The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [172]
Fortunately, other countries had friendlier policies. Canada, for instance, had lenient immigration laws, especially for political refugees. Thus Canada became the most popular destination for the Hong Kong émigrés, followed by Australia and the United States. No doubt many former residents of Hong Kong were attracted to these countries not only because of their liberal admissions policies, but also because English was their primary language. As people left in droves for those regions, the annual rate of migration from the city of Hong Kong soared from twenty thousand in the early 1980s to over sixty thousand after 1990.
But the road out of Hong Kong was anything but smooth, even for those who had money. First, their desperation made them easy victims for con artists, as some Hong Kong families handed over outrageous fees—often in excess of $30,000—to immigration “consultants” who promised to handle the paperwork for them. Second, after settling into their new homes, some found it impossible to replicate their earlier business success. Unlike Hong Kong, a city of unbridled capitalism, the United States had far greater government regulation, higher taxes, and more stringent labor laws, all multitiered, with complex local, state, and federal mandates to be met. Some entrepreneurs lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of their life savings when they launched enterprises doomed to early failure. Yet many were surprisingly free of bitterness. They simply wrote off the losses as the price of establishing themselves in America, obtaining U.S. citizenship, and assuring themselves of American political protection.
Over time, many found it easier to conduct business in Hong Kong than in America and hedged their bets by maintaining ties in both regions. They moved their families and transferred wealth to the United States, while continuing to operate their businesses out of Asia. Soon, they came to be known as “astronauts”: international commuters who spent many hours flying back and forth between Hong Kong and North America.
Coincidentally, the Chinese term for “astronaut”—tai kong ren—sounds like the Chinese words for “empty wife” or “home without a husband,” an appropriate description for women who, like the nineteenth-century “Gold Mountain widows,” rarely saw their husbands on a regular basis. And to a certain degree, the lives of these Hong Kong astronauts mirrored the lives of the early Chinese immigrants in America, but with a high-tech twist. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese in America lived an odd paradox: their American income was too low to sustain families in the United States, yet high enough to elevate their families to the status of gentry in China. A split-family arrangement emerged, in which wives reared children in Guangdong villages while the breadwinner worked on the other side of the ocean and mailed money back. During the 1990s, the split-family tradition reappeared as the astronaut phenomenon, but the direction of cash flow had reversed: wives and children resided in North America, while the husbands earned money in Asia to support their families in fine style in America.
The number of these Hong Kong astronauts ran in the thousands, and they ranged from moderately successful executives to celebrity moguls. The most prominent ones included Jimmy Lai, a newspaper and magazine publisher and founder of the Giordano clothing empire; Ronnie Chan, a billionaire real estate developer and chairman of the Hang Lung Group, a property development corporation; Frank Tsao, a real estate and shipping magnate; and Tung Chee-hwa, another shipping tycoon. All of them regularly commuted between Hong Kong and their homes in California.
Instead of cramped quarters in Hong Kong, some astronaut families moved into larger homes in North America, such as gigantic mansions in the Los Angeles area (which locals dubbed “monster houses