ASAM reading journals paper

Chapter Five

Surviving Poverty in an Ethnic Social Hierarchy

Baoshan Li, a stocky, self-employed construction worker in his mid-thirties, gained

permanent resident status under the 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act (see Chapter 2).

Nevertheless, he has not gathered the courage to apply for U.S. citizenship: the thought of being

questioned by non-Chinese immigration officials is too intimidating. After twenty years in the

United States, Li knows very little English, and he speaks Mandarin with a strong Cantonese

accent. For that reason he is not entirely independent. Highly skilled in wood floor and ceramic

tile installations, he gets work through Bob, the owner of a company selling carpet, wood

flooring, ceramic, and plastic tiles. Like Li, Bob is also from China. Immigrated to the United

States from Guangdong province with his family as a teenager, he finished high school in

California and graduated from a community college. His American education and the ability to

communicate with people in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin give him the versatility that Li

lacks. Starting as a construction worker himself a decade ago, Bob was able to get a job as a

salesman for a building material company before going in to business for himself. “You can say

that I have been in the trade for a long time,” he said. “To do well one needs to know the

materials, the labor involved in installation, and the clients. Not everyone has that kind of

knowledge; I had worked with all types of materials with my own hands.”1 In Diamond Bar in

Los Angeles County, Bob’s flooring materials have been in high demand since the boom of the

housing market in the late 1990s. He is not Li’s employer, but rather a labor contractor. Most of

his merchandise is sold with labor performed by a crew of construction workers like Li, and

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these workers give him a share of their earnings. Li thinks it is a fair arrangement; it saves him

the trouble of finding the work himself, and because he is a little shy, Li does not feel

comfortable bargaining with the customers. The money Li makes is not bad, especially because

most of it comes in cash. Living in a one-bedroom apartment, he goes to work in the morning in

an old Toyota truck and picks up take-out Chinese food for dinner on his way home in the

evening. He sends money regularly to his parents in China and is saving more so that his brother

there can get married. After that, Li said he might go home for a visit—his parents are eager to

find him a bride.2 That Li has a greencard makes him a very eligible bachelor in China.

Li works at his customers’ job sites, moving from one to another with his apprentice Lao

Wu (old Wu), a former factory worker from Tianjin, China. The apprentice is about ten years Li’s

senior, but he treats Li with unquestionable respect, addressing him as “master” [shifu]. The

skinny Wu likes to talk, if the subject is not about himself: Up to now, he is not sure whether the

move to the United States was a wise one. To finance their trip, Wu and his wife Fei sold their

own apartment and that of her parents, and they borrowed a substantial amount of cash from

friends and relatives.3 The travel documents they purchased to gain entry to the land of

opportunity have long expired. With neither marketable skills nor work permits, they depend

entirely on jobs within the ethnic community. The couple went to New York City first, where Wu

worked in restaurants. By the time they moved to Los Angeles two years later, he had made up

his mind to never go back to restaurant jobs again. “Hardship I can endure,” he said, “but at my

age, being bossed around and bullied day after day is difficult, mentally. So here I am, learning a

trade from Master Li, humbly.”4

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Wu’s wife, Fei, is a Yuezi gong—a live-in nanny for women with new-born babies.

Chinese tradition requires women to be confined in bed for a whole month to recover after they

deliver their babies. Middle-class women whose parents or in-laws are unavailable in the United

States often hire domestic workers during this time period, and undocumented women like Fei

come in handy. A Yuezi gong gets paid twenty percent more than a regular nanny and receives

room and board for free. Even though she has to work around the clock seven days a week taking

care of both the mother and the infant, Wei continues to do it because she needs the money badly.

The main problem is that each job she gets will last for only a very short period of time, forcing

her to move often. Fortunately there is a high demand for her service in Southern California. The

employment services sometimes call her for interviews for new jobs before she finishes the

previous one. However, Fei does not have job security of any kind. Once she took a job in an

affluent neighborhood in Orange County. The pregnant woman was expecting in two weeks and

promised to hire Fei for at least three months. However, less than a week after Fei started, the

employer’s mother came from Hong Kong. The old lady was not happy about Fei’s receiving a

Yuezi gong’s wage before the baby was born and persuaded her daughter to hire an hourly paid

maid instead. Fei was given a day’s notice to leave.

It is ironic that Fei works as a Yuezi gong taking care of other people’s children, while

she cannot even afford to take care of her own baby. A year after Fei came to America, she got

pregnant unexpectedly with her second child; her twelve-year-old daughter was still in China

with Fei’s parents. Eager to go back to work, she paid a traveler $1,000 to carry her then three-

month-old son to board an airplane in Los Angeles, to be picked up by Fei’s parents at Beijing

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International Airport. Three years after their arrival to the United States, Wu and Fei are still

deeply in debt.

Li, who lives not too far away from Wu and Fei, has become the couple’s closest contact.

He offers Wu rides to work, and hands his own cell phone to Wu when Fei calls. He loaned the

couple money when their son arrived. And when Fei gets fired, it is Li who comes to consol Wu.

“Don't’ worry,” he said in a soft tone. “She has worked too hard. She deserves a break. I will

drop her off at the employment service before we start to work tomorrow. It won’t take her long

to find another job. Don’t worry too much; things will get better.”5

The belief that things will get better keeps Wu and Fei going. Wu has good reason to

anticipate improvement, but he also understands the limited possibilities and sets his goals

practically and realistically. His dream is to become a master of his trade with a license like Li, to

gain legal status in the United States (both he and Fei are waiting for asylum hearings), to clear

all his debt, and to bring their children over. “As my wife put it,” said Wu, “we would ask for

nothing more if our children could attend colleges in the United States.”

Wu and Fei’s experiences, as well as Li’s, are shared by hundreds of thousands of

Chinese immigrants. Although many of them have already improved their situation, middle-class

status remains beyond their reach. The 2000 census calculates a national poverty rate of 12.4

percent. Although the 12.6 percent rate for Asian Americans is close to the national average, it is

significantly higher than the 8.1 percent rate of non-Hispanic whites. Though more and more

Chinese Americans have achieved social mobility, a decline in the poverty rate is yet to be seen.6

The Taiwanese American population in America has perhaps the highest rate of well-educated

and well-off individuals among other ethnic Chinese groups, but at the same time, the percentage

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of Taiwanese immigrant families below the poverty line is still much higher that that of non-

Hispanic whites.7 Moreover, the actual poverty rate of the Chinese American population would

probably be higher than the census reflects if all undocumented immigrants were counted.

Though it is a rising tide full of opportunity, the Chinese ethnic economy clearly does not lift all

boats equally.

The central concern of this chapter is the role of the ethnic economy in social mobility.

