Introduction

At the time of writing, twenty-one countries are recorded as being in a state of “war,”11 “Countries Currently at War 2022,” World Population Review, accessed August 3, 2022: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-currently-at-war where war involves sustained conflict, within or between countries. As people pick up the pieces, something is needed to keep surviving. But is this repair? And what is repair? Following perspectives on the contemporary situations in Ukraine and Myanmar, this contribution traces the act of witnessing as a precursor to repair.

“Repair” is commonly used to refer to the action performed upon material things one wants to get working again, be it an old computer or a favorite pair of pants. But repair can be immaterial too. As design scholars Alexandra Crosby and Jesse Adams Stein note, “repair is the expression of care, and therefore a way of making ethical decisions about design within complex and traumatized ecological systems.”22 Alexandra Crosby and Jesse Adams Stein, “Repair,” Environmental Humanities, vol. 12, no. 1 (May 1, 2020): p. 181, https://doi.org/10..1215/22011919-8142275 Repair as design may be part of a degrowth tool kit, such as the “mending, reassembling, maintenance” approach employed by repair cafes; a new design culture, as Australian Aboriginal designers have shown through the development of desert repair culture; or a practice of “designing to allow objects, codes, and systems to be opened, disassembled, or altered,” as with open knowledge systems.33 Crosby and Stein, “Repair,” p. 182 The “right to repair” advocacy movement pushes for consumers—including farmers—to have the right to repair their own machinery rather than be forced to depend on a manufacturer. But what about repair in relation to the human psyche?

If repair can take place only when someone notices a broken part or realizes that the proper function of something has been affected, then the question of who notices becomes central. Thinking about repair in relation to conflict leads us to think of humans as incarnate witnesses. Their bodies absorb what is unfolding; they are the very agents of witnessing—noticing, seeing, processing, feeling, recording—what is happening around them. Witnessing may be a way of holding space for someone else to fully experience emotions, creating mutually shared attentive spaces to process and understand conflict. And the act of witnessing may change the witness themselves: placing their relationship to the conflict within a larger web of relations. Thus, the witness may be the witnessed, opening up a conversation for self-reflection.

The ways in which people witness conflict, and ultimately understand and implement repair, are manifold. This contribution introduces three perspectives on the relationship between witnessing and repair. The first section links two conflicts—the war in Myanmar and the war in Ukraine—from the standpoint of international media as outside witnesses. In the second section, Ukrainian artist Maria Kazvan explores her lived experiences with war in both text and video. In the last section, three people from Myanmar speak about what witnessing and repair might mean.

We began discussing this project in the early months of the war in Ukraine, and in trying to understand this situation, we found it helpful to distinguish between different forms of witnessing: primary witnessing—witnessing the effects of conflict in one’s immediate environment; secondary witnessing—witnessing accounts of conflict of which one has direct experience (e.g., through media representations); and tertiary witnessing—witnessing conflict as an outsider, with no direct experience of the event described. These forms exist at different proximities to the conflict moment or event. While these forms of witnessing intermingle in everyday life, distinguishing them has helped us to clarify our roles and relationships to war, witnessing, and repair.

In the same way, readers with direct experiences of conflict and war will have one reading of this contribution; readers with no direct experience, or indirect experience, will have another. Can a work contribute to a meaningful and critical process of repair by bringing direct and indirect forms of witnessing into the same space? How can voices without a name or face be heard as equals? And how can voices and faces whose stereotypes precede them be earnestly read?

Unstable realities, collective witnessing

On a small 1990s television set, gray Russian tanks are moving across snowy ground, nearly camouflaged, driving in line with nearby soldiers. An elderly woman watches, lounging in a high-ceilinged house in northern Thailand, built from teakwood grown on a nearby agroforest. She has fought a different fight for over thirty years: to wean her farmland off chemical fertilizers. It’s February 12, 2022. Twelve days later, on February 24, the first bombings of Ukraine begin. The day after, February 25, Myanmar’s military council expresses support for the Russian attack,44VOA Burmese Service, “Myanmar’s Military Council Supports Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” VOA News, February 25, 2022: https://www.voanews.com/a/myanmar-s-military-council-supports-russia-s-invasion-0f-ukraine/6458527.html reciprocating a relationship Russia has strengthened since before Myanmar’s coup on February 1, 2021.

