With M, we talked about the study of history, cringe Asians, abolition, and the intricacies of the US prison system. We didn’t actually talk about this in the interview, but one of the most precious things in my life is the reading group I have with M, where we read books out loud to each other—we’ve been doing it since 2021—and I can’t begin to describe the pleasures, surprises, and challenges of the act of reading together! Thank you, M, for your friendship and kindness, and for your time today.
If you're getting this as a newsletter, read the properly formatted post here: https://jiaqikang.mataroa.blog/blog/questions-for-my-friends-7-m/
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The idea for this project is that I’m interviewing my friends and people I feel close to, who inspire me. There’s obviously a difference between this ‘on the record’ discussion, which will be published online for anyone to read, and the normal ‘off the record’ conversations we’d have as friends. I’m interested in the ways I might get to know you more through this slightly more ‘formal’ format and the choices you make in representing yourself. I’m also interested in oral history as a form, and in ways to preserve and archive intimacies and relationships in time and space.
Please come up with how you want to be called: name, initial, or pseudonym. I’ll be “Jiaqi Kang.”
The questions below are the 6 main questions I’ll ask you, but your answers will probably prompt some follow-up questions. Your answers can be as long or short as you want. The interview will be conducted orally, then transcribed using Otter and edited for length and clarity. You’ll get to take a final look at it before it goes up, and of course I can take it down anytime you like in the future (although it’s on my blog+newsletter which means that it will also exist in people’s email inboxes).
1. Please introduce yourself and your background, in any way you’d like.
2. How did you become politically engaged?
3. How did you and I meet?
4. What does the word ‘care’ mean for you?
5. What are some things you’re currently looking to learn, or learn about?
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say, or to ask me?
Thank you <3
This interview was conducted virtually in August 2025 and has been edited for length and clarity.
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Jiaqi Kang: Please introduce yourself and your background in any way you'd like.
M: Okay, hi, I'm M and I use she/her pronouns. I am a 24-year-old. I like to read and draw and sometimes do a little bit of research on my interests, which is prison security, and that's about it. Thank you.
JK: How did you become politically engaged?
M: I would say that this was around middle school. Before middle school, I really only cared about myself and making sure that I was happy every day and making sure I was getting my work done. When I was in seventh grade, one of my friends was like, “Hey, there is this online website where you post beautiful pictures and follow blogs that post beautiful pictures, and it's called Tumblr.” I went on the blogs and was like, “I love this. I'm going to post pictures of flowers and skeletons, this is so cool.” But then slowly I started seeing other posts filtered onto my feed, and these things just grabbed me and wouldn't let go. There'd be a post about this injustice or that injustice, or like, “This is the right way to talk about this issue or that issue.” You know, I was doing sports. I would get back and I would just stand in the shower for like, an hour and think. I just couldn't stop thinking. I was like, “Yeah, why? Why is the world that way? I can't believe something could be so terrible.”
Because I feel like we grew up in the age of internationalism, maybe with this total faith that everyone was just talking it out. There was the UN: if anyone had a problem with anyone, you could just go to the United Nations and everything would be fine, because everyone was reasonable. That's kind of what I grew up with—this liberal sense that everything was going to be okay, and we had figured it out, and everyone had rights now.
It felt like [Tumblr] was a moment where I was like, “Wait, actually, things are kind of bad.” And also I was gaining a sense of who I was in society, my own identity, learning about things like sexuality online.
JK: I think it's really funny that you say that before [this moment] you only cared about yourself, but you were, like, 11.
M: I mean, yeah, I was mostly concerned about my home life. I guess that makes sense, though.
JK: You’ve previously alluded to the suburban Asian American bubble. I wonder if you wanted to elaborate a bit on that and whether you see it as… I don't know if you would call it a sort of conservative bubble… Or do you think that it's a unique place to have grown up in?
M: I think it's both unique and not unique. I think for my particular identity group, it's not that unique because of immigration policy and the ways that immigration waves have shaped the experiences of many Chinese Americans in this country, like how these communities have developed and where they've developed. My parents came with a lot of other Chinese immigrants at a time [when] the tech industry started booming. There's just so many of these technology-related suburbs scattered around the country, but most notably on the West Coast. So I don't think my experience is unique in that regard.
But yeah, to explain a little bit more, immigrant labor from China and India settled in the area because they were able to get jobs in tech, starting in the 90s and 2000s. It's still happening now. My parents came over in that wave. I would call [these ethnoburbs] somewhat of a conservative bubble, if only because the idea is that people keep their head down and work hard to attain financial success. And also [they’re] coming with socially conservative values. In some ways [these immigration patterns have] created this bubble where it's like, “We shouldn't think too much about problems that don't concern us. Plus we want to maintain financial success. Plus social conservatism.”
But I think the second generation is somewhat of a liberal bubble, but in a bad sense. The kids are, I guess, the ultimate neoliberal generation [would be] my way to say it. That's a weird cesspool of different political identities that I don't really fuck with.
And if I could go on a little bit more about what it was like to grow up politically, in that sense, it was such an ethnic bubble. All of my lessons, all of my extracurriculars, were taught by Chinese teachers who didn't speak English. Everyone on my swim team, everyone in my drawing classes, and everyone I knew in elementary school was Chinese. I think that maybe also led to me not opening my worldview, and only thinking about my world in this very confined cultural sense. Then, I moved to private school for middle school, and I met, like, white people for the first time. That's also obviously when things outside—things like Tumblr—were introduced to me. And I'm not going to say that, thanks to the private school white people, I learned to be politically engaged. I don't think that's necessarily accurate. But I do think that if I had just stayed inside that sort of all-Chinese environment, I'm not sure I would have found my way out in the same way.
