S3E7 - The Benevolent Association (Hop Sing Tong)

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Chris: Alright, I assume that we're recording because you didn't tell me that we're recording, so for real now. It's showtime, baby.

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Kayla: How'd you know I was recording?

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Chris: Because I always know you're. When you're recording. I just know. Also, I'm just gonna keep saying it's showtime, baby. Just over and over until.

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Kayla: Why are you obsessed with that right now?

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Chris: I don't know. It's kind of just in my head. Can you. Can you give me like a. Like a Wayne's world? Like. And five, four.

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Kayla: For what?

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Chris: You know, the countdown thing.

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Kayla: My hands down to what?

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Chris: Countdown to being on air. We're live. Countdown to it's showtime, baby.

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Kayla: It's showtime, baby. You don't get a countdown. You just gotta be ready.

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Chris: Okay, well, always be ready. I am always ready.

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Kayla: Go.

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Chris: I'm ready to podcast at any given moment in time.

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Kayla: Okay?

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Chris: This moment, the last moment, the next moment, this coming moment, these moments, like tears in the rain. I am ready to podcast.

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Kayla: It is not like tears in the rain. It is like tears in rain. Get it right or pay the price.

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Chris: What's the price?

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Kayla: I don't know, but there is no extra. The don't misquote improvised line from Blade Runner.

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Chris: One of the most beautiful improvised lines in the history of cinema. Welcome to culture. Just weird. I'm Chris.

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Kayla: I'm Kayla. This is Rucker Hauer. He's here too.

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Chris: He's here in spirit of, I have, I think, a pretty exciting show for you today.

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Kayla: Ooh. Why?

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Chris: I don't know, it's just.

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Kayla: How dare you?

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Chris: Why would you do that? I decided to buck the trend of culture just weird. And actually do some exciting material that people might like.

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Kayla: What do you mean exciting?

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Chris: It's got twists. I don't want to spoil it, but it's got some dramatic elements to it.

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Kayla: You kind of seem like you're ready and raring to go.

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Chris: I am ready and raring to go. Any business or banter that we want.

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Kayla: To cover before we have a business?

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Chris: Oh, we do. Holy shit.

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Kayla: We have a business about our Patreon.

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Chris: We do.

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Kayla: Www.patreon.com cultorjustweird.

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Chris: That's right.

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Kayla: Where you can check out bonus content, outtakes, cute little video game sprites from the Zumba video game we're gonna do one day. You can read our scripts, you can take polls, lots of stuff going on over at the Patreon.

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Chris: You can comment at us and we will reply back. Although to be fair, we will also do that on Twitter and Instagram anywhere else. True, but whatever.

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Kayla: But the business we have for our Patreon is that we are restructuring our patron tiers in the upcoming group. So currently we have four different patron tiers. And we kind of think that's too much gatekeeping.

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Chris: Yeah. Cause it's like tears in the rain.

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Kayla: It's like tears in rain. There is no second thought.

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Chris: Sorry. No, the tears. It's Patreon tears in rain. And we're just gonna wash away some of them.

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Kayla: We're gonna wash away some of these tears. We don't wanna have so much gatekeeping going on. We're going to slim it down. We're gonna streamline. I think we've decided we're gonna have two tiers. So just like a little baby. One for each eye, one tier in the rain for, you know, if you just wanna, like, dip your toe in the culture's weird, Patreon waters. And, you know, another tier for. If you're absolutely obsessed with us, you're hardcore, you know, hardcore just like us. So if you are a current Patreon patron, keep an eye out for those changes. And if you are interested in joining our Patreon, becoming patrons, you can go to culture. Just weird. Wait, no. Patreon.com culturejustweird.

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Chris: Yes.

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Kayla: You can go now and subscribe and then we'll change the tiers. Or you can wait until we change the tears and rain and then subscribe then.

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Chris: Yes. And we also need to catch up on something that we promised a patriot tier that we did not do. So we will do that next episode. We're going to catch up on our shoutouts. So there's like a bunch of subscribers that we have that we owe some shout outs, some. We said we'd do some public shout outs on the show.

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Kayla: We owe shout outs.

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Chris: I think it's probably too much to do a shout out every single episode because that would. That would get pretty spammy.

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Kayla: But we will make.

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Chris: We will definitely do the shout outs for. Yeah, for that tier or for those folks.

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Kayla: Keep an eye out for those changes to our Patreon, which I think will only make it better and brighter.

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Chris: Yeah. And I think we've been doing a pretty good job this season, bro.

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Kayla: I made bonus content, video games, brights.

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Chris: And we have a video. We do have actual honest to goodness video.

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Kayla: Guys, we found Tartaria.

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Chris: Yeah, Tartaria all around Los Angeles. So go check it out. It's. Yeah, there's some good stuff there.

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Kayla: There's some good stuff there.

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Chris: Or don't check it out and just listen to the podcast and enjoy it because that's the main thing that we want you to do.

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Kayla: Absolutely. So that's enough about our Patreon. Just wanted to give that quick little business update. But right now I'm just excited to hear what your exciting topic is because you've been a busy little beaver the last couple days, just really digging into this research and this script writing. I want to know what you've uncovered.

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Chris: Well, first, thank you for the business. Thank you for giving us the business, Kayla, as always, we all appreciate it. And I have one more this is pseudo business, but I want to start today's episode. Before we get into the meat of the topic, I do want to just say something real quick about the stop anti asian hate movement. I don't really have anything in my script about this. It's more just off the cuff and I just want to acknowledge it and say that it's an important movement that's happening in the US right now. And there's lots of important things going on. So it's really hard to keep track of this stuff. But just as sort of like, I don't know, like a tribute or dedicate or whatever, this episode is maybe semi dedicated, if that's a thing, to that movement.

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Chris: And we will put a link to stop Aapi hate.org. I mean, that's the link. We'll also put it in the show notes, and I'll probably post it on Twitter as well. That's an organization that was actually started last year in 2020 in response to some of the anti asian hate that was cropping up as a result of, unfortunately, the pandemic and the way that it was handled in China and then responded to here. And, and discrimination cropped up a lot based on primarily on our, the United States response to where the pandemic originated. And of course, there's a lot of history behind, you know, our discrimination there, which actually we'll be talking about in a little bit. But I just wanted to dedicate this episode sort of to that. And we'll put a link.

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Chris: But yeah, so that organization was started last year that there was a group of folks that asked the government to start tracking anti asian hate crimes, and the government declined to do that. The United States government declined to do that. And so they started doing it on their own, which that aspect of sort of like mutual aid, grassroots, you know, the asian community helping itself when no help is given is something that will get to that. But yeah, so I'll put a link in our show notes. And you can go there. There's a donation button, there's a newsletter, but primarily it's there to help track anti asian hate crimes. And they're a good group. So that's my extra business.

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Kayla: Good business.

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Chris: Are you now ready to get started? I was born ready because I don't really have another good place to put the cold open music, so it's going here. How about that music?

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Kayla: Please just go with darkness.

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Chris: Go.

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Kayla: Oh, my God.

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Chris: Kayla.

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: Predictably enough, we are starting this episode of mine again with a question.

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Kayla: I got answers for days, so put.

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Chris: Your thinking hat on. I'm about to do the thing. Snug that you totally love. I know you love it when I put you on the spot.

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Kayla: Just ask the question, Mandy, my question.

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Chris: For you today is, in your opinion, what is a government?

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Kayla: Don't think I don't think about this a lot.

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Chris: I'm sure you do.

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Kayla: It's a made up.

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Chris: You think about a bunch of dumb shit all the time, as do I.

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Kayla: It's an entirely made up. It's a tulpa.

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Chris: Government is a tulpa. Okay.

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Kayla: Basically is.

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Chris: I kind of mean, like, what is the nature of a government? Like, what is the. What is it for? Like, what does it do?

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Kayla: A government is the body that has either taken power or had power bestowed upon it in order to organize a group of people in a society.

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Chris: So, like, that meme. This is a society, yes, but it.

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Kayla: Is the group of people that are in charge of making that happen. And that can, you know, be authoritarian, where it's like they just decide, or it can be representative, which ostensibly we're supposed to have, but I don't know.

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Chris: Do you think we could. You could have even a society that could even exist without a representative democracy? No, I don't know. Like, a society of humans. Could a society of humans exist without a government?

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Kayla: I mean, there are historically groups of people who believe.

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Chris: So.

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Kayla: I mean, that's like, we make fun of anarchists, but silly anarchists. The anarchism is very much about that. And I think that it's a little bit of. We kind of folks who aren't anarchists or who don't engage with that far left of a political viewpoint, maybe think of anarchists as just like, yeah, burn it down. And then we all just, like, run around beating each other with baseball bats.

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Chris: I've seen the purge. I know how it goes.

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Kayla: That's not necessarily. It's not generally what most anarchists are advocating for. It's more about self regulation. Amongst communities rather than a governing body regulating communities.

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Chris: So you would say that some folks would argue that you could have a society without a government. But it sounds like you're also saying that depending, maybe if you define it more broadly then, or at least you would say that the aspects, some of the things that government does currently would still have to be taken care of as a service. Sort of what you were saying there about like, you know, the self regulation and the self, you know, the mutual sort of aid and that sort of thing.

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Kayla: Right. I don't know enough about, like, the anarchist school of thought to say whether or not I think. I don't know, I guess, is my. I don't know. I don't know enough about.

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Chris: Yeah, well, this isn't really about anarchism.

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Kayla: To say whether or not you can have a governmentless society, probably. I mean, like, you think about uncontacted tribes. I don't know if they have governments. You know what I mean?

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Chris: Yeah, well, I guess it depends on how you define it. But this is. Yeah, this is less about commentary on anarchist movement and more just like, you know, getting your brain thoughts about what government is and what services it provides.

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Kayla: I think it would probably do all of us a lot of good to try and envision a world with a type of government very different than the one that we have just for the. Just for. Just to reimagine what we might be capable of, instead of just like, well, this is what it is.

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Chris: Yeah. Obviously, I had to write some stuff down here just so I had my own ideas and so I could respond to you. I think that I, in my mind, and this is, again, I am not a scholar about this sort of. I'm not a political science major or recipient of any sort of degree in political science. This is just my own ranting. But I feel like to me, there's three elements that are, like, if you just really boil it down and strip everything away, like, what are the fundamental essence?

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Kayla: The judicial, the executive. And the third one that I never remember.

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Chris: Third one. Legislative.

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Kayla: Thank you.

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Chris: That's because they don't do anything. Oh, zinger. Get dunked on.

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Kayla: Big anarchist.

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Chris: So for me, the three elements are the creation and enforcement of rules so that a society can actually function. Right. So in our case, that's law enforcement, that sort of thing. I think a second.

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Kayla: Cops.

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Chris: Yeah, cops. Yay, cops.

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Kayla: So you think you have to have cops?