On the Thailand-Myanmar border, crossings continue as people slip away from military violence through a network of contacts. The Myanmar coup has been going on for over a year, and the Ukraine war since February, and even though the two places are linked via common denominators—Russia’s weapons trade, and the effect of superpower concerns on people’s lives—they are usually discussed separately, as if they are discrete, unrelated events.

Times of upheaval and reassembly bring trauma close. With the invitation to create this contribution, we began asking how we might attend to the emotional upheavals friends are going through with news from home and also—as a testimony of Myanmar’s post-coup reality included here reflects—from reading media accounts of a war they have experienced firsthand. What does collective psychological support in these times look like? How can asking questions about something one has supposedly no reason or time to look into facilitate more than an informed answer?

Myanmar enjoys a special relationship with Russia: it gets military arms in exchange for gems and timber. Russian companies supplying Myanmar’s military reportedly include JSC Tactical Missiles Corporation, JSC Concern VKO (also known as Almaz-Antey), and Rostec, a Russian state-run defense conglomerate.55Allegra Mendelson, “‘Stronger tTgether’: Myanmar, Russia Parade Military Relationship,” Al-Jazeera, March 27, 2022: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/27/holdstronger-togethermyanmarrussiaparademilitary-relationship The arms trade is a matter of transnational business—and it is not limited to Russia.

If war-making has been transnational since the twentieth-century formation of nation-states, then transnational media has also played a role in spreading the effects of war across space and time. When videos emerged of the “Ukrainian tank man” on February 25 and 26, 2022,66“A Single Man in Ukraine Takes on a Russian Tank,” YouTube video, 0:55, posted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 26, 2022: https://youtu.be/Cl8stxUxfNw; Adam Gabbatt, “Video of Ukrainian ‘Tank Man’ Trying to Block Russian Military Convoy Goes Viral,” Guardian, February 25, 2022: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/ukraine-tank-man-video-clipit was a chilling reminder of the tank man in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1979—the image of whom has circulated widely, often as a symbol of resistance.

International media is shaped by both its reading public and time limitations: stereotypes and clickbait headlines condense complex events into celebration or condemnation. So in the Western, free, and supposedly pacifist world, Ukrainian men are celebrated for going to war; Central Asian soldiers (many of whom may not have Russian citizenship)77For instance, see Bruce Pannier and Muhammad Tahir, “Majlis Podcast: How Central Asians End Up Fighting in Russia’s War in Ukraine,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 27, 2022: https://www.rferl.org/a/central-asians-fighing-in-ukraine/31772782.html fighting with Russian troops arouse sympathy;88Whereas they arouse deep anger in many Ukrainians. and a journalism platform, New Naratif, defends its decision to publish and translate a piece about Dr. Sasa, a prominent people’s leader and spokesperson of the National Unity Government of Myanmar, joining a bomb-making class.99 Aye Min Thant, “Dr. Sasa Visits a Bomb-Making Class,” New Naratif, September 9, 2021: https://newnaratif.com/dr-sasa-visits-a-bomb-making-class/; “Announcement: New Naratif Responds to NUG’s Accusations,” New Naratif, September 9, 2021: https://newnaratif.com/new-naratif-responds-to-nugs-accusations/

Whose moral opinion enjoys visibility in conflicts? If Ukraine is overwritten and overdetermined by international press and policy analysts as a territory of “subracial, underclass, inhuman subjects” and resources,1010Asia Bazdyrieva, “No Milk, No Love,” e-flux journal, no. 127 (May 2022): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/127/465214/no-milk-no-love/. Also see Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. then the situation in Myanmar is also distorted by the weight of Orientalist-colonialist imagery that blinds perceptions of humanity.