JK: Interesting. Thank you for that. I wonder whether you wanted to talk a little bit about your current work. I wonder: what drew you to critical research on prisons in particular?
M: So I just talked about how I got more politically engaged—or at least not engaged; I don't know if I'd call it ‘engaged,’ but [more] ‘aware’—in middle school. I think I didn't really get ‘engaged’ until high school, and that's also where I started getting interested in the concept of mass incarceration for the first time.
Essentially, I started getting really into the classic liberal DEI stuff in high school, being like, “Why aren't we reading more books about these experiences?” or “We need to celebrate everyone's differences and understand where we're all coming from!” Things like that—things that I think are actually important in a school setting, but not very deep engagement with social issues. But I knew that I really, really wanted to learn more. I was still having those, like, hour-long showers where I was just trying to understand how these [unjust] things could happen, and I wasn't getting it because I don't think issues [of] racism and social inequality in the United States could be understood through this diversity, neoliberal lens. It's just impossible. You're gonna run up against places where things just really don't make sense. It's not just like, “Oh, individuals don't understand each other, and that's why they're mean or racist or bad.”
So two things happened at once. In my senior year, I was like, “I've run out of classes that I want to take in high school, so I'm going to do an independent study where I build my own syllabus around trying to understand some of these social issues I have.” At the same time, one of my good friends, who was two years ahead of me, was in college, and was telling me about them working on a campaign to ‘ban the box,’ which removes the box you have to check saying, “I've had a criminal record” on college applications.
I was just this open receptacle to ideas, and I feel like I still kind of am… But I was like, “Yeah, that's true. Why shouldn't people get a second chance through education? That is crazy that they discriminate based on that.” So I was thinking about prison because of this campaign. I was building my independent study, and I put two things on my syllabus. One is the documentary film 13th, which was super popular at the time—everyone was watching it. And then I put the book Locking up our own by James Forman Jr, which is a book that talks about how Black officials in Washington, DC, through a variety of nuanced and complex historical reasons and influences, helped shape the tough on crime era in the 1980s and 1990s.
I consumed this content and it just hit me all of a sudden. I was like, “I feel like I've been trying so hard to understand all of these disparate social justice or social issues that were making me really emotionally upset, all the time.” And for me, what it all came down to was prison. I felt like the idea of prison—the idea of punishing people, the idea of locking people in cages—structured every single other evil in society for me. I don't believe in ranking evils, obviously, but I felt like understanding this thing would help me understand everything else. To me, that became my most urgent priority in terms of what I could do in the United States.
I had no clue I wanted to learn about it for a career or anything. I actually had zero interest in doing a PhD. But when I got to college, after doing this independent study [in] senior year, I ended up joining all the prison activism groups on campus. Like I said, I was an open receptacle, and the first time I read about prison abolition in senior year, I was like, “Yeah, this sounds right. We shouldn't put people in prison, obviously.” So then I joined all these groups and also got involved with this community organizing group trying to end solitary confinement—so a mix of college groups and also community-based groups. That's when I got really deeply into the work and came up with deeper, non-surface-level research questions to ask, that these advocacy groups genuinely didn't have the answer to.
JK: It’s really interesting to hear about that, because I think for me, it took the 2020 George Floyd uprisings to really understand abolition. I have this horrible and embarrassing memory of—before that, as an undergrad—going to an event with Jackie Wang. I don't even know why I went, because I didn't know who she was. I was just sitting there, in the audience, talking to my friend who was there. I was like, “I just don't get it. What if someone commits a mass shooting?” And then I listened to her talk, and I was like, “Wow! I don't understand. This is going over my head.” It was hard-hitting [but I also didn’t grasp the implications].
I went up to her afterwards, and I was like, “Oh, Jackie. My name is Jackie too” (because at the time, I was letting everyone call me ‘Jaki’ as the pronunciation). There was this one thing I was so struck by, because she had been like, “My parents are Black Panthers.” I [said to her], “Your parents are Black Panthers, that's so crazy. How does it feel to have grown up with that inheritance?” And she was like, “Oh no, no. My biological parents are conservatives. These are, like, my spiritual parents.” I was like, “I don't know what's happening.”
But anyway, then, a year later, I properly learned about abolition. That really changed my life. I think a lot about this idea that the first step is in the imagination. When it finally clicked for me, I was like, “Oh, you're allowed to think that?” My personal journey with abolition was so informed by the George Floyd uprisings. It's interesting for me to hear that, for you, that wasn't necessarily the catalyst—you were already thinking about all that stuff.
M: First of all, yeah, totally agree with you about the imagination aspect. I do think that these political ideas can cause such immense personal transformation. I feel like they really saved me in some ways; coming to these conclusions really changed me as a person. I’m always grateful that I stumbled across them, but I also did in a place of immense privilege.
I haven't had what one might call ‘crime’ touch my life in significant ways. I was just out there reading things and just believing them. I mean, I agree with all those things I was reading. But still, it was very easy for me… I don't think I had to grapple with… The world of crime and punishment was so distant to me at the time that I think it was also easier for me to take everything in and come to my own conclusions, unhindered by any specific emotional response, I suppose.
