Sometimes words fail us. Sometimes, we overuse words meant for describing power when we’re trying to talk about people. When we call people minorities, it should only ever be in the context of naming and questioning who gets to be in the majority. These terms serve a purpose. They describe the power dynamics in society, a community, an industry, a workplace. We have to talk about them plainly in order to protect human rights and correct imbalances of power. But when it comes to describing individual human beings, the same words can only tell you the most reductive things about a person. The word minority, and even more specific identifying words like BIPOC, person of color, queer person, et cetera, don’t really tell you what a person is like, who they love, what they dream of, what makes them nervous, what makes them glad.

This is where art can help. Good art doesn’t have to try hard to “humanize” people. They were never not human. Good art helps the viewer look and see better. Dehumanizing was always a problem of the gazer, not the gazed upon. Sometimes art is able to get to the human core of things and also address imbalances of power, and I’m always glad when this happens.

If you’re in Oakland Chinatown this spring, make sure to stop in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and look for this exhibit of photographs of Bay Area immigrants by local photographer and activist, Joyce Xi.

It’s not obvious from the outside where it is, but this is what the facade of the building looks like:

You might recognize this plaza because its garage is one of the best places to park in Chinatown. Go up to the second floor, through the main doors of the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, and to the hallway on your right. There you’ll find several displays of photographs – first the smaller ones, then larger portraits as you continue through another doorway, down the hall.

I usually don’t love wall text in an art exhibit, but in this case it was necessary and powerful to read the words of the people in the photos.

“It’s different when you speak your own language. You speak freely. You don’t have to make up words…. You speak your heart, you speak your emotions.”

– Bushra

I learned English as a small child, before I was aware of language as a thing one has to learn. I remember not being able to understand or communicate at daycare when I was three or four, and that it felt isolating. And then I remember being five or six, in kindergarten, and resenting being pulled out of class for ESL instruction that I no longer needed. And slowly losing my Vietnamese as English became the language in which I think. It’s still there in me, not lost completely, as I grew up speaking it to my parents and to most of my elders. There are parts of me that can only be accessed through the tones of Vietnamese, certain words that strike a special chord, notes that don’t resonate otherwise. To be all the parts of me, I need more than one language.

“When I first came here and took my son to the children’s hospital, the lady who spoke Khmer and did medical interpretation for me… it was so important at the time. I didn’t speak any English. For her to translate the information that I gave to her accurately and she relay[ed] it to the doctor, it was so intriguing. I kept thinking in my head, this is a job I want to do later in life when I speak English fluently.”

– Sophal

I think about the continuity built by refugees and immigrants who become helpers for the ones who come after them. How much this is needed.

“I completed the 4th grade at the Thai-Burma refugee camp before coming to the U.S. When I came to the U.S., I was 16 years old, and I had the opportunity to attend Oakland International High School. I faced enormous challenges, including speaking in English, building relationships with friends and teachers.”

– Paw Paw

I recognized my former student from Oakland International High School before I read the wall text next to her portrait. And I remembered how she used to look at me sometimes, a mixture of sad and sorry. I was sorry too, for the gaps between us that the words we had could not bridge.

It strikes me now that we are not meant to understand everyone fully – how could we? But we can relinquish the colonizing impulse to control their language and how they express themselves. In California, a relatively large number of languages are considered in public contexts like signage, medical documents, and voter guides. English-only initiatives are stupidly popular in many states. With French roots, Louisiana is a bit of an outlier in the South, and New Orleans the American city most like being in another country. I learn new words here all the time.

But it was in Oakland, where I was a public school teacher whose students spoke over 30 different languages, that I experienced, on the daily, the complex beauty of the world, and was challenged, on the daily, to rise to meet it. Go see this photo exhibit if you can. You’ll get a taste of the richness of that experience, and come out a better person for it.

• Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and supported this publication through paid subscriptions and founding member donations! With your financial backing, I’m able to travel to visit folks in prison and detention and beyond, and to include that reporting in my writing. Next week I’m going to Georgia to write about ICE and family separation.

If you know people who would like this site, please recommend it to them. Thank you!

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At the edge of the market, you find a white van with a sign that reads, “Knife sharpening today,” in front of it a neat table displaying wood-handled chef’s knives and a black tablecloth that says in white letters, “Stone’s Touch.” The logo is an adorable bald Asian guy in a gray hoodie and jeans, animatedly sharpening a giant knife on a stone. In the doorway of the van, the logo’s human inspiration stands smiling. It’s Simon Liu, the founder and owner of this enterprise.

I’ve been following Simon’s major life events since I met him in 2018, a few months after his release from ICE detention. He’d been transferred there immediately after finishing a long prison sentence. I knew him as a Chinatown Ambassador in Oakland, employed by Asian Health Services as a community helper, walking folks to their cars, helping elders cross the street, checking in on houseless individuals whom he knew by name. He helped a former student of mine who was on the streets, got him some paid work and gave him a place to stay for a couple weeks. I attended his graduation from a software engineering bootcamp, across from the fancy Sales Force building in downtown San Francisco, where he bounced around in a black suit greeting his peers, who clapped him on the back and treated him like the class president. I attended a celebration at the beautiful house in the East Bay that he purchased with the backing of his colleagues in tech – a house not for him but for people in the tenuous phase of reentry, when a peaceful and supportive environment can make all the difference between a successful transition and a tragic return to prison. I got a text from Simon on my birthday during the pandemic, sharing the good news that he had finally, after several years of community efforts, received a pardon from the governor, which meant that he was finally free from the danger of being deported by ICE.

On this spring day in 2026, Simon greets me warmly and pulls up a chair for me behind the table. I compliment his hat and his whole van and booth set up, and we jump right into a conversation. The knife sharpening business is a big change from his former job as a programmer. San Francisco is a place where the tech utopian optimism of the early aughts still persists among the very stubborn and the very rich, but also where the crushing cost of living has driven many working people to live in their cars and many people out of work to live on the streets. Certain blocks look more armageddon than utopia. Many people have left tech for other kinds of work.

Thi: What do you think of AI?

Simon: I think AI is interesting. It’s another gimmick from the top .001 percent to get society enslaved. Right now they need us to work. Eventually as resources get slimmer, the regular people are gonna get eliminated.

Thi: Is AI a reason for your pivot from software engineering to this knife sharpening business?

Simon: I like to talk to people, work with my hands. I employ people, all formerly incarcerated. It’s a way out.

Thi: How many knives do you sharpen on a normal day?

Simon: On a busy day, we normally sharpen about a hundred knives. On a very busy day, maybe two or three hundred knives.

It’s an interesting scene, watching customers come by to ask about the sharpening service. One young couple had a lot of questions, and after some mental calculations, decided to have their very best knife sharpened. Many people were farmers’ market regulars who have seen him before. Many stopped by to pick up or drop off their kitchen knives. One man brought a several knives, two or three Leatherman tools, and a wild-looking blade with designs in it that he had made in a knife-making class. It felt like stepping back in time to an era when we kept our tools longer and took better care of them. It also felt like what the future will need to look like, and not a bad thing.

Simon is a disciplined artisan and an enterprising businessman. He got started learning about tools from a Japanese specialist, with whom he took classes. He has acquired and equipped two other vans, operated at other farmers’ markets by formerly incarcerated friends that he’s trained. His goal is to expand the business and make enough money to be able to provide health insurance for his employees.

He speaks calmly and clear-eyed about the state of the country. “Before, it used to be housing and healthcare that forced people to work. You’re shackled by work so you don’t even have time to challenge the structure.” But quietly, with dedication and strategic planning, Simon has been sharpening his metaphorical knives to unshackle immigrants and formerly incarcerated people, and challenge the systems that would leave them behind.

• Bay Area Freedom Collective is the reentry project that Simon helped create. You can read more about it on their website and donate if you wish.

• If you’re in the Bay Area, Stone’s Touch is where Simon and his colleagues will sharpen your knives for a well-worth it fee. Supporting businesses that hire formerly incarcerated folks is good economic and social policy. Prison Policy Initiative found that the unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people is nearly five times higher than for the general US population, worse than the worst years of the Great Depression. If you want people to succeed, it helps if they have a chance to. It’s not rocket science.

• This Wednesday I’m leading a mini-zine activity about community, in Oakland at the reception for the Racial Justice Poster Project (I designed this year’s poster). If you’ve already RSVP’d, I’ll see you there! If you’d like to request a poster from the Akonadi Foundation, you can do so here.

• If you like stories like this, make sure you subscribe to Before You Die, Dammit so you’ll never miss a story. If you can, support this work with a paid subscription or a founding member donation. It keeps the site free for all to read and this writer with enough coffee and food in her fridge to continue.

• If you, too, are having to do mental calculations about what you can and cannot afford during these uncertain times, it’s okay! That’s why this site is free. Do me a favor though and share this site so more people know about it.

Share Before You Die, Dammit

If you visit the San Francisco Bay Area as a tourist, you can take a ferry to go see Alcatraz, the famous island prison that is now a museum. But you probably don’t think about San Quentin State Prison, just 9.5 miles across the water on the edge of Marin County.

From State Prison to Rehabilitation Center

Built during the 1849 Gold Rush, San Quentin is California’s oldest prison and once the largest death row in the US, formerly a maximum security prison housing some big name inmates like Charles Manson. For a lot of the general public, it still carries the weight of this reputation. But in reality, over the years, through efforts by prisoners and advocates on the outside, it has adopted programs for rehabilitation, treatment, GED and college classes, and vocational training. In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a major initiative to revamp San Quentin State Prison into San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. He had already suspended the death penalty in 2019 and in 2022 ordered the dismantling of the building where death row inmates had been held. The initiative was meant to reduce recidivism by preparing prisoners for reentry into society. SQ is now primarily a Level 2 and Level 1 (medium to low security) prison.

Maybe it’s because I’ve recently moved to the South, where lawmakers talk very differently about the prison population (I’ll write about Louisiana State Penitentiary and the Angola Prison Rodeo another day), but I do want to say it’s positive to read statements like this one:

Darrell Steinberg, the former state Senate president pro tempore, said the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center “represents an even broader definition of justice.”

“When people commit a crime, accountability is appropriate,” said Steinberg. “At the same time, no human being who serves time should ever be forgotten or forsaken. This is not partisan, soft or ideological. What you created here is effective public safety.”

It’s good though, to see it oneself if possible and to speak with the people it’s meant for.

A new classroom in an old prison

On Monday I went to visit an Ethnic Studies class there and got to see the $239 million Learning Center that just opened this spring. The new building looked especially shiny and modern positioned next to the dusty yard, which looked the same as I remember it in 2019, the last time I visited. I wasn’t allowed to bring in a phone or camera but you can look at lots of pictures of the design and construction here and here. As is common with new things, there was a bit of a confusion about which classroom we were supposed to be in and how to unlock it and whether it would fit all of us. But the upbeat attitude of the group leaders made for a comfortable and welcoming transition in.

The ROOTS program

The group of about thirty men was three quarters of the way through a year-long curriculum called ROOTS, or Restoring Our Original True Selves, created by an Oakland-based nonprofit called Asian Prisoner Support Committee. APSC itself came about in 2002 as community support for the “San Quentin 3” – three men who advocated for Ethnic Studies at San Quentin and, in retaliation by the prison administration, were sent to solitary confinement and transferred to other prisons. The existence of the class alone speaks to the whole point of advocacy and community organizing. The program coordinator this year is Peejay Ai, a Cambodian American counselor and community organizer who was formerly incarcerated and formerly detained by ICE, and about whom I have written. I was one of three women there; another was a retired psychologist who was observing as a new volunteer with APSC, and a third, who worked at San Quentin, was providing ADA accommodations for one man who was deaf.

A reading from The Best We Could Do

I shared an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do. Peejay brought photocopies and I asked for volunteers in the class to read the narration and do the voices. One man pointed out that there were sound effects and volunteered to do those. The result was the best reading of my work I have ever heard, hands down. This is the chapter about being a refugee kid in San Diego in the early Eighties, and being raised by a stay-at-home refugee dad with undiagnosed PTSD.

We followed it with an excerpt from the next chapter, which is about my father when he was a young boy in Viet Nam during the first Indochina War.

Sometimes when I do a reading from The Best We Could Do with strangers, I get the sense that my family’s stories are of but mild interest to them. A novelty. An obligatory reading. Or even entertainment. So then I talk louder and hit harder with my commentary, because someone has given me a mic so I might as well, and because I want to take up space in people’s brains, where I might do some good. It’s hard work to counter some folks’ ability to dehumanize, but I’ll do it, when I have to.

But in this classroom in San Quentin, every voice that read carried the weight and pain that I put into the work and honored it, even as they made it lively with their energy and enthusiasm. When I asked them what stood out to them, I was floored by the depth and vulnerability of what they shared with me, in front of each other. So I got to do what I prefer to do as a presenter: be soft, and listen.

