It is the profitability of “debt bondage” that distinguishes Chinatown from other immigrant communities with sizable undocumented populations. Compared to the $50 to $1,000 the average Central American refugee pays to be smuggled into the United States, the $30,000 fee paid by some Chinese illegals is staggering. Whereas a Nicaraguan, Haitian, or Dominican illegal might work months to pay off his or her debt, an alien smuggled in from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Mainland China will work up to five or six years.
Another factor that distinguishes the problem in the Asian community is Chinatown itself. Unlike many ethnic ghettos that lack jobs and capital, Chinatown is geared toward a thriving business and political elite. Although it has changed somewhat in recent years, the work force is still controlled by the many tongs
,
or “family associations.” Each association’s power is based partly on its ability to provide cheap labor; it is in its own interest to do so.
Add to the demand for illegal labor the nature of the illegals themselves. Many lack formal educations and come from the poorest regions of China. Some yearn for the kind of freedom they associate with Western culture, or
Kam San
, the “Golden Mountain,” as America is known to many Chinese. Some are told of the hardships that await them, but their desire to emigrate is paramount.
“Many of these people think that America is the land of milk and honey, that New York is paradise,” says James Goldman, a senior agent with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). “What some of these aliens go through to get here would turn your stomach.”
Born and raised in the South of China, “Yin Lee” was working in a wristwatch factory in her native city, making the equivalent of $270 a month. In late 1989, she decided to come to the United States because there was “no freedom, no people’s rights” in her home city. For a fee of $2,000, arrangements were made for her to fly to Hong Kong and then to Panama. She had no idea who the arrangements were made with, only that the money was put up by her relatives.
With jet-black hair, doleful eyes, and broad, delicate features, Yin does not look like someone who has just been through a hellish ordeal. In her mid-twenties, she looks perhaps a few years older than she is. There is an openness about her, an innocence even. She agreed to talk about her experience only if her real name was not used. For the purposes of our interview, she spoke through an interpreter.
Once in Panama, Yin was to pay an additional $3,000 for a fraudulent visa that was supposed to get her into the United States. But within weeks of her arrival, complications ensued. In December of 1989, American troops invaded Panama in search of Manuel Noriega. Yin was stranded for the next seven months.
Speaking neither English nor Spanish, Yin worked in a Chinese restaurant and lived in a cheap hotel, waiting for the false documentation she needed to get out of Panama. After she had been there a few months, she was raped by a Chinese man who lived in her hotel.
“The guy says to me, ‘You want sex?’ ” remembers Yin. “I could do nothing. Afterwards, I tell no one. Too scared.”
Yin believes the man was connected with a professional smuggling ring, perhaps himself a “Snakehead,” as Chinese smugglers are known, or maybe simply a businessman who profited in some way from the smuggling racket. Either way, he seemed to know a lot about her situation. He knew, for instance, that she was unmarried, alone, and had no family in the country. He also knew she was in the process of being smuggled.
Weeks after the first incident, Yin was raped again by the same man. Then again. As she tells her story now—months after the fact—her voice is steady and determined, her face betraying little emotion.
At the time, Yin was depressed and lonely. Outside the window of her tiny room, a war raged and U.S. troops patrolled the streets. She was too terrified to tell anyone what had happened.
Eventually, Yin secured passage out of Panama to the Bahamas. Traveling with six other Chinese aliens, she arrived in Nassau with no documentation. Though she had half expected as much, Yin’s hopes were crushed when Bahamian customs officials would not let her in the country. She was put back on the plane destined to return to Panama.
On the return flight, Yin’s plane developed mechanical problems and was forced to touch down unexpectedly in Miami. When she tried to get through customs, she was taken into custody by U.S. immigration officials and charged with lacking a proper visa or passport.
Although she spent the next two months in a detention camp outside of Miami, Yin was overjoyed to be in the United States. She called her uncle in New York, who was able to put up money to get her an immigration lawyer. Because she was from the People’s Republic of China, she was able to apply for political asylum. In the meantime, she was paroled and released to her uncle’s custody.
