Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles NAYEREH TOHIDI In California, the popular face of immigration tends to be either Latin American or Asian, but large numbers of immigrants who come from other regions in the world, especially the Near East, have been quietly reshaping California demography. In this study, Nayereh Tohidi focuses on the Iranians who have come to Los Angeles in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution, largely middle- and upper-middle-class Tehrani- ans who have fled the repressive policies of the current post-Shah, fundamentalist regime. But American freedoms have offered particular challenges to Iranian immi- grants, especially women, who tend to have "more egalitarian views of marital roles than Iranian men," in Tohidi's words, a "discrepancy" that has led to "new conflicts between the sexes." Thus, Iranian women immigrants are at once freer than their sisters in Iran, more conflicted, and more in need of a "new identity acceptable to their ethnic community and appropriate to the realities of their host country." Tohidi is an associate professor of women's studies at California State University, Northridge. She directs a new program in Islamic Community Studies at CSUN and is also a re- search associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of Califor- nia, Los Angeles. Tohidi's publications include Feminism, Democracy, and Islamism in Iran (1996), Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity (1998), and Global- ization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women's Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts (2001). I mmigration is a major life change, and the process of adapting to a newsociety can be extremely stressful, especially when the new environ- ment is drastically different from the old. There is evidence that the im- pact of migration on women and their roles differs from the impact of the same process on men (Espin 1987; Salgado de Snyder 1987). The mi- gration literature is not conclusive, however, about whether the overall effect is positive or negative. Despite all the trauma and stress associated with migration, some people perceive it as emancipatory, especially for women coming from environments where adherence to traditional gen- der roles is of primary importance. As [one researcher] said, "When the traditional organization of society breaks down as a result of contact and collision .. . the effect is, so to speak, to emancipate the individual man. Energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition are re- leased" (Furio 1979, 18). My own observations of Iranians in Los Angeles over the past eight years, as well as survey research I carried out in 1990,1 reveal that Iranian 1 This article draws on a survey of a sample of 134 Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles, 83 females and 51 males, and on interviews with a smaller sample of women and men. 149 1 50 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History women immigrants in Los Angeles are a homogeneou.

1. Iranian Women and Gender
Relations in Los Angeles
NAYEREH TOHIDI
In California, the popular face of immigration tends to be either
Latin American or
Asian, but large numbers of immigrants who come from other
regions in the world,
especially the Near East, have been quietly reshaping California
demography. In this
study, Nayereh Tohidi focuses on the Iranians who have come
to Los Angeles in the
wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution, largely middle- and upper-
middle-class Tehrani-
ans who have fled the repressive policies of the current post-
Shah, fundamentalist
regime. But American freedoms have offered particular
challenges to Iranian immi-
grants, especially women, who tend to have "more egalitarian
views of marital roles
than Iranian men," in Tohidi's words, a "discrepancy" that has
led to "new conflicts
between the sexes." Thus, Iranian women immigrants are at
once freer than their
sisters in Iran, more conflicted, and more in need of a "new
identity acceptable to
their ethnic community and appropriate to the realities of their
host country." Tohidi
is an associate professor of women's studies at California State
University, Northridge.
She directs a new program in Islamic Community Studies at

2. CSUN and is also a re-
search associate at the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the
University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles. Tohidi's publications include Feminism,
Democracy, and Islamism in
Iran (1996), Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within
Unity (1998), and Global-
ization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women's Rights
in Catholic and Muslim
Contexts (2001).
I mmigration is a major life change, and the process of adapting
to a newsociety can be extremely stressful, especially when the
new environ-
ment is drastically different from the old. There is evidence that
the im-
pact of migration on women and their roles differs from the
impact of
the same process on men (Espin 1987; Salgado de Snyder 1987).
The mi-
gration literature is not conclusive, however, about whether the
overall
effect is positive or negative. Despite all the trauma and stress
associated
with migration, some people perceive it as emancipatory,
especially for
women coming from environments where adherence to
traditional gen-
der roles is of primary importance. As [one researcher] said,
"When the
traditional organization of society breaks down as a result of
contact and
collision .. . the effect is, so to speak, to emancipate the
individual man.
Energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition
are re-

3. leased" (Furio 1979, 18).
My own observations of Iranians in Los Angeles over the past
eight
years, as well as survey research I carried out in 1990,1 reveal
that Iranian
1 This article draws on a survey of a sample of 134 Iranian
immigrants in Los Angeles, 83
females and 51 males, and on interviews with a smaller sample
of women and men.
149
1 50 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History
women immigrants in Los Angeles are a homogeneous group,
despite
ethnic diversity. Most of them come from Tehran and represent
an urban
cosmopolitan subculture. And most are educated members of the
upper-
middle and middle classes who oppose the present regime in
Iran and its
repressive policies against women.
Migration has had both costs and benefits for women. Positive
expe-
riences include the sense of freedom, new opportunities and
options,
increased access to education and gainful employment, and a
move to-
ward egalitarian conjugal roles in many Iranian families. On the
negative

4. side is grief over the loss of the homeland, loved ones, and the
social and
emotional support of the kinship network. Many also feel
marginal and,
at least initially, experience a decline in their own
socioeconomic status
or that of their husbands. Moreover, conflicts between parents
and their
children and between women and men have heightened tension
and led
to an increasing divorce rate.
Migration involves culture shock. Immigrants' experiences of
migra-
tion and the process of adaptation are influenced by a number of
vari-
ables (Dane 1980; Melville 1978; Taft 1977; Salgado de Snyder
1987; Espin
1987; and Shirley 1981). Personal characteristics, such as age,
language
proficiency, educational level, and job skills, influence the
migrants' abil-
ity to adapt. Immigrants are also affected by attitudinal factors,
such as
their own perceptions of the decision to emigrate, their sense of
respon-
sibility for those left behind, and their perceptions of the
conditions in
both home and host countries. Economic factors also play a
role, espe-
cially the immigrants' ability to find a job, their financial
resources, and
their losses or gains in social status or class. Another set of
influential
conditions includes the attitudes of the citizens of the host
country to-

5. ward the migrant group and the degree of similarity between the
two
cultures. Finally, some personal factors, such as ego strength,
decision-
making skills, resolution of feelings of loss, and the ability to
tolerate
ambiguity (including ambiguity about gender roles), also
influence the
intensity of the culture shock experienced by the immigrants
and their
ability to adapt.
All these factors vary substantially for men and women, with
the result
that the processes of acculturation and adaptation differ for
them as well.
The survey questionnaire consists of a demographic section and
five scales measuring
acculturation, national/ethnic identity, perceived prejudice,
acculturative stress items,
and attitudes toward gender roles. To measure the respondents'
attitudes toward gen-
der roles, a Persian adaptation of the Spence-Helmreich scale
(1978) has been em-
ployed. This scale consists of twenty-five declarative statements
about proper roles and
behavioral patterns for women and men. For each statement
there are four response
alternatives: agree strongly, agree mildly, disagree mildly, and
disagree strongly.
Tohidi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1
51

6. Acculturation and Changes in Gender Roles
All immigrants experience acculturation, a process involving
changes in
values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The inevitable
collision of home
and host cultures ensures that some acculturation will take
place. This
does not mean that all values, customs, and behaviors
originating in the
home culture will disappear. In fact, the healthiest experiences
of accul-
turation result in biculturalism or multiculturalism. Not every
individual
immigrant, however, manages to attain a bicultural balance.
Many never
cease feeling alienated in the new society, while others
experience com-
plete assimilation.
As part of the process of acculturation, all immigrants develop a
"new identity" that integrates elements from the host and home
cultures
(Garza-Guerrero 1974). A psychologist who experienced the
challenging
and often painful process of migration firsthand writes:
Immigrants in accepting a new identity (or a new version of the
old one) at
the price of instant identification and intense work must leave
behind not
only old countries but also unlived futures, and not only
enemies to be dis-
avowed but also friends to be left behind—maybe to perish.
What right,

