Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  And yet none of this was surprising. Any student of American history knows that nativist and racist movements have been part of our social fabric since the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party. And when “real” Americans didn’t blame Catholics, Jews, Italians, Greeks, or Irishmen for their own inadequacies, they blamed Asians. First the Chinese, then the Japanese. I thought of all those old hurts, insults, and humiliations as my wife and I talked to the Koreans about their lives. They told stories as old as the immigrant tradition: how they arrived without language, full of hope, first laboring for others in the same immigrant group, finally buying their own businesses, starting families, working. And working. And working.

  “I buy a book, with English word,” a man named Kyung Ho Park said, after explaining that his average workday (before the boycott) was fifteen hours long. “No time for school. …”

  When I was growing up, Italians, Eastern European Jews, and Greeks told these stories. There were resentments then too from the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid; ethnic quarrels; even more brutal racism than now. But well into the 1950s, cities like New York were still manufacturing centers, and there were jobs for almost anybody who wanted to work, including people like my father, an immigrant with an eighth-grade education. The city’s traditional liberalism was made possible by an economy in which more than 30 percent of the jobs were in manufacturing; that figure has dropped to 10 percent, and the town’s great generous liberal spirit is as frayed and tattered as an old coat.

  One result: Immigrants like Kyung Ho Park are working in a city obsessed with fixing blame for its social and economic woes. New York is home to people of immense wealth, and they live well-defended lives in the gaudy canyons of Manhattan. But in spite of the Reagan-era economic boom, New York also contains 840,000 people who live on welfare, more than every man, woman, and child in San Francisco. They don’t often see millionaires in their neighborhoods; they do see immigrants. And in the American tradition, the wrath of some is falling upon the newest arrivals, of whom the Koreans are the most visible. Sadly, the Asian immigrants frequently look upon those customers who are welfare clients with more contempt than pity.

  “I work,” one Korean said to me on Church Avenue. “They don’t work. Why do I must feed them?”

  That is to say, why must I pay taxes, why must I work long hours at a difficult job, while so many will not do what I do? For years, the children and grandchildren of older immigrants have sung the same blurry refrain: We made it, why don’t they? Now you begin to hear it from the Koreans too. “You don’t like my store,” one angry Korean immigrant said to me, “then go to your own store. But they don’t have store. Too hard. Too much work.”

  Such complaints can’t be dismissed glibly as the latest examples of newcomers picking up the American racist virus. On the crudest level (down on the streets), they have a certain validity. In New York, as in other American urban centers, the Third World city within the larger city depends upon the taxes and energies of others for its food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, police, fire, and sanitation services. This year’s budget for New York City is more than $27 billion, and some estimate that fully half of that immense sum is used for servicing the poor. It’s inconceivable to think of this happening in Tokyo or Seoul or Singapore.

  The persistence of the virtually permanent welfare-supported underclass is the most disgraceful measure of the decline of America’s once all-powerful manufacturing plants. But most Americans don’t want to talk anymore about root causes; they just see people sitting on the stoop while they go to work. Even the most orthodox liberals now understand that welfare degrades those who receive it and infuriates those who pay for it. So it is no surprise that some poor Americans mutter paranoid theories while others look for scapegoats. More and more these days, our favorite scapegoat is the Asian.

  Cheap politicians blame Japan for the nation’s economic decline; they work too hard, they save too much money, they close certain markets. Lee Iacocca growls in commercials that Americans make better cars than they do. Idiots like Donald Trump bellow, “The Japanese are ripping us off!” In movies like Rambo, Asians are mowed down by the hundreds while audiences cheer. And as usual in this country, what we are describing as a race problem is really one of class.

  On Church Avenue in Brooklyn, you could feel the seething class bitterness of the black demonstrators. Earlier, they claimed that their anger wasn’t simply about the incident that set off the protest. They told various auditors that Koreans-all Koreans!-were rude to blacks, suspecting them of shoplifting, acting curt with them, refusing to touch their hands when making change. “Fuckin’ people don’t know how to treat people,” one exasperated black man said to me. “They act like every African American is a thief.”

  Even some Koreans will admit that this perception has some truth to it. A few will cite cultural differences as the heart of the matter (among Koreans, they say, smiling is discouraged, direct eye contact is considered aggressive, and women are taught not to touch strangers). Others blame bitter experience in underclass neighborhoods, which led them to make racial assumptions. A harder truth is that the success of the Koreans in New York is a form of humiliation for many African Americans. You can see a cartoon version of the relationship (and the problems with manners) in Spike Lee’s sad movie, Do the Right Thing. I hear it on black talk radio and in conversations with black friends. With amazing speed, the Koreans have become Haves, while too many blacks, born here, speaking English, remain Have-Nots.

