The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  The dangers of the journey equaled or surpassed what nineteenth-century Chinese émigrés endured. Smuggling often entailed lethal conditions, such as boats made of rotting, crumbling wood; illegal Chinese aliens have described trips in which they were forced to bail water out of sinking ships. In one case, crew members abandoned a disabled vessel and considered dynamiting it with hundreds of passengers on board. In July 1995, the U.S. Coast Guard discovered 147 illegal aliens from China on a fishing boat that one American authority called “the most incredibly screwed-up, rusted-out vessel I’ve ever seen.” The immigrants had squeezed into a room no larger than the width of two cars. Contaminated water filled the hold, and the air was fetid because the portholes were covered with plywood.

  Not surprisingly, the journey for some Chinese ended in the morgue. In June 1993, the Golden Venture, a ship with more than 260 illegal Chinese passengers, ran aground two hundred yards from Rockaway Peninsula near New York City. The crew urged the immigrants to jump overboard and swim for shore. So close to reaching their America, the Chinese took a last risk. Ten drowned, while hundreds of others were rescued by the New York City police, the Immigration Service, and the Coast Guard. Some Chinese émigrés died in Europe, which presumably many saw as a way station to the United States. In 1995, eighteen Chinese died of asphyxiation in a sealed trailer en route to Hungary. The following year, five Chinese corpses were discovered in a truck crossing the Austrian border. In the summer of 2000, authorities found one of the most grisly human smuggling tragedies yet: fifty-eight Chinese suffocated in a giant refrigerator of rotting tomatoes in Dover, England. When officials swung open the doors, they were met by the putrid stench of decay, and two survivors reaching out with torn bloody fingers, gasping, “Bang wo! Bang wo!” (Help me! Help me!)

  The most frightening voyages occurred within sealed cargo containers on freight ships. Some illegal immigrants were literally boxed in for weeks, enduring the entire trip in near-darkness. Some were given a certain measure of comfort, such as fans, mattresses, and cell phones, while others arrived “awash in human waste,” in conditions so filthy that immigration authorities had to don hazardous materials gear before entering. Many survived on starvation-level food and water rations: one Chinese boy who spent twelve days and nights in a cargo container said he had eaten nothing but water and crackers during the entire journey. He and his fellow passengers huddled under blankets on a mattress, used plastic bags as toilets, and played poker by flashlight to while away the time.

  By early 2000, American immigration authorities found that smugglers had turned to hard-topped shipping containers. As U.S. immigration officials grew more aggressive—using dogs to sniff out humans in cargo containers—so did the smugglers, who invented even more daring tactics. In Los Angeles, investigators found fifteen Chinese stowaways in a hard-topped container with two doors cut in the sides. The smugglers had camouflaged the doors with epoxy and paint, attached hinges inside the container, and created ventilation systems and escape hatches with fans and car batteries. The danger of a hard-topped container is that stowaways can be entombed alive. If there are no secret doors, the Chinese have to wait until the snakeheads cut open a door—or slowly suffocate to death.62

  Often the greatest threat to the Chinese emigrants was the snakeheads themselves. One twenty-four-year-old Fujianese who spent four months crossing the Pacific in a freighter said the smugglers withheld food and water from all females who refused to have sex with them. Another man reported a case in which the crew gave female passengers drinking water spiked with sleeping pills in order to rape them. On a rickety fishing boat intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1995, authorities discovered signs of severe mental and physical abuse among the 147 Chinese on board. The crew had sexually assaulted many of the male passengers, including boys as young as ten, forcing them to endure oral and anal intercourse, even group masturbation sessions. By the end of the trip, some were so seriously traumatized that they considered suicide.

  Most Chinese, however, survived the journey—only to find that the worst was still to come. The snakeheads hid migrants in “safe houses” as they awaited payment from relatives for the journey. During their stay, the enforcers often charged exorbitant rates for basic necessities like food and water so that their debt would increase. Illegal aliens reported being charged a hundred dollars for a single international phone call.

