It Could Happen Here - The Atlanta Shooting Part 2: The Red Flag Flying Here

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

In part 2 of our analysis of the Atlanta shooting we zoom out to look at how the history of capitalist development in East Asia drove migrant workers to their deaths in a spa half a world away.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yep. It's It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the show.

Today, our guests, fresh off their new hit movie by Paramount, Garrison Davis. What? Yeah, what? What? I'm doing like a thing. Chris, Garrison's lost the thread. Why don't you pick it up? I also have lost the thread, so here's a new one.

This has been very confusing for part two of an episode. It's just 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 uh welcome to part two of the atlanta shooting um we are back with actually less atlanta this time but more shooting. Oh, good. Sorry. This is a very absurd. We've had ourselves in dear God.

I just a normal day at work. 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 uh there's almost inevitably an autobiographical pivot that happens like at some point in the piece um may jong the the author of the vanity fair piece i mentioned last episode that's been a major source for both these episodes uh doesn't her piece so do i mean like dozens and dozens and dozens of asian 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 to understand a 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 the audio autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the scope into looking at just sort of the u.s and this story and the story of asian americans in general isn't just a story about sort of a minority in the u.s or about american imperialism it's about asia itself and here especially it's about china and korea to lesser extent japan and you know the 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, by actually looking at this, we get to introduce another key player in this horror show who only sort of appear tangentially 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 well yeah capitalism unfortunately moves at an incredibly relentless pace yeah capitalism's knees are in incredible shape yeah so and and thishmm. And this brings us back to Atlanta itself. Tao Youfeng died a hero. In the final moments of her life, as shots rang across Yang's Asian massage, she motioned for Marcus Leon, still half-naked on the massage table, to stay still and wait for her to walk in front of him before he dived 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 reward, in typical American fashion, was a bullet in the head.

It took six days for her family in China to realize that she'd 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 19 days before she was buried in the land of her killer at a funeral attended entirely

by strangers. Marcus Leon, the man Daoyongfeng 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 run 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 in this episode, which is that, like, and it is yeah this is I think what I wanted to sort of what I wanted to talk about in 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 like produce this horror are not you know they're. And the conditions that produce this horror are not,

they're not just the conditions that produce Robert Aaron Long. They're not just the conditions that produce The Shooter. They are the conditions that produce Dao Youfeng, who spent almost her entire life as a migrant worker supporting a family whose most pressing concern was attempting to marry her off. And I think it's worth tracing out these conditions

and how they develop, because a 12-year-old girl drops out of middle school to work at a factory 250 miles away and then 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 for Mao. Yeah, I would imagine not. Yeah, it's like i don't have much love

for mal but i don't think if you showed mal 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 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 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 are still felt to this day. It was a utterly devastating war. But it also has sort of more subtle effects on the sort of politics and economics of the region because one of the very important things about this war is that the u.s is fighting in east asia and this means that the u.s is going to leave 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 enormous implication for the entire region um i've talked on bastards before about like you know about so many effects this has but you know korea and later vietnam are a major like the war is the u.s fights There are a major factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees, you know, enormous US 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 think of this, but South Korea is likewise industrialized by American capital for, you know, pretty

much the same reason. You know, and this goes on to the extent that like Korean troops like fight on the side of the u.s in vietnam and you know so in south korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal military asset for the u.s 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 do if you like 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 looming possibility they're gonna have to fight the u.s again and they're going to have to fight the U.S. again. And if I'm going to call state-led development corruption and state-led development socialism, question mark, which sort of play out in China and Korea. And, you know, I think 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, spreading it across the world, seeking any kind of economic salvation. And a lot of the people who are killed in Atlanta are in Atlanta because of these crises.

are in Atlanta because of these crises. Yeah, so the first of these is the chaebol system in Korea, which is sort of informally established by the dictator Park Chung-hee as like the core of his plan for economic development. And it generates a number of extremely powerful family-owned mega conglomerates with intimate ties to the state and these sort of various political factions. And these conglomerates, which control to the state and these sort of various political factions. And these conglomerates, which control just vast sections of the Korean economy. I mean,

like, like, like to this day, Samsung, which is the, the large, the remaining tables, like,

I think, I think they, they're, they're, their total percentage of the GDP of Korea is like 17% or something. It's like, it's, it's absolutely absurd.

