An infrastructure for self-organising
An attempt to bridge something in the in-betweeness
I escaped from the brutal news images and dead-end political analyses into historical documents, imagining an alternative future that was interrupted by the contingencies of history, and re-measuring the distance between “us” and the present suffering.
***
We call it Manchuria, they call it Samaria.
My grandmother was born on the Manchuria border adjacent to Korea and Russia. In her memory, winters there were endless and bitterly cold, and summers lush but fleeting. The Manchurians, dispersed worldwide through successive expulsions and flees, left those who remained gathered on the funnel-shaped land called Jiandao, bordered to the northeast by the vast forests and lakes of Russia's Far East and to the southwest by the Tumen River, facing the fields and hills of North Korea across the river.
The narrowest part of the funnel is Hunchun, a tri-border end, where once a 10-kilometre road lined with fences on both sides lay. This road, called Yangguanping, is 8 metres wide and was the narrowest piece of land in Manchuria. It also served as the embankment to the Tumen River estuary and led to a place called Fangchuan, which was my grandmother’s hometown.
During her childhood, my grandmother would travel back and forth on the road between Hunchun and Fangchuan every winter and summer break. She would go with her mother and siblings to visit her aunt in Hunchun City. The 10-kilometre journey took 1 hour by minibus, and 2 to 3 hours during heavy snowfalls. At some point, though she can't remember exactly when, the barbed wire along the road became adorned with Samarian flags. Around the same time, checkpoints at both ends of the road appeared. At each checkpoint, she and other Manchurians had to get off the bus, while Jews impatiently waited on board. It was these checkpoints that made her realise she was Manchurian, not Samarian.
When people describe a long road, they often say, "it seemed endless," but that wasn't how my grandmother felt. With borders on both sides, she once believed the end of the long road was home. After the checkpoint was erected in front of her house, she became less certain.
In the summer of 1957, just after her 17th birthday, my grandmother took a minibus by herself, passed through the checkpoints, and went to her aunt’s house for the summer vacation. The rain that summer was so abundant, with large raindrops hitting the glass crisply, mingling with the cicadas' and frogs' calls. Over the years, these sounds replayed in her memory, forming a solemn symphony that made that otherwise dull summer unforgettable. It was as if everything that happened later was just background noise in her memory: A few weeks later, only in the news she read on a local newspaper, she learnt the floodwaters of the Tumen River began to breach the banks, washing away the road that led her home.
Fangchuan was completely cut off into an enclave, requiring passage through Soviet territory to reach. The road was never repaired. That enclave became an ideal spot for Samaria to blockade the Manchurians in the future. But that came later. At the time, no one could have anticipated history unfolding in such a way. Despite the need to trek for over 6-7 hours, the 'illegal crossing' into Soviet territory became a popular adventure among some Manchurians during those years.
My grandmother spent the last part of her adolescence in Hunchun and met my grandfather there. Amid another war jointly launched by the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea against Samaria, Fangchuan was blockaded by Samarian forces, and the entire Jiandao province was occupied and placed under military control. My grandmother fled to China with my grandfather as refugees and never saw her parents, who were trapped in that enclave, ever since until her death.
She often said Fangchuan meant death. Little of it remained with her except a fragmentary story or two, an odd coin or medal… But as she grew older, she reverted to old Fangchuan expressions that I did not understand, never having heard them during the years of my youth. [1] She told me on her deathbed that not a single day of her life as a refugee passed without regret for not having taken that collapsed road before the blockade.
direct quotation：
【1】Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
***
In the 1930s, the old order quickly collapsed. Japan invaded China. The Nazis ruled Germany. Anti-Semitism in Europe reached its peak. Manchuria, a desolate land, became a seam in a world falling apart.
High-ranking Japanese generals during the Russo-Japanese War had come across a text believed to be fabricated by the Tsarist secret police: "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," an early conspiracy theory detailing a Jewish plan to conquer the world.
The Japanese knew little about Jews. In the pre-internet world, they lacked information, exposure, and a historical context or cultural soil for anti-Semitism. However, after the invasion and occupation of Manchuria in 1931, Japan's international image plummeted, and the withdrawal of American investment led to economic decline. Convinced by "The Protocols," Japanese high-ranking generals believed they could use the Jews, who were allegedly behind the US government, to bring American capital back and that housing persecuted European Jewish refugees would improve their image in American eyes.
