The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/cooka%C2%80%C2%99s-tale

by throwaway344 • 12 years ago

115 39 12 years ago

>“Everything we do, we do for the next generation,” he said, and added, “No matter what, it beats sitting around in the village.”

Being from a small town in an impoverished area of the US, I can somewhat relate to that sentiment. Very interesting story. The author paints a very stark picture about restaurant workers from China. The subject of the story, who spoke the quote above, makes more than I would have supposed.

throwawayornot• 12 years ago

Great article! Being the fat guy I am, I had to google "salt and cornstarch on meat" and I'm glad I did! "As odd as it sounds, don’t skip the cornstarch. The cornstarch absorbs additional moisture from the surface of the steaks. Drier exteriors mean even darker, more intense browning, which translates to bigger, more complex flavor."[1]

[1] http://americastestkitchen.tumblr.com/post/86246187118/perfe...

cordovas• 12 years ago

It's almost cathartic to hear the struggle of immigrants coming to the US for better opportunities transcends ethnic and racial backgrounds. We've heard this story differently before about Latino immigrants coming to the US and taking tough jobs in the kitchen to provide for a better life for their family. Anthony Bourdain even chronicles it in his book, Kitchen Confidential.

Of course this narrative of a hard working immigrant coming to this country to work goes squarely against what we hear from critics saying immigrants only come here to freeload. If anything, this article just shows how lazy Americans can be, when Americans can't be bothered to eat meat or fish with bones, but of course that's just an anecdote.

How do you create opportunities for immigrants and people in general? How do you empower people to leverage their own skills and monetize them, without others looking to exploit them.

Great article.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

The whole 'immigrants coming here to freeload' thing is a ruse capitalizing on fear of the other in order to gain political power. If the immigrants would stop their work collectively and move back to their countries of origin the bottom would drop out of the economy within 90 days.

Strang• 12 years ago

"Immigrants coming here to freeload" and "immigrants coming to work industriously" are not mutually exclusive. The general concern is that immigrants work largely under the table. They therefore benefit from the welfare state without contributing taxes. In that sense they are "freeloading".

In other words, they contribute labor to the economy, but largely freeload when it comes to any government-provided benefits.

webnrrd2k• 12 years ago

I think the vast majority of immigrants come here to work hard and make a better life for themselves and their families. They also end up making life better for a lot of other people around them. One example is that a lot of illegal immigrants pay taxes through a fake Social Security Number, and they pay into the system for years. However, they very often don't get the benefits because they'd get caught using the number (e.g the number was for some 80-year old white lady), or go they back to their country.

However, it's still important to acknowledge the fact that a small number of immigrants get sick, or descend into alcoholism, or get hurt badly enough that they can't really work. It's just the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.

I've grow up around a lot of immigrants, illegal and legal, and they have pretty much all been decent, hard-working people, and they have the same kinds of financial/family/emotional problems that everyone else has.

incision2• 12 years ago

'If anything, this article just shows how lazy Americans can be, when Americans can't be bothered to eat meat or fish with bones, but of course that's just an anecdote.'

Labeling Americans as a group and particularly certain subsets within as lazy is just as credible and, I'd wager, often done for many of the same reasons as labeling immigrants freeloaders.

jacobbudin• 12 years ago

Plus Americans love chicken wings.

kjs3• 12 years ago

We (and most every other country) demonize immigrants as a matter of course on usually fallacious ethnic, religious and economic grounds. See how the Irish were portrayed[1] when waves of them were showing up in America in the early 19th century. The rhetoric and stereotypes have been reused in each successive wave, for the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Latin Americans, etc.

[1] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/10/06/negative-ste...

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

If this story were about prostitutes, it would be read differently.

mpthrapp• 12 years ago

If this story were about something else, it would be about something else.

