DATELINES
Steif, Jack Miller, Chris Bright, Jessica Jiji And Dennis Bernstein, And William
Rural Exchange Program Makes Links LA VALLE, WISCONSIN John and Jean Kinsman have raised ten children on a 150-acre farm, making a solid living without having to sell their souls. While Jean...
...I couldn't find a bed with a mattress...
...He only made a few dollars a week," Wing recalls, so it was a struggle just to keep everyone fed and clothed...
...She says armed men terrorized her children...
...But what turned this gentle farmer into an activist...
...In some ways, things are worse now in Mississippi and other parts of the South than before the civil-rights movement in the 1960s," he continues...
...At $500 a head by 1903, the charge was more than an immigrant could expect to earn in two years...
...It raised public discussion about the limits of obedience...
...They milk between thirty and forty cows and sell high-quality breeding stock...
...But without his secure farm base, he says with a smile, "they would have shut me up long ago...
...We take hundreds of gallons down every year, and it raises the spirits of the people so much to have their places brightened up and looking good...
...We had obligations to declare our oath [of loyalty] to the state but we also had obligations as democratic citizens with consciences to protest the bombing of Beirut in which many civilians died...
...There was no supervision or inspection...
...Under Uy's leadership, the organization has maintained a commitment to nonviolence...
...So what good would the repayment do at so late a date...
...In Montreal, Wing says, "When I came there were 3,000 Chinese and only a few were women...
...from more than 81,000 Chinese—and this at a time when it was paying Europeans to settle here...
...Spiro points out that many Israelis had "vested interests in the territories...
...So we don't have the time to leave our 'Comfort Zone'— to risk looking stupid as we make some mistakes while taking a vulnerable stand with these oppressed...
...The Exclusion Act and other anti-Chinese laws were also the basis for more systematic discrimination...
...Uy's first encounter with the death squads came in 1983, after the husband of Evelyn Neri, one of her co-workers, began to suspect it was Uy who had influenced his wife to pursue a life of activism...
...And I figured out that I had been poisoned by farm chemicals...
...Since 1984, the Council has been campaigning for the return of the tax money...
...An Israeli Draws the Line JERUSALEM Gideon Spiro is a fifty-three-year-old decorated Israeli soldier who says he's "a bona-fide Israeli patriot in the establishment...
...Urged on by student activists, she and several of her colleagues created new courses dealing with such issues as nuclear proliferation, workers' rights, the rights of tribal minorities, urban poverty, and women's issues...
...Jessica Jiji and Dennis Bernstein (Jessica Jiji and Dennis Bernstein are producers of "Con-tragate, "a daily report on U.S...
...While we wring our hands, our best allies will have fallen because they had no help...
...The intifada "killed the legend of our liberal twenty-year occupation...
...What "came to the surface," says Spiro, were "killings"—between 300 and 400 Palestinians, many of them children and women, died in the first year—and thousands of "administrative arrests without court procedures, torture, brutality, a hundred [Palestinian] homes destroyed...
...Uy remembers a seventy-two-year-old woman whose two sons were castrated and beheaded, apparently for their support of Uy during her 1987 run for congress...
...Wing remembers that the Chinese themselves considered it just "another phase of discrimination: They don't want us here, and we can't protest because it's their country...
...And yet they are so rich in life...
...We were treated like animals...
...We started a petition to [Prime Minister Menachem] Begin," says Spiro...
...If we sit by and let them lose the battle, we have already lost our battle...
...Israel is a nuclear power with 200 atom bombs today...
...During my visit the garage was stacked high with cans of paint...
...they made threats against them and vowed to kill their parents...
...When people are pushed to the wall," says Uy, "they have to defend themselves...
...This confrontation, apparently meant to intimidate Uy, has only helped solidify her commitment to social justice and equal rights in the Philippines...
...The girls were being followed by armed men on motorcycles who would point at them and wait for them at the school gates...
...He was born in Berlin, brought to Israel at the age of three by his father, a physician...
...Whenever I recall this experience, even now, I still feel hurt...
...support...
...Besides the tax itself, Wing describes a sort of bribery surcharge which regulated time in detention...
...Despite the threats, though, Uy plans to continue her work with Bayan...
...He says they're growing because "we're now reaching the Algerian Syndrome—France recognized it was time to negotiate after a million casualties...
...That got me to thinking...
...He was a complete stranger to me...
...At the time, Canadian citizens were subjects of the British Crown, but the Chinese, who were legal residents, could not apply for citizenship...
...The two older children, committed to the communist cause, never came...
...National survival is always an excuse for so-called patriots," Spiro says...
