A few days ago there was an article in the LA times about the city of Taishan, China. Taishan is the city of my ancestry. My great grandparents were all from there. It is the ancestry home of over half a million Chinese Americans. There are 1 million people in Taishan today but over 1.3 million people of Taishan ancestry all over the world. The story of this city and its people provides a lesson not only about immigration but also about prejudice (not just the racial kind) and about human nature in regard to work ethic.

Taishan was an extremely poor area even by Chinese standard in the early 20th century. Well before WWII the men from the area were leaving oversea to find work. The land was poor and there was no industry. Since it was close to South China Sea many people left for places like the Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The more ambitious ones went to Canada and the U.S. Of course most of them got in illegally. This means once they are in they can't leave easily because they may not be able to come back. So usually many years went by before the men could see their family again. My grandfather left for Canada, came back a dozen years later for about a year and then returned to Canada forever. My grandmother was pregnant with my father when my grandfather left the second time. It was over 30 years later that my father saw his father for the first time. My other grandfather never made it back home, having been stranded in SE Asia. Meanwhile back in Taishan the women were in charge. It became almost a matriarch society as most of the men were gone.

By the 1980's most of the people who had left Taishan had done well oversea. In the Americas they had gone from waiters and cooks to businessmen. Their children, if they were able to join them, had become professional people. In SE Asia they became even richer as many ran corporations or small businesses. While America is the land of opportunity for immigrants, in some ways it was easier to be successful in places where the natives were not as advanced as Americans. The drawback is that while the Chinese may face prejudice in America because of their skin color, they face even worse prejudice in other lands because they became richer than the natives. Many Chinese had to change their names to hide their ethnicity. When they became rich they had to hire armed guards. They were basically to SE Asians what the Jews were to the Europeans in the 40's.

As the Chinese did well overseas they sent large amount of money back home. Since Taishan had more people oversea than other Chinese cities, it benefited the most. Schools and hospitals were build with oversea money. The hillbillies of China had became the "Beverly Hills Hillbillies". But this would not last. As the overseas Taishanese became old and died, less and less money were coming back. The children and grandchildren of these "wah kius" had no connection with the old villages. The young people who benefitted from the new schools built by overseas money moved out to cities like Canton, Hong kong and Shanghai. This left the old and less educated in the old villages. Having dependent on overseas money all these years the people left behind are unable to lift themselves out of poverty. With the change to capitalist system throughout China there is no handouts from the government either.

What are some lessons I learned from this history of the Taishanese people? First of all, my view of illegal immigration. When you are desperate you will not hesitate to break immigration laws. If China was connected to the U.S. the most law abiding Chinese would have ran over here without regard to immigration laws. If the Chinese would risk their lives in the ocean to come here illegally, do you think that any fence would keep out the Mexicans? Where there is a demand there will be a supply.

Another lesson about prejudice. This is the prejudice of Chinese against Chinese. The Taishanese were considered inferior by other Chinese. They spoke a dialect that many Chinese considered to sound less intelligence than other dialects. This is similar to our belief that the southern accent sound less intelligence than those from other areas of the U.S. Due to their high poverty level, the Taishanese were also considered to be hillbillies of China. They were looked down upon because the men are gone from the villages. Just like the southerners here, the Taishanese were considered to be less intelligent. But look what happens when their children had the opportunity to have an education in America. So it is a matter of opportunity not genetics. So what we should do is make sure that all of our children have an opportunity to succeed.

As I mentioned before, Taishan was considered backward because most of the men had left. But the women were able to keep the society going without the men. They tended to the fields and animals while raising the children by themselves. So the theory of the weaker sex has to be thrown out the window.

Having the opportunity itself does not equal success. Some in Taishan took the advantage of the better school provided by the overseas money and left to bigger cities. But some just took the handouts. They spent their time playing mahjong and drinking. This is like the welfare system and the Indian reservations in this country. It just makes people lazier. Human nature is such that if there is a easy way out we would take it. Also if we are given handouts then pretty soon we would believe that we are always entitled to it. The Taishanese who left the country had no other choice, so they would do whatever it takes to survive and provide for their families. So to lift people out of poverty we cannot just throw money at them but we must think about ways to increase the opportunities. Then it is up to the individual to succeed on his own.

Now that I have angered the postal workers I will go on and anger the police. I understand that it is difficult job being a policeman. Sometimes a cop has to make a split second decision to shoot or not to shoot. I certainly would not want to be in that situation. I will always give the cop the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes I wonder if they are actually protecting us or making things more dangerous. The Rodney King incident a decade or so ago led to a riot. On May 1st a relatively calm immigrant demonstration turned violent in LA when a few thugs threw bottles at the police. The police somehow pushed the thugs into a park and started firing rubber bullets into a crowd of mostly peaceful families. Several people were injured. For some reason the police also started attacking some journalists on the scene. While some thugs started it, the situation was not dangerous until the police reacted. In other words the police actually made things worse.