7. then, does the immigrant have to usurp a new identity?
(Erickson 1974, 77)
For Iranian women, the process of developing a new identity is
perhaps the
most psychologically challenging and delicate aspect of
immigration....
Iranian women and girls are entering North American society at
a
time when the role of women is changing, both here and in their
home-
land. During the peak of the Iranian influx into the United
States, the pro-
gressive forces of revolution, on the one hand, and the
subsequent
character of the Islamic government, on the other, fostered a
transforma-
tion in the role of women. The Islamization of the last decade,
however,
has enforced a uniform identity for Iranian women, based on
traditional
and restricted roles. The difference between appropriate
behavior for
women in Iran and in the United States is much greater than that
for men
in the two societies. The differing demands on men and women
can ei-
ther facilitate acculturation or create confusion and conflicts for
women.
My survey indicates that changes in traditional conceptions of
wom-
anhood, manhood, and marriage—from an autocratic male-
dominated
model to a more egalitarian one—are taking place faster among

8. Iranian
women than among Iranian men. Studies of Latina immigrants
reveal
similar patterns. Even though the pace of acculturation tended
to be
slower for Latinas in other respects, the women exhibited more
egalitar-
ian attitudes toward gender roles than men (Vazquez-Nuttall,
Romero-
Garcia, and DeLeon 1987; Espin 1987).
1 52 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History
In studies of the acculturation of Iranians in the United States,
Ghaf-
farian (1989) found the same patterns; that is, that Iranian male
immi-
grants were more acculturated than females and that despite
their lower
level of overall acculturation, Iranian women migrants had more
egali-
tarian views of marital roles than Iranian men. Such a
discrepancy would
naturally lead to new conflicts between the sexes.
This is not to say that changes in sexual attitudes and family
roles are
the result of migration and acculturation into American society.
Actually,
the cultural collision between modernism and traditionalism,
between
liberalism and conservatism, and between male chauvinism and
femi-
nism had begun in Iran long before the major waves of Iranian

9. immigra-
tion to the United States. By the turn of the century, growing
urbanization
and the introduction of new industries, new modes of
production, and
new ideas had wrought major changes and raised questions
concerning
the proper role and place of women in the new society, and their
access
both to education and to work outside the home. Long-standing
cultural
and religious traditions, such as the segregation of women's
space from
men's and veiling requirements, were called into question.
During the
1978-1979 revolution, special emphasis was placed on
discovering the
authentic (aseel) identity of Iranian women, especially in
comparison to
"West-struck" or "Westoxicated" (gharb zadek) women. All
these issues
have remained unresolved since the . .. first decade of the
twentieth
century.
Women and the Family in Iran
During the years preceding the 1978-1979 revolution, the
"woman ques-
tion" became part of the Iranian intelligentsia's debate about
national
identity, development, modernization, and cultural and moral
integrity.
Those participating in the discussion included Iranian
nationalists, Is-
lamists, Marxists, and those influenced by the West.

10. Islam undergirds the patriarchy in Iran, just as Judeo-Christian
ethics justify the same system in the United States. The family,
with its
patrilineal and patriarchal structure, is the basic social unit.
Male and fe-
male roles are organized in a hierarchy based on sex, age, and
experi-
ence. A traditional Iranian woman's place is in the home.
Because her
role and activities are limited to familial and domestic spheres,
she has
no identity outside the family. She is identified only by her
connections
to her male kin—she has status only as the daughter, sister,
wife, and
mother of male family members. As a wife, her status is
determined by
her fertility, especially her ability to give birth to sons. The
wife is always
under her husband's tutelage or, in his absence, that of her
eldest son.
Tohidi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1
53
Her honor (namus) requires that she never be left unprotected
by her fa-
ther, husband, or other male kin (Nassehi-Behnam 1985, 558).
An old Persian expression illustrates the traditional conception
of
women in Iran: "Woman is a sweetheart when a girl and a
mother when

11. married." Such a view reduces women to their sexual and
reproductive
capacities.
The gender-based discrimination and double standards that
pervade 15
Iranian social life restrict women's movements, the physical
spaces they
may enter, their work and economic autonomy, their access to
education,
their personal power and authority, their sexual behavior, and
their ability
to express themselves artistically. From childhood, the members
of each
sex are socialized to prescribed roles. Boys are taught to
command, to
protect, and to make a good living for themselves and their
families. Girls
learn to be chaste and beautiful and to find a good husband....
The Impact of Migration
The impact of migration on Iranian women in Los Angeles
depends on
the reasons for their migration and the conditions under which it
took
place....
Some women left Iran (with or without their husbands) to
provide
their children with better education and broader opportunities.
They
found the Islamization of the educational system and the
political indoc-
trination of their children unacceptable. Other women
accompanied

12. their adolescent sons into exile to ensure that the youths would
not be
drafted during the Iran-Iraq war. Still others came to the United
States
alone, leaving their husbands and other family members behind
because
of economic considerations or to increase the likelihood of their
getting
a U.S. visa. These motivations are reflected in the immigrants'
sense of
marginality, their development of a new identity, and other
aspects of ac-
culturation.
Individual and Political Freedom
In comparison with women living in Iran, migrant and refugee
women
have gained considerable personal and political freedom. Their
basic
human rights are no longer violated by such institutions of
control as the
mandatory veil, strict dress code, and sexual apartheid. Many
middle-
class and professional women who found these repressive
measures in-
tolerable appreciate their new freedom. The sense of relief is
even more
profound for those women who escaped persecution and
imprisonment
in Iran.
1 54 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History

13. Women who migrated alone may feel free of familial control, of
con-
stant surveillance by the kinship network. They may feel free to
experi-
ment with new patterns of behavior and to search for a more
autonomous
personal identity. The opportunity to become self-reliant and to
develop a
personal identity is often considered the most positive
consequence of
migration for women. Many Iranian women who immigrated
alone, how-
ever, feel shame and guilt for developing an American-
influenced identity.
Other Iranian immigrants or family members back home may
criticize
them for not conforming to traditional roles. Although they may
have left
their families behind, the success or failure of individual family
members
reflects on the family as a whole. A woman's misbehavior,
especially sexual
misbehavior, brings shame not only on her, but on all members
of her
family (Barakat 1985).
Iranian women who successfully adapt to American society are
often 20
rejected by the home culture. Iranian immigrants in Los
Angeles, espe-
cially the women, have a reputation for conspicuous
consumption among
other Iranian immigrants in this country and in Europe, as well
as back
home. They are stereotyped as taghooti, a term rooted in
idolatry that in

14. this context implies decadence, narcissism, immorality, and
hedonism.
The Iranian community in Los Angeles is known in Iran as the
source of
contraband music videos—vulgar and commercial, these
represent the
worst elements of westernization.
Because of love-hate sentiments toward the West in general and
Americans in particular, immigrants in Los Angeles,
particularly the fe-
males, must prove that such stereotypes do not apply to them.
To be
westernized or Americanized has strong negative connotations,
politi-
cally, culturally, and sexually.
Even before the revolution, westernized members of the urban
upper-middle and middle classes were regarded as a fifth
column, pro-
moting imperialism, family disintegration, moral degeneration,
and
cultural erosion. In the campaign against westernization waged
by the
Iranian intelligentsia, particularly the Islamists, westernized
women
were held to epitomize all social ills (Najmabadi 1989; Tohidi
1993).
The clergy cleverly pointed to a few highly visible upper-
middle- and
middle-class women preoccupied with Western fads and
fashions in
condemning all unveiled, nontraditional, and progressive
women as
"Westoxicated." In the Islamic clergy's political discourse,

15. modern
women were stereotyped as frivolous and westernized and
condemned
as fitna, the erotic agents of social and moral disorder (Mernissi
1975).
The clergy demanded a return to the veiled Islamic model of
woman-
hood. During the Islamic revolution, the Iranian women's rights
move-
ment, which opposed the discriminatory and retrogressive
policies of
the new government, was crushed as an accomplice to
imperialism.
Tohidi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1
55
With such a political history, Iranian immigrant women have
had to
search for a new identity acceptable to their ethnic community
and ap-
propriate to the realities of their host country. To avoid
becoming mar-
ginal members of both societies, these women are trying to find
their
way along a painful and tangled route between tradition and
modernity.
The quest for personal as well as national and cultural identity
has be-
come a major concern of educated and politically conscious
Iranian
women, immigrant or otherwise. A very difficult challenge for a
migrant
woman is to balance her individuality and personal aspirations

16. with a
positive ethnic identity.2
Migration studies show that "light-skinned, young, and educated
migrants usually encounter a more favorable reception in the
United
States than dark-skinned, older, and uneducated newcomers"
(Espin
1987, 493). Even though the majority of Iranian women
immigrants in
Los Angeles possess these helpful attributes, hostile political
relations
between Iran and the United States have kept them from being
accepted.
The American bias against Arabs and other Middle Easterners
was com-
pounded by the "hostage crisis," making Iranians one of the
least liked
minority groups in American society.
Nevertheless, Iranian women migrants perceive less ethnic and
25
racial discrimination against them in American society than do
Latinas,
for example. They are less worried about having an Iranian
surname
than Latinas are about having a Spanish surname (Blair 1991).
No signifi-
cant differences were found in the perceived prejudice against
Iranians
in Los Angeles based on gender.
The marginality of Iranian immigrants and the other difficulties
they
encounter in the United States are not without rewards for
women.