...But how long, he asks, can Israel control 850,000 Palestinians on the West Bank and 650,000 in Gaza...
...And the bullets that killed Uy's dogs and wounded her husband carried the red markings of ammunition issued by the military...
...With this land, they can't touch me...
...At the funeral, the mother said she was going into the hills to cook for a guerrilla group newly formed to fight for social justice...
...The second visit by vigilantes came in the summer of 1987, and Uy was not at home...
...The Kinsmans' involvement in the Mississippi-Wisconsin exchange—called Project Self-Help and Awareness—began twenty years ago through their oldest son, John D. Kinsman, who was then a student at the University of Wisconsin and active in the civil-rights movement...
...Virgin Islands...
...Wing did finally become a citizen in 1948, a quarter of a century after his arrival...
...I realized that the very sick society I was talking about in the classroom was indeed very real," says Uy...
...Wing himself may be the youngest: "I'm seventy-six and I don't think there's anybody younger than me...
...military bases in the Philippines—the widespread prostitution and ill treatment of the women drawn into it and, even more disturbing, the rampant spread of AIDS in areas near the bases...
...Chinese Head Tax Haunts Canada MONTREAL When Ng Wing Wah arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1923, he wasn't thinking about his place in history...
...Bayan has taken the lead in documenting the negative social impact of U.S...
...I could imagine that because they were dragging my third son around...
...The medical people wouldn't admit it, but there was no doubt...
...According to human-rights groups, killings of leftists or people perceived to be leftists have dramatically increased in the Philippines in the past year and a half...
...He took to fighting them on a series of issues, most recently on a new technique whereby bovine growth hormone is injected into cows to get them to produce more milk...
...The best thing about the land, Kinsman says, is that it's "too tough to lend itself to big, industrial farming, which means that the big boys really don't want our land, and that has probably saved us...
...In twenty-some years, the project has arranged exchanges involving about 4,000 people—whites, blacks, and a few Indians (Wisconsin Win-nebagos and Mississippi Choctaws...
...Uy's problems began at the University of San Carlo, where she was teaching anthropology with an eye to the practical problems in Philippine society...
...He worked for a decade as a civil servant in the education ministry and then became a journalist, covering the United Nations in New York...
...For one thing," he says, "I've always had a strong sense of justice...
...When lack of work forced Wing back to China in 1932, he married there and the couple had the first two of their four children...
...It was an illegal war and it was our duty not to accept an illegal order to participate...
...Yesh G'vul now has 600 active members...
...Under the Exclusion Act of 1923, the Chinese became the only group ever barred from Canada as a people...
...With a talent for research and organization, he has more than held his own in head-to-head confrontations with the chemical companies' scientists...
...And he notes that Israelis "have to be very sensitive to the argument that soldiers can't hide under the curtain that we received an order...
...Sadly," he wrote me recently, "the press and those in power have lost interest in the 'farm crisis' and have moved on to more exciting things, intimating that the crisis is over and things are getting better for farmers...
...When I disembarked at Vancouver, I was immediately taken to a building not far from the wharf...
...Uy says the situation has further deteriorated since November, when Cora-zon Aquino's government outlawed Bayan and a number of other social-justice organizations actively opposed to the U.S...
...it's not fighting to defend our borders...
...In 1987, Uy ran for the Philippine congress...
...Looking back on those difficult years, Wing says, "It's hard to redress the suffering which they inflicted upon us, but what they could do now is refund the head tax to the victims...
...But he returned to Montreal alone in 1936...
...It would not be human just to stand around and watch while your family and friends are killed...
...During Christmas and Easter vacations, college and high-school students from Wisconsin make trips of five to ten days to Mississippi, working on home improvements and community buildings...
...How cruel can they be...
...For us, the occupation only brutalizes the occupiers...
...Some Israelis, in fact, would call him an outcast...
...Wing was admitted as a student, the only immigration category still open to Chinese, but his first lessons had nothing to do with school...
...Filipina Activist Fights Repression NEW YORK CITY "They killed our president, they killed our secretary general, and Bayan did not just fold up," says Zenida Uy, current general secretary of Bayan, a Philippine social-justice organization with three million members...
...Children stay with host families for two or three weeks, and many lasting friendships are born...
...While Jean Kinsman anchors the home and is active in church and community affairs, John has used their farm base to confront the agro-industrial complex—and, at the same time, to coordinate an exchange program between white Wisconsin people and black people in rural Mississippi...
...It is always a life-changing experience to get to know and love these people...
...foreign policy and covert action on WBAI in New York City...
...He says, "I'm committed to the state of Israel but not to an empire...