  Although many Chinese immigrants signed IOUs sealed with their own blood, upon arrival some were shackled and handcuffed to metal bed frames or heavy objects, kept in basements without light, and fed a little rice gruel. If their relatives were unable to pay in time, the smugglees might be doused in icy water, beaten, and starved. In 1991, the FBI broke into a Brooklyn apartment and found a Chinese man handcuffed to a bed, scarred with cigarette burns, and bludgeoned by crowbars. In 1994, the police arrested eight gangsters from Fuzhou who had chained prisoners to a ceiling and tortured them by yanking out their fingernails and thrusting red-hot irons into their backs. One woman whose family could not pay on time was raped and assaulted for months, an ordeal that left her paralyzed. Some Chinese reported being so abused in captivity that they grew desensitized to violence and lost all emotion. As one described his experience in the hands of the snakeheads, “After being there for a period of time, I had no sense of fear anymore because being punished became a daily routine.”

  The snakeheads often promised aspiring migrants that “they can make a fortune—maybe a million dollars—in two, three or five years,” according to Yu Shuing, a spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington. The reality was quite different. Without the government protection legal status afforded, Chinese laborers were at the mercy of their employers, and typically they found menial work through Chinatown employment agencies, jobs such as dishwasher, waiter, or factory worker. Reluctant to pay minimum wage when they could hire a Chinese illegal alien for half the amount, some sweatshop owners paid no wages to workers at all: when a manufacturing contract was completed, the owner would shut down the operation and move elsewhere. As a result, some Chinese bitterly regretted moving to America. “To tell you the truth, I feel like garbage in the United States,” a construction worker said. “Here, we sleep on the floor, and we work like slaves ... Those living with me in the same apartment cry all the time.”

  Overinflated rents worsened their misery. During the 1980s and 1990s, illegal Chinese aliens poured into Chinatowns just as businessmen from Taiwan and Hong Kong, jittery about political developments in Asia, invested their capital in American real estate. The result was a frenzy of speculation and soaring rents,63 which pressured Chinatown sweatshop owners to slash payments to workers even further. In New York, Chinese laborers routinely worked twelve hours a day in unventilated garment shops with broken sprinkler systems and padlocked metal gates barring the fire escapes, conditions rivaling those in the ill-fated Triangle Shirtwaist factory, where a fire destroyed 146 lives in 1911.

  After work, many Chinese aliens came home to dingy, crowded apartments, often rat-infested, dungeon-like basements with exposed rusty pipes, live wires, and asbestos. Instead of taking a private room, many rented bunk space—often little more than two-by-fours-for ninety dollars a month, and shared the cost with other illegal immigrants by sleeping in shifts. “Most of our villagers considered America heaven,” K. T. Yang, president of the United Fujian American Association told a reporter in New York. “And they’re now forced to live in hell.”

  Despite these hardships, the frugal living habits of these illegal Chinese aliens—such as sharing crowded apartments and eating at the restaurants that employed them—enabled many to clear their financial obligations within a few years. According to Ko-lin Chin, by the early twenty-first century Chinese smugglees typically worked off their debt to the snakeheads in four years, with the majority obtaining their green cards or U.S. citizenship within five or six years of their arrival. “They are hard-working and ambitious, which is why they are here,” Chin said. “Sooner or late
r, most will find a way to legalize their status.”

  Over time, he noted, some of these naturalized Chinese Americans have become highly successful, opening their own take-out restaurants, garment factories, renovation companies, groceries, and other small businesses. “They now drive Mercedes-Benzes and own million-dollar homes,” Chin said of several Chinese he had surveyed as illegal aliens years before. “Most don’t have a lot of formal education or skills—you wouldn’t see them in computers—but they are good entrepreneurs. Americans don’t realize how creative they can be.”