17. Women can wield power from their position as mediators
between the
two cultures. But the positive potential of marginality can be
realized
only by women of the right age, class, and educational status,
with the
right reasons for migrating. For others the cost of being
marginal to both
societies is overwhelming. Isolation from one's family,
especially if the
separation from parents and loved ones is premature and
traumatic, ex-
acerbates the sense of belonging nowhere.
Intergenerational Conflicts Immigrant parents tend to be
distressed by
the rapid pace of their children's acculturation, brought about by
the
media, American schools, and American peers. Whereas
parental au-
thority in the traditional Iranian family is based on the parents'
passing
2 See N. Tohidi, "Identity Politics and the Woman Question in
Iran: Retrospect and
Prospects/' in Identity Politics and Feminism: Cross-National
Perspectives, ed. V. Mo-
gadam (Oxford University Press: forthcoming).
1 56 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History
on to their children their own knowledge of life, children in
immigrant
families cannot readily apply their parents' knowledge to their

18. own new
lives. Instead, roles become somewhat reversed. The children
are the
ones passing on important information to their parents,
correcting their
English, and helping them in their daily interactions with
Americans.
Such role reversals threaten traditional relations in the family
and
create tension. The children's development of an identity
culturally dif-
ferent from that of their parents intensifies intergenerational
conflicts.
The gap is especially wide in families whose children grow up
in Ameri-
can society.
One particular area of conflict concerns children's rights to
privacy
and personal boundaries. For example, reading mail addressed
to an
adolescent son or daughter is considered part of an Iranian
parent's re-
sponsibility rather than an invasion of privacy. Iranian parents
often re-
sist their children's wishes to become financially independent or
to move
into their own apartments once they turn eighteen. While the
children
complain about their parents' interference in their lives, the
parents
complain about their children's lack of respect.
Adolescent girls and young women, especially those who
immigrated

19. with their families, must decide how to "become American"
without losing
their own cultural heritage, if they decide to "become
American" at all.
Role models of successful and respected bicultural Iranian
American
women are scarce, and for young women the negative cultural
and politi-
cal connotations of being westernized or Americanized are
particularly
problematic. Given the myth prevalent among Iranians that
American
women are sexually loose, being Americanized may be equated
with sex-
ual promiscuity. Conflicts between female adolescents and their
parents
frequently focus on appropriate sexual behavior. Hanassab's
1991 study
of dating and sexual attitudes among younger Iranian
immigrants shows
that the women are torn between two norms: behavior
acceptable to their
American peers, on the one hand, and their parents' expectations
and
their own obligations to their native culture, on the other. Some
young
women rebel against parental pressure by turning their back on
Iranian
culture and customs—changing their Iranian names to American
ones
(Blair 1991), for example, or refusing to speak Persian at home.
Gender Role Conflicts Commentators who cite cultural
collision, eco-
nomic pressures, and sexual freedom as the causes of familial
instability

20. among Iranian immigrants also blame women for the current
crisis be-
cause of their failure to fulfill their proper role. Women who
have become
"Americanized" are criticized for their loss of originality
(esalat) and
Iranian "female virtues," including obedience (etaat), chastity
(nejabaf),
Tohldi • Iranian Women and Gender Relations in Los Angeles 1
57
patience (saburi), and self-denial (fadakari). Americanization,
which is
equated with individualism and selfishness, undermines the
commit-
ment to family and the endurance needed to withstand the
hardships of
immigration.
In response, some immigrant women, particularly feminists,
criti-
cize Iranian men for failing to adjust their attitudes and
expectations in
the face of new realities. Women criticize their resistance to
egalitarian
relationships and their conscious or unconscious adherence to
tradi-
tional values and patriarchal norms.
Some men actually cling to traditional norms for gender
relations as
a reaction to the perceived threat of women's new independence.
A simi-

21. lar reaction is also seen among parents who perceive their
children's
faster pace of acculturation and parent-child role reversals as
intolerable
challenges to parental power and authority. When adult
immigrants are
uncertain and confused about what is right and wrong, many
hold on to
the "old ways," which they idealize in defending against a loss
of identity.
This refusal to accept change may intensify both
intergenerational and
gender-role conflicts in the immigrant families (Espin 1987,
493).
Ethnic Variations Such defensive loyalties to the traditional
gender
norms of the home culture seem to be less common among
Muslim im-
migrant families than among the religious and ethnic minorities.
In my
survey, for example, lewish and Armenian Iranians exhibited
more conser-
vative attitudes toward sexual norms and gender roles than their
Muslim
counterparts,3 perhaps in part because Iranian Jews and
Armenians tended
to migrate to the United States as families and kinship groups
rather than
as isolated individuals. Therefore, from the beginning of the
acculturation
process, ethnic pressure and the surveillance of the kinship
network have
reinforced conformity to traditional norms. The very presence
of the kin-
ship network may protect young women so that they need not

22. develop
self-reliance and autonomy.
Muslim Iranians tend to be more secularized than other Iranian
eth- 35
nic groups. Perhaps they developed an antipathy to Islam and
Islamic
tradition out of their own political and cultural opposition to the
Islamic
theocratic government in Iran and found that it was reinforced
in the
United States by the pervasively negative image of Muslims in
the media
and public opinion. For most Muslim Iranians in Los Angeles,
male and
female alike, language and national culture, rather than religion,
seem to
constitute the primary components of identity (Ansari 1990).
3 The number of other Iranian ethnic or religious groups in the
research sample was
too small to allow any meaningful comparisons.
1 58 The Great Migration: Immigrants in California History
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Tohidi, N. 1993. "Gender, Modernization, and Identity Politics
in Iran." In Gender and
National Identity: The Woman Question in Algeria, Iran,
Afghanistan, and Palestine,
edited by V. Moghadam. London: Zed Books.
Vazquez-Nuttall, E. V, L. Romero-Garcia, and B. DeLeon.
1987. "Sex Roles and Percep-
tions of Femininity and Masculinity of Hispanic Women: A
Review of the Literature,"
Psychology of Women Quarterly 11: 409-425.
This article is an edited chapter on the m ajor historical events
and contem porary
characteristics of the Hm ong Am erican com m unity, excerpted
from The New Face of
Asian Pacific Am erica: N um bers, D iversity, and Change in
the 21st Century , edited
by Eric Lai and Dennis Arguelles in conjunction with AsianW
eek M agazine and
published by the UCLA Asian Am erican Studies Center.