Are individual Chinese Americans of various socioeconomic and legal backgrounds allowed the

same opportunities to work within the system? If not, does the economy actually determine

Chinese Americans’ opportunities and encourage social hierarchy? I argue that the unconditional

dependencies of laborers on their coethnic middle-class employers isolate the newcomers from

the mainstream job market. Instead of promoting mobility for everyone and narrowing class

differences, the Chinese ethnic economy actually works to further polarize members of the

community.8

Housing and Poverty

Researchers have defined poverty in different ways. The U.S. Bureau of the Census

calculates the poverty rate based on family income in relation to the size of the household. This

measurement is most reliable for documented individuals and families with recorded income, but

does little to include undocumented immigrants or reflect activities in the informal economic

sector. Homeownership and neighborhood location offers an alternative measurement to

differentiate middle-class Americans from the impoverished ones. As Stephan Thernstrom

discovered in his study on mid-nineteenth-century Newburyport, Massachusetts, middle class

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families lived in their own houses while the laboring class families rented.9 In Class and

Community, Alan Dawley also found that nineteenth-century shoemakers in Lynn,

Massachusetts, could not afford to purchase homes. With supplemental income from three older

children and his wife, for example, one worker rented a seven-room house in a town of small and

large factories.10 The development of urban neighborhoods along class or ethnic lines in late-

nineteenth- and twentieth-century America has drawn much attention from researchers on race

and poverty. In these studies, Chinatowns in San Francisco and other American metropolitan

areas are described as filthy urban slums, similar to African American communities in New

York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Southside.11

Although still more urban than most Americans, the vast majority of Chinese Americans

are no longer residents of inner-city ethnic enclaves. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles,

Honolulu, and San Jose are cities with large Chinese populations, but their proportion of

Chinatown residents has declined significantly. New York City’s Chinatown accommodates 14

percent of the Chinese population in the city, but only 8 percent of San Francisco’s Chinese and 2

percent of Los Angeles’ Chinese reside in Chinatowns.12 More and more Chinese Americans are

apparently suburban dwellers. Even the new Chinatowns developed since the 1980s, as some

scholars have argued, are strikingly different from the old ones. No longer symbols of urban

slums, these ethnic neighborhoods have suburban and middle-class outlooks, and they are an

integral part of the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic American society. Geographer Wei Li terms

these ethnic clusters as “ethnoburbs” to make exactly this point.13

The geographic distribution of the contemporary Chinese American population allows

scholars to reassess the new Chinese America in terms of its class compositions. Most amazing is

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the fact that a large number of new immigrants are able to disappear into the suburbs as soon as

they arrive. Although the process of suburbanization of middle-class Chinese Americans began

before 1965, immigrants’ bypassing traditional primary centers of initial settlement is a relatively

new phenomenon. Some scholars are quick to conclude that because the proportion of

immigrants who made their first homes in Chinatowns has shrunk over the years, most of the

newcomers must have possessed sufficient resources to bypass the inner city and settle in

affluent middle-class suburbs.14

While housing and area of residence are certainly important indicators of wealth or lack

of wealth, 15 neither homeownership nor residential location permits quick judgment of economic

status for a population group of complex backgrounds and social relations. It takes time for

newcomers to purchase homes. A market of overpriced real estate properties in the late 1990s

and early 2000s made the American dream of homeownership beyond reach for many middle-

class families, while the instability of the American economy in more recent years probably

encouraged some potential buyers to wait. In other words, it is not unusual at all for middle-class

Chinese American individuals or families to rent their homes. While it is logical to assume that

poor Chinese Americans are less likely to own homes or rent in upscale residential areas,

drawing conclusions along neighborhood boundaries overlooks the intricate ways that immigrant

laborers find shelter. The multifarious relationships between middle-class Chinese Americans as

employers and landlords on the one side, and their coethnic laborers and tenants on the other

require an exploration of the economic status of individuals and families beyond a quick glance

of where they reside, for the realities of living patterns of immigrant laborers are far more

complicated than they appear to be.

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For many newcomers’ survival, finding affordable housing is as important as finding a

job. Currently, the income of a Chinese immigrant laborer at the beginning of the twenty-first

century is not sufficient to cover rent for an entire house. In many states laborers are not making

enough money to rent a whole apartment. Individuals and families decide where to live for

different reasons. While middle-class families find suburban living more desirable, others are

probably driven away from Chinatown housing simply because they cannot afford to live there.

Government subsidized housing units are so few in old Chinatown neighborhoods that even in

the late 1970s qualified applicants would remain on the waiting list for five to six years before

they could move in.16 To view old Chinatowns as urban slums is itself problematic, as the

amenities of such ethnic neighborhoods have pushed real estate values up drastically in recent

decades. Across the bay from San Francisco in Oakland’s historic Chinatown, for example,

modern apartment complexes erected since the late 1980s have attracted middle-class buyers

who prefer living in urban Chinatown over the suburbs. Meanwhile, even as their middle-class

neighbors drive the cost of renting up, easy access to jobs is still the main draw for Chinese

laborers, so many live in overcrowded, old buildings.

The high cost of Chinatown housing compels laborers to share their living space with

unrelated individuals or families. Baoshan Li, the floor master, rents a bedroom in a roughly

1,000-square-foot house. He has a television in his room with satellite cable to watch Chinese

language programs, and he shares the kitchen and bathrooms with two other families. “I snore

loudly; nobody can stand it when I sleep,” he said. Even so, until he paid off his debt he didn’t

even have a room of his own.17 To Jenny Yi, a hotel clerk who also holds a part-time job in a

restaurant, having a room to herself is a big luxury: “I like to read a little in a peaceful place or

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talk to my mother privately. In my room, no one bothers me.” Although the $800 monthly rent

consumes more than half of her income, after working for fifteen years in America, Yi felt it was

important to enjoy a different lifestyle than the one she had in her early years in this country.18

To many laborers who do not have a stable income, the luxury of having one’s own room

is beyond their reach. A day laborer in his mid-thirties in Flushing, New York, shares a bedroom

with another immigrant in a three-bedroom apartment. The other two bedrooms are taken by two

unrelated families; each of them has a young child:

My wife and son are not here so I don’t need much space. I share a room with a guy from

Dongbei (Northeast China), which is not that bad. The bathroom, kitchen, and living

room are for all of us to share. I don’t cook much and rarely use the living room. I figure

it is better to make some room for the children. I am not eager to go home after dinner

because it can be quite noisy there until late at night.19

Ping, who works in two L.A. Chinese restaurants for sixty-five hours a week, makes about

$2,000 a month, but she tries to put some money aside just in case: “I got sick last spring and

worked very little for almost three months. I almost had a mental breakdown at the time because