Collective witnessing in times of war might pull hearts and attention away from individual accounts of trauma and suffering. In their dialogue on mental illness and medicine, psychologist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers apply learnings from non-Western medicines to dominant Western understandings of illness.1111 Tobie Nathan and Isabelle Stengers, Doctors and Healers, trans. Stephen Muecke. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. They come to see collective acts of healing as moments that direct attention toward the hidden, invisible, and multiple other worlds that a singular “sick” individual reveals. Rather than condemning entities and companies that create what they (and others)1212 For instance, see a discussion of this topic that Stengers also participated in: John Law, “What’s Wrong with a One-World World,” Heterogeneities (John Law’s website), 2011, pp. 1–14: http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf name “the One World universe,” they propose building user associations that produce information of other kinds. Condemnation is a trap, they say.

And perhaps it is, if condemnation deepens isolation. How does condemnation interact with war and its iconic imagery?1313 The debate occasioned by Taring Padi’s artwork People’s Justice (2002) at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, raises important points to consider. A discussion of disrupted local knowledge systems, traveling images, and the role of artists and cultural institutions in repairing systems of knowledge and praxis can be found in Wulan Dirgantoro and Elly Kent, “We Need to Talk! Art, Offence and Politics in Documenta 15,” New Mandala, June 29, 2022: https://www.newmandala.org/we-need-to-talk-art-offence-and-politics-in-documenta-15/ How can interconnected groups support one another to fully express anguish and outrage, while knowing home and belonging may again be found—as a different being, in a different place?

This contribution forks into two paths. One looks at what safety—and the act of keeping safe in order to keep others safe—means in the context of preserving a collective sovereignty beyond the self. The other looks at how the loss of safety marks the emotional landscape and asks how to belong when home is lost. The first offers testimonies about war marked by far-reaching survivor guilt, homesickness, work, and worry for loved ones in Myanmar. The second is a visceral act of stitching a wound on one end as the other end burns. Its act of collaging, documenting, and framing done on the move, beyond stable realities.

In urgent art—art to preserve memory, and art that sustains living—it may also be tenderness, as Ukrainian artist and researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk finds, that people seek to give fleeting form to: drawings of gardens, photos of plants, things that arise from deeply embodied knowledge of a place; an impression of impermanence against erasure.1414 José Vergara, “‘The War Conquers You Not Only Physically’: Darya Tsymbalyuk on Plants and Humans in Ukraine,” Public Books, 2022: https://www.publicbooks.org/darya-tsymbalyuk-plants-and-humans-in-ukraine/. Yet if erasure—of physical bodies and identities—propagates from imperialist tendencies,1515 Darya Tsymbalyu, “Erasure: Russian Imperialism, My Research on Donbas, and I,” Kajet Journal, June 15, 2022: https://kajetjournal.com/2022/06/15/darya-tsymbalyuk-erasure-russian-imperialism-my-research-on-donbas/ we need to ask: Whose bodies, which bodies—from which non-thinkable moments of passed futures and future presents—can be expressed in an interscalar, incarnate witnessing?1616 Here we borrow from historian Gabrielle Hecht’s notion of the interscalar that crosses imaginable temporal and spatial boundaries. See Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 33, no. 1 (2018): pp. 109–41, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.1.05

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Maria Kazvan: War / Unstable reality

Maria Kazvan’s artwork explores the themes of land connection and rupture from home. War, Kazvan says, becomes a competition for funding from the Red Cross. Yet more crucial, she asserts, is to ask who instigates war through imperialist views of property and possession.

Past and present are mixed now.
I am still in the morning of February 24, even though a lot of time has gone by, at least that’s what the calendar says.
I am not sure where I am.
I am not sure if anything is real around me.
I know this is dissociative disorder. And I am trying to work with it.
But this is what war gives you—unstable reality.
Besides that, I have made a choice and left, where other Ukrainian people have not been able to or wanted to.
I do not have my family though. Well, I have never had it even in my country.
I had friends though. I have them now too. But we are more than 7,000 km away from each other, with seven hours’ time difference.
But I am lucky enough to stay alive.

With my work, I want you to think about Russia as a terrorist state.
The question is not only in Ukraine.
The question is in resources. Myanmar!
Syria. Afghanistan. Georgia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan continue the list.