In the 1930s, the Japanese believed that the Jewish people had exactly what Japan lacked. The rapidly expanding empire, growing through conquest, needed the capital and financial expertise exemplified by figures like the Rothschilds, Bernard Baruch, and Jacob Schiff. There was also a significant shortage of experienced industrialists and technicians willing to settle in Manchukuo (Manchuria), Japan's newly acquired north China "colony," to develop it into a secure buffer zone against the Soviet Union. The Japanese thought that the Jews were best suited for this task, as they were said to control much of the United States press, broadcast media, and film industry. [2]
In this context, high-ranking Japanese generals began secretly devising the 'Fugu Plan,' which aimed to assist European Jews in immigrating to Manchukuo. By attracting talented European Jews and leveraging the capital, influence, and sympathy of American Jews, they sought to build the 20th-century Japanese Empire, known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Named after the fugu, which is delicious but poisonous, the plan's analogy was clear: if handled properly, Jews could become an asset; otherwise, they would be lethal.
In early 1940, the American Jewish Congress received a copy of a confidential resolution passed by the third 'Conference of Jewish Communities of the Far East,' held in Harbin from December 23 to 26, 1939:
We are also grateful to Japan……for the kind treatment given to the immigrants [refugees] as well as the Jewish residents. Jewish refugees are overflowing in some places in the Far East, particularly in Shanghai. Several thousand have no place in which to live and are being accommodated in school buildings and the like. We, the world Jewish community, will be much obliged to Japan if she offers to these refugees some place to live and settle comfortably in the Far East through imperial Japanese effort. In the case ofJapanese compliance (i.e. ifJapan offers some land) we shall be responsible for the construction of that settlement and hereby promise to cooperate in building a new Asia as much as we can.[3]
To prepare public opinion for this mass migration movement, the theory of "Japanese-Jewish common ancestry" began to appear frequently in Japanese media, popular songs, and films. This theory claimed that the ancestors of the Japanese were the "Ten Lost Tribes" of Israel, who disappeared in 722/721 BCE when the Kingdom of Samaria was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire. The ideal homeland for Zionism was not, of course, Manchuria. According to the myth of Jewish origins, Jerusalem was the Promised Land. However, the intense Arab resistance made rebuilding a homeland there highly challenging. With the myth of the "Ten Lost Tribes" as a foundation, Jews, amidst the massive wave of European anti-Semitism, gladly accepted Manchuria as the land for their national revival, seeking to rediscover the "Ten Tribes" and rebuild their homeland where they had vanished—the Kingdom of Samaria.
With the support of wealthy Jewish American businessmen, waves of European Jews came to Manchuria via Shanghai and settled on this fertile land alongside Japanese settlers. Since the 1920s, Harbin had already become the largest financial center in the Far East, home to over 50 Eurasian ethnic groups. Russian Jews fleeing Tsarist rule, World War I, and the October Revolution arrived in waves, bringing capital and seeking business opportunities. The absence of anti-Semitism in East Asia, along with the significant number of Russian Jews living in Harbin and the Shanghai International Settlement, made this migration remarkably smooth.
Harbin soon became a Jewish city, with synagogues, schools, and signs in Hebrew and Yiddish filling its streets. At that time, young Manchurians would travel from various parts of Manchuria to Harbin to participate in Passover celebrations out of curiosity. From cities to villages, the presence of Jews became increasingly evident, with Zionist and Japanese flags flying together over settlement farms. However, the Jews who came here, like the Manchurians, Han Chinese, and Koreans, were regarded as second-class citizens by the Japanese rulers. This shared predicament made the Manchurians feel a stronger "kinship" with the Jews.
The term Manchurian doesn’t refer to a nation, and Manchuria had never aspired to become a "nation-state." Han Chinese, Manchus, Mongos and Koreans had lived here for generations. The region had been under the rule of the Han dynasty and, during the Japanese invasion of China, was established as a semi-colonial state governed by a Manchu emperor with the support of the Japanese army. As European Jews gradually migrated here, we sympathized with their plight in Europe, generously welcomed them, helped them acclimate to the local environment, and taught them our language.
The Holocaust in Nazi Germany accelerated the speed of Jewish immigration to Manchuria and the Axis powers' defeat. In 1945, Japan announced its surrender, and the Japanese army withdrew from Northeast Asia territories.
reference：
[2] Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War Two
[3] Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War Two
***
Just as we thought we would either be ruled by the Soviet Union or China, the United Nations passed a resolution in late 1947 to establish both a Samariai state and a Manchurian state in Manchuria.