Also, I think society conditions us in such ways to think that abolition is the last thing that could ever be possible. It's so hard to come over that conditioning, because everything about growing up in that liberal ordered society is: “We figured it out. We know who the good guys and bad guys are. The laws are here to protect us. Prison is the cornerstone of modern society: it's just how it works, and that's how it's always worked.”
That's why I think—well, two things. First, that's why studying history is so important, because you get to learn [that] that's not the way it's always been. But [secondly], unlearning the conditioning is so hard because it's so appealing to everybody. Anyone who's not on the other side of the bars can be so deeply compelled by this reasoning, because they're one of the good guys. It appeals to conservatives, for obvious reasons, but it also really, really appeals to both liberals and leftists, because society has become so built around this urge to punish people. [You see it also in] some strains of being on the left. It's like, “Oh, well, what do you do with the rapists? What do you do with the school shooters?” There's this impulse to be like, “Oh, but there's the good people, but then there's the really bad people. But what about those really bad people?”
It's such, like, an attractive idea, the idea that there are some people [who], if you put them away forever, then you can reach utopia. All that to say, I think I really understand why it would take some people a long time, or a lifetime, to get to the point [where they believe] that abolition is not only possible, but necessary immediately.
JK: It's really interesting to think about this idea of the good guy and the bad guy. It's actually really easy to become a bad guy, and as soon as you become one, everything is against you. You’re always permanently consigned to that badness, whether it's because you have a record or whether it's because of the color of your skin. And then it becomes just the norm.
It's really interesting to think about that in the context of discourses about political prisoners. Some discourse about political prisoners are non-abolitionist in that they try to create this division: “These people shouldn't be in there.” And that's often against the [intent of the] prisoners themselves—[it could be coming from] the people outside, supporting them. How do we come to understand the logic of incarceration and the logic of the so-called crime and punishment system as being one that doesn't just take place within the prison bars, but one that refracts across society?
It goes into this idea of, again, the liberal promise. The liberal promise is “Oh, as long as you keep your head down, everything's gonna be okay. You're gonna live the good life.” But then for so many people, that's obviously never going to be the norm. [In addition to that,] for some people—and this is maybe something that I've experienced—one transgression can immediately ‘flip the switch’... which is frustrating, because it's a privilege to even have had a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’
M: I totally agree with you. Criminality is something that is completely constructed. Not to get back to the whole idea of history and a deeper understanding of society, but that's why I think a deeper understanding of how things change over time kind of proves that point of, “We don't just exist in this perfect bubble or vacuum where people just do things out of their own agency, and then they reap the consequences of that thing.” Obviously, everyone has their own agency, but we live in a society, and understanding how we got to this point is much more important.
I feel like that level of, “Once you have made one transgression, you're out”—that permeates society, not just on the carceral system level, but also all the way down to the social level. This sounds so silly in comparison to what we've been talking about with abolition, but even the idea of social transgression in these communities… If you don't go the conventional path, if your sexuality diverges, if you choose not to become financially successful, or if you do something crazy socially, and all the parents get wind of it, [then] they'll talk about that forever. You're never the same again; you have a mark on your name. It's that concept of, “Oh, they didn't keep their head down. What were they doing?”
For me, it's all just about normalization. Transgressing what's normal is met with swift punishment and then exile. It's a very cruel way of living, a very cruel way for society to be structured. But again, it's so attractive to people on all levels of the political spectrum. I don't really want to get into cancel culture, but obviously, it's popular on the left as well.
JK: We’ve probably talked about this before, but, for me, the moment that I realized that I was a lesbian and that I was then going to have to go and actualize it… It [literally] felt like the doors to a quote unquote ‘normal life’ [shut in front of me].
M: I had the exact same feeling.
JK: Right? My friends who are trans have also talked about this. In The Trinity of Fundamentals, [Wisam Rafeedie] says, “You only know that you're a revolutionary once you've hit the age of 30, because 30 is when you're not going back: you're not going to have a career, you're not going to have a normal family, you've truly jeopardized your own future of normalcy.” In some ways being queer is beautiful, because you're already doing that. Once the doors have shut, then [other difficult choices are] maybe free game. That's the difference between being queer and just being gay, and being queer and being assimilated.
M: Yeah, I had the exact same moment where… Oh my gosh, this cannot be in the final [interview]. I had that 15-year-old Tumblr girl moment of being like, “I'm ace.” But, like, not actually. I just didn't want to think about queerness in that way. I was like, “Oh my god, I do not want to have sex with a man. I couldn't possibly, like, that's crazy.” And so I was like, “I'm asexual.” And then I remember being in such despair. I was like, “I will never be normal! This is all over for me.” I knew I was bisexual before, but I hadn't really thought about it very much [because it] didn't distress me at all. I was like, “I will just end up with a man. Everything's fine.”
But when I started thinking about asexuality and then later lesbianism, I was like, “Oh my god, I can never be normal again.”
But in a way, the whole debacle with middle school asexuality made me so chill when it came to lesbianism, because it had been four years [between starting to identify as asexual and then realising that] actually, I don't like men. I [had] already had the freakout [over losing my normalcy]. I was already over all of that.
Also, I do remember the moment in which you came out [as a lesbian] online, and I also remember that your Twitter bio was “abolition is the horizon.” I don't know when you changed it to that, or if it was always that, [but I thought of it because] you were talking about the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, and [that] that's when you started getting more into abolition. So I was going to say: both the lesbianism thing and the abolition thing [are things] I distinctly remember, about you, the first time that we [met].