26. A P o p u l a t i o n W i t h o u t a N a t i o n
The Hmong people are an ethnic group whose origins go back
about 3,000 years in China. Most
Hmong -- about eight million -- still live in southwestern China.
Another four million live in the
Southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Burma, Laos and
Vietnam, where they immigrated during
the 19th century following centuries of persecution in China.
There, they existed mostly as
farmers living in rural areas.
The first Hmong migration of notable size to the United States
began with the fall of Saigon and
Laos to Communist forces in 1975. Many Hmong had worked
with pro-American anti-Communist
forces during the conflicts in Vietnam and Laos. As a result,
they were subject to violence and
retribution in Laos. Many Hmong escaped Laos to Thailand
where they were incarcerated in
refugee camps.
From 1981 to 1986, the number
of Hmong refugees slowed to a

27. few thousand each year, but
admissions picked up again
between 1987 and 1994, when
about 56,000 Hmong refugees
were accepted. After 1994,
Hmong refugee admissions
slowed to a trickle as most of
the Thai camps were by now
empty, with the remaining
Hmong repatriated to Laos.
Also, Hmong immigration based on family reunification remains
low, especially compared to other
Southeast Asian ethnic groups.
With the first wave that arrived in the late 1970s and early
1980s, voluntary resettlement agencies
purposely tried to disperse the Hmong around the country, such
as Providence (RI), Philadelphia,
Chicago, Des Moines, Iowa, Kansas City (KS), Denver,
Missoula (MT), Tulsa, and Salt Lake City. This

28. strategy, however, proved unsuccessful as many Hmong were
settled in a poor, predominantly
African American neighborhoods where they encountered much
hostility and violence.
Also, many Hmong wished to be reunited with family and clan
members. These reasons led to a
massive shift of the Hmong population in the mid-to- late 1980s
to central California cities like
Fresno, Stockton, and Merced, and to a lesser extent, to
Minnesota and Wisconsin. The 2000
Census counted 186,310 Hmong Americans across the U.S.
(single race or part-Hmong),
representing a nearly 90 percent increase in the population from
1990. Many agree, however, that
the figure is probably a significant undercount.
B u i l d i n g a N e w H o m e
During the 1990s, the Hmong moved again: away from the West
and towards the Midwest and the
South. This shift was epitomized by the emergence of
Minneapolis and St. Paul as the unofficial
capitals of Hmong America, taking over from Fresno. About
half of Hmong today live in the
Midwest, mostly in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan,

29. compared to 41 percent in 1990.
Meanwhile, the proportion of Hmong in the Western states fell
to 42 percent in 2000 from 55
percent in 1990. Around 6 percent of the Hmong now live in the
South (with most in North and
South Carolina), an impressive increase from just 1.3 percent in
1990. In 2000, the Hmong
population numbered in the Northeastern states remained very
small, at just 2 percent.
Why did Minneapolis-St. Paul emerge as the new Hmong
American capital? The opportunity to
make a better life seems to be at the heart of things. "The cost
of living is cheaper here than in
California," Lee Pao Xiong, president of the Urban Coalition in
St. Paul, told the Associated Press.
"The quality of education is better here, and jobs are available
here." Xiong said he's recruited 10
families from his own extended family to come here from
California in recent years. "They came
here and they found jobs within a month or two and are making
ten, eleven, twelve dollars an
hour," he said.

30. A 2002 community
directory provides
listings of 13 Hmong
community
organizations and 39
Hmong religious
congregations in the
Minneapolis-St. Paul
area. Whereas many
Hmong in
California's Central
Valley have taken up
their old occupations
of farming, those in
Minneapolis have
found jobs working in factories. But there is a substantial
emerging class of Hmong small
business owners -- many of them congregated near St. Paul's
University Avenue -- and college-

31. educated Hmong professionals going into fields like law,
medicine, and non-profit management.
And the United States' first Hmong politician, a 32-year-old
female lawyer named Mee Moua, was
elected to the Minnesota State Senate in 2002.
The Hmong came to America less-prepared for the modern
capitalistic society of their new home
than most other immigrant groups. Most had been farmers in
their native country, and did not
graduate from high school or the equivalent. As a result, many
Hmong families when they first
arrived were forced to go on public assistance. Data from the
2000 Census shows considerable
upward socioeconomic movement, as many Hmong settled into
stable or more lucrative jobs.
L o o k i n g t o t h e F u t u r e
Traditionally, the Hmong favor large families with many
children. Some of this can be explained by
the Hmong's traditional farming roots. As a result, Hmong
households average more than six
persons per house or apartment in Minnesota and Wisconsin,
compared to about 2.5 persons
among the entire population. This helps explain the huge

32. Hmong American population growth
between 1990 and 2000, despite the decline in refugee
admissions after 1994. These
demographic trends suggest the Hmong population will continue
to be among the fastest growing
Asian group in the United States in the coming decades.
The Hmong are a fairly tight-knit group; many community
leaders are old clan leaders or
politicians from Laos and are their descendents and relatives.
For instance, the Hmong general
Vang Pao, who commanded the Hmong forces fighting against
the Communist North Vietnamese,
remains a political leader for many Hmong in America.
Still, there is a new generation of Hmong leaders emerging.
They are young, well-educated, and
not necessarily willing to be as beholden to old loyalties based
on clan affiliation. Cleaved along
this generational divide, the younger leaders support the reform
of some aspects of Hmong
culture that may clash with American customs. For instance,
Hmong womens' groups have
campaigned against polygamy, domestic violence, and teenage

33. brides -- not common but not
unheard of among more traditional Hmong.
Other leaders are trying to tackle the increasing number of
Hmong youth being lured into gangs.
Others are trying to encourage Hmong entrepreneurship, a
traditional route to the middle-class
for immigrants but one less common with the Hmong. Vang
Pao, for instance, has established a
program with St. Thomas University in St. Paul to provide
technical assistance to Hmong small
businesspeople. While Hmong Americans certainly face a
number of challenges, they are moving
forward into a brighter future.
A u t h o r C i t a t i o n
Copyright © 2003 by Mark E. Pfeifer, Eric Lai, Dennis
Arguelles, AsianWeek Magazine, and the
UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Reprinted in accordance
with Section 107 of the U.S.
Copyright Act of 1976.
Suggested reference: Pfeifer, Mark E. 2003. "Hmong
Americans" Asian-Nation: The Landscape

34. of Asian America. <http://www.asian-nation.org/hmong.shtml>
(September 24, 2014).
1
June
22,
2011
My
Life
as
an
Undocumented
Immigrant
By
Jose
Antonio
Vargas

35. ¶1
One
August
morning
nearly
two
decades
ago,
my
mother
woke
me
and
put
me
in
a
cab.
She
handed
me
a
jacket.
“Baka
malamig
doon”
were
among
the

36. few
words
she
said.
(“It
might
be
cold
there.”)
When
I
arrived
at
the
Philippines’
Ninoy
Aquino
International
Airport
with
her,
my
aunt
and
a
family
friend,
I
was
introduced
to
a

37. man
I’d
never
seen.
They
told
me
he
was
my
uncle.
He
held
my
hand
as
I
boarded
an
airplane
for
the
first
time.
It
was
1993,
and
I
was
12.

38. My
mother
wanted
to
give
me
a
better
life,
so
she
sent
me
thousands
of
miles
away
to
live
with
her
parents
in
America
—
my
grandfather
(Lolo
in
Tagalog)
and
grandmother
(Lola).
After

39. I
arrived
in
Mountain
View,
Calif.,
in
the
San
Francisco
Bay
Area,
I
entered
sixth
grade
and
quickly
grew
to
love
my
new
home,
family
and
culture.
I
discovered
a
passion
for
language,

40. though
it
was
hard
to
learn
the
difference
between
formal
English
and
American
slang.
One
of
my
early
memories
is
of
a
freckled
kid
in
middle
school
asking
me,
“What’s
up?”
I
replied,

41. “The
sky,”
and
he
and
a
couple
of
other
kids
laughed.
I
won
the
eighth-­‐
grade
spelling
bee
by
memorizing
words
I
couldn’t
properly
pronounce.
(The
winning
word
was
“indefatigable.”)
One

42. day
when
I
was
16,
I
rode
my
bike
to
the
nearby
D.M.V.
office
to
get
my
driver’s
permit.
Some
of
my
friends
already
had
their
licenses,
so
I
figured
it
was
time.
But

43. when
I
handed
the
clerk
my
green
card
as
proof
of
U.S.
residency,
she
flipped
it
around,
examining
it.
“This
is
fake,”
she
whispered.
“Don’t
come
back
here
again.”
Confused
and

44. scared,
I
pedaled
home
and
confronted
Lolo.
I
remember
him
sitting
in
the
garage,
cutting
coupons.
I
dropped
my
bike
and
ran
over
to
him,
showing
him
the
green
card.
“Peke
ba
ito?”
I

45. asked
in
Tagalog.
(“Is
this
fake?”)
My
grandparents
were
naturalized
American
citizens
—
he
worked
as
a
security
guard,
she
as
a
food
server
—
and
they
had
begun
supporting
my
mother
and

46. me
financially
when
I
was
3,
after
my
father’s
wandering
eye
and
inability
to
properly
provide
for
us
led
to
my
parents’
separation.
Lolo
was
a
proud
man,
and
I
saw
the
shame

47. on
his
face
as
he
told
me
he
purchased
the
card,
2
along
with
other
fake
documents,
for
me.
“Don’t
show
it
to
other
people,”
he
warned.