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Chris: I don't think you have to have cops. I think you do have to have a set of rules that people agree on, and there has to be a way to redress deviance from those rules and from agreements that people come into with each other.

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Kayla: Gotcha.

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Chris: I think the second element would be mutual aid. So in our society, that would be things like Social Security or welfare or food stamps or whatever.

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Kayla: Can there be a society where you don't have those things, but people's needs are still taken care of?

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Chris: I think so, which is why I say mutual aid and not like government services.

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Kayla: Gotcha.

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Chris: Right. I'm trying to be like, as neutral and broad with these things, thinking about these things as I can.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: And I think that. And that's also on purpose, right. Because we just talked about, like, you know, in anarchist society, if you still have mutual aid, if that still is a necessary service for humans to have to live together, then is that still a government or no? I would almost say yes. Like, if I'm. If you're defining it as broadly and neutrally as I am, I would say yes. And I would even say that in that society, you still need rules, right. You still need a way to enforce agreements between people when there's a dispute. Right. People will always have disputes. Good faith, good natured people that are acting and what they believe is their, you know, their truth will still have disputes.

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Kayla: Okay.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: Is this, is this topic whether or not the US is a cult?

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Chris: Yeah, we're finally doing it. No, you always actually, capitalism's a cult. Capitalism isn't a government, bruh.

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Kayla: Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

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Chris: Capitalism is in a economic system. Anyway, my third element was just, thank.

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Kayla: You for mansplaining that to me.

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Chris: Well, appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, you know, you're kind of slow, as our listeners know.

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Kayla: So is that really what you want to say on our podcast?

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Chris: Huh.

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Kayla: Yeah, you're a nice guy. Go ahead, mister judicial. I would say mister pro cop over here.

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Chris: Now, do you understand what economics is?

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Kayla: Do you want to sit in here and talk?

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Chris: I'm making fun of myself.

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Kayla: One could make an argument that capitalism has become our system of government, sir.

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Chris: Okay, sir. Let's move on, sir, because we don't have time to talk about the political corporate environment that we find ourselves in. The third one, I was just, again, this is just me, but I think that a government also has to in some way offer or promise power and rewards to the governing class in exchange for the risks of leadership and security roles. I feel like that is something that has been present throughout most of time. Right? Like a king or a queen is not just a king or queen because of their servant leadership role. They're also a king or queen because, ooh, that's powerful. And that's, you know, I want to pass that down to my lineage. And there's.

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Chris: There's this certainly this, like, personal power element, even in today's, you know, I say king or queen, but, like, you know, are people running for president because they truly want to serve society, or are they doing it because it's like, sweet post presidency book deal prestige? Right, right, exactly.

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Kayla: I think that for, in order for us to get to a place where we function more harmoniously as a people, figuring out how to have that power beverage as little as possible, that power, that prestige, that fame, that wealth, probably behooves us to make sure that's not too big of a piece of the pie.

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Chris: Yes. And I also want to say no, like, yes and no. So the way I see it as that third element is not so much. I think power is a type of reward that has been offered to the tribal leadership historically, whether that's a president or a king or a chief or whatever. Right. But I do think that there needs to be some sort of reward, some sort of incentive, because being in a leadership role actually does tend to be risky, and it does tend to, you know, it's its own service that's being provided. So there needs to be some sort of, like, reward in exchange for that. Now, it's, you know, obviously, like, unlimited and eternal power over your fellow humans is nothing, not great, the best reward to have. But I think that is an element.

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Chris: Anyway, all that discussion, I want you to just keep it in the back of your mind that absolutely rock solid definition that we just came up with as two highly qualified political science researchers. As we dig into today's topic, is it in the back of your head?

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: It's. Honestly, it went one ear and right out the.

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Chris: Fell out of the back of your head?

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Kayla: No, I'm just stuck on the reward thing.

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Chris: I mean, that's just me. Like, I don't know. I didn't read, like, on the nature of government. Like, I didn't read, like, plato's Republic or anything. Like, to eww, who reads? I'm sorry, but I had to do a lot of other reading for this episode.

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Kayla: Let's crack out a copy of anarchy, state, and YouTube.

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Chris: Speculating on. Right. Speculating on the nature of government for reasons that will hopefully become clear later. All right, but in order to dig in today's topic, let's start at the logical starting place and time, the big Bang. The date is May 27, 1644, my favorite date. And things are about to change at Shanghai Pass. Shanghai Pass is a key strategic point along the great wall abutting the Bohai sea on the eastern edge of China and only about 200 miles from China's historical and current capital of Beijing. On this day, when spring was giving way to summer in China, another transition was also about to take place. The Battle of Shanghai Pass is considered to be the decisive engagement, and that's among a huge network of events spanning from around 1610 to 1680.

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Chris: But this battle is considered to be the decisive engagement in the fall of the Ming dynasty in China, in the victory of its successor dynasty from Manchuria, the Qing. Kayla, by now, you surely know, if not the topic, at least where I got the idea for this topic, right.

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Kayla: I absolutely know what you're talking about because I pointed it out and I said, what's this? You should look it up. Maybe it's a cult.

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Chris: Yeah. So let's catch up our listeners. Until a few days ago, I was all ready to go with a different topic other than this one, but I, like, I wasn't super happy with it. Like, it was interesting, and I may still do it again in the future, so I'm not gonna say what it was, but the story, just, like, it wasn't popping out at me the way that I usually like to have it do, you know? But luckily, I was saved by the bell as Kayla and I here were taking a lovely walk through Chinatown in Los Angeles, and we totally had one of those, let's call it a best friends moment, where you just see something that makes you go, huh? What? Wait, what is. What's that? There's definitely more to this thing than I just saw that meets the eye.

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Chris: I can just tell you smell it. And for those of you who are not long time listeners, best friends. I call it best friends moment because that was our first episode. That was the first thing that got us into this. And we had one of those moments where were like, something about this place feels a little odd. We were volunteering there.

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Kayla: It's animal sanctuary.

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Chris: There's some conversations we had that perked our ears up, and there was, like, a weird logo that was going on that best friends has. The fact that it's called best friends, now that I think about it, is a little. I don't know. Anyway, we had one of those moments for Kayla and I the other evening as were walking by a building with a brightly green colored sign, a peculiar yellow logo, and calling itself a benevolent association.

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Kayla: I love that phrase.

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Chris: Specifically in this case, the topic of today's show, the hopsing Tong Benevolent association. But, Kayla, I digress. Let's get back to 17th century chinese history, shall we?

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Kayla: Sure.

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Chris: So we left off with the Qing dynasty supplanting the Ming, which had ruled China for nearly 300 years prior to its fall in 1644. One of the many interesting things to appreciate about the Ming dynasty is that it was a sort of native nationalist ruling class. The Han Chinese, which, broadly speaking, consider themselves the sort of like true native Chinese, were the ruling class in the Ming dynasty. Now, keep in mind here we are applying modern western exonyms, even like the word China is like a western word, obviously. And when the people that lived in what we'd call China, they were hugely diverse, both in terms of ethnicity, nationality, geopolitical organization. So the words we're using here, even like Ming, Ching, Chinese, whatever, they're very sloppy to use.

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Chris: There's a lot more precision that we could apply here if we had the time, but we're just going to sort of power through. And also, I don't have the historical chops to go into those nuances in real detail, but I just want to say that as like a disclaimer that these words are broad and sloppy when we're using them here in the west in 2021 on this podcast.

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Kayla: Dan Carlin, if you're listening, please help Dan Carlin do a supplemental episode for us.

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Chris: Yeah, for real. So, broadly speaking, the thing to understand about the Ming is that they were sandwiched between Mongol rule of China. That is what Han chinese people would have considered outsider rule, and Qing rule of China, who were a manchurian people. And Han Chinese would have also considered outsider rule. So why do I mention all of this now? Qing, by the way, might have disagreed with that, right? They might. They. And in fact, there's, you know, I read some stuff about, like, the way they consider, like, the way the different groups considered what was really China and what was like outside of China, what was inside of China. There was a lot of. There was. There was disagreement about that among different groups of. But why do I mention all this?

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Chris: Well, to introduce you to the idea that the Qing dynasty faced a substantial internal opposition to their rule. Of course, this opposition wasn't entirely ethnonationalist. It would be irresponsible to suggest that it wasn't entirely just Han Chinese saying, get out of our lands. That was only one element. But here, let me read the Wikipedia entry for and this is. The entry is anti qing sentiment. So the opening entry for that reads, anti qing sentiment refers to sentiment principally held in China against manchur rule during the qing dynasty.

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Kayla: How are there Wikipedia pages on shit that was going on in the 16 hundreds? You know what I mean? It's insane.

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Chris: Well. Cause it's history, and so. Wikipedia has a lot of history. Stuff that's been. Wikipedia has everything.

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Kayla: History's crazy, guys.

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Chris: So it refers to the sentiment principally held in China against manchu rule during the Qing dynasty, which was criticized by opponents as being barbaric. The Qing was accused of destroying traditional Han culture by forcing Han to wear their hair in a queue in the manchu style. So a queue is like, if you imagine, sort of like the bald front of the head with the long, like, ponytail. That's a qu. It was blamed for suppressing chinese science and for causing China to be transformed from the world's premier power to a poor, backwards nation. The rallying slogan of anti qing activists was. And I'm totally gonna fuck this up. Sorry, but fun Qing fu ming, which translates to oppose Qing and restore Ming. Oh, yeah. Pretty straightforward in the broadest sense. An anti qing activist was anyone who was engaged in anti manchu direct action.

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Chris: This included people from many mainstream political movements and uprisings, such as the Taiping Rebellion, the. And I'm gonna fuck up some of these, too. Sorry. Xinhai revolution, the revolt of the three feudatories, the revived China Society, the Tangmenghui, the Panthei Rebellion, the White Lotus rebellion, and others. Now, anytime you have a regime change, you're gonna have loyalists. That's just human nature at any time throughout history. Right? Ming loyalists sentiment, however, was robust and long lasting, as you can tell just from that short list of rebellious movements I just read. The white Lotus rebellion. The last one I read is particularly interesting because of its instigators, the white Lotus society. And it's not just interesting because magic the gathering has a black lotus. Gotta bring up magic the gathering.

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Kayla: How does that have anything to do with anything that you're talking about right now?

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Chris: This is white Lotus. I had to say black Lotus. Black Lotus is the most expensive magic card. It's like the most famous magic card we know, sir.

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Kayla: Anyway, get back to your script.

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Chris: Fine.

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Kayla: I need to know how what was going on in the 16 hundreds relates to the building we walked by in Chinatown the other day where I said, what is that? It has a members only sign. And you googled it, and then your eyes went all big and you tucked your phone quickly in your pocket and went, oh, that might, that might be a topic.