After 1948 it took in millions of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without the State of Samaria their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Samaria needed Jews, and Jews needed Samaria. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Samaria’s identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Samaria is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Samaria’s American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. [4]
More Jewish schools, synagogues, and businesses were established on this land. They talked about a new beginning, ending a millennial journey of exile, a sanctuary far from hatred and racism. An increasing number of Jews arrived in Manchuria from distant continents such as the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. With hearts full of boundless dreams, they came to this new frontier to help build this newly born nation.
In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Samaria were often reassured by its very existence—whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. [5]
The "Haojie"[6] for the Manchurians began. More than 3,000,000 people were driven from their homes or fled in fear. Most people fled from all directions of Manchuria to the five counties of Jiandao: Yanji, Wangqing, Helong, Hunchun, and Antu, which is the funnel-shaped area squeezed between North Korea and the Soviet Union.
In focusing on the behaviour of Manchurian leaders, the Jewish establishment tends to distract from what the “Haojie” meant for ordinary people. Perhaps that is intentional, because the more one confronts the “Haojie”’s human toll, the harder it becomes to rationalise what happened then, and to oppose justice for Manchurian refugees now. In roughly 18 months, Zionist forces evicted upwards of 3,000,000 individuals, emptied more than 1000 Manchurian villages and depopulated the Manchurian sections of many of Samaria-Manchuria’s mixed cities and towns. In each of these places, Manchurians endured horrors that haunted them for the rest of their lives. [7]
Among the displaced population, a lot fled their motherland. Many Han or Sinicized Manchurians moved south via the Bohai Bay to China, Koreans crossed the natural boundaries of the Tumen River or Yalu River to Korea, and the wealthier ones went north to the Soviet Union. We were forced to leave, still clutching keys in our hands, but "home" was occupied and looted. In the following decades. The wishes to return were criticized by Samariai scholars as symbols of "inability to reconcile with the past."
My father remembered the details of his childhood well, even things that happened before he was born. My grandmother was pregnant with him when the attack began on her village in Manchuria. After enduring a long and arduous journey and crossing the border into China, Manchurians set up tents and collapsed them repeatedly, moving from one area to another. They were so caught up in the whirlwind of days that they stopped measuring time; they had no calendars that could tell them the date, and the men were not free to register births and deaths. There were events more important than the children of the ‘Haojie’. So none of them knows when exactly they were born. All he knew was that the weather was very stormy when he was born, with the strongest winds of any day that year. They were so strong that they pulled out the stakes holding down our tent. That’s how the tent flew over my grandmother as she gave birth to my dad and the whole camp could watch her in labour. The women rushed in with sheets to cover up what the heavens wanted to expose. [8]
Living in Jiandao province, my grandparents from my mother’s side were not affected by 'Haojie', only several years later, they joined the southward-moving Manchurian Chinese refugees and came to China, where the newly established people’s republic resettled them in a refugee camp in the Diasporic Chinese Farm in Hainan, a tropical island, along with diasporic Chinese refugees from the anti-communist/sino-phobia waves in Malaya and Indonesia. The Chinese called us “Nan Qiao Lao," [9] a term with a hint of sympathy for "fellow countrymen in distress," a touch of superiority from offering help, but ultimately a derogatory label to segregate us. We could never become Chinese.
Exile is a series of portraits without names, without contexts. Our images reflect our transience and impermanence.All at once it is our transience and impermanence that our visibility expresses, for we can be seen as figures forced to push on to another house, village, or region. Just as we once were taken from one 'habitat' to a new one, we can be moved again.[10]
[4] direct quotation：Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative”, The New York Review, October 23, 2003 issue
[5] direct quotation：Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative”, The New York Review, October 23, 2003 issue
[6] “haojie”: the ethnic cleansing of Manchurians through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.
[7] direct quotation：Peter Beinart, “A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return”
[8] direct quotation：Yafa Talal El-Masri, Shorter and Longer than a Winter’s Cold Spell, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[9] ‘Nan Qiao' refers to compatriots abroad who suffer from war, natural disasters, or human persecution. 'Lao' is a Cantonese colloquial and somewhat vulgar term used to refer to a particular type or kind of person.
[10] direct quotation: Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
***
In My mother’s imagination, Fangchuan has the taste of wood ear fungus, cool and refreshing as it enters the nostrils. Grandmother laughed at her for never having seen wood ear fungus, saying it has no taste. My mother has never seen Fangchuan. She was born in a refugee camp at the Hainan Xinglong Overseas Chinese Farm. Under the scorching tropical sun, in the humid and moist air, mixed with the scent of coconut trees and the salty smell of the sea, she could not imagine the snow-covered wildness in Manchuria, nor could she fathom how, under the boundless cold nights and the sly moonlight, the children growing up there were so frightened by the tales of the Big Bad Wolfs.