Wow. Jesus. Yeah. Like, and, and, and like, and the thing is, you know, it's sort of, it's absolutely absurd wow jesus yeah like and and like and the thing is you know it's sort of it's amazing about this is that like the the tables are much weaker than they used to be um for reasons that we will get to in a bit and you know 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 founded and 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. There's an attempt to develop the economy. You know, there's an attempt to sort of the fuel. There's an attempt to sort of fuel the American and South Korean war machines. And the third thing they're trying to do is to make a lot of people in the government, their allies indescribably rich.

And it works sort of amazingly which is a weird thing to say about a development regime started by military dictatorship but they have they have an enormous amount of mill of of american capital military aid and like they they do successfully develop they kill an enormous number of people in the process but you know they do it on on the other side you have chinese daylight development 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's a number of sort of complicated reasons for this the the simplest one is that china just doesn't get the kind of investment technology transfers 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 the the part of the story that is directly sending 12 year olds off to a factory in shenzhen 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 dream what's sort of called the socialist period is about extracting grain from the countryside and fueling and funneling it 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 underdeveloping the countryside in favor of developing cities. And this is explicit state policy. From 1953 to 1985, 80% of the Chinese population is doing agricultural labor.

But agriculture receives less than 10% of state investments over the same period. So they are like really, really, really incredibly not funneling any resources back into rural areas. Yeah, I mean, is there a degree to that? Is there a degree of that that is maybe related to, like, I know in the USSR, a lot of the early left-wing resistance to the soviet regime came from rural areas um is it anything to do with that like is it kind of a desire to to avoid developing these places that are less controllable no and this is the sort of interesting thing about

china is that i mean okay so the the ccp originally has an urban base but they managed to get their entire urban base killed so okay well that'll that'll yeah yeah it's and this is this this is the cause of like like this this is this is one of the reasons for the sino-soviet split like this is basically like stalin and trotsky are bickering and their bickering gets like a million chinese communists killed and that means that you know this this is this is where the sort of rise of mao comes in because mao is a mao's a peasant organizer and once the entire rural 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 like a basically unprecedented

level of sort of buy-in from the countryside but the problem is that the party just isn't interested in in rural 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 fuel 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 like the least developed country in Europe and it's like yeah but like russia had like several times more industrial capacity during 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 part of what they're doing although it doesn't it doesn't work and you know i should mention there's one other thing that they're doing here which is that

so the their base 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 militant 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, they, they, you know,

they have all these welfare programs. They have all of this sort of these resources that 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 the things that happens here is, I guess, I guess you call them benefits, but things 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 you're someone who has a job in the countryside you're you the resources that you're getting are are also from the countryside and that means that you have just these like awful underfunded 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 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 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 and when i say your livelihood is tied to your family unit uh what i mean is that like other than this like brief like token attempt they made to socialize like housework reproductive labor in the great leap forward uh men and the state are just like entirely dependent on uncompensated housework and production by women which well yeah it's not just a china thing yeah i mean yeah it's like okay it's like oh hey this sounds like a modern system i'm like yes this is true um but on the other hand the socialists like ideologically are claiming to be better than

this so i'm holding them through their own standards giving them just like a d on this because this is fair like yeah i mean like i think this is really one of like you know okay so they failed to end capitalism but like i think 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 when mao is saying stuff about like women hold up half the sky like what he actually means is that like women's labor is holding up like 70 of the budget and they're getting like 20 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 uh really bad things start happening in terms of your gender politics which uh is a thing that has never has literally never happened

in any other regime and we should not at all take any lessons from this about how our own economy works it's great it's completely fine welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales fromadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHe radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast the other thing that we need to talk about is the ccp's just utter full-scale war against his urban workers and this is not the kind of like abstract class war that you hear leftist 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 pla the chinese army just butchering the chinese working class and this comes to a head in the

cultural revolution and you know i i have i have a whole rant about the cultural revolution that i will do sometime that's not now but the short version of it is that one of the things that happens in the cultural revolution is that the ccp crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and they kill a million people like from from from from that is a lot of people yeah yeah i mean it's like it's really it's really like comparing it like to the scale of like the great anti-communist purges like this is i think it i think it's actually more i think it's a 1.1 million people i think it's more people than than suharto killed it's like well there you go see there's some left right unity yeah well i mean the mount mount mount undisputed greatest anti-communist 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 a you've got a you've got a couple of titans battling it out here. Yeah, it's a difficult choice. But yeah, I mean, they are like... The CCP is literally fighting a war against the servant workers. And even by the mid-70s, there are moments where the army is sending tens of thousands of troops into cities to break up strike waves. And this is an enormous problem for ccp you know okay like it's a enormous 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 doesn't go great for them and the the other problem they have is uh you know this this creates this like this incredible militarization of society and this leads to stagnation 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 all these people on strike, you need them to not be on strike because you need them to produce stuff for your central planning production schedules. And so all of these cadre planners start being like, okay, these workers keep going on strike. Where can we get labor that won't do this? And they start looking at the countryside.