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Chris: Well, let's keep talking about the White Lotus society, then, which was a secret religious society favorite that appealed to Han Chinese. And in case it wasn't obvious from their rebellion, they weren't too fond of Qing rule. Now, in case it isn't obvious, we could do a whole podcast series on, like, pretty much every single sentence I've said so far in this episode. You could do a whole series on mongolian rule of China, on Ming rule, on the Qing, on those transitionary periods, multiple episodes of opposition to the Qing, on the White Lotus Society. All of these things individually are extremely deep and complex topics on their own, but we must bravely forge on ahead. So I can answer the question you just asked me.

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Chris: I bring up the White Lotus Society not to talk about them in particular, but to talk about their organizational descendants.

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Kayla: What does that mean?

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Chris: So that's just like successor organizations.

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Kayla: So, like how best friends was a successor to the great example church of the millennium. Like, actually, that.

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Chris: Not as direct as that, I would say. I would say it's more like, I don't know, something like, you know, Freemasonry and the Bavarian Illuminati, maybe. I don't know, something more like that. Freemason's birth, the Illuminati, the Bavarian Illuminati were a organization within an organization.

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Kayla: It was. The Illuminati was in the. Okay, yeah, yeah.

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Chris: So maybe more like that. But it's, you know, there's also, like, there's no real perfect analogy. Just think of it as like a successor organization that borrowed the same, a lot of the same, you know, traditions and same.

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Kayla: The White Lotus had.

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Chris: Yeah, you can think of it maybe a little bit like a Catholicism and, you know, pick your protestant religion. Right. Something like that. Where you have, like, Catholicism and then you have the Church of England.

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Kayla: Okay.

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Chris: Right. Because don't forget, this was also, I said this is a secret religious sect. Right, right.

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Kayla: Secret religious sects.

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Chris: Sex sects. Yeah, there were a bunch of sects, actually. So you could even say sex.

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Kayla: All over the place.

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Chris: One of the most important descendant organizations is called. I've heard this pronounced multiple different ways. So I'm just going to use the one that I can do the best. It's called the Tian di hui, which translates roughly to the heaven and earth society.

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Kayla: I want to be a part of that.

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Chris: They are also called Hongmen, which translates very roughly to vast family. Tian Dihui is sort of like eastern Freemasonry. Just mention that as analogy. In fact, I believe they have actually even been referred to as, like, chinese Freemasons.

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Kayla: Interesting.

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Chris: Now, obviously, freemasonry exists in China now as well.

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Kayla: Oh, it does?

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Chris: Yeah. I mean, freemasonry is global.

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Kayla: Now, I didn't know that.

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Chris: Like, everything's everywhere, but, yeah. So the. So the hangmen slash tiandu hui has been referred to as chinese Freemasons. And actually, I found out in my research, secret religious societies have been historically pretty popular in China, to the point where I even read that some religious scholars consider lumping them together as a fourth, quote, fourth major religious sect in China, next to the big three of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

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Kayla: Wow. So the fourth would just be, the.

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Chris: Fourth would be like, secret religions. Secret religions, secret society religions.

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Kayla: Interesting.

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Chris: Yeah. But back to the Tian de hui in specific, like freemasonry, it's spread far and wide. And when that happens, you get our favorite thing here on the show, schisming and splinter groups. Allow me to briefly quote another Wikipedia entry. Under british rule in Hong Kong, all chinese secret societies were collectively seen as criminal threats and were bundled together and defined as triads. Although the Hongmen might be said to have differed in its nature from the others, the name the three Harmony Society, which was a grouping or splinter, one of the splinter groups of the Tian de Hui was called the three harmony society. And that, in fact, is the source of the term triad, which has since become synonymous with chinese organized crime. Because of that heritage, the qiandife is both controversial and prohibited in Hong Kong. End quote.

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Chris: Just in case you were wondering about the etymology of the word chinese triad.

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Kayla: Just in case you played way too much GTA, right?

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Chris: Or watched a lot of the Hong Kong kung fu movies. But the Hongmen had other legacies other than Hong Kong triad organizations, which finally brings us to foreign shores, or I rather home shores from the perspective of our american listeners. Let's talk a little bit now about the history of the chinese american diaspora. Again, we could fill a whole podcast series with this as a topic. So we're just going to try to hit the main beats here.

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Kayla: We're just zipping on by. We're just kissing everything as we.

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Chris: Super fast.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: You know what we're doing? We're doing a ten k. Like, we're doing like a run, and we're running by all these delicious bakeries with just like hundreds of selections of delicious historical baked goods.

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Kayla: Which one?

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Chris: No, we're just taking a whiff. We're just going, mmm, smell how smelly. Good that is. Mmm. That historical bun.

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Kayla: See, maybe that's what you're doing, but I'm taking a bite.

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Chris: If you're taking a bite, that means that you're sitting here googling while I'm talking to you. Stop.

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Kayla: It's me taking a bite.

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Chris: So, chinese immigration to North America is nearly as old as the european discovery of North America, with the first chinese peoples being involved in mercantile affairs in Mexico as early as 1565. However, the scale of true immigration was actually quite small until the mid to late 18 hundreds. By 1848, there were a mere 325 Chinese Americans living in the United States.

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Kayla: Wow.

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Chris: By 1852, four years later, that number had grown to 20,000.

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Kayla: Dang.

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Chris: If you like gold rush history, or if you're a fan of the San Francisco 49 ers, you might know what happened in America during that time span. The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, kicking off the California gold Rush, which drew many Americans and many immigrants to America, many of them chinese, to the american west coast. By 1880, the number of Chinese Americans had grown to more than 300,000, of which included 10% of Californias population. Now, obviously, the gold rush alone doesnt explain this immigration boom, especially considering the gold rush ended somewhere around 1855. But I think most of us with just even a casual understanding of american history, know that chinese immigrant laborers were instrumental in construction of the transcontinental railroad, one of the United States crowning engineering achievements.

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Kayla: To this day, even I know about that.

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Chris: During this construction, chinese laborers were known for their skill on some of the more challenging and dangerous aspects of construction, specifically demolition and tunnel building. Now, one of the things that I had never considered, but really became apparent to me doing the research for this episode, is that most any immigration story, there was always some pull and always some push. So there's always the destination country and the home country are always things going on. There are always involved somehow in the story of that immigration.

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Kayla: Like a reason to leave and a reason to come.

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Chris: Yeah, and even more than that, like, well, I guess we'll get to that. We'll get to that. For the chinese immigration boom of the 18 hundreds, the pull is what we just talked about, California gold and railroad construction jobs. But there was also some push. The late 18 hundreds saw a decline in power and prosperity of the Qing dynasty in China, which always disproportionately affects poorer populations, causing them to seek survival and prosperity elsewhere. Many chinese immigrants were also driven away by the Taiping rebellion of 1850, which, interestingly enough, was one of the anti qing rebellions. We listed just a few minutes ago in the show. Anyway, as we know, America has always been a land of opportunity that has welcomed immigrants with open arms and treated them with dignity and respect. The end.

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Kayla: That was a sarcasm. That was a big sarcasm, big psyche.

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Chris: It's always interesting to learn about past immigration waves and compare it today because I feel like, and maybe this is just me, but I feel like in the past, like five to ten years, this current immigration panic we've been having, we tend to like, maybe a little bit romanticize the past and think of America as like this welcoming place to immigrants. Because after all, my great grandparents were immigrants.

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Kayla: So, oh, yeah, everything is just like.

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Chris: Everything was named and then you went.

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Kayla: Somewhere and fievel goes west and american tail and it was great, right?

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Chris: And then we kind of go like, why can't we do that today? Why are we such jerks today when were so welcoming before?

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Kayla: Or you get the other kind where it's like, well, my great grandparents came through Ellis island legally, so why can't you?

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Chris: Fact is, we have always had the exact same attitudes towards immigrants here in America.

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Kayla: Has it been the exact same or has it been like the same color with different shades?

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Chris: I think more of that. In fact, what I say next here is, or what I have next here in my script, is that the magnitude and severity of the response has changed. But you can pretty much always sum up the american attitude towards immigration as immigration is awesome until me and my family get here. And then after that, we gotta stop letting people in.

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Kayla: Right?

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Chris: Like, you can pretty much apply that to any period of american history. And like you said, there's different, like, flavors and different magnitudes, different severities.

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Kayla: Who specifically.

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Chris: But it's mostly always mad at.

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Kayla: Yeah, yeah, interesting.

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Chris: And the chinese american diaspora is no different. And in fact, I think you could make a solid argument that no immigrant group to the US has been treated as poorly as chinese immigrants. If you were to make such an argument, you'd probably want to base it on the Page act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882, and the Geary act of 1892. These were multi provisional. They had a lot of stuff going on. But the core of them was that, first of all, the page act straight up banned immigration to the US for chinese women. The Exclusion act of 1882 banned immigration of all chinese laborers, man or woman. And the Geary act extended the time span of the Exclusion act and added additional draconian measures related to citizenship and things like that. Let's hear from Wikipedia again.

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Chris: Passage of the law was preceded by and this is about the Chinese Exclusion act. Passage of the law was preceded by anti chinese violence as well as various policies targeting chinese migrants. The act followed the Angel Engle a n g e l l treaty of 1880, a set of revisions to the US China Burlingame Treaty of 16. There's gonna be a test on this at the end, by the way. You have to name all the treaties in the years they were passed, 1868, that allowed the US to suspend chinese immigration. The act was initially intended to last for ten years, but was renewed and strengthened in 1892 with the Geary act and made permanent in 1902. So this outright ban was made permanent in 1902.

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Chris: These laws attempted to stop all chinese immigration into the United States for ten years, with exceptions for diplomats, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers. The laws were widely evaded. The Chinese Exclusion act was the first and remains the only law to have been implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating to the United States, end quote.

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Kayla: So that's the only time where we've, like, said, hey, this is specifically at chinese people. Like, things where it's like, this is specifically at these countries.

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Chris: This country's right. And you could argue that, like, the, you know, the quote unquote muslim ban from, you know, the Trump administration was ethnic oriented, but in a sense, in.

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Kayla: A technical sense, couched in the language of, like, this is about.

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Chris: Right, it's about these countries. Whereas the Chinese exclusion Act was like, chinese people.

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Kayla: And again, I have to ask, why was this so targeted? Why was this happening?

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Chris: Right. Well, the next thing I have written here is, if you are wondering why all this happened.

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Kayla: Yes, I am. Yes, I am. Wikipedia and Chris Carlson.

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Chris: Oh, then I'm sorry for this next part of the sentence.

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Kayla: Oh, no.

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Chris: Then it's possible you haven't been paying attention to the latest immigration scare in America.

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Kayla: Fuck you.

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Chris: I didn't know you were gonna ask me that. I'm sorry.

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Kayla: Okay, well, I. I've been paying plenty of attention, and that means. That doesn't necessarily mean, like, oh, I know, I can restate that for the podcast. No, it's fuck you. Detailed, intricate knowledge of the nuances of our families.