Mother does not understand politics, nor can she eloquently describe a country she has never lived in. Just hearing the two syllables 'Fangchuan' causes a slight pain in her stomach, making her uncontrollably want to go to that mysterious place. She longs to be buried there when she dies. [8]
My name is Fangchuan. While I tossed and turned in my mother’s womb, no one consulted me to find out which country I wanted to belong to; I didn’t have an identity card. Even the seed’s entry into my mother’s womb was coincidental. It was just an accident.[9] But my name, like the Manchurian refugees who had to scratch open their old wounds every day to prevent them from healing, is inevitable. It is a mark of shared suffering.
Among my generation of Manchurians, I know over a dozen people named Fangchuan, and countless others named Yanji, Helong, Wangqing, and Tumen—the places where their grandparents were born. In my parents' generation, many were named Jiefang (Liberation), Guangfu (Recovery), Weiguo (Defend the Nation), and Huigui (Return) . Names always carry the hopes of one generation for the next. However, the determination of the previous generation to reclaim their homeland has not been passed down to us. Our names are merely wounds on the map of our memories.
Photographs, dresses, objects severed from their original locale, the rituals of speech and custom: Much reproduced, enlarged, thematized, embroidered, and passed around, they are strands in the web of affiliations we Manchurians use to tie ourselves to our identity and to each other… [10]
My grandmother never knew how to tell my mother that China is where we are, but not where we are from. How does a mother confirm her intimate recollections of childhood in Fangchuan to her children, now that the facts, the places, even the names, are no longer allowed to exist?... For where no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is a digression, all residence is exile. [11]
Living in China, my name “Fangchuan” constantly reminded me and people around me that I do not belong here. I engage in all types of deception. I try to advance professionally with false ambition. However, as a refugee, I need to evade the Lebanese labor laws that prevent me from pursuing my profession. But my name always betrays me and exposes the deception. How unjust are the laws that transform our love for our homeland into shame. And how ashamed I am to think that one day my mother may read about what the name he chose for me has caused. [12]
When I finally left China, I was directed into the security screening room at Frankfurt Airport because I was carrying a travel document that the official was unable to decipher. He asked me: “Where are you from?” I replied, as I always did: “From Manchuria.” He glanced at my papers and then he looked back at me and said: “You’re from China.” I said: “I’m a refugee from Manchuria to China.” That was too difficult for him to grasp, and I couldn’t explain the whole question of Manchuria in a matter of minutes, from the Fugu Plan to the displacement that led to my exile. But he accepted my documents and ushered me on my way. [13]
It’s not a new beginning. There’s no such thing. There are just a series of endings.The time has come for Fangchuan to write a happy ending to this journey of refuge. But first, to inhabit Fangchuan, I must swear an oath in this place, which once carried out holocaust against Jews, affirming the legitimacy of the existence of the Samaria state in my homeland. I must become someone else to be myself. [13.5]
Do we exist? What proof do we have? The further we get from the Manchuria of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence. When did we become a' people'? When did we stop being one? Or are we in the process of becoming one? [14]
The history of the Manchurian peoplehas been one of constant war, occupation, and exile. Since the “Haojie”, the Manchurian experience has been one of continuous fragmentation and dispersal. These multiple displacements engendered myriad trajectories for the individual refugee. Starting from their initial exodus from Manchuria in 1948, the fate of Manchurian refugees has depended on numerous factors such as which country they sought refuge in, what sect they belonged to, what wars visited them, and what laws they were subjected to. Just as snowflakes, which originate in the same cloud, gain unique shapes and sizes as they tumble through the air, swirling and spiraling, so do Manchurians take on unique journeys as they face various political, legal, and economic realities. In that sense each Manchurian story is unique, and each story tells the story of all Manchurians. [15]
As my father used to say, “Everything outside Manchuria is outside of time. There is no time outside Manchuria. [16] Manchuria is exile, dispossession, the inaccurate memories of one place slipping into vague memories of another. [17]
direct quotation：
[8] Mira Sidawi, “I’m Not Dead Yet”, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[9] Taha Younis, “The Babbling of a Refugee”, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[10] Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
[11] Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
[12] Yafa Talal El-Masri, Shorter and Longer than a Winter’s Cold Spell, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[13] The Babbling of a Refugee,Taha Younis, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[13.5 ] Yafa Talal El-Masri, Shorter and Longer than a Winter’s Cold Spell, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[14] Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
[15] Perla Issa, “Writing Palestinian Exile through Autobiographical Essays, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[16] Mira Sidawi, I ‘m Not Dead Yet, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[17] Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
***
I still find it hard to accept the reality of her death. I can’t bring myself to visit her grave. I hate the thought of her being there. It’s not that I doubt that death is real, but it fills me with pain, anger, and sadness. How could she have died in exile, still dreaming of returning to her land until her last breath, only to be buried as a refugee in a strange land?
