Chapter 5
Recorded on March 3, 2068, in Flushing, Queens.
Eman Abdelhadi: Hello, my name is Eman Abdelhadi, and I am speaking with Quinn Liu in Flushing, Queens. We are sitting in the Commons of the Falasheng Commune. Quinn, welcome! Thanks so much for agreeing to do this.
Quinn Liu: You’re welcome.
Abdelhadi: Let’s start with what year you were born.
Liu: Sure, I was born in 2030.
Abdelhadi: Where?
Liu: Monterey Park, in Los Angeles. I have a few memories of it. There was a soccer field near my home where I would play. I went to an elementary school that was mostly other Chinese kids. My mom worked at a dry cleaner. My dad did day work, like in construction.
Abdelhadi: But you didn’t stay there?
Liu: No, the internments started when I was still a kid. The hate had been building for years. I was a little protected from it initially because our school was almost all Chinese. But you could feel this vicious, deep resentment growing, like the stares on the street and the police harassment. Then I started hearing about mob violence, like one of my dad’s coworkers and friends got beat up by these college students. It wasn’t until much later I understood anything about the politics of it—the desperation as the economic crash, and water crisis, and fires were tearing California apart. They really needed someone to blame. I was probably, I don’t know, seven or eight when the Internment Act passed. We ended up in Napa Valley.
Abdelhadi: At a camp?
Liu: Yeah. Camp Wolfskill. It was one of the bigger camps, and the main one in Napa Valley. ICE managed it. They had converted a derelict winery.
Abdelhadi: Your parents were migrants?
Liu: They had both moved together from Guangxi before I was born.
Abdelhadi: Gotcha. Tell me about the camp.
Liu: I … I honestly don’t remember it much. I spend a lot of time these days trying to help refugees and trauma survivors to figure out how to relate to their past to be able to be in the present. I’ve processed my past a lot. But it is still hard to talk about. And this sort of interview is a weird way of going about it. What do you want to know?
Abdelhadi: Tell me about your family’s living situation.
Liu: We lived in this inflatable bubble building with four other families. We were sort of refugees, sort of prisoners, which was the story for so many people all over the world. The camp was surrounded by these old shipping containers. Everything for a half mile in any direction they put us to work dismantling or defoliating, so when the fires ripped through a couple of times a year it wouldn’t completely destroy the camp. The ICE guards lived in the old vineyard house, and everyone else was in bubble buildings. Maybe two hundred people lived there? I really hated it. Like really hated everything about it. I grew a lot more distant from my family during our time there. I spent a lot of time sneaking out of the camp with these other kids. We would wander around the countryside and explore and try not to get caught.
Abdelhadi: What was the surrounding area like?
Liu: California was in bad shape around then. This was before the prison breaks and the early communes and all. White people were basically fleeing the state. The whole area around Napa Valley was a bit of a ghost town, just a lot of dead vineyards and empty strip malls. There were still these walled-off armed residential enclaves, a couple of them were not far from our camp. We stayed away from the livezone enclaves, so all we saw were Mexican families. I later realized they must have been the workforce for the gated livezones. I spent time wandering around in Union. The Mexican families weren’t friendly, but they wouldn’t shoot you like the guards at the enclaves would. Most of the white people, anyone with money, were moving east, into the Sierra Nevadas in these barricaded cities or headed to Texas.
Abdelhadi: It used to be so beautiful.
Liu: What? California?
Abdelhadi: Yeah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I am old enough to remember it though, before the fires, the extinctions, the deadzones.
Liu: Pretty, huh?
Abdelhadi: The prettiest.
Liu: I’m sorry.
Abdelhadi: Thank you.
Liu: The California I saw—well, it wasn’t beautiful.
Abdelhadi: [Long pause.] Was there any kind of schooling for you in the camp?
Liu: Not really. The elders tried. It was hard to wrangle the kids though, and the elders were constantly being hauled away by the feds to do work. These trucks would show up every day to take them. And you kinda never knew how long they’d be gone or where they were going. I think the camp director—we called him the Warden—just sold their labor to whoever was paying. I tried to help a bit with the school idea initially, I had been into school. But after a few months there I didn’t want anything to do with life in the camp.
Abdelhadi: What kind of work were the elders doing?
Liu: I think it varied. I think a lot of construction to the east in the mountains. The new cities. But they would come back pretty beat up; some people didn’t come back. People would come back with big gashes or missing limbs. Dad came home with his hand bandaged one day, and when the bandages came off, he no longer had an index finger. I never asked why.
