Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  As the days passed, Little Yan’s worries grew to fill her idle time. She tried to study English but spent most of her time watching Chinese television online. Zhuang left their door open, hoping to meet their neighbors, but no one came. They had made no new friends. Quietly, Little Yan decided to keep her own counsel and find a job. The problem was how to go about it in the United States.

  She found her solution in a barbershop. Zhuang would browse job advertisements on local Chinese websites, but Little Yan didn’t trust the impersonality of the Internet. She wanted to talk to a real person about getting a job. So one day when he took her with him to get a haircut, she asked the barber what she should do. She had no experience, she told him, limited English, and no work permit. The barber had no trouble answering. He told her to find work in a nail salon. “Go get a newspaper and look at some of the ads,” he said. So she picked up the same Mandarin-language newspapers they had used to find the apartment and circled the nail salon ads. Some listed openings in Brooklyn, some in Manhattan, others in Long Island. There were nail salons in New Jersey and upstate New York. There were vans that would run workers to Connecticut and rural Maryland. Little Yan called numbers for salons in New York City, but beyond that, she didn’t ask where they were. The locations were all the same to her.

  The job that Little Yan got was at a shop in Long Island City, in a bad part of town, where no one tipped. She got the job, she later understood, because no one else wanted to work in that area and because summer was coming, peak season for nail salons. When she couldn’t produce her address over the phone, the boss didn’t hesitate and asked, “Is there a grocery near your house?” People commonly navigated according to the Chinese groceries. Little Yan said yes and named one on a corner a few blocks away. The boss instructed her to go stand in front of that store the next morning. She would pick her up and take her to work.

  The night before, Little Yan had been worrying that she would be kidnapped and sold into slavery—get into the boss’s car and never come back. Before she met Zhuang, when she was living as a migrant worker in Guangzhou, she had heard horror stories about women who had not been cautious. Little Yan hadn’t been in New York long enough to hear cautionary tales, but she didn’t need to. Migrant workers from rural areas were vulnerable in Guangzhou, cut off from their families; New York was much farther away, and Little Yan didn’t speak English. If she found herself stranded in another part of the city, she would have no idea how to get home or even ask for directions. But she was determined to work. She asked Zhuang to walk her to the corner so he could memorize the license plate of the car that picked her up.

  On the morning of her first day, Little Yan and Zhuang worked their way around snowdrifts and passed a handful of women lingering on street corners waiting for other vans. They arrived at the grocery store a little too early and stood quietly, Zhuang smoking a cigarette with a pinched efficiency brought on by the lingering cold. And then a van pulled up, a door opened from the inside, and the woman driving asked Little Yan’s name. “Get in,” she said. Little Yan did, and the van sped off.

  * * *

  • • •

  Little Yan had expected New York to be luxurious. She had seen movies. She had watched episodes of Friends and absorbed the fabulous large apartment and big windows. New York had to be the wealthiest city in the world, she thought. And then on her first day in the city, she had taken the subway to Flushing. The neighborhood had looked worn out, as if it needed a break from the daily traffic. Little Yan had lived in big cities before and on their outskirts. Flushing did not measure up to them—it was like a third-tier city in China. The bridge carrying the Long Island Expressway over Main Street was dripping and old. The storefronts were dirty and packed together. Little Yan had prepared herself for hardship, but she had imagined a metropolis that was ordered and clean, even in its poorest neighborhoods. She had not considered that she would be packed in with thousands of other Chinese immigrants, walking streets that were cluttered and chaotic. She talked to no one. She saw rats on the subway and out in the open, and no one else blinked.

  For nearly a hundred years, the Chinese immigrants who had come to the United States were men. In 1890, Chinese men living in the United States had outnumbered women more than twenty to one. They were not necessarily bachelors—in some cases, a village family arranged for a young man to be married just days before he left town—but they were alone. They worked long hours in laundries and restaurants. They pooled their money to start new businesses. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had prevented immigrants from bringing over their families, so the imbalance only grew with time. Men packed boardinghouses and gambling dens. They lived according to their village connections, filling up buildings with distant cousins. Their limited family lives helped darken the reputation of Chinatown; lonely men were more likely to smoke opium or frequent prostitutes.