According to immigration officials and members of the Chinese community, familiar with the plight of today’s illegals, Yin’s experiences are both typical and unusual. Sexual abuse is not uncommon. And the route taken by Yin through Panama is a well-worn path. Following the U.S. toppling of Noriega, immigration officials were estimating that as many as 35,000 Chinese had been stranded there without documentation.
What is unusual about Yin’s odyssey is the price. By the time she arrived in New York, Yin had run up a total debt of about $10,000, which included the smuggler’s fee to Panama and money for a lawyer. This price, well below the $30,000 to $40,000 fee paid by many Chinese illegals, was mitigated by the fact she did not have to pay a snakehead to smuggle her into the United States. That came about merely through an act of luck, or, as Yin calls it, “an act of Buddha,” when her plane, unexpectedly, had to land in Miami.
Now that she has arrived in Chinatown, Yin’s primary concern is finding a job. Along with thousands of other Chinese women, the garment business is her most likely bet. (If she were male, it would be the restaurant businesses or construction.) Though Yin’s prospects for work are good, the conditions are likely to be deplorable.
Wing Lam, program director for the Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA)—a nonprofit labor rights group dedicated to “securing dignity for Chinese workers”—says that with the recent influx of illegals, wages and working conditions have spiraled downward. Lam estimates an average restaurant kitchen helper might make $1,100 a month working twelve hours a day, six days a week.
Despite the prospect of wages and working conditions only slightly better than what she left behind in China, Yin Lee seems relieved to be here. “After all that has happened already,” she says, “how can things not get better?”
In Corona, Queens, where the Number 7 subway that runs through the neighborhood is known as “the Orient Express” because of the area’s burgeoning Asian population, the days are long. In an alley off Forty-Fourth Avenue, below the elevated Long Island Railroad tracks, a typical garment “sweatshop” is in full operation. Inside a nondescript redbrick warehouse, a few hundred women toil over sewing machines and steam presses on a chilly afternoon.
Joe Halik and Charles DeSiervo, supervising agents with the New York State Department of Labor’s Apparel Industry Task Force, climb the steps to the first floor. Since the task force was begun in October of 1987—after a state investigation revealed widespread abuse in the apparel industry—Halik and DeSiervo have made daily visits to sweatshops in Queens and Chinatown.
As the two stroll through the factory, the women keep their eyes on their work. They’ve seen Halik, DeSiervo, and other members of the task force on many occasions, and they know they have nothing to fear. Unlike the INS, labor inspectors are not concerned with the immigration status of the workers. Their job is simply to make sure the working conditions meet state law.
The warehouse is cluttered with mounds of cut fabric. The sewing tables are situated next to one another in row after row. Overhead, dingy fluorescent lights, many burned out, hang from the ceiling. Some women wear white surgical masks to keep from breathing in dust; almost all are Asian, with a few Hispanics mixed in.
The most common violation Halik and DeSiervo find is an employer who has not paid overtime when, in fact, most women work ten- and twelve-hour shifts. Inevitably, the undocumented aliens aren’t even on the books.
For the employer, the benefits in using such labor are clear and compelling. If owners aren’t caught by state inspectors, they can pay the worker below the $3.80 minimum hourly wage and avoid paying Social Security, payroll taxes, and insurance benefits. Also, the docile nature of an undocumented work force living in fear makes it a lot easier for the employer to call the shots.
“The worst thing,” says DeSiervo, “is seeing five- and six-year-old kids working alongside their mothers.”
Task force statistics show that in the last two years, they’ve closed down thirty-three shops, usually for the most basic requirement: failure to properly register with the Department of Labor. Halik and DeSiervo have seen dozens of shops open and close within a matter of months, in classic fly-by-night fashion. Says Halik: “It’s an ongoing cat-and-mouse game.”
A recent report by CSWA predicts that if conditions continue on their current path, women working in the sweatshops can expect declining wages and longer hours in the year ahead. Right now, some women are earning a daily wage of twenty dollars, half of what they might have made a year ago. The report concludes: “Sweatshops reminiscent of the early twentieth century have come back in a big way.”
As bad as conditions are, things could be worse. For someone with a smuggling debt, a bad job is better than no job at all. Especially for women, the options are limited. Mostly, there are only the sweatshops, or, for some, the sprawling Asian sex trade—an occasional form of employment for young, desperate women with a debt to pay.