...Lean Alejandro, Uy's predecessor, was hacked to death in September 1987 by a government-supported vigilante group...
...The Israeli military, says Spiro, "should not be committed to oppressive police work...
...There wasn't a lot of opposition to the occupation even among peaceniks...
...Although problems in Wisconsin are much more subtle than in Mississippi, John Kinsman has deep concern about the future of family farming here...
...Cheap Chinese labor had been essential to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, but a few months after the last spike was driven, the head tax was in place...
...Their home is in a conservative, hilly area near the small town of La Valle, about halfway between Madison and La Crosse...
...We have built some deep and lasting relationships with these people in Mississippi," Kinsman says...
...The result: 150 reservists were tried by court-martial and jailed, and 500 more were "exempted" from Lebanese service...
...The immigration service had never welcomed women, and the Chinese here had always lived as bachelors...
...Seven of her campaign workers were assassinated...
...The whole task of social change does not rely on one person's activity...
...Nobody seemed to be concerned how we fared...
...He says the Palestinians are engaged in "a legitimate struggle...
...We pretend to be the little baby in the Middle East, but we are the Goliath that could drag the whole world to catastrophe...
...We were only young kids...
...They also haul such items as beds, blankets, tools, building materials, clothes, books, and gifts of food and toys for Christmas...
...They are on the battle line...
...And then, when I was a young farmer, I got seriously sick, hospitalized...
...The organization then became quiescent...
...But since then, a new process has started, with the rise of religious fundamentalism and secular chauvinism...
...Finally, it was clear that our presence on the West Bank has a very heavy price...
...They killed the family dogs and shot her husband at close range, even after everyone's hands were raised in surrender...
...Over time, until the borders closed, the Canadian government collected some $23 million ($18.4 million U.S...
...The paint we get donated from paint companies," he explains...
...Our society is so out of balance...
...A few thousand reservists signed...
...We don't leave ourselves any time, he said in his letter, "to use our talents to help those who are much more oppressed than we—our brothers and sisters who are red, who are brown, who are in prison, who are homeless, who are elderly, or who in any way were not born into the advantages we take for granted...
...Since then, we have farmed without chemicals, and it has done wonders for the soil, for the animals, and for us...
...No law allowed it...
...For the current Israeli leaders, he adds, the signs of U.S.-Soviet rapport are "a big tragedy" because that might mean the end of $3 billion to $4 billion in yearly U.S...
...The military denies any connection to such vigilante activity, but those who have disappeared frequently turn up in military detention...
...One was shot down in front of her house...
...Evelyn Neri was gunned down and killed after the attack on Uy's family...
...Nobody had a wife over here and I couldn't bring mine either...
...I didn't have any hope of that at the time...
...If I had a job somewhere, they would have found a way to silence me or get me fired...
...We white folks here in the North are materially rich but culturally deprived...
...Today that sum represents an investment value of about $896 million, according to a study commissioned by the Chinese Canadian National Council...
...Those who paid less were locked up for three and those who paid nothing were in for a month...
...The limit, for Spiro, is that a soldier "must not participate in the violation of human rights...
...Because we are just a bit further up the hill, and we are next on the battle line...
...The men ransacked the house, says the Filipina activist...
...Separation from one's family, already a fact, was now mandated by law...
...presence in the region...
...But the banning and the vigilante violence have caused a number of members to consider joining the communist New People's Army...
...But the Act didn't arouse much controversy, even among those most affected...
...William Steif (William Steif a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, is a free-lance writer based in the U.S...
...I was put into a very large hall, and it was locked with some sort of sliding iron bar...
...There's a terrible political and economic repression going on, and it's led by the white plantation owners and their cronies...
...Some do, to his face...
...They told them, 'Don't worry, we will find your parents.' " The Uy family was forced to abandon their home and remove their daughters, aged nine and thirteen, from school...
...His wife joined him four years later, with their third child...
...More than fifty of Bayan's regional leaders have been assassinated or have disappeared over the past two years...
...I fear the direction in which Israel is moving...
...Saving the money to pay Wing's head tax, plus travel expenses, was an extraordinary accomplishment...
...Continuing reports of the murder of her colleagues in the Philippines and the dangers of returning home have forced her to consider extending her stay indefinitely...
...But today he's no longer part of the establishment...
...Those who could afford to pay $100 were locked up for just a week...
...That's a recipe for fascism...
...Neri's husband, an officer in the Philippines' Military Intelligence Group (MIG), was furious...
...He was also one of the last to pay the head tax, an entrance fee imposed exclusively on the Chinese...
...Spiro's group is not the only one thinking this way...