One man, K., said he was a child in Grenada when the US invaded. He remembered having to hide from the American soldiers the way my father hid from the French soldiers. L., the man sitting next to me, was excited to share that his family was also from the north of Viet Nam, he came to the US in 1975, and reading some of these passages, he had to take a deep breath. Others chimed in with their personal connections to the childhood feelings, the intergenerational trauma, the preoccupation with safety, and the power of storytelling that allowed them to connect with me. I thought to myself, I think I might have more in common with this group of prisoners than with most audiences.

Not necessarily because of how our lives share early patterns, though that’s important. I think there was something about their readiness and willingness to go deep and vulnerably into the question of who we are, who we aspire to be, and what that has to do with there being more justice in the world. I hate small talk, unless it’s the friendly chit-chat that’s part of catching someone’s vibe and putting them at ease. I hate that most people talk at length to each other about superficial things as though they’re important, while the big questions that matter, the big problems that we suffer from, go unaddressed because it makes people feel uncomfortable to talk about them. The class kept thanking me for coming in, but I had a lot of thanks to give them for thoughtfully engaging with me in a way that I spend most of my days craving.

Revolution and Repair

And then I did something I’ve never done before. I shared a brand new piece of writing: last week’s essay, Revolution and Repair. Volunteers read it aloud in what classroom teachers call “popcorn style,” which I explained means whoever feels compelled can jump in to read next, and everyone listens and works together like jazz musicians to make it flow. They deftly handled the logistics of being a large group passing around the two microphones needed for the sign language interpreter on the other side of a laptop video conference. And with their strong voices and soulful delivery, they added a warmth and depth to my words that was such a gift.

Afterwards I told them I hoped to hear their thoughts about the piece and about ideas of repair, accountability, healing, justice, and making this world better. I said that Peejay would facilitate so that I could take notes and sketch them. Hands went up and microphones were passed and Peejay never had to facilitate because everyone listened so respectfully and those who spoke did it so eloquently.

I was quite moved and thus produced some very sloppy sketches, which I present to you in their rawness. I am not a neat notetaker. My ideas start all spread out and unstructured. And it’s not easy to draw in a flimsy sketchbook on one’s lap with a ballpoint pen while you are trying to be present for the emotional connection and wisdom that people are giving you. I noticed this time that San Quentin’s rules have gotten less strict, but I was following the old rules by bringing in nothing but my driver’s license, one small sketchbook, two ballpoint pens, and a paperback copy of my book to donate. If I want to make art that’s more produced, it helps to have more of my tools and/or more time and focus. If you want people to do deep, meaningful soul work and for rehabilitation programs like this to work, it helps when they have the tools and space and time for them to do their best work. It’s not rocket science.

The quotes below have been lightly edited to include things I heard but did not manage to write down.

K.: It’s a shame I had to go to prison to get this education. How can my elders also get healed so that I can also get healed? We used to do this healing tribally, in villages, in community, together. It was intergenerational.

C.: There’s a lot of hurt people who have experienced trauma and not having the resources. For example, what happened when you went to foster care? As far as restorative practices that address our humanity, we are going backwards. We have a lot of higher classes telling us how to heal, when they don’t know what our indigenous or immigrant experiences are. The people’s voice is being drowned out.

X: We need to get the youth the help that they need. Bring awareness to them before it’s too late.

X: A lot of lawmakers just see people who are committing crimes. And they don’t see, or they don’t care, that these are people who are hurt.

J.: [On self-development and practices like active listening] Was I better today than I was yesterday? Do I like myself better today than yesterday? I do this for me.

D.: To understand what I was doing wrong, I would read other people’s denials of parole and find words like mollification, rationalizing, impression management, which are all things we do to deny responsibility, to not take accountability. And I think we can teach people about these things they do. Draw it out in simple ways, maybe in stories or comics like you do, and not use big SAT words.

Y.: Systemic racism, systemic violence. We’re doing systemic rehabilitation. You need to recognize what’s going on in here. It’s a revolution within these walls. Once I’ve served and I’m out, I’ve done the work; accept me for who I am. And I’ve done the work! Follow my lead.

Listening to the men in this classroom in San Quentin, following their lead does seem like the way to move forward. Who better to follow out of the muck than those who have struggled and found their way out?

It’s important to note that the rehabilitation model at San Quentin fits the definition of restorative justice. Some activists have pointed out that structural problems within the prison system or society itself remain unchanged in this model, and call for a transformative justice that goes broader than the individual’s self development. One of the men gave me a drawing he made that depicted a crowd of prisoners filing into the mouth of a giant CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) guard, with the words “New building, same old bullshit” in bold letters across the top. He had expressed frustration with a criminal justice shot caller saying that there is no racism against Asian people in Orange County. Of note is how many Asian people are categorized in prison as “Other” because they don’t fit the categories of White, Black, or Hispanic, so there is inconsistent data and, as a result, underfunding and misunderstanding when it comes to Asians in the prison system.

The men are in their twenties, thirties, forties, and a few of them older. I thought about the regrets they expressed about not learning important life lessons earlier, when they were young, and I do believe that so much can be done through prevention and providing young people with the support and guidance that they need. But having taught public high school for many years, I also know that a lot of young people aren’t open to the lessons the way these older guys are. The opportunities for growth have to be there for people when they’re young and old, whenever they’re ready.

And when they’re ready? It’s powerful. Revolutionary power.

What’s next?

I’ve invited the men to stay in conversation with me on this topic of revolution and repair, and I hope they’ll take me up on it. I’d like to share more of their words with you in future posts on this site.

They’ve also invited me to come back before their graduation, and to their healing circle later this fall, when some of their family members will participate. I think I have more to learn here.

Generally if we have been taught by moral people how to deal with this shortcoming of our species, it is something along the lines of forgiveness. Buddha’s teachings, Christian prayers, mushy endings to Hallmark movies, and so on. And yet we live in a world built for punishment. Maximum security prisons, Three Strikes you’re out, adult sentences for juvenile offenders. As someone invested in building a better world than this, I reject both ends of this spectrum for the simple reason that they don’t work.

I spent a lot of time thinking about war and intergenerational trauma in The Best We Could Do. But I’d rather be thinking about how to break out of the cycle and on to something better.

Forgiveness without accountability is not enough to reverse the effects of harm. It is taking painkillers to cope with a violent world.

Justice without repair is simply punishment or retribution.

A revolution has to happen both within and outside of ourselves.

On Thursday night, I went to a poetry reading and the poets were singing my pain like Roberta Flack. They spoke of mothers who won’t let their daughters be angry, and fathers who absorb the brutality of empire and war and pour it out as violence upon their wives and children.

Julie Thi Underhill moderated, Barbara Jane Reyes and Lan Duong read at The Ruby in San Francisco, March 26, 2026

I love angry, smart women because they make me think in ways that use both my logic and my feeling, ie my whole human self. We can’t solve human problems without feeling, and we can’t get carried away by our feelings because we lose sight of our goals. The discussion was about storytelling and activism, and someone in the audience raised the question of forgiveness. I paraphrase, but both poets basically said, “I ain’t there yet.” Lan Duong added that she is not at forgiveness, but in a place of giving grace, and I liked that.

I am an angry woman, in case you hadn’t noticed. I have been working on hulking out on my enemies and not my loved ones, and I will say that years of therapy have helped with that, though it’s a work in progress. I am angry because there is a lot to be angry about, and if I am to participate in the changing of the status quo in order to bring about a more just and beautiful world, it’s not forgiveness but anger that fuels that work. And sometimes I have to fight my own communities to do the work.

Many of us live in communities where people choose the status quo over change, ambient peace over actual justice. That is why when someone deemed important by the community does harm, the community often exerts pressure on the victim to prematurely forgive and forget. Of course I am thinking about Cesar Chavez, our most recent fallen hero. And I am thinking about how communities that silence victims multiply their pain and do nothing to address the harm or change the conditions that led to it.

When the harm is done, however, by someone less valued by the community, for various reasons that often include racism and classism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia…then the pitchforks come out. And often the victim becomes a side character in this drama, more a symbol than a person, and the end goal is always some version of a public lynching.

Our systems for addressing harm are all wrong. In the US, we have a sprawling system of criminal justice and massively inflated budgets for law enforcement, ten thousand ways to punish and entire economies built around the impulse to guard ourselves from harm. And yet we are not safer. Because these systems are all built around vengeance and fear, both of which are reactions and not needs.

We need love and safety. These are the original needs and the end goals. When we remember this, then it becomes more clear that the answers do not lie in personal shame or public lynchings or even more laws or longer or harsher sentences. They lie in ways to restore the conditions in which love and safety can exist. So much can be done in prevention. And when harm still happens, as it will?

We need tools and systems for accountability and repair.

It is clear to me, from years of doing research on immigrant detention and mass incarceration, that we need revolutionary thinking to dismantle the systems that don’t work for us. Systems that oppress, that cause more harm and perpetuate cycles of violence.

And we need tools to become self-aware and able to self-correct. As humans we make mistakes, and that is forgivable, but we also have to take responsibility for our impact. Most of us need help learning how to repair the harm we cause, because shame is such a strong emotion that it can paralyze and prevent us from taking the steps that actually lead to repair. It is also extremely hard to give what we have not ourselves received, when the harm that may have been done to us, long ago, cannot be undone. We need healing to repair broken bonds between us and the broken parts in us that could still love and be loved.

“Healing helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to.”

–Prentiss Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world, 2024

I assume that if you are reading this essay, you are in some way an idealist, a survivor, a fighter, an activist. A person who is worried and tired. Maybe a little broken. Broken, we could still fight for a beautiful world, but then I think we’d just fuck it up again. I am too tired to fight for a world that I know unhealed people will fuck up again. I’d rather try to heal the people and fight for the world at the same time. Some of the healing to be done is within; much of it is in the systems around us that are broken or unjust. Less broken, we can fight for a more just world, together. And fighting together, we are so much more likely to succeed.

• Can you recommend authors and essays and interviews to me? I have been reading about abolition and am growing my imagination about what the alternatives are to the violent systems we have. I am still at a stage of critiquing their violence, which is important because the status quo is incredibly difficult to change. But I want to better understand concepts like restorative justice and transformative justice, not just throw the words around like juicy sound bites. How do communities hold people accountable? How do they support those who were harmed? What does that look like? Does it work? Next week I’m going to San Quentin State Prison to learn more. But if you have recommendations for me to read or listen to, please leave a comment or send me a message. Thank you.

• Can you share this Substack with others? One supporter’s recommendation on Facebook this week brought a lot of new readers, and I am very grateful. If that’s your platform and you appreciate my work, I’d really appreciate you giving this site a shout-out.

I know folks are upset about airport lines right now, but remember ICE raids on our cities?

City sieges have become a common threat from Donald Trump, who, like a tyrant king, deploys his personal army upon cities to show off his might and punish local leaders who defy him. From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portland to New Orleans, DC, Charlotte, and Memphis, ICE spreads chaos for citizens and inflicts terror upon immigrants. We’ve somehow reverted to feudal times, but our oppressors come with guns, teargas, and modern, fascist tech. During a long winter of ICE, clashes between federal immigration enforcement and local residents erupted violently in the state of Minnesota and in particular, the city of Minneapolis.

The brutality was so bad and so visible that it actually shook some Democratic leadership into action (a good thing), resulting in an ongoing standoff between our two political parties over funding the Department of Homeland Security, which houses both ICE and Border Patrol. All the monies that fund most of the government in Fiscal Year 2026 have been approved; the only remaining appropriations bill in question is the one that pays for DHS, FEMA, and, currently on everyone’s mind, TSA. After several times rejecting Democrats’ proposals to separate funding for immigration enforcement from TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard in order to get them funded and their employees paid, Republicans finally took a deal they accepted to Trump, who promptly killed it. “We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week, but the President said ‘no deal,’” explained Senator John Kennedy (the Republican junior senator from Louisiana). Instead, Trump is instructing Republicans to make no deals with Democrats that don’t include passing the SAVE Act, a highly unpopular bill that would take away the right to vote from millions of Americans.

Governance is not a fairy tale for kids. It’s complex accounting and systems management. We’re so fucked.

On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social a declaration that sounds like something out of feudal times, complete with Capital Letters in random Places. "I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before," quoth Trump. On Monday, ICE agents were deployed to at least thirteen airports. It is now both highly inconvenient to fly AND terrifying to immigrants and activists to go to the airport, and TSA workers are still unpaid. Another fatal airplane accident, late Sunday night at LaGuardia Airport, reminds us about the shortage of air traffic controllers and honestly about the precariousness of life these days. Meanwhile the President blames Democrats and pushes conspiracy theories and weird transphobic attacks on Truth Social to try to pass a sweeping anti-democratic voting law. It is a veritable three ring circus designed to make you distracted and confused. In the center ring, which represents the present moment, clowns set fire to a house and there’s a mom and baby in a high window crying for help. In the other two rings, the recent past becomes a blur of trauma while a dystopian near-future unfolds as quickly as it can to avoid drawing your attention.

This concludes my Thi Reads the News summary of current events. I haven’t even touched international affairs or the global impact of Trump’s war on Iran, but that would require a whole other post and there are better experts to read on that. To offset the particularly high level of cuckoo bananas related to ICE at this time, I want to slow things down, and take us back to the human experience of living through one of Trump’s city sieges. The point of Thi Reads the News, after all, is for you to be able to keep up with the news without losing the plot. We have to remember WHY we are trying to defund DHS and why we have to abolish ICE. I reached out to someone who helped me understand what was happening in Minnesota as it was unfolding.