I still had to pay $400 rent each month. In L.A., no one in my shoes would pay $1,000 for

rent.”20

Working at two part time jobs in southern California, a woman slept on the couch in the

living room of a one-bedroom apartment for two years. The couple who rented the apartment

paid $1,100 each month and charged her $450. That was about the cheapest housing she could

get in a town of affluent middle-class Americans. Because the rental agreement did not allow the

couple to add additional tenants, she was told not to talk to the neighbors, and she could not have

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visitors. She knew she would have to move out once her husband and son came to the United

States. Not knowing how much her husband would be able to make, she was horrified by the

thought of having to pay rent by herself and tried to get into a homeless shelter. She did rent

eventually, but a few years later, after she and her husband were divorced and she moved to

Arizona to start a new job, her seventeen-year-old son ended up in a homeless youth shelter.21

The worst living conditions are found in family motels. In Monterey Park, Los Angeles,

Lao Wu and Fei take long-term shelter in a motel converted from a two-story single family

house. The owner of the property, a Chinese man from Vietnam, lives in a bigger house two

blocks away; the motel tenants are mostly from mainland China. For ten dollars a day, the couple

gets a room that is big enough to squeeze a double-size mattress and a small television into, and

they share a kitchen and two-and-half bathrooms with two dozen other tenants. At one point, Wu

recalled, the house was occupied by thirty-two individuals. On his day off and when Fei is away,

Wu likes to purchase a pound of shrimp and a bottle of wine. He waits for his turn to cook and

dines sitting on his bed; the bedroom is so small there is not even room for a chair.22

Family motels are especially popular in Los Angeles and New York, although these

unlicensed businesses do not advertise officially. From the outside, a motel looks just like any

single-family dwelling or apartment in the neighborhood. However, one homeowner in Monterey

Park said that the house next door sometimes accommodates as many as twenty tenants:

These people must be new to this country. They are loud and some smoke a lot. There

are men and women, new faces all the time. Some will sit on the steps of the porch or

simply squat there. Do you know in which part of China people squat like that? One

day a stranger came knocking on our door looking for the motel, with a piece of paper

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in his hand. My husband looked at the address written on that piece of paper; it was

our neighbor’s house. I peeked through a window of a room of the house once and

saw four bunkbeds. It’s illegal, but my husband said we shouldn’t bother them. He

said we don’t report on our neighbors.23

In August 2004, police raided a family motel in Los Angeles and found that the 1,500-

square-foot, three-bedroom and one-bath residence was partitioned into six rooms. Besides the

kitchen and the bath, every room was filled with mattresses and bunks. In a complaint filed with

the city government, the neighbors said that a few dozen people lived in the house and their cars

took up all the parking spaces on the street.24

According to an investigation by the Shijie ribao, there were many family motels in the

Los Angeles area, especially in San Gabriel, Monterey Park, and Alhambra—areas that are

considered suburban. Most managers of the motels were Chinese immigrants. They leased the

properties, installed partitions, and built bunk beds for short-term tenants. Some were hired by

property owners to do so. Flyers advertising these motels were posted on the walls of

supermarkets and community centers, and on lamp posts and telephone poles, but most tenants

learned about their services from friends, employment agencies, tourist bus drivers, immigration

lawyers, and sometimes smugglers.25

Complaints were especially loud in San Gabriel. In 2003, Ken Moy, a Chinese American,

promised that if elected to city council, he would close the motels and bring peace to these

neighborhoods. For more than a year after he came to office, Moy conducted several

investigations with the cooperation of the city police and shut down a number of family motels.

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In August 2004, under pressure by local residents, the city of Monterey Park also launched a

campaign to crack down on family motels. The mayor of the city and a number of council

members visited several neighborhoods; they called the operation of family motels a violation of

the rights of local residents and a disruption of municipal peace. To encourage people to come

forward, the city installed a police hotline and solicited tips regarding illegal residential

activities. Several family motels were exposed, and the police also went to some targeted areas

and issued parking tickets for unclaimed cars. The locals, however, wanted more decisive

measures. Some residents stormed a city council meeting and urged the government to report

illegal business operations to immigration authorities. Alarmed, several family motel operators

quickly evicted their tenants, and a few homeowners put their houses on the market.26 The

language used by local residents against the operation of family motels reminded Chinese

Americans of a city-wide effort to halt Chinese business expansion in the 1980s.27

The persistence of family motel reflects the fluidity of the immigrant laborers. Lao Wu

and Fei have lived in the same room in a family motel for two years, which is unusual. Because

neither of them has job security, they are unwilling to sign a lease.28 These motels are especially

patronized by short-term visitors. Hong Deng, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, said that

many of his clients who come to Los Angeles to file petitions cannot afford to stay in regular

motels. A tourist bus driver in New York said that he often referred young students visiting the

city to family motels: “If they could save money, why not? Why should they pay over $60 a

night when they can get by for $10 or $20?”29 But most tenants of the family motels are

newcomers or laborers returning to the city in search of new jobs and medical treatment. Without

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access to cars, these individuals have to stay close to employment and ethnic services, and most

family motels are in convenient locations near ethnic business clusters.

Although extremely crowded, family motels provide services unavailable elsewhere. In

addition to shelter, motel operators help newcomers get started. Airport pickups and rides to

employment services are crucial to the survival of immigrants who have no family or relatives in

the United States. Sharing living spaces with people in a similar situation is both comforting and

rewarding: some tenants gain critical knowledge from each other on how to survive in the United

States.30 The motel operators or managers are often recent immigrants themselves. With little

capital investment, they can have a business of their own and draw a good income from rent,

chauffeuring, and various kickbacks. For each successful referral to an immigration lawyer, for

example, a family motel operator can receive a bonus of as much as $500.31

While the possibility of sharing living spaces and the availability of family motels continue

to attract immigrant laborers to urban ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles, New York, San

Francisco, and Oakland, the search for more affordable housing also drives many newcomers

away from these areas. To attract laborers to more remote areas or areas with a small Chinese

American population, Chinese restaurant owners and employers of domestic helpers usually

provide room and board accommodations for their employees. Jerry, who runs a big buffet

restaurant in a small town in Wyoming, said that the only way for him to attract and keep his

employees (including two chefs, one manager, and four waiters; the dishwashers and busboys are

Mexican) is to provide them with housing: “Why would they come here otherwise? If they have

to pay rent, they would have preferred New York.”32 As a busboy in his early years in America,

Xiao Wen shared a house with his co-workers in Nevada. The two rooms upstairs were occupied

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by the chefs and their family members while Xiao Wen and seven or eight others had their beds

on the first floor.33 One college graduate from Shanghai said that she worked as a live-in nanny

for a female attorney who had a new-born baby so that her husband could finish graduate school.