And they start going like, beard stroke stroke can we send this over here and meanwhile like the actual rural like ruralites are fed up with just being treated like shit and they start de-collectivizing their farms because well 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 simplest explanation of it is that they basically start forming these things that become called a town and village enterprises which are these like the simplest explanation of it is that they basically start 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 to china and the ccp looks at this it goes something right and this is where you start getting markets coming back to

china and the ccp looks at this it goes like yeah sure this is fine uh 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 and village enterprises which are called tvs like mostly what they're doing is they're like selling parts and stuff to like these giant state owned enterprises, which are, you know, your state owned enterprises are things that are building like bikes, like tractors and refrigerators. So they're like, you know, they're selling them like wheels or like refrigerator parts. And this is the thing that becomes the core of the Chinese economy, particularly in Daoyoufeng's home province of Guangdong. Because Guangdong is a really unique province, I guess, is the thing you can say about literally every province. But Guangdong 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 of the weird like diplomacy stuff that like uh 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 guendong gets these special economic zones and this becomes sort of the the prototype for china's like eventual sort of capitalist centric like export development model. Guangdong is like – they're taking foreign capital from Hong Kong, and they're using it to produce goods for the market.

And this is the world that Danyou Feng and Xiao Jitong grew up in. It's a world where, on the the one hand there's enormous economic growth but on the other hand like all of the safety nets that chinese socialism had 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 diane fong'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 80s where we're on you get into the reform period you have simultaneously

you have the one child policy which is this incredibly draconian state enforced destruction of bodily autonomy and it also serves this really horrific role in devaluing girls because girls are seen 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 there are these mass sterilizations that happen and yeah it's this just enormous patriarchal engine and it sucks and there's also there's a return to Confucianism as well because like this is one of the things that's like the most

infuriating about this because like 80% of like what the original Chinese revolution was about was like hey Confucianism sucks like this incredible like reactionary patriarchal ideology is in fact bad and then like 40 years in they're like hold on wait what if we bring this shit back and it is it is it is extremely bad and you know and it serves as a sort of like like this

pacifying patriarchal ideology that they're using to sort of hold the family unit together because the family unit are like so a lot of the the firms in this period are they're just like owned by families right and you know you you there's a lot of sort of similarities here between if you look at your like you know you're sort of like right wing like, culturally Christian, small business owner families. And you look at this, and it's like, we've redeveloped the wheel here. We have once again created the patriarchal death engine.

Yay! Woo! It's great. It's... Yeah, and... This is basically this is the world that da yong fong like grows up in and this is the period where the the old urban working class is just hammered to pieces so 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

its vanguard are these women who are given two imperatives by their families and these these imperatives are given i mean literally da yong fong like dao you fong like directly and i i think indirectly to um xiao zhetan okay so like with dao you fang we like we literally have the quotes of this right like she she is told by her family get married and find a job and xiao zhitang gets married off at 20 but a a middle school da yong fang like drops out of school and just goes to work in a factory in shenzhen and this like these are the women who built modern china like these are these are literally these are the people who turn shenzhen from a tiny rural town into a world-class manufacturing hub 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 shit for it. Like the wages they are working for, like Da Yong Fong's brother is working on rubber plantation. He's making $5 a month. And, you know, in Da Yong Fong's case, like the other thing she's dealing with is literally these constant demands for family to get married. And Fong just refuses. They try to do it as a young adult and she just goes no and they try to get like when she's like 38 they bring her back to her village and are like

pick a husband and she just goes no and she's just like they keep showing her guys and she's just like no and you know what she does instead is charter her own path by managing to secure a visa to the U.S. So Daniel Fong is a migrant worker for ages, and eventually, I think in 2016, she moves to the U.S. to support her family again from afar.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcast there's there's only there's one more piece of macroeconomics we need to talk about before we can follow daniel fong to the massage parlor and this one is going to get like everyone else to the scene of this massacre so when we last left our uh korean corruption tables uh business business was booming and in the early 90s business is like even more booming it is

