FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

In the past six years that I’ve been a PhD student and academic worker at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), grads have been through three strikes. First, a wildcat, wherein we demanded a cost of living adjustment to keep up with skyrocketing rents, followed by two UC-wide strikes authorized by our union, the United Auto Workers (UAW): bargaining a new contract (2022) and striking for Palestine (2024). Over this period of time, I became a mother. Pregnancy, motherhood, labor and tenant organizing – these are durational projects always in flux, responding to shifting conditions at every scale. While motherhood has informed the terrain of my organizing, organizing has also redrawn the coordinates of my kinships. 

My pregnancy, even if my baby was somehow not all right and maybe not long for this world, could also serve a purpose; I have always been utilitarian minded. My pregnant body, this unborn baby – we could help with optics. At a rally, I was slated to give a speech, but in the fog of pregnancy, not a single thought had come to my mind. I was suddenly holding the megaphone, the Pregnant Striker. I don’t like to be in the spotlight, but it wasn’t about me. I was a cliché. I yelled something about all of us carrying dreams inside of us. It didn’t need to be original; the pregnant striker is a symbol: vulnerable but defiant, heralding new life and a new order to come.

In written Chinese, characters are made up of individual components that each carry meaning. My name, LuLing, is made up of two words, Lu 路 (path or road) and Ling 寧 (peace). Within the word for peace, there is the character for “heart.” There is also a symbol of a roof, which is placed over the heart. These component parts are known as “radicals.” You can think of them as various roots of the word. So, I always conceived of the word radical to mean something anchoring, not something far flung. 

I didn’t feel as if I was doing anything radical, joining hundreds of grads on a wildcat strike. It seemed the only way to immediately start earning the wages we desperately needed to live. And I wasn’t the only pregnant striker: there were Rebekkah and Emma; we were all due within a few weeks of each other. We frequented a prenatal water aerobics class (we basically floated around in a warm pool), and afterwards, we’d migrate to the shallow end to debrief about the strike. The other pregnant women, who chatted good-naturedly about baby showers and the like, eyed us with suspicion – what were we talking about with such intensity? I released my anxieties into the water. My job was simple: stay on strike. In some ways, despite everything there was to do (endless meetings, mutual aid, walking the picket) striking was more about not doing than doing. Pregnancy was like that too. The developments were constant. I needed to remain fundamentally still. 

In an accelerated birthing class, which took place over two days, the instructor had all the pregnant women do an exercise to help us learn about our own pain thresholds and pain-management styles. We were each given a bucket of ice and instructed to plunge our arm into it and to hold our arm there for as long as we could manage. “Fuck!” was yelled all around me. A couple women pulled their arms out right away, sending ice cubes flying. I learned that I go silent, that I don’t want to have my back rubbed, and that I can withstand discomfort for a long time. At the end of the exercise, I longed to keep my arm in the bucket of ice. It was cold and numb and safe and quiet, and I felt at last a respite from the hormonal heat and physical, often searing, discomfort of pregnancy and the heat of the strike. There were thousands of messages every day, meetings, decisions, escalations, actions, intimidations, reactions. I felt that I had been building up a sort of internal resistance. Keeping my arm in the ice was half about resisting the urge to remove it and half about willing it to remain there. 

My mother would call, imploring me to stop striking. At first I thought she was just telling me to be obedient and respectful of my elders and to follow the rules, as that was the kind of Confucianist ideology with which she raised me. 

I knew that my mother grew up in poverty in Hong Kong. She, her four siblings, and their parents lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a slum in Kowloon, without enough food and almost no money for medicine. My mother was the only sibling who scored well enough to go to secondary school; her older sister worked in a factory to pay her tuition. In the evening my mom did her schoolwork on the sidewalk under the light of a city streetlamp because her family could not always afford oil for the kerosene lamp. Her father, my Gong Gong, sold sweet potato soup from a cart. He was a street vendor, and if the cops were making their rounds, he’d either have to abandon his cart or, if a fellow hawker or passerby gave him enough of a heads-up, he could try to run it down the block. I imagine soup splashing everywhere. 

Finally, during one of these despairing calls, my mother told me that Gong Gong sold sweet potato soup from a cart because he’d been fired for striking his job as a tugboat operator. He and other ship workers had joined the strike movement beginning on May Day 1967, which would grow more widespread over the next two months. Ultimately, he and his fellow workers were fired. The spreading strike was met with violent police crackdowns, and soon anti-colonial riots roiled what was then still British territory. Afterwards, my grandfather assumed he’d be able to find other work, but he couldn’t. My mom said he begged for his job back but was turned away. 

I had never known that she attributed the impoverished conditions of her childhood to her father’s participation in a strike. She witnessed her mother bear the material consequences, exhausted by the work of keeping their family of seven afloat. My mother had worked so hard to get out of poverty, and she seemed fearful that I would find myself in the same position as her father. I wanted to show her that in order for the cycle to really be broken, the whole system of worker exploitation has to be broken. The strike offers a forceful hit towards this breakage.

