It
has always been there and even understood to be there but never
properly described. I think that this article fills in the blanks
rather nicely. It is a narrow world that is cut of from the
surrounding culture and these folks see none of it. Yet it seems to
work for everybody involved.
The
rest of us gain a chinese restaurant in places where no other
restaurant will bother to come. This holds true almost world wide.
These
workers accept a lot and are typically loyal. I was once asked why
my back room was populated by mostly Chinese clerical staff. The
answer was terribly simple. They rarely quit while all other staff
quit in a couple of years.
The Kitchen Network
America’s
underground Chinese restaurant workers.
BY LAUREN HILGERS
In a strip mall on a
rural stretch of Maryland’s Indian Head Highway, a gaudy red façade
shaped like a pagoda distinguishes a Chinese restaurant from a line
of bland storefronts: a nail salon, a liquor store, and a laundromat.
On a mild Friday morning this July, two customers walked into the
dimly lit dining room. It was half an hour before the lunch service
began, and, aside from a few fish swimming listlessly in a tank, the
room was deserted.
In the back, steam was
just starting to rise from pots of soup; two cooks were chopping
ginger at a frenzied pace. Most of the lunch crowd comes in for the
buffet, and it was nowhere near ready. “Customers are here
already!” the restaurant’s owner, a wiry Chinese man in his
fifties, barked. He dropped a heavy container onto the metal counter
with a crash. “How can you possibly be moving this slowly?”
The senior cook, a
lanky twenty-nine-year-old who goes by Rain, had been working in
Maryland for almost two months. He stood silently frying noodles in a
wok, his loose bangs tucked into a trucker hat with the band name
Linkin Park written across the brow. “You’re too slow!” the
boss yelled at the other cook, who had arrived only a few days
earlier. Rain stayed focussed on the buffet dishes. He was weighing
the possibility of getting a cigarette break soon. There was no sense
in getting into trouble defending a co-worker he hardly knew.
Rain was born in a
village in rural China. He had left his family, walked through a
desert, and gone tens of thousands of dollars into debt to reach the
United States. From Manhattan, he had taken a late-night Chinatown
bus, which stopped at freeway off-ramps to discharge other restaurant
workers, whose bosses picked them up and took them to strip malls
along Interstate 95. He was in his fourth year of restaurant work and
felt a growing pride in his fried noodles and sautéed shrimp.
The other cook set
down his knife and squared off with the boss. “I have worked in a
lot of restaurants, and none of those bosses complained!” he said.
“If you’re so worried about it, why don’t you come do it
yourself?” The cook stormed out of the kitchen, on his way to catch
a bus back to New York. Rain sighed. The next forty-eight hours were
the busiest of the week, and he would be the only cook in the
kitchen. “You think I was wrong to talk to him like that?” the
boss asked. Rain didn’t answer.
There are more than
forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three
times the number of McDonald’s outlets. There is one in Pinedale,
Wyoming (population 2,043), and one in Old Forge, New York
(population 756); Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania (population 1,085), has
three. Most are family operations, staffed by immigrants who pass
through for a few months at a time, living in houses and apartments
that have been converted into makeshift dormitories. The restaurants,
connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San
Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment
agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that
reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being
abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.
Rain, who asked that I
use his adopted English name to protect his identity, is reedy and
slight, with a wide face and sloping cheekbones. He is observant, in
no hurry to speak, but he is more cagey than timid. Like his boss,
and like everyone else who works at the restaurant, he is primarily
concerned with saving as much money as possible. He needs to pay the
snakehead that got him to the U.S. and send money to his family in
China. He harbors the vague suspicion that everyone around him is
angling for more money, less work, or some other benefit at his
expense. So, instead of conversation, Rain occupies himself with the
math of a transient cook: the time it takes to clean the shrimp, the
days before he can visit his girlfriend in New York, and the balance
of his debts. At night, he lies on a cot in his boss’s otherwise
empty living room, mulling the slow processing of his green card.
During the day, if he’s feeling bold, he walks across the
strip-mall parking lot to order lunch at Subway, pointing at the menu
when he doesn’t know the English word for something.