this is this is the best i've ever done economically and the reason it's the best i've ever done economically is because is is by is 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 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 1980s as people probably are aware the u.s the u.s 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 devalue its currency relative to the yen and the deutschmark 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 weaker. Now we can produce shit again, but it just, you know, it,

it, it combines with this like structural weakness japan's economy japan's economy just implodes and japan goes okay fuck it how do we keep the economy going without a 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 the japanese economy was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later um but this this has a series of effects uh 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 reason they're doing this is because of japanese credit and the fact that like the there's more complicated currency bullshit going on 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 won 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 U.S. in 1995 does the reverse Plaza Accords, 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-to-do. And this just, like, this just obliterates, like, every economy in East Asia. Like, they all just implode. Thailand goes under. most of these countries like 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 the asian economic crisis and you know saddled with like enormous debts declining declining profits, like, these tables start just collapsing left and right. And South Korea just is

on the edge of bankruptcy. And right on cue, the IMF shows up and makes everything worse. Because, yeah, it's great. It's the IMF. They do normal IMF stuff, and they impose a bunch of austerity measures. And this just annihilates the Korean middle class.

It just gets obliterated. This is just death knell, and it has a lot of effects. But one of the other ones is the Korean labor movement is really severely damaged by just all the economic devastation that's happening around them. just all the economic devastation that's happening around them and the product of this is just a sort of rural poverty drives Da Yongfang and Xiao Jitan

from their villages the economic collapse drives Hyung 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 u.s here well okay there's something about the u.s is that its economy is incredibly

strong and the dollar is incredibly strong and even people who come to the u.s for other reasons two of the women who wind up here like are here basically because they married someone and but even that you know like there's a couple people like they marry someone then they they break up divorces them but they stay in the u.s they stay in the u.s because like the 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 the combination of that and the strength of the American dollar sort of, it brings the brave, the desperate, and just the love struck to our shores. Hernandez Ortiz, who's the man that Long shot while he was on his knees begging for his life.

Hernandez Ortiz was in that mall because he was wiring money home to his family in Guatemala. And we could do another entire story here about Guatemala and the Yadda Fruit Company and the US-backed coups 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 euphemistically call it

capitalism or society or reality and the survivors of this are just flung from meat grinder to meat grinder desperately looking for a new life in a new country and you know they get there and the country just buries them instead dao yong fang was also you know constantly sending money home to her family when she arrives in the u.s she's supporting like 10 members of her family off of a salary that is like i mean like she's supporting 10 members of her family off of a salary that is like i mean like she's supporting members of her family off of the salary that you get from massage work right yeah i i think this is like like again i think something that people don't understand about the u.s is that like yeah american wages are low but the dollar is so strong that even like like really 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 u.s who are here basically to work and to send remittances back home and this is i mean this is like this is an enormous part of just how the economy of the philippines works because of yep yeah a bunch of the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the marcos's did um yeah and you know for for asian women in particular once they get here they're often drawn to spa work because i mean there's a lot of reasons we'll get into in a second. But these spas are in some sense just like a microcosm of the US. The pay is good, and the people doing the work often prefer it to other jobs that are accessible to immigrants. to immigrants 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 u.s 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 stalkers and you know they face sort of constant like racial misogynist 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 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 face constant police raids and this is true but if anything it understates how bad it actually is because like asian massage parlors are subjected to two different kinds of police raids that just happen constantly um i'm gonna read a thing from buzzfeed yeah it's it's great it's it's really fun uh from 2016 to 2020 94 percent of people arrested for unauthorized practice of a profession for any job requiring a license in new york were asian and 96 percent were women according to data from the new york division of criminal justice services and where prostitution is a misdemeanor defense unauthorized practice of a profession which

is the charge that covers unlicensed massage along with roles like veterinary medicine and engineering is a felony that carries higher penalty including up to four years of jail time now i'm i'm no expert but that sure does sound like racism and misogyny yep well it's like yeah there's an argument to be made. If you're moonlighting as a bridge engineer and you're not qualified, yeah, sure, maybe that's a felony. Robert, you're really just calling me out on the pod, just right in the... Now, Garrison, we've agreed not to talk about all of those people

who died when that bridge collapsed that you built in Florida on that university campus. Nothing 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, OK, back to back to back to the racism it's like okay so you have these raids that are like literally only like targeted against asian massage workers and then on top and so that's type one and the second type of raid is that the other thing that happens at these places constantly are i are these anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking raids and i'm putting both of those in enormous quotations heavy heavy quotation yeah you know i this is okay i'm 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 uh oh the the the georgia like georgia's like resources on sex trafficking says that uh uh salon asian salons

