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RADIO ACTIVISM.
ACROSS THE NATION, SCORES OF ASIAN AMERICANS WITH TWO CENTS TO SPARE HAVE TAKEN TO THE AIRWAVES. IS THE MOTTO OF THE '90S "TURN ON. TUNE IN. SPEAK OUT"?
TOPIC: Asian Americans in jail. Talk amongst yourselves. Or listen to the opinions of talk-jock Dan Tsang, who boldly broached this taboo topic on his weekly public affairs show on KUCI, UC-Irvine's radio station. "Asian Americans and incarceration as a topic has been totally ignored," says Tsang, whose audience spans the entirety of Orange County. "No one really mentions it. Or at least, no one's really called in to yell at me."
KUCI is "underfunded," euphemistically speaking. "A lot of the equipment doesn't work," grouses Tsang. "I have to bring in my own headsets. Actually most people think of KUCI as an alternative rock station." But Tsang and his program, Subversity, have been written up twice in the Los Angeles Times in the last two weeks, most recently for his coverage of police abuses in the local Vietnamese community, where officers have been stopping adolescents -- "potential gang members" -- simply for wearing baggy pants.
Tsang jokes that his show is a play on the word "perversity," a nod to his frequent discussion of gay rights. But it's also a portmanteau word, combining subversion -- which, in this traditionally conservative bastion of Southern California, his show is seen as -- and diversity, which reflects both his ethnic identity and the breadth of issues he and his call-in listeners bring into his on-air discussions.
"Subversity" is a canny description of what many Asian American broadcasters are doing: struggling to be heard, to reach and represent overlooked communities -- immigrants, workers in sweatshops and groceries, and the general Asian American population -- and to urge listeners to act on what they hear. But why the radio? Why not TV, or film, or newfangled digital devices like the Internet?
Even its proponents admit that, amidst the high-tech buzzes and beeps of the information highway, radio seems like an antiquated form of communication. "It's a little like a butter churner," says Emil Guillermo, who for two years hosted National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and went on to have his own radio show on KSFO-AM [see following...