“I understand why he
acts like this,” Rain told me, about his boss. “He’s been
working in that restaurant for almost twenty years. He goes back and
forth between the restaurant and the dorm where we live. Back and
forth, back and forth, every day for years.” The boss’s wife and
kids are in China. “You do this kind of work for that long, and you
start to lose perspective.” Rain pinched his fingers together.
“Your world is this small.”
I
met Rain in New York’s Chinatown, standing under a sign that read,
“Lucky Days Employment Agency.” He had left his previous
restaurant job, at a takeout place in Connecticut, a week before, and
after a few days off he was looking for a new job. “You can look
online, but nobody does,” Rain said. “This is easier.”
The corner of Eldridge
and Forsyth, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, is cluttered with
employment agencies that do business in Chinese. Signs identify the
Xingdao Restaurant Employment Agency, the Red Red Restaurant
Employment Agency, and the Successful Restaurant Employment Agency.
“There are only three jobs a Chinese immigrant can get without
papers,” a woman from Beijing told me. “You can work at a massage
parlor, you can work doing nails, or you can work in a restaurant.”
People come here looking for work as busboys, waiters, or cooks.
It was Sunday, the
busiest day of the week, and job seekers spilled out of the agencies,
down stairwells, and out into the streets. In tiny local canteens,
they ate spicy peanut noodles and pork dumplings before resuming the
hunt. The corner gets quieter as the weekend approaches. Bosses don’t
want new employees showing up on a busy Friday or Saturday; even an
experienced chef requires a few hours to learn a new menu.
Each agency consists
of a narrow room with a desk behind bars and employs a small staff of
women who sit flanked by phones and notebooks. Stickers pasted to the
bars differentiate jobs in New Jersey, Long Island, and upstate New
York. Most everything else is just “out of state.” Rain moved
among the offices, weaving through the crowd. “All the agencies are
about the same,” he said, watching a Chinese couple pass from one
door to the next. “But your chances are better if you leave your
phone number with all of them.” The women behind the bars scribble
the information in college-ruled notebooks. Then, Rain said, you sit
around in stairwells and on sidewalks and wait for them to call. Job
seekers have to be ready to leave within hours, and Rain expected to
be on a bus by the end of the day.
In a smoky
second-story office, Rain passed a man who was explaining to an agent
that he specialized in painting mountain landscapes on plates, using
hoisin sauce. He showed the agent pictures of his work on his cell
phone. “I’ve got a job here out of state!” she shouted.
“Connecticut! Talk to the boss!” She slipped the phone under the
bars. “Hello, boss?” he said.
When an agency finds a
suitable match, the cooks and the waiters speak to the restaurant
owners, asking about hours, living conditions, and salary. A busboy
might make twelve hundred or fifteen hundred dollars a month; a
waiter who speaks English could make twice that. Restaurants farther
from New York have a harder time attracting workers, so they tend to
pay better. Rain explained that the first thing to ask a prospective
boss is his age and his home town. “There’s a generation gap
between people in their fifties and us,” he said. People who
remember the privations of the Cultural Revolution are more focussed
on money and more dismissive of quality-of-life concerns. There are
regional differences, too. “The bosses from the north of China are
usually more easygoing,” one cook told me. “People from Fujian
and Taiwan only think about money!” This is a significant
consideration; prospective workers will tell you that the Fujianese
own the overwhelming majority of Chinese restaurants in the country.
For more than a
hundred years, the restaurant trade was dominated by the Cantonese,
whose cuisine, fantastically reimagined, provided America’s idea of
Chinese food: sweet-and-sour pork, wonton soup, General Tso’s
chicken. In the late nineteen-eighties, the mixture of immigrants
changed. As reports of China’s one-child policy and of the clash in
Tiananmen Square outraged the American public, Chinese immigrants
started getting special dispensation in U.S. immigration courts. The
Fujianese saw an opportunity. Fujian Province, hemmed in by mountains
on one side and by the Taiwan Strait on the other, had been a largely
impoverished place for centuries. Its inhabitants began leaving with
such urgency that villages emptied out virtually overnight.