JK: Yeah, “abolition is the horizon” became my bio after I became an abolitionist. I just thought it was really good. And with fandom Twitter: I went in being like, “Me and my friends are here to promote communist and radical leftist propaganda in the fandom.” So I was very [upfront].
M: I mean, I think it worked because—in the way that some people are scared of the word abolition, because it feels so extreme—I was definitely indoctrinated by 20 years of American propaganda into being like, “Communism is kind of a scary word.” Even if you believe in things that are related, you can't really label yourself with that word. Just seeing you guys so openly talk about it and use it made me so much more nonchalant about… [Or just] so much less scared about its connotation. So I would actually say that it worked successfully on at least one person.
JK: Wow. Well, before we move on, I did want to say that one of my friends has a slightly problematic pet theory that [many] quote unquote ‘women’ who identify as bi and ace are actually just lesbians who don’t know it.
M: Wait, that was me.
JK: Like, that's actually true…
M: Did you also have that phase? I don't want to call it a phase.
JK: Yeah, I was asexual and bisexual. And then it turned out that I just didn't want to have sex with my boyfriend.
M: That's actually exactly my experience. But now it feels biphobic to call it a phase.
JK: Well, here's [A, my girlfriend], our resident political lesbian.
A: Oh, I think liking men was genuinely a phase for me. Sexually, I'm still bisexual, but I think that, honestly, I can't date a man again.
M: That's how I genuinely felt for [me in] the first few years of being a lesbian. I feel like that [stage] was already lesbianism for me. That was already no longer bisexuality for me.
A: And right now I would probably identify as lesbian over bisexual, yeah.
JK: Political lesbianism is back in.
M: I also feel like people can just use whatever word they want. I care so little about [this].
A: Sorry, I wasn’t listening before this, I just came in to change my clothes. Bye.
[A leaves]
JK: There was this time, like the spring of 2021, [when] so many people in our fandom circle came out as lesbians. And I remember when [these friends would say], “Oh, I don't know, maybe I'm a lesbian,” this is the thing that I would always say to them in the comments (after I had just come out, like, the week before)—I would be like, “You can just be a lesbian if you want to be a lesbian.”
M: And you were right.
JK: Yeah, and it's so true. Anyway, how did you and I meet?
M: Well, we met on Twitter. I mean, okay, so I feel like context is really important. So first of all, it was Covid, and everyone was going crazy. A lot of people who suddenly couldn't go outside anymore were like, “Let's check out what there is to do online.”
For me, what happened was I was having a pretty rough living situation, and I needed escapism. I think a lot of people needed escapism, but having a rough living situation while it's Covid and you literally can't go outside was not really great. So for the first time ever, I made a public Twitter account to post my art, I guess because I also suddenly got really into drawing. I got an iPad when I was 18 but I never quite figured out how to do digital art. It was just too hard, I didn't know, it was just impossible to draw with a fake pen, like it wasn't real. But then I was like, “No, I want to get good at this, and I want to make friends online to like, escape, I guess.”
Then I started posting art online, and I think you were actually, like, the fifth person ever or something to ever see my art. I was getting like one or two likes, and I think I was kind of lucky, because that was the moment when everybody was coming online. A lot of fan culture blew up really big, and a lot of different media gained super, super huge fandoms. I was there in that moment, and we were in the same… Whoever reads this: I'm just not going to give context as to the whole fandom situation. If you know, you know. It's a need-to-know basis.
But basically, I think you saw my art somewhere online, and then you commented. One of the first things I remember about you is the generosity. You would really comment on a lot of people's art, and you would just talk to people online, like a lot. I feel like you were always replying to people and having fun. I was so scared of doing that. Because I was raised on “everything is offensive” Tumblr, I was so scared of talking or doing anything—but you were just talking to people and saying things and commenting on my stuff, and I was like, “Oh my god, my first ever friend online; I did it, I've made a friend.” That's how we followed each other on Twitter.
And then you became, like, Twitter famous, which was, I think, really stressful for everybody involved.
I don't know if there is anything more to the story. I guess I could talk about us actually becoming in-person friends… Oh, well, the craziest part was that actually our lives had touched in unseen ways [before] so that wasn't technically the first time that we had crossed paths. It was just unknown.
JK: It was 2019.
M: It was 2019, when there wasn't a pandemic yet. You came to my college campus [in the United States] to visit a friend and attended a party. I forget what exactly…
JK: I think it was a random party [thrown] because I was there.
M: Oh, okay, a random party because you were there. I was a baby first-year in college, and we had these things called mentors in different houses. You have, like, an Asian mentor, an LGBT mentor… I had an LGBT mentor who was supposed to take me out to lunch once in a while, and that was like one of the things that I had on my birthday, which was in December, which was also the week that Jiaqi came to visit. I was looking forward to my birthday lunch with my mentor. (It wasn't [formally] a birthday lunch. And also, I don't think they knew it was my birthday. But it was just like one of the social things I planned to do.)
I had put on all my winter clothing, and was getting ready to go to lunch. As soon as I leave the door, I get outside into the cold, I get an email, and it's like, “Actually, sorry, I can't make it today.” I don't think there was any reasoning, it was just like, “I'm so sorry I can't make it today.” And I was like, “Oh.” And I went inside, took my coat off, took all my winter clothes off, and sat there. It was kind of sad. [Five years] later I found out it was because my mentor had attended the party that had been thrown since [Jiaqi was visiting] and gotten super, super, super hungover, and woke up and could not make it to my lunch. So in a dramatic way, sometimes I'm like, “Oh, wow. Jiaqi ruined my 19th birthday.” But that's actually just an over exaggeration.