are a place where there's a bunch of sex trafficking and it's like 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 is sort of

like all of that stuff that I talked about like last episode about Robert Aaron Long like all of you object that i talked about like last episode about robert aaron long like all of the objectification and the racism and the horophobia and that like mixture of like desire and loathing like the cops have this but like also the journalists who are writing about this have this stuff and even the people who don't are sort of like picking up on the sort of like avian 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 to police

investigation means you get more of these stings and you know like we we mentioned at the beginning that uh uh da yung fong like no like 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 there 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. that would be well and her her brother wanted to come but the the like travel to the u.s was was expensive enough that 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 atl Atlanta victims have been arrested as part of raids before this. And even though both of them are innocent, Soon Chung Park was convicted of criminal trespassing anyways. Again, which is 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 trespassing because this entire system is made up of just like robber and long levels of of racism but they have it they have a legal outlet to do it so they don't have to just go murder people and and sometimes they still do murder people yeah definitely yeah um i mean we talked about very generous with that

sometimes garrison yeah i mean there there's a really horrific story of uh 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 uh the nypd kept doing raids on her and eventually she died because she jumped out a window trying to escape one of the raids oh god because these people are just literal monsters yeah um yeah and you know soon chung park like she's convicted of criminal trespassing and she gets you know the 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. Again, this is an entire system full of Robert Aaron Longs. It's the judges, it's the prosecutors, it's the social workers, it's the journalists, it's the cops. And this is an incredible level of systemic state violence that makes these already tenuous migrant worker communities even more vulnerable because if someone's harassing them, they can't call the cops because if the cops show up it's like oh hey it's good

this is this is even worse than the harassment 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 to help spa workers and sex workers um there's two proposals that spa and sex workers have been backing one of which is just ending the licensing licensing requirement for massages because it's it's literally only ever used to target asian massage workers yep that seems that seems like a good call yeah it's definitely not the law but oh yeah yeah yeah getting rid of it getting rid of it yeah clarify there yeah yeah i mean it's you know like this this is my this is my like my my most libertarian position is just being against like a lot of these licensing things because what's next to license to make your own toaster. If it's a thing that people just do all the time and in fact cannot be stopped from doing under any circumstances, then it shouldn't require a license to do like flying a plane,

like flying exact garrison, like flying a plane, like performing surgery, you know, 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 yeah on the one hand in theory it is good to have licenses that that you know like have have a way to tell who knows how to do something and who doesn't right yeah

but the thing is that's not what the state does yeah massage yeah yeah it's massage and like and the thing that the state actually does even with licenses like and they do they do this with driver's licenses, even with driver's licenses, which is the thing that, yeah, people should know how to drive before you put them behind the four-wheel death machine. What do they do with it? It's like, oh, they use it to go after undocumented immigrants because the state is just incredibly racist. And this is the thing that's happening 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 law would be like oh 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 basic 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 fuck 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 it it it only ever

causes violence against people who are already the the most marginalized people doesn't actually help against trafficking either in fact it makes it makes fighting against trafficking actually harder because people feel not able to talk about things when they see stuff that's questionable. I'm sure we can do more content. I'm sure we can do more stuff about sex work in the future. But yeah, it really should be not a crime. Yeah, and I think this is something like, it reminds me a lot of the anti-trans stuff where it's like okay so you you should care about the stuff because you should care about trans people you should also

care about the stuff because it affects people who are not trans and this this is a this is a 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 the splash over effects are hitting them too. And yeah, the, the consequence of that is eight people are dead. Yep. Yep. Go hope your local sex worker organizations and go hope your help,

your local spa workers associations, like get rid of this licensing stuff and fight for decriminalization because this, this, this kind of shit doesn't have to happen and we can this is something that we actually can concretely do and win 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 uh you can do you can do things that involve

safety where the police are just useless we we have seen we we we have seen we have seen zach wait is his name zach yeah zach is his name yeah yeah but look we we we have we have yeah he's nice he rules we have seen bodega zach uh outwit like outdo the entire police force even after literally the guy called them to turn himself in and bodega zach still got there before they did one man beat the entire new york police department turned himself in and left his wallet and gun at the scene like you know and again this is this this is, this is a $10 billion 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. Uh, yeah, get, get rid of them. Yeah. That sounds nice.

Okay. Well, there we go. We did it. Happy episode, everybody. Yay. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here

updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.