Abdelhadi: How long were you in the camps?
Liu: We didn’t really count. Maybe five years? I was definitely a teenager by the time we left.
Abdelhadi: How did you end up leaving?
Liu: Well, there was a series of rebellions within the camps. One day, they went off in the trucks and so many did not come back. Maybe a third? I’m not sure what they had them doing. But, like, everyone lost someone. A couple of my friends lost both parents. They got reassigned to new families—the elders would take them aside and talk to them, tell them their parents weren’t coming back, and plug them in with a new family. That seemed to be a turning point.
Abdelhadi: What happened next?
Liu: The elders started having meetings late at night. There was a buzz, like something was going on. The kids, we were excited about it, but we had no idea what was happening. You know, we were riding the high of it all. Anyway, one day the trucks came and the elders wouldn’t get on. The soldiers were never many, but they had guns and batons that they would use whenever anyone talked back to them. They tried to use the sticks to force everyone on, but no one would. So, they left. They came back the next day and there were more of them. They said they would shoot. No one got on. They pulled a couple of people out of the crowd and shot them. I remember my friend, Kuo, this old guy that I liked, he was one of the people shot. Everyone saw it. He was yelling at them after they shot him, and coughing up blood and dying in the dirt, but he was still yelling and pointing and blood everywhere. That did it. The elders got on the trucks. When they came back the next day, they buried the bodies on the outskirts of the camps. They had been left out there all day. We avoided them. I hadn’t … um … I hadn’t thought about this in a long time.
Abdelhadi: Are you okay?
Liu: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, at first the feds tried to really hone in. They realized they couldn’t just let the camps be. They started setting up daily patrols all over the camp to monitor what people were doing, trying to crack down on meetings and stuff. There were more of these ministrikes too. But honestly, they didn’t have the manpower to do it, because all the other camps were rising up too. The elders kind of knew that, because I guess they would meet other interred people when they’d be sent out to work. The more the feds pushed, the more opportunities there were to push back. People started killing the patrol soldiers and stashing their weapons to use later. Eventually the soldiers just stopped showing up, but that meant the food stopped showing up too, and what little water we had. So, people started leaving to try to find provisions elsewhere. Our camp kinda split up into a bunch of little roaming clans. My parents dragged me along with them. We stayed with a group of mostly other people from Guangxi, all people who spoke Zhuang like my parents. I remember Kuo’s wife was also in our clan, and a couple of the kids from my pack. There was this plan to try to get back to China. Some people had relatives in Shanghai and thought that was our best bet.
Abdelhadi: Where did you go?
Liu: Well, we ended up going south to the East Bay. San Francisco was almost completely cleared out at that point. Still lots of people in Oakland, but whoever had stayed behind was desperate and scared. We’d sleep in old malls or abandoned farms, look for food, and then keep moving. The longest we stayed anywhere was like a month in this camp on Mount Diablo, in a mixed Chinese/Mexican camp. They were a bit political there and I remember people were not so mean. We stayed until the feds attacked. I feel like that was my only experience during those years feeling anything but hatred for being Chinese. My parents and others talked about leaving all the time, making it back to China. My parents always bought into that, that something would be better at the next place. They needed to believe that, I guess. There were still cargo ships going from LA to Shanghai, and their goal was to make it back to LA to get on one of those ships. That had become a hustle—smuggling Chinese onto those ships. A lot of Chinese people were trying to make it back to China, because we had this idea things were better there. I knew about my family, but I guess it was sort of a thing all over the world.
Abdelhadi: Did they manage it?
Liu: Yeah. It took a few years, but yeah. It was dicey. Like the feds were the only really organized government left, but the enclaves had these militias and were always rounding up people for forced labor. So, we had to just kind of make our way down by traveling through the deadzones—like the really abandoned areas, places where everything had died and no one knew why—or at least I didn’t know why, and I didn’t think my parents knew why—places not even the militias would go. We were finding ways to smuggle ourselves undetected, be invisible. Of course, you wanted a big group for safety and to get more resources, but the bigger the group, the easier it was to be hunted down by the feds or the militias. And we had so little information about which towns were live. The cell networks had gone down in California and it was all just gossip, travelers talking with each other, but no one wanted to talk with us. Eventually though, my parents made it happen. They got us to LA and onto one of those ships.
Abdelhadi: What was the ship like?
Liu: We hid in a box.
Abdelhadi: Literally?