JK: No, I did ruin your 19th birthday, and it was also the day of the Labour defeat in the UK.
M: Wow. Yeah, there were some bad things going on. I still had a great birthday.
JK: I'm sorry that I ruined your birthday lunch, but I love that our lives touched before we even knew. That's actually really crazy. You're so important to me, and I'm so glad that we met.
I will say: I had a lot of issues [back when we first met]. I didn't know how to have boundaries on the internet until I learned the hard way through fandom Twitter.
M: Yeah, I did feel like you were really online.
JK: I was [up] at 7am, drinking coffee and going on Twitter for, like, eight hours a day. [Note: It was definitely more than that.] I was supposed to be doing my Master’s, but I wasn't really. The pandemic was crazy…
M: That was kind of a great way to spend those [times], at least for me. I feel like school and also—because of Covid—friendships felt distant and not that important. I feel like it was good that I locked into making art instead of my political philosophy class.
JK: I loved your art, and I still love your art. I'm a huge fan of your art, and I'm so glad that we met.
M: Yeah, me, too.
JK: What does the word care mean to you?
M: When I read this question, I was thinking about it, because I feel like it’s used in a lot of different ways. I came to my conclusion that there's three phases of care for me.
I think the very surface level idea of care is to care about something, and that's an emotion, that's something you feel in your heart. It's simply feeling strongly about something. It's hard to put emotions into words, but that feeling, it's an intense feeling in your chest where you can't stop thinking about something or something really matters to you.
The next part of caring is wanting to understand, wanting to learn, wanting to know as much as possible, or to dive deeper into whatever you care about. It’s to pay attention, I guess… Attention is limited, [so] to spend that resource or that energy in the direction of whatever you care about [is a meaningful act].
The third thing is to care for, so like care work—‘work’ as an actual action or doing something. To care for something is to maybe think about how you feel, and then think about what you've learned and what you know, and then put those ideas and feelings and thoughts into actual action and do something about the things that you care about.
I'm actually now curious about what other people have said about it. To me, it involves this transformation of thoughts and feelings into action.
JK: It's very succinct and well put.
M: I don't know, people kind of use the word for whatever.
JK: I think it's true that ‘care work’ is kind of a trendy word right now, but I think it's because people are thinking about it a lot more.
M: I think it came out of acknowledging women's work and acknowledging domestic work—this idea of emotional labor, or care work being seen as… [These ideas] came out of a formal ‘labor’ sense of, “Care work is work and should be paid, and has to have certain formal regulations about it.” But also [there is the need] to talk about the unseen, informal domestic work that goes on behind the scenes.
But [‘care work’ has] kind of been broadened to mean everything—in a bad way. I think it has lost some of its specificity. Now it's like emotional labor: you text your friend, “Do you have the emotional space to hold space for my thoughts in this moment?” It's very diluted.
JK: People sometimes will make fun of ‘therapy speak’ and stuff. Sometimes I'm worried that I'm the therapy speak person.
M: I think therapy speak is fine, but I do think it makes things feel kind of transactional—there is a way that you have to format your friendship. It kind of reminds me of that debate about, “Do you drive your friends to the airport?” We have to moralize all these things. Friendships are just messy sometimes, and sometimes you really fuck up with how you emotionally respond to someone, and sometimes you don't. I get wanting to ask if people have emotional space, but it does make things feel more distant. “Is it morally correct to put emotional labor on your……?” I don't know. There's something kind of unnerving [about that framework].
JK: Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I've been on the receiving end of therapy speak, but I also feel like sometimes I'm the one doing it… Why does everything [have to be moralised]? I think I struggle a lot with that. I always feel as though something is a sign that I'm bad, or a sign that I'm doing okay. But that's not how it works.
I've been doing [a lot of] care and support work lately, which I actually think I find really fulfilling, but maybe it's just because of my psychological profile.
M: I think your work is important. I genuinely used to say [that] I really want to be a homemaker, someone who makes places feel like home for people, because there's just something about doing service for others. Fulfilling people's emotional needs is very appealing to me. But at the same time, I've been trying to divorce that urge from the whole trad wife movement that we have going on. It's a weird cultural moment right now.
JK: Definitely. For me it also comes out of this moment where I feel a lack of other ways to be engaged around me right now. I feel a sense of disillusionment and demotivation. But because care work and support work is never ending and consistent, and there are so many different ways to do it… ‘Care work’ is such a big umbrella for the different ways that you can show up for people, or support people and support yourself and each other.
I'm about to go to my first ever prison visit next week, and I think I'm feeling apprehensive about it, because I already know that it's going to be kind of traumatizing, even just to be a visitor in a prison [let alone actually a prisoner]...
I'm reading Tip of the Spear [by Orisanmi Burton], which you recommended to me originally, over a year ago. I'm halfway through, and I'm struck by the moments that Burton described, of care between the captives—whether at Attica or some of the other revolts in the Long Attica Revolt. I just read that moment where they're doing their encampment outside [in Attica’s D Yard], and someone burst into tears because, for 23 years, they hadn't seen the stars. Someone else burst into tears because they've never been close to other people like this before.
Care is maybe sometimes stereotyped as this very maternal service, [a] smooth, feel good kind of thing. But it can also be really destabilising.