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Speaking near Myanmar

More than a year has passed since a military coup took place in Myanmar. Early on, when protesters took to the streets to demand a return to democracy, international onlookers were shocked to see just how brutally the military responded, leaving protesters, opposed politicians, and civilians injured or dead. The conflict now has evolved into a full-blown war between the military, a wide array of ethnic armed groups, and the People’s Defence Force, which was formed by civilians who took up arms to fight the military.

The next section weaves together a selection of personal testimonies by Myanmar people now living in neighboring Thailand. While we incorporate our analysis into a single section, our conversations took place through questions framed within different forms of witnessing. These distinctions, we have found, encourage one to pause while listening to a story about war and to ask what tertiary witnesses can do to create conducive spaces for primary witnesses to be, and to feel, safe. We are all connected to war and the fractured emotional landscapes it leaves behind. Outrage is part of this landscape. So too is guilt, trauma, and insecurity.

Testimonies: Repair or healing? Repair and healing?

The excerpts below come from separate conversations, conducted in English, between Noah and three respondents from Myanmar: A, K, and L. We have used pseudonyms to keep their identities confidential.

A worked as a communications officer at an international humanitarian aid agency until the coup. On February 1, 2021, she was left jobless. She observed the situation of uncertainty until she got word that politicians, activists, and famous people were starting to get arrested, and protesters were getting shot with live bullets.

We thought that we might also be arrested. So we locked the door. […] On February 10, the first victim was shot in the head. So we were really scared. Because we never expected that. […] Although we didn’t know her, […] we could not eat, we could not sleep.

Not knowing whether she might be arrested or whether the situation would escalate, A was forced to stay inside with her friends, awake day and night. Her mental health suffered greatly in that period, she recalls. She later left to study in Thailand, while her friends were fighting back home.

What I have is the guilt, and the trauma.

For A, repair is necessary, but it is not a given.

I don’t think repair is possible as long as we do not win this fight. Even if we win this fight, we have to sort many other problems [e.g., with the federal system1717 See the following sources for more on the vision of federalism in Myanmar among its different states and ethnicities: Htet Myet Min Tun and Moe Thuzar, “Myanmar’s National Unity Consultative Council: A Vision of Myanmar’s Federal Future,” Fulcrum, January 5, 2022: https://fulcrum.sg/myanmars-national-unity-consultative-council-a-vision-of-myanmars-federal-future/; Ye Myo Hein, “Visions of a Federal Future for Myanmar are Fading Fast—Part II,” Irrawaddy, September 2, 2021, https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/guest-column/visions-of-a-federal-future-for-myanmar-are-fading-fast-part-ii.html]. As long as we do not get peace between the ethnic armed groups and Myanmar and between the different parties in Myanmar, […] if we do not get this independence back, our trauma cannot be repaired. […] Repair is not possible if the revolution is not won.

A repeatedly stresses that repair needs to go beyond fighting the military—that relationships between different ethnic groups must be mended going forward. Repair also has to do with personal practices.

How I repair is that I try to invest myself more in the cause. OK, I am here [in Thailand]. So I look at the ways in which I can help in defending, or [provide] emotional support. […] I even share my Netflix password with the jungle friends. […] The way I cope, trying to repair myself, is by […] pursuing happiness in my own way. Just trying to pursue different interests, and I’m trying to learn guitar, and this month I started swimming a little bit. So I try to make myself active the whole time.

K, too, left after the coup when she realized she could not continue working.

I went to the office for a few days [after the coup], at least for a week, but I knew that I couldn’t continue to go to work anymore in this situation. […] I decided, OK, from the next week on, from Monday onward, I won’t go to work. Maybe I will resign, or I will officially join the Civil Disobedience Movement.

Upon leaving Myanmar, K was torn between feeling happy that she ultimately got to study abroad and feeling unhappy about the cause of it being the military coup.

I love Thailand, the people are nice, […] I love everything about here. But what I can’t deny is that however things are OK for me here, and I have a better living standard here, but my ambition is one day [to return]. I have to go back, when things get settled.

