Weaving Solidarity

Marla once likened the process of weaving to the moments in life in which we are brought together and brought apart, thereby connecting us.  In class, we have sought to trace the tangle of connections that connect Canada to Mexico.  However, I am interested in exploring the ways in which the intricacies of daily life are tied to greater social and political struggles, both local and transnational.  If the personal is political, then how can we live the routine of everyday life with purpose?  After all, we live in the commonplace of the everyday, and not in a grand, romantic vision of political struggle.

Yat Ming’s project provided me with much food for thought.  He found commonality, and, I would say, solidarity in the activism of indigenous peoples across Latin America.  He identified with their struggles over land.  For Yat Ming, the mode of capitalism that was dispossessing many indigenous groups of their land was the same as that which was dispossessing many locals of a cherished way of life.  So he began his experiment: for one year, he will not be patron to Hong Kong’s real-estate development companies, and their subsidiaries.  I witnessed Yat Ming’s politics in the details of his everyday life.  He buys his groceries from public markets, not supermarkets; and he uses internet services made available at a municipal building nearby.  He minimizes his use of public transit, opting instead to ride his bike.  This is because real-estate companies own a majority of the shares in the city’s largest providers of household supplies, internet services, and public transit.  Marla has related power as a subtle and insidious thing, and indeed, Yat Ming finds it in the most unexpected of places: in the most intimate, and most mundane spaces of our lives.

Yat Ming lead me to see that undoing privilege is a trying practice, one that involves mindful actions in the mundane routines of everyday life.  Hong Kong’s streets are hostile to cyclists, yet Yat Ming insists, choosing to navigate through unrelenting traffic; through the abuse of irritated drivers.  And to what ends?  The class, and Yat Ming have reminded me that the struggles for social and political justice are not waged in a noble and romantic vision.  It takes place in our everyday lives, in the commonplace, for that is where we write our present and script our future.

Contained in Yat Ming’s act of resistance is an act of cultivation—in the process Yat Ming has fostered a sense of community, albeit small.  I feel that we have done the same in class…and may we continue to build, continue to grow.