Wow. Can't say that I thought of that.

jkaunisv1• 12 years ago

Actually pessimizer is drawing a parallel between the two situations. Both involve going into fairly substantial debt to get from China to the US under the promise of more money than could be made at home. Both involve years of difficult labor and living conditions. Both have limited options for leaving the lifestyle once committed. Yet the article about kitchen workers reads more like a hard path to the American dream, while the (hypothetical) one about sex workers reads more like a terrible, inhumane path to sexual slavery.

I think it's a noteworthy comparison and not a non-sequitur/trueism. Can't say I've seen much evidence of thought yet.

pessimizer3• 12 years ago

Didn't realize that this would be confusing to people. This is a story of human trafficking.

nlh2• 12 years ago

Fascinating article. One part in particular answered a question I've had about Houston for ages:

I visited Houston with a friend about a decade ago and we were both puzzled about the Chinatown area of the city. Why, we asked, would a city smack in the middle of the country have such a large Chinese population? NYC & California made sense, but Texas?

And as it turns out:

"Rain and his companions walked for a full day and most of the night, until, before dawn, they came to a road, where an associate of the smugglers picked them up. They went to Houston first, and from there a van took them straight to New York."

Waystation city on the international Chinese immigrants smuggling route for folks who just crossed the Mexican border. Fascinating.

EDIT: Aaaaaaand I'm wrong. Thank you shiftpgdn for the Wikipedia link and background.

shiftpgdn• 12 years ago

That's not the real reason at all. First Houston is major port city, the fourth largest city in the country, the most diverse in the country and it's certainly not "smack in the middle of the country." Houston has two China towns. The east downtown China Town area was established in the 50s-70s but later abandoned due to white(yellow?) flight as the new Chinatown area expanded in the west of the city in the 1980s. This was also fed by Vietnamese "boat-people" who were typically of Chinese descent.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_American...

nlh2• 12 years ago

Even more fascinating. Thanks for the correction and link.

dozy3• 12 years ago

I'm curious as to your source or why you say, in no uncertain terms, that Houston is "the most diverse in the country". If such a thing could be accurately quantified, I would bet my life savings on NYC.

abat• 12 years ago

That's not necessarily the reason for Houston having such a large Chinese community. The majority of Chinese in Houston are legal and often more educated immigrants that would not have gone through Mexico.

The people profiled in the article were from specific poor areas in China (eg Fujian) that could be considered the Chinese equivalent of Appalachia.

protonfish• 12 years ago

This is the kind of article that I want to read in a newspaper. It's a story about real people in my own area - not some scary, exotic, far-off place. Politics should not the only source of news.

crazygringo• 12 years ago

“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.”

Curiously, Chinese laundries are not mentioned, and are ubiquitous here in NYC. I wonder it the omission is a mistake, or if there's some reason laundries don't fit in this list.

dozy3• 12 years ago

The quote is from the perspective of 'a woman from Beijing', it's not meant to be an exhaustive list, just as this article is not meant to be a research study - it's a perspective piece. Interestingly enough, it implies that women from Beijing (or at the very least this one) are under the impression that those are the only three jobs available to Chinese immigrants. Of course there are more possible jobs available, but I find the anecdotal perspective more valuable in this journalistic context.

incision2• 12 years ago

I was actually surprised that the workers in question are themselves Chinese. In and around DC (Indian Head extends perhaps 15 miles out) restaurants that 10 or 15 years ago would have been staffed entirely by Asians are overwhelmingly staffed by Hispanics under Asian management.

I often wonder what sort of path the people who used to work those jobs have taken since.

wnissen• 12 years ago

Anyone who's interested in a more in-depth look should check out Fortune Cookie Chronicles. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446698970 It really explains why the food at 99.9% of the "Szchewan" and "Peking" etc. places all tastes the same.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

A heartwarming story of conspiracy to violate immigration laws, the tax code, and employment discrimination law.

JoblessWonder• 12 years ago

I remember going to Chinatown in San Francisco when I started college and seeing the job postings posted in a window for Chinese restaurants throughout the country. It blew my mind but also made so much sense.

The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers

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