K’s secondary witnessing of media coverage has sharpened these feelings.

My situation is better than theirs [the people back in Myanmar]. Just comparing my situation to theirs, I have to try very hard. I have to improve myself very hard, whether I like it or not. So that I will be in a better position to help our people. My people. […] It is them, not me, who are directly affected by the war, you know. The People’s Defence Force [PDF], they lost their families and their body parts. […] Some people became refugees in poor conditions. It is them; it is not me. But it makes me feel as if I also experience the same things, even though I don’t. So it makes me feel very sad.

K is also trying different hobbies and interests. While she does not read much anymore, she started watching a lot of movies, walking outside, and talking to her friends from Myanmar.

When they feel depressed, I try to give emotional support to them. I even help my friends through—you won’t believe it—matchmaking, sometimes.

For L, who does not take safety for granted even in Thailand, there is the daily ritual of living and reading the news to contend with, before repair seems possible:

Insecurity is the first thing they put in our mind. If we continue this work: insecurity. If we go outside: insecurity. […] We also heard that the Thailand and Myanmar governments are very close friends; they sometimes request what they want from the Thai government, and the Thai government follows their friends’ requests. So what we’re afraid of is the Burmese military guys who may be here secretly. […] So even though we are in Thailand, I’m not going too many places. For example, there is Myanmar Market for fundraising, but we are afraid of that market, because the guys may be there. So insecurity is still here.

His current job requires him to keep up with discussions online, and he spends his mornings each day reading the news. When asked how the consumption of media makes him feel, L replies:

Myanmar journalism […] is at risk, because all journalists are not free to report freely the news they want. They are running, some are in exile. [The military junta] ha[s] banned many media houses. [The journalists] are working with the situation with multiple limitations. So I understand that. That’s why there are many untold stories happening. When journalists are away from their news and sources, it’s very difficult for them to work things out.

L finds repair and healing in continuing his work as an activist and researcher.

For healing purposes, I do what I can do. […] There are many digital platforms supporting the military or distributing misinformation, or conspiracy, what the military is doing. […] Reporting is what I can do at the moment. As I’m also a researcher, I also collect evidence. This is in the hope that one day I can contribute to the court, for justice. […] Young people in Myanmar have it very difficult. Unlike us, they cannot travel here; they have no option other than to stay there. So I sometimes contribute my knowledge to them. […] I used to donate money to armed resistance groups who are my friends; they are successful militias. PDF too. Many PDF are not getting enough support. We sometimes give monthly support, sometimes pooled funds, whoever wants to give to them. This is what I can do for healing.

As for Noah, who visited Myanmar twice prior to the coup and lived in a Thai town close to the Myanmar border at one point, something clicked into place after traveling to Mae Sot, a large commercial and social hub on the Western Thailand-Myanmar border. Since the military coup, the city has witnessed a continuous influx of politicians and activists from Myanmar, while also seeing new waves of people fleeing from the ongoing fighting. When Noah visited Mae Sot on a field trip in February 2022, these complex social dynamics unfolded before him in a full manner. Military checkpoints spread across the entire area, and small boats made trips under the closed-off border bridge, carrying goods and those seeking refuge. Noah accompanied a group of private helpers who organized food shipments to refugees squatting along the border, beyond the reach of official aid. Witnessing these scenes as an outsider prompted him to act.

We did three rounds of donations. We raised maybe 50,000 baht. It was enough for basic necessities—mosquito nets, diapers, lights—for fifty families. It’s nothing—it’s like a drop in the ocean. […] I went back to Germany and joined my mother’s language course. There were only ten students, but my mother gave me the opportunity to talk about […] Mae Sot, [to] five to ten people. I took more than two hours. After that, two or three people donated 4,000 baht each, per person, because they listened to my story. That’s ten out of 80 million people in Germany, but they know the story from the ground. That’s maybe what my role as a tertiary witness is about: to educate people, just as I was educated by my friends.

