Tales of the #fishballrevolution, From Hong Kong to San Francisco, the Friendship and Fighting Tour at Howard Zinn Bookfair San Francisco #Zinn25
I was in town for the Last leg of the Friendship and Fighting tour, the weekend of December 5 to 7 for the Howard Zinn Bookfair at the Mission Center of City College of San Francisco, 1125 Valencia Street. A city that inspired me like few others, a weekend in San Francisco is always a reminder of a far away feeling.
December 5
I woke up at 414 am. Walked out into the darkness to catch the A train to the airport. Homeless people chatting on the train. Listening, I just about forgot my stop at JKF, for the flight to San Francisco.
Traverse the continent, thinking about manifest destiny, revolutions past and present.
Two days before to explore.
Feel the bright sun, grab the BART to the Civic Center, people about, down 7th Street, South of Market, strolling, where Danny Glover is calling for justice for Kevin Epps, outside the court house. On past the Endup, a 70s era late night dance hall, up to Market, people passed out on the street, somewhere between this life and that, past a sex shop, a bored clerk, a few people screaming, a woman in a conversation with the sky, a harm reduction center, past rooming houses, GLIDE Memorial Church, where Cecil used to preach, up Taylor, past street art, a mural declaring, 'Stop plant your feet, this is where I allow our minds to meet, look towards the street...' I see a lot there, people, ideas, history. Walk past the Owl TreeBar on a dive on Bush, closed, onto Dashiell Hammett St, some people walked out of Chelsea Place, a cozy little dive. I chatted with the bartender. 'I've been here for 32 years,' she says. I used to live here, I tell her. Like those people. They used to live here. They come back every year. That's a good life, lots of friends,' she says. I agree. We talk about the city, ever changing. I thank her. Walking up to Stockton looking back down at the city, walking up the street, to the tunnel, over Nob Hill, a porn magazine with photos strewn about the street, into Chinatown, down Vallejo to Caffe Trieste, where I meet brother Ron, from New York. We talk with the woman sitting by us about Patti Smith. Doug joins us, LESC reunion. Down to City Lights, we look at the staff picks, want to read them all, peruse the poetry room. Stop for a pint at Vesuvio, where Doug's friend Scott, the tour guide and I talked about Lawrence who saw the bombings at Nagasaki, on the 9th August 1945, when the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities, rattled he studied at the Sorbonne and opened the bookstore that we all love, next door. We talked about the writers here and his divorce. 'We all live in Herb Caen's San Francisco,' he says to me. I agree.
There are many ways of looking at a city.
But the writers, who listened to the streets scream, they guided us.
Off Noe, Dion meets us, sharing stories about Columbus, Ga, recalling Mom's Moms advice all those years ago.
December 6th
“I met some friends at the Live Worm Gallery,” said Scott, welcoming us for his tour, starting at the Dragon Gate of Chinatown: “Welcome to the cool, gray city of love,” he said paraphrasing, George Stirling, about San Francisco. A best friend of Jack London, he was one of the many, to try to make sense of this strange geography where waves of vagabonds found a possibility, albeit desolate, a coldest winter in the summer. Scott talked about a few San Francisco writers Mark Twain, a few Bohemians, Bret Harte, Ena Coolbrith, and Charles Warren Stoddard. These writers shaped American literature through frontier humor, local color, and unique styles, capturing the spirit of the Gold Rush era, Herbert Asbury wrote The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, a lively account of San Francisco's Gold Rush era, covering gambling, prostitution, and gangs.
Walking through Chinatown, we talked about the history of the city, its Italian and Chinese immigrants, 49ers, and fires that destroyed the city, and what emerged, workers and writers, street murals and merchants, red lights and alleys. Stopping to look at a street memorial, a street band plays, books hanging above the street, a plaque referring to "The Language of the Birds" at Columbus and Broadway, a public art installation in North Beach by Brian Goggin & Dorka Keehn, flying books with quotes from local authors like Ferlinghetti, tracing historical notions of a divine, secret language, hinting at hidden meanings in language and culture. These books hang in time, suspended, as birds in motion, various wing positions created by the forms of the pages and bindings. Passing under, words and phrases embedded in the plaza floor, which appear to have fallen from the pages above, words in English, Italian and Chinese, from the neighborhood’s literary history. There's more to imagine with each step.
We stopped at a park, looking for a bathroom, finding a statue of Sun Yat Sat in St. Mary's Square. An inscription: "All under heaven is for the people" ... "The world is for all, all is for the people" Out for tea, we walk up Stockton Street to the Owl Tree, talking about the world, the Elks club closed, back down to Li Po Cocktail Lounge, saying hi to Scott, our enterprising guide, meeting James, chatting about it all, James pontificating about Jack Hirschman, workers and poets at Spec's Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, a longtime watering hole with a museumlike collection of knickknacks & oddities on the walls across from City Lights in North Beach, laughing with the comedians at the Elbo Room, telling stories into the night.
December 7th
Ron and I listened to Park Avenue Petit on the way to the beach in Pacifica, stopping for a coffee at the Chit Chat Cafe at the Pier on Beach Blvd. And made our way to Valencia Street.
There, Laurie joined us for our panel on friendship at the #Zinnfair2025. With panels on punk and anti ICE organizing, the conversations extended into the evening.
Dan was there talking about Bob Kohler. It was the 100th anniversary of Bob Kohler’s birth, he told me.