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Chris: Kayla, we're just sniffing the bakeries here.

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Kayla: Immigrant laborers in the 18 hundreds. I was just hoping. Yes, I can absolutely guess based on the way we have treated immigrants. As the child of an immigrant, particularly.

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Chris: I can't throw that gauntlet down.

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Kayla: I can't guess. But I don't want to guess. I want the person who's done the research. All right, explain to me. All right, what was going on at the time that made it so that this happened? Why was it specifically about China? Can I finish, someone?

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Chris: Can I finish? Can I finish?

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Kayla: I feel like I have to defend myself because someone is writing scripts that are shading me. So let's go.

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Chris: Let's keep our eyes on the prize. I'm going to shade you, probably, no matter what. So I. But I blanket apology about that. Anyway, why was all this happening boiled down to, in the words of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, they took our jobs.

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Kayla: So specifically about the fact that chinese laborers were coming in and being chinese laborers.

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Chris: Yes. So obviously that's an oversimplification necessary to keep this episode length at bay, but that's kind of what most of the stuff always boils down to, right? Such as right now, that's a big concern, is that immigrants are coming to this country and taking jobs of normal, hard working Americans. Blah, blah. Ethnic resentment is extremely reliable throughout history when populations experience economic difficulty. And the US indeed did experience several recessions in the latter part of the 19th century, including one that is currently now called the long depression. That's what I have 1873 to 1896. I think it was technically a recession, but I didn't go into that too much. And this was actually referred to as the Great Depression until the Great Depression. The Great Depression stole its title.

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Kayla: So was it actually a bigger depression in the twenties as opposed to the 18 hundreds? Is there a way to measure that?

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Chris: I believe that there's like. So, yes, there are ways to track that via, like, economic indicators. And I believe that the Great Depression was more severe than. I'm not sure if it lasted long, but it was more severe than the long depression.

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Kayla: Gotcha.

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Chris: So you combine this with a few other factors. Right after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, you have an absolute shit ton of skilled chinese laborers that suddenly have no project to work on. Times are tough, and now skilled chinese labor is taking your jobs. Furthermore, we mentioned before when were talking about the push and pull of immigration, another interesting thing that I didn't realize before doing the work for this episode was that the conditions in a homeland not only affect motivation to emigrate, but they also affect the conditions of the diaspora in other countries.

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Kayla: Oh, interesting.

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Chris: So, in this case, since the chinese civilization was in decline during this time period and was spending all of its political energy on fending off colonization, it had very little diplomatic leverage to counter some of these draconian american immigration laws. So if you've ever wondered, like, why some countries, immigrants are valued more than others. Yeah. Some of it is economic and class resentment. That is like poor people coming over. Some of it is racial resentment, but some of it is also just like the political clout of the immigrants homeland. In other words, the US faces steeper diplomatic economic consequences, for example, for treating french immigrants like shit than it does for treating like, you know, colombian or mexican immigrants like shit.

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Chris: It's also one part of why chinese immigrants are in much better shape stepping on american soil today than they were in the 18 hundreds. So, to summarize, we have a chinese diaspora now that is starting to be discriminated against in some pretty extreme ways at the top of the american government. And this was also true at the middle and the bottom as well. On top of the entry ban for their countrymen, Chinese Americans. Like many other diasporas in America, Italian comes to mind, which you'll see the parallel here pretty shortly faced the dual problem of being neglected by governmental services and also being excluded, and in some cases, violently excluded from broader society. So, Kayla.

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: You remember the first question we talked about at the beginning of the show today.

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Kayla: What is a government?

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Chris: Right. Well, those functions of government that we talked about, specifically rule enforcement and mutual aid, I think, are both critical to the functioning of a community, which is why I wanted to talk to you about them at the top of the show. Okay, so where there's a vacuum of those things, when the greater San Francisco and the greater Los Angeles government neglects or refuses to provide those things, something will pop up on its own.

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Kayla: That is extremely true. And as we know, that is why things like the italian mafia exist.

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Chris: Yeah. As I just said, italian immigrants may come to mind, and you may see some parallels here. Enter to the story, just to go back to that.

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Kayla: The italian mafia started in Italy for these same reasons.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: It wasn't just Italian Americans coming here and not having the scaffolding. It was also the failures in that particular country as well.

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Chris: So there's analogy in the sense that there was a vacuum to fill at this sort of, like, governmental service level.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: But it was also different in some key ways as well, which we will see. Enter the chinese tongs. The word tong is chinese for hall.

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Kayla: Like h a l l, hal.

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Chris: Like a meeting hall.

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Kayla: Okay.

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Chris: Tongs are organizations unique to the chinese diaspora, and especially the chinese american diaspora. They were formed as a direct result of the needs of chinese immigrants to the United States, especially during this time period where chinese immigrants had extreme challenges living here and no other american organization existed that was willing to support them. Here's Wikipedia again. These associations often provide services for Chinatown communities, such as immigrant counseling, chinese schools, and english classes for adults. Tongs follow the pattern of secret societies common to the southern China, and many are connected to a secret society called the tian di hui, which follows this pattern.

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Kayla: This is the dopest thing I've ever heard because it's like a mini, okay. It's a provider of services for a community that needs them and also a secret society. My two favorite things.

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Chris: Just wait.

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Kayla: Oh, no.

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Chris: Other groups worldwide that follow this pattern and are connected with the Tian dihui are known as Hui Hongmen, which we mentioned before, and triads, which, again, broad term, but it refers to other groups that have this similar sort of secret society structure to them. End quote. So for those of you keeping track of the secret society lineage at home, it went roughly white Lotus society, tianjui Hongmen, chinese american tongs.

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Kayla: This is cool.

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Chris: Yeah, this whole thing really tickled my history. Funny bone. And like, that's why, like, when I started reading about it, when we walked by the other day, I was just like, whoa.

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Kayla: Yeah, I have to ask, because here's what happened. We walked by this building. It had the name on it. It said, members only. I went, what's that? And you went, I don't know. And I went, I bet there's something to that. And then we sat down on a bench and you googled it. And then you put it away and you were like, nah, it's nothing. And I was like, I don't believe that.

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Chris: No, no. I said, don't. I said, don't look it up. No, because I wanted to do it.

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Kayla: No, no, you. No, literally, you googled it and went, I don't know if there's something here. You again, you kept reading, then your eyes got all big and you went, don't look it up. Don't look it up.

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Chris: Oh, I forgot that bit.

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Kayla: What made your eyes go big?

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Chris: I mean, any number of the things that I just spent time talking about.

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Kayla: You don't remember exactly what it was?

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Chris: I don't remember exactly what it was, but it might have been this, it might have been the, like, the chain of lineage for like, you know, going back to, like, secret size. I mean, you know that I always like to smuggle history into this podcast anyway.

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: So I'm totally doing that here. Here's another quote about chinese tongs. This time I'm going to read to you the significance statement for none other than the hop sing tong in LA's Chinatown, the one you and I saw the other day. I'm not sure exactly what a significant statement is, but I imagine it's probably something you have to submit to be considered as a historic resource. Where I got this quote, which was the Los Angeles Historic resources inventory on the web. That's historicplacesla.org dot. And by the way, while this particular hop sing Tong is a chapter in Los Angeles, like most larger tongs, it has branches in multiple cities. Boise, Denver, San Francisco, Portland, San Jose, Seattle, and a few others.

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Kayla: Wow.

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Chris: Anyway, the significant statement for the hopsing Tong hall in LA reads as follows. Significant as a chinese benevolent association in Los Angeles Chinatown. The National Hopsingtong Society was established in 1875 in San Francisco. A Los Angeles chapter was in operation by the 1890s.

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Kayla: Oh, my God. Is that old?

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Chris: Yes.

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Kayla: Wow.

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Chris: Chinese benevolent associations are charitable organizations established to provide for the needs of chinese immigrants, such as social welfare and cultural activities, in order to preserve the culture and traditions of chinese people. Benevolent associations were often organized around villages or surnames, serving immigrants who shared a common dialect or place of origin. The Hopsingtong Benevolent association continues to operate at this location. End quote.

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Kayla: So it's been there since. That one that we walked by has been there since 1890?

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Chris: The organization has been there since 1890. I can't say for sure whether that building has, but it actually kind of sounds like it has.

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Kayla: It may or may not. Because the only reason I say maybe not is because I learned today that the original Chinatown that was established in Los Angeles was demolished to make way for Union Station and re established where it currently resides as new Chinatown.

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Chris: In that case, it almost certainly was not there in 1890. It was probably back in the old location.

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Kayla: If I had to guess, before new Chinatown was established there, it was Sonora town, and it was where many immigrants from Sonora, Mexico, ended up.

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Chris: I did not know that.

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Kayla: That's what I learned today.

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Chris: And that's the story of hop Sing Tong. The place we walked by the other day. What did you think? Any questions?

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Kayla: I feel like there's more. I feel like I'm just leaning over right here. What? I'm looking at your script.

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Chris: You shouldn't be spying.

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Kayla: And I feel like you're only halfway through the scene.

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Chris: You should just be listening.

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Kayla: I'm spying, and I, You should actually know.

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Chris: You're just talking. You're just reacting. You shouldn't be spying on my script.

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Kayla: I don't even need to see your script. I know that there's more.

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Chris: What? By the way, that I asked that question.

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Kayla: Just by the way, I know the.

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Chris: World works well, my friend, you are correct.

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Kayla: Oh, my God.

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Chris: For once in my life, this is the first time. Mark your calendar, everyone. But yes, I have not yet gotten to a big part of the story.

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Kayla: What's the big part of the story? Please tell me quickly.

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Chris: A big part? Not the big part. A big part.

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Kayla: Please tell me fast. I need to know.

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Chris: We've already been sort of dancing around and hinting at this, I guess heavily hinting in some cases.

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Kayla: Oh, my God.

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Chris: Another crucial aspect of tongs. Remember when I said a hot minute ago that chinese immigrants and their tongs reminded me of italian immigrants in particular? And you talked about the mafia.

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Kayla: What were we gonna talk about? Organized crime here?

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Chris: It's a familiar story because we've heard it before. An immigrant group comes to America, finds opposition to their very existence, and ordinary government services are essentially withheld. And in this vacuum, something else springs up. The italian mafia also provided crucial immigrant services to early Italian Americans.

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Kayla: Mafia gets a bad rap, you guys.

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Chris: Including government oriented services like dispute arbitration and protection services.

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Kayla: I don't actually think that the mafia gets a bad rap. I just think it gets an inaccurate, rapid.

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Chris: Hold on to that thought for basically this whole episode.

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Kayla: Oh, my God.