  Little Yan’s Chinatown in Flushing was different. In the 1960s, a change in immigration policies eliminated a quota system based on nationality and focused on reuniting families. Thereafter women made their way from China to the United States in ever greater numbers. In the 1970s, wealthy Chinese investors opened sewing factories, and in the 1980s and ’90s sweatshop clothing manufacturing was tucked into warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens. Bosses would not consider women for labor-intensive jobs like construction or stocking groceries, but they could work in nail salons or push carts at dim sum restaurants. Wealthy Chinese families needed nannies and housekeepers.

  Many of the jobs available to women paid even less than what their husbands and sons were making. But when a woman spoke a little bit of English, her options expanded. Women were popular at the checkout counter in groceries or as salesladies in shops. Restaurants would hire women to answer phones and take orders or as waitresses—jobs that paid slightly more than the kitchen or delivery roles available to men. In Manhattan, some hostels still offered cheap beds to men only, but in Flushing the newspaper classifieds offered beds for women and families. Women had to pay a little more, fifteen dollars a night rather than twelve, but they could live as peripatetic a life as men.

  * * *

  • • •

  The nail salon where Little Yan worked was a tiny operation—a narrow, dark shop with light coming in only through the front windows. In the winter the boss kept a skeleton staff of mostly part-time employees. There were two women in their fifties and a student who came in on the weekends. Each of them wore a little nametag that the owner would recycle as her employees came and went. If the women in the shop ever learned Little Yan’s real name, they forgot it quickly. She had long ago picked the English name Angel for herself, but as a nail technician, she became Lisa.

  Nail salons in New York occupy a low rung of the immigrant employment system. Most offer low wages and long hours, but many are willing to hire even the newest immigrants, paying wages under the table, no questions asked. Little Yan’s boss did not worry that she had no papers. She took a hundred-dollar training fee and promised to give it back as soon as Little Yan worked in the shop for three months. It would take that much time, her boss reasoned, for her to pay back the expense of training her. It would also ensure that Little Yan stayed there for most of the summer, keeping the store running at peak efficiency during the busiest time of year.

  Little Yan’s boss didn’t do much in the way of training. Instead, Little Yan learned by watching the older manicurists, practicing when business was slow. They told her what order to go in, how to cut cuticles with reasonable confidence, and how to keep the varnish neat. She learned the English words for upgraded services—gel polishes, hand massages, and moisturizing treatments. She was to keep her tools in a little sterilizer beside her desk. She didn’t understand the allure of a manicure; no one she had known in China liked to paint their nails. It was, she decided, a quirk of American beauty. “They don’t have to work with their hands,” she said. The streets might have been chaotic, bu
t New Yorkers liked their toes and fingers buffed and neat.

  For the most part, Little Yan’s co-workers did not open up to her. They talked impersonally about jobs and money but avoided divulging the details of their lives, wary of one another. After a few weeks, however, details started to trickle out, and Little Yan started to build a social map of immigrant life. It was not uncommon, she learned, for students to work at nail salon jobs part time as a stepping-stone to something better. Nail salons paid poorly because they accepted undocumented workers and everyone had to rely on tips. (A statewide investigation of nail salons undertaken by New York’s Department of Labor in 2015 found that 85 percent of salons maintained inadequate payroll records.) Zhuang had been right about their advantages—he and Little Yan might live in a shared apartment, but many nail salon workers lived in shared rooms, stacked in bunk beds or separated from one another by hanging sheets.