In the U.S., the
Fujianese took restaurant jobs, learned the trade, and saved up to
buy out owners or to open restaurants of their own. The restaurants
were concentrated in big cities, but, as competition grew,
enterprising immigrants moved away, in search of greater profits.
“Previously, if you were looking for a job, it was inside Chinatown
or Queens, so people just recommended each other,” Peter Kwong, a
professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College, in New York,
said. As Chinese restaurants spread across the country, employment
agencies cropped up to link them together.
Fujianese
food is traditionally soupy and slightly sweet, heavy on shellfish
and seafood. But, as Fujianese immigrants took over restaurants, they
adopted their predecessors’ menus, offering the same spring rolls
and egg foo young. In the Chinese-restaurant business, the Fujianese
have a reputation for being hardworking and somewhat myopic. A common
joke describes their doggedness: if an entrepreneur opened a
successful gas station along a highway, Western businessmen might
build a grocery store or a café nearby; an influx of Fujianese
entrepreneurs would open fifty more gas stations.
The joke underplays
how lucrative the restaurant business has been. In the villages
surrounding Fuzhou, the provincial capital, the evidence of people
flowing out and money flowing back in is visible on nearly every
street. The village of Houyu, after a decades-long building boom, is
filled with ostentatious mansions, even though few people remain to
live in them; the area is so depopulated that, in some cases,
squatters have moved in and stayed, undetected, for months. A woman I
met there, who runs a takeout restaurant in New Jersey, waved at the
empty houses and said, “It doesn’t matter if no one is living
there. You have to build a big house so people look at it and say,
‘Oh, that person is doing really well in the United States.”
The
village that Rain left in 2009, on the water north of Houyu, has been
similarly transformed. Most of the adults who still live there are
supported by someone overseas, and the ones who remain eke out a
living as fishermen or farmers. Rain’s father, a former teacher,
worked in faraway factory towns, and came back when he could,
bringing toys. “I worshipped him,” Rain told me.
Rain speaks
nostalgically of village life. Growing up, he played games in the
alleys until dinnertime and then ran out again to play under the
stars. As he got older, he and his friends liked to light
firecrackers, stick them in water-buffalo dung, and then sprint away.
He remembers the days stretching out lazily, running into years with
no urgency. There’s little leisure in the U.S., he says. “If you
ask people here if they want to go out and eat dinner with you, or go
somewhere to have fun one day, they’ll say, ‘What? You think I
have that much American time?’ ”
He told me that he was
forced out of the village not by poverty but by religious
persecution. After he graduated from vocational school, at nineteen,
he started attending a Christian house church with his mother, who
had converted when Rain was a child. One day in 2009, he met with a
group of other young people to discuss the Bible. The local police
burst in, threw him roughly in jail, and demanded the equivalent of
three hundred and twenty-five dollars in bail. Once he was released,
the police told him not to go anywhere, and checked in regularly to
make sure that he was at home. He couldn’t work, and he soon grew
desperate.
In the U.S., stories
of religious repression are frequently viewed with skepticism.
Chinese asylum claims vastly outnumber claims from any other country.
In 2012, more than ten thousand Chinese applicants were granted
asylum, many of them with the help of high-priced lawyers and
interpreters; Egyptians, the second-largest group, had fewer than
three thousand successful applicants. The Fujianese government is not
known to be particularly strict with Christians, and there are rarely
crackdowns on small house churches. When pressed, Rain admits that
there are other reasons a person from his village might want to go to
the U.S. His parents, for instance, might want him to go: “They’ve
been poor their whole lives. They don’t want their children to be
poor.” Even well-educated Chinese find few opportunities to pull
themselves out of the lower classes, Rain said: “There are a lot of
people who went to college, who are very refined and cultured, and
even those people can’t find work.”
The cost of passage to
the U.S. varies by province. In a packed hostel in Queens, I met a
twenty-six-year-old from Henan Province who paid twelve thousand
dollars for a student visa. After a smuggler trained him to pass an
interview with the consulate and enrolled him in an English-language
school in Oklahoma, he flew straight to New York and applied for
asylum. Peter Kwong points out that people from Fujian, working
through a different network, pay some of the highest fees: “If
you’re a Fujianese villager, you’re not likely to say, ‘The
price is better in Shandong. I’ll go to Shandong.’”