She stayed with the same employer for more than two years because housing was provided for

both her and her husband.34

Now a factory operator in San Jose, Liying was a housemaid for several years in Lafayette,

California. After her husband died of liver cancer it became especially important for her to

provide a safe home for herself and her then school-age daughter:

I took that job out of concern for my daughter. There was no other way I could

possibly have afforded housing in a nice neighborhood like that. My late husband

probably would not have approved of my working as a maid, but I think he would be

happy to know that we were living in a safe place and that our daughter went to a

good school.35

It must be pointed out that under the same roof of a mansion owned by her employers, Liying’s

living standard and lifestyle were anything but middle class. Neither she nor her daughter was

allowed to spend leisure time outside their living quarters in the basement, which consisted of a

bedroom with a bath and the adjacent laundry area where they cooked meals with an electric hot

plate and a microwave oven. Although their living conditions were still better than most of the

laborers cramped in inner-city Chinatown areas, residing in an upscale neighborhood is by no

means an indication of their wealth. On the contrary, it is the level of poverty that prevents

laborers like Liying from paying rent in the city, and pushes them to seek alternatives in the

suburbs.

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Working and Poverty

Newcomers who have no personal connections often find jobs in restaurants, garment

shops, construction, and domestic service in the ethnic economy through network services.

Forgoing the eye-catching bilingual or multilingual signs popular with banks, restaurants,

markets, beauty salons, hotels, and other businesses in ethnic business clusters, Chinese

employment services advertise mainly in Chinese, and they work closely with immigrant

laborers who have no access to the mainstream job market.

Those who cannot afford to be choosy have to start at the bottom, and sometimes in

remote areas. When Tommy Tang first arrived in 1996, he visited an employment office in Los

Angeles and was sent to work in a restaurant in Indiana. He recalled:

It took me only one trip to the employment office to find my first job. The agent said that

I arrived at the right moment, for some restaurant in Indiana was looking for a guy to

wash dishes for $1,000 a month. Five or six people were hanging around in the office at

the time; everyone seemed to be surprised: “Wow! Washing dishes for $1,000 dollars!

What a deal!” The agent handed me the phone and I talked to the restaurant owner. He

told me that I could make an additional $100 if I was willing to clean the bathrooms. The

people in the office again showed their surprising faces. They said bathrooms in Chinese

restaurants are tiny so the cleaning job ought be easy. I couldn’t figure out why I was so

lucky and wondered why those who seemed to envy me didn’t jump at the opportunity

ahead of me. It took me years to understand that only a person fresh off the boat would

accept a job thousands of miles away.36

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It turned out that Tommy was sent to a huge buffet restaurant: “I had never seen that many dishes

in my life. My hands are fast, but no matter how quickly I put them away, there were always

more to come. The bathrooms were big too, and I had to clean them several times a day for about

$3. Those were hard days.”37

But Tommy was able to move up, one step at a time. As sociologist Min Zhou argues, the

new ethnic enclave not only provides opportunities for newcomers to find work and get started,

but it also allows them to learn entrepreneurial skills from employers of a similar ethos. In that

sense, Tommy’s first job was his first step toward social mobility.38 Twenty-five years old at the

time, Tommy was healthy, strong, and hard working. He later was promoted to busing the tables

and performing other tasks. It was in that restaurant that Tommy began his education in running a

small business. When he returned to Los Angeles three years later, he waited tables and learned

to cook. He also made a short trip to China and returned with an immigrant visa, because by then

his mother, who had remarried to a U.S. citizen, was eligible to sponsor him. Six years after he

arrived in the United States, at age thirty one, Tommy and two friends bought a fastfood Chinese

restaurant. And after he got married, he and his wife bought all shares from the other partners

and operated their own business. He and his wife worked long hours to make ends meet and

hired two part-time employees. “Look at the scars on my hands,” he said, rolling up his sleeves.

“Look here, and at the burns here! That’s nothing in our trade. When I cut myself, all needed was

a paper towel to stop the bleeding and I would go right back to work.” 39

About a quarter million Chinese immigrants find jobs at fifty thousand Chinese

restaurants scattered throughout the United States. A newcomer often starts as a dishwasher or

simply a dazade [a worker who does everything]. If promoted, he might move up to wait tables,

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which is considered skilled work. A dishwasher can receive $1,000 a month working seven days

a week, while a dazade might make as much as $1,500. The income of a waiter/waitress is

usually higher; when business is good the person might get $100 in tips in a single evening. “I

would not say that I liked the work,” said one former waitress, “but counting tips in the evenings

made me happy. I worked hard everyday for that moment.”40

For some individuals, passing the initial test was difficult. Lao Wu, who came to the

United States at age forty, for example, found it hard to adjust from being a factory worker in

China to a dazade in a restaurant in America. He said that he didn’t mind hard work, but having

someone always looking over his shoulder made him nervous: “Just as I finished mopping the

floor—before putting away the mop—I could tell she [the boss] was right there to tell me to do

something else. She would yell at me for the smallest mistake I made—like not picking up a tiny

piece of paper on the floor or breaking a glass. And I was told constantly to speed up. In the

factory, I operated the machines. In the Chinese restaurant, I was the machine.”41 Eventually he

got fed up and switched to construction.

Most construction workers have also worked in restaurants before. In construction, they

often start at the bottom as day-laborers. In New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los

Angeles, the day-laborers gather on a particular street of ethnic business clusters in the mornings,

waiting for those who would employ them for the day. In Flushing, New York, one man from

northern China said that he couldn’t make it in a restaurant because most of the businesses in the

city were operated by Fuzhou people who spoke a different dialect. Standing against a wall with

a group of guys, his eyes fixed on the far end of the street, hoping the next approaching car

would bring him a chance to work.42

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Standing next to this man was Xiao Liu, a young man wearing glasses and a baseball cap

and carrying a backpack. Inside the backpack he said were gloves, masks, and first-aid gear. “I

asked for gloves one day and the contractor looked at me as though I came from a different

planet. Can you imagine they don’t provide gloves for this type of work? These guys [his fellow

day-laborers] do not care about their own lives any more, but I’m still in my twenties and I don’t

want to ruin my health. If I don’t provide myself with some kind of protection, who will? Have

you heard about the guy who was killed by a falling wall? No one even knows his name! That’s

extremely scary!” The subject brought silence to the group. Everyone looked away as if they

heard nothing. Asked what he had done for a living before coming to the United States, however,

Xiao Liu dropped his head and paused. Pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, he became

somewhat emotional:

I won’t tell you what I did for living back in Shenyang (a city in northern China).