M: I love that book. That's what I was thinking about—the distinction between this whole tradwife movement of, “You should care for your nuclear family and be subservient” [which] is so different from how you and I probably see important care work as [being] for a wide network of people, even people that you've never met or are not friends with, but people who you feel political solidarity with, for example. It's not prescribed by gender roles. The book gets into masculinity—there's significant discussion about masculinity and the care that they had for each other in the Attica uprising.
Care work in the prison context is so divorced and maybe a blueprint for us as we think about how this kind of informal labor can be subversive, or is different from the type of quote unquote ’emotional domestic care work’ that is required of women in today's society or whatever.
But about the book, yeah, it really moved me personally. It describes the emotionality of being there. I think he's only able to write this book because of his care in real life within his methods. He formed friendships and caring relationships with people who were there: revolutionaries who perceived the entire event unfolding in a—of course—much different way than the state did, and maybe even in a different way than other incarcerated people did because everyone has different takes or opinions on what that experience was like. [Burton] was able to access these never-before-seen archives or documents or ideas because of the emotional and relational kinds of connections that he built with other people who are deeply embedded into the work and in the community, and who entrusted him with their papers and experiences. This book is such a good reminder to me that the relationships, the care and the community work will always come first, and the scholarship is something that arises out of that—it's not something that will ever supersede that connection.
JK: His methodology is so antithetical to the extractiveness of academia, as I've come to see it today, especially within—for me—a field like Sinology. The extreme care, the attention that he pays… I just read this bit where he talks about this specific interaction that he had with one of his interviewees. [Burton] doesn't understand what his interviewee is even trying to say, and he brings in his own feelings and the context of this ‘stutter’ in comprehension in the interview. [In another instance], one of his interviewees says to him, “You need to go and write all this stuff down.” Research itself is about getting things down, getting things written down, finding things out. Not all research has to be necessarily extractive, even though sometimes it can be that way.
M: The research does not have to necessarily be in service of the academy or a career even, but can just truly be you getting money to do something that really matters to you and to the people around you. I mean, I think [Burton] did get tenure off this book, but still.
I've thought about that a lot as well. But also, he's an anthropologist. [Ironically] for how the field was created (colonialism), they now do a much better job of talking more critically about their position within their own research. They also employ more creative methods than in history.
When you were talking about what research is like, I also want to bring in history as a specific discipline. Because for me, it's one of the things that give me the greatest hope. It represents that things were not always this way. Sure, what I study is filled with atrocities and terrible things, but they were all done by people who made specific choices. And by reading history, you come to understand that it's not the natural spin of the earth to move in this direction—they are all choices that people made. Sure, structured by society. But the world was created, and it can be uncreated and remade.
History as a method is against determinism: the idea that things would have always just ended up being this way, because the future is determined. Only by unpacking all the different ways that the past came to be can we understand that nothing is written in stone, and that the future can always be shaped in super, super powerful ways. Probably 10 years before slavery was abolished in the United States, people would never have imagined that this institution would be illegal in federal law.
The past few years, it’s felt like really awful, terrible things have just suddenly… Not even suddenly, but occurred with great frequency, whether it's the pandemic or the genocide [in Palestine], which has obviously been ongoing for like decades, but has really intensified in the past couple of years. Even amidst all that, history is one of the few things that gives me a fair amount of hope for significant change within my lifetime.
JK: I've been thinking a lot about history, historical fiction, memory-making and the act of writing history. One of the things that I find most meaningful is reading and writing history.
M: I love reading. I love reading history books. Like, it doesn't even matter what the topic is on, it's just always interesting. I just enjoy it.
It's also funny though, because I just said all this stuff about doing care work within your research and obviously that's very important to me. But I also have to make clear that I absolutely study people for whom it is hard to have empathy and sympathy for. My research has involved calling weapons company CEOs and workers and talking to people who the majority of people on the same political spectrum as me would find to be bad people doing pretty heinous things. So that's been like an interesting space to navigate, where I'm like, “To gain all that understanding and really deeply dive into history and understand how things functioned, I inevitably have to have a level of understanding and sympathy—or at least, if not sympathy, then empathy—for people who normally I would have very little attention or care for.”
JK: Because you're not writing a history from below. How does that feel?
M: We've talked about this somewhat in class, but also there's this impulse, I think, among leftists in academia to swear off anything that isn't grassroots work, or things that focus on like the community—their community—or writing from your own experience, writing about or for people that you agree [with]... Writing with a degree of care and empathy only for people with whom you agree with.
I don't know if it's a larger trend, but I do think that there is some of that impulse, every time you read a book on state power, for example, to be like, “Oh, this is an elitist book. It only talks about the state perspective and it's not peopled enough.” I often agree with these critiques, but also it is impossible to understand how power functions without other perspectives… The most important thing for me at this moment is tracing the way that power moves. That's how I understand oppression. That's how I come to my interactions, whether it's online—whether I choose to get mad at a tweet or not—to larger, grander things about society and how I understand society. It's about power and impact and understanding who has power to do what in these situations. You just simply can't get full understanding without also exploring the state perspective. I'm using ‘state’ because I study prisons, and they're state-run or federally-run. Of course, the state is not the only elite or powerful force in society. It's just my stand-in [word] right now.
But yeah, I didn't want to be an Asian American studying the Asian American community and writing a bottom-up story about how, actually, Asians have had a radical history. First of all, I think it's silly that so many Asian people are always trying to grasp for the perfect leftist Asian figure in American history.
