Socks

I wanted to finish writing about tour – about hitching through England and France, the incredible squats in Holland, all the kind folks that took care of me – but that’ll have to wait… which probably means never. It wasn’t for lack of sweet kids along the way, though, and I owe a huge thanks to everyone who helped put together the tour. I hope I get the chance to return the favor(s) States-side soon.

For all the books and articles I’ve read, for all my solemn awareness of the conflict, Palestine was fucked up to a degree I was not prepared to handle. I’m sitting in my Dad’s apartment in New York – with disconcerting swiftness growing re-accustomed to all the small and large luxuries of being home – trying to sort through this ambiguous mix of rage, indignation, and profound sadness that barely a week in the West Bank has left me with.

There is a lot of controversy, both within activist circles and increasingly in the mass media, over whether it is appropriate to refer to Israel as an “apartheid state.” In many ways, I’m still uneasy with the cavalier way people throw it around: expropriating language, particularly terminology signifying such a specific time and place, risks obscuring the equally unique historical circumstances that are central in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (An excellent exposition of an opposing view comes courtesy Tony Kushner monologue). But if it helps people get a better visceral understanding of the intensity of the occupation, I guess I have a hard time objecting now.

I’ve never been to South Africa, though, so as an American my closest reference point to what I saw – and, again, the obvious caveat of historical difference –was Jim Crow.

There aren’t segregated bus stations. Instead, you get entire networks of road that - through military checkpoints, earthen barriers, and bridges and tunnels - have become effectively off-limits to Palestinians. I visited the Friends School of Ramallah, where just a few years ago the Lower School had over 60 students who lived in nearby Jerusalem; now, because of the Qalandiya checkpoint, there’s just one. From Nablus to Ramallah, maybe 30 miles apart, we had to go through three checkpoints, each of which takes anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours depending on the soldiers’ mood that day and the color of your skin. (Just so folks understand, 63% of the checkpoints aren’t along the “Green Line” between Israel and Palestine, or even along the Separation Wall; they’re between towns in the middle of the West Bank).

There aren’t burning crosses. But Palestinian shops and homes near Hebron’s city center – where approximately 500 well-armed, right-wing Israelis have built six settlements – get stoned on a near-daily basis. Over the historic central commercial thoroughfare the Israeli army had to install netting, due to all the refuse and bricks raining down on shoppers from the Israeli settlement overlooking it. There are literally thousands of Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood to keep the enclave secure, but they’re under strict orders not to touch the settlers; I spent a while talking with international monitors who now have to escort the Palestinian children to and from school to keep them from being pelted near the settlements. And so the Old City has become a ghost town: 42% of the Palestinian homes and 77% of the Palestinian businesses in the area near the settlements have been abandoned.


In Bethlehem, I got beers with this rad Palestinian community organizer named Samer Jaber, who, when I mentioned I was from Chicago, IL, went: “Saul Alinsky!” He threw a rock when he was 15 years old, and like many Palestinian kids, spent the next six years in an Israeli prison for it. (His friend described his experience being tortured in jail: “If you go through that process, you will see both God and the Devil at the same time”).

There aren’t restrictive housing covenants. But there are streets in the West Bank that non-Jews just can’t walk down anymore.


There aren’t laws preventing blacks from testifying in court. But I spent a few hours at the emergency room and the police station in Hebron with a Palestinian man and his family after a drunken settler beat him on his doorstep. The Palestinians’ entrance to the police station - which consists of a barbed-wire fence, metal detector, and ten-foot concrete barriers – is around back; the settler entrance is in front. Still covered in his own blood, the man was told by the Chief Investigator that his testimony, that of multiple Palestinian witnesses, and videotape of the attacker weren’t enough. No one had expected any different, of course: they were there just to get a written confirmation that a complaint was made, “so maybe for history they will remember.”

And there aren’t separate water fountains for blacks and whites. Instead, Israel just takes a grossly disproportionate share of the water from shared underground aquifers and the upper portions of the Jordan River. Whereas Israel consumes 280-330 liters of water per day per person, consumption in the West Bank is 60 liters of water per day per person, 40% well below WHO and USAID guidelines for basic need. While Israeli golf courses stay green year-round, hundreds of villages in occupied Palestine are complete without running water.

While it’s still fairly unacceptable to call Israel an “apartheid state” in America, many people (including very well-intentioned folks) without hesitation decry the absence of a Palestinian Mandela or a Palestinian Gandhi. The thing that struck me most from my time in the West Bank, though, was how extraordinary it was that any sort of non-violent organizing was happening at all.

