In Immigration Purgatory

Twenty years ago this morning, a ship called the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens. Inside its hold—a cramped, hot, windowless space that was about the size of a two-car garage—the vessel carried nearly three hundred undocumented immigrants from China. They came, mostly, from a series of villages in Fujian Province. Some of them might be called refugees, as they were fleeing political or religious persecution, or the occasional horrors of China’s one-child policy. But many, and perhaps most, would more accurately be described as economic migrants; they knew that in America there were dishes that needed washing, food that needed delivering, clothes that needed pressing. In a menial job on the margins of the U.S. economy, they could earn in a year what it might take a decade to make back home, and they were willing to risk their lives to get here.

The voyage was a Conradian nightmare, from Bangkok to Mombasa, Kenya, and then down around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1620, it took the Mayflower sixty days to reach these shores. In 1993, it took the Golden Venture a hundred and twenty.

When the ship plowed into a sandbar several hundred yards offshore, passengers mobbed the deck, then began, one after another, to jump over the side and into the chilly Atlantic. They had been informed by the “snakeheads”—human smugglers—who controlled the ship that if they could set foot on land in the United States before being caught by the authorities they would be permitted to apply for political asylum. Ten of the passengers did not survive the swim to shore. (In 2006, I wrote an article about the Golden Venture for the magazine, and then, later, a book.)

Today, after two decades of galloping economic growth in China, it may seem hard to imagine a time when people were willing to die in an effort to flee the country. But the Golden Venture arrived in New York on the crest of a great wave of illegal migration from China to the United States. In 1995, the C.I.A. estimated that a hundred thousand people were being smuggled here from China every year.

For the Clinton Administration, this posed an acute dilemma. When the Golden Venture arrived, it was quickly swarmed by TV news helicopters, which broadcast stark images of the malnourished passengers as they huddled in blankets on the beach. Until then, if you arrived in the United States without the proper documentation, but requested asylum when you got here, you were generally given a court date, then released. But many new arrivals failed to show up for these hearings, opting, instead, to try their luck as undocumented migrants. In the hours after the Golden Venture arrived, as the White House and immigration authorities tried to determine what to do with the passengers from the ship, it was decided that this catch-and-release asylum policy had become a “magnet” for illegal migration. The sheer magnitude of China’s population was enough to fluster even the most ardent of refugee advocates. (When Jimmy Carter admonished Deng Xiaoping in 1979 for not allowing more of his people to emigrate legally, Deng is said to have replied, “Why certainly, President Carter. How many millions would you like?”) 

Read more in the New Yorker

I Just Met A Very Racist Chinese !

Interesting! I have always joked with my close Chinese friends that I think Chinese are one of the most racist people around. Some agree with me, but than they are my close friends, where jokes are taken light-heartedly.

Yesterday, I arrived KLIA from KK and my wife from Phnom Penh, after visiting our daughter and grandchildren there.My wife's plane arrived 20 minutes earlier but she said she would wait for me so we can take the same taxi to our hotel.

I bought a ticket for a limousine at the airport. More often than not, most limousines that I can remember taking before have had Malay drivers, but for today, we have a Chinese driver.

On our way to the city I noticed the driver constantly talking in Chinese to his friend over the VHF radio. Half way to the city it started to rain heavily and my wife started talking to the taxi driver in Cantonese. There was a moment of silence and a slow response from the driver and I can't help noticing that blood have rust to his head, he was red-faced and shocked.

I asked my wife what she said that have made him blushed so badly, not that his colour is much brighter than pale. She said she asked him whether it is always raining in KL and told him to drive carefully as the road might be slippery. I asked why he looked shock and almost speechless? 

My wife said "I will tell you when we get to the hotel."

Here go the story.

While this guy was talking to his friend on the VHF radio his friend asked him whether he is taking passengers to Genting and he said no, that he is going to the city and that his fare are two lalat (flies), husband and wife going to a five-star hotel. He didn't realise my wife fully understands the exchanges in Cantonese all this while.

My wife is half Malay and half Chinese and speaks fluent Cantonese, Hakka and Mandarin. I scowled her for not telling me while we were still in the car and she told me what she did was more appropriate than me picking a fight with a low-life taxi driver.

She told me she purposely spoke to him in Cantonese to embarrasse him, which she did well to impound his rudeness without being rude herself and probably taught this low-life a good lesson that there are non-Chinese looking people who understand and speak Chinese.

This brings us back to the subject of stereotyping all Chinese as being racist, which I believe is more cultural than actual racism. 

To the Chinese, anything they find repulsive will constitute name-calling, which bring us to Chinese against Chinese. 

Insults swirl as Hong Kong Chinese called mainland Chinese locusts and complained that mainland tourists bring their less-than-refined social habits and women on the verge of childbirth into the territory. 

The Hong Kongers only want their bulging wallets but not their fetishistic bad manners.

The common Chinese term for anyone not Chinese is kui,  the lesser beings to the Chinese eyes. No other races are spared from the kui, including the kwailos that once ruled Hong Kong from 1841 to 1997 and one that have taught social finesse to the Hong Kong Chinese, who now feel, theirs, are of superior culture than the nouveau riche mainland Chinese.

Kui is less repulsive than flies or locusts, one that carry diseases and the other one eating everything in its way.

China's Unlivable Cities

BY ISAAC STONE FISH

In Invisible Cities, the novel by the great Italian writer Italo Calvino, Marco Polo dazzles the emperor of China, Kublai Khan, with 55 stories of cities he has visited, places where "the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells," a city of "zigzag" where the inhabitants "are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day," and another with the option to "sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles." The trick, it turns out, is that Polo's Venice is so richly textured and dense that all his stories are about just one city.

A modern European ruler listening to a visitor from China describe the country's fabled rise would be better served with the opposite approach: As the traveler exits a train station, a woman hawks instant noodles and packaged chicken feet from a dingy metal cart, in front of concrete steps emptying out into a square flanked by ramshackle hotels and massed with peasants sitting on artificial cobblestones and chewing watermelon seeds. The air smells of coal. Then the buildings appear: Boxlike structures, so gray as to appear colorless, line the road. If the city is poor, the Bank of China tower will be made with hideous blue glass; if it's wealthy, our traveler will marvel at monstrous prestige projects of glass and copper. The station bisects Shanghai Road or Peace Avenue, which then leads to Yat-sen Street, named for the Republic of China's first president, eventually intersecting with Ancient Building Avenue. Our traveler does not know whether he is in Changsha, Xiamen, or Hefei -- he is in the city Calvino describes as so unremarkable that "only the name of the airport changes." Or, as China's vice minister of construction, Qiu Baoxing, lamented in 2007, "It's like a thousand cities having the same appearance. Read more.