The host at the Legend KTV, a karaoke lounge in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is not expecting someone like me—a laowai, a foreigner—to walk in the door. That much is clear from her abrupt switch from casual Chinese to halting English when I explain that I am waiting for a friend. “Yes, maybe you have a seat.” I sit down and try to act natural, flipping aimlessly through iPhone apps. But the lobby is anything but natural. I have been unwittingly transported to a version of New York City where I am the outsider. I feel underdressed in my black pants and red flannel shirt and bewildered by my new surroundings: a room lined with fake gold and red velour.
I stare at the flat-screen TV on the opposite wall, killing time and wondering whether I would recognize any of the C-pop hits playing on mute. I’d been in lobbies like this before in Beijing and Shanghai, where it was hard to ignore the many advertisements for European-themed high-rise complexes and the obsession with haute couture brands like Louis Vuitton. The aspirations of the country’s wealthiest 1 percent, a class GQ dubbed “The Bling Dynasty,” were on display everywhere, expressed in gold filigree, marble columns, and Swarovski chandeliers. It became a standard of prestige that trickled down far beyond the country’s social elites. But even these spaces in China had felt less tacky; they hadn’t been yearning so earnestly to convey an aura of opulence that they clearly could not afford.
Finally, O’Neill comes bounding past the two bouncers stationed outside. His black hair is perfectly coiffed, and he wears an Abercrombie-style cable-knit sweater underneath a light-wash denim jacket. He is late because he had gone home to shower after getting off work at No. 1 Chinese Kitchen on Nostrand Avenue. O’Neill is a 37-year-old cook who spends six days a week in the kitchen. He’s from Fujian, China, a province on the country’s southeastern coast.
O’Neill and I first met, or, rather, first made contact, after I walked into the takeout where he worked in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and handed the cashier a slip of paper. The flyer explained that I was a journalist who wanted to interview restaurant workers about their lives and encouraged interested people to contact me via WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app similar to WhatsApp. The woman behind the counter simply nodded. After I had walked several blocks away, a notification popped up on my phone: “Ni hao! I’m so happy to meet you!”
My attempts at meeting cooks, waiters, and delivery workers were driven by curiosity and a desire to know what the lives of these immigrants are really like, but I also hoped there would be a story to uncover. A 2014 New Yorker story by Lauren Hilgers on the underground network of Chinese restaurant employees in the U.S. piqued my interest about the workers in my own backyard. What I didn’t expect was that I, in turn, would become a resource for the workers I interviewed.
Mengba, a delivery worker, asks whether I could help him set up a profile on the delivery app Caviar. Jack asks whether I could help him translate a traffic ticket he’d received. Henry seeks recommendations for where to try authentic American food; he thinks TGI Fridays and Ruby Tuesday are shockingly bad. I oblige when O’Neill asks whether I can write a positive Yelp review to counteract the dwindling business at his takeout. I am happy to help where I can. But not every problem I am consulted about is as easily resolved.
Shan, a man I meet while surveying delivery workers with researcher Do Lee of Biking Public Project, shares a plastic bag full of traffic tickets and summonses that he is unable to decipher because he does not speak or read English. Altogether he has received more than $5,000 in fines while riding his e-bike to make deliveries. If you can imagine living in a country where you don’t speak the language and therefore lack the agency to speak up when confronted by authorities, life begins to seem eerily similar to Josef K.’s plight in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. One day you wake up to authorities from an unknown agency in your bedroom, arresting you for a crime they refuse to disclose.
As the sole person in contact with many of these workers who speaks Chinese and English and is fluent in American culture, I become a kind of lifeline. Though many have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades, what they know about American life is filtered through their limited interactions with customers and what they see in TV and movies.
“What’s your American dream?” I ask one cook who works at a Brooklyn takeout.
“My dreams are many,” he says, “but there are a lot of influencing factors. … Many things have already been determined for me.”
The life of a Chinese cook is grueling and monotonous. Each day begins the same way: Workers report to their restaurant around 11 a.m., then spend the next 12 hours prepping ingredients, flash-frying orders, and maneuvering a wok at scorching temperatures until closing at 11 p.m. That leaves just enough time to go home, shower off the kitchen grease, and sleep before doing it all over again the next day.
The pay is not quite as egregiously low as other service-industry jobs, like those in nail salons. The going rate for a cook, based on the half-dozen I speak to, hovers around New York State’s minimum wage of $10.40 an hour, plus or minus a dollar or two depending on the cook’s skill level and references.