In Chinatown, an ethos of insularity prevails. Fear and ethnic pride makes most residents reluctant to put forth a negative image of the community. Chinese Americans have long been perceived as the “model minority” by many non-Asians, an image carefully cultivated by the community’s business and political leaders. But the oppressive system of indentured servitude both undermines and, ironically, underscores that image by supplying cheap labor that makes it all possible.
In the last decade, numerous advocacy groups like the CSWA, Asian Americans for Equality, and the Center for Immigrants Rights have been trying to challenge the established order in Chinatown—one that was essentially transplanted from feudal China in the late nineteenth century. Even some business leaders have spoken out, like Yee Kam Yeung.
Last April, Yeung decided to “disassociate” himself from the Fujianese American Association, after having been a member since 1973. The association is believed by many law enforcement officials to be a conduit in the smuggling process. One of the association members is Cheng Chui Ping, aka Sister Ping, a Fujianese woman cited in a recent New York
Daily News
report as the “empress of alien smuggling.” She and her husband are two of only twenty members to have donated $10,000 or more to the association’s $1.6 million building fund.
Even before he left the Fujianese Association, Yee Kam Yeung had become a vocal critic. When he left, he did the unthinkable: He began his own association, the United Fujianese of America, located on Canal Street.
In Chinatown, few undertakings are more perilous than trying to start your own renegade association. One evening last September, Yeung says he was visited in his offices by four Chinese males who put a gun to his head and pistol-whipped him—an incident later reported in the local Chinese press. One of the men allegedly warned Yeung: “Don’t fool around in Chinatown.”
“I believe my life is in danger,” said Yeung, who nonetheless agreed to be interviewed.
Seated in a Manhattan coffee shop far from Chinatown at one o’clock in the morning, the fifty-two-year-old community leader frankly admitted that there is a problem of indentured servitude among the Fujianese. He knows the appalling conditions under which many of the new illegals are forced to live. In association newsletters he has called for an amnesty similar to the one granted by President Bush in 1989 following the upheavals in Tiananmen Square.
The very fact that Yeung was willing to talk with a journalist about the problems in Chinatown puts him at odds with members of the business community who, activists contend, implicitly condone the phenomenon of indentured servitude. Yeung claims that the beating he received was partly a result of this calling for the amnesty, which many in the community feel would ameliorate the current crisis.
The violence directed at Yeung underscores another fact of life in Chinatown. Local police and the feds believe that the Fuk Ching, a New York-based gang made up of Fujianese, plays a major role in the hugely profitable alien smuggling racket. It was Fuk Ching gangsters who kidnapped and tortured Kin Wah Fong in the Bronx two weeks ago. A recent fatal shooting at a Chinese travel agency on Bowery is also believed to be related to the smuggling rings. Cops are finally beginning to get a handle on what community organizers like Yeung have known for years: that muscle provided by Fuk Ching gangsters is the intimidating factor that makes indentured servitude possible.
As the February 15 New Year approaches, ushering in the Year of the Ram, Chinatown continues to grow. Community and immigration officials point to 1997 and the repatriation of Hong Kong with mainland China as the cause of increasing immigration. In the year ahead, already scarce jobs and housing may become even more rare.
For Yin Lee, who traveled halfway across the world and through a war to get here, the future is uncertain. On the day of our interview, she had just come from a Manhattan abortion clinic. Living with the humiliation of having been raped, she neglected to reveal her secret to anyone until it was almost too late. Now four-and-a-half months pregnant, the doctor had warned her that it would be a potentially dangerous operation.
Despite everything, Yin was hopeful. Sitting in the bustling midtown coffee shop, she spoke idealistically of going to school to learn English. Today, her $10,000 smuggling debt was far from her mind; the fact that she might be working twelve hours a day for a wage of twenty or thirty dollars hadn’t registered. She talked with such animation and intensity that she barely touched her tuna salad sandwich. “I don’t really like it, anyway,” she explained, smiling politely. “When I was in the detention camp in Miami, that’s all they had—American food.”