The Bobby Bones Show - (SPONSORED) On the Job – The Second Act: From Dentist in China to LA Musician

Episode Date: February 14, 2018

Mr. Song left his home in China and moved to Los Angeles after his wife passed away. He had plans to continue practicing his lifelong career of dentistry, but when things don’t work out quite as he had planned, Mr. Song decided to switch gears by bringing the erhu, a traditional Chinese folk instrument, to his new American audience.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. APUS.edus.edu slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS.org slash military. There is no mandatory retirement age in America, so at a time when people are expected to slow down, some find that older age can become an opportunity to start over in a completely new career and even a new life.

Ying Chang Song did just that when he landed in Los Angeles almost 10 years ago. I left China because there were some things I wanted to do in my life and didn't want to admit I was too old for that. It turns out he wasn't too old, but starting over in a foreign place and in a new culture without speaking the language or knowing a single person turned out to be more liberating than he'd ever imagined.

On this edition of On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we've got the story of a man who gave up a conventional life in China and found his artistic calling in Los Angeles later in life. We'll have that story in a moment. The On the Job podcast celebrates the journey of hardworking men and women as they work toward making their dreams a reality. In season two of this podcast from Express Employment Professionals, we share the ups and downs, triumphs and challenges, and the oftentimes winding roads that lead to satisfaction in our work.

We learn how people earn a living and watch them define who they are in their communities and beyond. Our long-term goal? To put a million people to work. Are you ready for a new job? Did you take your job search online, only to spend hour after hours searching and applying, but rarely connecting with anyone? It's time to find your next job

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Find your local Express Employment Professionals Office by visiting expressprose.com now. And here's independent producer Ruxandra Gwitti with the story of Ying Chang Song. I first met Mr. Song last spring on a warm Saturday morning in Chinatown near downtown Los Angeles. He sat on a plastic stool at the intersection of Broadway and College Street, where tons of tourists cross back and forth each day as they visit shops and restaurants. Standing at barely five feet tall, Mr. Song wore a Panama hat and a red silk jacket, the kind with the Mao collar and the dragon designs all over. In his left hand, he held a bow,

and in his right, a traditional Chinese instrument with a long wooden handle and a small round body, the size of a grapefruit. That's his Urhu. Our interpreter, Chi Shang, approached him while he played in earnest. And within minutes, the two of them realized they were from the same city in northern China, so they hit it off immediately.

Not only did they both speak Mandarin, which made them a minority here in Chinatown, where Cantonese is more prevalent, but they knew the same folk songs. He was visibly thrilled to have met someone who could sing along with him. She's more than half his age. He's 68. It's a song from a popular folk song from a TV show.

It turns out Mr. Song has been playing the Arhoo on the street for money at this corner for almost five years. It doesn't matter how much money I earn, I'm just happy coming here to play. He can make as much as $200 on a weekend, he says. But still, he considers this a hobby. He first started playing the instrument when he was a teenager, more than 50 years ago,

and kept practicing at home whenever he got a chance. Playing music is really my passion, and I have a lot of time to devote to that now. There isn't much else I want in life other than play music, but I do have this wild dream of going all over the U.S. It would be like going on tour solo, just he and his Urho, playing street corners all over the United States. He would get to visit new places

while introducing the Chinese two-string fiddle to people who've probably never heard the sound before. You could think of Mr. Song as a cultural ambassador on the road without a worry in the world. This is his very own version of the American dream. We spent about an hour chatting on the corner of Broadway in college. But on that first visit, Mr. Song didn't tell us much about his life before the Arhoo and how it is that he had ended up in L.A.

So we made plans to catch him another time. On a weekday morning, we met up at his local library. That's where he often goes to keep up with the news back home through Chinese newspapers. Chi sat next to him at a table. He looked down at her smartphone, eyes wide open. So I was just showing him the wonders of online-based map, where you can see, you can zoom out and see the entire China. And where we are, which is what the blue dot shows.

And so we are, where we're from is part of Shandong province, and the city is called Qingdao. With his thumb and indexed fingers, Mr. Song zoomed in and out of an online map for the very first time. He told us he'd actually been raised in a rural community, but in the late 1950s, alongside millions of other Chinese, his family resettled in a big city. Yeah, he was born, like, somewhere around here in Shendom.

And when he was 20, there was the great famine in China. So his entire family moved to Hargan in the north. He went to college in Qingdao and became a dentist. Mr. Song got married and had two sons. He started his own dentistry practice and was able to provide his family a good middle-class life. By every measure, he was a successful man. He had a good career and loved spending time with his family. But a decade ago, his wife suddenly passed away.