  The dangers of working in a nail salon were largely economic: long hours for poverty wages. But other industries in Flushing could be more hazardous for women. Massage parlors in particular had a reputation for paying well, but not all were straightforward in their services. Next to the nail salon job ads in the classified sections, it was possible to find ads that were explicit in their intent to hire “beautiful women” only; some offered suspiciously high daily wages. Other ads were deceptive. In previous years, multiple police raids on brothels masquerading as massage parlors in Flushing, Manhattan, and as far afield as Boston ensnared women who claimed they had gotten into a van in Flushing on their way to a job as a masseuse, only to find out they were expected to provide sexual services. There were stories of bosses who held hostage the passports of women who traveled to jobs in other cities and found themselves stranded.

  On the other hand, for women who arrived in Flushing alone and in debt, working as a prostitute could be a practical choice. It paid far more than any other immigrant job and functioned nearly the same as a nail salon: bosses picked up women in the morning and delivered them home at night. In a 2012 book, the sociologist Ko-Lin Chin explained that most of the brothel owners he met were not underground crime lords but former prostitutes or just regular immigrants who had rented a room, relying on classified ads and word-of-mouth to build their business. Some establishments served exclusively Chinese clients, others a mix. Nail salon jobs were a safer choice for women, but they offered a hardscrabble existence. They were for women who needed flexible hours or who shared rooms, keeping their monthly expenses to a minimum.

  * * *

  • • •

  As time went on, Little Yan learned more about her co-workers. The two older women had both divorced after coming to New York. “Everyone in Flushing has a story like this,” her boss told her. Divorce was common among immigrants in Flushing. The younger of the two admitted that she was looking for a boyfriend. The other announced she was off the market, complaining that many of the available men in their fifties were still married to the women they had left behind in China.

  When Little Yan came home and told Zhuang about her workmates, he started to worry. He still didn’t like the idea of Little Yan working in the first place, and he didn’t want her gossiping with divorcées. At his worst, he would get angry with her on nights after she came home from a long day of bathing in nail salon fumes. He had known that working would give her a bad attitude, he said. “You don’t understand anything!” he would tell her. “People here are greedy and money-obsessed!” Little Yan was too easily influenced. “I tell you not to worry, and you don’t listen to me!”

  Little Yan was quieter in an argument but deadlier. She complained that Zhuang wanted her to stay home and sweep the floors—which would be fine with her if he would get a job. She would sweep all the floors her husband wanted as long as he was earning good money. But if he didn’t, she was going to work. They had to send money to her family in Guangxi to help them take care of their baby. And Zhuang’s family, with one brother crippled and the other a drug addict, had started demanding money as soon as they arrived. “You are not an expert on money,” she told her husband.

  While Little Yan worked, Zhuang searched listlessly for jobs online and worried about their asylum application, but mostly he obsessed over his past. He could not tear himself away from Wukan Village. Every day he followed the news coming out of the village and complained bitterly to Little Yan about the mismanagement there. He compiled stacks of the petitions he had filed in Guangdong. He took screenshots of his media interviews and wrote page after page of his story. Someday, he thought, he would turn his story into a book. He could find a publisher in Taiwan if someone helped him clean up his manuscript. He wrote as he was—a man with a middle school education, preoccupied with specific details and exact dates. He identified the quantifiable pieces of his past: dates, acres of land, number of protesters. People in Flushing might dismiss him as an uneducated fisherman, but the numbers were unassailable.

  Otherwise he filled his time with trivial things. He took their laundry to the local laundromat. He smoked cigarettes with their neighbor’s boyfriend, a young immigrant from Fujian who had finally, after weeks, introduced himself. When an argument turned too bitter, he would go into their shared kitchen and open a beer.

  Zhuang was determined to come up with something that he could tell his friends in Wukan about without embarrassment. He felt he had a reputation to uphold; he would not lose face by failing to thrive in the United States. If a job on a boat didn’t materialize, he had a million other ideas. He kept his door open, hoping to meet a neighbor who could offer advice. Their current neighbor’s boyfriend told him about Chinese employment agencies that connected immigrants to employers in New York, Florida, Chicago, and beyond. Offices in Flushing offered jobs, but mainly to women hoping to work as nannies. In Manhattan, streets were filled with agencies catering to the tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants scattered across the United States.