Liu: Yes. Literally. There were these cargo containers, and one of them was emptied out and made into a little bunker basically. I still don’t really know how my parents got us on it.
Abdelhadi: Were you the only ones in the bunker?
Liu: No. It was packed. There were at least five other families being smuggled. There were these mats spread everywhere and buckets for waste. They had fabbed a little door on the side of the bunker where you could dump the waste out once a day. It got pretty foul in there. And they had these small serrations along the grates for air. But if you weren’t paying attention, it looked like any other container being shipped. These ships didn’t have a lot of crew and no one went through the cargo units, so once we were loaded and the ship was on its way, it was all about just not attracting any attention to ourselves.
Abdelhadi: How long did it take to make it to Shanghai?
Liu: Three weeks. Three weeks without sunshine, or a toilet, or air. We had very carefully packed and portioned canned food and stuff for the trip. But we were hungry all the time of course. But yeah, we made it. The container was delivered like any other container with a set of others carrying … something or other. I can remember when we climbed out—squinting up at the lights of Shanghai taking up half the sky and the cranes on the dock. [Shakes head and laughs quietly.]
Abdelhadi: What happened when you got to Shanghai?
Liu: The smugglers kept us because of the debts and ended up selling us to factories in Hangzhou. They said we had to stay there until the debts were paid off.
Abdelhadi: The debts?
Liu: Yeah, basically you paid for being smuggled by promising to work when you arrived. The deal was two years, but they didn’t stick to that.
Abdelhadi: How could they enforce that? Couldn’t your parents just leave?
Liu: No, because they had no money and no papers. The Chinese state wasn’t welcoming to the returning refugees. We lived in these factory barracks. They had managed to stay with a few of the people from when we first left the camp. My dad was really sick. He had developed a bad cough during crossing. He never really recovered, just got sicker and sicker.
Abdelhadi: What was Hangzhou like?
Liu: When we arrived, it was just this boring industrial city. Like the jobs they had us do. It was just horrible and dull and grey. The first factory they placed my family in was soy. I remember we were living in this ground-floor flat with a bunch of other people who worked at this soy factory. I can still smell it. I can’t quite picture it, but I can smell it. They put some shit on these soy burgers that made them smell like smoked meat. So, we all smelled like smoked meat. All. The. Time. I hated everywhere we worked. We were there for a few months, and then got relocated to a robotics assembly plant.
Abdelhadi: You disliked it?
Liu: I hated that work so much. At this point I was basically not on speaking terms with my father, but they were still ordering me around and I’d still do what they asked. It didn’t feel like I had anyone else to count on. My job was spraying paint on the casings. I would sneak out a lot. Both around the factory—it was a big place—and in the surrounding city. But eventually I met all these other people like me, teenagers who had grown up abroad and been dragged back to China by scared parents and ended up doing indentured factory labor. Teenagers who spoke English, and we all recognized the same bitterness in each other. We all hated the factories, we all couldn’t really relate to our parents, and we were all really struggling to figure out who we were in the world. It was like the kids I used to sneak out of the camp with. I became really close to some of them—Yuhang, Zachery, Xinyi, Kexin. Kexin and I became a pairing. He was from New York, from Flushing actually. We would wander around Hangzhou and break into random buildings, and light fec on fire, and spray graf, and steal food, and whatever to keep ourselves from getting bored.
Abdelhadi: Was your family still trying to make it to Guangxi?
Liu: Initially. They kept telling me how we would belong there, how good it would be, blah blah. But the rebellions kicked off.
Abdelhadi: Tell us more about the rebellions.
Liu: Things heated up pretty quickly. This was … maybe 2046? The insurrection in Xinjiang was the year before, and there were all these wild rumors about the commune of Changji and how the Uighurs had won and burned down their concentration camps and were actually making communism or some shit. There had been huge strikes through the thirties, but when we arrived it was a bit of a lull in industrial centers like Hangzhou. By my second year there, they had completely kicked off again. At some point, there was a general strike that turned into riots after a bunch of factories shut down. Soldiers came in and quelled it, but things kept popping off in smaller ways after that. Factory owners would go missing or show up decapitated and hung in some public square. There were basically uprisings sector by sector. And it was harder to control those because they were more sporadic and the army wouldn’t respond in full force, like when the whole city rose up. The whole city was on constant strike, and there were tons of riots and a lot of chaos. My parents weren’t paying attention to any of it, but I soaked up every word I heard about it.