When
Rain decided to hire a snakehead, his parents asked around in the
village and came back with a price: seventy thousand dollars. Once he
arrived in the U.S., his family and friends would borrow to cover the
fee, and Rain would slowly pay them back. “Seventy thousand dollars
is a lot of money, but you can make two thousand dollars a month—so
you can pay it back in a few years,” he said. “And afterward
you’re still making two thousand dollars a month.” A worker in
China’s private sector makes, on average, about forty-seven hundred
dollars a year.
The snakeheads
instructed Rain to bring as little as possible, he told me: “They
said, ‘Do you think we’re taking you on a tour? The lighter the
better.’ ” Two weeks later, a van drove him to Fuzhou and
dropped him off at the airport with a fake passport, an address on a
slip of paper, and a ticket to Beijing. “As soon as I walked out my
front door, everything was a first,” Rain said. “It was my first
time on an airplane. It was the first time I travelled so far. And,
in Beijing, it was the first time I saw snow.” Rain hailed a taxi
and gave the driver the address, which turned out to be a hotel—a
way station for emigrants. He spent two weeks there, walking around
the neighborhood and watching TV. He felt as if he were on vacation.
Finally, Rain and an
older man from Fujian were put on a plane and given another address
on a slip of paper: a city in Mexico that Rain had never heard of.
During a layover in France, they searched nervously for their
connecting flight. Landing in Mexico, Rain was frightened. He took a
taxi and paid the driver far more than the trip was worth. “I think
they saw us and knew what we were,” Rain said. After spending a
night in a hotel, he and his companion were picked up and driven
north for hours, until they arrived at a small house with crops
growing in the fields around it. Inside, a number of Mexicans,
watched over by smugglers, were waiting to cross the border. No one
spoke Chinese, so when Rain got hungry he pointed at his stomach and
someone gave him a cup of instant noodles.
Wherever
the house was, it was close to the border. The smugglers looked them
over to make sure they were fit to spend the day walking in the
desert, gave them each a bottle of water, and herded them out the
door. Their guide blew up an inflatable boat, and they floated across
the Rio Grande. “You didn’t need to understand anything besides
‘Go,’ ” Rain said. “When the guide said, ‘Go, go, go,’
you ran.”
BUY OR LICENSE »
Rain and his
companions walked for a full day and most of the night, until, before
dawn, they came to a road, where an associate of the smugglers picked
them up. They went to Houston first, and from there a van took them
straight to New York. “I just got here and looked at the sky,”
Rain told me. “Everything looked so big. In China, everything seems
squeezed together and small. I thought, The U.S. is going to be
wonderful.”
Rain had relatives
near New York, and a cousin he barely knew drove him out of the city
to a family-owned restaurant. For a week, he stayed at his cousin’s
house, alone, while the rest of the family went to work. “Everyone
is like this,” he said. “They don’t want to take you to the
restaurant, because every person that goes into the restaurant wants
to get paid.”
Eventually, Rain’s
cousin got him a ride to Manhattan and told him that he was on his
own. With the help of a friend from his village who was living in the
city, he made his way to the employment agencies in Chinatown. He
struck a deal with a restaurant owner and paid the agency a small fee
of about twenty dollars. The agency gave him a slip of paper that
listed his salary, the boss’s name and phone number, and the right
bus to take. The restaurant’s address, in keeping with the usual
practice, was left out. “No one knows where they’re going,”
Rain explained. “They just show up and call the phone number.”
Along with the other newly employed workers, he collected his
belongings and walked to one of the Chinatown bus agencies, a few
blocks away.
Rain’s
first job was outside Albany, at a family-run restaurant where he was
the only employee. When he arrived, his boss put him to work prepping
all the food for the evening’s service. Rain kept cutting his
fingers chopping chicken. The boss told him, “Oh, little brother,
you don’t understand anything,” but he refused to help. At
mealtime, the family handed Rain a bowl of rice with a few vegetables
and left him to eat by himself. Later, the boss dumped buckets of
water on the floor and told him to mop it up. Rain called his friend
to complain. “That boss is bullying you,” the friend said. “He
knows you just arrived in the U.S., so he’s making you do too
much.” The next day, Rain was on a bus back to New York.