48. ¶5
I
decided
then
that
I
could
never
give
anyone
reason
to
doubt
I
was
an
American.
I
convinced
myself
that
if
I
worked
enough,
if
I
achieved
enough,
I
would

49. be
rewarded
with
citizenship.
I
felt
I
could
earn
it.
I’ve
tried.
Over
the
past
14
years,
I’ve
graduated
from
high
school
and
college
and
built
a
career
as
a
journalist,
interviewing

50. some
of
the
most
famous
people
in
the
country.
On
the
surface,
I’ve
created
a
good
life.
I’ve
lived
the
American
dream.
But
I
am
still
an
undocumented
immigrant.
And
that

51. means
living
a
different
kind
of
reality.
It
means
going
about
my
day
in
fear
of
being
found
out.
It
means
rarely
trusting
people,
even
those
closest
to
me,
with
who
I
really

52. am.
It
means
keeping
my
family
photos
in
a
shoebox
rather
than
displaying
them
on
shelves
in
my
home,
so
friends
don’t
ask
about
them.
It
means
reluctantly,
even
painfully,
doing
things
I

53. know
are
wrong
and
unlawful.
And
it
has
meant
relying
on
a
sort
of
21st-­‐century
underground
railroad
of
supporters,
people
who
took
an
interest
in
my
future
and
took
risks
for
me.

54. Last
year
I
read
about
four
students
who
walked
from
Miami
to
Washington
to
lobby
for
the
Dream
Act,
a
nearly
decade-­‐old
immigration
bill
that
would
provide
a
path
to
legal
permanent

55. residency
for
young
people
who
have
been
educated
in
this
country.
At
the
risk
of
deportation
—
the
Obama
administration
has
deported
almost
800,000
people
in
the
last
two
years
—
they
are
speaking

56. out.
Their
courage
has
inspired
me.
There
are
believed
to
be
11
million
undocumented
immigrants
in
the
United
States.
We’re
not
always
who
you
think
we
are.
Some
pick
your

57. strawberries
or
care
for
your
children.
Some
are
in
high
school
or
college.
And
some,
it
turns
out,
write
news
articles
you
might
read.
I
grew
up
here.
This
is
my
home.
Yet
even

58. though
I
think
of
myself
as
an
American
and
consider
America
my
country,
my
country
doesn’t
think
of
me
as
one
of
its
own.
¶10
My
first
challenge
was
the

59. language.
Though
I
learned
English
in
the
Philippines,
I
wanted
to
lose
my
accent.
During
high
school,
I
spent
hours
at
a
time
watching
television
(especially
“Frasier,”
“Home
Improvement”
and
reruns
of
“The

60. Golden
Girls”)
and
movies
(from
3
“Goodfellas”
to
“Anne
of
Green
Gables”),
pausing
the
VHS
to
try
to
copy
how
various
characters
enunciated
their
words.
At
the

61. local
library,
I
read
magazines,
books
and
newspapers
—
anything
to
learn
how
to
write
better.
Kathy
Dewar,
my
high-­‐school
English
teacher,
introduced
me
to
journalism.
From
the
moment
I
wrote
my
first

62. article
for
the
student
paper,
I
convinced
myself
that
having
my
name
in
print
—
writing
in
English,
interviewing
Americans
—
validated
my
presence
here.
The
debates
over
“illegal
aliens”

63. intensified
my
anxieties.
In
1994,
only
a
year
after
my
flight
from
the
Philippines,
Gov.
Pete
Wilson
was
re-­‐
elected
in
part
because
of
his
support
for
Proposition
187,
which
prohibited
undocumented
immigrants
from

64. attending
public
school
and
accessing
other
services.
(A
federal
court
later
found
the
law
unconstitutional.)
After
my
encounter
at
the
D.M.V.
in
1997,
I
grew
more
aware
of
anti-­‐immigrant
sentiments
and
stereotypes:
they

65. don’t
want
to
assimilate,
they
are
a
drain
on
society.
They’re
not
talking
about
me,
I
would
tell
myself.
I
have
something
to
contribute.
To
do
that,
I
had
to
work

66. —
and
for
that,
I
needed
a
Social
Security
number.
Fortunately,
my
grandfather
had
already
managed
to
get
one
for
me.
Lolo
had
always
taken
care
of
everyone
in
the
family.
He
and

67. my
grandmother
emigrated
legally
in
1984
from
Zambales,
a
province
in
the
Philippines
of
rice
fields
and
bamboo
houses,
following
Lolo’s
sister,
who
married
a
Filipino-­‐American
serving
in
the
American
military.
She
petitioned

68. for
her
brother
and
his
wife
to
join
her.
When
they
got
here,
Lolo
petitioned
for
his
two
children
—
my
mother
and
her
younger
brother
—
to
follow
them.
But
instead
of
mentioning

69. that
my
mother
was
a
married
woman,
he
listed
her
as
single.
Legal
residents
can’t
petition
for
their
married
children.
Besides,
Lolo
didn’t
care
for
my
father.
He
didn’t
want
him
coming
here

70. too.
But
soon
Lolo
grew
nervous
that
the
immigration
authorities
reviewing
the
petition
would
discover
my
mother
was
married,
thus
derailing
not
only
her
chances
of
coming
here
but
those
of

71. my
uncle
as
well.
So
he
withdrew
her
petition.
After
my
uncle
came
to
America
legally
in
1991,
Lolo
tried
to
get
my
mother
here
through
a
tourist
visa,
but
she
wasn’t
able

72. to
obtain
one.
That’s
when
she
decided
to
send
me.
My
mother
told
me
later
that
she
figured
she
would
follow
me
soon.
She
never
did.
The
“uncle”
who
brought
me

73. here
turned
out
to
be
a
coyote,
not
a
relative,
my
grandfather
later
explained.
Lolo
scraped
together
enough
money
—
I
eventually
learned
it
was
$4,500,
a
huge
sum
for
him
—
to

74. 4
pay
him
to
smuggle
me
here
under
a
fake
name
and
fake
passport.
(I
never
saw
the
passport
again
after
the
flight
and
have
always
assumed

75. that
the
coyote
kept
it.)
After
I
arrived
in
America,
Lolo
obtained
a
new
fake
Filipino
passport,
in
my
real
name
this
time,
adorned
with
a
fake
student
visa,
in
addition
to
the
fraudulent

76. green
card.
¶15
Using
the
fake
passport,
we
went
to
the
local
Social
Security
Administration
office
and
applied
for
a
Social
Security
number
and
card.
It
was,
I
remember,
a
quick

77. visit.
When
the
card
came
in
the
mail,
it
had
my
full,
real
name,
but
it
also
clearly
stated:
“Valid
for
work
only
with
I.N.S.
authorization.”
When
I
began
looking
for

78. work,
a
short
time
after
the
D.M.V.
incident,
my
grandfather
and
I
took
the
Social
Security
card
to
Kinko’s,
where
he
covered
the
“I.N.S.
authorization”
text
with
a
sliver
of
white
tape.
We

79. then
made
photocopies
of
the
card.
At
a
glance,
at
least,
the
copies
would
look
like
copies
of
a
regular,
unrestricted
Social
Security
card.
Lolo
always
imagined
I
would
work
the
kind

80. of
low-­‐paying
jobs
that
undocumented
people
often
take.
(Once
I
married
an
American,
he
said,
I
would
get
my
real
papers,
and
everything
would
be
fine.)
But
even
menial
jobs
require
documents,
so

81. he
and
I
hoped
the
doctored
card
would
work
for
now.
The
more
documents
I
had,
he
said,
the
better.
While
in
high
school,
I
worked
part
time
at
Subway,
then