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Chris: So the thing is, when you're providing these services, when you're providing something like a protection service, right? It is by definition extralegal in context of the larger society in which they operate. It's very necessary due to the neglect of said larger society, but it is extra legal and like attracts like in that sense of if you're operating extralegally in one area, say, protection, racketeering, you might be more likely to specialize in other activities outside the law. Tongs operated in this way as well, which is interesting because their overseas organizational cousins, the triads, found themselves specializing in criminal activity as well, but for different reasons. I guess they're actually similar reasons, if you broaden that to say, to be like, because they were doing stuff that was either prohibited by law or monopolized by government.

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Chris: So I guess triads and tongs are similar in that way. But, like, the way the british government viewed triads in Hong Kong was different than how tongs got started doing criminal activity in America. Okay, so, yes, tongs provided a bevy of services to chinese american immigrants. Welfare, employment translation, social and cultural connection, even the act of immigration itself. And actually, here's a quick side story about that. There was a practice tongs participated in called paper sons or paper daughters, in which someone in China would adopt the surname of a sponsor in the US in order to immigrate here and bypass the Chinese Exclusion act, becoming the son or daughter of that sponsor, but only on paper, hence paper. Sons or daughters. Tongs also provided mutual aid services that typically the official government would consider monopolized protection and dispute arbitration and enforcement.

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Chris: The protection services, in fact, forced almost every citizen and business in Chinatowns across the US to belong to at least one local tang. And it wasn't long before tangs also began to specialize in other illegal vice activities, especially the big three of drugs, gambling and prostitution.

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Kayla: Are we gonna get in trouble?

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Chris: Let's talk about each of those in turn. I don't know. We might get murdered. We'll see.

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Kayla: I don't want to get murdered.

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Chris: We probably won't get murdered.

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Kayla: Are you going to post pictures of the thing on the Instagram? Should we not? I mean, the sign was there for anyone to see.

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Chris: I think it's okay if we take a picture of a building in Chinatown, but, you know, I don't know. We'll see.

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Kayla: That's Chinatown, baby. That's the line from the iconic movie Chinatown as you'll all recognize it. That's Chinatown, baby. That's the line.

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Chris: So I actually don't have a heck of a lot to say about the drug trade in tongs, other than opium trade was indeed the drug trade of choice, which is where you get the semi derogatory term opium den from. Like the other two major vice trades, the drug trade was extremely lucrative. And in one source I read said that at its peak in the mid to late 18 hundreds, somewhere between 16% to 40% of the chinese american populations of Chinatowns were dependent on opium in some way.

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Kayla: Wow.

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Chris: Why was this the case? Well, remember the page act of 1875 that we mentioned a little while ago?

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Kayla: Do I?

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Chris: The one that prohibited chinese women from immigrating to the United States?

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Kayla: Yeah.

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Chris: Yeah. So early chinatowns were what I saw referred to over and over again as, quote, bachelor societies. The ratio of men to women in San Francisco's Chinatown, I saw estimates as low as ten to one and as high as 20 to one.

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Kayla: That's terrifying.

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Chris: 20 chinese men to one chinese woman in these chinatowns. So you have a bunch of male bachelors with money to burn, and one of the things that they burn it on is drugs.

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Kayla: Sure.

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Chris: Which quite naturally segues me to the second big vice trade that tongs were involved in, which was prostitution. Obviously, in a 20 to one situation, there's going to be a very high demand for sex work by the 20 side of the equation. And I say prostitution purposefully here rather than sex work, because let's just say that it was not typically the case that this was something chinese women were doing voluntarily. So forced prostitution, according to one source I read, the sex trade in american Chinatowns was more brutal than your average sex trade of the time, which is saying something. The foundation for the sex trade for certain tangs, which this is probably a good time to bring up that while all tongues were involved in some way and all sorts of businesses across town, they tended to specialize when it came to the vices.

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Chris: So one tong might be more specialized as a gambling hall, where another might be more specialized in, say, the opium trade.

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Kayla: Okay.

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Chris: Anyway, the foundation for the sex trade for such tongs was, unfortunately, primarily trafficking from mainland China and quite literal sex slavery, complete with auction style purchasing of women from China.

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Kayla: Horrible.

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Chris: It was, as we say, not good.

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Kayla: No. And this is why governments should do a good job of taking care of the people that live under them, because otherwise things like this happen.

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Chris: The third major vice trade category is gambling, which is the most complicated of the three to talk about, because the fact is, gambling, much more so than the others, is one of those criminal activities that is especially dependent on social context in chinese culture, particularly southern China. Gambling is not even considered a vice the way it is in America, where we are like somewhat descended from Puritans. It's simply part of the fabric of their culture. One interview with a chinese author that I read for this episode actually had a really interesting insight about this. The following quote is from that interview. The one that I read. The author's name is Bill Lee. He was actually a former Tang and gang member in Chinatown, I believe, in San Francisco. He wrote a book called Chinese Playground, a memoir about those experiences.

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Chris: Heres what he has to say about chinese gambling culture. There is also the fact that gambling is very prevalent in chinese culture because it has always been accepted and perceived as a social activity. Thats where you go and gather with friends. The other part of it is that especially in southern China, most people from that region tend to be very poor farmers. Things are so unpredictable there that you could build your home and plant your crops, and a typhoon or a monsoon comes along and wipes everything out. You have to start from scratch. My own theory is that when you have those types of challenges, you also have the dynamics of gambling being acceptable. People tend to be very superstitious. There's not much they have in the first place, and they're very willing to try their luck. End quote.

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Chris: It's such a neat little insight, isn't it?

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Kayla: Yeah, that makes sense. You don't hear that kind of take.

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Chris: Yeah, often right here. Right. Obviously, I don't think that's, like, the single one true reason gambling is important to chinese culture. But I think he makes, like, a pretty strong case for, like, that being part of it. In any case, it's this cultural context that makes the illegal gambling aspect of tongs kind of hard to put in an ethical box. Like sex slaves are pretty obviously horrific. But providing a service that has such cultural meaning and provides social glue doesn't sound so bad.

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Kayla: Well, it's like sex slavery, pretty clearly, you are infringing on the rights of a human being.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: Gambling and drugs, less so. Gambling. Especially when you consider gambling with a cultural relevance even less so.

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Chris: Right, exactly. And, hell, if we disparage mahjong, then we also have to disparage Las Vegas. Right.

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Kayla: Well, I mean, I can sit here and disparage Las Vegas, okay.

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Chris: But for different reasons. Not for the craps tables, because it's.

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Kayla: Okay. Let's talk about classic Vegas, kitschy and plastic life with the italian mafia.

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Chris: That's true, too. There you go again with the extralegal, immigrant based crime syndicates. I mean, perhaps we could say that it's worthy of punishment still in this case, because maybe it opens the door for other, more socially negative criminal activity. It's hard, maybe impossible to say. So the point here isn't really to make some ethical call on gambling, but rather just to shine a bit of a brighter and more complete light one aspect of taung activity.

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Kayla: Okay.

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Chris: I'd also venture to say that, as with the protection, racketeering and some of the other extralegal social services that were going on, there may be some chicken egg confusion here with criminal activity. In other words, did tangs broadly engage in criminal activity because they were criminal or criminal adjacent organizations, or did they engage in criminal activity because essential services that they arose to provide, such as protection, were unfairly criminalized?

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Kayla: Right, right.

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Chris: It's a bit of chicken egg. And I think, you know, again, you can say that for other similar organizations, like the mafia, like, there's a lot to criticize. But, you know, if these communities were being taken care of with the expected governmental services from the city of San Francisco or the city of Los Angeles, then would this have even happened?

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Kayla: I mean, it's that you look at the gang, the correct. You look at the more classically recognized gangs of Los Angeles, and those exist for also similar reasons.

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Chris: Right, right.

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Kayla: Lack of governmental infrastructure, lack of social services, lack of this and the other lack of protection. Lack of these groups pop up for reasons that are not entirely like. People are bad.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: Kind of are taught as children.

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Chris: What's interesting to me for that, too, is that I feel like some of the. It's like similar but different. Right. If you. The similar reason is you can't trust the established governmental authority to take care of these needs. That's the similar reason. The different reason, I think, is it feels to me like with Chinatowns, it was more the result of neglect.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: Whereas with, say, like, black communities in LA, it was maybe more the result of the law, of enforcement being like a negative influence. It's not that law enforcement wasn't in watts. It was that law enforcement was there. And you don't go to law enforcement to take care of things because they're worse than the problem, which I would.

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Kayla: Argue is a form of neglect. The needs are neglected just because the needs are neglected. But the needs are still neglected.

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Chris: Yes, but it's a different flavor, because instead of being like, eh, let them do their own thing. There's an active element to it.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: The other problem that black market economics tends to create, as we know, is turf warfare. Kayla, if you and I have a business dispute, legal avenues and enforcement exist to settle those disputes. If you and I have a business dispute, but we ourselves are the legal avenues and enforcement, what happens then? Did that make sense?

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Kayla: Say it again.

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Chris: If you and I have a business dispute, but there's no legal entity above us to help arbitrate. Rather, you and I are the legal avenues ourselves. Like, let's say you're the head of Tang A and I'm the head of Tang B. We're each providing legal, sort of like pseudo enforcement services. But what happens when we have a dispute, right.

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Kayla: There's no board above you.

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Chris: Right. So this brings us to these so called Tong wars.

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Kayla: Oh, no.

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Chris: Which were a long running series of disputes among tangs in every major Chinatown in America. This primarily took place around the late 18 hundreds. And in San Francisco, with the country's largest Chinatown, it didn't cool off until the mid 1920s.

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Kayla: Dang.

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Chris: These disputes were over what you might expect. The phrase I liked from my research was that they called them inter gang grievances, and this was things like disputed payments between tongs or members honor related grievances. So these are things like the desecration of the deceased, which was supposed to be something that you didn't do even in the criminal world or revenge for murdered members. Along with the cooling of the Tang wars, Tang influence in chinatowns in the first part of the 20th century also waned, largely due to the increasing americanization of American Chinese, both from the simple passage of time and also from the ever increasing number of american born Chinese. This all changed, however, with a new wave of chinese immigration to America in the 1960s.

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Chris: What I found super interesting was that just as with the immigration wave in the 18 hundreds, the political and economic situation in both the home country and the destination country were what drove the immigration, both in terms of how and when it happened in China. The cultural revolution of Mao Zedong would be getting underway in 1966. And we don't have the time. Again. Don't have the time to get into it.

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Kayla: That'll be on our spin off podcast.

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Chris: We should be spin off podcast. Yeah. But let's just say it was not great for your average chinese citizen. It was bad times. So there's your immigration push. You also had pull from the United States because the chinese exclusion acts were finally abolished in 1965.

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Kayla: I'm sorry.

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Chris: Yeah, 60. Wait, no, 80 years after they went on that long. 65, yeah, if you were 1964.