Rain’s friend told
him to find a job farther away, “so the boss will treat you
better.” Rain found work in South Carolina, where he stayed for two
months. “At the beginning, I couldn’t do anything—I could only
clean up, do a little frying,” he told me. “Now I can do pretty
much anything.” He encountered his first eggroll and his first
fortune cookie, and learned how to prepare dishes he had never seen
in China. He practiced using cornstarch to make a crispy coating on
General Tso’s chicken and to thicken the sauce for beef with
broccoli. Like most cooks in busy Chinese restaurants, he figured out
how to use a single knife, a heavy cleaver, for everything from
cleaning shrimp to mincing garlic. “It’s important that you do it
fast,” he said.
Since then, Rain has
bounced from restaurant to restaurant, staying for a few months and
then going back to New York for a rest before getting another job. He
has few impressions of the states and cities where he has worked; he
leaves the kitchen only to smoke cigarettes in a back parking lot or
to be driven to the restaurant’s dorm at night. He told me that he
would never go on a walk on his day off. “What if you get lost?”
he said. “You can’t ask anybody directions, and your boss is
going to be too busy at the restaurant to come get you.”
Six mornings a week,
the boss picks up Rain and the other workers from their dorm and
takes them to the restaurant. Their preparations have a catechistic
order: first the rice cooker, then dishes for the buffet, then those
for the lunch rush. Twice a week, a Chinese-run company brings
supplies, and everyone gathers to butcher meat, hacking it into small
pieces for quick cooking. They put on rubber gloves and pour salt and
cornstarch over the meat, mix it by hand, then seal it and put it
into the freezer. Chinese kitchens in the U.S. have none of the
badinage that makes for good reality TV. In Rain’s kitchen, the
only person who talks is the boss, complaining. When a buffet tray
gets low, a waiter calls through an intercom, set at a startling
volume: “We need more pineapple chicken up front!”
When Rain arrived in
the U.S., he assumed that he had a fair proficiency with Chinese
food. His father had prided himself on his culinary skill, and his
mother was a capable cook, too. She taught him when to add spice to a
dish, when to temper it with Chinese celery. Rain worked briefly as a
fry cook in his village, and found that he had absorbed some of his
parents’ knowledge. “Even if I’ve never cooked a dish before, I
can think about it and draw from my experience,” he said. Having
grown up on his father’s subtly flavored fish soups, he was
surprised by American Chinese food. Americans seemed to eat like
kids: they love starches and sweet things, and are frightened of meat
and fish with bones in it. “Americans eat all that fried stuff,”
he told me. “It’s not healthy.” Real Chinese food is more
refined: “You have to spend a lot of time studying and really
understanding it.”
In
Maryland, most of the patrons seem to come for the buffet and eat as
much as they can. Still, Rain loves watching people in the dining
room. “I like seeing a clean plate,” he said. “I like it when
people take the first bite of my food and they start nodding their
head.” He spends hours trying to create a perfectly round Chinese
omelette. “There’s a lot of kung fu in making egg foo young,”
he told me. “If you have time, you’ll make it really perfect.
You’ll make it bigger, better-looking, rounder. They’ll think, I
spent so little money and I got such good food, and on top of that
it’s good-looking. And then maybe they’ll come back.”
Rain
viewed the job in Maryland as an opportunity to expand his
repertoire. “In a takeout restaurant, people order the same dishes
over and over,” he said. At a bigger restaurant, he could learn new
dishes. And his salary—twenty-eight hundred dollars a month—was
good, but not good enough to arouse concern. “If you come across a
job paying three thousand, you think there must be something wrong
with that restaurant,” he told me.
Rain lives with five
co-workers in a red brick town house that his boss owns, part of a
woodsy development near the restaurant. The house is tidy; there are
three floors covered with white carpeting, and each worker has been
supplied with an identical cot, a desk, a chair, and a lamp. “Some
bosses don’t take care of the houses,” Rain said. “If they’re
renting the house, especially, they don’t care. The rooms will
actually smell.” Every restaurant worker has a story of sleeping in
a dank basement or being packed in a room with five other people.