When I arrived in Israel I was supposed to stay with an Israeli friend Eran in Tel Aviv, but he was recuperating from being shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier during the weekly Friday demonstration in Bil’in a few days prior. It was a rubber-tipped bullet – one of the advantages of being an Israeli or international activist as opposed to a Palestinian – but it still ripped through his leg muscle and had to be surgically removed.

Samer invited me to come witness the Friday demonstration – they happen all across the West Bank – outside Al-Khader. When the wall construction there is completed soon, it will expropriate 5,000 acres of the small agricultural community’s land. The protest consisted of about fifty men saying Friday prayers for fifteen minutes in the street, at least a football field’s distance away from the nearest soldiers, who had blocked off the street with armored jeeps and barbed wire barricades for the event. Then they went home. Up on the hillside, Israeli snipers trained their rifles on the men the entire time.

But it’s also important to remember that non-violent resistance means a lot of different things, and it’s pretty much everywhere. It’s the weekly protests against the Wall, but it’s also those folks in Hebron who take the time to fill out those police reports even though they know nothing will come of it. I spent the day with this guy Issa who was documenting every broken, interviewing evicted families, making reports with the authorities, and when I asked why he kept it up he replied, “because they want us to stop.” It’s also the teachers and parents who continue educating their kids during curfew or other adversity, or anyone else just managing to get along day-to-day under what are truly brutal conditions.

Post-Script:

Israeli intelligence stole my dirty socks, and everything else I’ve been traveling with for the past three months.

During the typical pre-flight questioning they decided to search my bags, during which security came across a Palestinian soccer jersey, which I explained I had picked up as a gift in Ramallah. This set off all sorts of alarm bells, and upon closer inspection they then found information from B’Tselem – perhaps the foremost Israeli human rights organization – and the Alternative Information Center, a joint Israeli-Palestinian NGO. Furiously I was asked why I was “exporting enemy propaganda,” taken into a back room where I stripped down to my underwear, and interrogated there for the next two hours. At one point I counted thirteen people going through my clothes, music, and every piece of paper in my wallet.

Twenty-five minutes before departure I was escorted through security, directly onto the boarding ramp for my flight, sans any of my belongings. I want my friggin’ socks back, please.

Tour, Gig #5

After the show in Bristol, Al Baker gave me a lift to Newcastle where we were playing the following night. We got to Newcastle in plenty of time, because also fortuitously playing that afternoon were Premier League squads Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers. Being on tour our budgets were rather tight, but if there's one thing I learned from certain past political (mis)adventures - okay, I learned a lot of things - it's that confident white people can get in to almost anywhere if they really try.

Attempt 1 at sneaking into St. James' Park involved circling the stadium knocking on closed doors, and when they'd open kindly ask to be let in. You know how British people can say almost anything and Americans find it super-charming? Yeah, turns out it doesn't work the other way around.

Attempt 2 at sneaking into St. James' Park consisted of hanging around the gate and trying to organize the local kids to all storm in at the same time. It didn't really get off the ground, but not for lack of the little guys' toughness. After the game, a buzz cut 11-year-old with his track suit tucked into his pulled-up socks came up to my friend Niall. "Give us that cigarette, yeah?" Niall, a good eight years the boy's senior, quickly hands over the half-smoked cigarette, explaining later: "They'll hit you for no reason at all! They're unpredictable the little ones... just like junkies!".

Finally we figure out that we're over-thinking the whole matter, and that the back door to the "Platinum Club" happens to be wide open where people who have paid too much for their seats come out for cigarettes. We chat up the usher guarding the doorway into the lounge proper, buy some chips to look less conspicuous, then pass through the second layer of ushers with the herd during the post-halftime rush back to the stands. Suddenly we find ourselves smack in the middle of the luxury seats inside the stadium! Newcastle definitely outplayed Blackburn, but American Brad Friedel had a couple unconscious saves in goal for the Rovers, who steal three points on a last minute goal by Matt Derbyshire. Afterwards, a kindly looking, well-dressed man comes up to us smiling. "So you blagged us then, did ya?" I'm not sure what that means, but I'm pretty sure we did, and he winks as he walks away.

We play that night in a gazebo in a park right in the shadow of St. James' Park stadium. It's cold as hell, but between sets there're liters of cider and the bedlam of Shoe Game to stay warm.

Afterwards we crash on a floor in Widdrington, a working-class mining town by the sea where the British government recently deposited tens of thousands of cattle carcasses to be cremated during the last foot-and-mouth outbreak. In the morning we head to the beach at Creswell, spending an hour jumping dunes and seeing just how much sand we can take to Scotland with us in our shoes. It was beautiful there, like Rehoboth in the winter, only with more rocks and a castle. Tour is wicked fun.

