Quote

The village had a mill near it, situated on the little creek, which made very good flour. The population consisted of civilized Indians, but much mixed blood.

There are these very poor communities on the outskirts of Cairo called Mokattam, where a lot of the garbage collectors live. I used to volunteer there, doing health and education work when I was younger and living in Egypt.

As a child in the rural district of Penal I remember sharing meals from the same pot with neighbours of different racial, ethnic, social and economic backgrounds.

Today, the world is so awash in sugar - it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy - that it's hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance.

Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.

The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.

Besides paid white laborers, there was everywhere a class of white servants bound without wages for a term of years, and a more miserable class of Negro slaves.

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.