I realized, though, in my ambivalent embrace of the potent symbolism of pregnancy (“we do it not just for ourselves but for the next generation”) that I had not invited the ghosts of strikers past to stand alongside us. We inherit injustices suffered by our parents and their parents – especially immigrants and workers. Striking is raw and vulnerable and tenuous but also inherently transformative. And striking, whether deemed successful or not for any given set of demands, can work towards redeeming the indignities suffered by generations before us. So while striking is powerful because it strikes – it hits, foils, disrupts – striking is also a way to make an offering to our ancestors and to not leave their unfinished work behind. Striking is healing work. 

Tycho was with me, floating in utero, as I walked the picket. Eventually, at eight months pregnant, I was fired. I wrote an open letter asking the administration if they were really going to cut off our health insurance during a pandemic. We won it back. And then we entered pandemic isolation. At the time I was eating copious amounts of sweet potatoes, a craving that fed me, Tycho, and tethered us to my Gong Gong across time. The strike movement that my grandfather participated in began on May Day 1967. It was on May Day 2020, 53 years later, that Tycho was born. 

Birth itself may be the site of originary struggle: the baby experiences pressure and pain in the push through to this new world. Our bodies will forever share a muscle memory: labor. Then, breath.

A year and a half after Tycho was born, we went on strike again – this time a sanctioned strike for a new contract. I was still a department steward, organizing with fellow visual studies grad workers, while also organizing specifically around childcare demands with parents at UCSC and across the UC system. UCSC parents had a strong network, having fought a relentless slog against the university’s move to privatize the campus childcare center that had begun several years prior. Parents had won, and it felt miraculous. Many were still around for the contract fight. 

Before Tycho got a coveted spot at the subsidized childcare center on campus, we drove 30 minutes to a daycare in the mountains. It cost my entire monthly income. Key’s entire monthly income went to our rent. The “solution” frequently suggested by the university’s financial aid office: debt. Grad worker parents needed a much, much higher stipend for childcare. We didn’t get it. 

In bargaining, our childcare demands for the new contract – such as significantly higher childcare stipends and dependent health insurance – seemed to suddenly go from being real demands that we’d been organizing relentlessly around, to being editable articles of contractual text, to being chips that half of our union’s bargaining team seemed ready to simply let slide off the table. I later learned that these demands were successively slashed in an attempt to appear “reasonable” to the employer and to “land the plane” on the strike. I felt so naïve; it had not even occurred to me that these demands would be dropped before a genuine fight.

When it came time to ratify our new contract, I was furious with our union’s statewide leadership. At least during the wildcat strike, grads had a common enemy in our boss, the UC. This time, UAW leadership used its entire official apparatus and platform to push for contract ratification, a move that I found abhorrent in its partisanship. I was not swayed by the claim that this contract strike and its outcomes were “historic.” How could we celebrate this as “historic” when it could’ve been so much more so? How could we celebrate a contract that included arbitrarily tiered wages and individual UC campuses played against each other? I thought we would’ve fought harder for the more marginalized among us, those with accessibility needs, international students, parents and children. 

I’m relieved that workers managed to get the raises that we did. But for Key and me, the increase in our wages in our new contract meant we were no longer eligible for state-subsidized health insurance for Tycho. Our raises are entirely eaten up by Tycho’s private healthcare costs. Meanwhile, rents keep going up. We needed health insurance for our kids, and we didn’t get it. 

At 8am there were four of us, all grad student mothers with young children, all residents of FSH. We were trying to reach the base of campus. We’d brought granola bars, juice boxes, snacks we grabbed from our cupboards. The day’s picket hadn’t been set up yet. 

The cops had cordoned off every possible angle of approach. We walked towards a couple of them. They hardened; our audacity to engage was already an affront. We said that the students must be exhausted, hungry and thirsty, up all night, and we just wanted to bring them snacks. The word “snacks” was comical, painful in its innocence against the backdrop of assault. Stephanie had her baby strapped to her chest. There was barely a back and forth before one of the cops barked that if we didn’t turn around, he would arrest us and Child Protective Services would take Stephanie’s baby. Our hackles rose like a mountain range. The juice box in my hand, a brick. A telepathy spread like anticipatory choreography between us, how swiftly the armada of our bodies readied to layer between the cops and Stephanie’s baby. Hannah’s levee broke; she was screaming in the cop’s face. Unprepared for the aftermath of his threat, the cop flinched, like a kid in costume. And yet, he was also the university in costume. And yet, this was no costume; this cop had the ability to take Stephanie’s baby away. 

Three days before, university administration patently lied in its messaging to the entire university community, intimating that the encampment needed to be disbanded because student protest was not only inconvenient, it was life threatening. They alleged that an ambulance was unable to reach a toddler in need at FSH. Despite video footage that clearly proved otherwise – and I’m certain because I was there with undergrad protestors and fellow FSH residents, directing traffic – students did not impede the ambulance at all. The truth didn’t stop the university from weaponizing the toddler. I saw how shamelessly they would use a child if it served them. 

