The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [196]
Many illegal aliens believed that eluding the snakeheads was impossible. “You can hide for a few years, maybe a year or two, but you can’t for a lifetime,” said Wang Libin, a passenger on the ill-fated Golden Venture who was granted political asylum because of his activism during the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. However, he still owed money to the smugglers. “You have friends, these friends have friends, you have family. They will find you. There’s no way to hide.”
As a result, many victims dared not report snakehead crimes to the authorities. For even if they did, neither the police nor the INS would have the manpower, time, or money to crack down on the underground world of Chinese smugglers. Nor did officials have any incentive to do so.64 During the 1990s, critics charged that neither the U.S. government nor the People’s Republic of China enforced their immigration laws because the American garment industry relied on or exploited illegal Chinese aliens, and the mainland Chinese economy benefited from overseas remittances.
Given these unfavorable conditions, then, why did the Chinese continue to come? For those considering emigration, the prospect of their being exploited was only half of the equation. The other half was how their families would benefit from remittances sent home. During the 1990s, the fruits of émigré labor transformed entire regions in China, studding the Fuzhou landscape with mansions. Many were elegant stone houses with traditional moon gates and round windows; others were cheap, gaudy replicas of European castles, sparkling with pink or gold tiles, resembling the architecture of Las Vegas and Disneyland. Some were six stories tall, complete with elevators, swimming pools, luxury cars, and satellite dishes. Within these ostentatious homes, occupants wore gold jewelry and carried cell phones—flashy displays of wealth that provoked envy among neighbors and inspired others to emigrate.
Like suburban bedroom communities, these Chinese neighborhoods were filled with wives and children, except the men were working not in a nearby city but on another continent. By the end of the 1990s, so many wives were left behind in Fujian province that their home villages were known as “widow villages.” Some “widows” built mansions piecemeal. Looming over rice paddies were half-constructed palatial homes, some with bare concrete inside, awaiting fresh infusions of cash from the United States. They evoked memories of the fortresses in Toishan, built by relatives of the earliest Chinese immigrants. Indeed, the people of Fujian were repeating a pattern from the nineteenth century—impoverished, overworked Chinese émigrés laboring under conditions of near-slavery in the United States, supporting families who lived like gentry in China. By the end of the twentieth century, a culture of leisure had already settled among the young in Fujian province. Everyone knew that laborers who earned $40 a month in China could make $2,000 in the United States. “So no one in the village works before they go to America,” one immigrant’s wife told a reporter. “There’s no point.”
In many areas, even the wives and mothers were missing. Some villages have been reduced to “ghost towns,” as one scholar put it, “populated only by old people caring for very young children whose parents are working in garment factories on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Chinese takeout restaurants scattered across the 50 states.” Because these communities lost their most productive adults—almost all men and women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five—child care responsibilities fell primarily on the shoulders of doting but aged grandparents. In 1999, the New York Times reported that female garment workers were paying a $1,000 fee, plus airfare, to have their infants safely delivered from New York Chinatown to their families in Fujian. So while some of the most affluent Americans were importing