Bao Phi is a spoken word artist, writer, and community activist who has lived in Minneapolis all his life, since his family fled Viet Nam when he was an infant in 1975. He was kind enough to answer my questions this week as an artist and individual. The following is our conversation.

Thi: Operation Metro Surge began in December and lasted well into February. What most people know about it is the killing of two citizens, Alex Pretti and Renée Good, that it was extremely cold, that there were many arrests, and that there was also a strong resistance on the part of Minnesotans. Can you describe what you witnessed as a resident of Minneapolis?

Bao Phi: I witnessed terror, bravery, community, and exhaustion - from people close to me, to people I don’t even know. Armed, masked men who inflicted violence on us with impunity, empowered by the federal government, roamed the streets like monsters from some bleak fairy tale,.and those of us who spoke up were often gaslighted. I also witnessed hundreds of thousands of everyday people step up and look after their neighbors, even though most of us had full time jobs, or had families to take care of, or ourselves had family members or friends or neighbors already taken from us, or ourselves lived in fear of being shot, taken away, or otherwise persecuted. I was often in tears when I witnessed all the people helping when and how they could, without need of recognition or fanfare.

As someone who is deeply invested in working class, BIPOC, and immigrant and refugee communities there, what do you want people to understand about the effects, both short-term and long-term, of a statewide siege of this scale and duration?

Bao: What has happened has caused a deep, historical trauma that will live in us forever. Depending on who you are, maybe this trauma is not new, but the specific instance of it adds to what you’ve already been dealing with. If it’s new to a person, then that person will need to reckon with the psychological effects of it. In all cases, I hope people get the help they need. It wasn’t until my mid 30’s that I went to therapy and began the long journey (not over yet) of learning about trauma, understanding it, and coping with it. I hope folks get this sooner than I did. And because ICE hasn’t left - they’ve just been quieter - we need people to know it’s not over. Not just for Minnesota, but for every area they have and will lay siege to, so we can understand, prepare to, and continue to resist.

And people much smarter than me have pointed out that the boycotts, strikes, and small businesses shutting down in solidarity will have a deep impact on things like taxes and the local economy in the months to come. There will be court cases to try to bring the murderers of Pretti and Good to justice. We still need help: material help, public pressure, etc.

Much respect to Minnesotans for being incredibly organized as a resistance. Can you paint us a picture of what that entailed? In both resisting ICE and supporting impacted people, and each other?

Bao: What I witnessed was a decentralized movement made up of neighbors and everyday people who self-organized, took initiative, and shaped their care depending on what their neighbors and community needed. You had folks cooking and dropping off food and supplies for people who were afraid to leave their homes. You had folks getting together to sing as an act of resistance, poets and writers documenting and witnessing, and so many different ways artists and culture bearers showed up. There were immigrant rights and deportation rights lawyers and activists working overtime and beyond the point of exhaustion. Folks donated money, stood sentry at schools to protect kids, patrolled the block with whistles to give people advance warning, translated information into various languages, wrote letters and called representatives, protested and boycotted. And still are.

I imagine that a lot of groundwork for this resistance was laid during the activism that followed the murder of George Floyd. Can you help me understand, practically, what that looks like on the level of organizing?

Bao: From a culture standpoint, the murder of George Floyd and the effects on Minneapolis in particular - everything from the mass protests to the violence from racist agitators - may have been the trigger for some to really witness and absorb the blatant structural racism and state sanctioned violence against Black people in particular. Of course, Black people have known about this since this country’s beginning, and Black leaders connected George Floyd to many other cases of police brutality inflicted on Black people, as well as Black-led community and family social justice movements around them: Tycel Nelson, Terrence Franklin, Philando Castile, Amir Locke, and many others. The mass education on structural oppression, and the grassroots organizing, by Black leadership, laid much of the groundwork for the movements in 2026. And whether or not more policing made communities safer became a question asked more broadly and widely as a result of George Floyd and other Black movements around police brutality. There was also the use of contemporary technology to communicate off the grid (Discord, and now, Signal) combined with decentralized, self-organized community groups forming and taking the initiative to protect and look out for one another back then, which was then echoed in 2026.

And in addition to Black leadership and community from George Floyd and many years before, I would also affirm that many different small grassroots movements over the years in Minnesota have also fed into this movement: immigrant and refugee rights organizations,Native American movements, Asian and Latinx movements, Somali community organizing, women’s movements, labor movements, arts activist movements, LGBTQI+ movements, Greater Minnesota organizers, and more.

Trump’s unhinged rants about Representative Ilhan Omar and about Somalis in Minnesota are bananas racist but he’s so unhinged about so many things that I don’t think his racism gets called out enough. Do you want to talk about this?

Bao: I don’t know what else there is to say. He’s racist, unhinged, and ridiculous. This is in line with the administration’s strategy to set so many fires so frequently that we can’t keep up.

Your solidarity is broad. Not all people from “minority” groups think this way. How did you become you in this way?

Bao: Lived experience, time, and people smarter and wiser than me believing in, and helping with, my growth. Also, in short, asking myself the question: what kind of world do I want to live in, and what kind of world do I want my kid to be a part of? I don’t want a world where oppression just switches from me and my people to another group of people. The beautiful world that is possible is going to take a whole lot of us. I had to grow out of some ideas drilled into me by Western culture: that justice is equivalent to violent revenge, and move away from the desire for others to suffer the way I see our people and other people suffer.

You also write frequently about your frustrations with the stories that are told, and that as Asian Americans, we tell, about Asian Americans in the US. What are people getting wrong? And what do you want them to understand?

Bao: The limited perception of Asian Americans are: we’re all problematic MAGA supporters, we’re all passive beneficiaries of other peoples’ movements, or that we’re just yellow colored white people too afraid to speak up. These narratives are so deeply entrenched that I’ve seen and heard people of all races and genders - including fellow Asian Americans - repeat them as if they were the full truth. While there are definitely Asian people who fit some of those stereotypes, we also have a history of Asian American people engaged in, and leading, social justice movements, going back a couple of hundred years. And yet this history is erased and dismissed, from people all over the political spectrum. It’s frustrating because I believe we need to learn about, and understand, what different peoples have been through and continue to go through, in order to create the beautiful world that is possible for all of us. Asian Americans certainly need to learn about many different peoples’ contributions and struggles - and also, everyone needs to learn about ours.

• Literary Hub published several Letters from Minnesota during the occupation. Here is Bao’s letter: “There’s some good in this world…”

• Related reading: Thi Reads the News, A Life, They Are Building a War Machine, How Did We Get Here?, Humanizing and Dehumanizing. Also related to organizing: Get In Where You Fit In, Get Shit Done.

• Before You Die, Dammit has gone from a modest goal of publishing once a week to a highly caffeinated 2-3 times a week. I’m happy to say that this is indeed helping me write NOWHERELAND, my weapon against ICE in the form of a well-researched book with good writing and pictures. A consistent 12-14 percent of subscribers are supporting with paid subscriptions. This feels good, especially after reading that many newsletters hover around 1-3 percent in the early stages. I would love to get this work to more people in total who might learn from it or do something with it. Can you help me grow this site by recommending it from your Subtack, or gifting a subscription (free or paid) to a few people you know? Or sharing your favorite essay on your social media? Feel free to grab a picture, with credit, because those tend to help people stop to look. Thank you for helping get the truth in people’s hands, and for coming along on this wild ride.

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I knew a little about the writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995), but it wasn’t until last Sunday when I saw the new documentary, TCB - the Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, at the Patois Film Festival, did I realize she was a teacher in all the best ways. At CUNY and Spelman College but also in her communities, at a neighborhood arts center in Atlanta, at her house with women writers once a month. Even in her writing, wild and rhythmic poetry that it is, she instructs. I wish I had known about her when I was a baby artist and teacher-in-training. It would have given me another role model to live by. I guess it’s never too late to move closer to the light, whenever it finds you.

Next week I’ll turn my gaze back to the news, but while my thoughts are here, looking inward, it’s worth being thorough on this notion of being a teacher. Knowing oneself is, I think, key to being a part of something greater than oneself in a way that honors both.

I’ve been a teacher. I taught hundreds of students over two decades, and they taught me too. The large class sizes of public schools made it hard to spend as much individual time with students as I would have liked, but we had the closeness and dynamic of a large family. One-on-one, I mentored graduate students working on their own long comics and graphic novels. In recent years, I taught a comics bootcamp at the California College of the Arts, all day every day for a week with the same group of grad students. That intensity suited me. I could go all in and not lose myself because of it. Sometimes people who have been my student want to keep the same relationship with me after the class is over, and I feel sad and regretful that I can’t be there for them in that way. How I explain it to them is, they’ve seen how I am one hundred percent present with them when I am teaching. That means I am ignoring everyone else, and if I’m not, I’m going over-capacity. Stretched thin for more than a short time is not strong. The class I am with gets the one hundred percent, and that’s what I can do.

Most of the year, now, I don’t do classroom teaching in order to claim back time and energy for myself and my own art practice (which, it turns out, still has an educational bent). I still possess the same disposition that makes me a teacher. I listen, I observe. I watch people for them to tell me who they are, and what they are still learning, and then sometimes, when I can see their potential for greatness or freedom shining through despite the obstacles that frustrate them, I want to help. This, I have learned, can be a liability in my relationships, as not everyone who meets you wants you to see them in this way. I suppose it feels vulnerable. I am still learning too, I want to say. We all are.

But learning is hard. Don’t you know we all die? is what goes through my head when I am giving my one hundred percent to someone who isn’t ready for it. Don’t you know how precious this present moment is? And then I have to talk myself down, let go of my urgency, let that person live on their own timeline without judgement, and bring my energy back to the urgency of my own timeline. I have things yet to learn.

My son is now at an age where he gives me great gifts in the form of revelations he’s having as a young man articulating his moral code in a morally inconsistent world. He says that he didn’t used to see it this way, but now he recognizes my intensity as a combination of love and generosity and I’m not gonna give up on you. Words cannot express what it means to be seen by your child. “Một trăm phần trăm!” is a phrase you’ll hear Vietnamese people say as they clink glasses and get drunk with a group people that they love, their ride or dies, their roll dogs. We are evoking our refugee resilience, our war trauma bonding, our ancestors’ grit and courage with that phrase.

That said, I wonder if the doggedness that I am used to exhibiting comes from the demands of being a public school teacher. It is a Sisyphean task, being responsible for the learning of every child in your classroom in a compulsory education system that is overcrowded and underfunded, yet simultaneously bad-mouthed for not overcoming the effects of every societal problem. Perhaps I am still showing up in ways that were demanded of me in public school teaching, and it is maladaptive, at times.

I still long for a teacher, of sorts, to hold that safe learning space for me. Ideally people can switch off in that capacity and be equals. Sometimes I meet people who are good at listening and a rarer sort who are good at motivating, and it is wonderful, but ephemeral. When all else fails, the teacher most available to me is…me. I am learning to be the student of my own bootcamp, and to give one hundred percent to my projects now that I am less bound to domestic responsibilities and the care of others, and have healed a lot of the hurt that was holding me back. It’s a work in progress.

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? … Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”

“Take away the misery and you take away some folks’ reason for livin’. Their conversation piece, anyway.”

– Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

Why yes, I want to be well, to be whole, and to be free. I’m looking to you, Toni, for clues about how.

Our minds are probably our own worst enemy with all the self-limiting beliefs and insecurities. I think about the process of decolonization, how it takes generations and a lot of work to uproot those weeds from the soil of your mind, to make room for the good that also exists there. And while distractions work sometimes, and routines work pretty well a lot of the time, for me, purpose is best at both focusing and freeing the mind.

The following is what Toni Cade Bambara said in a 1982 interview with Kay Bonetti for the American Prose Audio Library:

“The task of the artist is determined always by the status and process and agenda of the community that it already serves. If you’re an artist who identifies with, who springs from, who is serviced by or drafted by a bourgeois capitalist class then that’s the kind of writing you do. Then your job is to maintain status quo, to celebrate exploitation or to guise it in some lovely, romantic way. That’s your job…

“As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible. One of the ways I attempt to do that is by celebrating those victories within the [B]lack community. And I think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for celebration. Also, my job is to critique the reactionary behavior within the community and to keep certain kinds of calls out there: the children, our responsibility of children, our responsibility to maintain some kind of continuity from the past. But I think for any artist your job is determined by the community you’re identifying with.

“But in this country (US) we’re not encourage and equipped at any particular time to view things that way. And so the artwork or the art practice that sells a capitalist ideology is considered art and anything that deviates from that is considered political propagandist, polemical or didactic, strange, weird, subversive, or ugly.”

“As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”

This sentence is often quoted as, “The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.” It is tempting to pick the easier version of the two, but I think it’s important to present it with Toni Cade Bambara’s original, more challenging assertion that as artists, we have a conscious choice to make about who we identify with, what kind of art we create, and for whom, and for what.

