This
is the seventh and last part of the memoir of my four-year tour of duty as a
radio talk show host for AM1300 (KAZN).
If we
take a look at the bigger picture of the Chinese community (and maybe, to some
extent, the American society as a whole), my experience with AM 1300 (KAZN) is
indicative.
First,
people are weak, especially those working in the media. They are well-educated,
i.e., highly degreed by the educational system, and think that they are
supposed to be the winner in the world, making top dollars. The fact that they
are actually making bottom dollars (for those working for KAZN, they make less
than those working in the fast food chains) makes them think that the society
is unfair. Their political ideology is for the government to set up laws and
regulations to force employers to pay them "fairly." In the meantime,
they would not take the trouble to fight for better treatment, as they would
neither make any requests to the management, nor form unions, nor stand up to
the station's abuses.
In time,
the overwhelming majority of the employees are those who could sustain the
station’s abuse. I found out that these are a special type of people. They are
smart people. Once upon their lives, they had dreams. However, they are too
weak, or too devious, to take any action to make the station a habitable place.
In
the meantime, the community at large understands better the difference between
being smart and getting paid for it, i.e., the value of risk-taking. Inside an
organization, when you fight for the fair treatment, it is risk taking, as you
may lose your job. Of course, forming ones' own company is another type of
risk-taking. Risk taking typically brings higher remuneration is just a showing
of reasonable market, which award improvements, or services to the consumers by
doing things in a better way. At a foundamental level, rewarding risk-taking is
simply a part of market mechanism to reward those who provide more services to
others (customers), as reasonable market set people's earning by the market
value that he or she could produce. For market, providing unneeded services (by
highly degreed people) and getting paid are contradictions.
As I
found out, those who stays in the station long term do not recognize that fact.
They are too quick to admit that the ration is their only job possibility. When
their English are sufficient to communicate, they almost uniformly admit that
their English would allow them to find a job elsewhere. Since the station is
the only choice for them, they don’t want to do anything themselves to risk
that job. The problem is that they are all smart people. They know that they
are being short-changed, but they want someone else to change that situation
for them. That someone else inevitably becomes the government, as today’s politicians
peddle the classical Marxist class-struggle theories to them to great effect.
The result is layers after layers of revengeful regulations burdening the
corporations, reducing opportunities to all except those who are a part of the
burdening effort. Just like drug addicts, when things are going worse and worse
to them, they want politicians to be more revengeful and lay on more
regulations to the evil corporations.
In
our age, these are the people who inform us what happened in the world. I live in
Los Angeles , and have been
interviewed by The Los Angeles Times about SCA-5 (the law intended to change
the California Constitution so the universities could discriminate the Chinese,
among others), but when the article came out, my side of views was not
presented. The paper made an appearance of reporting different sides of views,
but in fact, at least to me, it reported the same side, the side that supports
the discrimination. After I was fired by the station, I wrote down the event
and send the article to The Los Angeles Times reporter, who did not even bother
to acknowledge my email.
Once,
when I was still working in New York ,
I talked to the managing editor of The New York Times. He said that the paper
only hired reporters with more than five years' experience with a comparible
newspaper, because the paper relied on the reporters for the selection of the
topics to write about. Then, the problem of the bias, for The New York Times,
AM 1300, and the like, comes from the fact that the hiring managers typically
choose those similarly minded. Those who write positive stories about the
market rewarding mechanism of risk-taking probably would offend these people,
or to be more precisely, runs afoul with their denial of the benefit of
risk-taking and their lack of strength to take risks.
For
people outside these so-called intellectual cocoons, such as newspapers and
universities, America
is a great country because it permits the entrepreneurial spirit, not because
the big government forces employers to pay people by their status (college
degrees or whatever else) other than the contribution to the business (for the
uninitiated, that means services that the customers would pay for). If the
employer refuses to pay its employee his market, the employee could simply find
a different employer or establish his own company to compete with his former
ineffective employer.
For
the smart people who refuse to take any risks, the question is why should the
society reward them with higher pay, as the duty of the management is to
maximize the profitability for the owners. Of course, the employees have their
entire denial mechanism to deny any possibility for them to confront that
question. Once the denial mechanism is up and running, they use the same
mechanism to handle all contradictions in their lives.
For
those who work for The New York Times, at least, they have more opportunities
open for them. For those working in the Chinese language media, the vast
English language businesses are not available to them. So the media outlets
could build an isolated island of low pay. One of the first thing I learned
after working for the Chinese-language media is that all media outlets treat
the employees the same way. Worse, the Chinese-language media live in an environment
that many eye balls are taken away by government propaganda (either the Chinese
government in their grand overseas propaganda effort or the U.S.
government in the Voice of America). Also, the most popular newspaper and radio
station are linked to Taiwan .
The situation is so bad that I once heard that the Voice of America commented
that all Chinese-language media in the U.S.
belong to the Chinese government’s overseas propaganda machine. Although that
comment is extreme, there is no denial that the Chinese government is putting
in a lot of dollars to make sure that the Chinese-language media here do not
become the originator of negative content against the Chinese government, as AM
1300 has many joint project with China with questionable financial deals. In
this confused environment, it is almost impossible for anyone to launch an
independent media operation without serious financial backers (although the
market itself, being a wasteland with high-income consumers, is a lucrative
one).
Under
this type of environment, the Chinese immigrants are separated into two groups.
Those who understand English well consume little Chinese media, like me before
and after the period when I hosted the program. There is no cultural
preservation effort here at all. For those who rely on the Chinese-language
media, they are poorly served. The result is that 80% of the Chinese voted for
Obama in 2012, making the Chinese community irrelevant to American's political
process as the Republicans see no hope of getting any vote from the Chinese,
and the Democrats don't see why they should mess with something this good.
I
have been critical of the Chinese government. The station stood up to the
pressure to fire me, although it might have come close at one point. What
became totally unexpected by me was that, after I arranged an interview with
Jack Orswell, who was running against Judy Chu for representing the California
27th district, the station first published a notice banning any type of
interview to any political candidate, and then fired me after I refused to
cancel the interview. Is informing voters that evil?
I
live in a place where people work hard and are comparitively wealthy. It is
clearly evident to those who care to take a random drive through the Chinese
communities east of the downtown Los Angles, where the nicest buildings are
occupied by small businesses, rather than large corporations and government
offices, like many other areas of the country. Yet, the political system, the
media, and the educational system, betray these hard-working people, for their
own vested interests.
After
working for the radio station for four years, I picked up a strong sense of
wasteland. Only for me, May is the cruellest month.
Hearing
that I was fired, one listener commented that he has expected this to come for
some time now, as he did not think that people like me have a chance to last
long.
In
any case, I think that I've had a good run. The four-year radio career gave me
a clear sense of the community that I live in. For that, I am grateful.
Also,
someone said that life is about putting out a record. With some 200 programs,
all available at YouTube, I have expressed my thought about the U.S. ,
China , and the
world.
Now,
after the career of talk show host, I finally have the opportunity to pick up
painting.
Old
soldiers never die. They just fade away.
Finally,
I want to thank everyone who have read this far.
(End
of the series)
First
published on August 19, 2016
Contact
information:
Past
AM1300 (KAZN) programs in Chinese: http://www.youtube.com/user/pujiezheng
For
law firm business (business, patent, trademark, and business-based immigration),
please write to info@pujielaw.com or call 626-279-7200.
