The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [191]
For many ambitious Chinese, only three choices seemed open: to resign oneself to one’s station in life; to master the game of politics; or to leave. The globalized Western media made the third alternative the most enticing. During the Deng era, the glamorous lives of Hollywood celebrities reached the Chinese masses through satellite dishes and VCRs.61 By the early 1990s, the prospect of unlimited wealth in America had infected the Fuzhou region with immigration fever. One cause for the perceived differences in national wealth was the exaggerations of movie and television dramas, but the greatest reason could be found in hard numbers. In 1991, the per capita income in the United States was $22,204, compared to a figure that ranged between $370 and $1,450 in China, leading many Chinese to become obsessed with the prospect of making a quick fortune in America. “Everyone went crazy,” the Sing Tao Daily reported. “The area was in a frenzy. Farmers put down their tools, students discarded their books, workers quit their jobs, and everyone was talking about nothing but going to America ... If people found out someone had just successfully arrived in the United States, his or her home will be crowded with people, both acquaintances and strangers, to come to collect information about going to America.”
Even though the United States granted an annual quota of twenty thousand immigration slots to the PRC, these usually went to the Chinese with education, official connections, or relatives in the United States. Consequently, many of the poorer or less-educated Chinese had to emigrate illegally, turning to the underworld for help, to achieve their Western dream. No one knows how many resorted to such methods, for it is not the nature of illegal operations to maintain records. Estimates range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand people a year, but an exact figure is impossible: “It’s like trying to pin jello to a wall,” said one FBI agent in New York.
These arrivals bore a striking resemblance to the first wave of Chinese who arrived during the nineteenth century. Both émigré waves consisted largely of young, able-bodied adult men with wives and families remaining in their native land. According to a survey conducted by Ko-lin Chin, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, most illegal Chinese immigrants in New York City were married men between the ages of twenty and forty, former laborers with an elementary or junior high education. But instead of originating from Canton like the early waves, they came mostly from Fuzhou, a commercial and fishing city of five million in Fujian province in the south of China.
Like Canton, Fuzhou enjoyed a tradition of citizens migrating abroad and establishing overseas communities in other countries. Close-knit family relationships provided émigrés with international capital and extensive business networks. Fujian province, like Guangdong, was also renowned for its independence and entrepreneurial spirit. Historically, it had been a frontier country overrun by outlaws and adventurers, something like the Wild West in the United States. The Chinese stereotyped the Fujianese as ruthless and ambitious, obsessed