A spread from the current draft of NOWHERELAND

• I’m headed back to the Bay Area for a bit because life as an artist in connection with the world is a balance of being independent and interdependent, and sometimes the people you love would like you to be around. Forgive me in advance if we don’t manage to connect this time; I’ll be back another time.

• Today the poster that I made for the Akonadi Foundation’s annual Racial Justice Poster Project is officially out! From New Orleans to Oakland and to all of our cities and communities I want to say this: even when the days are dark, we can find courage together. Take heart; there’s room for all kinds of courage. Get in where you fit in.

• If we know each other, let me know if you’d like a physical copy of the Akonadi Foundation poster and I'll try to get you one. Also let me know if you’re in the Bay and you’d like to come to the screening of the short film that was made as part of the project, directed by the lovely Leo Maco, produced by the wonderful Shana Lancaster, and featuring my loves Hamida Yusufzai and my mom. It’ll be Wednesday, April 8 at the New Parkway Theater.

The topic of teaching spun off from a conversation we were having about the documentary I saw Sunday night at the Patois Film Festival. It was called TCB - the Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing. I have a crush on Toni Cade Bambara now, so expect more on that in a future post! But in the meantime, enjoy this little zine we made over coffee and breakfast in my neighborhood.

Making a zine is a really pleasant experience and a cool exercise for your brain. It takes very little time and the ROI is way high.

Shay Mirk’s got a bunch of resources for zine making on their website which you should check out. A bunch of downloadable zines too, on important topics like abortion access, ICE watch, and basic security for activists. And one of my favorites, an adaptation of Gangster Party, an essay by Hamilton Nolan that I shared in my Intro to Comics Theory class at CCA last summer. Shay’s got a Substack too.

Shay’s also a generous gift giver and gave me all this cool comics and zine stuff. Making Nonfiction Comics just came out last year and is an essential resource for comics journalists and comics teachers. For everyone else: most cartoonists are humble artists and generous gift givers. You should find some and adopt them.

In the spirit of giving, we are giving our zine, Teaching Is Making, to you as a free downloadable PDF:

Teaching Is Making

11.9MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

As with anything published under Creative Commons, if you share it, do credit us, and don’t sell it or change it.

You can print it on 8.5 x 11 printer paper and fold it and cut it following the instructions here. Give it to a budding artist. Or a teacher, along with a cookie or coffee, and your thanks.

Anyone can have an opinion, but rising up along with others is the energy of a movement. The success of a movement depends on many things: strategy, clear goals, persistence, luck, organization. The collapse of movements can be, has been caused by nefarious external interventions, but these almost always exploit the fragility of human relationships. I don’t want to get existential or depressed about this, though.

I have been among organizers, activists, educators, administrators, and elected representatives for a lot of my life. People who have more than opinions. People who want to do good and get shit done. Some pretty radical, some more moderate. I have worked and been friends with some conservative people, but this essay is not about reaching across the aisle. Today, I want to think about the proverbial Big Tent that is supposed to hold our “team” as we organize against the other team, and what else is needed besides a big tent.

First, it’s hard for me to even want to think that way. The only time I feel compelled to claim a team is when there are people in power who have clearly marked a whole bunch of people, including me, for oppression, for our rights to be taken away, for elimination. These are the times we’re living in. A whole lot of us, who on the regular do not hang out much less get along, are being attacked by the same bunch of idiots with power, and if we want to not get picked off one vulnerable group at a time whilst they consolidate power, we must learn to organize ourselves into an effective resistance.

Who are we resisting? I’ll quote the great voting rights activist, lawyer, author, and former Georgia State representative, Stacey Abrams (who in an alternate universe, is my Vice President or the Governor of Georgia): WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST PROTONATALIST ETHNOFASCISTS. I couldn’t hear the rest of her sentence because when she said it yesterday at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University, the audience was so delighted that they filled the auditorium with thunderous cheers and applause.

This panel of authors was an example of bigger tent building that is meaningful and not just performative diversity. Charles Blow moderated a discussion between Stacey Abrams, Eddie S. Glaude Jr, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Three African American authors and a Vietnamese American author, talking to each other about storytelling and its power in the US. Not a single moment in that hour was given to performing any gratitude for being there or why America is awesome because they were together on stage. They went hard and fast into critiques of the most damaging stories that America tells about itself, and thought deeply about the possibilities for stories to offer ways for Americans to understand themselves (ourselves) differently, and in doing so, shape the nation differently. Better. They spoke from their own experiences and listened to each other to learn, and in real time, on stage for the audience to witness, built solidarity through shared values and mutual appreciation for witty jokes and sharp fucking minds. More of this please.

Put smart people from different backgrounds together to smash the same enemies

is a great fucking strategy so I’m gonna put it in bold type because I hear some people like headings.

LEFT to RIGHT: Charles Blow, Stacey Abrams, Eddie Glaude Jr., Viet Thanh Nguyen

Graphic journalist Shay Mirk and me in the audience, about to take some A+ lecture notes.

And because we cartoonists like to do things quietly but few people understand what the fuck we do besides draw pictures, I’m going to explain a process that is obvious to me but maybe not to you. Comics journalist and editor extraordinaire Shay Mirk and I combined our listening and drawing skills to capture sound bites from this panel into a visually attractive two-pager that we could share with everyone, and we did it with very humble tools: printer paper and a clipboard we passed back and forth, and three pens. Shay had the plan, started the heading just before the speakers got on the stage, and we finished it as they left the stage. One hour. We left blank space for each other, gave mutual appreciation for the cool surprises that showed up on the page, and basically maximized what one can do in the audience listening to other people speak. (The only thing I can’t do is clap in the middle of drawing while holding two pens with their caps off; I’m not that coordinated.) But basically,

Put creative people together to make or do something concrete in the limited time they have together.

How many great artists have been bored out of movement work by endless meetings that are all talk and never any designated time to actually do things? Time is not infinite, people! If you want people who make things to make things, you have to factor that into the time they give you. If you try this one weird trick, I promise you that good artists will surprise and delight you and also appreciate the heck out of you. (But also, pay your artists if you have any budget to. They need to eat. They forget this because they get carried away with their passion for movements too, but if you keep them fed and alive, it is a good thing for everyone.)

These are practical suggestions and I like that.

After hanging out with Viet Thanh Nguyen for two days, I have decided that I am not much of a theorist. I like that he is, and I enjoy reading social and political theory. Sometimes. It was most useful when I was in college and graduate school and needed that kind of intellectual immersion to open my mind to new ways of thinking and understanding the world than what I had been exposed to through my family, K-12 schooling, and limited social experiences as a kid. In my older years, I am a lot more interested in the practical ways that I can embody and enact the ideas that I believe in. And help get shit done.

Power created together is more sustainable than power held alone.

Viet and I shared our occasional grim thoughts about how much we can actually affect in the world being writers. Damn, when a Pulitzer Prize winning, bestselling author who gets his work adapted for TV and gets invited by Harvard to deliver prestigious lectures doesn’t know if he affects the world, what hope is there for the rest of us? So, don’t think this way.

I convinced Viet Thanh Nguyen to take some photobooth pictures with me at Bud Rip’s Old 9th Ward Bar.

Your work is not done alone. It can feel that way, often. And often what I see is strong people muscling through their loneliness and weariness to keep getting up to do the work, day after day. And that works. But it can be really energizing, or at the very least, occasionally nice! to remember that we are not actually alone. Each of us knows at least one, if not several, maybe even several hundred, other people engaged in similar work. If one of them were to crumble and stop doing the work, we would feel the loss. We have to let ourselves feel as important to others as we know they are to us. They probably don’t know we feel this about them! We could stand to love on each other more.

Love is more motivating than critique.

That’s an obvious one, no? You would think more of us on the Left would be loving to each other, but anyone who organizes on the Left can recall a meeting or situation where an escalation of calling out and critique of other people’s imperfect ideological stance or methods or phrasing ended up collapsing the makeshift tent people were trying to organize under. Some people are assholes, that’s just probability. But I do think that we are often harshest on the people we believe in while we’re working hard on the things we believe in, and everything around us is stressful. You can’t change other assholes but you can be less of an asshole yourself. Twenty percent less! It’s a reachable goal. Again, this is not an essay about reaching across the aisle. I want you to organize against our enemies. But be a little kinder to each other because it’s the right thing to do AND it’s more effective.

Not everyone works the same way, and that’s a good thing.

This is an important one. I need a lot of autonomy to do my best work. I also like direction and having someone smart to help me choose the simpler, more logical route to a goal sometimes. I do not do well with micromanaging, and patriarchy or just overbearing people in general will piss me off and cause me to quit. I work really, really well with organized people who give me space to do my thing and appreciate how lightning fast I am at responding to and adding to their work. Maybe because I am so idiosyncratic in my ways, I am also good at recognizing other people’s special talents and giving them space to flex their power.

We want to be formidable like an army but I think we are more like an ecosystem.

If we can work together like the different parts of an ecosystem, we do what no army can. An ecosystem supports life in healthy balance. Organizing is ecosystem building. Revolution is world building.

“Coming to America, it’s a bad thing to me. I loved my friends and I loved being in China. It wasn’t my choice. My parents migrated to America for a better life and that’s a significant event in my life that makes me a part of America.”

“Also good and bad. I wouldn’t say it’s all bad.” He slips a yellow leaf under the rock.

“And then…committing a robbery, going to prison. I was sixteen.”

“Very bad, first going to Pelican Bay State Prison at eighteen. Very bad, seen a lot of ugly things. A place I wish I never went to.”

“But then, a few years later, I got out of it. I’ma pick the biggest leaf – actually, that is one of the happiest moments of my life.”

“And then, I think in my thirties, I started to educate myself. To learn about the world that I never experienced, never feel, I never understand. So that is a good thing.” He gently places another leaf on the timeline. “I was at Solano State Prison. I was reading a lot. I also come to build my own self confidence. Learned that I am smart. That comes with good and bad. Because one thing I’m learning and I’m building up confidence, and the other thing is I realize that I wasted most of my life instead of living up to my full potential. That is also very sad. That’s a big rock.”

Birds are chirping overhead as we sit on the deck, gazing down at the story of leaves and rocks at our feet.

“And then I took some college courses, which is really good. In San Quentin. Really liked it. And then, I was released! Which is also really good.” Two bright yellow leaves for the timeline.

“But it was also very bad because I went to ICE.”

“I was thirty seven years old when I was in ICE. Spent eleven months there. Very bad.”

I met S. a few months after he was released, in 2018. I’ve been following developments in his life ever since.

I think a lot about how to tell a story.

I have a lot of interviews I’ve done with S. and other folks who have experienced ICE detention. Their life stories are full of good and bad. But NOWHERELAND is also about the systems they had to navigate. There is a lot of information I need to convey.

I think everyone in America needs to know this stuff, and yet they don’t. How do I change this?

My niece, who is a very good student but also very much an Instagram-using teenager, told me recently that having to scroll through too much writing makes her less likely to read a long article or essay, if she’s on her phone. If she reads on a computer, she will read longer stuff. But if she’s on a computer, it probably means she’s doing something for school.

Do headings help?

I asked my niece, so if I add headings to break up long text, and the headings point to topics or answer the questions you have that are driving your reason to be searching on the internet, would you be more likely to read? She said yes. Glorious!

What about pictures?

I also asked my niece if breaking up the text with pictures would make her more likely to read. She said yes. As my junior high school French teacher used to exclaim, formidable!

Cool, but how do I make this fun for me?

I’ve been thinking about images and vertical scrolls and horizontal swipes through carousels and the instances where that feels pretty cool. Sometimes I want to try stuff out.

That was kinda fun. Let’s do that again.

And now a shorter one for punctuation.

Cool.

Alright, so I wouldn’t say I’m SUPER excited about exploring the frontiers of reading on the internet, but it is a real part of my work, taking into account people’s reading habits that have been shaped by the tools they use. Hopefully la plupart of my brain goes into the content of my writing and the craft of writing good sentences and drawing good pictures. But there is an extra stomach where I am still digesting some old stuff, like a cow, chewing grass, thinking about how we alienate or include readers by how we present our ideas. And how treating this as an interesting design problem can sometimes lead to interesting leaps in thinking and creating.

I am remembering meeting graphic designer Ellen Lupton a long time ago and being taken with her simple statement that design is art that people use.

And I am remembering saying after the success of The Best We Could Do, that I didn’t have too many ambitions beyond it, so I figured I’d just try to be useful. I think a sometimes cartoonist and a former high school teacher who by training, differentiates for very different types of readers, can be pretty useful for educating the people when so many forces want to keep them ignorant, overwhelmed, and distracted. I just have to remember to pull out all the different ways of making I have tried, and keep trying things.

It is a little humbling to write for a few hundred readers on Substack when I am used to getting thousands of views for a dumb picture I post on Instagram. But I am also reminding myself that it is good to have a low-stakes place to experiment.

The words in this drawing are from an interfaith prayer I heard on Angel Island. They are beautiful, no?