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Kayla: Relationship with China. Well into the 19 hundreds, obviously. I just didn't know that the attacks lasted this long.

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Chris: So, yeah, I mean, that's. Again, don't have the time to go into all the details, but it wasn't like that entire 80 year period. There was no change. And then suddenly there was. There were other smaller steps that happened in between. Then, in particular, tricky Dick, were allied with.

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Kayla: When did Tricky Dick come in?

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Chris: Tricky Dick was later. He was, I think, 1970, but were allied with China in the second world war. So there was some. I don't remember exactly what, but some reduction in these horrible anti immigration acts with China happened during that time period. But 1965 was when, like, that act was finally abolished. So what these combined forces give you is a new wave of chinese immigrants. And what's interesting, and also kind of tragic here is that because these immigrations happened in such large but punctuated waves, in other words, you had like a bunch in the 18 hundreds, and then it slowed to a trickle thanks to the racist laws. And then the faucet opened up wide again. In the sixties, you had a large population of americanized and american born chinese people that were suddenly mixing with new immigrants from Hong Kong and China.

408
01:06:23,480 --> 01:07:06,484
Chris: And this created conflict and opportunity and renewed interest and vigor from the Chinatown tongs. They had never fully gone away, but they found a new lifeblood starting in the sixties, which unfortunately went hand in hand with an increase in criminal activity for similar reasons as before, lets briefly talk about San Francisco as an example. The city of San Francisco still basically didnt give a shit about Chinatown or these new chinese immigrants either, and left them essentially to their own devices. So the conditions that gave power to the tangs back in the 18 hundreds were essentially the same. Immigrants still needed support. Citizens of Chinatown still needed rule enforcement and protection and mutual aid. Official american institutions still didnt care to provide any of that.

409
01:07:06,682 --> 01:07:21,760
Chris: So this mix of new immigration wave, plus continued neglect, plus these power structures that the tangs existed within, already proved to be a volatile combination, culminating in San Francisco in an incident called the Golden Dragon massacre.

410
01:07:21,840 --> 01:07:23,400
Kayla: Oh, no, I don't like that word.

411
01:07:23,560 --> 01:07:41,474
Chris: On September 4, 1977, in retaliation for a murdered gang member and a previous dispute over illegal fireworks trade, which, by the way, we mentioned the other three vices. By this time, though, illegal fireworks had become an extremely lucrative trade in San Francisco and other chinatowns.

412
01:07:41,522 --> 01:07:42,990
Kayla: That's really cool.

413
01:07:44,770 --> 01:08:02,228
Chris: Members of a gang called the Joe Boys entered the Golden Dragon restaurant. Their target was the leader of the Hua Ching gang, whom the assassins had been tipped off would be present there during that time. They walked into the Golden Dragon, tragically full of diners, and indiscriminately opened fire.

414
01:08:02,324 --> 01:08:15,720
Kayla: That's not how you a everybody, don't kill people. First of all, that's the stance of the church. Don't kill people. We're anti murder here across the board, but just leave other people out of it, man.

415
01:08:16,580 --> 01:08:44,024
Chris: Yeah. So while there were opposing Joboy and other gang members present, none of them died. Gang survivors said that the difference between them and the rest of the restaurant's patrons was that they had the street instinct to just hit the deck in time, the innocent bystanders were not so savvy or lucky. Five people were killed and eleven wounded in the massacre, which has been called the worst mass murder in San Francisco history.

416
01:08:44,112 --> 01:08:44,899
Kayla: Jeez.

417
01:08:45,359 --> 01:08:48,296
Chris: Which is interesting because I had never heard of it until doing this research.

418
01:08:48,368 --> 01:08:48,979
Kayla: Same.

419
01:08:50,090 --> 01:09:31,448
Chris: In the aftermath of this incident, the city of San Francisco finally started to pay attention to Chinatown and created the Chinatown and what was later called Asian Task Force, which a New York Times article later credited with cleaning up gang related violence in San Francisco Chinatown. By 1983. Knowing what we know today about policing in America, it's difficult to imagine that this was the sole result of said task force. And it's equally difficult to imagine that said cleanup was conducted in a way that was, like, super awesome for the chinese american community in San Francisco. But that's just my own commentary. It's not from the New York Times investigation. According to that, this task force, quote, unquote, cleaned up gang activity there.

420
01:09:31,504 --> 01:09:36,743
Kayla: Yeah. The phrase cleaning up or cleaned up is very fraught and potentially, like, triggering.

421
01:09:36,872 --> 01:10:24,714
Chris: Right. You hear the word cleaned up and you kind of go like, oh, what happened? Yeah, but it's very sanitized. Yeah. So the real shift here was that a, innocent people died, b, some of them were tourists, and c, it really depressed the revenue in Chinatown. So, like, the day after it happened, there was like a mass, like, cancellation of dinner reservations. Like, nobody was on the streets and nobody was buying things. Nobody was like. And chinatowns tend to depend as much as the tangs depend on some of these other, like, vice trades. Chinatowns in general depend on tourism for their revenue and their lifeblood. So this was like, finally a thing where it was like, oh, fuck, we gotta do something here.

422
01:10:24,762 --> 01:11:07,670
Kayla: It's actually something kind of interesting that you'll notice if you, like, google the Chinatown in Los Angeles, is that you'll get simultaneously a lot of hits on, like, Chinatown is a vibrant community with, like, lots of restaurants and places to go out and, like, come visit. And also people being afraid of, like, is Chinatown dangerous? Talking about, like, the quote unquote gang activity in Chinatown, saying things like, oh, you know, this part of Chinatown is safe, but this part isn't, and don't go out at night. So it's like this interesting mix of, like, fear over alleged gang activity, which I don't think. I don't know anything about that in Los Angeles current Chinatown. But you juxtapose that with also the, like, let's have tourists come in and stuff, right?

423
01:11:07,830 --> 01:11:21,990
Chris: My understanding is that is mostly cultural memory. Like, it's mostly historical. It's mostly thinking back to things like, you know, something like the Golden Dragon massacre is going to loom large for a long time in people's minds.

424
01:11:22,030 --> 01:11:22,686
Kayla: Sure.

425
01:11:22,878 --> 01:11:51,868
Chris: But I also got the impression that it's not, like, totally crime free these days. So we'll talk about that a little bit later. But regardless, by the end of the decade of the seventies, the period of gang violence in chinatowns across the US had largely died down either way. Oh, and I neglected to mention one thing about the Golden Dragon restaurant. It was owned by none other than San Francisco's hop Singh Tong.

426
01:11:51,964 --> 01:11:53,068
Kayla: Oh, damn.

427
01:11:53,204 --> 01:12:10,780
Chris: Which was the San Francisco branch of the building that you and I walked by the other day. Not only that, some of the other gang members present were members of a group called the Hop Sing Boys, which was a youth group enforcement arm of the hopsing tong in San Francisco.

428
01:12:10,900 --> 01:12:13,644
Kayla: A youth group enforcement arm.

429
01:12:13,772 --> 01:12:15,640
Chris: Well, that's what a gang is, right?

430
01:12:16,060 --> 01:12:17,044
Kayla: It's just interesting.

431
01:12:17,092 --> 01:12:19,124
Chris: I mean, gangs tend to recruit youths.

432
01:12:19,172 --> 01:12:24,052
Kayla: Yeah, sadly. It's just interesting, too, to see it phrased as youth group slash.

433
01:12:24,116 --> 01:12:26,372
Chris: Well, I phrased it that way, but that's.

434
01:12:26,476 --> 01:12:29,444
Kayla: It's still interesting to hear phrased that way. Yeah, it's an interesting phrasing.

435
01:12:29,532 --> 01:13:06,104
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Let's round out our historical journey of Chinatown tongs by talking about the late nineties and two thousands. I want to bring up the late nineties because, and this is analysis, by the way, that I'm stealing from a national Geographic documentary that I watched about this topic. But there's another example of politics and economics of a home country affecting events in a destination country. In this case, the transfer of Hong Kong from british to chinese rule in 1997 triggered a wave of Hong Kong triads to pick up and move due to their fear of extreme crackdown measures once Hong Kong's laws were being enforced by the Chinese Communist Party instead of the british.

436
01:13:06,232 --> 01:13:07,260
Kayla: Interesting.

437
01:13:07,560 --> 01:13:29,370
Chris: So this led to, like, another mini crime wave in west coast chinatowns in the late nineties. Although to be clear, by this point, we're getting away from talking about, like, tongs and chinese immigration, and we're just talking purely about how geopolitics affects movement of people and organizations and crime patterns. But I found it. Yeah, I found that interesting that, like, those geopolitical events affecting things in this, like, interesting way.

438
01:13:29,830 --> 01:13:33,970
Kayla: You found it interesting that things were affected in an interesting way in this way.

439
01:13:34,430 --> 01:13:35,758
Chris: And I'm gonna cut out that part.

440
01:13:35,854 --> 01:13:36,662
Kayla: No, it's funny.

441
01:13:36,726 --> 01:14:02,736
Chris: No. And finally, let's zoom all the way today, which, for anyone that's too young or that's we're here. Ooh, that's the time travel on culture. Just weird sound. So for anyone that's too young or doesn't remember the eighties and nineties, China was not the economic powerhouse that it is today. China has seen extreme economic growth in the past 20 years, and that has fundamentally changed the nature of chinese immigration to the United States.

442
01:14:02,808 --> 01:14:06,712
Kayla: And our media and government has been terrified of that since it started 20.

443
01:14:06,776 --> 01:14:56,248
Chris: Years ago or before. Not only are there more robust services for newly arrived immigrants than there were in the 18 hundreds, but whereas in the 18 hundreds and 1860s, most chinese immigrants were poorer classes seeking survival and opportunity overseas, in the 2020s, chinese immigrants are comprised more and more of middle and upper class than they have been in the past. On top of that, as we mentioned earlier in the show, the diplomatic clout of the mother country actually has quite an effect on how immigrants are treated here in a destination country. And the scales have tipped quite a bit in favor of China since the 18 hundreds in that regard as well. Altogether, what this means is actually that chinese immigrants now actually primarily don't even settle in, say, La's Chinatown. And existing chinese american populations have also been suburbanizing here in southern California.

444
01:14:56,344 --> 01:15:14,034
Chris: The San Gabriel Valley has multiple robust and vibrant chinatowns in cities like. Like Alhambra, Arcadia, and Monterey park. Again, I have to point out here for the third or fourth time this episode how interesting it is when the conditions in the home country and the destination country have such a huge impact on how and when immigrations happen.

445
01:15:14,162 --> 01:15:14,834
Kayla: Right.

