Q.D., as he’s known, likes to talk of heartbreak. He’s had his busted wide open.
“You ever tell someone you love them on the first date?” he asks.
Then answers himself: “I have.”
No, he wasn’t drunk. He doesn’t drink or do drugs —never touched the stuff. Instead, he’s a hopeless romantic, drawn to long odds and lost causes. It gets him into trouble. He got booted from a pro-Palestine group chat after a woman he’d gone out with months earlier showed up and basically called him a predator.
“I have no idea why she said that,” he says. “That’s all it was — and swoosh, I got kicked off. No investigation.”
That same drive carries over to his relentless protest for human rights. He calls himself a straight-edge anarchist, too, which he proves with a Zippo from his pocket, marked with a red anarchy symbol. A new acquisition.
He holds it out, laughs, “See!”
But Q.D. doesn’t just complain — he roots himself in action. He helps build mutual aid, rejects control, and stands with others when things fall apart. He goes out of his way to feed the hungry.
Lately, anyone who won’t kneel to the rulers could be called an anarchist — because things have gotten that bad with mook Donny in charge.
Outside, Q.D. leans on a low fence beneath the soft spill of yellow string lights by his aging modernist apartment. The front gate lock is broken — anyone can wander in or out. AC units hum, cars motor past in the night. A hefty security guard eyes us.
Long jet-black side-swept hair. Thin-waisted and lithesome, like he could glide through water. A pink-hued, vertical-striped shirt, unbuttoned over a T-shirt tucked into black jeans. Black boots. A white western bandana at his neck. Purple, round-lensed sunglasses dangling from his collar. How he hangs.
There’s a natural, quiet androgyny to him — an everything-fits-together ease. He isn’t trying to be anything. He just is.
People are drawn to him — on sidewalks, at protests, even out back on the patio of a 4th Avenue bar. Heads turn as he passes. He’s got a thing. Not just the looks — though he’s pop-star striking, with a face shaped by angles light adores. It’s something else. A kind of voltage. An unrest. An energy that can be misread as too intense. Maybe it has something to do with where he’s from — growing up in a culture that prizes discipline, pressure, and drive. He laughs hard, often. Bores easily. He’s too charismatic to be alienated in America—that’s his gift. And he doesn’t even know it.
Q.D. was born in China 23 years ago and grew up in Jixi, a city in Heilongjiang — China’s northernmost province, pressed against the Russian border. His father has Romani, or Roma, ancestry — some call it “Gypsy,” a pejorative — but the details are vague. Q.D. never met his grandparents. Still, he felt it. Responded to it. The free-spirited, nomadic pull of Roma life gave him something—call it a kind of magic, or just a way out. A way to move past the isolation and trauma of his teens. “I was just following the flow,” he says. “I feel connected to them.” His dad worked as a fortune-teller for 20 years.
He occasionally communicates with his parents. “The last conversation,” he says, pauses, adds, “was not pleasant.”
Q.D.’s first language is Mandarin, a tonal world. But his English comes clean — clear consonants, easy to follow. Until he talks about his childhood. Then the Mandarin creeps in. “It’s the trauma,” he says — English breaking down as memory floods back. Like the times his parents tied him to a post in their front yard — “like a dog” — and left him there till dark. He was 5.
He calls his parents gaslighters and gatekeepers. “I hated them both. I was a boy and used to buy his vodka. My mom got beat up a lot before I was born, she told me.” He laughs hard. “The fucked thing about my dad,” he adds, this time laughing, “is he beat me when I was young, but when I got bigger he said, ‘I never beat you up!’”
The laughter stops. He pulls back, a rare and quiet moment. Says, “Some of the trauma is blocked out. I just don’t remember.” He has a sister, 18 years older, who “fled the family when she turned 18.”
Q.D. grew up as communism twisted into something darker — Xi Jinping’s China, run as a fascist state. “There is no civil society,” he says flat.
He talks of the “Communist Youth League of China,” a kind of systematic brainwashing for kids and teens to join the communist party. “There is no other choice than to submit to the party in power. If you are out of line, they report you to the communist party.”