And Mr. Song struggled to find new meaning in his life, to figure out what was next. He was 58 and ready for a big change. He struggled as he looked for answers for about a year. And then, seemingly on a whim, he decided to leave his dentistry practice to his sons who had followed in his path. He packed a single suitcase

and got a one-way flight to America. Before I came, I thought the U.S. was a very magical place, almost like a paradise in the West. But after coming here, I realized that I couldn't really read the road signs. I couldn't talk to people. So I felt like I was blind and deaf and felt isolated. When I came to Chinatown, I finally felt like I could get accustomed to life here. At first, Mr. Song thought that even though he didn't speak in English, he would go back to doing what he knew, fixing people's teeth. He had the idea of opening a small clinic in Chinatown, where there weren't very many.

There are a lot of Chinese-speaking people in Chinatown, and at most places you can speak Chinese. But even if he spoke his customer's language, there was another big challenge up ahead, getting certified to practice here. That recertification process was lengthy and expensive, and he needed to get to work right away to support himself. Before long, he gave up on that idea of China,

trying to become a dentist in the U.S. That's when it occurred to him. Why not play the Arhu for money? I've been playing several instruments since I was a teenager, like the flute and also the Arhoo. But the flute was really loud and several neighbors complained. So I primarily played the Arhoo. And when I started hearing complaints from the neighbors

were playing the Arhoo too, that's when I decided I'm playing it on the street. He'd seen a lot of the street. Other street performers around downtown L.A., collecting change in their instrument cases. So he gave it a try one day, on a corner just a few blocks from his Chinatown one-bedroom apartment. It worked. At first, he headed out to play the Urhu almost every day. Sometimes I meet younger people who appreciate my music on the street,

and we have a good time together, and they start dancing. I don't really know how to play Western music. I just know Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday. A lot of the tourists would request that he play Happy Birthday to someone for some change. But he had good days and bad days, and living in Los Angeles isn't cheap. His share of the rent is about $400 a month. So he had to figure out a new hustle on top of his street performance if he wanted to stay in the U.S.

We're listening to independent producer Roxandra Gwidi, bringing us the story of Ying Chang-Song, a Chinese dentist who has found another calling here in the United States. We'll continue with his story in a moment. First, a word from express employment professionals. One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it? Not to express employment professionals, seeking a skilled labor position, or administrative work.

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Go to expresspros.com to find a location near you. I'm Steve Mensure, your host for On the Job. Now, back to our story. Early on a weekday morning, we met Mr. Song outside an old, nondescript gray building in downtown Los Angeles. He's come on his bike,

hauling a small cart behind him, something that he's rigged himself with a sharpening wheelstone and some tools. I used to work in a garment factory as a garment worker myself, and I saw people coming around doing scissors, sharpening.

And I thought, I know how to sharpen scissors, so I got the idea that I can do that myself. I started doing it manually, but it was too hard on my hands. So I got a machine, and I earned more money than I did when I worked as a garment worker. With cart and tow,

Mr. Song walks into every warehouse inside the gray building, advertising his services to the garment workers there. Filo tigeras, he yells. I sharpened scissors. The workers, most of them Spanish-speaking, know him already. They get their scissors sharpened with him every month.

and some of them recognize him from his Urhu playing in Chinatown. He sharpens the garment workers' old scissors for a dollar and also sells new scissors for two. But I usually don't care about what they get. I just want to sell all the boxes. And at the end of the day, when he sold all the wholesale boxes of scissors he's been hauling, he usually ends up with a couple of hundred dollars in profits.

I like sharpening scissors. It lets me get around, and I see more of the city that way. He takes the elevator down to the street level and attaches his sharpening cart to the back of his bike. It's almost noon, and he's headed home, riding through L.A.'s historic downtown and towards Chinatown, a good 10-mile ride above main streets and freeway overpasses. He's in great physical shape for a 68-year-old man

in no small part because of his daily bike rides. And because he keeps busy and engaged. When he's not playing the Arhoo or sharpening scissors or riding his bike, Mr. Song is back at the library, studying for his U.S. citizenship test. But because he must speak English in order to take the test, he's trying to learn English too. And that's perhaps the most daunting part of his new life in America, learning a new language.