Why should anyone even ask? All I can tell you is that nothing I had done in the past

was anywhere near what I am doing now, not a bit! I wielded a pen—you know what

I mean? I made a living using my pen! How did I end up here on the streets of New

York like this? Of course I was frustrated with my job. I needed to do research, but

they didn’t give me money to travel to Beijing. I thought I was treated unfairly. I was

fed up and jumped at an opportunity to come here. And now, I am learning a new

lesson!43

Life in the United States turned out to be even more difficult for Xiao Liu. He started in a

restaurant and worked there for three months. One night after work he helped his boss clean and

close up. “Just as I was about to say goodbye,” he recalled, “he [the boss] told me that I didn’t

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need to come back the next day. He said it in a low voice in such a casual way, as if he was

telling me where I should go for dinner. It really hurt!” Since then, Xiao Liu has been a day-

laborer. The job was hardly better, he said, but at least he was not worried about getting fired

anymore.44

Being a day-laborer means looking for work constantly, almost on a daily basis. On the

street these workers gather into small groups of five to ten people. They share information about

housing, and they talk about how much they were paid for their previous tasks. In the years of

the housing market boom, these day-laborers were in high demand by building contractors and

homeowners with various building or remodeling projects. On a good day a lucky worker could

pocket $120 in cash after ten to twelve hours of work; and most thought they shouldn’t accept

anything less than $100 a day. One weekend morning in August 2005, a middle-aged building

contractor stopped at Prince Street near Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing where about twenty-five

laborers were still waiting. Two men stood up immediately to greet him. “Master Wang [Wang

shifu], what’s up?” one of them asked hopefully. Wang said that he was looking for someone to

demolish the interior of an old house and help install new dry-wall. The man who first

approached him nodded and left with him. The other man lit a cigarette and sat down. Within

minutes the guy who went with the building contractor returned to the group. “How come?”

someone asked. The man shook his head: “$90 a day. Not me. I am ready to take the day off!”

Master Wang showed up again. He borrowed a cigarette from someone to light up his own. He

didn’t say a word, as if nothing had happened. A tall man who was sitting on the curb rose slowly

and nodded at Wang, and the two left together. No one commented. It was after 9:00 am;

obviously some of the workers would not be able to find work for the day.45

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Asked whether it was difficult to find work, Guang Wu, who was in construction for

more than two years, said that it had to do with supply and demand. Whenever there was a

surplus of labor, it was difficult to bargain for higher wages. “If you insist on getting paid no less

than $100 a day, some days you just can’t get hired. If you don’t mind getting as little as $60,

there will be plenty of work.”46 “Every day I come here telling myself I will not work for less

than $100 a day,” said Xiao Liu. “But after sitting around for two or three days, you look at

things differently. That’s the way it is.”47

Construction work is dominated by men, while garment shop and domestic service work

fall on the shoulders of women. Due to international trade agreements and the increasing

domestic pressure to improve working conditions in garment factories, the number of Chinese-

operated factories has declined significantly since the late 1980s.48 Some of the small garment

shops, however, are still outside government or union regulations. Chinese novelist Bing Ren,

who came to Los Angeles to research the lives of Chinese immigrants, found that many

immigrant women work in conditions much worse than garment factories in China.49 The

demand for domestic service has increased significantly since the late 1990s, and some

employment agencies specialize in the trade, offering middle-class Chinese American employers

a variety of choices. One can request a house maid who cooks a particular type of regional food,

a nanny who speaks a particular Chinese dialect, or a service provider who comes from a

particular region of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, or the Philippines.

When Yamei first arrived in Los Angeles, an employment agent tried to talk to her into

taking a domestic job after learning that she was alone. Yamei hesitated; she was told that people

from Shanghai were not considered desirable for restaurant work because they had a reputation

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for being too clever to follow orders. Yamei gave in after waiting for two weeks without work.

She was called in to meet a prospective employer, a middle-aged man looking for a maid to work

in his house. Yamei followed him to his house in a hilly neighborhood overlooking city streets.

Her main duty was to take care of the man’s 82-year-old father, who was terminally ill. Yamei

was expected to feed, bathe, and dress him and administer his medicines. The elderly man’s

legally blind wife needed assistance as well. Yamei’s responsibilities would include cooking and

cleaning for the household. She would be paid $1000 a month, including free room and board.

Yamei needed to work desperately, but she did not take the job. More troubling than the heavy

work load was realizing how vulnerable she would be in that type of working environment.

“What could I do if this man [the middle-aged employer] tried to take advantage of me? If

something happened to me, no one would ever find out. My husband would not be happy if he

knew that I was living in the same house with a single man like that.”50 To Yamei, safety was the

main concern since she had no family or friends. Her fake travel documents not only made her

ineligible to work, but they also prevented her from seeking assistance from law enforcement

agencies. The only protection available to her would be offered by the ethnic community. For

that reason, she tried hard to find work in restaurant where other workers would be around.

The demand for domestic servants is so high that employment agencies have to push

female job seekers to take such positions. One agent in New York said that she talked many

women into these jobs:

People are careful about whom they will hire to work in their houses; they like

women who are neat, capable, honest, educated, and have no family around. I have

good eyes for these women. Some of them were former teachers, office clerks, or

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nurses back in China. I understand it is hard for them to think of themselves as

servants. But when they are new to this country they often have few other choices.51

Some domestic care providers chose the work because the people they take care of often

depend on them. A woman in her late thirties said that her employers were usually kind to her

because they wanted her to take good care of their children: “When the lady of the house is

away at work, I am the one in charge. As long as I take good care of the small children, I can

do whatever I want.”52 Lanlan, a Yuezi gong, felt her job was important to her employers:

“When the lady came back from the hospital, she was tired and her body was weak, and she

needed me around to help her and take care of the baby. I gave her advice on how to take care

of the baby, and both she and her husband respected my suggestions. They understood I

worked hard and I cared about them. Even the visitors showed respect.”53 Yuanmin, who has

taken care of an elderly woman in Los Angeles for more than four years, said that she did not

look for other jobs because the woman’s children wouldn’t know what to do if she quit. “They

are all busy with their work and families,” she said. “They basically begged me to stay. The old

lady’s hands and legs do not work well. She needs help with cooking and washing and she

cannot go out by herself. When I told them that my son was coming, her daughter-in-law

immediately said that he could stay in the house too. It was hard for me to say ‘no’ to them;

they knew they wouldn’t be able to keep me otherwise.”54

But others have had different experiences. Some women said they had to swallow their

pride and often endured insults, which is not always easy to do. Liying, for example, said that

after each grocery shopping trip, her employer would go over every item on the receipt before

paying her back. “She never trusted me. She always acted as if I would steal,” she said.55