What these interview snippets show is a multitude of ways to think about witnessing, healing, and repair. Each interviewee shared a different perspective; each individual involved in this contribution is connected to the conflict in some way, and witnesses it differently. Similarly, each reader will have their own takeaways and each interviewee’s contribution will resonate differently for them. Perhaps readers again become tertiary witnesses, and the net of witnessing spreads further across the globe.

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Conclusion

Many of us who contributed to this text were born around 1991, when the Berlin Wall fell and after the USSR came apart. We feel that a generational shift happened around the world then, with the opening up of economies and the celebrations that came after German reunification. What happened in the global or cultural economy that enabled this?

With this work, we want to make visible how aggression and rampant violence affect not just victims and survivors but also their friends, family, and extended networks. Each generation shows us what we stand for. We, at least, stand for peaceful coexistence and the celebration of shared sensory, cultural, physical, and emotional commons: this ability to empathize, hold each other, rage, exult, and organize for trust.

On the history of trauma and abuse, the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman writes: “To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance”1818Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992, 9.—that is, it requires supportive social contexts that involve political movements. This thought from Herman, which concerns the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, sees continuation in the more recent #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, which have powerfully tilted the burden away from victims, bringing bystanders in to share the weight of the unspeakable. While best known for her work on domestic violence, child abuse, incest, and post-traumatic disorders, Herman also speaks to how trauma re-emerged in American public consciousness during the United States’ war on Vietnam:

The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. […] Advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial. In the absence of strong political movements, […] the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.1919 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 9/

As such, we use the term “tertiary witnesses” to describe people who make up the larger social context within which war takes place, and within which trauma has to be first acknowledged before repair is imaginable. We use “secondary witnessing” to acknowledge the retraumatization that occurs through media accounts of a war that has been witnessed firsthand. In many cases, primary witnesses have left the scene. They are victims of an episode of aggression and live where others have perished or are otherwise incapacitated. The terms “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary witnessing”—though imperfect reflections of what living with war trauma actually means—encourage an awareness of the different psychological needs and capacities that arise within a global community during war and help us to learn to share its weight.

Real experience often exceeds these categories. Maria Kazvan’s contribution combines direct experience—as a victim and primary witness of war—with secondary witnessing of the war through the media. The reality is that separating these levels of witnessing is often difficult and exhausting. But since witnessing is often more complex in reality than when parceled out in the comfort of abstract thought, it becomes important to learn these categories well, in order to adequately respond to and communicate about war and its aftermaths.

Kazvan’s project pushes us to ask: Is a political movement against war possible today? This means not only questioning Russian involvement in war terrorism but also composting imperialist war cultures, by tracing, as art historian Asia Bazdyrieva puts it, their motivating rationales to the “resourcification” of “territories, their soils, their mineral deposits, and their populations.”2020Bazdyrieva, “No Milk, No Love.” These imperialist war cultures have long material and ideological histories, through which “material transactions between colonial powers” have “contributed to the emergence of regimes of material power that prevail today through constant reinvention.”2121Bazdyrieva, “No Milk, No Love.” Myanmar’s military regime has reinvented itself through time, inheriting colonial patron-client relations and finding new military alliances and arms brokers.2222See “Exposed: Companies Brokering Arms and Equipment to Myanmar Military,” Justice for Myanmar, August 11, 2022: https://www.justiceformyanmar.org/stories/exposed-companies-brokering-arms-equipment-to-myanmar-military These interconnected histories, presents, and futures are one reason that contemporary attempts at decolonial work in what counts as the global north, fulfill only a fraction of their emancipatory potential—if they remain disconnected from, or unwilling to engage with, decolonial practices in former and current colonies.

Emancipatory work uplifts not only because it dreams of better futures. It is able to do so precisely because it digs into sources of pain and injury, and makes different what is broken. Within spaces of witnessing, may we find others with whom to organize and collaborate in creating reparative endings to the worlds we will let go of.

With thanks to three testimony-givers who go by pseudonyms

Conceptualization, interviews, writing: Noah Tanigawa
Film and text: Maria Kazvan
Conceptualization, writing, editing: Huiying Ng