Cicadian Rhythm

I'm working on my second book right now, about the ~18,000 German, Austrian, and Polish Jews who fled to Shanghai between ~1938 and 1941, and who stayed there until ~1946-1950.

I'm working heavily with memoirs written by people who spent the war years in Shanghai, and as I reach the end of each one, the writer and their families are trying to figure out where to move next after they discern that the Shanghai of the future wouldn't be overly friendly to foreigners (which, some of them recognized, made perfect sense).

They weighed their options. Only the very old wished to return to Germany, Austria, and Poland. Many regretted it once they did. Some went to Israel after it declared statehood. Many more expressed that they didn't want to move to another war zone where life may be even harder than it was in Shanghai.

Some of them spent a few years in Australia, and then relocated to the USA.

Throughout these sources, Jewish refugees and Displaced Persons speak of America as though it is their destiny; their fate. They believed that they would eventually make it to America, regardless of the Paper Walls situation of the late 1930s.

Throughout the war they prayed for a US victory. When American planes reached Shanghai, they cheered the bombers even when the "Designated Area" in which they lived took a direct hit. They mourned President Roosevelt, and when they finally made it to America, they felt free.

They felt safe. They felt as though they were staring boundless opportunity in the eye after spending so long in (metaphorical) chains.

There's an episode of Derry Girls where President Clinton traveled to Derry to make a speech about the NI Peace Process. I remember in that episode, the symbolic value of the POTUS traveling to Northern Ireland. The way it gave everyone so much hope. That episode makes me so sad to rewatch.

The USA was a symbol of hope for those characters, their experiences based on the lived experiences of series creator Lisa McGee.

In many ways, for many millions of people, that version of America never existed. My grandmother and her parents were Holocaust refugees had successfully fled to the USA. Shortly upon their arrival they took a road trip through the American South. My grandmother was so horrified by the way she saw black Americans being treated that she never traveled south of the Mason-Dixon Line again.

Even as black soldiers were fighting against White Supremacy in Europe, they were forced to do so in segregated troops. And in late 1940s/early 1950s America, no black, Hispanic, or Asian Americans were sailing into San Francisco with wide optimistic tear-blurred eyes. That America wasn't real. America was a place of violence, unfreedom, lack of agency, violence, and rejection. In many ways it still is.

And for some of the Jewish refugees, it wasn't real. For Americans in the 90s, that symbolic sense of trust that President Clinton bought with him to NI wasn't real. It was the product of nearly a century of hard and soft power building on a global level.

But it could have been real. It could be real.

I was chatting with Bestie about how, as disgusted as we are by the last quarter century of US domestic politics, there is still a little part of us that feels a sense of discomfort, of insecurity when we read about other countries surpassing the USA in some metric or another. Because nationalist socialization, but also, in our hearts, we see this country's potential. We see everything it could be and could have been and might still be if we change course.

I'm sad. I'm sad, watching women of my mother's generation protest over rights and issues they thought they'd already won. I'm sad seeing fascist rhetoric and behavior come from the highest levels of government. I'm sad, seeing how many American elites are bending the knee to said fascism. I'm desperately sad to see how eagerly the US right and left have refashioned anti-Semitism to fit the purposes of the mid-2020s. I'm sad, seeing the hope and progressivism of the Obama Era turn into something old-fashioned and "cringe." I'm sad, seeing how deeply my people dreamed of coming here, only for me to be quietly looking into emigration options two generations later.

I hope maybe we can one day be that country that Jewish refugees dreamed of; that country which carried so with it so much promise of peace and egalitarianism and, the strong notion that grown ups are in charge. We never were that country. I used to have hope we could be that country. I still hope for a course reversal.

“Native people used to live in this National Park” No. They still do.

“Native people used to tell these stories-” No. They still do.

“Native people used to use this plant as a natural remedy-” No. They still do.

Colorful mid century modern 1965 home in Kalamazoo, MI. 3bds, 2ba, 1,938sqft, $350k. (Zillow's est.: $253,400). According to the listing, the owners invested $150 in improvements, so that the new owner will not have to worry about replacing things or making repairs. I think it's a good value.

Still in pursuit, we followed the ball toward a small lake in Motor World that had been earmarked for a fleet of tiny bumper boats for children. The area wasn’t open yet, but the empty boats were being tested and floated on the surface. The ball soared over the grass and smashed into several of them, scattering the others with rippling waves from the impact, which launched some of the boats several feet in the air.

Charlie and Ken waded into the water looking for the hatch. After some difficulty, they got it open. Charlie pulled Frank out by grabbing him under his armpits like a baby. Frank crawled up the bank, coughing and sputtering. He splayed across the grass as we all stared at the ball, which bobbed in the water like it was attached to a fishing lure.

