the white waving cats. We ordered our tempura combinations from one of the Sansei aunties who, it seemed, had always worked there.
“So back to your communist days.”
Dad grimaced like he’d hoped I’d forgotten.
“You all went to get jobs?” I said, picking up the thread from his office. “As in, becoming proletariat?”
He leaned forward, his hands intertwined, a reluctant conspirator. “Yes,” he said softly. “We were part of an organization that structured us into different cadres: a group working on miners in West Virginia or factories in East L.A. I ran deliveries for a shipping company in Oakland.”
I tried to picture Dad driving a delivery truck, going door to door in a brown uniform. I couldn’t, partly because he was my dad and partly because I’d never seen an Asian person who was a native English speaker in anything but a white-collar job. “Did that work? I mean, were people sympathetic?”
“We were a little naive, I think, about going in cold to recruit people. It’s not that easy to sit next to someone at lunch and casually hand them a pamphlet about use value and exploitation.” He cleared his throat as if to shake that old vocabulary off.
“With the eventual goal of communist revolution? Like, if enough of you organized enough mines, you’d build a mass proletarian base,” I felt like some ethnographer who’d only read about this lost tribe and was now finally sitting across from a member. “And then seize the means of production.”
Dad groaned as if this were torture. “Something like that.”
The old white lefty who’d given me the newspaper came to the table and clapped Dad on the shoulder. He grinned and congratulated Dad on his speech. Mom often joked about the cohort of loco old guys who followed Dad around.
“Thanks, brother, thanks,” said Dad, which meant he’d forgotten the guy’s name. “This is my son, Reed.”
“Right on, Reed!” He missed the cue to give his name, and instead gave me another fist bump, which felt less weird as I realized it was a relic of the seventies that had looped back around to our generation. “Man, what a family. Hey, lemme know what you think of this issue,” he said, handing the paper to Dad. The man turned back to me. “You ever read Trotsky?”
“Oh, Reed reads everything,” Dad cut in. “See you at the labor breakfast in a couple weeks?”
“For sure, brother, for sure.” He fist-bumped Dad, which was so awkward I had to avert my eyes.
Dad watched the guy retrieve his picket sign and leave the restaurant. “Watch out for Trotskyites,” said Dad. “They’re a little bit out there.”
“You could be a little more sympathetic, considering your past.”
“Some of us outgrew that phase,” he said curtly.
“Why, though?” I asked impatiently. “How can you just walk away from the revolution, when that’s all that matters?”
“How long has the Gurley case been going?” Dad countered.
“Almost two years,” I said, surprised at how long it had been, how saying it made me feel tired.
“We were involved for about twelve,” Dad said flatly.
“Twelve years!” I exclaimed. I tried to imagine another ten years of weekly marches, cop watch trainings, community outreach, teach-ins, member recruitment, forming and re-forming coalitions, then my mind stopped.
Something else clicked and I did some math. “Wait, but if you did this for twelve years, and then got your union and city jobs in the eighties . . . how were you organizing in these proletariat jobs while you were in college?”
Dad coughed. “We weren’t.”
I clapped my hands together and felt a wild grin spreading across my face. I had the urge to jump on the table and gloat, to make my own diagram and draw a big X across it. “Oh my god! You two dropped out of college? You dropped out of college!”
Dad’s shoulders went soft, and he seemed relieved, actually, not to be holding the information anymore. “There was this idea,” he said slowly, “that education was filling us with bourgeois illusions.”
A little montage from the last few days ran through my mind: Mom’s coded warnings about the same mistakes and reminding me of myself.
“So, hello?” I said, waving at Dad as if he were far away. “You guys have no ground to stand on! How can you tell me not to do something you did yourself?”
Dad leaned forward again to subtly suggest we keep our voices down. “The thing is, Reed, I’m not speaking from some moral stance. I know Columbia is a private, pro-status-quo institution. I know you care about your work. I’m not saying it’s right or good to go back. But one thing we learned is that life was a lot harder, in the long term, than if we’d just spent another year or two getting our degrees.”
The waiter dropped off two huge bowls of white rice piled with panko-crusted squash, potato, broccoli, and exactly two shrimp. I was deflated by Dad’s sincerity. Rubbing it in was no fun if he wasn’t going to argue back.
“And,” I said, not ready to give up my little victory, “when were you going to tell me this?”
“It’s not like we wanted to keep it secret—we just didn’t know when it was responsible to tell you.”
“Responsible?” I scoffed. “Like you might accidentally put that idea in my head?”
Dad gave a tepid smile. “I guess the joke’s on us.”