JK: [This reminds me of] I Wor Kuen, the community defense Asian American group in San Francisco that existed at the same time as the Black Panthers… People talk about it so much [and it creates this impression that it was as big as the Black Panthers]. But apparently there were literally, like, six people in it. [NB: I am not knocking on I Wor Kuen.]
M: [And] Yuri Kochiyama. Everyone's like, “Yuri [was] best friends with Malcolm X—a Japanese woman! Wow, Asians were really with it.” And it's like, well, first of all, historically, things were so different. Most Asians in the US today cannot trace their political lineage to the Asians that were politically agitating in California in the 1970s. But also, why are we so desperate for a beautiful past? I don't know. I don't know. It's kind of crazy.
JK: That's a really interesting question. Why are we so desperate for a beautiful past? I guess it's because we feel as though we need a beautiful past in order to justify ourselves in the present and in the future. We crave it.
M: We crave the ancestors.
JK: Yeah. We crave history. I think actually a lot of people, maybe specifically second generation [diasporic Chinese people our age] don't feel that they have a lot of access to history. A lot of children of immigrants don't feel that they have a lot of access to history. Because sometimes, your only access to history is your parents, and if they don't want to talk about then that's kind of that. Simultaneously, for a lot of really privileged children of immigrants, their personal history [does] not [seem] very glamorous.
M: The word ‘boba liberal’ has become common speak these days. I feel like people want so desperately to lean into “I stand between two worlds” and they're like, “Yeah, my history is boba and dumplings and hot pot.” And then you get tankies, obviously, who so deeply want to have ancestral history. They're like, “China's the Motherland that will save us from everything.”
History has its pitfalls. I think it's good to study and understand it, but people who are so desperate to find idols to put on pedestals—that feels so dangerous. No one in history was perfect. I think that's something that's so clear when you study things like prison, because you're inevitably going to be writing about people who have done some truly bad things. I'm writing about guards who believe that they are good because they haven't been arrested or convicted of a crime, but they are doing absolutely terrible things. And meanwhile, you're also writing sympathetically about incarcerated people who have always taken responsibility for the things that they may have done. I don't make this distinction of people who ‘deserve’ or ‘don't deserve,’ because no one deserves to be there. But there are, obviously, rapists, there are people who have killed… There are people in prison who have no backstory as to why they did those things—they just did. Looking for that perfect historical figure to be like, “This person was, I don't know, a symbol of revolutionary-ism that we should all revere,” is just so uncomfortable to me. I think [diasporic] Asian people want that person so bad. [Diasporic] Asian leftists want that person so bad.
That was kind of a tangent, but it has been making me a little bit annoyed, and it's also why I was like, “I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute in Asian American history right now.” I don't think I would enjoy this.
JK: It’s the double-edged sword of the “writing from your own experience” kind of thing. On the one hand, it can be empowering, but on the other hand, it can be severely limiting. It raises questions about what it actually means when people say, “Write what you know.” Do you even know what you know?
M: People are always talking about being an insider versus outsider. [But] you're always going to be an outsider. Even in your own community, you're going to feel like an outsider. Like, I always think of that example—I no longer remember exactly where this was—of W. E. B. DuBois interviewing people in the rural south and trying to ask about their experiences. We might think of him as an insider, because he was so revolutionary in the social sciences, because he was arguing that actually studying our own communities is very valuable when all the white people were like, “We're the only ones who can study Black communities because we're objective.” He was changing that narrative. But even then, these people saw him as an outsider as well. They were like, “You're an elite Harvard-trained sociologist coming here to study us. That's really weird, and we don't want to tell you things about ourselves.” There's no real way to parse who is an insider, who is an outsider, to certain communities.
It comes back to being careful in your research, and coming from a place of community and not putting scholarship above who you are as a person. Everything else, I think, is after that.
JK: The act of writing itself somewhat turns you into an outsider. That's something that I think about a lot. I'm a fiction writer in English. What does it mean that I'm writing [creatively or academically] in English academically about China, for example? Automatically, it engenders so many power dynamics.
What are some things that you're currently looking to learn or to learn about?
M: The most current thing that's been on my mind is… I've been super disillusioned with my whole research topic this summer. Everyone's [talking about] private prisons, and prison technology and surveillance technology, and all these evil companies producing all this stuff. [How] there's so much investment into technology on the border, military technology being used to kill people in Palestine—all this stuff that's super urgent and super important. You would think that there's some relationship [between that hypermilitarisation and] domestic prisons. But prisons are so, so far behind in the market. Their prison facilities are outdated. Their budgets are huge, but it's mostly because housing people is so expensive, they have no money to upgrade their technology in the same way that police and ICE do. I was like, “There's not a story here.” Sure, there are tons of companies that contract with prisons. But these companies, they have to watch people 24/7, and they have to house, feed, clothe all of them. Obviously the state isn't doing all of this on its own. Obviously, private companies are involved. So I was like, “What is even the story? We know all of this.”
But then the question [is]: Out of all of our awful military surveillance carceral complex, why is it only prison that is so technologically and conditionally inferior? The prison population has been slowly decreasing since 2010. What is actually going on right now? Why is prison unique in that sense?
I'm sure there's a very obvious answer that I also haven't come to, and I'm going to get there and be like, “Yeah, this also isn't worth writing about [because it’s not novel],” but that's just what I've been thinking about and wondering lately. I've been kind of deep in the weeds looking at state contracts with lock manufacturers and razor wire fence [suppliers] and things like that. It’s a deep in the weeds question, but that's something I want to learn more about.