Now I am not saying that the average person would not have done the same as the cops in these cases. But I am saying that the cops are suppose to do a lot better since they are trained for these situations and they are paid to do this. Sometimes they act as if they had no training at all. Like the time they fired about 20 shots into a car with a black woman sitting in it. Granted she was on drugs and had a gun next to her and was startled when she awoke and grabbed the gun. But shot after shot even though she was diabled already? Then there was an incident where a black (sounds familiar?) man stole a car and was cornered by the police. They surrounded him and started firing. Now I said they surrounded him so if they miss the car they can actually hit each other. They fired over one hundred shots! Some ended up in houses way down the street. You tell me anyone with any training would have done this?

Now you may say these are isolated incidences in a large metropolitan area. But those are some of the incidences that happened to be captured on camara. What about the times when nobody is there to film the situation? I bet the cops get away with a lot of use of illegal force. Blacks and Latinos are always complaining the illegal use of force by cops. I usually side with the cops because most of the ones complaining have criminal records. But working in the old Detroit Genraly Hospital I also saw alleged criminals come in with injuries by cops that were probably sustained after they were already subdued. I had a neighbor in Michigan who retired from the Detroit police dept. after serving in the elite STRESS unit. He said he quit when he realized that every time he saw a young black man he instinctively reach for his gun. Unfortunately not many cops come to that realization. Of course this makes things more dangerous because minority groups tend to not trust the police and more crimes are then not solvable.

It is not just the violence by the police that gets me. There is also the financial aspect as with all government employees. There are way too many desk jobs. Whenever there is a call for more money for cops they would say that we would have to transfer some office personels to the streets if no additional money are provided. Well, they belonged on the streets anyway. I suppose the only drawback is that some of these guys are way out of shape from sitting at a desk all this time! A few years ago a woman cop in the police dept of the city I work at filed a gender discrimination suit against the dept. The reason I think this is outrageous is that her husband was third in command at the dept! So either she is making all this up or that the people in charge there are stupid enough to discriminate against the wife of one of the top people in the dept. Of course the case was settled so the public cannot find out exactly which of the two scenarios it was. See how the government is not afraid to spend your money for no reason?

Another postage increase starting today! I think we just had an increase in the beginning of 2006 from 37 to 39 cents. So this makes an 11% increase in less than a year and a half. It is a mandate that the postal service be self-supporting. Of course it is easy to be self-supporting if when you are losing money you can just increase the price without worrying that the consumer will go some place else. Isn't this the reason why we have laws against monopolies? But with government service there is no law against monopolies. Sure the increase in fuel prices must be devasting to the postal service. But this would apply to UPS and Fed-ex as well. The way I understand it is that the cost of labor is much higher with the postal service than UPS and Fed-ex. It seems to me that the government is the only sector that cannot negotiate effectively with the unions. Why? Because it is our money that they are using to pay the workers not their own money. There is an old saying in Chinese that when you work for the government you have an iron rice bowl. It is perfectly true in America today.

I understand that big business is cold. But if you can be easily replaced then you don't have leverage in the private workplace. With the government, however, once you are in you are in good shape. The average postal worker makes over $62,000 which is much higer than a nurse. The number of first class mail has decreased with the increase in e-mail. Generally when there is less demand, the prices goes down. But that is not the case here. Labor costs continues to go up in the postal service. This is typical of government services. The teachers, police, fireman etc unions have done a lot better in negotiations than the unions in the private sectors. Some prison guards in California are making close to $100,000 per year. This is outrageous.

Now that I have angered all government workers who read this blog, I would like to point out that I would not mind too much if they actually do their jobs well. In the case of postal workers, there were couple that my wife has come across at a post office near my office that she found extremely helpful. So certainly some government workers deserve what they are paid. Unfortunately, with the contracts that our so called public servants have given to the unions, the pay in government service is almost never based on merit. Unless we can find a system where if the government service can lose its monopoly due to poor performance, we will pay higher and higher taxes with worse and worse services.

I saw George Tenet on t.v. couple times recently, plugging his book. Journalists like to interview him because he is criticizing the Bush administration. Basically he said that while the intelligence for the war was not very accurate, the Bush administration had decided to go to war regardless of the intelligence. I would agree with that assessment as I have always felt that Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld had convinced Bush to go to war right after 9/11. The Bush administration did make a scapegoat out of Tenet. Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"? Nevertheless, from watching the interviews, I feel that I have very little respect for Tenet.