As an older person, it's really hard for me to memorize anything, so learning a language is a real challenge. Most of the people in English class are elderly, just like me, but some of them have better memory than I do. It takes them once to remember things. It takes me five times or ten times, so I really have to put in a lot more effort. On this day, Chi is sitting next to him in class, helping him with his pronunciation.

George Washington is the father of our country, he says, under his breath, and she corrects him, writing out what the sounds of those words in English would look like in standard Chinese. Little by little, over the many months I spent getting to know Mr. Song, his English skills seemed to improve. He was serious about practicing and going to class. His main goal at this stage in life was to be able to pass his citizenship test and fulfill his dream to travel across America on a greyhound bus with his Arhu. But the more I looked around at other people, even much younger people, the more unique Mr. Song seemed.

He had a drive to succeed in his own terms, and no qualms about what that took. He was endlessly positive and hardworking. And even despite the challenges of a new life in the U.S. without his grown sons, he showed no desire to return to China. Yes, you are right. Mr. Song is a very rare case. I asked Brandy Orton, a gerontologist who works for St. Barnabas Senior Services in

Los Angeles, serving a population of immigrant and low-income seniors like Mr. Song. When you become a street performer or as someone who sharpens knives, you are your own boss. There is no one to discriminate against you, quote-unquote, as an employer, and you determine who you're going to do business with and where you're going to go. And quite often, you build a community around you of people who purchase your services. This is true for Mr. Song. He has very loyal customers, whether they are the garment workers who get their sister sharpened with him, or the tourists or locals who walk up to him and give him change when they hear him playing his Arhu in the neighborhood.

Some of these people have helped him find new sources of income, or they have told him about the free English classes at the library. They are his network of friends and fans, the ones who make him want to keep playing his Arhu for as long as he can. What really matters? what are the critical things that make their life worth living? Dr. William Vega is looking for an answer that would help explain Mr. Song's resilience. He's executive director of the University of Southern California, Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging. And what are the things that impinge upon their ability to achieve those things or not?

That is the critical message that people want to know about, because in the end it's an existential question. I've asked Mr. Song those same existential questions, and time and time again, he's told me the same thing. He doesn't want to feel like he's too old for anything, not riding his bike or learning a new language, and always, above all, he loves playing the Arhoo. Few other things in life seem to make him as happy. One day, last summer, Chi and I ran into Mr. Song in Chinatown in Chinatown. It had been a while. She tells Mr. Song that she's going to China soon to visit her parents and he asks her to bring him a new Arhu back. She stops to think about it.

Why do you need a new Arhu? Just the day before he tells her, he'd had a good gig playing as Arhu and he imagines he'll get more of those in the future. Some TV or film producers approach me to play music on their set as part of their movie. So I've been to their studio. It paid like $50 or $60.

It only took 10 or 20 minutes, but they put makeup on me and they put me in costumes. From the sound of his voice, I could tell he loved it. I asked him if he wanted to be in the movies. If that was part of his dream, too. No, not really. He just wants to keep playing, he says.

Keep getting better. He wants to prove to himself that he can be a great 70-year-old Arhu player someday. Being a famous musician or singer would have been great, but I don't think I'm playing quite at that level yet. So playing on the street is just a way for me to have fun and also a way to share Chinese culture.

It doesn't matter how much money I earn as long as it brings me joy. And with that, Mr. Song jumped back on his bike. He asked Chi to think about bringing him back on Erhu. He was wearing his Panama hat and his red silk jacket. His Ur-Hoo case was slung across his back, and he was on his way to his corner at Broadway in college. You've been listening to The Second Act, from retired Chinese dentist to L.A. musician.

Producer Ruxandra Guidi first met Mr. Song while working on a story for public radio station KCRW with support from the Eisner Foundation. And that's all for this edition of On the Job, express employment professionals. Find out more at expresspros.com, and you can listen to every podcast this season at expresspros.com slash podcast.

This podcast is produced by your host, Steve Mencher, from Mench Media, IHeartRadio, and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on IHeart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review that helps other folks find us. And, of course, you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

See you next time. On the job. Air Tasker handles your never-ending to-do list. Pick up the cat, get nails done, yard work, taxes. Local taskers can do all that. Visit Airtasker.com or download the app. Air Tasker, get anything done? What if your soda actually did something for you?

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APUS. Dot E-DU slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS.edu slash military. Make every day feel epic in the all-new Hyundai Palisade hybrid. The Palisade Hybrid is packed full of features, cutting edge tech,

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62314-4-603 for complete details. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.