I talk to the son of Fujianese immigrants (he asks that his name be kept private) who have run a successful restaurant business in Connecticut since the ’80s. Conditions have improved considerably since his father started out in the industry, he tells me. In those days, his dad worked 13 hours a day, 365 days a year. “The pay is much better,” he says. “The money you earn at a Chinese restaurant working as an employee is comparable to a person who is earning $80,000 to $90,000 a year.” His calculation is based on the fact employers provide workers with room and board in suburban or rural areas outside of New York City. After taxes, most cooks pull in $2,500 to $3,500 a month, making actual take-home pay closer to $30,00 or $40,000 a year.
Still, none of that diminishes the tedium and utter exhaustion workers experience being confined to a hot kitchen or making countless deliveries for 70 hours a week. The local Chinese papers and online news services regularly cover the occupational hazards of the Chinese restaurant industry, though we rarely read about such incidents in the mainstream media.
In March 2017, a WeChat-based news platform reported the death of a 55-year-old Fujianese man named Lan Zhenjie, who had been living and working as a cook in NYC since 1993. A few months before he died, a varicose vein burst in his right leg and continued to bleed sporadically, never healing because of his untreated diabetes. Even though his daughter in China urged him to see a doctor, Lan felt he couldn’t afford to take time off work. For most restaurant workers, any moment spent away from the job is a missed opportunity to make more money. One evening, after previously attempting to stanch the blood with napkins, Lan called for help from the restaurant’s bathroom. He was found collapsed on the floor in a pool of blood. He later died at a nearby hospital.
World Journal, a popular Chinese newspaper, speculates about the death of Chen Yongshuo, a 45-year-old delivery worker. He wound up brain-dead in the hospital in January 2018. Another World Journal article, no longer available online, suggested it was the result of overworking himself to pay back the $75,000 he owed to the human smuggler who brought him to the U.S. At the hospital, a family friend discovered that he was carrying a notebook ledger on his person and $126 in cash—the tips he had earned from that same day’s work. An average tip of $2 a delivery, by most accounts the industry standard, would mean that he’d have completed more than 60 individual deliveries that day.
One cook sends me a link to a short documentary on YouTube. Floating Days, as the film is titled in English, was released in 2013 and follows a young Chinese immigrant who works at a takeout called China Chen in Syracuse, New York. In it, the dark side of the American dream emerges: exhaustion, isolation, disillusionment, and a growing sense of frustration and aimlessness. In one scene, the cashier at China Chen describes her life in a nutshell: “The restaurant is my stove. Home is my pillow.” That phrase, enigmatic even to native Chinese speakers, has become a kind of sardonic mantra within the restaurant-worker community. It’s a line easily intuited by those who live the life, but the monotony isn’t limited to taglines. I frequent an employment center on Eldridge Street, hoping to meet workers who’d be interested in sharing their stories. One man responds with exasperation. “What stories?” he asks. “Every day is the same. I wake up, go to work, come home. Wake up, go to work, come home.” He has lived that reality for 24 years.
I mention this to O’Neill, that everything I hear about the Chinese restaurant industry makes his life as a cook sound xinku, bitter. He responds matter-of-factly because he knows full well the trade-off he has made.
“If the dollar depreciated to the yuan equal, presumably no one would like to come to the United States!” O’Neill says, preferring to message me in English, though I suspect he is doing so with the help of Google Translate. With an exchange rate of 6.88 Chinese yuan to one U.S. dollar, an uneducated, low-skill worker without resources or high-powered guanxi back in China can make a killing in America, frequently earning double the average salary in top cities like Beijing and Shanghai. “Life is not perfect,” O’Neill says. “Life in the United States is good and bad! Have to pay the harvest!”
When I ask what “have to pay the harvest” refers to, he clarifies that this is a Chinese idiom that means, essentially, “no pain, no gain.”
“I think that’s Irish,” I try to explain when O’Neill first tells me his adopted name.
Nonplussed by my resistance, he replies, “The name is what I take for myself. More suitable for me.”
(He was right. After all, in America, if you can dream it, you can be anything you want.)
“Do you think about going back to China?” I ask O’Neill several days later. He waffles.
“I went back to China three times,” he says, but he still isn’t sure where he sees his home for the future.
“It’s hard to make a decision like that,” I offer.
“China has … the feeling of home! Feel very wandering in the United States, lonely helpless!”
The unease around immigration often stems from a fear of people who are different from us. The unfamiliar can be disorienting, even threatening. Because we live in a winner-takes-all world, there is no room for compromise in the gulf between us-versus-them. You’re either with us or against us, even though in the back of our minds we all know we or earlier generations of our families weren’t always a part of the “us.” Assimilation is a comforting ideal for mitigating the fear that comes with the constant flux of immigrants seeking opportunity and asylum in the U.S.
But assimilation, even for those eager to adapt, is not an easy process. Journalist Olga Khazan sums it up best in her examination of language’s effect on cultural integration: “Immigration reform can be polarizing, but language assimilation is one thing people on all sides of the debate tend to agree on: How quickly immigrants learn to navigate their host countries plays a big role in how likely they are to thrive in their new homelands.”