446
01:15:15,002 --> 01:16:03,584
Chris: Anyway, as always, with a change in settlement patterns, unfortunately, comes geographic winners and losers. Today, only Manhattan and Chicago's chinatowns are currently experiencing growth elsewhere. They are in decline in terms of population and economics. This is something that communities have tried to counter in various ways, which I think is a really good thing because chinatowns in America to me, are just like so full of historical magic. They're just rich with historical magic. They have such an important place in this country. So I'm glad that, like, that's, people are trying to figure out how to, like, preserve them, right? In Los Angeles, as we experienced recently, some of this decay has been fought with what I saw referred to as bohemian style gentrification, which means things like artists enclaves and hip foodie joints.

447
01:16:03,752 --> 01:16:25,430
Chris: Of course, this has its pros and cons, but again, I feel like a broken record here. This isn't an episode about the very complex topic of gentrification, so we kind of have to just breeze by it. But what is relevant to this episode is that ultimately taungs are not a central feature of chinese american life the way they once were. And their involvement in criminal activity has waned alongside their prominence.

448
01:16:25,770 --> 01:16:32,650
Kayla: It's interesting because the population of Chinatown is considered to be an aging. Quote, unquote, an aging population.

449
01:16:32,810 --> 01:16:33,250
Chris: Right.

450
01:16:33,330 --> 01:16:53,412
Kayla: And it's. There's actually, there are a lot of localized social movements that are attempting to aid that community. Like the local, for example, the local DSA branch does a lot of work with the aging population in Chinatown.

451
01:16:53,516 --> 01:16:53,924
Chris: Interesting.

452
01:16:53,972 --> 01:17:18,420
Kayla: Or does some work, I don't want to say a lot of work, but does work specifically, just regarding the fact that Chinatown has a lot of, quote unquote, low income housing, and it was originally a place where there was like low income housing. And now that population is aging, there's not a lot of immigration into that part of Los Angeles. So it's just interesting to think about how that might affect that area in 10, 15, 20 years, right?

453
01:17:18,500 --> 01:18:13,172
Chris: Absolutely. Here's an excerpt from an article in San Francisco magazine to help sort of illustrate this whole point. Chao, who was the interview subject of this article, points out that in the past, the chinese cultural tradition of mahjong was vigorously policed for its connection to gangs and gambling. But over time, many of the mahjong parlors were supplanted by out of town casinos just down the street from chows Tong. In fact, a travel agency is advertising casino bound shuttles. As the gamblers went elsewhere, the gangs moved on as well, and law enforcement's attitude toward mahjong eventually relaxed. Other criminal activities have declined as well. Brothels mostly disappeared when prostitution became a largely online operation conducted by independent contractors. Illegal lotteries have been replaced by the state run system, and opium is no longer in demand, though other drugs linked to chinese gangs still are.

454
01:18:13,356 --> 01:18:33,880
Chris: Now, Chow says tongs make their money from the management of their historic landholdings. A Tsingtao Daily reporter says each tang owns different buildings. They make money from renting out their buildings. Some are apartments, others are for business use. And the tangs use the money for the community events, for the seniors and for the chinese people living in Chinatown.

455
01:18:34,410 --> 01:18:37,990
Kayla: Didn't I point at the top of that building and go, is there apartments up there?

456
01:18:38,290 --> 01:18:44,314
Chris: Yeah. So I think, and I mean, I think tongs were also like halfway houses for immigrants for a long time as well.

457
01:18:44,322 --> 01:18:45,310
Kayla: Makes sense. Yeah.

458
01:18:46,530 --> 01:18:56,874
Chris: But, yeah. I got the impression that tonks today are more like masonic lodges, like, ie, like social clubs for older folk more than they are like criminal.

459
01:18:56,962 --> 01:18:57,546
Kayla: Sure.

460
01:18:57,698 --> 01:19:08,588
Chris: Although some would disagree. I've seen it said that just because we don't see illegal activity as much doesn't mean that it's not there. It's just hidden or handled peacefully. It doesn't erupt in violence. So we don't hear about it when.

461
01:19:08,604 --> 01:19:30,550
Kayla: It'S also like the phrase criminal activity is very broad. Like criminal activity can refer to anything extra legal. Like, I don't know, I just, I don't think there's, in the, in current Los Angeles Chinatown, for example, where the population is aging, I can't imagine there's the same level of facilitating the big three vices that we talked about, for example.

462
01:19:30,670 --> 01:19:39,662
Chris: Right. I mean, the quote that I just read was from San Francisco about how those things had sort of migrated away. But I imagine that those patterns are similar in other cities such as our own.

463
01:19:39,726 --> 01:19:40,330
Kayla: Right.

464
01:19:40,910 --> 01:20:12,690
Chris: However, sometimes the violence still does peak above the surface on occasion. As a matter of fact, in the Los Angeles Hopsingtong, the very beautiful building we walked by the other day, that is mostly a place for elderly Chinatown residents, play mahjong and feel at home, was host to a double murder only as recently as January of 2017. The two victims died at the end of a knife blade, and one of them, I shit you not, was the president of that very same hop sing tong.

465
01:20:12,730 --> 01:20:13,510
Kayla: Oh, no.

466
01:20:15,210 --> 01:20:19,722
Chris: If we didn't have our gimmick criteria to do that would have been, like, a good outro moment.

467
01:20:19,906 --> 01:20:32,482
Kayla: Let's skip the criteria. Last episode, we shucked all tradition and declared the topic a religion, so we could just go ahead and just be like, no criteria today. No criteria for this one.

468
01:20:32,546 --> 01:20:42,350
Chris: There are no rules. Do what you want. But that does bring us to the end of the story of hop sing and other american tongs. What do you think, Caleb?

469
01:20:43,090 --> 01:20:44,490
Kayla: What do I think? What's my.

470
01:20:44,530 --> 01:20:47,234
Chris: Yeah, what's your. Quick take.

471
01:20:47,282 --> 01:20:49,106
Kayla: Quick take off the cuff, off the hip.

472
01:20:49,138 --> 01:20:50,530
Chris: Shooting from the hip, shooting from the hip.

473
01:20:50,570 --> 01:20:51,832
Kayla: Off the back. Skin of my teeth.

474
01:20:51,906 --> 01:20:55,340
Chris: How do you feel about no skin off my back? Yeah.

475
01:20:55,460 --> 01:21:12,700
Kayla: Cutting off my nose despite my face. I would say it's not a cult, personally, just without having gone through all of the criteria. But perhaps you can guide us through those steps and stages, and we can arrive at a same or different answer.

476
01:21:12,820 --> 01:21:57,830
Chris: We will get to that. There are a few things that I did want to sort of. I don't really have, like, a well defined script about this, but there are just some bits that I want to talk about, because I do think that there's some interesting sort of, like, themes here to me. Like, first of all, I think it's really interesting that there's these parallels between taungs and other secret societies, right? Like, in some ways, it seems similar to Freemasons in that it's like the social club, right? In other ways, it seems, like, wildly different. In some ways, it seems similar to Mafia because it has these underworld connections. But then, in some ways, it seems wildly different. Cause it's more about, like, they're very specifically, like, immigrant halfway houses, immigrant help. That's, like, why they were created.

477
01:21:59,130 --> 01:22:22,344
Chris: And I also think that, like, there's a big element here of, like, good or bad. Who's to say? Like, one of the points I think I really want to make that I was just sort of thinking about when I was writing this was like, I don't want. I don't want to make a call here, like, oh, man, tongs are bad because criminal stuff. Because the immigrants that they helped, that was a very necessary service that they provided.

478
01:22:22,432 --> 01:22:35,448
Kayla: Yeah. You can't really look at organized crime, particularly in this country, and go, like, that's bad. Without understanding. Like, there's a lot of nuance. There's bad things, there's good things, there's neutral things. It's just.

479
01:22:35,624 --> 01:22:53,910
Chris: But at the same time, I also don't want to, like, minimize victims of some of the things that the tangs were involved in. Like, the golden dragon massacre is pretty bad. And the victims there were, I believe, either four out of five or five out of five of them of the deceased were Asian Americans.

480
01:22:53,990 --> 01:22:54,614
Kayla: Right.

481
01:22:54,782 --> 01:23:07,722
Chris: So, you know, and then there's also, like, all of the victims of the sex trafficking that was happening. So, like, one hand, I want to say, like, man, it's a good thing that they were there to help immigrants and be a, you know, community center.

482
01:23:07,826 --> 01:23:08,186
Kayla: Right.

483
01:23:08,258 --> 01:23:17,122
Chris: But on the other hand, it's like, ugh. But a lot of negative stuff happened, too. Yeah, exactly. So it's just. It's a very complex topic.

484
01:23:17,186 --> 01:23:18,370
Kayla: Fraught and nuanced.

485
01:23:18,450 --> 01:23:18,826
Chris: Yes.

486
01:23:18,898 --> 01:23:20,910
Kayla: And also, new tagline of this show.

487
01:23:23,250 --> 01:23:27,594
Chris: Fraught yet not nuanced. Fraught and unnuanced. We're just a bull and a.

488
01:23:27,642 --> 01:23:30,990
Kayla: Fraught and straightforward as hell, baby. It's Chinatown, baby.

489
01:23:32,120 --> 01:24:08,886
Chris: And then the other sort of big theme thing that I just. I don't know why. I hadn't really seen this as clearly before, but how immigration is so inextricably tied to events in home and destination countries. Sure, right. And, like, when I think about now that I'm, like, looking for it, you kind of see it everywhere. Like, oh, yeah, potato famine in Ireland. Now you have a bunch of people of irish descent on the east coast of America. Right, right. So there's just. It's really interesting how geopolitical events affect the movements of human beings and how they do and who moves where and what happens to them.

490
01:24:09,038 --> 01:24:12,570
Kayla: The United States stages a coup in South America, and suddenly.

491
01:24:14,670 --> 01:24:20,238
Chris: All right, Kayla, before we get to the criteria, gotta do the obligatory interjection of research sources.

492
01:24:20,334 --> 01:24:22,606
Kayla: There we go, baby. This is what I've been waiting for the whole time.

493
01:24:22,678 --> 01:24:28,270
Chris: Yeah, everybody wants the sources. Juicy, juicy administrative stuff.

494
01:24:28,650 --> 01:24:29,722
Kayla: That's me taking bites.

495
01:24:29,786 --> 01:25:36,224
Chris: I consulted the following, of course, Wikipedia articles on chinese secret societies, tongs, chinese wars of conquest, rebellions, criminal organizations, immigration. Just all the things so many Wikipedia articles. Also a website that I mentioned called historicplacesla.org, a place called FoundSF, which is a digital historical archive for the city of San Francisco. Francisco, sanfran.com, the Encyclopedia of Chicago online, villagevoice.com, the SF weekly online archives, mafianj.com, that's New Jersey, NJ, americanhistoryusa.com, comma, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times National Geographics documentary entitled Chinatown Mafia, available on YouTube. Another podcast, the China History Podcast, specifically episodes 171, 172, and 173, which is a three parter on the Taung wars of New York's Chinatown. If you want to get some of the sweet details that we kept saying were going to gloss over in this episode today, this dude goes into details like baller details.