Sometimes I wonder if I cuss too much in my writing. Then I go to the Department of Homeland Security’s website, or read something the President rage-posted on Truth Social, and I want to cuss all day. Not just because I am angry at the content of their claims. No. I am angry because these alleged leaders are leading public discourse on pressing matters into the toilet. Public discourse is healthy. Democracy is hard and involves a lot of arguing about the best course of action. But these fuckers aren’t encouraging you to see, listen, or think. Listening to them kills brain cells and empathy for fellow human beings. Just paying attention to them for the sake of knowing what I am talking about makes me at least 120 percent more of an asshole. (There goes the last year of therapy! And my personal goals for this community.) So call me an asshole for saying this without nuance and for shouting it generally into the internet, but calling someone an “illegal” makes you a racist. I don’t care what color you are or they are. It’s fucking racist.

Sure, the notion of an “illegal immigrant,” is, in a straightforward sense, a xenophobic idea. The nativist afraid of the foreigner. It don’t get doled out equally to the less melanated though. Trump, in one of the many ways he is the id of America’s most bigoted, famously blurted out during his first term a question about why America had to take immigrants from “shithole countries.” Last December, eight years later, he brought it back. “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”

In the word salad of his rambling sentences, Trump drops a very clear turd sandwich of xenophobia and racism. In his actual policy, it’s even more clear. Last October, Trump slashed the number of refugees that the US would admit in fiscal year 2026 down to 7,500, the lowest it’s ever been since we’ve had a refugee program. And yet this February, the State Department was making plans to process 4,500 refugee applications PER MONTH from white South Africans. The math ain’t mathin’, and that’s because it’s racist.

In the US, we have a racial hierarchy that is both contested and upheld in a forever battle of wills. Prioritizing certain ethnicities of immigrants, while designating certain kinds of immigration a crime and certain kinds of immigrants as criminals allows racists to be flaming racists while hiding behind the virtuous veneer of the law. The one positive thing about this is that it still seems to be shameful enough to be a flaming racist that flaming racists still hide behind things like the law. I think we owe a lot of credit to the fierce fight against racism in this country that has been led by and paid in blood by Black Americans. While they did not manage to wipe out racism (who could?), they did impress upon most people that it is bad to be racist. Which is why racists expend so much energy on trying to convince you they are not racist.

Which is why you need to get very efficient at yanking off their masks and exposing their racist fuckery when they call people “illegals.” If they try to say something about following the law or immigrating “the right way,” and even if they invoke some immigrant wife or wife’s family who had to do it “the right way,” you can’t let that shit go without challenging it. Ask them some follow up questions about the law and what should happen to people who break the law.

The easiest tell to their fake-ass virtue signaling is that they have absolutely no problem with the law being applied extremely inconsistently, with outsized portions of punishment heaped upon those they hate and none to those they worship. See: January 6 insurrection, Epstein files, Trump felony convictions, etc etc.

The other tell on fake law and order people is when the actual parameters of the law do not satisfy their thirst for blood or cruelty. If a person truly believes that laws exist to maintain order in society, then they should also believe that:

1. No one is above the law;

2. Laws should be applied fairly and consistently, and

3. Punishments imposed by the law also come with an end as prescribed by the law.

Our current government falsely uses the word '“criminal” as a permanent identity. A cultural stigma that does not go away even after the person has served the punishment for their crime. Immigrants who have criminal convictions are the current scapegoat for everything. Don’t feel safe? That’s got nothing to do with there being heavily armed, masked thugs employed by the government to kidnap people off the streets of your city! It must be because there are “CRIMINAL IMMIGRANTS” in your midst!

You guys, I am so tired.

I have been talking to audiences ever since I finished The Best We Could Do almost ten years ago, trotting out the painful personal details of my family history to help people see Vietnamese people, and by extension refugees and immigrants, as…people. Do I like the job of humanizing people who are often dehumanized in the stories told about them? I do not. But I have done it with my teacher hat on, because as annoying as it is, I have felt that some people must be willing to do it.

With NOWHERELAND, I am writing about individuals who have spent their entire adult lives having to prove their humanity over and over again to an inhumane and unjust justice system, just to demonstrate that they deserve an ounce of mercy. The unfairness of this weighs heavily upon me.

And with the increasing and expanding brutality of mass deportation as the current administration’s immigration policy, I have reached a limit to my willingness to play this game of humanizing the people that racists dehumanize.

So I’m just going to lay some facts down here.

Human beings don’t stop being human just because you fail to recognize their humanity. But it could be you who loses pieces of your humanity when you lose your ability to empathize, to see yourself in others.

If the law is racist and you hide behind the law to do racist things, you are still a racist.

Refugees and immigrants are people, just like you. That they have to deal with immigration law is a matter of luck and bureaucracy and has nothing to do with your value as a human being or their value as a human being.

One day all this will be self-evident, and no one will need a former refugee to spell it out. I may have to fight a lot of fuckers between now and then.

I am done proving my humanity to racists. Let them prove their humanity to me.

I hear the calliope from the steamboat

On the Mississippi

Magnolias rain pink and grow green

I have things to do before summer’s heat

But there is still time

The cypress branches are all bare

And the yard is half dead

From winter’s freeze

Twigs for kindling

But probably no more fire pits for a while

Sorrel and stickyweed

A butterfly and bee

A lizard smiles

At me

When the sun goes down

And the down on your arm goes up

It’s spring in New Orleans

My heart is calling

The trombone’s calling

For you

The Dirty Rotten Vipers on Wednesday evening in the French Quarter

I’m not above an ode to spring, one of our sweetest metaphors. We have to build in little breaks so we don’t break.

And then we can get back to work.

A few updates:

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been fired. I have similar feelings of schadenfreude for her as I did for Greg Bovino when he lost his job as Border Patrol commander. Good riddance. But a new head always grows back on the monster so we can’t lose sight of the goal to get rid of ICE altogether.

• Senate Democrats managed to hold the line and, voted, for a third time, to block funding for DHS unless ICE and Border Patrol curb their tactics. If only they could have done that to curb Trump’s war powers too.

• I’m heading to Oakland, California for a few days to shoot a video that I’ll be able to share with you next month, I think. This will be a test of how well I keep up with Before You Die, Dammit while on the road and doing other things. I’m looking forward to being around people.

• I have more I want to write about third country deportations. And the lives of regular people they fuck up. And a million saves and notes for NOWHERELAND about other ICE-related topics. I’d like to hear from you what has been helpful, and what you’d like me to cover. How people are fighting deportation? Detention center warehouses? History of ICE? The militarization of ICE? Community organizing? What’s something you’ve heard about but don’t really get and don’t have the time to research on your own? I’m happy to read a bunch of news (and whatever else is needed) and summarize it in my own style of smart, sad, and mad, with graphics! Leave me comments or send me a message. Thi Reads the News is here for you.

• All of this is supported by readers. If you can, please sign up for a paid subscription at the very reasonable rate of $5 a month or $50 for a whole year.

In May, ICE arrests your husband and says they’re going to deport him to Vietnam. You don’t understand this. He was only a baby when he left Vietnam; his home is in America, with you in Bridge Creek, Oklahoma. He’s already been through this with ICE before. He served his time in prison already. Why are they detaining him again? They move him to Tulsa County Jail for a week, then to Cushing Correctional Facility for two and a half weeks, and then out of state to Texas, to a place called Bluebonnet Detention Facility. This is the same place you just saw on the news, where detainees linked arms and formed a human chain SOS in the yard. Geezus. You’re calling everyone you know who might know what to do. You’re not Vietnamese and you don’t know anything about Vietnam, but dammit, you know how to use the internet and somebody’s gotta know how to help. There’s a number that detainees at Bluebonnet have been circulating called Collective Freedom hotline. They say it’s a woman who’s been helping Vietnamese people. Your husband calls this number shortly before ICE moves him to El Paso Service Processing Center in Texas.

The transfer to El Paso is bad news. You know this because you’ve also been talking to folks who do deportation work. Someone from an organization called VietRISE has been talking to you after you filled out a form on their website. They gently tell you it’s time to make preparations for him to get support in Vietnam, and introduce you to a woman who’s been organizing mutual aid for deportees when they arrive in Vietnam. Your heart’s breaking but there doesn’t seem to be a way to fight this. On a Saturday in mid-July, you talk to the woman from Collective Freedom on the phone and the two of you make a game plan for Vietnam. Where your husband will arrive. Who can be there to meet him. Where he can go. She tells you about the Ba Lô Project and you realize it’s the same people you heard about from VietRISE. Then you get a call from them! A woman with a soulful voice. When she asks you about your husband, “What’s he like?” you break down crying. You tell her about the two of you. How you’re both big nerds. He plays video games. Takes care of the dogs. The weeks of trying to navigate this system have taken a toll on you. She tells you that she’s in Vietnam for a few more days, and that she might be able to meet him herself at the airport in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). If not, she says, someone on her team will be there to bring him a backpack of supplies and help him get his Vietnamese ID card. You take some comfort knowing that on the other side of this journey, there will be someone there for him.

But then things don’t happen the way folks expected. They told you deportation flights to Vietnam normally leave the US out of Alexandria, Louisiana. On Sunday he doesn’t call from Louisiana like he’s supposed to. You can’t find him on the ICE locator. You call the El Paso facility trying to find out what happened to him. They tell you he’s been deported to his home country.

But no one’s seen him in Vietnam either. He’s gone missing. No information. Just silence.

Then on Tuesday, the woman from Ba Lô Project texts you. “Is this him??”

It’s a photo of your husband.

A screenshot of a post on X. From the account of Tricia McLaughlin, the spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security.

There’s a photo with no name, just a caption about a Vietnamese national and his criminal conviction, and that a third country deportation flight has landed in Eswatini. Five posts on X about five different men, calling them “uniquely barbaric” and “depraved monsters…terrorizing American communities,” all deported to Eswatini.

“Where is Eswatini?!” you scream.

But more important is the question, WHY is your husband, who was born in Vietnam and came to the US as a baby, who already served his entire prison sentence and came home years ago, now in prison in a country you’ve never heard of?

Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is a tiny country bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. It is the last absolute monarchy in Africa. Matsapha Correctional Complex is its main maximum security prison and where pro-democracy activists have been held. This is where the five men deported by the US last July were kept in solitary confinement. They had no ability to contact their families, and for several weeks, no lawyers were permitted to visit them. No charges, no trial, no date for their release. The men’s countries of origin were Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen. None had any relationship to Eswatini.

The Trump administration has used various methods to pressure foreign governments to cooperate with repatriations, including withholding visas for diplomats’ families. Vietnam caved under several years of pressure in 2020, and agreed to start taking small numbers of Vietnamese nationals who had left as refugees before July 1995. Fear of Trump’s tariffs and their effect on trade is a big factor in his second term. Eswatini exports a lot of sugar, and the US is one of its biggest buyers.

It turns out the Trump administration is paying millions of dollars to foreign governments to swiftly move human bodies overseas as part of its mass deportation campaign. Washington has made secretive deals with several countries in Africa. Last November, Eswatini confirmed that it had received over $5 million from the US to receive deportees. According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Eswatini had originally requested half a billion dollars to do this dirty work.

As of early February this year, the Trump administration has paid over $32 million to five countries. The report comes from the US Senate foreign relations committee, and The Guardian summarizes:

In the most extreme case, the administration paid Rwanda $7.5m plus an estimated $601,864 in flight costs to accept just seven people – about $1.1m per individual, according to the report’s analysis of government spending data and flight records. The administration similarly paid Equatorial Guinea $7.5m to take 29 people, costing taxpayers an estimated $282,126 per person. Palau was paid $7.5m with no documented flights, Eswatini was paid $5.1m for 15 people, and El Salvador $4.76m for about 250 people.

Human rights groups have since named many other countries that have agreements with the US to accept deportees who are not from their countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Dominica, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Liberia, Libya, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Poland, Rwanda, South Sudan, St. Kitts and Nevis, Uganda, Uzbekistan.

The United States, the world’s leader in mass incarceration, is taking its model global by taking advantage of the wealth inequality of nations. Vast sums of money are changing hands between nations to move human bodies in a political game. US taxpayers foot the bill, foreign governments and companies that provide transport and logistics make money, and immigrants caught in the system pay the human cost. As the number of refugees and internally displaced people rises every year with continued crises due to conflict and climate catastrophe, this new approach to moving bodies around is a dystopian nightmare.

What happens to people once they are deported to third countries? As with people held in immigration detention in the US, outcomes depend very much on whether the person has anyone advocating for them. The American Immigration Council reports:

Of the immigration court cases decided from FY 2019–2024, 62 percent of immigrants without a lawyer were ordered deported, compared to 27 percent of those who did have legal aid.

It is not by some fluke that people who are arrested by ICE get sent to facilities far away from their families and to remote regions of the US. Distance isolates them from help and makes it incredibly difficult for them to fight their cases. The rapid expansion of this network to prisons in OTHER COUNTRIES, with their own legal system and law enforcement, not to mention governments with records of corruption and human rights abuses, creates an uncertainty so daunting that many immigrants are now giving up on their cases and accepting immediate deportation in the hopes that they will at least get sent to a country they have some connection to.