  The Koreans only began coming to the United States in significant numbers after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act finally ended the racist restrictions against immigrants from Asia. Today more than two hundred thousand Koreans are believed to be living in New York, and they own 9,500 small businesses. The Korean greengrocer has become a widely admired (if stereotypical) figure in the city’s life. And in spite of language problems and immense cultural differences, the newcomers have leapfrogged over the city’s blacks on what used to be called the ladder of economic success.

  “Don’t try an’ tell me that Koreans work harder than we do,” a black man named Virgil Hills said to me a few blocks from the boycott site. “They just got advantages we don’t have.” Again, some truth here. Certainly, it’s extremely difficult for American blacks to open their own grocery stores (or other retail businesses), because so many banks redline them, refusing to provide start-up loans. But the real advantages the Koreans have are not those talked about on the street. Back home, almost all of the Koreans were middle class; that is, urban, well educated, goal oriented, imbued with the Confucian ethic. In a 1987 essay on New York’s Koreans, the sociologist Illsoo Kim cited one survey of 560 Korean householders in New York showing that 86 percent were married and living with spouses. Some 67 percent had finished college back home. Another study showed that 40 percent of Koreans who arrived in the mid-1970s had professional or technical backgrounds. American blacks with the same backgrounds have no need to open grocery stores; they have access to higher levels of American society.

  But these educated Koreans — blocked from American corporate or professional life by the language barrier — have made great use of their abilities. In the greengrocer business, they have analyzed the American systems of purchase, distribution, and marketing, and made their own improvements. In addition, they get up early and stay late, usually the only formula for success. The Koreans have also expanded the sense of family beyond the essential base. In New York alone, there are twelve Korean banks, six daily newspapers in Korean, several cable channels with Korean programming, and at least three radio stations. There are almost three hundred Protestant churches in the Korean community and a burgeoning number of business groups and “prosperity associations.” This network helps bind Koreans together, allowing them to learn from one another about the sometimes scary new world in which they are living. In a way, of course, this is another version of the old “self-help” philosophy that
helped older immigrants become Americans. It had its failings; many immigrants were injured or exploited by their own kind. But that system worked a hell of a lot better than state welfare. Talk to Koreans, and they tell you they would rather starve than go on welfare; that would be a loss of face. They absolutely refuse to enter the dependency culture in which so many of the American poor find themselves trapped. Those blacks who sense a certain contempt from Koreans are probably reading the signals correctly. In the Korean grocery stores, all members of the family work; most often, the business itself was set up by the pooled savings of several family members. In underclass areas, where the Korean grocer is often paid with food stamps, the American family is in disarray or doesn’t exist at all.

  As it is to most working people everywhere, pride is important to the Koreans; it also shapes their reactions to trouble. Because they work so hard, they are understandably furious when kids steal from their stands. “I pay for what I eat,” one Korean told me. “They don’t want to pay. Just take.” Since many of the stores are in ghetto or marginal areas, the kids are usually black, and that shapes the way some Koreans see all blacks. In a more perfect world, they would make finer distinctions; unfortunately, they live in this world. They are also frustrated by the lack of interest American police and courts have in such petty crimes. So they often deal with shoplifters themselves. In the past two years, I’ve witnessed three separate incidents of Korean grocers chasing kids through the streets. They didn’t catch them, but when I asked for their reactions, they just shook their heads, full of contained fury. I saw the same look on the Koreans who were objects of the boycott, as they gazed out at the protesters and the TV cameras.

  “I don’t understand this kind of problem,” Man Ho Park (brother of Kyung Ho) told my wife that day on Church Avenue. “So much anger. So much time doing nothing. Why not work? Why not use time for, for … improve life?”

  Later, driving back slowly from the boycotted stores, we passed many other Korean groceries, wedged among the video shops and record stores and fast-food joints. Black women shopped. Children cried in strollers or gazed at the colorful displays of oranges and mangoes, bananas and grapes, yams and tomatoes. On the corners, knots of young black men talked, laughed, watched passing cars, sipped from beer cans. As we stopped for a light, one of them saw my wife looking out the window. He stared at her for a long moment. The light changed, and then slowly, almost as a matter of duty, he gave her the finger.

  ESQUIRE,

  September 1990

  A CONFEDERACY OF COMPLAINERS

  One rainy morning this past spring, Colin Powell went home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for thirty-seven years. But now Powell was one of the most famous generals in recent American history, thanks to the crisp poise and tough intelligence he displayed on television during the seven months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and he was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again. He stepped briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly. He smiled. He shook hands. He ignored the small crowd of black and Latino men across the street, huddled in front of a methadone clinic. And he didn’t seem to notice the abandoned hulks of gutted buildings down the slope of Boston Road. As a man tempered by Vietnam, he has taught himself to ignore the defeats of the past. He glanced up at the school entrance, shook his head in an ironic way, and went in. I walked across the street to talk to the junkies.