About 150 families live here. We have a neighborhood-wide WhatsApp chat; someone always has that lemon or cilantro you realize you need mid-cooking. There’s a thriving gift economy. Countless meals shared, on-site daycare, kids running in and out of each other’s houses. During the wildcat strike, when poet-scholar Fred Moten came to support grads at the picket, he said, “Don’t expect the university to give you what you need. Only you can give each other what you need. Go somewhere where land is cheap. Go to Kansas. Start a commune.” 

While we have some makings of a commune at FSH, the university is our landlord, and they are squeezing us dry. The units are falling apart, replete with mold that has given numerous children respiratory problems, but the university resists tearing up the damp carpets because there’s asbestos beneath. Is it a surprise that the university is not only a company town – recouping, on average, 65% of our income in rent – but a slumlord too? Last summer, angered that the university was raising our rent yet again, we started organizing in earnest around the rent hike and the conditions in our apartments. Admin plowed ahead with their 5% increase; another flick of an exploitative wrist so routine it might as well be obligatory. A 5% increase registers when you’re broke, especially when you’re a single parent or single-income household raising multiple kids. On my pessimistic days, I feel we’ve only won crumbs so far: a utilities credit, new floors. But we’ve also made huge strides: the formation of a tenants’ association, an infrastructure for ongoing and future actions, a stream of media attention, deeper relationships with our neighbors.

We recently learned that at the new complex the university is relocating us to, our rent will go up by 30%. This means some grads will now spend up to 80% of their university-issued income on rent. The university has also drastically reduced the number of available units. They are knowingly and readily pushing student families out, as if salivating for our exodus. 

*

Over Costco pizza, we’re having a meeting to decide what to do about the rent hike. A debate about our leverage is interrupted by the need to find more paper and crayons for the kids, who are growing restless. They’ve just run in from outside, screaming, “Rainbow!” They wonder why we aren’t rising from our chairs to take a look. I suddenly feel so exhausted, so old. We are too busy figuring out our demands; we have to get back to cook dinner soon; we simply do not have time for this rainbow. Nor do we really have time in this meeting to listen to individual residents’ hardships – but we do, and I’m glad we do. At the same time, I hope someone more assertive than me will steer the conversation back to strategy. 

The meeting wraps up without a solidified plan, but we need to morph now from academic workers and renters to partners and parents. Who’s bottom-lining what – that will have to wait. For the time being, we agree on a core demand: we’ll fight the astronomical hike.

*

When I was pregnant, my cousin sent a gift in solidarity: a brightly illustrated children’s book about farm cows who go on strike. In the book, the farmer demands too much from the cows, forcing them to produce milk even though they can’t sleep at night because they’re so cold. It’s just a children’s book, but I want to kill this farmer for overworking these mothers, exploiting their bodies, neglecting their basic needs. The cows eventually have had enough, and they go on strike. This should be a victorious moment – but I was aghast; their strike is way too short. They barely bargain at all, making a deal with the farmer way too soon. With my poor illustrating hand, I Scotch-taped a few pages of my own cartoonish drawings and text. First, the cows have a meeting to talk. What do they want? They figure out their demands: besides warm blankets, I throw in less work, yummier food, and more time to play. 

Next, they get ready for an actual bargaining process; they tell each other not to be scared. They rebuff the farmer’s first offer, obviously, and double down, rejecting the second offer too. They prepare to lose their dinner, maybe breakfast as well. But together they refuse to capitulate until all of their demands are met. They triumph without compromise. And, as I took these authorial liberties, I debated whether to have the farmer feel remorseful for the hardship he’s caused the cows and so moved by their fellowship and gumption that he becomes a changed man, wanting to not only be a better boss, but even to share in the farm’s profits and to transform the farm into a worker-owned cooperative! My pen hovered; should I, as a mother, model optimism – tell the story of alternative futures? But I opted against it. The farmer is not the hero here; the cows are. These mothers, who fought for their right to warmth and to rest their own breasts. My little endeavor started as a tongue-in-cheek exercise, but then I wanted to do the task some kind of justice – narrativizing, for my four-year-old, the exploitation of workers under capitalism, the necessity of resistance, the strength in collectivity, the possibility of change. I like that the book teaches children to stand up, but we must also teach them not to stand down. 

My grandfather didn’t know how to read or write. But he was fluent in fatherhood and refusal, expressions of ancestral strength. When Key and I graduate next year and move out of Family Student Housing, I’ll tuck the book in a box, amid the other anti-capitalist children’s books our friends have gifted Tycho for his birthday over the years. When I imagine the arc of Tycho’s life, I don’t know what future May Days will hold, nor the strategies that those conditions will demand. But struggle is like a river, reaching far into the past while flowing forth with the inevitability of collective power. And I know he will never struggle alone.