(All photo credits to Al Baker and his camera phone).

China. Rock City.

After three days hiking in Wenhai, Max and I came back to the guesthouse sunburned, exhausted, and pungent. As we climbed the old stone stairs to the courtyard, though, we noted something was different since we'd left: the ground was carpeted with fresh pine needles, a 12-piece orchestra was striking up Naxi tunes, and a 60-odd person wedding party was hanging out singing along to the jams. We hustle into our room where Max has first dibs on the shower, and I peek my head out to see if I can figure out what's going on.

Then things start happening very fast. Before I know it, I've been spotted by a drunk uncle, dragged across the courtyard, and seated next to (what I now understand to be) the groom of the wedding. Other relatives or family friends then kindly notice my inexcusable lack of cigarettes and Chinese grain alcohol, and without speaking a word of English politely communicate that I have no choice but to begin drinking and smoking. By the time Max gets out of the shower to translate such key phrases as, "Sorry I reek so bad," or, "No more... I think my lungs are collapsing," I've been compelled to consume three shots of baiju and two cigarettes (which, incidentally, brings my lifetime cigarette total to five).

Post-shower and change, the groom asks me if that was my guitar he saw, and would I bring it out, and again there's no real way to politely decline. So a few minutes later the orchestra is silenced, the groom "opens" for me with a song, and then I (already a bit buzzed from the baiju) stumble through "Honesty Is Not Fucking Emo." All in all I think it was pretty well received, in a generally insane sort of way.

The show Max set up for me in Changsha was slightly less impromptu. A buddy of his runs the premiere punk rock bar in town, and he was able to add to the bill with this folk singer from Beijing. We (Max, myself, and a few friends) arrive at the place via a fleet of motorcycle taxis, and it felt like we were superheroes or something zooming through the cool, disgustingly polluted Changsha night. It was a ton of fun, obviously, and the kids were all super friendly. Afterwards we went to another bar that had a full drum kit and PA set up, and for a few brief shining moments 2/5 of Sharks and Guns! (the best ever college band out of New Haven, CT) would ride again.

What I Do With My Free Time

I had a plan to pose as the scion of a wealthy American textile family, set up meetings to discuss sourcing opportunities with manufacturers, and then go poking around some of the massive factories in the Pearl River Delta's “special economic zones” (SEZs) on my way out of China. As of 2001, nearly five percent of the entire world’s goods were manufactured in the Pearl River Delta (worth US $265 billion), and it continues to grow at a rate over 15% per year. Introduce the unbridled forces of global neoliberal capital to an impoverished, near-limitless workforce enjoying all the individual liberties of a bureaucratic Communist state, a lot of cheap action figurines are going to get made.

Alas, the ruse proved to require a bit more effort than I was prepared to invest, and instead the afternoon before my flight out of Hong Kong I met up with Geoffrey Crothall from China Labor Bulletin (CLB). Founded in 1994 by labor activist Han Dongfang – whose abortive efforts to form the Beijing Autonomous Workers’ Federation during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 made him one of China’s most wanted political dissidents – CLB is widely regarded as the leading independent voice for workers’ rights within China. For more on Han Dongfang, check out the interview in New Left Review (and, while you’re at it, almost anything else in that “Movement of Movements” series is worth reading). Below are some summarized notes, not a transcript, of our conversation.

(I realize this may seem incredibly nerdy and of only moderate interest to many of you; the next post will involve far less weighty material, I promise.)

What sort of work is CLB doing now?

Basically there are two sides to our work. The first deals with individual workers’ rights and is primarily done through our litigation program. Workers face huge obstacles with regards to employment discrimination, non-payment of wages, disability benefits, and responding to privatization of formerly state-owned companies. We’ve had some successes at the District Court level and we've also gotten workers out of jail when they’ve been arrested illegally. The second is collective workers’ rights, which essentially means encouraging collective bargaining.

What does collective bargaining look like presently?

Well, there’s the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which is the sole official union in China, with about 130,000,000 members. Employers finance the union at a rate of 2% of payroll, which by US standards might seem like a great thing, but then they also wield complete control of the organization. Union representatives are usually managers; if they’re not, they wouldn’t dare go against them.

Would the ACFTU ever, say, call for a strike?

No, never. The right to strike is actually a grey area. It was part of the Constitution until the early 1980s, then was removed, but a strike itself isn’t illegal. It’s complicated.

But there are still work actions happening?