We did not ask for the inspector’s report, nor did we ever hear of one being filed. Ken Bailey returned to Canada. The snow-makers cleared away the PVC. Told to dispose of the Bailey Ball, they rolled it into the woods, where it remained for many years."

STEP 1: Take a screencap of the video, preferably while it's playing so that the PLAY button isn't blocking the image.

STEP 2: Reverse image search of choice. To my chagrin, I tend to end up resorting to Google's Search by image because Tineye keeps failing me and I haven't gotten around to doing a deep dive into currently available reverse image search services.

If you use the Firefox desktop web browser (untested: other desktop web browsers, Firefox mobile web browser) you can combine STEP 1 & STEP 2: Feel free to repost the video to Tumblr first, preferably as a draft or private post to prevent people from reblogging the uncredited vid, because this method doesn't work as well on Reddit videos.

Right-Click on the video. In the right-click menu, look for "Image Search Options" and hover over it to bring up a list of search options. I'll have to try out some of the other options later, but for this demonstration I used Google.

The search engine should open in another tab.

STEP 3: The Search. This part will be a mix of luck, tenaciousness, and deductive skills.

For Google, I recommend going to the "Exact matches" tab because it presents matches and their information in a much more condensed format than the other tabs. "Exact matches" is a misnomer, as is apparent in the screencap below. This search actually pulled up images from at least two separate videos by the same woman hanging from the same tree: one where she's wearing a slate grey pencil skirt and blazer (as in the video reposted by OP) and one where she's wearing a pale grey long-sleeved dress.

Ideally, a functional search engine would let you sort results by useful variables such as "date posted". Google is not such a search engine, and with its progressive enshittification you may or may not be able to bully Search by image into limiting results to certain date ranges. Luckily, these videos have been less flagrantly reposted than some, so I didn't have to scroll through too many.

When searching for a source, one of the primary things to pay attention to is date. Obviously, the original source has to be older than any of the reports. Unfortunately, not all the Google results have dates, so the earliest dated video isn't guaranteed to be the original.

In this case, the earliest result was of the grey dress video variant posted on Instagram on Jan 17, 2026. However, upon checking the link it became apparently that the Instagram account was not the originator of the video and their repost was unsourced.

If the date check fails you, keep an eye out for any undated results that clearly stand out from the rest. In this case, I picked up on the following:

Which has the following unique traits:

A new outfit! This is the only result that features the woman in a pale brown blazer and pencil skirt.

Dimensions. This result is 1080 x 1920, while the majority of results were smaller in size. Reposts are more likely to be downscaled from the original than upscaled, so if the initial date-check fails you, you're better off checking the largest undated results first.

Specific username (Liang Li (@liangli521)). A lot of the other results just have captions or titles in various languages. Depending on the website, these are usually either captioned reposts or random search terms that don't even link to the actual video. Results with specific usernames are rarer and thus worth checking out, though some of them may turn out to be reposters.

In this case, I hit the jackpot! There they all were: OP's video, the grey dress video, the brown blazer & skirt video, and many, many more!

Legitimately, Liang Li's whole thing seems to be going ham in skirts, dresses, and frequently heels. Possibly for advertising purposes? Very beautiful. Very powerful.

Bonus videos:

Cool lights!

Obstacle courses and playgrounds with friend!

H-hot damn, ma'am...

Except! Inexplicably, someone brought it to JAPAN! Where they grow it still! So what the fuck! The wikipedia page lists all the reasons it's too hard to farm, then immediately says "oh but they farm it in Japan and it's called America-hodoimo." Why! How does this make sense!

So then a Louisiana professor started trying to breed it and improve the tubers, but he retired and abandoned the project.

Why am I crazy for this plant? Oh yeah, it fixes its own nitrogen and it's allegedly shade tolerant, so I wonder if it could grow under solar panels.

I am boggled by the natural heritage of eastern North america that is totally unknown and ignored.

I've heard of this and seen it, but I've never had any success propagating it. I brought some tubers to my meadow and buried them last fall but I don't see anything sprouting. They might just be hidden from my sight though.

I don't know if I've heard of it being cultivated in Japan!

Yes, it was domesticated, and there were lots of efforts to re-domesticate it a while back. I didn't know what had happened to the project though, it's sad that it was abandoned.

My foraging mentor said that some people can randomly develop a severe sensitivity to it and get really sick when they eat it...but I reckon that's the case with a lot of foods.

Even though the original LSU project is no more, there are several small farmers who are still working on improving it. I have tried to grow some of these plants but thus far have failed due to animals digging up the tubers and I believe because one spot I tried was too dry

Hunting for some coochie

Wrote a G up on his belt

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”