82. at
the
front
desk
of
the
local
Y.M.C.A.,
then
at
a
tennis
club,
until
I
landed
an
unpaid
internship
at
The
Mountain
View
Voice,
my
hometown
newspaper.
First
I
brought
coffee
and
helped

83. around
the
office;
eventually
I
began
covering
city-­‐hall
meetings
and
other
assignments
for
pay.
For
more
than
a
decade
of
getting
part-­‐time
and
full-­‐time
jobs,
employers
have
rarely
asked
to
check

84. my
original
Social
Security
card.
When
they
did,
I
showed
the
photocopied
version,
which
they
accepted.
Over
time,
I
also
began
checking
the
citizenship
box
on
my
federal
I-­‐9
employment
eligibility
forms.
(Claiming

85. full
citizenship
was
actually
easier
than
declaring
permanent
resident
“green
card”
status,
which
would
have
required
me
to
provide
an
alien
registration
number.)
¶20
This
deceit
never
got
easier.
The

86. more
I
did
it,
the
more
I
felt
like
an
impostor,
the
more
guilt
I
carried
—
and
the
more
I
worried
that
I
would
get
caught.
But
I
kept
doing
it.
I
needed

87. to
live
and
survive
on
my
own,
and
I
decided
this
was
the
way.
5
Mountain
View
High
School
became
my
second
home.
I
was
elected

88. to
represent
my
school
at
school-­‐board
meetings,
which
gave
me
the
chance
to
meet
and
befriend
Rich
Fischer,
the
superintendent
for
our
school
district.
I
joined
the
speech
and
debate
team,
acted
in

89. school
plays
and
eventually
became
co-­‐editor
of
The
Oracle,
the
student
newspaper.
That
drew
the
attention
of
my
principal,
Pat
Hyland.
“You’re
at
school
just
as
much
as
I
am,”
she
told
me.

90. Pat
and
Rich
would
soon
become
mentors,
and
over
time,
almost
surrogate
parents
for
me.
After
a
choir
rehearsal
during
my
junior
year,
Jill
Denny,
the
choir
director,
told
me

91. she
was
considering
a
Japan
trip
for
our
singing
group.
I
told
her
I
couldn’t
afford
it,
but
she
said
we’d
figure
out
a
way.
I
hesitated,
and
then
decided
to
tell
her
the

92. truth.
“It’s
not
really
the
money,”
I
remember
saying.
“I
don’t
have
the
right
passport.”
When
she
assured
me
we’d
get
the
proper
documents,
I
finally
told
her.
“I
can’t
get
the
right

93. passport,”
I
said.
“I’m
not
supposed
to
be
here.”
She
understood.
So
the
choir
toured
Hawaii
instead,
with
me
in
tow.
(Mrs.
Denny
and
I
spoke
a
couple
of
months
ago,
and

94. she
told
me
she
hadn’t
wanted
to
leave
any
student
behind.)
Later
that
school
year,
my
history
class
watched
a
documentary
on
Harvey
Milk,
the
openly
gay
San
Francisco
city
official

95. who
was
assassinated.
This
was
1999,
just
six
months
after
Matthew
Shepard’s
body
was
found
tied
to
a
fence
in
Wyoming.
During
the
discussion,
I
raised
my
hand
and
said
something
like:
“I’m

96. sorry
Harvey
Milk
got
killed
for
being
gay.
.
.
.
I’ve
been
meaning
to
say
this.
.
.
.
I’m
gay.”
¶25
I
hadn’t
planned
on
coming
out
that
morning,
though

97. I
had
known
that
I
was
gay
for
several
years.
With
that
announcement,
I
became
the
only
openly
gay
student
at
school,
and
it
caused
turmoil
with
my
grandparents.
Lolo
kicked
me
out

98. of
the
house
for
a
few
weeks.
Though
we
eventually
reconciled,
I
had
disappointed
him
on
two
fronts.
First,
as
a
Catholic,
he
considered
homosexuality
a
sin
and
was
embarrassed
about
having
“ang

99. apo
na
bakla”
(“a
grandson
who
is
gay”).
Even
worse,
I
was
making
matters
more
difficult
for
myself,
he
said.
I
needed
to
marry
an
American
woman
in
order
to
gain
a
green

100. card.
Tough
as
it
was,
coming
out
about
being
gay
seemed
less
daunting
than
coming
out
about
my
legal
status.
I
kept
my
other
secret
mostly
hidden.

101. 6
While
my
classmates
awaited
their
college
acceptance
letters,
I
hoped
to
get
a
full-­‐time
job
at
The
Mountain
View
Voice
after
graduation.
It’s
not
that
I
didn’t

102. want
to
go
to
college,
but
I
couldn’t
apply
for
state
and
federal
financial
aid.
Without
that,
my
family
couldn’t
afford
to
send
me.
But
when
I
finally
told
Pat
and

103. Rich
about
my
immigration
“problem”
—
as
we
called
it
from
then
on
—
they
helped
me
look
for
a
solution.
At
first,
they
even
wondered
if
one
of
them
could
adopt
me
and

104. fix
the
situation
that
way,
but
a
lawyer
Rich
consulted
told
him
it
wouldn’t
change
my
legal
status
because
I
was
too
old.
Eventually
they
connected
me
to
a
new
scholarship
fund
for

105. high-­‐potential
students
who
were
usually
the
first
in
their
families
to
attend
college.
Most
important,
the
fund
was
not
concerned
with
immigration
status.
I
was
among
the
first
recipients,
with
the
scholarship
covering

106. tuition,
lodging,
books
and
other
expenses
for
my
studies
at
San
Francisco
State
University.
As
a
college
freshman,
I
found
a
job
working
part
time
at
The
San
Francisco
Chronicle,

107. where
I
sorted
mail
and
wrote
some
freelance
articles.
My
ambition
was
to
get
a
reporting
job,
so
I
embarked
on
a
series
of
internships.
First
I
landed
at
The
Philadelphia
Daily
News,
in

108. the
summer
of
2001,
where
I
covered
a
drive-­‐by
shooting
and
the
wedding
of
the
76ers
star
Allen
Iverson.
Using
those
articles,
I
applied
to
The
Seattle
Times
and
got
an
internship
for

109. the
following
summer.
¶30
But
then
my
lack
of
proper
documents
became
a
problem
again.
The
Times’s
recruiter,
Pat
Foote,
asked
all
incoming
interns
to
bring
certain
paperwork
on
their
first

110. day:
a
birth
certificate,
or
a
passport,
or
a
driver’s
license
plus
an
original
Social
Security
card.
I
panicked,
thinking
my
documents
wouldn’t
pass
muster.
So
before
starting
the
job,
I
called
Pat

111. and
told
her
about
my
legal
status.
After
consulting
with
management,
she
called
me
back
with
the
answer
I
feared:
I
couldn’t
do
the
internship.
This
was
devastating.
What
good
was

112. college
if
I
couldn’t
then
pursue
the
career
I
wanted?
I
decided
then
that
if
I
was
to
succeed
in
a
profession
that
is
all
about
truth-­‐telling,
I
couldn’t
tell
the
truth
about

113. myself.
7
After
this
episode,
Jim
Strand,
the
venture
capitalist
who
sponsored
my
scholarship,
offered
to
pay
for
an
immigration
lawyer.
Rich
and
I
went

114. to
meet
her
in
San
Francisco’s
financial
district.
I
was
hopeful.
This
was
in
early
2002,
shortly
after
Senators
Orrin
Hatch,
the
Utah
Republican,
and
Dick
Durbin,
the
Illinois
Democrat,
introduced

115. the
Dream
Act
—
Development,
Relief
and
Education
for
Alien
Minors.
It
seemed
like
the
legislative
version
of
what
I’d
told
myself:
If
I
work
hard
and
contribute,
things
will
work
out.

116. But
the
meeting
left
me
crushed.
My
only
solution,
the
lawyer
said,
was
to
go
back
to
the
Philippines
and
accept
a
10-­‐year
ban
before
I
could
apply
to
return
legally.