I spoke with attorney Tin Thanh Nguyen, who is now representing the Southeast Asian men who were deported to Eswatini. In a written declaration he shared with me, he details how prison officials in Eswatini denied every attempt by two local attorneys to see the detainees, even after the High Court of Eswatini granted a habeas corpus petition. Finally after three weeks of no contact, the prison warden changed their policy to allow the men to communicate with their families via WhatsApp, and even then only briefly and under supervision, once a week. Nguyen is now able to speak with his clients once a week, usually together, with the video projected onto the wall so the call can be monitored. He says the men are depressed, agitated, and frustrated. They don’t understand why they are still in government custody when they have already served their prison sentences and have not committed any crimes in Eswatini.

Nguyen’s goal is to get his clients repatriated to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. (A second group of ten men was sent to Eswatini last October.) This legal approach is a big change from when I first met Nguyen in 2018, at a convening of Asian American organizers in Washington, DC, where groups from different parts of the US were coming together to address Trump’s immigration raids on Southeast Asian communities. Back then, the focus was on fighting any kind of deportation at all. Now, folks are giving up their fight because of the terrifying prospect of getting deported to a random third country. Conditions can be very bad. Nguyen told me that two more of his clients are part of the group detained in South Sudan since last May, and that they are being held in a house with no furniture, no contact with anyone, one meal a day, and one jug of water every three days. Nguyen’s case load is getting heavy, with ten more arrivals in Eswatini in October including men from Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines. (Another attorney, Alma Adams, is representing the Filipino man.)

Jamaica has repatriated the first of the Eswatini five. Orville Etoria came to the US as a child, was convicted for fatally shooting a man in Brooklyn in 1996, served 25 years in prison for it, and upon his release in 2021, did annual check-ins with ICE. He earned a bachelor’s degree while in prison, successfully completed parole, got a job at a men’s shelter, and began a master’s degree in divinity. Even a person who believes in law enforcement and prison as the correct punishment for crimes such as murder would reasonably say that justice had been served and additional precautions were already being taken to make sure he was not a danger to anyone. Yet without committing any additional crime, Etoria was arrested by ICE in July 2025. His story follows the standard profile for someone with a criminal conviction who has been targeted by DHS to serve as an example in Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Witness the bananas language on DHS’s website:

This is some wild shit.

I’m still getting used to what is supposed to be a serious government agency, tasked with protecting the country, sounding like reality TV on its official website and trashing a national newspaper for factually reporting the news. I guess it makes sense when the guy who is supposed to be a serious President is a pedophile, rapist, and convicted felon (on 34 counts!), but has never served any time for any of his crimes. I find it hard to take the law or the government seriously when the rich and powerful people who appear in the Epstein files are still rich and powerful and running around, quite free and unaccountable for any of the abuses of which they are accused.

But the law is very real for regular people like you and me. At this moment of extreme xenophobia and racism in America, it is destroying the lives of people who happen to be immigrants.

This moment is a test, really, of how much bullshit you will tolerate from the people in charge. And also how much cruelty. These tests are always done on individuals they believe you won’t care about. The ones who are easy to dehumanize.

At every level you fail to call out the bullshit and inhumanity, another weapon of authoritarian power is successfully built. The US government’s ability to put people in indefinite detention in foreign countries on other continents is a gravely dangerous development for ANYONE in this country. An actual existential threat to your safety, to our constitutional rights that Americans like to boast about, to whatever integrity remains of our justice system, and to democracy as a whole. If you wait till your ass is on a deportation flight to Uganda for criticizing the government, it will be far, far too late for us all.

One piece of good news in all of this is a ruling on February 25 by US federal judge Brian Murphy, who declared the third country deportation policy invalid because the swiftness of the deportation – as short as six hours’ notice – denies migrants due process. DHS will likely appeal this ruling and take it to the US Supreme Court. The bad news is this is the same court that sided with Trump over the same federal judge when it OK’d the deportation of six men to South Sudan in July.

As my youthful admiration for judges and the legal system erodes further into the dirt with each bad decision this Supreme Court makes, I’d like to bring us back to the important work of community organizers.

I spoke with Thao Ha, who was one of the helpers on the phone with the Oklahoma Vietnamese man and his wife. (I am in contact with the couple and confirmed the details of his arrest, transfers, and deportation with them, but am leaving out their names while the case is pending.) Ha started the nonprofit, Collective Freedom, whose mission is to support justice-impacted individuals from Southeast Asian communities. She says, “This is about dignity. If they have a legal pathway, we show them the legal pathway. If they don’t, we walk with them through detention and deportation, and when they land in the country.” She has worked with a lot of people deported to Vietnam and Cambodia. Since Laos began taking repatriations last year, following intense pressure and a partial visa ban, she has been coordinating a care package for people when they arrive in Laos. Just some basic supplies that they’re not given, including toilet paper, and their medications. She is helped by three volunteers in Laos. All of them were themselves deportees. They now work to help new arrivals have a little more support than they had when they arrived with nothing and nowhere to go.

Both Nguyen and Ha spoke with great love about the grassroots network of community organizers providing this help. It is remarkable how much they are able to do given how few of them there are, and how vast and inhumane the systems are that they are helping people navigate. “There’s probably five of us in the whole country,” laughed Nguyen, talking about Vietnamese American attorneys who do anti-deportation work.

Ha told me, “It’s a special little light I hold inside and hope to light the way for others in this mess we’re in. There’s a special soulfulness about our connectedness. This is about community and supporting one another. We love our people. And that, to me, is very Vietnamese.”

• Collective Freedom has a contact form on their website for Southeast Asian individuals needing assistance navigating ICE detention. This is an excellent resource for impacted individuals and/or their family members to receive quality information before retaining a lawyer, which can be very expensive and unproductive in cases where the lawyer does not know the particularities of Southeast Asian political histories.

• If you’d like to donate to Collective Freedom to support their community work with justice-impacted Southeast Asians, you can do so here.

• VietRISE is a nonprofit building power with working class Vietnamese and immigrant communities in Orange County, California to advance social and economic justice. To access their resources, learn more about them or donate to their work, click here.

• Ba Lô Project is a unique mutual aid project that began last January. You can still donate to their GoFundMe page, which gives this description: “The Ba Lô Project aims to provide returnees the support they need to start rebuilding their lives in Vietnam from day one. Our vision, grounded in the collective experiences of prior deported Vietnamese Americans and Montagnard Americans, is to begin with a simple act of community care. We want to gift every person deported to Vietnam with a starter backpack filled with items like medicine, socks, shoes, a toothbrush, a map, and a phone—essential items that other returnees wished they had after being torn from their communities in America and dropped into Vietnam.”

• Other organizations who are part of the network of Asian Americans defending immigrants and fighting deportation include SEARAC, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Atlanta, and Asian Law Caucus. These organizations do what Ha calls macro-level work that is informed by the community-level work that she and Nguyen do. These organizations coordinate with bigger groups like AILA and ACLU, who have the means to do big things like suing the government on behalf of large groups of people.

• I’m a freelance writer and artist and this newsletter is funded entirely by readers like you. I’m lucky to have unique access to the communities I write about and there’s a lot more reporting and analysis I want to share with you. If you haven’t already, please pitch in with a paid subscription to keep my writing and reporting free and accessible to all. If you’re feeling particularly keen on my work, a founding member donation goes a long way to support me. Thank you!

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Sometimes more information is not the answer. I decide to put the news on my phone down and go for a run to get my blood moving. Not five minutes later, I pull a muscle in my back in the simple process of getting ready. The body protests what the mind tries to suppress.

And so my work, for an hour or two, is to find a way to use the rest of the hours of this day in service of the work I have cut out for myself. To care for this body in which I do this work. And to care for my soul so that it doesn’t disconnect from this world that can be so challenging sometimes.

I call my mother, who has started to read my essays, to thank her. She signed up this morning as a founding member of my start-up Substack. I see more of her in me with each passing year, and it deepens both my appreciation for her and my acceptance of all the parts of her. She talks about the question of sending my writing to people she knows and loves, but whose politics are unclear to her. I joke that I am fine with being her mouthy daughter who gets people upset. We talk for a while longer and the conversation goes deeper. We talk about selfishness. How some people do for themselves and their children, but for no one else, and think that’s okay. How they don’t think about the ways other people’s labor benefits them, or how they impact other people’s lives. I tell her that I don’t write about politics to divide people. It’s that I see that people are too divided and they need to see how they are interconnected.

It seems, some days, that the world is made up of the lies people tell themselves as they go to work for evil corporations and governments. Today James Baldwin’s words gave me some solace and courage. So did calling my mom.

Writing is a lonely profession for someone who likes people. I have to choose to write instead of seeing people, more often than I wish. It gets even worse when I go into full art production. Social media became overwhelming and I could not keep up over the years with replying to everyone who wrote to me. I don’t know if I cause people to feel hurt as a result. I hope not. I long for people more than they know. From a desk in the corner of my room, I send out love letters to the world, hoping that they pierce through layers of armor and distance, imagining the best of me, conjured this way, might reach the best in others. That if something lights up in you, maybe it reflects the light in me. And that is something worth getting up for, again, tomorrow.

Since I drew these pages, the people in them have been moved all around. The big picture problem of ICE remains. It is a thousand times faster for me to type words and edit my writing than it is for me to change pages of comics I have drawn, even if they were rough drafts. There is simply TOO MUCH INFORMATION I am working with that is happening in real time to do this all as comics.

So you’re just gonna have to read words, okay? I promise after I get the first pass written, I will go back and find as many places as I can to turn into visual art so that the reading experience gets that breath and those layers that art give it.

Happy Friday. I hope you get to look at some trees. But also read the news. Stay strong. Fuck ICE.

I drew these follow-up sketches in early 2020, during Trump’s first term. It was scary times. Since Trump began his second term in January 2025, it seems things have only gotten worse. So bad that everyone knows what ICE is now, which I guess is good. But new kinds of awful are happening that I never saw coming. Mutherfuckers aren’t even sending people back to the right countries anymore.

That’s right. They’re called third country deportations. It used to be that when a Vietnamese or Cambodian person was facing deportation, the grassroots network of activists and family members here could coordinate with someone in Vietnam or Cambodia to provide some kind of support for when the person arrived, so that they weren’t completely alone. Now, the new terror added to an already devastating situation is that there’s no guarantee that the person will even be sent to Vietnam or Cambodia. They could get shipped off to a cell somewhere in Africa or the middle of the Pacific.

How on earth is this even a thing? In the United States of America? What about the Constitution and due process and the rule of law?

I’ve been reading a lot of news and legal summaries to make sense of it. It would be easy to blame it all on Trump, of course, since this new practice started with him. But the truth is that the mechanism was already there, and so were the cultural attitudes. Trump just let it all out of Pandora’s box. Let me explain.

In Oakland, California, at a high school for recent immigrants and English language learners where I taught for many years, I heard the words, “Go back to your country,” used like a joke. Not by any of the adults. By the kids, mock insulting each other. Some of them spoke very little English, but they quickly picked up that phrase, “Go back to your country.” It’s a line used very often against immigrants and anyone with an accent, and pretty often against people who don’t look like their ancestors came from Western Europe. A kid can pick it up like a germ in the air or lead in the water.

“Go back to your country, bro,” called the teenage boy from the ethnic Karen group, who had lived all his life in a refugee camp on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, to the Yemeni boy who had kicked a soccer ball at him on accident and failed to apologize. “Go back to your country, man,” the Yemeni boy clapped back. Lunch and afterschool were prime time for kids with spillover energy to rile each other up. The boys’ words made me wince but the wide smiles on their faces and their unserious tone and body language made me chuckle a little, in spite of myself. These kids went through a lot before they came to our school. Sometimes the early days of Oakland International High School, where over forty languages were spoken, felt like a model UN or a very beautiful vision of the future. And sometimes when jokes got out of hand and the feelings of twenty boys got hurt, it felt like World War Three about to break out. So I would wander over to the action, acknowledge everyone by name, and take the pulse of the situation. Because this is how you lovingly raise up boys to be men. In our school, our kids got to be kids.

Outside the safe bubble we cultivated at the school, these kids, like all immigrants, experienced a lot of…expectations. I’m not even talking about the crazy talk of some influential people in politics, like Senator Mike Lee from Utah who, in January, posted this hysteria on X:

I’m just talking about regular American xenophobia, the kind you might overhear at a bar, see in your workplace, or get from your relatives at Thanksgiving. Many people expect that newcomers will be a burden and a threat to the people already here. This, of course, is a hypocritical opinion to hold if you are descended from Europeans who colonized North America, displaced its indigenous people, and stole their land. Xenophobia is an even wilder mindset if you’re an immigrant or child of immigrants. It forces you to say crazy things like, “We did it the right way,” or “We’re one of the good ones.” That’s some Stockholm Syndrome shit. Scarcity mentality and pulling up the ladder below you. To ignore all the stealing and killing that made this country, and to flaunt citizenship like it’s a Harvard phD you earned really doesn’t line up with the reality that modern immigration is a highly bureaucratic process with a lot of risk, financial cost, and scrutiny – people with authority over every aspect of your future, screening you for any possible reason to deny you the life you hope for.