...The reason...
...Ten members of Bayan have disappeared since the ban, and death threats against Uy and other activists are now commonplace...
...Spiro is a co-founder of Yesh G'vul, which translates from the Hebrew as, "There is a limit...
...Some host families have the same children back every year and keep them for the whole summer...
...During the summer months, the project runs two big old buses, which are maintained by Kinsman and his sons...
...So we used his comforter as a mattress and we used my woolen blanket to cover...
...Some, like Spiro, believed the invasion "was a violation of all international norms...
...We called it the Golden Mountain," Wing says, but Canada actually had precious little to offer its Chinese immigrants...
...I went to RCA and they told me the same thing...
...Wing's father arrived in 1913 and supported his family by sending home most of the proceeds of his restaurant in Montreal...
...In some families, the project now involves a third generation...
...Wing was ten years old when he arrived to join, he says, "a father I had never seen, because I was born in 1912 and he left in 1913...
...The West Bank and Gaza Strip were a source of cheap labor and a market for exports, "following well-known colonial principles...
...The only such tax in Canadian history, it was enacted in 1885...
...The recent settlement with Japanese-Canadians interned during World War II (See "Canada Settles an Old Debt," November issue) and some attention to the head-tax issue during last fall's election campaign offer hope that people like Wing may finally get their money back...
...Partly this comes from my Catholic upbringing...
...My father could only afford $50, so I was locked up for two weeks...
...Soon after, Uy's family was visited during the night by five armed men...
...We slept together to keep warm...
...Thank God even at that age I had enough sense to team up with another boy who had a cotton comforter...
...There was a question whether our ideas should apply to the West Bank and Gaza Strip," says Spiro...
...The movement was a new phenomenon in Israeli society," Spiro says...
...I could take all the blows," she says, "but imagine all the children kneeling, holding the legs of the military men...
...Before the intifada—the Palestinian uprising that began on December 9, 1987-"the situation was not so clear-cut...
...Jack Miller (Jack Miller is editor of North Country Anvil, a Minnesota-based magazine in which a longer version of this article has appeared...
...It was the end of an illusion...
...Her activism continued—as did the harassment...
...Adolph Eichmann also said he obeyed an order, that he was 'only a soldier doing my duty.'" Spiro says Yesh G'vul "contributed an important part to growing Israeli opposition" to the Lebanese invasion and to the eventual withdrawal in early 1983...
...But with the intifada, Spiro says, Yesh G'vul was again relevant...
...With a house heated with wood from their farm and a big, lush garden, they manage to live well and prosper on a farm well below the size and scale the experts say is needed for survival...
...The Kinsmans are fourth-generation dairy farmers...
...At that time, a couple of hundred thousand Israeli reservists were called up for General Ariel Sharon's forces...
...He believes family farming is in danger of becoming extinct, the result of longstanding national and corporate policy to eliminate all but large farm operators...
...He names others: The 21st Year, Peace Now, Down with Occupation...
...Yesh G'vul, he says, "came into Israeli life due to the invasion of Lebanon in mid-1982...
...Wing, now retired from a position at Marconi Canada, recalls an example from his job hunt in 1942: "Northern Electric wouldn't hire me because I wasn't a British subject...
...Several hundred more have been "exempted...
...And he worries about the indifference people show not only to the farm crisis but also to those who are discriminated against...
...Detention was every Chinese immigrant's first stop, and the conditions were not good...
...From 1948 to 1967, we looked for peace...
...What it's doing is pure Pinochet-type work...
...In the first year of the intifada, fifty-one reservists have been tried by court-martial and jailed for refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories...
...The experience also made Kinsman suspicious of the advice of corporations and their government and university allies...
...Chris Bright (Chris Bright is a free-lance writer in Montreal...
...But 1923 was the year Canada closed its borders to Chinese immigration and so James Wing, as his Western friends now call him, was among the last to be granted entry...
...I knew what terror meant, and I knew if this could happen to me, a professional, it must be happening to many other poorer families...
...He went to a kibbutz high school, volunteered for an elite paratrooper unit, fought in the Sinai in 1956, in East Jerusalem in 1967, and again in the Sinai in 1973...
...About a dozen exchange trips are made each summer, organized on the basis of sixteen "sister counties" in the two states...
...I wish they would act quickly while some are still alive...
...James Wing says simply, "It would be my happiest day to have it refunded to me...
...She is currently on a speaking tour of Canada...
...The poverty among our friends in Mississippi is desperate, and—in spite of the impression you get in the media—it has been getting worse...
Vol. 53 • April 1989 • No. 4
