The Chinese

Despite my disappointment with academia and the situation in Brazil, other things did fill out my days for the past month in Brazil: helping to host three chinese visitors, who are spending one year with the MST in Brazil. They arrived through Sao Paulo but came to Brasilia soon to learn Portuguese at the Catholic Church´s Missionary Cultural Center, where they are used to giving crash courses in Portuguese to foreigners who need to quickly engage with Brazilian society. This was arranged by Paulinho, who straddles both Church and Movement, but since he was in Europe for the first month the chinese were here, he asked me to help translate and take care of them. I agreed with much excitement.

We showed them around town, they were hosted at Paulinho´s house by the rest of his family of friends, who are also my closest friends in Brasilia now, and they were taken to visit camps and settlements around the Federal District and surrounding region. I also brought them over to my house sometimes to see a different class neighborhood, experience, etc. There were many things we did together, many great conversations, about the land issue in Brazil, China, Taiwan, the rest of Asia, Latin America and the world, other political issues, many other social and cultural issues, religion, food, music, history.... So much that, unlike my previous blog entry, on this one I must admit I didnt not write much because I was too ´busy´ with my activities in Brasilia to make time to sit and write. Unfortunately, it is also too much now to ´catch up´ in any significant way, so I will only highlight a few events and a little something about each of the three.

They have Portuguese classes during the mornings, and most afternoons free, which they end up studying language, watching Brazilian movies, or sometimes going on some outings or just resting. They visited Pipiripau twice, at first more officially, going around to a few families and seeing a formal meeting, the second time we went there to work on the land of our friends who will be living in nucleus 16 (Luiz and others from Paulinho´s family, and other organizers from the national office), and ended up having lunch with the community and taking our siesta at Netinha´s house. They also visited a settlement on its two-year anniversary, Eldorado, and a few others on the region. That was a great visit because of the celebratory situation, and also because a UN/FAO delegation was going through the settlement as part of a weeklong visit to Brazil to report on the right to food to the commission on human rights. They made a very short visit, clearly, and although their work is similarly superficial, they seem to be providing, at least, generally positive reports on the situation in Brazil - that is, condemning what is to be condemned and praising what is to be praised, generally, with some complications.

The best times and experiences I had with the chinese, however, were in more personal interactions during our field visits, translating for them, and also there in town, going out for food, drinks, film, meeting university professors, or just spending good quality friend times at my house, at our friends´ house in Sobradinho, or at their school (where they also reside).

Sit Tsui is the only ´real´ chinese of the three, and even then, she is actually from Hong Kong, but taught at Shanghai and currently at the Univeristy of Beijing. She teaches cultural studies and rural sociology, and works with peasant women in organizing themselves through handcrafts and such work. She is very involved in the research and process of ´a new socialism for the countryside´, a policy of CCP since 2004, in addition to having done work elsewhere in Asia, such as India. She is the most ´academic´ of the three, which sometimes raises discomfort on the other two, but I can relate with her as well because of this... her questions, which I´ve had to translate many, are the most systematic and structured ones. She really does field work. After all, she is doing a post-doc in social movements and the agrarian question in Latin America! She, as with the others, is being funded by the HaoRan Foundation, a make-me-look-good institution for a fucked up construction development corporation in Taiwan... They hosted, however, the Via Campesina to talk about the current economic crisis last year, where Latin American peasant movement people made the contacts that is resulting in their visit now to us. Sit Tsui will return to Sao Paulo after Brasilia to do some more research and work with the MST´s national college, named after Florestan Fernandes, and from there she is still to decide where to go.

Ming Hsien is Taiwanese, very Taiwanese, and also the only one who has any peasant background. The oldest son of a peasant family from northeast Taiwan, he went to college in Taipei and stayed there working with labor movements, to which he is still attached. He is also the oldest of the three, the one with most language difficulties, but also the one who is most excited about children and most adventurous to deal with Brazilians and make his way around. He even prefered to move out of the Missionary Cultural Center to go live on his own at the Movement´s lodging in a satelite city of Brasilia! Being a social movement organizer and not an academic, as well as a pro-independence Taiwanese (still of Han ethnicity, but Taiwanese for a few centuries already), he is often at odds with Sit Tsui. After November, however, they are going separate ways, as he is going to Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais, where the MST has a strong urban presence and where new labor movements are gaining strength. Hopefully he will learn more Portuguese now that I am gone and he can no longer get English (or often, English-with-Mandarin) translation.

Xiao Ta is the youngest of the three, and one that goes between them in many ways. She is Taiwanese, but her mother´s family emigrated only recently, with the Guomindang occupation during the 50´s, so she speaks more Mandarin than Taiwanese at home. Also, her father is a prominent labor movement organizer, while her mother is a prominent university professor. Both are very politically engaged, and she was raised in the struggle all along. But, being this new, apathetic generation of ours, she has always had to play mediation roles between generations within the movements, as well as in other ways (as between Sit Tsui and Ming Hsien, since she, after all, speaks both Taiwanese and Mandarin, identifies as being from Taiwan but culturally chinese, etc.). She graduated with a history degree, but went on to work with labor movements in many ways... played and sang in a workers´ band known in such circles, helped found and organize a documentary film directors union (since she also makes documentaries herself), and was a major force in the sex workers´ movement in Taiwan, serving as secretary of their union until she came to Brazil this year. Unlike the other two, who have clear interests in rural sociology and land issues and fomrs of social movement organization (Tsui and Ming Hsien), Xiao Ta is currently with less specific goals and broader horizons... In a way, she needed to get out of Taiwan for some time, but, given who she is, she doesnt just go on vacation backpacking... she writes grand proposals and takes on a project like this one of working for international solidarity! Just before, for example, she undertook a similar, but shorter project investigating community currencies and barter systems in Mexico and Argentina, and since she had also lived in Guatemala for six months working with sex workers, she speaks relatively good Spanish and has far greater ease speaking Portuguese than the other two.

It also turned out that Xiao Ta and started liking each other a lot....

...but soon I had to leave for Peru and Bolivia. When I come back to Brazil, however, I will do some more traveling, and she will likely be in Paraná, so I might go see her there, and travel some with her. That would be good.