  “What the hell he know about bein’ down?” said a man named Roderick. “I seen him on the TV. That man’s whiter than George fuckin’ Bush! Talk so pretty! Man got everything he want, college boy, all that shit.”

  Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing. They’d drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made. Their fathers had run off when they were young, or their mothers, or their girlfriends. They’d been locked up by bad cops, beaten up or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses. Look at us, they said: Look what has been done to us. By Vietnam or racism or capitalism. I stood there for a few minutes, listening to the old familiar litany, and then fled across the street to see Powell talk to some kids.

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive. The core of his twenty-minute talk, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes: Stay in school and get a diploma; don’t take drugs, because that’s stupid. But such bromides were given some renewed power because Powell now spoke with the authority of success. In addition, he was a black man who’d come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag. Certainly Powell had arrived here with luminous cards of identity. But then, after the clichés, he delivered what was probably the morning’s most important message — and its most subtle.

  “If you’re black, if you’re Puerto Rican or Hispanic,” he said, “be proud of that. But don’t let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else’s problem.”

  Thus spoke a man who clearly has spent his life refusing to become a victim.

  To hear Colin Powell that morning was refreshing, even moving, because we live now in a nation that is sick with what I call victimism. Since the collapse of communism and the continuing mistrust of capitalism, victimism might now be the dominant American ideology. Many whites insist that they are innocent victims of vengeful blacks, who are portrayed in their fearful fantasies as marauding bands coming to get their wives, sisters, mamas, or selves. Meanwhile, Hispanics in big cities claim to be the victims of whites and blacks, while I’ve heard blacks claim that AIDS was invented to kill blacks and crack cocaine was invented as part of an antiblack conspiracy set up by the CIA and the Medellin cartel, both of which are pumping it into the ghettos to debase black society.

  At the same time, all sorts of people say they are victims of Asians, from the professional Japan-bashers in Washington to those on the street who believe the Korean greengrocer must be engaged in some nefarious plot that will end with a takeover of America. And there are Asians among us who believe they are victims, too; they are angry because someone once called them the Model Minority; they’re mad because some universities are creating quotas to keep out Asians and Asian-Americans; in the Miss Saigon uproar, they were furious because the part of a Eurasian went to a Caucasian.

  This peculiar American capacity for anger seems without limit. Millions of women claim to be the victims of men, while men cite alimony laws and stake claims to their own status as victims of feminist hypocrisy (“How can they claim I’m oppressing them,” one divorced friend said, “and then take my money?”). The American day seems to begin with one long and penetrating whine: Look what they are doing to me! And “they” are Catholics or Protestants or Jews, liberals or conservatives, northerners or southerners, eastern bankers or western oilmen, members of the NAACP or the NRA, slaves to the AFL-CIO, with occasional believers in the remaining power of the International Communist Conspiracy or the Trilateral Commission. Life in these semi-United States often seems to be an illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that hell is other people.

  In the end, all adherents of victimism have a few things in common. Most of them are miserable. They hate their jobs, their wives, their husbands or kids or dogs, the cities in which they live, the food they eat, the politicians who lead them, the newspapers, Peter Arnett, their mothers and fathers, and almost all foreigners. For a few brief weeks, they were happy hating Saddam Hussein. But then they noticed that people they hated also hated Hussein, so they retreated back into life as gray, throbbing muscles of resentment.

  More important, victimism has one overriding slogan, the response to almost all questions about the source of their misery and victimhood: It’s not my fault! Dropped out of high school?
Not my fault. Started shooting heroin or smoking crack when others passed up both? Not my fault. Married the wrong people, got caught robbing stores, crashed the car with a load on? Not me, man, not my fault. Victimism implies that nobody is personally responsible for the living of a life. The defeats, disappointments, and failures that were once thought to be part of each human being’s portion on this earth are not only unacceptable now, considered soul-killing, career-bruising, life-threatening, but they are always the fault of somebody else.

  I’ve heard the endless complaint on all levels of society. In a ghetto, I see a woman point to a hole in the bathroom wall and demand to know why the landlord won’t fix it. Well, I ask, how’d it get there? It just appeared, she says. Why doesn’t she fix it herself? What? What? Are you crazy? It’s not my fault! This could be explained as the heritage of fifty years of welfare. But I hear the echo out in East Hampton on a summer afternoon, where one of those captains of industry is complaining about the Japanese. We shouldn’t even let their cars in here! Why not? Because the Japanese are unfair. In what way? He mumbles about rice, cigarettes, other items not easily admitted to Japan, and how the Japanese won’t let Americans into the construction business, and how they insist on writing their documents in Japanese, the crafty buggers. I say, What does all that have to do with car sales? The captain of industry glowers: Well, he says, what would you do about our car sales? Make better cars, I suggest. He looks at me, eyes widening. What? Don’t you understand? The Japanese are giving us the shaft! We are falling behind, but hey, fella, get on the team! It’s not our fault!