Down the front steps and in the basement of one anonymous tenement is a sprawling, cluttered living quarter, once home to nearly two dozen Chinese immigrants. Further down a dark hallway, deep into the basement of the building, is a maze of low-ceilinged cubicles measuring perhaps five feet by ten feet. Each cubicle is furnished with only a homemade bunk bed haphazardly put together with unfinished wood. The rooms are dank and filthy. There are no windows. The lack of air is stifling.
Throughout the rooms and hallway there is evidence that the occupants have left in a hurry—scattered clothing, a calendar on the wall from a local Chinese restaurant, cigarettes left in ashtrays. In one cubicle, a pair of men’s underwear hangs neatly on a hanger perched on the back of a door.
Outside, around the corner on Hester Street, similar conditions prevail. Here, a seven-story walk-up was recently cleared out when an anonymous phone caller informed the fire department about the dwelling’s primitive conditions. Fire officials found each of the five floors occupied by some fifty people, all living in makeshift cubicles that were even more cramped than those on Eldridge Street.
Once again, the occupants—in this case “illegals” from Fujian Province in southern China—scattered quickly. Among the items left behind on the third floor was an unpaid phone bill totaling $1,351.84.
For every deserted Chinatown building like the ones on Eldridge and Hester Streets, there are perhaps a dozen more within a few blocks’ radius that are fully occupied. In most, the tenants are illegal aliens, ready to move fast when housing inspectors or the fire department pay an unexpected visit. Alone, with no understanding of the English language or the byways of American culture, they represent the undocumented Chinese, growing in vast numbers each year. Now, an estimated 30,000 illegal Chinese live in New York City. Traditionally, their presence has always been tolerated in the Chinese community; their willingness to work “off the books” has fueled the underground economy.
But these days the presence of the illegals has created a crisis in Chinatown, taxing community groups and bringing about troubling accusations of exploitation, both within the community and beyond. The squalid living conditions tell only half the story.
Like generations of Chinese immigrants who came before, most new illegals will find work in the restaurant and garment trades. They will work long, arduous hours for low wages, and they will do so without many of the benefits on which most Americans rely—worker’s compensation, overtime pay, medical insurance. But unlike those who came before, these undocumented aliens will spend years working before they accumulate anything even remotely resembling a savings.
That’s because many of them owe huge fees—anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000—to be paid to the smugglers who provided fake documents and secured their passage, usually through Central America and Mexico, sometimes through Canada. Part or all of the fee will have been fronted by a relative, an informal credit association, or the smugglers themselves. U.S. immigration officials estimate that since 1980, as many as 50,000 Chinese have been smuggled into the metropolitan area from Fujian Province alone.
Upon arrival in the United States, the smuggled aliens work to pay off their debt. The consequences for those who don’t pay are sometimes enormous.
In early January, police arrested thirteen people—all illegal aliens from Fujian Province—for kidnapping and torturing Kin Wah Fong, a thirty-year-old restaurant worker also from Fujian. Fong had refused to pay his smuggling debt. He was snatched from the restaurant where he worked and taken to an apartment in the Bronx, handcuffed to a bed for twelve hours, and beaten with a claw hammer. “They also put him on the phone with his family and he begged them to come up with the money,” Lieutenant Joseph Pollini of the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad told Newsday. “He thought that at any moment they might terminate him.”
One week later, Pollini’s squad rescued four more Fujianese who had been kidnapped on Christmas Day and taken to an apartment near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There abductors demanded money still due from a $20,000 smuggling fee. For twelve days, until they were discovered, three of the illegal immigrants were handcuffed to a bed. The police found a fourth crammed into a small sink cabinet.
Despite the recent spate of kidnappings, the more common way for smuggled immigrants to pay off their debt is somewhat less sensational, though no less demeaning. It’s a payment described as “debt bondage” by the international Anti-Slavery Society, a 150-year-old human rights organization affiliated with the United Nations, and it amounts to a modern form of slavery.
“We’ve never seen anything like this in the Chinese community before,” says Pete Kwong, author of The New Chinatown and a professor at State University of New York at Old Westbury. “Living conditions are worse than ever. As for wages and working conditions, they’ve always been bad. But now it has become like slavery competing against slavery.”
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.
American Gangsters Page 10