Many complain of living in a house that has no washing machine, and
being forced to spend their day off scrubbing their grease-spattered
T-shirts in a sink.
Rain’s boss, in
contrast, is fastidious. The house has a granite-countered kitchen,
but he forbids the employees living there to use it; instead, a hot
plate and a card table have been set up in the garage. Outside, the
building is indistinguishable from the other town houses, aside from
a tin can full of cigarette butts on the doorstep. The shades are
kept drawn.
Restaurant workers
heading to jobs in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, or in Buffalo, New
York, don’t worry much about the hard work or the long hours. They
worry about the isolation. “If you do this job too long, you’ll
eventually lose your mind,” one cook told me. Rain said that the
people around him were constantly on guard. In the kitchen and the
restaurant dorms, no one talks to anyone else, so it’s difficult to
ask questions. (“For example,” Rain said, pointing to the Linkin
Park logo on his hat, “can you tell me what my hat says?”) He
hadn’t learned the names of half the people working there. “I
said hello to one guy, and he didn’t answer me,” he said. “Some
people go to twenty different restaurants in one month. They don’t
have time to make friends.” When Rain arrived, he shared the living
room with another cook. At night, they sat on their beds across from
each other, watching Chinese dramas on their computers or sending
text messages. “You don’t talk, and you don’t say good night,”
Rain said. “You just see that the other person has turned off their
lamp and you think, Oh, I should lower the volume on my headphones.”
After a year in the
U.S., Rain started thinking about a girl he had met in middle school,
who was working in restaurants and passing through New York every
couple of months. A friend told him how to reach her on a Chinese
instant-messaging service, and Rain began inviting her to meet him on
his days off. “The two of us were of the same world,” he said.
“We had the same goals.” Rain’s girlfriend, who goes by Annie,
is twenty-nine and lanky, nearly as tall as Rain. She came to the
U.S. a year before he did, and she speaks with assurance about
restaurant work. “She’s got a lot of opinions,” Rain told me.
“She’s got more opinions than I do, even.” Annie pushes Rain to
work harder, to take less time off, and to save for a family.
Although she spoke no English when she arrived from China, she
quickly learned enough to answer the phone in a takeout place. (Rain
points out that the jobs women typically hold in restaurants—taking
orders or working as hostesses—give them better opportunities to
practice English.) Recently, she moved to a Japanese restaurant,
which many Chinese workers prefer; the jobs pay well, and rolling
sushi isn’t such hot work as frying noodles. Rain accepted the
position in Maryland partly because she had worked in the area a few
years before him. “I like to think I’m following a road that
she’s walked on,” he told me.
After a year of
sleeping in hostels and on friends’ couches whenever he returned to
New York, Rain decided that he needed a base. He now rents a bedroom
in an apartment in Brooklyn, for five hundred dollars a month, and
tries to visit every other weekend and cook a meal for Annie. “If
you have your own apartment, you can put your luggage somewhere and
your clothes somewhere,” he said. “When you’re injured, when
you’re unhappy, when your boss scolds you, when you get fired, you
know you can go home.”
The most worrisome problem for Rain is securing citizenship. Soon
after he arrived in the U.S., his friends directed him to an asylum
lawyer in Chinatown, whose services started at ten thousand dollars.
Rain paid the fee, wrote up his claim, and collected supporting
documents. Because asylum claims must be made within a year of
crossing the border, he got a Brooklyn church to confirm the date of
his arrival. Three months later, he was invited for an interview.
“The lawyer told me to look the asylum officer in the eye,” he
told me. “If you’re nervous, or if you mess up the timing,
they’ll think you’re lying.”
Rain was granted
asylum in late 2010, and a year later his lawyer helped him apply for
a green card. But soon afterward, he told me, the lawyer was arrested
in an F.B.I. sting targeting fraudulent asylum claims. The
application process, which is supposed to take six months, has
dragged on for almost three years.
In September, during
China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, Rain negotiated a week of unpaid
vacation, and he invited me to Brooklyn to try some home-cooked
Fujianese food. “Come to my cousin’s apartment,” he told me.