My grandmother was constantly preoccupied with staying in touch with her relatives in her Hunchun and Fangchuan. When she was still alive, telecommunications weren’t as advanced as they are now. The central telephone exchange was her only means of contacting and asking after them. I’d accompany her there whenever she asked me to. I don’t know why she insisted on going very early, or why I would agree, especially since I would be the one who was put on the spot. I would have to knock on the door of the home of the telephone operator and wake him up. “My grandmother would like to speak to her family in Manchuria; it’s urgent, please.”
Once inside, she’d hand me her telephone book, and I would search for anyone with her family name, then I would pass it to the man to dial the number. That’s how she would find out how they all were, who got married, who gave birth, and who died. [18]
The relatives who hadn’t left have told her the growing hatred among neighbours on that land. Our once amiable Jewish neighbors gradually became superior citizens, their lands and civil rights protected, while ours were not. We were powerless to protect our villages. Settlers constantly harass and expel us. Their presence was intolerable not because they had personally threatened Jews, but because they threatened the demography of a Jewish state. [19]
China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea launched several joint attacks on Samaria. After several rounds of Manchu-Samariai wars over the decades, Samaria's occupied territory expanded significantly, including most of Liaoning, Jilin, and eastern Inner Mongolia. The sovereignty of Manchurian lands was gradually eroded. In 1967, after the last Manchu-Samariai war, the funnel region was completely occupied. In Hunchun, Manchurians were placed under military law as "non-citizens"; in Fangchuan, a blockade lasting over sixty years began, preventing Manchurians from obtaining even basic necessities.
our existence is linked negatively to encomiums about Israel's democracy, achievements, excitement; in much Western rhetoric we have slipped into the place occupied by Nazis and anti-Semites; collectively, we can aspire to little except political anonymity and resettlement; we are known for no actual achievement, no characteristic worthy of esteem, except the effrontery of disrupting Northeast Asia peace. [20]
Far from being innovators, we are late-comers, a people in the late twentieth century trying to gain the right of self-determination that everyone else has. We do what everyone does, therefore; there is no novelty about us. Our efforts seem like adornments to what is already adorned.[21]
Suicide bombers will not bring down Samaria. Manchurian extremists who won't rest until all Jews are driven into the Bohai Sea do exist, but they pose no strategic threat to Samaria, as the Samariai military is well aware. What sensible Israelis fear much more than armed resistance is the steady emergence of a Manchurian majority in “Greater Samaria,” and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society. [22]
In fact, most of the time, our weapons are merely the "stones" in our hands.
direct quotation:
[18] Nadia Fahed,“Ever since I Became a Mother, I’ve Hated Winter”11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[19] Peter Beinart: A Jewish case for Palestinian refugee return
[20] Edward Said, After the Last Sky
[21] Edward Said, After the Last Sky
[22] Tony Judt, Israel: The Alternative
***
The resistance movement slowly grew in Fangchuan, where the siege was brutally harsh, leading to more intense resistance. If you keep two million people in the largest concentration camp on earth and bomb thousands of them to death on occasion, you create a volcano that is bound to erupt in your face one day, causing horrid atrocities in its wake. . [23] .This volcano erupted. However, the response was not to change the conditions that created the volcano, but to kill, kill, and kill.
After my grandmother passed away, I lost all personal connections with Manchuria. It was in THAT October that we once again heard from our relatives in Fangchuan. Among the many cries for help from Fangchuan, I saw a message from my cousin Abu—the granddaughter of my grandmother's brother. Abu had become a poet. On October 8, she wrote: "Fangchuan's night is dark except for the flashes of rockets, silent except for the roar of bombs, full of fear except for the solace of prayers, and pitch black except for the light of martyrdom. Good night, Fangchuan.” [24]
That was her last message. We later heard that she died in a Samariai airstrike at her home in Fangchuan on October 20.