There are many reasonable people who understand this somewhat but still expect immigrants to be too different from themselves to ever fully assimilate. These people need to get out more and hang out with some immigrants, or they will keep on voting for racists.

Then there’s good ole nativism, which is kinda like when the little kid whose parents host a party decides that they are the boss of everyone. No one likes this kid because this kid is an entitled brat who didn’t earn anything they have. A lot of people expect immigrants to erase their own rich identities in exchange for a white bread-ish American identity. It’s very depressing. Many Americans, including ones who consider themselves to be open-minded and charitable, expect immigrants to be grateful, to keep their heads down, to work hard (often for poverty wages), and not cause any trouble. All of these people are likely to invoke the tiresome line, “Go back to your country,” when immigrants don’t do what they expect. And because the imbalance of power skews in their favor, and because scapegoating immigrants has always been a popular (and successful) way for politicians to win elections, immigrants are more likely to lose.

“Go back to your country,” is, in other words, old hat. Nativism isn’t new. Throughout US history, under different presidents, there have been spikes of xenophobia, with deportation and anti-immigrant laws as the policy outcomes. Mass deportation is that policy on steroids, and it’s a vile hallmark of Trump 2.0 and his sidekick, the fake white folk hero J.D. Vance, and behind them, an actual white nationalist, Stephen Miller. The culture has been there, the actors have too. Something that is new is the expansion of third country deportations and the buildup of an international network to support them.

It started in February 2025 with the US government sending 299 people to Panama. Not one of them was from Panama. What these individuals had in common was they had entered the US from the Mexico border since Trump’s inauguration a few weeks before. In his inauguration speech, Trump had proclaimed a “disastrous invasion” was taking place at the southern border, and he would put a stop to it and return millions of “criminal aliens” to the places from which they came. In the same speech, he also made a false claim that China was running the Panama Canal and that the US would take it back. Under this political pressure, Panamanian President José Raúl Molino agreed that Panama would act as a transit country for deportees whose countries of origin have difficult relationships with the US.

The next month, Trump invoked a wartime law from 1798 and struck a deal with El Salvador, paying it $6 million to take 238 Venezuelans accused of being Tren de Aragua gang members. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele played along like a gleeful fellow villain. It was a highly publicized move, very flashy, very trash TV. It seemed designed to appeal to the part of Trump’s base that loves his strongman bravado. Nevermind that a later investigation found little evidence of criminal backgrounds or links to the gang, and a federal judge blocked the deportation.

The impact on the men sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where they were beaten, intimidated, and in some cases, tortured, has been life altering and horrific.

You would think Trump sending these men, without a trial or any due process, to be detained indefinitely in a maximum security prison in a country they’re not even from, would set off red flags in the minds of Americans who say they don’t mind immigrants as long as they “follow the law” and come here “the right way.” People who say immigrants need to follow the law but look away from our government’s gross violation of law are full of shit. Those of us who actually believe in law as it’s supposed to be, a social contract that keeps us from killing each other and descending into societal collapse and brutal chaos, are the ones who actually examine the law and how it’s applied to make sure that it is morally right.

Is third country deportation even legal? Apparently it is, though until Trump 2.0, it has rarely been done. This seems to be a common problem these days. In April of last year, a federal judge blocked the government from deporting noncitizens to third countries without due process. The next month, the Trump administration sent seven men with national origins in Cuba, Mexico, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and one from South Sudan on a plane to South Sudan, a country on the brink of civil war. The same judge rebuked the move, and the plane landed in Djibouti, where the men were kept for several weeks in a shipping container on a US military base. The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which voted 7-2 to okay the deportation to South Sudan, setting a legal precedent for the continued expansion of third country deportations. This is not the first time this particular court has rubber stamped Trump’s actions, a sad reminder of how the law is only as good as those who interpret and enforce it. More third country deportations followed, to Eswatini, Rwanda, Ghana, Palau.

International and US law both say that people cannot be deported to any country where they are likely to be persecuted or tortured. The US is supposed to consider countries that make sense – where the immigrant is a citizen or national, or where they have lived in the past. Historically, people who successfully make a case that they will be persecuted in their home country are granted asylum or a different status called withholding of removal, a lesser form of protection but which still allows them to stay in the US. People with certain criminal convictions are not eligible for this status, even if the conviction is decades old. Many remain in the US because their original country will not accept them, usually because of complicated diplomatic relations with the US. In the past, ICE has not had the capability to detain all these people, so after a period of detention, it monitors them with technology and mandatory check ins.

Trump 2.0 is about doing away with all that fuss. His strongman style appeals to people’s frustration with government inefficiency and also their latent racism and violent tendencies. If you study American history that hasn’t been whitewashed, it’s hard to witness how quickly people will discard their humanity and Christian values for a good ole public lynching.

Thi, you might say. Not everyone is a flaming racist. Some people just have economic anxiety. I am here to tell you that deportation is cruel and violent but it definitely does not make America any less painful to live in for people who are struggling to get by. Mass deportation doesn’t bring down the cost of living. Immigrants are a huge part of our labor force and taxpayer base. Instead of lower bills and good schools and health care, racist America gets ICE: armed thugs who kidnap people off the street, break up families, destroy lives, and make no one safer. The only people getting richer are the companies that profit from the government spending tens of billions of dollars, collected from our taxes, on the deportation machine. And now we are seeing the rise of countries in the Global South cashing in on third country deportations, the newest fad in America’s obsession with performative cruelty.

Despite appearing to be low hanging fruit to get the numbers up for a mass deportation campaign, third country deportations aren’t even easy or cheap. Earlier this month, US Senators who form the Foreign Relations Committee released a 30-page report detailing how, in the last year, this Trump administration spent $40 million to deport just 300 people to third countries. That’s an average of $133,333 per person! $32 million of that taxpayer money was sent directly to foreign governments, including countries with records of corruption, human rights abuses, and human trafficking, without any oversight after deportees were delivered. The message to immigrants is clear: the US has the power to disappear you to anywhere in the world, so don’t bother coming here, and if you’re here, leave, or you’re fucked.

The message to the world is clear too: the United States is paying good money to move human bodies and take mass incarceration global. It’s an international racket, and we American taxpayers are paying for it.

Third country deportations are an abomination of human rights. An obsession with cruelty. An international Ponzi scheme. A stupid, wasteful use of millions, potentially billions, of taxpayer dollars. And a symptom of a sickness that will eat America’s soul from the inside out, if we don’t stop it.

A lot of people shake their heads at what’s going on with ICE and its abuses. They say, “This isn’t America.” I think I know what they’re trying to say. And I used to talk this way too, honestly, though in retrospect I was a refugee kid doing it under duress. But now I’m living in this body under Trump, under fascism, under a build up of mass incarceration and a long history of racism, and I am tired and angry, y’all. Too tired and too angry to nod along to your liberal folk songs about America being better than this. America should be better than this. What will you do, with the power you have, to make it so?

• This week, Democrats seem to be holding the line on Department of Homeland Security funding in exchange for some reforms to ICE and Border Patrol practices. Republicans have not caved and instead are prolonging the partial government shutdown. Because FEMA is part of DHS, this could be a big problem if a natural disaster occurs. To make the shutdown annoying to the average American, DHS suspended TSA PreCheck and Global Entry. Pushback made them reverse the suspension on TSA PreCheck. Call your reps and tell them no funding for ICE or Border Patrol.

• Congress ultimately has the power to defund ICE and Border Patrol. Who makes up Congress is a wild contest between the powers that be and we the people, and we need to get organized for midterm elections this year. Mike Lee isn’t up for reelection until 2028, unfortunately, but there are a lot of other assholes you can vote out and good people you can vote in. Find a political home, like DSA, the Working Families Party, PSL. Your local union. Indivisible, Swing Left. PIVOT for progressive Vietnamese Americans. There’s something for everybody. There are some new tools for organizing voters around issues. It is really important to be loud and public and insistent in saying Fuck ICE. Defund ICE. Abolish ICE. Over and over in our representatives’ ears and faces. In each others’ ears and faces. I know “be nice” rhymes with “fuck ICE,” but I need you to focus on the “fuck ICE” part right now, please. Momentum is key.

• Speaking of money, this writer cannot function without it either. Essays like this take hours and hours of research and writing. If you are learning things from my work, and you are broke, share this piece with your friends and family. If you are not broke, become a founding member or sign up for a paid subscription for the very reasonable rate of $5 a month or $50 a year to keep me writing until we abolish ICE.

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Please excuse this post being one day late. I know I said I’d post every Tuesday morning, but I live in New Orleans, and yesterday was Fat Tuesday, or as we call it here, Mardi Gras.

I had good intentions of writing my post the night before. But I also needed to reapply the glitter on my headpiece and glue the decorative horse back on my sunglasses. For Mardi Gras Day, I dressed up as Fire, a nod to the Year of the Fire Horse and the fact that Mardi Gras this year was also the first of the Lunar New Year. I saw a lot of cool costumes out in the streets, but I made sure to collect and collage all the Fuck ICE ones for you here.

I know my mandate as a Californian who moved to New Orleans recently: be respectful, lift up locals, and don’t try to change the city if you moved here because you love it. I took a two-year observation period before being a bit more vocal about my opinions on certain things. Do I complain about the infrastructure and the weather? Nah, because I know that what are inconveniences and annoyances to me can be life altering and even deadly for others. Will I whine about this city’s unstoppable culture of parties, live music, and street life? Um, never.

Am I going to say hey, those white folks with masks riding horses in that Uptown Mardi Gras parade in a krewe whose name starts with “Knights” are scary and I do not like this? Yes, yes I am. A krewe is a social organization that organizes things like parades and balls for the Carnival season. Carnival season starts every year on January 6th, twelve days after Christmas, and ends on Mardi Gras Day, 47 days before Easter. Discrimination in krewe membership was only officially outlawed in the early 1990s and there are still incidents of float riders chucking racist throws into the crowds every year. I respect traditions but this city had a long history of slavery and Jim Crow, and in matters of racism and injustice, I will side against the perps every time.

In past years I have gotten to witness elements of Black Carnival, from Black Masking Indians to the North Side Skull and Bone Gang to the Zulu parade. This year, I took a little longer getting ready on Mardi Gras morning and basically tumbled out of my house and into a river of costumed people in the Saint Anne walking parade, and missed my window for walking with Saint Anne into the French Quarter and cutting over to Basin Street to catch the last of the Zulu parade. I did get to watch a lot of high school and middle school bands play in last weekend’s parades. Their warm ups in the Rouse’s parking lot on Tchoupitoulas and the Battle of the Bands in Laurence Square on Napoleon filled my soul with a revolutionary spirit I can’t quite describe but tried to capture in photographs.

As an Asian American from California, I have to say it is a little weird sometimes to be Asian here. If a white guy says Gung Hay Fat Choy to me in the Bay Area, I can reasonably roll my eyes at him for presuming that I am Chinese. In the South, even in New Orleans, where Vietnamese are the largest Asian population, said white guy replies, “But at least I get credit for trying, right?” Okay, my guy, I’ll play. It might be the several drinks I’ve already had on this Mardi Gras Day, but next thing I know I’m teaching this stranger how to say, “Chúc mừng năm mới” in line at the Frenchmen Grocery and Deli. A middle aged Black man, also in line, has taken an interest and starts to practice saying it too, and now we have a little rainbow of cultural interest and lack of inhibition that I do love about this city. When my friend, Amy Le, and I get to the counter to pay for our freshly fried egg rolls and whiskey drinks, the Vietnamese guy at the register is matching our shouting energy. His name is Bart and he compliments my Melt ICE headpiece and comps our purchase, and when Amy gifts him a Lì Xì envelope with a lucky two dollar bill inside, he is so moved he whips out his phone to do a video selfie with us. We get real loud with our blessings: “Chúc mừng năm mới! Vạn sự như ý!! Tiền vô như nước!!” It can be pretty cool to be Asian American here too.

In this positive direction, there’s a pan-Asian Mardi Gras krewe called the Krewe of Phantasia that I am a part of. We participated in the Bohème parade this year and last, and in the Red Beans parade the two years prior under the name, Krewe of Mung Beans, which local Vietnamese American author and last year’s One Book One New Orleans pick EM Tran wrote about for Oxford American. We’re now also part of a tradition on Lundi Gras (the Monday right before Fat Tuesday), with krewes representing cultures that are beautiful and vibrant but lesser known in New Orleans. There’s Lucha Krewe, who rock Mexican wrestling masks and the skimpiest costumes of all of us. Ritmeaux Krewe is Louisiana’s first Latin Dance marching group. Krewe da Bhan Gras delights so many people with their Bollywood dances that they get invited to lots of parades now. Batey Bayou and Krewe of Queerly Beloved joined us this year. We gather at the Magnolia Bridge in the Bayou Saint John neighborhood, folks do some cool dances and lovely speeches, and then we follow a brass band to Pal’s Lounge and make merry in the streets. My friends Marion Hill and Daniella Zalcman, both biracial and Vietnamese, both very talented transplants who have been here longer, loaned me a camera and lenses to take nice pictures. Here are some nice pictures of some cool New Orleans Asians, being beautiful and proudly taking up public space. We may still be in the building power part of a movement. The gains right now may still be just respect and representation. We’re not yet at redistribution of power or revolution. But wherever we’re headed, this is an important step in the process.