117. ¶35
If
Rich
was
discouraged,
he
hid
it
well.
“Put
this
problem
on
a
shelf,”
he
told
me.
“Compartmentalize
it.
Keep
going.”
And
I
did.
For
the
summer
of
2003,
I

118. applied
for
internships
across
the
country.
Several
newspapers,
including
The
Wall
Street
Journal,
The
Boston
Globe
and
The
Chicago
Tribune,
expressed
interest.
But
when
The
Washington
Post
offered
me
a
spot,
I
knew

119. where
I
would
go.
And
this
time,
I
had
no
intention
of
acknowledging
my
“problem.”
The
Post
internship
posed
a
tricky
obstacle:
It
required
a
driver’s
license.
(After
my
close
call

120. at
the
California
D.M.V.,
I’d
never
gotten
one.)
So
I
spent
an
afternoon
at
The
Mountain
View
Public
Library,
studying
various
states’
requirements.
Oregon
was
among
the
most
welcoming
—
and
it
was

121. just
a
few
hours’
drive
north.
Again,
my
support
network
came
through.
A
friend’s
father
lived
in
Portland,
and
he
allowed
me
to
use
his
address
as
proof
of
residency.
Pat,

122. Rich
and
Rich’s
longtime
assistant,
Mary
Moore,
sent
letters
to
me
at
that
address.
Rich
taught
me
how
to
do
three-­‐point
turns
in
a
parking
lot,
and
a
friend
accompanied
me
to
Portland.

123. The
license
meant
everything
to
me
—
it
would
let
me
drive,
fly
and
work.
But
my
grandparents
worried
about
the
Portland
trip
and
the
Washington
internship.
While
Lola
offered
daily
prayers

124. so
that
I
would
not
get
caught,
Lolo
told
me
that
I
was
dreaming
too
big,
risking
too
much.
¶40
I
was
determined
to
pursue
my
ambitions.
I
was
22,
I

125. told
them,
responsible
for
my
own
actions.
But
this
was
different
from
Lolo’s
8
driving
a
confused
teenager
to
Kinko’s.
I
knew
what
I
was
doing
now,

126. and
I
knew
it
wasn’t
right.
But
what
was
I
supposed
to
do?
I
was
paying
state
and
federal
taxes,
but
I
was
using
an
invalid
Social
Security
card
and
writing

127. false
information
on
my
employment
forms.
But
that
seemed
better
than
depending
on
my
grandparents
or
on
Pat,
Rich
and
Jim
—
or
returning
to
a
country
I
barely
remembered.
I
convinced
myself

128. all
would
be
O.K.
if
I
lived
up
to
the
qualities
of
a
“citizen”:
hard
work,
self-­‐reliance,
love
of
my
country.
At
the
D.M.V.
in
Portland,
I
arrived
with
my
photocopied
Social

129. Security
card,
my
college
I.D.,
a
pay
stub
from
The
San
Francisco
Chronicle
and
my
proof
of
state
residence
—
the
letters
to
the
Portland
address
that
my
support
network
had
sent.
It

130. worked.
My
license,
issued
in
2003,
was
set
to
expire
eight
years
later,
on
my
30th
birthday,
on
Feb.
3,
2011.
I
had
eight
years
to
succeed
professionally,
and
to
hope
that
some
sort

131. of
immigration
reform
would
pass
in
the
meantime
and
allow
me
to
stay.
It
seemed
like
all
the
time
in
the
world.
My
summer
in
Washington
was
exhilarating.

132. I
was
intimidated
to
be
in
a
major
newsroom
but
was
assigned
a
mentor
—
Peter
Perl,
a
veteran
magazine
writer
—
to
help
me
navigate
it.
A
few
weeks
into
the
internship,

133. he
printed
out
one
of
my
articles,
about
a
guy
who
recovered
a
long-­‐lost
wallet,
circled
the
first
two
paragraphs
and
left
it
on
my
desk.
“Great
eye
for
details
—
awesome!”
he
wrote.

134. Though
I
didn’t
know
it
then,
Peter
would
become
one
more
member
of
my
network.
¶45
At
the
end
of
the
summer,
I
returned
to
The
San
Francisco
Chronicle.
My

135. plan
was
to
finish
school
—
I
was
now
a
senior
—
while
I
worked
for
The
Chronicle
as
a
reporter
for
the
city
desk.
But
when
The
Post
beckoned
again,
offering
me
a

136. full-­‐time,
two-­‐year
paid
internship
that
I
could
start
when
I
graduated
in
June
2004,
it
was
too
tempting
to
pass
up.
I
moved
back
to
Washington.
About
four
months
into
my

137. job
as
a
reporter
for
The
Post,
I
began
feeling
increasingly
paranoid,
as
if
I
had
“illegal
immigrant”
tattooed
on
my
forehead
—
and
in
Washington,
of
all
places,
where
the
debates
over

138. immigration
seemed
never-­‐ending.
I
was
so
eager
to
prove
myself
that
I
feared
I
was
annoying
some
colleagues
and
editors
—
and
worried
that
any
one
of
these
professional
journalists
could
discover

139. 9
my
secret.
The
anxiety
was
nearly
paralyzing.
I
decided
I
had
to
tell
one
of
the
higher-­‐ups
about
my
situation.
I
turned
to
Peter.
By

140. this
time,
Peter,
who
still
works
at
The
Post,
had
become
part
of
management
as
the
paper’s
director
of
newsroom
training
and
professional
development.
One
afternoon
in
late
October,
we
walked
a
couple

141. of
blocks
to
Lafayette
Square,
across
from
the
White
House.
Over
some
20
minutes,
sitting
on
a
bench,
I
told
him
everything:
the
Social
Security
card,
the
driver’s
license,
Pat
and
Rich,
my
family.

142. Peter
was
shocked.
“I
understand
you
100
times
better
now,”
he
said.
He
told
me
that
I
had
done
the
right
thing
by
telling
him,
and
that
it
was
now
our

143. shared
problem.
He
said
he
didn’t
want
to
do
anything
about
it
just
yet.
I
had
just
been
hired,
he
said,
and
I
needed
to
prove
myself.
“When
you’ve
done
enough,”
he
said,
“we’ll

144. tell
Don
and
Len
together.”
(Don
Graham
is
the
chairman
of
The
Washington
Post
Company;
Leonard
Downie
Jr.
was
then
the
paper’s
executive
editor.)
A
month
later,
I
spent
my
first
Thanksgiving
in

145. Washington
with
Peter
In
the
five
years
that
followed,
I
did
my
best
to
“do
enough.”
I
was
promoted
to
staff
writer,
reported
on
video-­‐game
culture,
wrote
a
series
on
Washington’s

146. H.I.V./AIDS
epidemic
and
covered
the
role
of
technology
and
social
media
in
the
2008
presidential
race.
I
visited
the
White
House,
where
I
interviewed
senior
aides
and
covered
a
state
dinner
—
and

147. gave
the
Secret
Service
the
Social
Security
number
I
obtained
with
false
documents.
¶50
I
did
my
best
to
steer
clear
of
reporting
on
immigration
policy
but
couldn’t
always
avoid
it.