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Another domestic worker, who was a former government official in China, said that her mistress,

whose husband owns a car dealership in Los Angeles, was simply rude. “Let me give you an

example. Once she was angry at me because I gave her seven-year-old son orange juice before

dinner. I explained that the child asked for it, but she snapped, ‘Would you give him shit if he

asked for it?’ You see, this is someone who has not had a good upbringing. No one ever talked to

me like that.”56

Poverty and Mobility

Most immigrant laborers try hard to make as much money as possible and save more

whenever they can, but moving up is easier said than done. For people who live in poverty, there

seem to be many obstacles that prevent them from improving their economic status. Most

important is the fact that wages in the informal sector of the ethnic economy have not increased

much in the past two decades. Betty, a domestic worker, blamed new immigrants, especially

undocumented immigrants, for bringing down wages: “There are too many of them, which

makes it impossible to bargain.”57 As domestics, the workers are never paid by the hour. Betty’s

day starts at 6:30 in the morning when she gets up to cook breakfast and pack lunch for her

employers. She took care of two preschooler during the day, in addition to cleaning the house

and cooking meals. Her chores will not be finished until after 8:30 in the evening. In 2007 she

received a flat payment of $1,800 a month, which was considered very good for a domestic

worker within the Chinese American community at that time. Counting the hours that she puts

into the work, her pay was much lower than the minimum wage. “I can take a break when the

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family goes to visit friends over the weekend. Families take vacations too, but in that case they

usually send the nannies home and find a replacement when they return.”58

Within the ethnic economy, wages increase at a very slow rate. One factory operator in

Houston said that she gets an hourly wage increase of twenty-five cents each year.59 It is

common for restaurant workers to be paid below the minimum wage because their employers are

counting the tips. Undocumented workers have to accept less than other workers with papers,

“Not that I don’t know there is such a thing as minimum wage,” said one of them. “Giving me a

job is a huge deal because there is a risk on his [the boss’s] side. Whether I am happy about what

I am getting is irrelevant. I am sensible enough to not bring this up.”60

Even though they tried hard to spend as little as possible on rent, food, and other

necessities, saving money seems like the hardest thing to do for many immigrant workers

because of unexpected expenses. Lao Wu and Fei, for example, thought they could be debt free

after working for two years in America, but because of Fei’s pregnancy and the birth of their son,

they had accumulated even more debt. In addition to their low income, unemployment and

illness (most of those working within the ethnic economy do not have health insurance) are

major obstacles when it comes to making ends meet. Many newly arrived undocumented

immigrants are deeply in debt because the cost of purchasing travel documents has gone up

significantly in the past few years. Meanwhile, the higher cost of living in the United States has

made it even more difficult for these individuals to advance. Without legal status, undocumented

immigrants are most likely to remain at the bottom of the social ladder.

Laborers receive very little protection not only from their job, but also from the services

they get from the ethnic economy. To use the services of an employment agency, a laborer is

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subject to a fee of ten percent of his/her estimated first-month’s wage, which is due right after the

person is hired. If the worker gets fired any time during the month, he or she is not entitled to a

refund from the employment agency. In early 2000, as more and more undocumented immigrants

were looking for jobs, and some of them simply had no money to pay upfront, some employment

services began to charge a piece rate of $45 for each job recommendation. Although the fee was

lower, many noticed that some agents were no longer finding long-term jobs for them.

Sometimes the workers were sent to jobs that lasted only a couple of days, putting them in a

more tenuous situation. According to one news report, on June 20, 2004, the Singapore

Employment Service in New York’s Chinatown referred a woman named Gao Xiaoqing to a

restaurant job in Alabama. Gao, who had just arrived in the United States, accepted the job and

agreed to leave for the South that afternoon. Within ten minutes of her taking the offer and

paying the $45 fee, the restaurant owner called back to say she was no longer needed. However,

the employment agent refused to give her a refund, arguing that she had already entered into a

contract. Several people who witnessed the situation had had similar experiences and expressed

sympathy for Gao.61

The lack of security and protection causes tremendous stress and frustration in the

laborers, who often have no place to go to file their grievances. In early 2002, a young man

named Zhao Yongding was sent by an employment agent in New York to work at the Lucky Wok

restaurant in Florida. He moved to Florida at his own expense, but the owner, upon learning that

Zhao did not possess a work permit, told him he would be paid $200 less each month. The two

got into an argument and the owner’s wife, who was from Malaysia, called the police and

immigration authorities. According to a report in a Chinese language newspaper, the immigration

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officer was sympathetic to Zhao and sent him back to New York. There Zhao learned from his

lawyer that he had little chance of winning his asylum appeal. With $40,000 of debt and no way

to get out, Zhao jumped in front of a fast moving subway train.62

Though crucial to social mobility, attempts to change legal status can be difficult,

expensive, or even dangerous. A lucky asylum petitioner might win a case within a few months

for as little as $5,500. But, should the petitioner’s credibility become an issue of concern at any

stage of the process, he or she can be arrested and deported. Some asylum cases are pending for

many years, even over a decade at times. After failing two interviews, a 25-year-old asylum

seeker named Peter had no confidence of winning his final appeal at all. He said his attorney

made a strong case, claiming he was a victim of religious persecution in China, but Peter

performed poorly during the hearings because he was not good at lying: “How could I not fail? I

couldn’t find the courage to make eye contact with the official when I was lying. He [the official]

could see it, and the judge was no fool either.” Peter appealed again, but only to avoid immediate

deportation; he can work legally as long as his case is pending, and he wants to save enough to

return to China. Even though he holds two jobs and works almost eighty hours a week, saving

money is extremely hard because he has to pay a high legal fees.63 Even for those with money or

a good case, widespread rumors about police arrests outside immigration courts have stirred up

so much fear that some individuals simply cannot gather enough courage to go to the hearings,

which means they have completely given up hope of gaining legal status.64

Some individuals also question the morality of filing political asylum, which requires

them to denounce the Chinese government by portraying themselves as victims of various

persecutions. Restaurant manager David said he would rather to go back to China than make

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false accusations against his homeland. First arriving as a short-term worker from Sichuan

province in China in 1991, David and the majority of his group did not return after their contracts

expired. In Los Angles he progressed from dishwasher to waiter and then to a managerial

position in a big Chinese restaurant. He could save more than $1000 a month because the

restaurant owner provides free housing and food, but instead he lets a large part of his hard-

earned money disappear during his monthly trips to Las Vegas. He now has a girlfriend and

wants to settle in the United States permanently, but seeking asylum is still out of the question.

He said:

I am staying here for personal reasons. I had no home to go back to at the time

because my wife and I were divorced. I am not a political person; the truth is that

China had done me no harm. To make false accusations against the country would be

against my nature and my religion. I am a big man, I can’t do that.65

The company that hired David when he first arrived is willing to help him out by putting his

name back on the company’s payroll, but the lawyer, who charged him $6,000 in fees, did not

manage the case properly. David eventually switched to another lawyer and paid additional fees,

and he is still waiting anxiously to find out how his fate will be determined.66

Successful asylees are not always proud of what they have been able to accomplish.

