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By Ben Dooley | May/June 2014 Issue
TWO DAYS AFTER BARACK OBAMA won reelection, I met a young Chinese woman, whom I will call Anne, in the basement café at the San Francisco Public Library. Anne worked part time and gave a large portion of her earnings to a group she called "the Community," a Christian sect led by a charismatic Korean pastor named David Jang. After joining the group in her late teens, Anne had spent more than seven years working in its ministriesorganizations and businesses run by Jang's disciples. With short hair and large glasses, Anne was now in her late 20s but looked younger. She said she rarely had enough money for small luxuries like coffee. We chatted with a mutual friend while we waited for her husband, Caleb, who also worked for a ministry: the International Business Times, the flagship publication of an eponymous online news company that would, nine months later, become the new owner of Newsweek magazine.
Caleb was running late because he was translating Obama's victory speech into Chinese for IBT, which publishes 11 editions in seven languages. When he arrived, he shook my hand and, without meeting my eyes, sat beside his wife. "Tell him," she said, pushing her husband's elbow and raising her chin in my direction. They argued under their breath in a few clipped, Chinese sentences, and then he turned to me and said, "We're working here illegally."
For the last year and a half, Caleb said, he and Anne had worked at Community ministries while living in San Francisco on visas they received for Caleb to attend Olivet University, a small Bible college Jang founded in 2004. Caleb was enrolled at Olivet, but he rarely had time to study. Instead, he told me, he translated articles from English into Chinese for 10 to 12 hours each weekday, and commonly worked weekends.
"The pay isn't bad," Caleb said, as though daring himself to be wrong.
I asked him how much he was making. He told me between $500their part of the rent for the group home they shared with 8 to 10 other Community membersand $1,000, depending on the month. I did a quick calculation of what he'd earn working full time at California's minimum wage. I wrote the sum, $1,280, on a napkin and slid it across the table. His hand trembled as he picked it up. He and Anne looked at each other. "That doesn't include overtime," I said.
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http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/03/newsweek-ibt-olivet-david-jang
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)resource magazine for initiating discussions of what was happening in the world. From there, we would spend each week researching for information regarding its top stories by examining articles in other print sources and media. Mind you, this was before cable and there were only three broacast channels plus PBS on the teevee. And radio stations, which were not talk radio but extensions of the broadcast media of the television news. And we were encouraged to access the history section of the library too.
For the younger set, computers and the intertubes were not anywhere close to being a viable technology for personal use. My first experience using computers was to take a course in BASIC in university and punch out cards on a machine the size of a washing machine. Cards went to the "In" bin to be processed and picked up a week later. If you screwed up data entry, it would set you back another week to get results. Sad how communications has become so much easier yet eroded so much. So much garbage in.
oldandhappy
(6,719 posts)Gave it up years ago