The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [195]
Overinflated rents worsened their misery. During the 1980s and 1990s, illegal Chinese aliens poured into Chinatowns just as businessmen from Taiwan and Hong Kong, jittery about political developments in Asia, invested their capital in American real estate. The result was a frenzy of speculation and soaring rents,63 which pressured Chinatown sweatshop owners to slash payments to workers even further. In New York, Chinese laborers routinely worked twelve hours a day in unventilated garment shops with broken sprinkler systems and padlocked metal gates barring the fire escapes, conditions rivaling those in the ill-fated Triangle Shirtwaist factory, where a fire destroyed 146 lives in 1911.
After work, many Chinese aliens came home to dingy, crowded apartments, often rat-infested, dungeon-like basements with exposed rusty pipes, live wires, and asbestos. Instead of taking a private room, many rented bunk space—often little more than two-by-fours-for ninety dollars a month, and shared the cost with other illegal immigrants by sleeping in shifts. “Most of our villagers considered America heaven,” K. T. Yang, president of the United Fujian American Association told a reporter in New York. “And they’re now forced to live in hell.”
Despite these hardships, the frugal living habits of these illegal Chinese aliens—such as sharing crowded apartments and eating at the restaurants that employed them—enabled many to clear their financial obligations within a few years. According to Ko-lin Chin, by the early twenty-first century Chinese smugglees typically worked off their debt to the snakeheads in four years, with the majority obtaining their green cards or U.S. citizenship within five or six years of their arrival. “They are hard-working and ambitious, which is why they are here,” Chin said. “Sooner or later, most will find a way to legalize their status.”
Over time, he noted, some of these naturalized Chinese Americans have become highly successful, opening their own take-out restaurants, garment factories, renovation companies, groceries, and other small businesses. “They now drive Mercedes-Benzes and own million-dollar homes,” Chin said of several Chinese he had surveyed as illegal aliens years before. “Most don’t have a lot of formal education or skills—you wouldn’t see them in computers—but they are good entrepreneurs. Americans don’t realize how creative they can be.”
But unforeseen events could thwart even the best-laid plans, and during the first critical years in the United States—the years when illegal aliens struggled feverishly to pay off their debt—the opportunities for their extortion were endless. Snakeheads were known to threaten relatives of immigrants, hoping to squeeze more money out of them, even if they were not behind on their payments. “If smugglers want the money, they say they will kill the males and sell the girls into a brothel,” one illegal Chinese alien said. In 1995, Chinese debt collectors kidnapped Gao Liqin, a thirty-eight-year-old immigrant seamstress, from her home in Queens, New York. The abductors woke her family in Fujian with a phone call in the middle of the night, demanding $38,000 in ransom. Weeping into the phone, Gao Liqin made desperate pleas to her parents to cooperate. But by sending their daughter to the United States, the Gao family still owed a $30,000 debt, and they could not raise the money. The kidnappers cut off her finger, stuffed her head into a plastic bag, gang-raped her, strangled her with a telephone cord, and crushed her skull by hitting her over the head with a TV set. Amazingly, this killing did not deter other members of the