Those who are open enough to share their stories often say they simply followed the advice of

their lawyers and did what needed to be done to win their cases, which is crucial to their survival

in America. The asylum program was established to give aliens who are “refugees,” as defined

by law, permanent resident status. To build a case for refugee status one must show that he has

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suffered from or fears persecution if returned to his native country. What is regarded as grounds

for granting asylum is discretional; those criteria, which change from time to time, are

determined by the attorney general of the United States through asylum officers and immigration

judges. This means that for someone to simply convince the government that he or she is

unwilling to return to his or her home country due to prior ill-treatment or a well-founded fear of

future persecution is not enough; to win a case the petitioner’s claim has to fall into a category

for which asylum would be granted. Assistance from those who know the process is absolutely

crucial under the circumstances, and legal service advertisements in Chinese-language

newspapers and other sources keep their potential clients informed of what works and what

doesn’t depending on policies and practices of the government. In the early 1990s it was

relatively easy for individuals to obtain asylum based on claims against China’s one-child birth-

control policy. Many petitions were rejected by the courts in the late 1990s as the U.S.

government realized establishing such a policy would make an entire generation of Chinese from

the PRC eligible for asylum. Legal expert have since explored new avenues for their clients

within the framework of the legal system, and many petitioners file their claims accordingly

because they badly need legal status.67

As discussed in Chapter Pne, some of the problems with the asylum program are largely

responsible for the actions of individual petitioners. For example, Yamei, who claimed religious

persecution, would have felt more comfortable claiming that she was a victim of China’s one-

child birth-control policy, but had she done so, her petition might have been denied. For that

reason she felt fortunate that she had followed her lawyer’s advice. Some immigrants felt there

was nothing wrong with using the asylum provision to gain legal status, even though they had to

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make false claims. One asylee told a news reporter that using the efficacious petition, instead of

the accurate one, showed the person’s wisdom [zhihui] and knowledge of the United States.

Huang Keqiang, the president of the Lin Zexu Foundation in New York, sharply criticizes

American immigration policies. He points out that the system itself is to blame: “All one has to

do is to make up a false but touching story. Even if the immigration officer knows it is a lie,

asylum may still be granted, while honest people are often treated in the opposite way.”68

To get legal status through a false marriage an undocumented immigrant has to pay a

standard fee of $30,000, half of which goes to the citizen as soon as the marriage certificate is

issued. The two partners are required to stay married for three years to secure permanent resident

status for the undocumented immigrant. Should the citizen partner decide not to fulfill his or her

obligation, which happens often, the other partner would lose the money and face deportation. In

recent years immigration authorities have tightened their investigations of such cases. A married

couple needs to present evidence to show that they are living together through a joint bank

account and photos, but the investigators can also check each partner’s associations outside the

marriage. Investigators found that some citizen partners who received money to enter false

marriages still list themselves as single in their Facebook profiles, while others continue to have

checking accounts with their actual girlfriends. In some cases the immigrant partners are arrested

when they go for the scheduled interview, but the citizen partners still get to keep their money.69

In most cases, the struggle to escape poverty does not end with getting legal status. Many

years of working within the ethnic economy have hindered these individuals from entering the

mainstream job market. Xin Yao, who came from Shanghai in 1988 at the age of 19, has never

found the time to go to school because she works such long hours. Working as a motel clerk in

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New York, she makes $8 an hour and receives no benefits. Although the motel serves free

continental breakfasts, the workers are not allowed to eat it. She spends about half of her income

to rent a room in a three-bedroom apartment and another quarter of it to a Christian therapist

after her boyfriend of five years left her. But Xin does not think of herself as being at the bottom

of society. The fact that she has legal status (gained under the 1992 Chinese Students Protection

Act) makes her feel somewhat middle-class. She emphasizes the fact that she does not share a

room with anyone—a luxury not many laborers in New York can afford. The decision to see a

therapist also makes her feel special; in a way she is spending money like middle-class

Americans. She is not worried about saving money because as a U.S. citizen she is entitled to

social security and medical benefits.70

Like many immigrant laborers, Xin finds consolation in religion. She considers the church

she joined when she first came to New York as the only home she has in the United States. Every

Friday evening she shares her own thoughts with God and her Bible Study group, where she

hang out with several laborers, half of them undocumented. She believes strongly that God

created her for a reason and put her where she is for a purpose. The greatest thing about having a

Christian faith, she and her Bible Study classmates said, is to have the power not to think much

about what they can or cannot acquire, for material possession is a very small aspect of one’s

life: “I gave myself to God; God will take care of me.”71

If Chinese immigrant laborers do gain social mobility, most of them climb up slowly

within the ethnic economy and remain in professions where they started on the bottom rung. A

day-laborer may become a self-employed skilled worker, a garment shop worker may become a

sub-contractor, and a restaurant worker may attain mobility by purchasing a business of his own.

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More often, however, small business owners who rise from their position as manual laborers

cannot make ends meet without utilizing the unpaid labor of family members. Although the

children of these immigrants have more opportunities to advance into the mainstream job market

through education, because many of them grew up working in their family’s own business, they

too remain disproportionately concentrated in the occupations of their parents.

Poverty within an Ethnic Social Hierarchy

The large impoverished immigrant population within Chinese America has become a

solid foundation upon which the ethnic social hierarchy is built. To some extent this factor offers

some not-often-mentioned explanations to a frequently asked question: Why are the Chinese in

America able to advance so rapidly? The economy and the supporting networks are built to

benefit middle-class entrepreneurs and employers. With the assistance of ethnic networks,

business owners and middle-class families throughout the United States are given easy access to

immigrant laborers, allowing them risk-free opportunities to maximize business profits and

improve the quality of their family lives.

The operation of employment agencies offers a good example of how the ethnic networks

serve clients of different classes simultaneously. The laborers have to pay fees to get the service

that is provided to their potential employers free of charge. Even though the income of the

employment service comes entirely from those who are looking for work, the agents are

completely geared to supplying what the employers are looking for. Acknowledging that her fee

was determined by the wage scale of her labor clients, one agent specializing in domestic care

providers in New York said that the success of her business depended on the employers’

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satisfaction rather than that of the nannies because the former were the ones who provided the

jobs. For that reason she often finds herself trying to persuade immigrant women to accept low

wages. “Most employers come to us because we give them cheap labor, although most would say

that they were looking for someone who could cook Chinese food or speak a certain dialect,” she

said. “We would have no business if our workers asked for what American domestics are getting.

I will tell a client the going rate for a certain type of work and let them know higher pay is

expected if the nanny doesn’t get weekends off, but I do have to be flexible because if I’m not,

they can go to other agents. Not many people can afford full-time domestics these days.”72

Although a hire is not completed until the two parties reach an agreement through an

employment agent, the employers are not obliged to keep their promises. The agent will ask only

the employee to sign a piece of paper stating that the fee is not refundable, while the employer

does not have to sign anything. It is common for the laborers to find out after they start work that

they have to do more than they agreed. When the employers find excuses to reduce their wages,

there is little room for the laborers to negotiate. Asked whether he worried about workers quitting

their jobs, one restaurant owner said this happened all the time, and he was only concerned when

replacements were hard to find. However, he did say that the problems could not be solved by

increasing workers’ wages: “We keep the business going by offering quality food at a low price.