148. On
two
occasions,
I
wrote
about
Hillary
Clinton’s
position
on
driver’s
licenses
for
undocumented
immigrants.
I
also
wrote
an
article
about
Senator
Mel
Martinez
of
Florida,
then
the
chairman
of
the
Republican
National

149. Committee,
who
was
defending
his
party’s
stance
toward
Latinos
after
only
one
Republican
presidential
candidate
—
John
McCain,
the
co-­‐author
of
a
failed
immigration
bill
—
agreed
to
participate
in
a
debate
sponsored

150. by
Univision,
the
Spanish-­‐language
network.
It
was
an
odd
sort
of
dance:
I
was
trying
to
stand
out
in
a
highly
competitive
newsroom,
yet
I
was
terrified
that
if
I
stood

151. out
too
much,
I’d
invite
unwanted
scrutiny.
I
tried
to
compartmentalize
my
fears,
distract
myself
by
reporting
on
the
lives
of
other
people,
but
there
was
no
escaping
the
central
conflict
in
my

152. life.
Maintaining
a
deception
for
so
long
distorts
your
sense
of
self.
You
start
wondering
who
you’ve
become,
and
why.
10
In
April
2008,
I

153. was
part
of
a
Post
team
that
won
a
Pulitzer
Prize
for
the
paper’s
coverage
of
the
Virginia
Tech
shootings
a
year
earlier.
Lolo
died
a
year
earlier,
so
it
was
Lola
who
called

154. me
the
day
of
the
announcement.
The
first
thing
she
said
was,
“Anong
mangyayari
kung
malaman
ng
mga
tao?”
What
will
happen
if
people
find
out?
I
couldn’t

155. say
anything.
After
we
got
off
the
phone,
I
rushed
to
the
bathroom
on
the
fourth
floor
of
the
newsroom,
sat
down
on
the
toilet
and
cried.
¶55
In
the

156. summer
of
2009,
without
ever
having
had
that
follow-­‐up
talk
with
top
Post
management,
I
left
the
paper
and
moved
to
New
York
to
join
The
Huffington
Post.
I
met
Arianna
Huffington
at
a

157. Washington
Press
Club
Foundation
dinner
I
was
covering
for
The
Post
two
years
earlier,
and
she
later
recruited
me
to
join
her
news
site.
I
wanted
to
learn
more
about
Web
publishing,
and

158. I
thought
the
new
job
would
provide
a
useful
education.
Still,
I
was
apprehensive
about
the
move:
many
companies
were
already
using
E-­‐Verify,
a
program
set
up
by
the
Department
of

159. Homeland
Security
that
checks
if
prospective
employees
are
eligible
to
work,
and
I
didn’t
know
if
my
new
employer
was
among
them.
But
I’d
been
able
to
get
jobs
in
other
newsrooms,
I

160. figured,
so
I
filled
out
the
paperwork
as
usual
and
succeeded
in
landing
on
the
payroll.
While
I
worked
at
The
Huffington
Post,
other
opportunities
emerged.
My
H.I.V./AIDS
series
became
a

161. documentary
film
called
“The
Other
City,”
which
opened
at
the
Tribeca
Film
Festival
last
year
and
was
broadcast
on
Showtime.
I
began
writing
for
magazines
and
landed
a
dream
assignment:
profiling
Facebook’s
Mark

162. Zuckerberg
for
The
New
Yorker.
The
more
I
achieved,
the
more
scared
and
depressed
I
became.
I
was
proud
of
my
work,
but
there
was
always
a
cloud
hanging
over
it,

163. over
me.
My
old
eight-­‐year
deadline
—
the
expiration
of
my
Oregon
driver’s
license
—
was
approaching.
After
slightly
less
than
a
year,
I
decided
to
leave
The
Huffington
Post.
In

164. part,
this
was
because
I
wanted
to
promote
the
documentary
and
write
a
book
about
online
culture
—
or
so
I
told
my
friends.
But
the
11

165. real
reason
was,
after
so
many
years
of
trying
to
be
a
part
of
the
system,
of
focusing
all
my
energy
on
my
professional
life,
I
learned
that
no
amount
of
professional
success

166. would
solve
my
problem
or
ease
the
sense
of
loss
and
displacement
I
felt.
I
lied
to
a
friend
about
why
I
couldn’t
take
a
weekend
trip
to
Mexico.
Another
time
I
concocted
an

167. excuse
for
why
I
couldn’t
go
on
an
all-­‐expenses-­‐paid
trip
to
Switzerland.
I
have
been
unwilling,
for
years,
to
be
in
a
long-­‐term
relationship
because
I
never
wanted
anyone
to
get
too
close

168. and
ask
too
many
questions.
All
the
while,
Lola’s
question
was
stuck
in
my
head:
What
will
happen
if
people
find
out?
¶70
Early
this
year,
just
two
weeks
before
my

169. 30th
birthday,
I
won
a
small
reprieve:
I
obtained
a
driver’s
license
in
the
state
of
Washington.
The
license
is
valid
until
2016.
This
offered
me
five
more
years
of
acceptable
identification
—

170. but
also
five
more
years
of
fear,
of
lying
to
people
I
respect
and
institutions
that
trusted
me,
of
running
away
from
who
I
am.
I’m
done
running.
I’m
exhausted.

171. I
don’t
want
that
life
anymore.
So
I’ve
decided
to
come
forward,
own
up
to
what
I’ve
done,
and
tell
my
story
to
the
best
of
my
recollection.
I’ve
reached
out
to

172. former
bosses
and
employers
and
apologized
for
misleading
them
—
a
mix
of
humiliation
and
liberation
coming
with
each
disclosure.
All
the
people
mentioned
in
this
article
gave
me
permission
to
use
their

173. names.
I’ve
also
talked
to
family
and
friends
about
my
situation
and
am
working
with
legal
counsel
to
review
my
options.
I
don’t
know
what
the
consequences
will
be
of
telling
my
story.

174. I
do
know
that
I
am
grateful
to
my
grandparents,
my
Lolo
and
Lola,
for
giving
me
the
chance
for
a
better
life.
I’m
also
grateful
to
my
other
family
—

175. the
support
network
I
found
here
in
America
—
for
encouraging
me
to
pursue
my
dreams.
¶75
It’s
been
almost
18
years
since
I’ve
seen
my
mother.
Early
on,
I
was

176. mad
at
her
for
putting
me
in
this
position,
and
then
mad
at
myself
for
being
angry
and
ungrateful.
By
the
time
I
got
to
college,
we
rarely
spoke
by
phone.
It
became
too

177. painful;
after
a
while
it
was
easier
to
just
send
money
to
help
support
her
and
my
two
half-­‐siblings.
My
sister,
almost
2
years
old
when
I
left,
is
almost
20
now.
I’ve
never

178. met
my
14-­‐year-­‐old
brother.
I
would
love
to
see
them.
Not
long
ago,
I
called
my
mother.
I
wanted
to
fill
the
gaps
in
my
memory
about
that
August
morning
so

179. many
years
ago.
We
had
never
12
discussed
it.
Part
of
me
wanted
to
shove
the
memory
aside,
but
to
write
this
article
and
face
the
facts

180. of
my
life,
I
needed
more
details.
Did
I
cry?
Did
she?
Did
we
kiss
goodbye?
My
mother
told
me
I
was
excited
about
meeting
a
stewardess,
about
getting
on
a

181. plane.
She
also
reminded
me
of
the
one
piece
of
advice
she
gave
me
for
blending
in:
If
anyone
asked
why
I
was
coming
to
America,
I
should
say
I
was
going
to
Disneyland.

182. Jose
Antonio
Vargas
is
a
former
reporter
for
The
Washington
Post
and
shared
a
Pulitzer
Prize
for
coverage
of
the
Virginia
Tech
shootings.
He
founded
Define
American,
which

183. seeks
to
change
the
conversation
on
immigration
reform.
Editor:
Chris
Suellentrop
(C.Suellentrop-­‐
[email protected])
Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter
Annals of Immigration
OCTOBER 13, 2014 ISSUE
The Kitchen Network
America’s underground Chinese restaurant workers.
BY LAUREN HILGERS
I
Chinatown employment agencies can get immigrants
kitchen jobs in a few hours.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNIE LING

184. n 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.

185. 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
I
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

186. 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

187. 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.”
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
F
The corner of Eldridge and Forsyth, at the foot of the Manhattan

188. 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

189. 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

190. 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

191. the Fujianese own the
overwhelming majority of Chinese restaurants in the country.
or more than a hundred years, the restaurant trade was
dominated by the
For more than a hundred years, the restaurant trade was
dominated by theCantonese, whose cuisine, fantastically
reimagined, provided America’s idea ofChinese 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

192. 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,

193. 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
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

194. 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

195. 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
R
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

196. 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

197. 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.”
Rain and his companions walked for a full day and

198. 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.”
ain had relatives near New York, and a cousin he barely knew
drove him out of the
R
S
ain 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.”

199. 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.

200. 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.”
ix mornings a week, the boss picks up Rain and the other
workers from their dorm

201. Six mornings a week, the boss picks up Rain and the other
workers from their dormand 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

202. 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

203. 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

204. 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
R
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.
estaurant 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

205. 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

206. 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
I
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

207. 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

208. 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.
n 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

209. 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.”
and they enjoy themselves,” he told me. “Chinese people—it all
depends on your boss.”