The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe Page B
Authors: Patrick Radden Keefe
Tags: General, Social Science
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apartments, sneaking past doormen when the buildings had them, hovering outside until some legitimate guest was buzzed in when they didn’t.
They stayed in a range of decrepit accommodations: grimy flophouses and single-resident-occupancy hotels along the Bowery, rat-infested dwellings where men and women, segregated by floor, slept in windowless six-by-six-foot cells. They crammed into the century-old tenements of Allen Street, Essex, Chrystie, and Hester, chutes-and-ladders fire escapes of black wrought iron stenciling a zigzag geometry across the brick facades. The famous Fujianese entrepreneurialism has a tendency to feed on itself, so landlords who owned, say, a one-or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood realized that they could break up the space into bunk beds and sell it in shifts. Everybody won. New arrivals from Fuzhou could keep their housing costs to $90 a month, forfeiting their bed to other off-shift tenants for sixteen hours a day, and the landlords reaped the benefits of triple-booking the space.
Employment agencies, many of them Fujianese-owned, began to bridge the gap between New York employers looking for cheap, exploitable labor and hungry arrivals from Fuzhou. The agencies occupied simple, brightly lit spaces where jobs were announced over a microphone or posted on little scraps of paper pinned to the wall. You couldspot the Fujianese, their eyes hungry but downcast, looking to avoid conversation, chain-smoking, eyeing the wall, milling around, waiting for the next job—delivery boy (must supply own bike), seamstress, construction, cook. It was a buyer’s market: the Fujianese were illegal, and many of them owed money to whoever had brought them over. They needed work fast, and the kind of work that wouldn’t require them to fill out a W-2 form. As such, the jobs tended to be menial and often backbreaking, with minimal pay and excruciatingly long hours. And when a job came through, it was the worker, not the employer, who owed the employment agency a fee. They usually paid a few cents on every dollar they made.
The scrappiness of the Fujianese was not lost on the existing Cantonese community, which had reigned in Chinatown for a hundred years. Nineteenth-century Cantonese had come east from California around the time of the exclusion act and established the neighborhood at the intersection of Mott Street and Pell. Their descendants looked down on the Fujianese arrivals as strivers and peasants, poorly educated and willing to sully themselves in untold squalor in order to make a buck. Sister Ping felt that the Cantonese did not show the Fujianese adequate respect. “Fujianese and Cantonese always seem like different people, not very alike,” she observed. As a result, the Fujianese stuck to themselves. “We always did our own thing,” she said. It must have been unsettling for the Cantonese to watch the traditional identity of Chinese America give way to a tidal wave of Fujianese. In 1960 there were 236,000 Chinese in America. By 1990 that number had swelled to 1.6 million. A large proportion of that growth was Fujianese, and for the vast majority of Fujianese emigrants, the first stop in America was New York City. Chinatown residents began referring to East Broadway as Fuzhou Street. They knew that most of the Fujianese arrivals were illegal and were still paying off their passage. They called them “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the going snakehead rate in the eighties.
But the fact remained that a dishwasher in Chinatown could make in a month what a farmer in Fuzhou made in a year, and the Fujianesekept coming. They were willing to take on the debt associated with the journey because of the promise that life in America held. It was an investment, and families pooled their resources to support each émigré. The criminologist Ko-lin Chin likens the logic of the Fujianese in those years to the decision of a college graduate to take out loans for Harvard Law School; a huge debt
They stayed in a range of decrepit accommodations: grimy flophouses and single-resident-occupancy hotels along the Bowery, rat-infested dwellings where men and women, segregated by floor, slept in windowless six-by-six-foot cells. They crammed into the century-old tenements of Allen Street, Essex, Chrystie, and Hester, chutes-and-ladders fire escapes of black wrought iron stenciling a zigzag geometry across the brick facades. The famous Fujianese entrepreneurialism has a tendency to feed on itself, so landlords who owned, say, a one-or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood realized that they could break up the space into bunk beds and sell it in shifts. Everybody won. New arrivals from Fuzhou could keep their housing costs to $90 a month, forfeiting their bed to other off-shift tenants for sixteen hours a day, and the landlords reaped the benefits of triple-booking the space.
Employment agencies, many of them Fujianese-owned, began to bridge the gap between New York employers looking for cheap, exploitable labor and hungry arrivals from Fuzhou. The agencies occupied simple, brightly lit spaces where jobs were announced over a microphone or posted on little scraps of paper pinned to the wall. You couldspot the Fujianese, their eyes hungry but downcast, looking to avoid conversation, chain-smoking, eyeing the wall, milling around, waiting for the next job—delivery boy (must supply own bike), seamstress, construction, cook. It was a buyer’s market: the Fujianese were illegal, and many of them owed money to whoever had brought them over. They needed work fast, and the kind of work that wouldn’t require them to fill out a W-2 form. As such, the jobs tended to be menial and often backbreaking, with minimal pay and excruciatingly long hours. And when a job came through, it was the worker, not the employer, who owed the employment agency a fee. They usually paid a few cents on every dollar they made.
The scrappiness of the Fujianese was not lost on the existing Cantonese community, which had reigned in Chinatown for a hundred years. Nineteenth-century Cantonese had come east from California around the time of the exclusion act and established the neighborhood at the intersection of Mott Street and Pell. Their descendants looked down on the Fujianese arrivals as strivers and peasants, poorly educated and willing to sully themselves in untold squalor in order to make a buck. Sister Ping felt that the Cantonese did not show the Fujianese adequate respect. “Fujianese and Cantonese always seem like different people, not very alike,” she observed. As a result, the Fujianese stuck to themselves. “We always did our own thing,” she said. It must have been unsettling for the Cantonese to watch the traditional identity of Chinese America give way to a tidal wave of Fujianese. In 1960 there were 236,000 Chinese in America. By 1990 that number had swelled to 1.6 million. A large proportion of that growth was Fujianese, and for the vast majority of Fujianese emigrants, the first stop in America was New York City. Chinatown residents began referring to East Broadway as Fuzhou Street. They knew that most of the Fujianese arrivals were illegal and were still paying off their passage. They called them “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the going snakehead rate in the eighties.
But the fact remained that a dishwasher in Chinatown could make in a month what a farmer in Fuzhou made in a year, and the Fujianesekept coming. They were willing to take on the debt associated with the journey because of the promise that life in America held. It was an investment, and families pooled their resources to support each émigré. The criminologist Ko-lin Chin likens the logic of the Fujianese in those years to the decision of a college graduate to take out loans for Harvard Law School; a huge debt
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