Lisa Nguyen in a fiery red Lunar New Year ensemble that she spent hours crafting.

Above, left to right: Wan Qi, Lisa, Cheryl, Jessica, and Bon get ready to do a demonstration of tinikling dance, a Filipino folk dance named after the tikling bird.

Below, left to right: Phantasia members Batman, Thorn, Lisa, Wan Qi, Sam, TuVy, Ami, Melissa, Jessica, Thi, Gigi, Lisa, Ian, Bon, Khai, Daniella, Glynn, Dung

Above: Phantasia captain Glynn Bai sports a whimsical lampshade hat atop a traditional Vietnamese áo dài.

Below: Wan Qi Kong adorns a Chinese cheongsam with a handmade Palestinian flag. In the Bywater neighborhood on the same day, NOLA Musicians for Palestine led the Krewe of Zeitoun walking parade.

ABOVE: Ian Makaila Kealoha Cessna, designer of the Phantasia trading cards that some lucky parade goers got at the Bohème parade, poses with his mask and Thorn Chen.

BELOW: Parade goer Van Le gets showered with love in the form of throws, as Phantasia members are known for being creative and generous gift givers.

ABOVE: Daniella Zalcman and Melissa Tran enjoy a moment over drinks outside Pal’s Lounge as I enjoy the No ICE bean decoration in the background.

This Tuesday is the first day of the Lunar New Year. Some years ago, I made a new year wish: for oppressed people to stop fighting each other and instead destroy the systems that pit them against each other while letting the criminal behavior at the top go unchecked. I still wish it. Maybe now I shout it more.

I used to worry that writing a book about ICE that’s focused on Asian Americans rather than Latin Americans was weird. But today I’m very clear about it. When we fight for our communities against injustice, we are fighting against the same institutions, the same discriminatory laws, the same systems of oppression that harm other communities. When we win, we all win.

To this point, it’s Black History Month, and I’d like to give an important acknowledgement to the activists of the Civil Rights Movement. It is because of their courage and persistence that federal law was rewritten to ban discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. The 1964 Civil Rights Act also paved the way for women to challenge gender-based workplace discrimination and break into industries that had previously excluded them. It led directly to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the race-based quotas against Asians and southern/Eastern Europeans that had been in place since 1924. By removing racial barriers, it opened the doors to immigration from non-European countries, beginning the transformation of the US into the multiethnic country we see today. It is thanks to Black Americans who fought for justice that my family was able to come to the US in 1978 after the Vietnam War.

This is an illustration I did for an anthology called The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, thinking about myself in the (then) present and the short window in my life in which I was technically stateless:

In May 1978, while my family, pictured above, waited in a refugee camp in Malaysia for word on our asylum application to the US, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin was advocating for people exactly like us. He had been the chief strategist of the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, and had also served on the board for the International Rescue Committee. He wrote, “A new "invisible man" has been born within our midst—the Southeast Asian refugee. Shunted from country to country, over 150,000 of these "invisible people" cling to a precarious existence in scores of refugee camps that dot non-Communist Asia. They have a simple and solitary message for the international community: "Do not forget us!" Some well-meaning people have said to me: "The black community suffers from record high unemployment. Why should blacks be concerned about Southeast Asian refugees? They'll only take jobs and housing that black people desperately need." Such an attitude is understandable, but allow me to describe the enormity and urgency of the refugee problem…” He goes on to describe it in great detail that is both empathetic and fact-based.

Photo from International Rescue Committee’s website

I get a little emotional every time I speak of this. This was a man who had fought long, hard years for the human rights of Black Americans to be codified in law, who was fighting, still, for the humane consideration of Vietnamese refugees like me on the other side of the world. Even when it wasn’t straightforward or easy.

This is the standard for justice work. This is my reminder, that no matter how bad ICE gets, no matter how ugly MAGA America can be, that here in America, there were those who fought for me.

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I moved to New Orleans three Mardis Gras ago. I started researching NOWHERELAND a few years before that. In a moment of desperation (or inspiration), with a backlog of too many reference photos that I’ll never turn into comics unless I find a faster way to dig myself out, I recently signed up for a photojournalism workshop with the very talented and dynamic duo, Daniella Zalcman and Natalie Keyssar. It kicked my ass in the best way.

Our photo assignments were to go out and shoot the parades and other Mardi Gras-related things that caught our attention, and to build a story. The fantasy in my head was very colorful and fun. The reality was first learning where to get street parking near Tulane University. Then, how to navigate Uptown parade traffic and dodge families with small kids and wagons while reading the parade tracker app, a tool that lets you follow a green dot and a red dot on a map to know where the first and last parade floats are on the route. I learned a lot of things, but one of the hardest was how to deal, after you’re burnt out from a daytime parade, with getting your car trapped inside the police barricades of a nighttime Uptown parade, a.k.a. THE BOX, when you live on the other side of town. If you know you know, and if you know me and how much I hate traffic and driving at night, you understand what a big fucking deal this is.

Anyway. I learned to be a student again. I learned how to use a camera again. Aperture and shutter speed, focus and lighting, framing and layers. Fortunately when you’re a whole ass grown up who knows who she is, you can tell your ego to take a nap while your beginner’s mind pairs up with your adulting skills to learn new things faster. I had to trust myself to figure things out on my own on a borrowed camera, and to ask for help after I tried my best. I learned to push past my comfort zone and recognize how my comfort zones hold me back from making my best work. I started to learn about moving my feet and using my whole body to take pictures, much like when I was eighteen and my first real drawing teacher, Jane Rosen, taught me that I had to move my whole arm and my body to draw. I’m starting to think about space differently. And now I have another tool in my toolbox for telling stories with words and pictures. I can’t wait to see how that shapes the book.

Mardi Gras parades for me are about the dopamine chase. The thrill of a big crowd, big sound, a big spectacle. Raising your hands up in the air, making eye contact with someone on a float, hoping they throw you something good. The dopamine hit from catching it out of the air! And the immediate impulse to do it again and again. It’s fun, but like too much candy, it can leave you feeling exhausted and a little empty afterwards. It’s especially strange to chase dopamine like this when the world is on fire.

But there’s another aspect to Mardi Gras that the high school marching bands and majorettes remind me about. The discipline and culture that go into making New Orleans’ Mardi Gras what it is. They represent the longterm, higher baseline dopamine you get from consistent, strenuous exercise.

This dopamine is the reward for working hard. This is the discipline behind revolutions, behind social change. This is a good reminder when the world is on fire. When the parade is over, when we go back to our lives marked by injustice and inequality.

After the dopamine wears out, strength remains.

Whether you know me personally or you just read my Manifesto for My Next Fifty Years, you probably think of me as an optimist. I try to be. I do come with a strong sense of wonder and some rose-tinted glasses, and everyone I meet is the beneficiary of this until they give me strong reasons to think differently. I am energized by the possibility of good things. I can envision them and I am quite driven to bring them into existence.

But I’m not a fool either. I know that death comes for us all. That empires rise and fall. That hurt people hurt people. I know many kinds of pain. I was born into war, in a country that doesn’t exist anymore. I was raised in the hollow of its absence, mostly by the sheer force of my mother’s will to survive and thrive. This has shaped me into who I am. The Best We Could Do was basically my way to grieve all that was lost. I am prone to depression, I often feel stressed out and alone, and I have to fight against cynicism on the regular. I understand cynics, even if they frustrate me because they are often wrong and self-defeating. I can work with cynics who still choose one or two things to fight for in this life. Grumpy Smurfs. I’ll probably be one before I’m dead.

What I have a much harder time understanding, or rather accepting, is the middle of the road numbness I see in so many people. People who don’t have strong feelings about what is happening in the world. Or who feel something but it’s mostly discomfort and fear, so their response is directed inward, their priority being to feel more comfortable and less scared. Which means that they have to dissociate so hard from the reality of the garbage fire that is this country, their head may as well be literally in their ass.

I don’t know what’s going on with their heart. Maybe that’s not my business. What I will say is that we may not make it through this current crisis. Things are moving very quickly towards authoritarianism. Our democratic institutions are failing. The safeguards that we have to at least give us the ability to fight for our rights are being systematically dismantled. To witness Trump’s corruption and power grab and the advancement of Project 2025 and Stephen Miller orchestrating mass deportation with a white nationalist agenda, and to hope that someone in charge will put a stop to it…seems like optimism but it is really an utter lack of belief in one’s own agency or power paired with a naive trust in people with power.

I am an optimist, but I do not dream that the Democratic Party will save us, that the next election will save us, or that having the right candidate to run against Trump will save us. If you like living in a democracy, even the flawed one that we have, you’re going to have to help fight to keep it. No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves.

You have to fight. You have to be willing to lose some fights, and not let losing completely defeat you. You have to allow for the possibility that, in fighting well and fighting together, you – we, could actually win. Probably only one or two readers are going to click on that link, so let me paraphrase it: Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied mass movements of the last century and found that when 3.5 percent of the population participated in active and sustained resistance to a regime, that regime fell. I think half this country, at least, does not approve of Trump. We need 3.5 percent of them to be very loud and insistent about it. This seems very doable, doesn’t it? So why the timidity, people? Let’s fucking go.

What fighting looks like is going to vary from one context to another. I have other posts with specific calls to action and advice about how to envision yourself as part of a bigger network of helpers.

Today is about the spirit of fighting. You can think like you are literally a fighter, and dedicate yourself to beating your opponent. Like a fighter, you get stronger the more you train and the more you fight. You can think more collaboratively like an organizer or an activist, and find your role in a collective effort. If you do your part well, and keep showing up to do it, that’s huge. And what usually also happens is you form relationships with other people who have also come to help, and you develop an appreciation for the beauty of teamwork and my personal favorite of all story arcs: Band of Misfits Comes Together to Solve a Problem.

You can also create something new to meet a need. That is basically what an artist does. A lot of people think artists are about self expression. That’s part of it. But the best definition I ever heard is this: an artist is someone who looks around, notices what’s missing, and sets about trying to make it.

That is how I began making art and comics about Asian Americans and deportation, back in 2018. I started small and added on more to have more impact. I didn’t feel like I had much impact because it seemed to me that the lawyers were the ones who were filing motions and suing ICE and winning people’s freedom. (A long time ago, in college at UC Berkeley, I was a legal studies major. I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. I almost went to law school. Instead, I went to art school. A decisive fork in the road.)

A couple lawyers in the anti-deportation movement told me that I was doing something they couldn’t. That through art, I could help shift the culture, and that shifting culture creates that powerful and mysterious thing people call political will. Political will is the force behind social change. Sometimes it comes from a single event, like a tragedy or a news photo so powerful, it compels outrage and action. You never know when these things will happen, so to me, it’s not good strategy to count on them and it is absolutely cynical and manipulative to manufacture them. So, with a little faith in my heart, I keep making art while admiring immigration lawyers and the very brave people they represent, people whose lives are on the line in direct ways that I can only witness. In 2019, I pitched a book – a graphic nonfiction narrative – about Asian Americans and deportation and am under contract to publish one. This is a very big promise and I have been sweating under the weight of said promise for too many years. Every year I fail to be done with the book adds to the weight of my shame and anxiety.

What I have to remember is that no one benefits from my shame and anxiety. At least some people will benefit from my care and effort to show up and do what I can, however imperfectly. Many people might benefit from the book I produce. I have to keep my eyes on that goal, and figure out ways to help myself get to that goal.

This weekend I am taking a photojournalism workshop on the campus of Tulane University, and learning how to better use a camera while forcing myself to take it into public spaces and integrate it into the ways I interact with strangers. I need ways to work faster because only drawing images takes forever and the backlog of reference photos I have fills me with regret for all the shorter essays I could have written if I hadn’t sat on the raw materials, waiting to have enough time to draw the comics I imagined making from them.

I am writing one or two essays a week for this site now, hitting the PUBLISH button before my inner critic kills my courage. I am training myself to be braver, one post at a time.

In my quiet hours, alone with my thoughts, I have to also manage my feelings. When a case of the Very Sads hits me, I treat it like the flu. I stay in, rest my body, and work because the bills don’t pay themselves but I give myself more time and let myself watch movies while working. I call a few friends and ask them to hold space for me to be sad. When I start to feel better, I exercise. I hit a punching bag because I have a lot of anger, and anger helps me be less sad. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s something. This is the self care that people talk about. This is what I have to do in order to stay strong enough to keep showing up in the world.

Let’s keep showing up, friends. I don’t want to disappear. I don’t want the good things in this world to disappear. We are here. We are good. And we can do so much with what we already have in our power. I believe in us.

This is a comic I made for The Nib back in 2017, when we were just getting used to the insanity of Trump being the President of the United States. Now the US is a country with Trump in his second term and joking about changing the law so he can continue for a third term. I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to make my little fists a lot stronger.