  But unforeseen events could thwart even the best-laid plans, and during the first critical years in the United States—the years when illegal aliens struggled feverishly to pay off their debt—the opportunities for their extortion were endless. Snakeheads were known to threaten relatives of immigrants, hoping to squeeze more money out of them, even if they were not behind on their payments. “If smugglers want the money, they say they will kill the males and sell the girls into a brothel,” one illegal Chinese alien said. In 1995, Chinese debt collectors kidnapped Gao Liqin, a thirty-eight-year-old immigrant seamstress, from her home in Queens, New York. The abductors woke her family in Fujian with a phone call in the middle of the night, demanding $38,000 in ransom. Weeping into the phone, Gao Liqin made desperate pleas to her parents to cooperate. But by sending their daughter to the United States, the Gao family still owed a $30,000 debt, and they could not raise the money. The kidnappers cut off her finger, stuffed her head into a plastic bag, gang-raped her, strangled her with a telephone cord, and crushed her skull by hitting her over the head with a TV set. Amazingly, this killing did not deter other members of the Gao family from planning to travel to America. “If you work hard and stay out of trouble, usually you are fine,” her brother said. “We had bad luck.”

  Many illegal aliens believed that eluding the snakeheads was impossible. “You can hide for a few years, maybe a year or two, but you can’t for a lifetime,” said Wang Libin, a passenger on the ill-fated Golden Venture who was granted political asylum because of his activism during the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. However, he still owed money to the smugglers. “You have friends, these friends have friends, you have family. They will find you. There’s no way to hide.”

  As a result, many victims dared not report snakehead crimes to the authorities. For even if they did, neither the police nor the INS would have the manpower, time, or money to crack down on the underground world of Chinese smugglers. Nor did officials have any incentive to do so.64 During the 1990s, critics charged that neither the U.S. government nor the People’s Republic of China enforced their immigration laws because the American garment industry relied on or exploited illegal Chinese aliens, and the mainland Chinese economy benefited from overseas remittances.

  Given these unfavorable conditions, then, why did the Chinese continue to come? For those considering emigration, the prospect of their being exploited was only half of the equation. The other half was how their families would benefit from remittances sent home. During the 1990s, the fruits of émigré labor transformed entire regions in China, studding the Fuzhou landscape with mansions. Many were elegant stone houses with traditional moon gates and round windows; others were cheap, gaudy replicas of European castles, sparkling with pink or gold tiles, resembling the architecture of Las Vegas and Disneyland. Some were six stories tall, complete with elevators, swimming pools, luxury cars, and satellite dishes. Within these ostentatious homes, occupants wore gold jewelry and carried cell phones—flashy displays of wealth that provoked envy among neighbors and inspired others to emigrate.

  Like suburban bedroom communities, these Chinese neighborhoods were filled with wives and children, except the men were working not in a nearby city but on another continent. By the end of the 1990s, so many wives were left behind in Fujian province that their home villages were known as “widow villages.” Some “widows” built mansions piecemeal. Looming over rice paddies were half-constructed palatial homes, some with bare concrete inside, awaiting fresh infusions of cash from the United States. They evoked memories of the fortresses in Toishan, built by relatives of the earliest Chinese immigrants. Indeed, the people of Fujian were repeating a pattern from the nineteenth century—impoverished, overworked Chinese émigrés laboring under conditions of near-slavery in the United States, supporting families who lived like gentry in China. By the end of the twentieth century, a culture of leisure had already settled among the young in Fujian province. Everyone knew that laborers who earned $40 a month in China could make $2,000 in the United States. “So no one in the village works before they go to America,” one immigrant’s wife told a reporter. “There’s no point.”

