A Ricepaper Airplane

Gary Pak

2 ideas

1. Class solidarity requires separating people from empire

   A Korean who fled Japanese colonizers can only organize effectively on a Hawaiian plantation if he tells apart the Japanese state that occupied his homeland from the Japanese laborers exploited in the fields beside him. The planters profit from ethnic divisions among Korean, Japanese, and Filipino workers. Workers break that control only by recognizing that their shared oppressor is the owner, not the nationality they learned to hate.

2. Deathbed testimony as counter-history

   Read a dying immigrant's spoken account to a younger relative as a way of passing down history that official records and assimilated descendants would otherwise lose. The stories of colonial resistance, strikes, and failure survive only if the listener takes them in before the teller dies. This makes the act of listening itself a form of inheritance and obligation.

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