While he acknowledged that the intelligence was flawed, he said that he warned the administration not to go to the public with them. Of course, he claimed that he had not read the state of the union address ahead of time where Bush said that Hussein was building nuclear weapons. When pressed by the reporter about his estimate for WMDs, he said that since he said it was an estimate that they were not wrong. Well, that is nonsense. In medicine when we put a drop of urine under the microscope and can see one single bacterium, then we can estimate that there are more than 100,000 bacteria per ml of urine, indicating a significant infection. If we don't see any, we can't estimate anything. Since there was no WMDs found at all, how can they come up with any estimation?

Tenet sat behind Colin Powell while Powell embarrassed himself at the UN with false intelligence. All Tenet would say is that he has talked to Powell about that incident but would not say that he apologized or what exactly did he say to Powell. He also flatly denies that the U.S. has tortured any prisoners at Guatanomo Bay or elsewhere. Common, when Russia and China denied torturing people, did anyone believed that? I don't have problem with torturing known terrorists. But I don't think all the the people incarcerated at Guatanamo all dangerous terrorists. So if Tenet had said that there were a few al qaeda operatives that we had to get information out of by any means necessary, it would be believable. Zero torture? I don't think so.

Tenet accepted the Medal of Freedom from Bush. This is obviously a bribe for him to go away quietly. To make Tenet a scapegoat and then tell the nation what a great job Tenet did was dispicable. If Tenet is a real man he would have tell Bush where he can shove his medal. But Tenet gleefully accepted the bribe, er, medal. Now couple of years later he is trying to make a few bucks and clear his name by blasting away at the Bush administration in his book. I can only be thankful that he is no longer running the CIA.

A few people have asked me to comment on the Virginia Tech shooting. I don't think I have much of interest to say about this tragedy. In the future I would write something about growing up as an Asian American male. This would seem to be easy since I am an Asian American male, but to me it is not so easy. It would be difficult for me to be objective and my experience may not reflect other Asian males. So I am going to wait for the right opportunity, with the right type of lead in. To me the VT tragedy is about one mad man and not reflective of an ethnic group's experience. Anyways, there are a few points I want to make:

My wife was all worried when the killer was identified as Asian. She said that she hope that he is not Chinese. I can understand her feelings. The paper next day interviewed Korean leaders in LA who apologized for the killing by a Korean. I can understand that also. But I think we should set these feelings aside. There is no need to apologize. White people didn't have to apologize for Tim McVeigh and Jeffrey Dahlmer. Just because some people think that I should know all the Chinese doctors in town, it doesn't mean I should. Nobody is responsible for this killer's action except for him, so nobody else should apologize.

Now that doesn't mean that there are not some racists out there who would take advantage of this. Remember the time an American spy plane went down in China? Some Chinese restaurants were threatened or vandalized. After 9/11 the yoga studio my wife goes to was graffitied with the words "go back to where you came from". This happened even though the studio was owned by a white female and there are no Arab members. Fortunately there were not too many of these incidences. Majority of Americans are fair-minded. We should not let a few crazies intimidate us. There is no reason feel shame of being Asian over this.

I am a gun control advocate. I don't see the reason to have any guns except rifles for hunting. All automatic weapons should be banned. Forget about the so-called constitutional rights to bear arms. There has to be a line drawn because if not then someone can claim his right to own an atomic bomb. Some people say that to protect one against criminals, one needs to be armed. Some even suggest that if someone had a gun in VT then the killer may have been stopped. Well, I don't think the average person is carrying automatic weapons and if he has just a hand gun, then he would be no match against the bad guys. I would bet the number of times an armed innocent person save the day is way smaller than the number of accidents caused by guns. People, not guns, are ultimately responsible for killing people. But I have yet to see a person kill thirty people at a time with a knife or a baseball bat.

All this nonsense about privacy of mental illness has to change. Psychology is not an exact science. But a person with a history of psychological illness should not be allowed to purchase guns. People who have seizure disorders are not allowed to drive and a doctor has to notify the state. This is obviously a right law because a person may have a seizure and kill others with a car. So why should people with mental illness be allowed to operate a gun and be able to kill others? People with mental illness can also refuse treatment unless they are imminently dangerous to himself or others. Since their judgments are impaired, why do we have to wait to the danger point or maybe beyond that to force treatment?

I think these issues are the more important lesson to be learned from this case. It is not a case of ethnic or racial problems. It is a case of mental illness and our violent world in which guns play a major role.