  In many areas, even the wives and mothers were missing. Some villages have been reduced to “ghost towns,” as one scholar put it, “populated only by old people caring for very young children whose parents are working in garment factories on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Chinese takeout restaurants scattered across the 50 states.” Because these communities lost their most productive adults—almost all men and women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five—child care responsibilities fell primarily on the shoulders of doting but aged grandparents. In 1999, the New York Times reported that female garment workers were paying a $1,000 fee, plus airfare, to have their infants safely delivered from New York Chinatown to their families in Fujian. So while some of the most affluent Americans were importing Chinese babies for adoption, many of the poorest Chinese women were shipping their babies—U.S. citizens by American birth—back to their home villages, to join the ranks of a new Chinese aristocracy.

  Many illegal aliens felt the money was worth the risk, the heartbreak, and the fractured families. Some believed their children would ultimately benefit from the arrangement: “I am sacrificing myself to bring happiness to my family,” one Chinese worker said. Others groped toward an elusive but enticing vision of future paradise. “Look at your salary,” Fuzhou native Cho Li Muwang told an American reporter after two failed attempts to leave China. “If you can go to some other place, even very far away, across the ocean, and work the same, but make ten times more money, would you go? What about twenty times more? What about one hundred times more? Would you go?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  An Uncertain Future

  My grandfather came to this country from China nearly a century ago and worked as a servant. Now I serve as governor just one mile from where my grandfather worked. It took our family one hundred years to travel that mile. It was a voyage we could only make in America.

  —Governor Gary Locke of Washington State, the first Chinese American governor in the United States, January 28, 2003

  My book chronicles only the past and present journey of the Chinese in America, not where their story will go from here. Each new generation must rediscover history in the light of new events, and so it must be left to future scholars to continue the narrative.

  Instead, I can only close this book with a fervent hope: that readers will recognize the story of my people—the Chinese in the United States—not as a foreign story, but a quintessentially American one.

  From the moment the Chinese set foot on American soil, their dreams have been American dreams. They scrambled for gold in the dirt of California. They aspired to own their own land and businesses, and fought to have their children educated in American schools alongside other American children. Like most immigrant groups, they came here fleeing war and famine, persecution and poverty. And like the descendants of other immigrant groups, their children have come to call the United States home.

  The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese. Generation after generation, they worked to build the American nation to its present level of greatness. Some fought in the Civil War and built the railroad that welded the country together. Their early struggles for justice created new foundations of law later used by the civil rights movement. They built America’s ea
rliest rockets and helped win the cold war. In Silicon Valley and elsewhere, their contributions helped establish and maintain U.S. supremacy in the information age. Today, they are dispersed in every profession imaginable: as inventors, teachers, authors, doctors, engineers, lawyers, CEOs, social workers, accountants, architects, police chiefs, firefighters, actors, and astronauts.

  But sadly, despite this long legacy of contribution, many Chinese Americans continue to be regarded as foreigners. “Go back where you came from” is a taunt most new iminigrants have faced at some point. As one put it, “Asian Americans feel like we’re a guest in someone else’s house, that we can never really relax and put our feet up on the table.” Accents and cultural traditions may disappear, but skin tone and the shape of one’s eyes do not. These features have eased the way for some to regard ethnic Chinese people as exotic and different—certainly not “real” Americans. Thus the Americanization of Chinese Americans has been overshadowed by the convenient but dishonest stereotypes in the mass market, which portray them as innately and irreversibly different from their fellow Americans.

  What, in human terms, is the impact of such divisiveness? It’s a native-born Californian, a West Covina city council member, being told over the phone, “Funny, you don’t sound like a Wong. You sound so American.” It’s the virtual absence of Chinese American doctors on medical TV dramas, when in actuality one in every six medical doctors in the United States is Asian American. It’s a famous Chinese American movie star with good reviews in serious work reporting that she and her colleagues are always asked by studios to “don our accents and use our high kicks à la Jackie Chan or a Bond girl.” It’s the decision of the Mattel toy company not to release an Asian Barbie doll in their year 2000 fantasy collection of future female American presidents, even though white, black, and Hispanic dolls are included. (“People like Asian-American dolls in costumes, not as president,” notes Berkeley professor Elaine Kim. “This tells us how we are thought of.”)