This morning I marched with classmates and throngs of thousands down Market Street today. I assembled with my social welfare buddies (we call ourselves the Get-a-long Gang) and we took the BART to the city. We wore our white shirts and followed other white shirts until we found a pot-banging throng milling down the street yelling and waving banners. It was a smallish crowd that was constantly redirected by the police, who came up running behind me wearing riot gear and bearing billy clubs. I must have been surprised at least twice when bumped from behind by running police officers. It was quite terrifying, too, to see see them route marchers and think of how close we could be to bodily harm. Imagine the crash of a fist or the whack of a club. I want to keep my bones whole! No pain, no pain.
Arms linked to stay together, we finally merged with the main marchers starting at Pier One. This group matched more of what I was expecting: it was much bigger and more Latino. With this critical mass filling up Market, the Get-a-long Gang crept along with viscous languidness, animated most by shouts of
El pueblo unido,
Jamas sera vencido!and
Si se puede!We read the banners around us, images of Che flying on red flags. And saw all the babies and children that accompanied their parents, marching, marching, marching.
When we finally made our way out of the crowd, preparing to head back to Berkeley, when we were stopped by a man with a microphone and recorder. He asked us for a sound bite for NPR, and my friends encouraged me to speak.
I told him that the day before I was walking with my friend through Berkeley's Elmwood neighborhood. We stopped to admire some California poppies in yard when a woman stepped out of the house. She asked us what language we were speaking. We looked at each other quizically and replied, "English." She went on to question my friend's accent and would not believe that she was from LA. She moved on to me, complimenting my English, though my accent was still highly obvious. She chided Chinese people for their reserve and unemotionalness, and complimented my "good breeding" for making me unlike them. And on she went with a "benevolent" diatribe on the scarcity of female students, the wonder of our being able to study when our parents and grandparents had not the opportunity, the "bubble" that we lived in as students that kept us from recognizing that we were at war, those hippies that her sons were a generation short of becoming because we are paying for their medical bills, the military accomplishments of her husband as opposed to her domestic ones, and on and on. She would not stop, yet delivered as a "sermon on the mount," as she finally called it, we couldn't very well get away. And I seethed over it. Finally, slinking away to pop back into our "bubble," I did seethe over. She had made me so angry, hurt me so deeply, struck at tender heart of what has troubled me much this year. She questioned my identity as an American for being Asian. As if my appearance told the whole story. And though I told myself rationally that she was an old woman, that there really wasn't much I could have done in that situation, what she said still wounded me more than I could cognitively or emotionally understand.
So in deciding whether to paticipate in Monday's protest, I jumped off the fence. And, God bless them, my friends came with me. I marched for the people of this country. Todos Immigrantes! Our right to belong here. Our right to be both American and not belong to dominant white culture. To be seen as people, not criminals or work thieves. A decent life, free from abject need and bigotted treatment. I marched for me, for what I want this country to be, and for that paternalistic old white lady.
This is what I told the NPR reporter. Maybe in not so many words or in such detail, but essentially so. Viva America Nuevo!