I began the panel tracing stories of oral histories I’d collected from San Francisco to Chicago to New York.
There, Laurie joined us for our panel on friendship at the #Zinnfair2025. With panels on punk and anti ICE organizing, the conversations extended into the evening.
Dan was there talking about Bob Kohler. It was the 100th anniversary of Bob Kohler’s birth, he told me.
I began the panel tracing stories of oral histories I’d collected from San Francisco to Chicago to New York.
And I introduced Laurie Wen, my buddy from ACT UP, who would be standing in for Lynn Lewis. I had only seen her once since we all got back from the demos in Hong Kong in 2018 and 19.
“Laurie went to an ACT UP NY meeting originally to do research for a documentary film. She didn't want to leave, so ACT UP became her political home. She went on to organize with Healthcare-NOW!, the Hunger Action Network of New York State, Occupy Wall Street, and Physicians for a National Health Program. She also worked as a policy analyst at the New York City Council, before returning to her hometown, Hong Kong, to participate in the democracy movement. Now based in San Francisco, she's working on a book about the Hong Kong democracy movement. She's active in Bay Resistance, SF Rising, and the Free Farm Stand…”
“How did you become politicized?” Wen asked the audience.
“High school, seeing Trump elected,” said one man in the audience.
“I was in college. People were talking about Pinochet,” said another woman.
“I started documenting demos,” said another woman.
“I’m obsessed with how people become motivated to engage in political action,” Wen followed. In Hong Kong in 2019, two million people out of a population of m seven and half million were involved in mass protests. How were people mobilized on such a scale? From Wen's experience in activism in New York and in Hong Kong, and from her interviews with more than 80 Hong Kongers, she concluded that ideals only inspire action in small groups of people. Action from this small group of vanguards inspires action in everyone else.
In 2014, dozens of pro-democracy high school students sat down in front of the government HQ and began a peaceful occupation. The police responded with tear gas, prompting thousands of Hong Kongers to rush to the scene. "I've learned so much from the interviews, having people share with me how they felt at the moment they decided to run toward the tear gas," said Wen. The oral histories told her that, while the policy goal of the students' occupation was a democratic electoral system, not a single person she interviewed mentioned democracy as the reason they dropped everything to go join the students. Yes, of course, they wanted democracy. But what actually got them to act at that moment was not the idea of democracy. Everyone said they went because of what the students had done, and because the government responded with tear gas. The students and their supporters refused to leave and began an occupation that lasted 79 days, which became known as the Umbrella Movement.
Hong Kongers have been fighting for self-determination for almost two centuries. The British colonized Hong Kong from 1841 to 1997. Then, when Hong Kong was "handed back" to China in 1997, Hong Kong was promised semi-autonomy under the "One Country, Two Systems" framework. But China has broken that promise and has increasingly cracked down on Hong Kong's civil liberties.
During the Umbrella Movement, the mainstream of the pro-democracy camp adhered to nonviolence. Whenever a few people advocated property destruction, they were almost always denounced as infiltrators. Cancel culture dominated. But a year and a half later, during Chinese New Year in 2016, everything changed.
ABC News reported:
Leaders of the Fishball Revolution were sentenced to six to seven years in prison, precipitating a major reckoning. The movement's mainstream started to acknowledge that people with the same goals could genuinely have different ideas about how to achieve them, and that blindly branding those who disagree with you as "infiltrators" would only engender anger and split the movement. So when mass protests erupted again three years later, in 2019, a major cultural shift arose: "Brothers climbing a mountain, each has his own way" became a guiding principle. "Unfortunately, the motto is sexist," Wen said, "but it explains a new ethos, replacing the cancelling culture of a few years prior." A growing faction embraced the idea of "using force to fight (police) violence" and called themselves "the Braves."
The panelists and audience moved on to discuss the current political moment in the U.S. Wen said, "I think of what we're going through now as a dark tunnel. We have no idea how long we're in this tunnel for. Two years? Twenty years? If the Trump administration disappears today, what kind of a world do we have? Meaning, what kinds of cultural values will dominate, and what kinds of structures have we created to build a more progressive future? There are lots of things to do in the tunnel before we get out.”
One kind of structure Wen is excited about is the decentralized organizing model championed by Bay Resistance. Starting in late 2024, Bay Resistance recruited volunteer facilitators to run neighborhood-based action pods. A year later, there are now almost 100 pods. Each has 15-30 members who commit to doing two actions together per month. People internalize a sense of agency through actions.
We talked all afternoon, panel after panel, some recalled the feeling of solidarity of battling ICE. Another recalled being in the kink community, sharing, making food for your neighbor, building community, in the mosh pit, building solidarity, overcoming alienation.
After the panel, Laurie and I walked down Valencia Street, talking about old friends and actions. Laurie wonders when people in the U.S. will rise up. Many she knows in Hong Kong are in prison. Others in ACT UP New York are sick.
We stop for a rice ball, looking at the city, the sun bright, ideas moving forward, the smell of fresh tacos in the air.
And said goodbye.
I walked to 16th, where I drafted my notes about living in San Francisco, three decades prior.
Through Mission Delores, up to the Castro I met Dion after the conference as I always do, enjoying a glass of bubbly.
And made my way back home, traversing a continent.
Back to Baby C, friends and a smile at Big Tiny.
Barbes and my comrades.
Next morning, I pull out my collection of Jack’s poms:
“Like You” by
“Like you Ilove love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.”