The great irony of working in the restaurant industry as a Chinese immigrant is that your labor plays a direct hand in preserving an iconic, much beloved staple of U.S. culture—Chinese takeout. And yet you are almost wholly excluded from American life because of your inability to communicate. There is never enough time to learn English, and there are few resources and connections available with which to navigate mainstream society.
When I first meet Henry, a 32-year-old cook who works at a Chinese restaurant in upstate New York near Cornell University, he says he plans to return to China in the summer so that friends and family can introduce him to potential girlfriends. Most of his friends in the U.S. are already married, and, as an only child, he feels the pressure of his parents’ desire to see him start a family from thousands of miles away.
“Even though I’ve been in the U.S. for a while now, I don’t want to drift,” Henry says. “I want to settle down.” I send him a link to the top five dating apps in China, which seems to offer a glimmer of hope. But when I check in with him months later, the summer had passed and he had not gone to China. Instead, he had decided to let things be. “Suí yuán,” he explains. He would follow fate’s lead.
Like Henry, O’Neill has seen many of his friends move on to the “married with children” stage of life. He tells me, wistfully, how one friend met an American girl at the takeout where he worked; the couple later married and had a son. He shares their most recent Christmas photo with me: a handsome young couple smiles in front of a winter wonderland backdrop, wearing festive red outfits and holding two giant candy canes, while their baby son, in a Santa onesie, sits on their knees.
“So I envy him. I can meet the same love as him?” O’Neill asks, as if wondering out loud.
The immigrant narrative of coming to America to work and send money home to family is nothing new. The history of the Chinese in the U.S. is one of imported labor, and the rise of Chinese restaurants in the country can be traced back to a legacy of exclusion.
The first Chinese were lured to the U.S. by the gold rush in California, but when that opportunity quickly dried up, they found work building the Transcontinental Railroad. Chinese laborers, who were almost entirely men due to a variety of forces that discouraged or hindered Chinese women from immigrating, were willing to work for lower wages than most any other group and did some of the most dangerous labor, such as digging tunnels and blowing up mountainsides. One method, for example, required lowering a worker down the side of a cliff in a basket so that he could plug a stick of dynamite in the rock, getting pulled up just in time to clear the blast. The Central Pacific Railroad Company did not bother to keep records of worker deaths and injuries at the time, but the number of casualties is presumed to be in the thousands.
The Chinese gained a reputation for being strikebreakers, a “coolie class” that could be exploited beyond modern comprehension. Certainly, the thinking became, no civilized white man could compete with their inhuman levels of endurance. So in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, effectively placing a 61-year moratorium on Chinese immigration to the U.S. The law would not be repealed until 1943, when China garnered sympathy as a U.S. ally in World War II against the Japanese.
As a result of discrimination and exclusionary practices, the Chinese were all but squeezed out of the regular labor force. “They had little capital, yet wanted work that would avoid dependence on either white employers or workers,” the late sociologist Peter Kwong wrote in his book Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930-1950. “Service jobs—as laundrymen, domestic servants, workers in Chinese restaurants—fitted these requirements. Once the first Chinese began to work in these areas, others followed, and they became ‘Chinese’ trades.”
In fact, a loophole in immigration legislation permitted a limited number of visas to be granted to Chinese who qualified as a special merchant class. Some immigrants pooled their money to open upscale chop suey palaces, taking turns running the establishments and bringing family members to the U.S. under the pretense of working at the restaurant. By 1930, 84 percent of the Chinese working in New York were employed by restaurants or laundries, according to Kwong.
Today, the majority of workers at Chinese restaurants, in New York and elsewhere, come from Fujian. Some of these workers enter the U.S. as refugees claiming asylum from China’s one-child policy (which had been relaxed since 2013 before being abolished in 2016) or fleeing the communist government’s religious intolerance. Many more workers come here with the help of snakeheads, human smugglers who promise safe passage to the U.S. for $60,000 or more.
Like their predecessors, the Fujianese arrive saddled with twin responsibilities: paying off the debt they owe to the snakehead and sending money home to relatives in need. The economic reality of their situation, the fact that they must work nonstop under these immense financial pressures, is accepted as a given, often without complaint. Have to pay the harvest.
But unlike previous Chinese sojourners who saw the U.S. simply as a means to an end—a place where they would toil day and night so that they could return home with a fortune to retire on—many of the young men I spoke to see America as a place they might build a life for themselves. The question is how to go about building that life.