JK: That is really interesting. The discourse about prisons is so much about, “Oh, it's like the new slavery, they're profiting from it.” But [what you’re saying is] the profit margins are maybe lower than you'd think, or there's no profit to be made at all in prisons.
M: I think that's the biggest mistake about… We talk about this all the time, about how The New Jim Crow and 13th kind of tricked people. They are rhetorical inquiries into the connection of chattel slavery to [the] present day, but they are not based in concrete historical evidence. Because prison is not slavery in the same way.
If you read Dan Berger's Captive Nation, there's a very fascinating chapter where he talks about the afterlives of slavery in prison. It's not the legacy of economic exploitation [but] the legacy of racial control that relates slavery to prison. It's about control and the discursive work that prisoners, and mostly Black prisoners, are doing for the state.
It's not really so much as, “We are earning money off of incarcerated people's labor.” Prisons are not profitable [and] have never been. Prison labor, pretty much, is barely enough to subsidize some of the costs of running prison. There are some economic arguments where rural towns are like, “We need the jobs. Can you build a prison here?” But by and large, the towns never end up benefiting, and prisons are usually shuttered or never fill up, or the jobs all go to out of town residents. There have been extremely few economic benefits of prison, except for its discursive work in reinforcing the neoliberal capitalist state, which functions on racial control. So I genuinely think that the economic argument needs to be understood [as]: it's helpful for the capitalist economy in the sense that it reinforces disposability. But there is no concrete material financial benefit, except for the few big companies like Securus, GEO Group, who have benefited from providing services immensely. And even then, CCA [and] some of these private prison companies or contractors have nearly gone bankrupt multiple times. Most of their money now comes from ICE contracts.
I don't have a big conclusion to that, but I do think that people dramatically overemphasize the economic aspect because they want to make it more about economics and less about race.
JK: That's really interesting. Thank you. That's so much to think about.
M: Maybe different in the UK, though, I don't know.
JK: I don't have enough of an understanding, in-depth, about what it's like in the UK. But there are private prisons in the UK. The one I'm about to go visit my friend in is a private prison, and it's pretty bad. Two people have died recently in the prison.
M: That's awful.
JK: Is there anything else you'd like to say or to ask me?
M: This is kind of a broad question, but sending it back towards you: What are you thinking about? I don't even know how to phrase this, but right now, urgently—just on a personal level, not a philosophical answer about society—what have you been thinking about lately that inspires you to get out there and do something?
JK: I think I've been feeling pretty defeated lately. I've had a lot of trouble thinking in the middle or long term. Lately, I can only think in the short term, which is like, “What am I gonna do this week? What do I have planned next week?” I think I'm finding it really hard, and it's partly because there's been a lot of things [around me] that could make someone feel disillusioned or trapped or stagnant. I'm finding it hard to be really optimistic. I'm not cynical, but I do feel a little bit alienated or grated when I hear people voice very optimistic things. Even the slogan that people say at protests, “I believe that we will win”—you know, everyone starts jumping [as they say it]. “I believe…” I've not really been feeling very connected to that [energy].
But then at the same time, I also don't feel totally hopeless. I feel powerless, but also I'm not like, “Oh, I can't do anything.” Maybe going back to [what I said earlier], I've been doing a lot of support work and care work for the past couple months. That's been the main thing that I've been doing. That is something that always needs to be done in some way. [It’s] about consistency. That is something that I want to keep doing.
M: Yeah. I think that's really significant right now, because I'm also thinking in the context of fundraising for Gazans who are trying to leave or trying to provide for their families in the Gaza Strip right now. I feel like the phrase ‘care work’ is quite nebulous to me, but there is a network of care here that has to be done—of giving, and not in a top down, “We have a lot of money, and we're going to give downwards” [way], but of trying… “How do we make it actually relational and caring?” Is it possible in this context?
There have been these mass movements or actions, and of course, they must continue. But in the end, Palestinians are freeing themselves, of course, and I think that they will free themselves. It feels silly to put so much weight on what Westerners are doing in their countries. Like, it's important, but ultimately, beyond continuing to protest and show up—[there are also] people who are actively impeding the war machine by stopping arms manufacturing and things like that… 1. We need to continue carrying on in an emotional sense, and feeling connected and tapped in even when it's difficult. [2. We need to continue] doing that support work, even if it's just giving money or giving supplies. That's significant right now. [I’ve sometimes noticed that] there's an unwillingness to give in, a worry about verification [of fundraising campaigns]. That feels very silly to me.
So I feel like that is related: caring for your immediate friends, but doing this care work on a grander scale—building relations on a grander scale—is also important.
JK: I think it's actually dangerous. I think that there are connections between the Effective Altruism ideology and this idea of, “You should only donate to verified international NGOs that are going to be able to bring in tons and tons of aid once the Rafah crossing opens or something.” Because it's like, while you're waiting for that to happen, what are Palestinian families in Gaza eating for dinner tonight, or tomorrow?
People that are reluctant to trust or reluctant to give to on-the-ground mutual aid [groups], or to individual families… I think it's about trust. It’s about saying, “This is something that we very much can do.” Going in to question [that] and [to] be like, “What's the most effective?” or, “This is too short term,” or whatever is actually kind of dehumanizing.
M: People should just give, and people have a lot of resources, and we should just keep giving.
People have come around on the [idea that] it doesn't matter what a houseless person does with your money once they have your money—it's theirs. People have come around on that [but], for some reason, are still worried [about] verification and all this silly stuff of authenticity.