496
01:25:36,272 --> 01:25:50,288
Chris: So it was a great listen if you want a finer grained picture on this topic. And finally, I got a little bit of help from a good friend of mine, Kayla. You know him. He was at my wedding party. I got some help from him on this episode because of his perspective as a Chinese American himself.

497
01:25:50,384 --> 01:25:51,140
Kayla: Dope.

498
01:25:51,520 --> 01:25:58,200
Chris: All right, so is it a cult or not? Take us through charismatic leader.

499
01:25:58,360 --> 01:25:59,340
Kayla: No idea.

500
01:26:00,960 --> 01:26:05,260
Chris: I know. I love that. That was like. It's like, our first criteria, and sometimes there just isn't one.

501
01:26:06,200 --> 01:26:23,226
Kayla: It doesn't seem like there is an overall charismatic leader. Probably individual halls. There may have been leaders that were charismatic, but I cannot say that overall, we can point to a singular charismatic leader.

502
01:26:23,338 --> 01:26:30,202
Chris: Yeah. If you narrow it down to, like, a particular hall or even in, like, maybe a particular Chinatown at a particular time.

503
01:26:30,306 --> 01:26:30,642
Kayla: Right.

504
01:26:30,706 --> 01:26:51,336
Chris: There were definitely, like, mob bosses of some renown that we could have covered in this episode, and we just kind of didn't. Because I think if you think about, like, if the topic is hop sing tong or american tongs, there isn't, like, one single leader that, like. Yeah, exactly. So there's, you know, they've had multiple, like teal Swan.

505
01:26:51,368 --> 01:26:52,184
Kayla: There's no Ramtha.

506
01:26:52,232 --> 01:27:07,066
Chris: Yeah, exactly. So low. Zero. But some of these guys. I mean, some of, obviously the mob bosses are pretty charismatic. Expected harm. There's some expected help, but also definitely some expected harm.

507
01:27:07,178 --> 01:27:17,786
Kayla: Like, we just have expected help be. Cause it's like, again, this isn't. This is. In the context of this episode, this is an un nuanced criteria.

508
01:27:17,938 --> 01:27:18,274
Chris: Right.

509
01:27:18,322 --> 01:27:29,840
Kayla: But I think the answer is. I think at a certain point in history, the answer's high. Maybe now low. So I think maybe we'll just say medium.

510
01:27:30,420 --> 01:27:58,650
Chris: Yeah, it's hard to say. I agree, because as we just got done discussing. You know, they provided all kinds of necessary services for chinese american immigrants, but they also did a lot of harm in a lot of cases. So unclear. I think maybe medium is fine. Medium presence of ritual. So we didn't talk about this a lot, but actually there were some initiation rituals involved because they are secret societies.

511
01:27:58,690 --> 01:28:04,402
Kayla: Yeah, I'm gonna say the secret society is kind of built in, and also, if there's gang activity, it is also built in.

512
01:28:04,466 --> 01:28:24,950
Chris: Yeah. So, like, a lot of triads have initiation rituals. A lot of these tangs had initiation rituals. And I think I would even also point out here that one of the little red flag things, one of the little, like, there's something going on there. Things that we saw was there was a little logo. Remember that little, like, star logo and a members only sign and a member's only sign.

513
01:28:25,070 --> 01:28:26,998
Kayla: So if you gotta become a member.

514
01:28:27,094 --> 01:28:31,766
Chris: There'S probably ritual involved, right? Niche within society?

515
01:28:31,918 --> 01:28:33,130
Kayla: I would say yes.

516
01:28:33,630 --> 01:28:46,014
Chris: Yes and no. I think within larger american society, maybe yes. But if you're. If society is Chinatown, like, where it was operating, then no, then definitely not, actually.

517
01:28:46,102 --> 01:28:54,980
Kayla: But I feel like we're looking at larger american society here. I don't know. What do you think? It's your topic.

518
01:28:57,240 --> 01:29:21,714
Chris: I think that the spirit of this. Of this question is about, like, whether a group of people might see something as being normalized versus deviant. And I think that in order to properly answer that question, I think the right population to ask about is Chinatown, not larger american society.

519
01:29:21,802 --> 01:29:22,154
Kayla: All right.

520
01:29:22,202 --> 01:29:24,270
Chris: Because larger american society at this time.

521
01:29:26,530 --> 01:29:27,710
Kayla: And ask them.

522
01:29:30,050 --> 01:29:50,580
Chris: I think larger american society at the time might have said that, like, Chinatown itself is niche. Like, there's a bunch of american stuff and some of it's chinese. I think that if we're talking about the tongs, I think it's most logical to ask that question as being within american Chinatowns, in which case, I would say not niche.

523
01:29:50,620 --> 01:29:52,320
Kayla: Not niche. Got it.

524
01:29:52,900 --> 01:29:58,788
Chris: Antifactuality doesn't seem like it's there. Yeah. They weren't like. They weren't truth bending. They were law bending.

525
01:29:58,844 --> 01:29:59,480
Kayla: Yeah.

526
01:30:00,300 --> 01:30:23,500
Chris: Life consumption, probably high. Yeah. If you were. It kind of depends if you were somebody that needed them as a halfway house, obviously. Hi. If you were, you know, one of the hop sing boys that had, like, pledged your, you know, your life personhood to. Yeah, to the gang. Pretty high dogmatic beliefs.

527
01:30:24,160 --> 01:30:25,180
Kayla: I don't know.

528
01:30:25,520 --> 01:30:45,292
Chris: I don't like it. I don't think that there. It's. Some of these are hard to answer because being a secret society, it's like, I don't know what went on in there. Like, they played mahjong, I guess. But I didn't get the impression that there were a set of correct insider, outsider type belief systems going on here.

529
01:30:45,316 --> 01:30:45,972
Kayla: Gotcha.

530
01:30:46,116 --> 01:30:58,892
Chris: I know that some of the ancestral organizations were secret religious sects, and they might have some dogma going on, but as far as tangs specifically, they followed the structure, but I don't think they had dogmas.

531
01:30:58,996 --> 01:30:59,460
Kayla: Interesting.

532
01:30:59,500 --> 01:31:02,670
Chris: I think. And then chain of victims.

533
01:31:03,250 --> 01:31:06,034
Kayla: I don't know. I keep saying I don't know. I don't.

534
01:31:06,162 --> 01:31:07,946
Chris: Wow. You are not doing your job.

535
01:31:08,018 --> 01:31:12,466
Kayla: I know. It's just hard. It's a hard job.

536
01:31:12,618 --> 01:31:18,138
Chris: Well, I also. Hold on. I didn't answer all these fully. Like, I didn't tell you about some of the initiation rituals and stuff.

537
01:31:18,194 --> 01:31:21,550
Kayla: So I'm gonna say chain of victims.

538
01:31:22,210 --> 01:31:29,410
Chris: So that refers to recruitiness. Like, does one person recruit another such that we lose track of who's the victim and who's the abuser?

539
01:31:29,570 --> 01:31:37,498
Kayla: I don't get the sense of that, but I do get the sense of kind of, like, if you are somebody coming, if you are someone immigrating, you are going to pass through this place.

540
01:31:37,674 --> 01:31:40,026
Chris: Yeah, I think I'm going to say low here.

541
01:31:40,058 --> 01:31:41,710
Kayla: For me, victim is a hard word.

542
01:31:42,050 --> 01:31:56,314
Chris: I think there was definitely victims. Obviously there are victims of some of the criminal activities that were happening. I don't think, though, that I don't get the impression of, like, chain of recruiting. I don't. I don't get the, like, evangelical sense. Like.

543
01:31:56,362 --> 01:31:57,002
Kayla: Yeah, yeah.

544
01:31:57,066 --> 01:32:03,890
Chris: You definitely had to join a tong at a certain point in time. If you're a chinese immigrant or particularly if you owned a business. Right. You had to join a tong.

545
01:32:03,970 --> 01:32:04,210
Kayla: Right.

546
01:32:04,250 --> 01:32:11,690
Chris: Because you had to have that protection service. But it didn't mean that you had to, like, then go out and, like, evangelize about that tong.

547
01:32:11,730 --> 01:32:15,898
Kayla: Like, three guys to give you money, and then they'll have their downline.

548
01:32:16,034 --> 01:32:26,244
Chris: Right. It wasn't a pyramidal structure. It was a flag. Relatively flat structure like zumba. What do you call it? Hexagon. No, trapezoid. It was a trapezoidal structure.

549
01:32:26,372 --> 01:32:32,780
Kayla: So zumba, the tong halls. Very similar entities.

550
01:32:32,940 --> 01:32:46,354
Chris: Yeah, obviously. So the only one that we really. Oh, actually, no, sorry. We score relatively high on life presence of ritual and life consumption, and then expected harm washing mixed.

551
01:32:46,522 --> 01:32:58,954
Kayla: To me, this indicates we do not have a cult on our hands. Just something, a fascinating piece of history that still has vestiges and appearances today.

552
01:32:59,122 --> 01:33:14,650
Chris: Right. I agree. And I even think that, like, in their heyday, I wouldn't even necessarily call it a cult. I think it's the type of thing that makes the cut for the show for a couple reasons. One is it's like, ooh, secret society. Like, that automatically kind of gets it in the door.

553
01:33:14,730 --> 01:33:15,066
Kayla: Yeah.

554
01:33:15,138 --> 01:33:29,270
Chris: Yeah. And two, it's just like, it was just a really interesting story and really interesting history. So, again, kind of want to smuggle that in there whenever I can, but ultimately, it seems pretty clearly to be not a cult.

555
01:33:29,770 --> 01:33:31,390
Kayla: You heard it here first.

556
01:33:32,570 --> 01:33:35,202
Chris: Yeah. So I don't have anything else. That's it.

557
01:33:35,266 --> 01:33:46,420
Kayla: If you're ever Los Angeles or San Francisco or any major city that may or may not have a Chinatown, go check it out. Eat some food, buy some things, and keep your eyes.

558
01:33:46,460 --> 01:33:49,724
Chris: Check out the Chinatown. The tang is members only, so I don't know if you'll be able to get it.

559
01:33:49,732 --> 01:33:50,420
Kayla: It wasn't done.

560
01:33:50,540 --> 01:33:51,276
Chris: Oh, sorry.

561
01:33:51,388 --> 01:33:55,236
Kayla: Keep your eyes peeled for a interesting building with a members only sign.

562
01:33:55,348 --> 01:34:13,564
Chris: That's right. Well, hopefully you learned some cool stuff here today. And like I said, I will say, I will post a link on the show notes for stop aapih.org. And thank you, everyone, for listening. This is Kayla, and this is Chris.

563
01:34:13,652 --> 01:34:16,180
Kayla: And this has been cult or just weird?