One day, a couple of months into our conversations over WeChat, O’Neill invites me to join him and some friends for a KTV outing. KTV or karaoke television is the Chinese equivalent of letting loose with friends at the club on a Saturday night, only KTV furnishes your party with a private lounge equipped with microphones, a vast selection of Chinese and American pop songs, and a flat-screen TV that plays shoddily produced videos to accompany the lyrics (usually low-fi footage of would-be lovers dramatically walking away from each other, standing in for the original music videos that have not been licensed). Servers, who are just a button away, keep the room stocked with drinks and snacks. At KTV, you can carry on like a king with your closest friends—if for only one night.
O’Neill and I make plans for that coming Sunday since many of his friends, who work together at the Cottage, a Chinese restaurant near Union Square, have Mondays off.
I take two trains from my apartment to the Legend KTV in Sunset Park’s Chinatown, a neighborhood where Fujianese immigrants can conduct their lives almost as if they are still in their homeland. The streets are dark and quiet, what you would expect on a Sunday night. But the party inside is just getting started. I arrive a quarter after 11 and wait in the lobby for O’Neill. The moment he walks through Legend’s doors is the first time we meet face to face.
We chitchat for a minute on the velour couches. A few guests take pictures in front of the gilded Louis XV–style chairs. Then O’Neill disappears into a labyrinth of private rooms to see whether he can find his friends; he comes back with a small posse. Jack, a delivery worker who is in his mid-40s, dons an ascot cap and welcomes me to the party in confident English. He tells me he learned to speak English from the American girlfriend he lived with for four years in North Carolina. He seems to be the master of ceremonies for the evening.
A couple is singing a duet in Chinese when we enter. I scoot onto the U-shaped pleather couch that encompasses half the room and faces the gilded flat screen. Two glass coffee tables are crowded with half-drunk bottles of Corona, plates of fresh fruit and black melon seeds, and plastic containers of bing fan or “ice rice”—a concoction of shaved ice served over rice and topped with chunks of watermelon, peanuts, fruit jellies, and cloud ear fungus.
A giant glass appears and is filled with red wine before I can refuse. Cigarette smoke circulates the windowless room as people take turns belting Chinese pop songs. O’Neill insists on speaking English to me despite his limited vocabulary, and, though I can barely decipher his accent over the music, I make out one phrase that he repeats throughout the night: “This is how we enjoy ourselves, to have happy life. Tonight have happy life.”
Jack asks me whether I like to go clubbing. He tells me that he goes dancing in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, the neighborhood that Sex and the City made hip, and how he thinks most white girls are surprisingly predictable—they all love cocaine. Later in the evening I see him pull out a wad of cash and take out several bills for a friend who’s leaving. In their social circle, Jack clarifies, the men take turns treating the entire group to an evening out. Women never pay. “I can spend $1,000, maybe $2,000, in one night. Easy,” he tells me, mimicking the “work hard, play hard” ethos that typifies the America he has seen in pop culture.
Around 2 a.m. the karaoke songs finish and the lights are flipped off. An LED disco ball transforms the room into an impromptu dance floor as Chinese techno throbs through the walls. Everyone is on their feet, jumping and sweating and twisting their bodies to the beat like there’s no tomorrow. By 3 the group has expended the last of the frenetic party energy, and people start to peel off.
I leave the karaoke with O’Neill, his childhood friend Aaron, and Jack; all three share the same hometown in Fujian. Staving off early-morning hunger pangs, we walk a few blocks into the heart of Sunset Park’s Chinatown in search of food. We sit down at a Fujianese restaurant where the three friends delight in having me try the dishes and flavors that remind them of home: bowls of noodles bathed in a subtle, fish-based broth; delicately folded, miniature wonton dumplings; savory, fried doughnuts speckled with green onions.
We finish eating, and I start to order an Uber home. Instead, Jack calls a Chinese taxi service to pick me up. O’Neill accompanies me for the ride back to Crown Heights even though he’ll have to double back to Sunset Park, where he lives. The car is quiet compared with the last several hours inside the Legend KTV. We talk about the difficulties of being far away from home—in my case a five-hour flight from California, in his case an entire continent away from China. When the driver stops at my building, I say goodnight and slink into my apartment.
It’s almost 5 a.m. and the birds outside my window have begun their morning song. I climb into bed smelling of cheap cigarettes and start to drift off to sleep. But my phone pings with a new message from O’Neill: “I hope you are happy tonight.” I’m reminded of something he told me earlier in the evening. In 15 years of living in the U.S., I am his first American friend.
Unlike the others, O’Neill still has work in the morning. At 11 a.m. he’ll report back to No. 1 Chinese Kitchen, just a few blocks away from my apartment. I will be fast asleep.
Katie Salisbury is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. Her work on Chinese restaurant workers was featured in her TED Talk “As American As Chop Suey” and has been collected in a photography exhibition called Thank You, Enjoy that will travel across the U.S. in 2019.