He learned English in school, which felt weird. A Russian teacher taught it. But most of his English came from Hollywood, YouTube, Tarantino. He laughs, “I watched Pulp Fiction dozens of times.”
In high school, Q.D. read Mo Yan — the Nobel-winning writer who blurred rural poverty, political violence, and surrealism into something strange and true. “He wrote it how it is,” Q.D. says. The stories felt dangerous, dreamlike. They stuck with him — in his writing, art, and worldview.
Yet each day was a moral struggle. “I don’t want to be like these people, followers of the doctrine. I was like, ‘this is torturing me every day.’” He followed the doctrine in middle school. “Everything you see is PR for the Communist Party.” Doubt crept in by high school.
“Noncompliance was my major form of protest in China,” he says. “Using the follow-the-current or go-against-it analogy, I chose to stand still. You can still get in trouble if you get caught. I wouldn’t actively attack the regime; I’d go to jail or get killed. I tried to avoid my active duty as a Chinese citizen.”
Classrooms had snitches — “book note takers,” translated literally — reporting anti-China talk to the party.
“Everyone knows it’s fucked up. No one says anything out of fear.” Recently, on the phone with a friend in China, the guy had to move to another room — worried roommates might overhear and snitch.
“You’ll go to jail if you oppose.” He adds, “This stuff is never reported in any media. You say anything bad about your government, you could be locked away, your family arrested.”
Post something on China’s social media—like QQ—saying “Xi Jinping sucks,” and the post vanishes. Then, Q.D. says, “police will knock on your door.”
(In China, they kill for 55 different crimes. No one knows the real number — they don’t say. But the executed dead pile up higher than the rest of the world combined. Executions come quietly, offstage, as policy.)
“That’s what I see in Trump — the GOP — there is no power in the people. This is why I am so rebellious,” he says. “Hands were suffocating me all the time.
“I came here to avoid fascism,” he laughs. “And now it’s total fascism here. That’s not why I came here, baby.”
Back inside his third-floor apartment—a tight-quartered, kind of glorified motel room—the bed sits beside the small kitchen, a beat-up laptop perched on a tiny table cluttered with handwritten notes and scribbles, some related to a screenplay he’s writing, what he calls “a satire of humanity,” and leaves it at that. An open closet works as an entrance to the bathroom. Neatly arranged. Minimalist.
His own art, showing a breadth of skill and intelligence, floats across the walls, spills through his phone, lights up his computer. Around it: dozens of small educational wildlife posters, symmetrically arranged like a gallery curated by instinct.
“I like animals because they don’t deceive,” he says, balanced on his kitchen counter when asked why he surrounds himself with images of mammals and fauna. “They’re pure nature.”
Next to the bed sits a seatless metal folding chair reimagined in Free Palestine colors and words — an art piece gifted by a friend.
His art I’ve seen — integrated digital work that feeds on protest, pithy satire, mammalian magic, and the loss of personal agency. One piece recasts the four Beatles crossing Abbey Road as a quartet of disparate Jews, set against Palestinian colors. He calls it Jews for Palestine. Another: a minimalist portrait of a woman in a Muslim prayer dress, her face wiped blank — an erasure, a kind of visual mourning. Blood tones bloom at her neck and chest.
Q.D. ranked in the top 1% of his classes in Jixi and its urban districts (population 1.5 million) and got into the city’s most prestigious high school. The pressure came hard. He was bullied, caught in the relentless race for test scores.
He says, “It really comes down to a sense of national insecurity amongst the students, because their scores decide your worth as a human.”
That same yen for knowledge pushed him past the borders of state control. The Great Firewall of China blocked access to Western sites — a barrier both literal and metaphorical for Q.D. At 19, he broke through with help from Falun Gong, a religious group offering VPNs to skirt censorship.
He laughs, remembering the night: “Alone in the library, rain and thunder crashing outside like a Hollywood movie. A fateful night of awakening.”
He attended university in Guangdong, a province outside Hong Kong, spent two years there studying atmospheric science, obtained a student visa transfer and scholarship, and transferred to UA in 2022 to become a physicist. College entrance exam scores (Gaokao) heavily shape the process, allowing little deviation or change.