“We hang out there most days.” The apartment was on Eighth
Avenue, in Brooklyn’s Chinatown.
When I arrived, the
door was wide open, and Rain was sitting at a glass-topped table with
his cousin and two friends. They wore plastic gloves to protect their
hands as they munched on cured duck heads. Rain poured tea and told
me, “Don’t feel like you have to eat the duck head.” A
soup-filled wok bubbled on the stove, and his cousin, having
retrieved a half bottle of wine he had stashed away, cooked rice
noodles in the broth, tossing in oysters and cabbage and a handful of
tiny, curled squids. “There’s no name for it,” Rain said. “It’s
just a simple soup, with noodles. Call it seafood noodle soup.” He
opened kitchen cabinets to show me the ingredients his cousin kept.
“You see?” he said. “Chinese people use all of these sauces and
ingredients for just one dish.” His cousin, gesturing toward the
duck heads, said, “Do you know why Americans don’t like eating
meat with bones in it? They’re too lazy!”
Rain’s cousin had
worked in restaurants when he arrived in the U.S., but he got out of
the business as soon as he could. “It’s too hard!” he said,
pantomiming a cook’s frantic routine: shaking a wok, grabbing
things off shelves, tossing them in. “All day, for twelve hours,
you’re like this!” Rain sat at the table, grinning. He
sympathized with his cousin’s restaurant fatigue. “Americans,
when they want to rest and enjoy themselves, they rest and they enjoy
themselves,” he told me. “Chinese people—it all depends on your
boss.” Rain’s father died in 2012, and he was unable to go back
to China for the funeral. “I regret a lot when it comes to my
family,” he said.
For many restaurant
workers, the decision to come to the U.S. is irrevocable. But, as the
disappointments of immigrant life accrue, it can be hard not to
imagine that things might be better elsewhere. Chinese-Americans,
despite a good public image, suffer higher rates of poverty than the
general public. Mental-health problems are an increasing concern in
New York’s immigrant communities. In parts of China where the
growing economy has given people more options, the allure of working
in the U.S. has faded. This February, in a hostel in Queens, I met a
woman who had just returned from a difficult day of job hunting. “I
thought America would be heaven, and all it is is cold!” she
complained. She returned to Beijing after four months. In Fuzhou, a
taxi-driver told me that he was glad his attempts to emigrate had
failed. “My father says that having a son in the United States is
like having no son at all,” he said.
Rain tried not to
dwell on returning to Maryland, where he was due in a few days.
Everyone else who had worked at the restaurant when he started had
been driven off by the boss’s temper. “And it’s so far away,”
Rain said. If he could find a job somewhere closer, he could see
Annie every weekend. As his family’s only son, Rain feels
increasing pressure to send money home to his mother. But, he
reasoned, everyone who comes to the U.S. should be prepared for
hardship. “Everything we do, we do for the next generation,” he
said, and added, “No matter what, it beats sitting around in the
village.”
When
the soup was ready, Rain ladled out bowlfuls, thick with noodles and
shellfish. The broth, barely salted, was delicate and fresh. Everyone
at the table slurped it from the bowl before starting on the noodles,
and Rain smiled proudly as we ate.
After dinner, he and I
walked along Eighth Avenue to find some moon cakes, and he talked
about the future. In five years, if all goes according to plan, he
will have his debt paid off, and enough money set aside to help
support a child. He and Annie want to raise a family somewhere with a
Chinese community, and they sometimes talk about opening a restaurant
of their own. He wondered if a Fujianese restaurant could succeed
outside Chinatown. Americans might not be ready for it, he said, but
if they just tried his food they would be convinced. The next time I
came for dinner, he promised, he would make something more elaborate.
Rain watched the
fishmongers on Eighth Avenue as they dumped out ice and packed up
their fish. “This is the best time of night to buy cheap seafood,”
he told me. “They’ll just have to throw it away.” He pointed at
a woman buying a huge, scrabbling red crab. “If you’ve never had
those crabs, you’ll have to try them!” he said. With a look of
concern, he added, “Don’t worry—I’ll take it out of the shell
and chop it up. It will be easy to eat.”
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