I remember Kexin and I came across this riot of factory workers who were lighting fire to all these abandoned police cars and it was just the fucking best. In the indentured factories, things were quieter, but Kexin convinced me we had to organize people—or at least organize the other kids at our plant—to make trouble. But my parents weren’t into me organizing. They said we had to keep working, to earn our right to leave the factory, to get our papers, to regain our citizenship. I wasn’t having any of that.
Abdelhadi: You were organizing the factory?
Liu: I was organizing the kids, the other teenagers, yeah. Initially the olds were trying to make it into this union thing. We went to the managers, and for a minute everyone pretended like it was normal. Like we started getting paid, and the food got better, and families were allowed to live outside the barracks. I think the owners were just scared, really scared. But it didn’t last. The robots we were making? At one riot I saw one of our models tear-gassing the crowd, like spewing it in everyone’s faces. There was no way I was going to keep making those things. My mom was so upset with me that night, we were screaming at each other.
Abdelhadi: What did your parents want?
Liu: It was really contradictory. Like they wanted to leave, to make it back to the towns they were from. But the military controlled the countryside, and there was no way they were going to make it without papers. The managers were saying they would get us papers, if we kept working and finished up our terms. But no one ever seemed to finish their term. We would get charged extra times for random infractions. The terms were endless. But they couldn’t fucking see that. So, it was all about how we all had to make it back home, but we had to stay there and keep working. It really made no sense. That kind of fight was happening all over the factory, because so many people were in our situation. So many of these families that had made it back to China from terrible situations, and these huge divides between parents who had this fantasy of the old life and kids like me that were ready to burn it all down.
Abdelhadi: What happened?
Liu: We burned it down.
Abdelhadi: The factory?
Liu: Yeah.
Abdelhadi: How did it start?
Liu: No one had been paid in weeks. Everyone was hungry and agitated. There had been an explosion on the line, and two women were killed.… I can’t remember their names anymore.… Damn. After that, people were talking about what to do, and everyone was getting more and more heated. Finally, the decision was made to arm up and go confront the management in the morning. My parents said they didn’t want to do that; they were sure that things would get better. There was a big, heated argument. The kids and the parents got in these big shouting matches. I wasn’t in the middle of it, and I think my parents still didn’t get how strongly I felt about it. Eventually, my parents came in and told me it was time to pack up and go. They felt sure the [Chinese People’s Liberation] Ground Force was going to invade the city and kill us all. I said no. “We have to go. Go pack up,” they said. I just kept saying, “No, no, no, no.”
Abdelhadi: How did they react?
Liu: They … thought I was a monster. Like their daughter had been slowly taken and replaced by someone they didn’t understand. I know they felt that way because that’s what my mom yelled at me. She said I was a demon. They had never really heard me when I said I didn’t care about making it to Guangxi, that I didn’t think there was any reason to think things would be better there, that I always thought we should stay and fight out whatever was going on. So, when I kept saying no, they went into where our stuff was and they packed it all up. Then they came back in and said, “It’s time to go.” Again, I said, “No.” They stayed the night instead of leaving, and in the morning they tried again. Again, I said, “No.” They tried to convince me. I was too big at this point for them to force me to come. “Don’t you want to go home to Guangxi?” they said. I said, “What home? I’ve never been there and you’re crazy to think that whatever is happening here isn’t happening there. You don’t even know anyone there anymore.” Then they left.
Abdelhadi: Did you go with them?
Liu: No, they left without me.
Abdelhadi: [Long pause.] You were pretty alienated from them by then. [Long pause.] What happened to them?
Liu: I don’t know.
Abdelhadi: Oh.
Liu: I never saw them again. We never spoke.
Abdelhadi: I’m sorry.
Liu: Yeah.
Abdelhadi: You didn’t have phones?
Liu: We barely had food.
Abdelhadi: Right, sorry. So, what did you do?
Liu: I stayed. The confrontation went forward with the manager. Of course, it got really violent. The manager tried to stave us off, but then he gave up the owners’ whereabouts. They lived in this gated community, we couldn’t get in. They had their own army. We went back to the manager. Dragged him back to the factory, he gave us whatever money was there. But he still didn’t, uh, survive. Got knifed. We destroyed all the machines and torched the management offices. Meanwhile the riots were burning down a lot of the city around us.
Abdelhadi: Were there many other factory occupations?