More money paid to the workers means we have to raise prices, which would drive the

customers away.” In any case, he didn’t worry about not being able to find enough people to

work at low wages: “If not enough Chinese are willing to work for us, I can go for Mexican

laborers.”73

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To business owners or middle-class families, the employment services are simply magic.

One restaurant owner said she always got what she wanted. Once she was looking for a waiter

and called in advance, she arrived to find five guys waiting to be interviewed. During another

trip to Los Angeles for a medical appointment, she and her husband stopped by an employment

office to see if they could find a good chef. The agent asked them to wait, and two candidates

came in within twenty minutes.74 Jennifer, an accountant who was confined to her bed for two

years due to an illness, recalled a similar experience. “All I wanted at the time was someone who

could help with household chores and administer shots, but the agent asked a number of

questions: ‘Do you want a Mandarin speaker or a Cantonese speaker? What type of cuisine do

you prefer? Do you mind if the person is young?’ They are very thoughtful. My husband went to

the office over the weekend and returned with Xiuhua. She is only 28 years old, and a nurse back

in China.”75

Paying only a fraction of what their non-Chinese compatriots would have to pay, middle-

class Chinese Americans can enjoy a lifestyle that not many Americans in a similar financial

situation can afford. For $1000 a month Jennifer had her own nurse who gave her shots, baths,

medicine, and massages, on top of doing daily chores such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry.76

Paying her only $600 a month because her daughter also needed to live in the house, Liying’s

former employers gained a lot of leisure time and used their residence for parties and gatherings.

When the husband was away at work, the lady of the house would spend most of her time taking

care of her own skin, exercising, shopping, and socializing with friends. She hosted mahjongg

games at home twice a week, and the guests were served tea and hors d'oeuvre during the break,

along with dinner after the game. Bigger parties were held on weekends and Liying was

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responsible for all the cooking and cleaning. When the family had house guests, Liying baby-sat

young children and did everyone’s laundry in addition to her regular duties. Sometimes she

would be asked to wash the guests’ cars. She was never paid extra for doing extra work (she was

hired to take care of a two-person household) and was told not to accept tips from the guests.

“They would have to pay thousands of dollars to get what I did for them if they got a non-

Chinese service provider. But what can I say? All I heard before we moved out was that they

found a Chinese nurse to replace me; that the woman could give the lady massages on top of all

the tasks that I performed. There are too many desperate people looking for jobs and housing. I

was not surprised by what they could find.”77

Business owners often take advantage of the fact that some of their immigrant laborers

are well educated and have various skills. Few well-educated individuals would work as menial

laborers or domestics, but downward mobility is a common experience shared by many Chinese

immigrants. One waitress who has a science degree from a college in China said that her boss

often took her home to tutor his teenage son: “I overheard that he used to pay $20 an hour for

tutoring, but now he gets away with paying me only $8.”78 Timmy, an artist, was often asked by

his boss to teach painting to her and her children. “She told everyone she did not have the heart

to watch me use my hands to do the dishes. She asked me to teach them drawing once or twice a

week, as if it was a favor to me, but she paid me a dishwasher’s wages.”79

The presence of a large number of undocumented immigrants places real monetary value

on U.S. citizenship. Katherine Fan, whose family came from Vietnam, said that her sister bought

a house for the family in Oakland, California, with financial assistance from Denny, a clean-cut

young Chinese man. Katherine was ten or eleven when the purchase was made. Denny would

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come to visit every once in a while, and he would hand her sister checks. She thought he was her

sister’s boy friend, but her sister, who had a child out-of wedlock, never acknowledged that. The

memory of Denny was fresh in her mind: “Once he came to tell my sister that he would need a

few more days to deliver the money. My sister was furious; she let out a loud scream and threw a

cup of coffee at him. I didn’t understand what was going on and felt very sorry for Denny. My

sister was so mean and crazy, but he did not talk back or move a muscle. He just stood there, and

I could see one of his arms was soaked with coffee.” Long after he stopped coming, Katherine’s

family ran into Denny in a shopping mall and everyone asked how he was doing. Only then did

she learn from her parents that he and her sister had a legal, but fake, marriage. The deal was

mutually beneficial: Denny needed legal status; her sister needed help paying the mortgage.80

Dealing with clients who have no permanent residences or stable income, ethnic

businesses often require payment in cash before the service is provided. A simple asylum petition

case, for example, is paid in three installments. The lawyer will not start to work on a case until

he receives the first payment. Once the case is prepared, the second payment is due. The third

payment is due when a hearing is scheduled. The outcomes of these cases have a huge impact on

the future lives of the petitioners, but the lawyers are paid regardless of the ruling. In the late

1990s and early 2000s, asylum petitions—a very small portion of the legal services immigration

lawyers provide—generated about one hundred million dollars each year, attracting more and

more legal professionals to work for their coethnic clients.

This is the case in just about every sector of the ethnic economy involving the

participation of both immigrant laborers and middle-class Chinese Americans. As long as a

substantially large number of Chinese immigrants remain at the bottom of the ethnic economy,

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middle-class Chinese Americans are going to have a much higher quality of life than their

compatriots of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. They can maximize their profit margin by

utilizing low-cost immigrant labor; they can benefit from offering services to these laborers; and

they can enjoy affordable goods at the market and gain access to childcare and other domestic

service at a cost way below the market value. The end result is the image of Chinese Americans

as a “model minority” group, yet the countless individuals who make this possible are all but

invisible.

To outside observers the Chinese are doing well and manage to get ahead by sticking

together. The growing number of ethnic banks, shopping centers, supermarkets, eateries, real

estate agencies, accounting offices, law firms, and other businesses in metropolitan areas as well

as nearby suburbs show the vigor of the Chinese ethnic economy; their ability to attract laborers,

entrepreneurs, and consumers of various socioeconomic backgrounds are more than impressive.

Although one can hardly deny the fact that the ethnic economy is mutually beneficial to all

parities involved, and that many immigrant newcomers simply cannot survive without the

assistance of their ethnic networks, equal opportunities for all participants have yet to be

developed. This is not to blame the Chinese American middle class; most Chinese American

business owners, employers of domestics, and professional service providers are ordinary

Americans who work hard to improve the quality of their own lives and get ahead. If many

middle-class Chinese Americans indeed have done well for themselves, their success also

contributes to the economy of the United States. But certain aspects of the ethnic economy, upon

which the ethnic social hierarchy is built, have also worked to perpetuate poverty and widen the

gap between rich and poor. As Chinese Americans continue their struggles for equality and civil

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rights in the United States in the twenty-first century, a critical examination and reevaluation of

economic activities and social relations within their own community is urgently needed.

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