There are 1,000+ worker strikes and sit-ins happening every single day in the Pearl River Delta. Some of our information we get from government statistics – which report tens of thousands of worker disputes going through the official arbitration procedures – but we also get calls from all over China from Han Dongfang’s weekly radio show [broadcast on US-government funded Radio Free Asia].

What’s the government’s reaction to all this?

Officially, the line is that these are ‘manifestations of internal contradictions within the people that naturally occur during a period of economic transformation and reform.’ It is the role of the Party to alleviate and channel that tension.

Wow, they talk just like Cultural Studies grad students! My friend Max suggested the government was pretty much untroubled by individual labor disputes at this point; that what they’re really opposed to is the formation of any sort of broader organization or framework that might ultimately rival the Party. What’s your take on it?

I think that’s pretty much spot on. [Pause]. And I should say that CLB is not advocating the establishment of independent labor unions, which is illegal. We’re saying that there’s a great opportunity here [with the implementation of China’s new “Labour Contract Law” on January 1, 2008] for the AFCTU to start acting like a real union.

Do you really think the ACFTU can become a real voice for workers? Does the Labour Contract Law indicate a genuine shift on the government’s part towards a more tolerant attitude on trade unionism? [Until recently, CLB maintained any engagement with the ACFTU was futile].

[Carefully] With any organization, political and economic changes engender new opportunities. The new labor law does offer a lot of new opportunities. At least on the municipal level, we think there’s definitely room now to pressure ACFTU officials and engage with them. There would be a lot fewer strikes if they make these unions legitimate vehicles for workers to air their grievances. [Somewhat quieter, almost as confession] But the legal changes we’ve seen so far aren’t really anything beyond tokenism… it’s by no means a transformation towards liberalism.

What position should the international labor community take towards the ACFTU then?

We’re a domestic NGO in China. We work from the bottom up. We leave the big decisions up to the international labor movement. There’s room for a wide range of strategies, and really we’re not in a position to tell the labor community what to do. They’re accountable to themselves and their own members.

If you’re interested, check out China Labor Bulletin’s most recent report, “Speaking Out: The Workers’ Movement in China 2005-2006,” or the other reports on the website. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions' (ICFTU) position on the ACFTU is also online.

Mountains and Such

I apologize for taking so long between posts. I’ve officially entered the punk rock phase of my travels, and since being anti-social to update your blog for a few hours isn’t terribly punk rock, the journal has suffered accordingly. I’ve got a day off without a show in the little Dutch town of Den Bosch, though, so hopefully I can get close to up-to-date. Also, all the photos on here are Max's... props to Max.

The highlight of Xi’an – obligatory terra cotta warriors aside, of course – was when Max got cheated by the dumpling lady, brazenly decided to liberate the dumplings from her stand, and then in the ensuing bedlam insisted in Mandarin, “My bag is too light! How can I leave two dumplings short?” This, of course, was translated to me later, since I was standing there mildly terrified by the incomprehensible and rapidly escalating shouting match (rendered all the more surreal because of Max’s typical Siddhartha-like calmness). But the move paid off, and the laughter from fellow vendors quickly compelled the woman to relent.

In part due to the cold weather, in part fleeing enraged street vendors, we decided to hightail it down to rural southwestern China, near the border with Burma. We caught a flight to Kunming (“the City of Eternal Spring”), the provincial capital of Yunnan, and from there it was seven hours in minibuses before we got to the small city of Lijiang. Eventually we stumble upon this little unmarked footpath over a hill that leads into the Old City, and come out onto this absolutely breathtaking vista. We throw our bags down at the first guesthouse we find, where much to their Pekinese puppy’s delight the family is hacking up a massive pig in the courtyard, and retire to our balcony to sip Tsingtao as the sun sets.

Lijiang was beautiful, but got less and less cool the longer we spent there. The historic home of the Naxi people - one of China’s 53 recognized ethnic minority groups, who have their own language, religion, pictograph language, and matriarchal social structure - Lijiang is now a burgeoning tourist destination for Chinese vacationers and a “protected” UNESCO World Heritage site. I put protected in inverted commas, apologies to Prof. Gilmore, because although the physical infrastructure seems to be is nicely maintained (witness the wood-paneled public bathroom stalls, each with 9-inch TVs playing music videos of traditional Naxi song and dance), all the actual Naxi people have been priced out into the countryside. In their place are Han people wearing authentic Naxi costume, selling traditional Naxi trinkets and food, and performing traditional Naxi dances as entertainment in the bars. It felt weirdly meta-touristic watching the Chinese tourists eat this up, gawking at the gawkers, as it were.