Liu: Tons of them. All over the city. We went to a couple of assemblies of other occupied factories. But huge divides there too. Like between people who wanted to keep their plants working, a lot of these old workers who had been around forever, some who were proud of their skills or what they made or something, and those of us who thought it was all bullshit. I had been living behind fences in prisons my whole life, and the factory was another fence, another prison. A lot of people had done what we did and destroyed it all.
Abdelhadi: What happened next at your … former factory?
Liu: About half the people who had been living in the factory housing left. The rest of us felt a bit lost. We ended up pairing with this occupied apartment building near the factory. These chaps that lived there had all been working for a company with a few factories that made random shit—hair ties, toys, stuff like that. When the factories were shutting down, instead of splitting apart and going to look for food and jobs all over the place, they stayed together. They had been working on connecting with food depots, farms outside the city, and had a whole plan about how they were going to feed everyone in the Binjiang.
Abdelhadi: Binjiang?
Liu: Just the area of Hangzhou we were in. An old government name. The robotics factory was in a subdistrict, Xixing. But we spent a lot of time connecting to people all around Binjiang and that’s sort of how we were starting to think of ourselves.… So, these chaps at the apartment building. We adopted their model, or they taught us how they went about things. They wanted the group to be cohesive, so they also set up meetings to talk shit out and they started thinking through what else they could arrange together. They did a lot of skill sharing—people who had done community gardens started presenting to the group, and they started planting things, thinking through how to do that systematically and all that. At first, mostly people got together for meetings and skill sharing, but then eventually people got together just for fun too, to watch a movie or to read something together. Some of the elders noticed that a lot of the younger folk had really disrupted educations—some people could barely read or write. So miniature schools got set up too, adults would trade off on various jobs.
Abdelhadi: What was your role?
Liu: At first, I was on cleaning duty. I liked that. I liked getting things clean and ready for everyone. Then with time, I got tired of that, so I switched to food. Then I got bored again and moved to sewing and mending. I think I was always restless. I think living in the camps and then in the factory housing left me with this very deep resentment about work, and it took me some time to learn other ways of relating to tasks. It all kinda worked out so that chaps were doing what they wanted to do. It was so different than the factory, but it took a while for that to sink in for me.… Like, we knew in the factory we would starve if we didn’t work. But now there was no job that no one was unwilling to do. No job was worth more than another. But I had always hated work so much, there was a clash inside me. I bounced around a lot from job to job. I was into carpentry at some point, made some lovely furniture, mostly beds. Then I moved into communications as other communes popped up and we started to build with folks from around the city and even other cities, eventually, once trains were restored.
Abdelhadi: Were you—
Liu: I still hoped to find my parents. That’s why I got into comms. I had this one picture of them from when they were married. Ridiculous of course, because they didn’t even look like that anymore when we parted. But I would circulate it, on the off chance.
Abdelhadi: No luck though, huh?
Liu: Yeah. It’s okay. I had family in the commune, the elders, my unit mates, a pairing. But yeah, it makes me sad that we never said goodbye, at least. Slowly, I started grieving my parents.
Abdelhadi: What did that look like?
Liu: At first, I was just so angry and sulky at the time. I was really mostly by myself. I didn’t have anyone to direct this anger at. I was so happy to be with other people when I joined the commune, but I also realized I didn’t know how to relate to people, how to share space. I had a lot of conflict. It was always the same pattern, I’d get really close to someone, want to spend all our time together, and then they’d do one small thing that annoyed me or that I felt meant they weren’t as committed to me as I was to them. Then I would withdraw completely. Punish them with silence and distance.
Abdelhadi: Definitely a familiar trauma response!
Liu: Yeah, at some point, one of the elders pulled me aside and said, you need to talk to someone. And I didn’t know what they meant. But they said come see me tomorrow morning at the garden. There was a little area with benches under the fruit trees, it was very peaceful there. I met them there, and they said: tell me your story. And I told it. It turned out they’d been reading all these psychoanalysis and psychology books and sort of training themselves to play that role. So, they were a sort of therapist for me, and that’s how I got into trauma healing. They also sent me to the meditations. I had never joined any of the meditation groups. But they said it was a must, so I went. Over time, I started to feel better.
Abdelhadi: I imagine, given how many people had been displaced and how many families had been split apart, that a lot of people were struggling with the same things you were.