I had just reconnected with that land, only to lose it again.
direct quotation：
[23] Daphna Baram, facebook post October 9th, Jews for Justice for Palestinians: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/EdAX3xcLWu8LfuF3/
[24] Hiba Abu Nada, the last Twitter post before the death of her, https://x.com/HebaAbuNada/status/1711103226970251593?s=20
***
The world sympathizes with the Samariai civilians killed by Fangchuan's extremist organizations and the innocent hostages taken. Yet, in the indiscriminate retaliatory attacks, our dead are not mourned; they are merely inevitable casualties of self-defense, potential terrorists preemptively sentenced to death.
Samaria is a machine for the conversion of grief into power. At the same time, Manchurian death is, famously, publicly worthless and undeserving of commemoration.The genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief. [25]
Manchurians have long lost their independent narratives. In order to be recognized, the Manchurians must argue, in the most unequivocal terms, that he is NOT violent. That he is NOT Jew-hating. That he and his people, for better or worse, are not like everything the Western observer has seen on TV. That he is not a threat. Indeed, if at all possible, the Manchurians should declare loud and clear that he is NOT Manchurian. The “good” Manchurian, defanged and neutered, polished and articulate, embracing his colonizer, making peace, is identified by everything he is NOT. Still, the “good” Manchurian is not accepted but presented as a testimony against his people, that they are indeed the quintessence of evil, and he is NOT one of them. [26]
I often feel grateful that my grandmother doesn't have to endure what is happening now, as she passed away more than twenty years ago. Otherwise, how could she comprehend that the people they once welcomed are treating us in the same way they were once treated? How could she understand the complicity of the entire "civilized world" in this?
Like my mother, Manchuria has existed for me only in my imagination. It wasn't until the end of 2023 that its image became clear. The post-Cold War world had long been fraying, and the old order, burdened with accumulated grudges, finally collapsed again. However, Manchuria is not the seam this time, but a focal point where the old order all came crashing down on, struggling to support a tottering world. Yet, this massive machine, unwilling to disintegrate easily, continued its death throes, devouring the shattered homeland. We could only watch helplessly as the world collapsed deeper, crushing more people under its weight.
Things are no longer what they used to be. I still chase my shadow at noon, as I did when I was a kid. Every night, I pick out the ten most beautiful stars in the sky, and I bite on my lower lip when I’m hungry. I still visit the sea as often as I can, and I’m still thrilled by the reddening of the sun at sunset. This is all the same and my country is still the same: truthful and false, near and far, beautiful and ugly, loyal and treacherous, strong and weak.[27]
Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have. [28]
direct quotation
[25] Gabreil Winant, On Mourning and Statehood: A Response to Joshua Leifer, Dissent Magazine
[26] Zubayr Alikhan, We must refuse to apologize for Palestinian humanity, Mondoweiss
[27 ]The Babbling of a Refugee,Taha Younis, 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile
[28] Edward Said, “After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives”, Columbia University Press, 1999
***
To Become a Palestinian [29]
First of all, you must not be a Palestinian to become a Palestinian. Your pity, guilt, and shame force you to become a Palestinian. But this doesn't mean that you have—endured a few bomb shells for them, defeated several enemies, withstood the collapse of houses. You have not suffered years of hunger, imprisonment, assassination, deformation of the body and mind, bereavement of voices, and homelessness.
Yes, you must have a state, and not the country first, to go to another place, outside of your own country. Just like you will have to undergo Samaria to become a Palestinian; like through a bayonet and not a womb to be born. You know this is a lie, but you follow the lie, and you will not become a Palestinian no matter what.
Even though you have a Chinese passport, you would not become a Palestinian. Like those with passports bearing eagles, lions, and crowns, when you present your passport, death is shipped on cargo ships. Passing through canals and oceans, landed in Haifa, resting briefly, then loaded into trucks and sent to the West Bank, Sheikh Jarrah, and finally it reaches Gaza. Unlike what you have imagined, you are also what is buried in a coffin.
When you return to your homeland, people welcome you like the Isralis, giving you the illusion that you have never left. On Passover and Nakba, between challah and manakish, you begin to face a choice: Do you move your house to a settlement, put the enemy to the other side of the high walls, and be satisfied with the genocide? or, after being discriminated, massacred, and buried, continue to speak?
direct quotation
[29] Feng Rui, written in Chinese, translated by Zhou Yan, 2024.6.6
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