  Zhuang didn’t want to leave New York, but in New York jobs were harder to come by. He spent a week training at a travel agency before he realized his entire salary would be on commission. Restaurants nearby were reluctant to hire someone like Zhuang, in his thirties, with no English and no experience. And the potential loss of face there was great: while he could imagine working in a kitchen, he did not want to be a busboy taking home a salary barely enough to pay rent. He walked Little Yan to her street corner every morning and picked her up every night, and he tried to think of a solution.

  Flushing was full of face-losing situations. People on the street looked down on Zhuang and his wife, both villagers and recent arrivals. When they went to a sit-down restaurant, early on, and didn’t know to pay a tip, the boss openly scolded them. Every transaction, every purchase they made, made it clear to Little Yan and Zhuang that they were bumpkins. The real estate office, that first day, had been just the tip of the iceberg. Every outing revealed some new bit of ignorance—they stuttered while checking out at the grocery store, or they jumped off the bus too early out of fear they would miss their stop. The veteran immigrants would sigh, tired of the complications that the steady influx of newcomers presented.

  It hurt Zhuang more than Little Yan. The more he tried to assert himself in his new city, the more he opened himself up to disdain. After a heavy snow, he borrowed a shovel from the neighboring house and cleared the sidewalk. He left a note for his landlord suggesting that they buy a snow shovel that everyone could use and take turns. The Chinese kid looked at him like he was insane. Zhuang grinned but could see the condescension in his landlord’s face. He had struggled before. He had tasted humiliation. But he had no stomach for it anymore.

  In retrospect, Zhuang would claim he came to New York with no expectations. He had known it would be hard, but the list of his disappointments was long: the crowded streets, the smell of garbage in summer, the cluttered sidewalks, and the dim, packed housing that cost so much more than anyone in China could imagine. His spending li
mits were constantly being pushed upward as he paid more than expected for groceries, rent, and bus fare. He took to eating at McDonald’s for the cheap sandwiches. This, he supposed, was what American food tasted like. In the hours he spent indoors, he would scroll through advertisements on websites like 51nyc.com (a play on the similarity between the Mandarin words for “five” and “one” with “I want”). There were no openings to work on Chinese-run boats. He could work long hours on a fishing boat, but he would have to move to Boston. And even then he would have to wait until he got papers. Zhuang decided not to waste time worrying about money. Something would come along.

  * * *

  • • •

  Every morning Little Yan walked to the street corner where the van would stop, passing other unmarked corners where other groups of women clustered—eddies in the stream of people in the sidewalk. People stood silently with their faces buried in their phones or their hands stuffed into their pockets. They would nod a quick hello and go back to staring at the ground. And then a van would pull up—black and white, mostly—and a nail salon boss would swing open a side door. Corners emptied out by late morning. Pedestrians were just pedestrians again.

  About a year after Little Yan got that nail salon job, the New York Times would run an exposé on the working conditions and low pay at nail salons across the city, and the subsequent crackdown would scatter workers as salons suffered fines and shutdowns. Although she didn’t know it, Little Yan had been lucky to find her job in Long Island City. The woman running the shop was honest—she returned the hundred-dollar deposit Little Yan had given her, a refund that the New York Times investigation found was not the norm. Little Yan worked six days a week, resting on Mondays, and her boss gave her a bonus every Friday, a little boost to her fifty-dollar-a-day base pay. She had learned, however, that a nail salon worker’s income depended on tips, and so she wanted to find a shop in a better neighborhood. She also hoped for one with better ventilation. She was especially sensitive to the fumes, she decided, since other people worked all their lives in nail salons and never got a headache.