If You Could Have Dinner With Anyone, Where Would You Go? (Part II)

We are back. Because one blog post was never going to be enough.

Part I took us to Paris, Kenya, Pakistan, West Virginia, and Nigeria. This time we are going to the mountains of the Philippines, the South Side of Chicago, the stages of Los Angeles, the tracks of South Africa, and the fields of California. Five women. Five places. And at the end, something bigger than any one name.

Same question as before: If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be, and where would you go?

Here are a few more of ours.

Apo Whang-Od, Kalinga, Philippines

The place: Her village of Buscalan, high in the Cordillera mountains. You would have to hike to get there. It would be worth every step.

Whang-Od is 106 years old. She is the last and oldest mambabatok, a traditional hand-tap tattoo artist of the Kalinga people, and she has been doing this work since she was a teenager. She uses a thorn from a pomelo tree and a stick of bamboo. Every mark she makes carries generations of meaning.

For most of her life, the world had no idea she existed. Then travelers started making the trek up the mountain, and slowly her name spread. She became the oldest person ever to appear on the cover of a major Philippine magazine. She was named a National Living Treasure.

She did not chase any of it. She just kept doing her work, in her village, on her mountain, the way she always had.

Dinner question: What does it feel like when the world finally comes to you?

Michelle Obama, Chicago's South Side, USA

The place: A kitchen table on Euclid Avenue. The kind of meal that takes all afternoon.

Before she was the most admired woman in the world, Michelle Obama was a girl from a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago, watching her father get up early for work every single day despite living with multiple sclerosis. She took that image with her to Princeton, to Harvard Law, to the White House, and to every stage she has stood on since.

She has talked openly about the feeling of not belonging in rooms she had every right to be in. About the weight of being watched, judged, and reduced. And then about choosing, every time, to show up anyway.

Chicago holds her in a particular way. The city is proud and complicated and layered, just like her story. If you visit, the South Side will tell you something about where grit actually comes from.

Dinner question: What did you decide, early on, that you were simply not going to let stop you?

Atsuko Okatsuka, Okinawa, Japan (and Los Angeles, USA)

The place: A comedy club in Los Angeles, front row, after the show.

Atsuko Okatsuka was born in Okinawa and moved to the United States as a child, living undocumented for years alongside her mother and grandmother. They shared a small space. They made it work. Her grandmother, who spoke no English, became the unlikely co-star of Atsuko's rise to internet fame, appearing in videos that made millions of people laugh and feel something at the same time.

She built her audience slowly, doing the work long before anyone was paying attention. Her comedy special is sharp and warm and deeply personal. She talks about identity, immigration, family, and what it means to belong somewhere that does not always make you feel welcome.

She is one of those performers who makes you laugh until you realize you are also crying a little. The best kind.

Dinner question: How did you learn to make the hard stuff funny without making it smaller?

Caster Semenya, Tshwane, South Africa

The place: A track in Pretoria, early morning, before anyone else arrives.

Caster Semenya ran her way to two Olympic gold medals and became one of the greatest middle-distance runners of her generation. She also became the center of one of sports most painful and public debates about identity, biology, and who gets to decide what a woman is.

World Athletics ruled that she had to take medication to suppress her natural testosterone levels in order to compete in her preferred events. She refused. She fought the ruling through courts and tribunals for years. She kept showing up.

She is from Limpopo, raised in a rural community, and she carries that groundedness with her everywhere. The world tried to tell her what she was and was not. She has never accepted that framing.

Dinner question: Where do you find peace when the noise gets that loud?

Dolores Huerta, Stockton, California, USA

The place: Somewhere close to the fields. Simple food, strong coffee, a long conversation.

Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers union alongside Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. She organized laborers, led boycotts, negotiated contracts, and fought for the rights of some of the most overlooked workers in America. She did this while raising eleven children.

History, for a long time, remembered Chavez more than it remembered her. That is its own kind of story.

She is 94 years old. She is still organizing. She has been arrested more than twenty times for nonviolent protest. She coined the phrase that would become a rallying cry for generations: Si se puede. Yes, we can.

Her work feels especially alive right now, as conversations about farm workers, immigration, and labor rights continue to shape this country. She was there before the conversation was fashionable. She is still there.

Dinner question: How do you sustain the work when progress is slow, uneven, and often unseen?

And Then There Is Everyone Else

Five women. Five places. Five dinners we would not trade for anything.

But here is what we keep coming back to: for every woman whose name made it into a headline, there are thousands who did not. Who organized the meeting no one showed up to. Who raised the child who changed everything. Who said the thing out loud in a room that was not ready to hear it, and said it anyway.

The Women's March put millions of people in the streets on every continent. Not one leader. Not one face. Just people who decided that showing up mattered.

Tarana Burke started the MeToo movement in 2006, in community centers, for survivors who had nowhere else to turn. The hashtag came more than a decade later. The work came first.

And somewhere right now, a woman is doing something quiet and necessary and thankless that will matter enormously to someone, someday, who may never know her name.

This blog is for her too.

Women's History Month ends March 31st. The work, the stories, and the women who carry them, those do not have an end date.