He lasted a semester at UA studying physics, then bailed. Money ran out—his scholarship didn’t cover tuition — and the place felt nothing like the free-thinking haven American universities are thought to be in China.
“The academic environment was a letdown,” he says. “Not much room for critical thought. More indoctrination.”
He had nowhere to go, couldn’t return to China, so he squatted in UA buildings for, basically, 14 months between ’22 and ’24. A few times he got hotel vouchers, but mostly it was stealth, ingenuity, and mapping intelligence.
“Free lockers, free showers in certain buildings. I figured it out.” He’d steal food from banquets, sleep in the physics department, stairwells, a basement under the main library. “My fellow anarchists were like, ‘dude! That’s legendary!’”
He solved his living situation through tutoring jobs—kids in public schools, students at Pima College, anyone who needed help. The last he quit because they asked him to clean toilets. Now he’s nearly out of money. Rent’s due.
“If the education system worked here,” he says, “I’d be doing physics research — not applying for bartender jobs.”
A few years ago, Q.D. began reading lots of Chomsky, got interested in Palestine, then the genocide came down.
“The moment I joined the pro-Palestinian movement I saw it as a great way to mobilize common people to go up against the unjust system. I never organized with Americans before, so it was a practice run.
“Every war is a domestic class war,” he adds, nodding to the Marxist idea that war isn’t for defense, but a way for the ruling class to tighten its grip. The poor fight and die, the rich profit at home.
“Is the ruling class born evil?” he says, quoting Lord Acton: “Absolute power corrupts …”
Yeah, give a flawed person too much control, and he soon forgets the faces of the people and sees only his own reflection.
Q.D. has protested hard in Tucson, mostly peaceful. At times skirting laws—from student encampments at UA to spray-can weaponry, where words do the shouting.
Protests, boycotts, feeding people — whatever it takes. It’s how communities push back without waiting on politicians or asking permission. Power doesn’t yield on its own. Yet he is shocked how “in-fighting is tearing the leftist community apart,” how it flies in the face of community organizing.
He volunteered at Tucson Food Share for a year, left (“too much infighting”), and now runs a Tucson chapter of Food Not Bombs. FNB isn’t charity — it’s a refusal to let people go hungry. Q.D. and a loose band of locals collect food donations — from the Co-op on 4th Avenue, a bagel shop, or purchased from their own pockets—and hand it out or deliver it. No sermons. No forms. Just food. Anyone hungry eats. It’s action. It’s community. It’s human.
We’re headed down 4th Avenue, bars coming alive, the sun burning orange in the western sky.
Q.D. walks in long, unhurried strides, talking about how Chinese heritage was gutted during the Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1976. Chairman Mao. The Party. Torture. Murder. Intellectuals, teachers, dissidents, ordinary people—anyone seen as an enemy. And the long shadow that still hangs over China.
“Humanity is ending,” he says. “The nuclear winter, global warming. It’s all fucked by the ruling class.”
He thought he had a better shot at helping save the world in America.
“If everybody says, let’s do something about it — it seems so simple.”
We stroll past a few homeless folks. He recalls seeing a woman with nowhere to go, out on the streets with tubes sticking out of her back. It horrified him.
“I will never forget that stuff as long as I live. You never see that in China. Healthcare in China is dirt cheap, $20 U.S. a year. They fix you right up. Healthcare in America, if I’m not dying, I’m not going to the hospital. The gap between the rich and poor; the ruling-class party is sick.”
He continues, “basically 95% of the population in China is poor, by Western standards. In my 20 years of living there I’ve never seen a homeless person. The number of people on the street here is outrageous.
“One good thing about Chinese people, and even Eastern Asians — and maybe it’s from thousands of years of emperors — is that common people, even though they are hostile, there is self-sacrifice to help others. ‘Oh, you don’t have bread? Here, take half of mine. Need a place to stay, stay here.’”
He maintains real friends in Tucson, through the left, adds “people are more friendly here, in Western culture, than China. That’s my experience. People look out for me.”
Then, as night comes down, he adds, with a grin, “Here, I won’t get killed for saying ‘Fuck Trump.’”