The next five days, though, were definitely the high point of traveling in China. Leaving most of our stuff in Lijiang, Max and I first hiked off to a relatively nearby village called Wenhai. We met up with a guide north of Lijiang who helps run the one little lodge in town (founded as an eco-tourism project with help from the Nature Conservancy), and spent about three hours hiking in over a deceptively steep mountain pass. After an ungodly number of hours of muscle atrophy on planes, trains, and buses over the past little while the trek was sort of brutal, but the views back down over the valley below made it worth every minute.

It’s tough to describe how picturesque Wenhai is once you arrive. Nestled in a little a valley right at the foothills of the Himalayas, Wenhai is this tiny 900 person Naxi village. Until a couple of years ago, when Wenhai got its first dirt road link-up to Lijiang, hiking (3-4 hours over the mountain, or 6-7 hours the longer way around) was the only way to get to there. Behind it towers Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (18,360 ft), of which we have a perfect view from our room, and all around are wooded hills and mountains where the cattle and sheep go to graze. In town there’s a big golden pig with little black piglets running around her, and a big pink one with little red piglets. In the summer the village is right on the edge of a lake, but in winter the water recedes and leaves behind a flat bowl that looks almost like a moonscape at night. We have the lodge to ourselves, and at night sit out in the courtyard around a bowl of coals watching the stars and satellites (which are probably as clear here as anywhere in China), and then pass out around 8PM since there’s not a whole lot else to do.

The next morning we try to see how far up Jade Dragon Snow Mountain we can hike. We have our sights set on a vast rocky clearing a good ways up (before it looks like the hike turns technical), but our plan is complicated by 1) the fact that Jade Dragon Snow Mountain is 18,000 feet tall and an indeterminate distance away, and 2) there’s no real trail up it. Some of the way (well, the first 15 minutes) there’s dirt road, some of the time we’re able to follow actual trails (though we have no idea where they lead), but most of time we just follow little paths blazed by the goats and cattle. When those die out, it’s “let’s go that way” and we bushwhack our way up the mountainside until we find another animal trail. At one point climbing up a wash, the road must have been nearby, we stopped for a few minutes listening to this Naxi girl singing in the most hauntingly clear voice.

It’s steep going and slow, but we keep getting higher and better views. Around mid-day we stumble into a mountain pasture where some goats are chilling and join them for lunch. There are some curious looking dug-out caves nearby with blocked off entrances – maybe for a shepherd escaping the rain – but rather than exploring we keep pushing on. (On the way down we stumble across six or seven similar caves in the woods, and I’m greatly relieved we didn’t crawl in when we realize they’re probably Naxi graves). Finally we make a last push up a steep ascent above the tree-line, and find ourselves on a ridge with one of the most epic 360 degree views I’ve ever seen. We’re nowhere near where we set off to get to up Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, but the top of this ridge opposite it is one of those vistas that just makes you want to laugh and giggle and shout. It’s like a friggin’ Shelly poem or something... definitely one of my best hikes ever.

We hike back to Lijiang, this time forging our own path through the woods the long way around mountains. Hiking is so much fun when you don’t really know how you’re supposed to get somewhere, just its general direction and approximate distance, and every so often you stumble upon a family of goats, or a graveyard, or maybe a Naxi villager collecting firewood.

The next morning we head out to Tiger Leaping Gorge. Carved out over millenia by the Yangtze River, the gorge is the steepest in the world: you look down and 1500m straight below is a river, you look up and towering above are a staggering series of peaks. The hike takes two days, and at the midway point (for less than $3 per night) you stay at a guesthouse with bedroom views that, again, are just epic. We watched a Chinese soccer match on TV with the owner’s family, then stayed up till the impossibly late hour of 11:30 drinking beers and talking about DC and Yale, kids we knew, trading stories. I haven’t had too many “remember that time back at Yale” sessions since graduation – they offend my political sensibilities, naturally – but reminiscing with Max felt surprisingly good.

The next day we hike out of the gorge, finally arriving in an eerily quiet little town called Daju. The buildings are either abandoned or only half-built, and we come across a school that still has yellowing exam results posted almost two years ago. The power station’s windows are broken, as are those at the old Communist Party building. Also, there isn’t a single light on in town and it’s starting to get late, though we learn later that that’s because the town hasn’t had power for a few days. In short, Daju seemed to be lifted straight from a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, and we resolved to get the hell out of there on the first bus the next morning. Max and I start rewriting the words to Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town” (“Daju-town, Daju-town, better get away from Daju-town”), and somehow it seems a fitting end to the mountain adventures part of our travels.