Liu: Absolutely. My growth was connected to some broader changes in the Binjiang Commune. Gradually, we were moving to playing this particular role in the city, like as a … refugee center. Very early on, like soon after we destroyed the machines, Xinyi started advocating that the factory be a refuge. It went along with some of the ideas of the chaps in the apartment building, but it went deeper, like it became a spiritual thing for Xinyi. She said we had to welcome everyone, we had to bring together the broken people, we had to care for whoever needed it. We had to be a refuge. We all became really compelled by this idea. A refuge. A safe place where people could come make a home. None of the kids my age, or Xinyi’s age, had ever had anything like that. Our parents had always told us it was somewhere else, but Xinyi said we had to build it right there for ourselves.
Abdelhadi: Where there many refugees?
Liu: Initially, just hungry workers from around the city. But things were blowing up all over China. It was a full civil war by then. The CCP ended up leveling whole cities, and the hunger crisis was massive. I think nearly a third of the population was displaced at some point of the war. So much accumulated trauma, from the war, the crises leading up to it, everything. A lot of people were like me, completely shut down and angry and reactive to everything. I was growing, healing, and our commune was more and more figuring out how to take care of people too. We took care of who we could, usually hosting about two or three hundred people at a time. A few would stay permanently, but many were with us for a few weeks or months before heading to their home provinces. Eventually, I became part of the individual treatment council for Binjiang. That’s what led me to New York.
Abdelhadi: How so?
Liu: As things were settling down in China, we heard it was getting intense in North America. Our factory, remember, was all these diasporic Chinese, people who had been born elsewhere and moved back and were working in captivity to pay off their debts until the insurrection. A lot of us were born in the US. We started trying to connect to Chinese American communities and ended up having these daily strategy and care conversations with activists in Flushing, Queens. Queens was fragmenting then, this was around 2050 or 2051. The [US] Army was occupying NYC and putting a lot of people in camps. But the Army’s presence in Queens was really uneven; they controlled the freeways but had decided the borough wasn’t a strategic priority. Queens had become all these different isolated fiefdoms, like every weird little group or community took over a few blocks at a time and set up checkpoints. We heard a lot about it. Most of the activists, organizers, and community leaders from Flushing ended up in a military camp in Flushing Meadows. Lots of people were being detained, interrogated, and released. The neighborhood was filled with people who had spent a few days or a few weeks in the camp. So, it was just an enormous amount of trauma. I decided I wanted to help them in Flushing, more than our daily calls.
Abdelhadi: What did you do?
Liu: We put together a delegation of trauma healers and assembly facilitators. We found someone still doing flights from Shanghai to New York, and found ourselves packed in with a cargo hold of high-end military electronics bound for US military intelligence. It was a lot more comfortable than my first trip across the Pacific. This time we had a toilet, plenty of food, everyone in their own bed! The pilot smuggled us out of the plane at LaGuardia, and we all made it to Flushing without incident.
Abdelhadi: Did you arrive before the military pullout?
Liu: A few weeks before, yes! So, everything dramatically opened up at that point. Falasheng had its public debut as a commune and became a leading force in reconnecting neighborhoods in Queens. We set up a trauma recovery center at Falasheng, and the commune soon became a hub of refugee resettlement. The military was losing steadily down south, and then eventually in the Midwest. Thousands of people were fleeing the front lines of the fighting, and hundreds of them ended up spending time in Flushing hosted by the commune there. We brought some of the skills we had learned in Hangzhou, working with displaced people. I’m incredibly proud of the work we are doing.
Abdelhadi: You said the vision of becoming a refuge was offered by your friend—Xinyi?
Liu: Yes, she was my age, but I learned so much from her. I really think of her as a hero of the revolution. A lot of my care and healing was done by elders, some really powerful women who also mentored me. But Xinyi really put her ideas of love and care out there, and it transformed our whole district. In a way, I think through her leadership we played an important role in a deeper, longer-term healing of East Asia, and eventually the Mid-Atlantic.
Abdelhadi: What happened to her?
Liu: She was killed. In 2048. A Chinese military missile was undetonated in the wreckage of a building, just a couple of blocks from our original factory. She was helping with cleanup and it ended up exploding. She was the only one who was killed. It was really devastating for all of us. We had this huge parade in the district, like thousands of people came out. We ended up naming our refugee center after her. There is a park in Flushing named for her too.
Abdelhadi: That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for this interview. I see we’ve run out of the time you set aside. Anything else you want to share?
Liu: Nah, I think this is the most I’ve talked to anyone about my life since I started therapy. Usually, I’m the listener! It’s been a pleasure.
Abdelhadi: I appreciate you. Thanks.