7 ms·

The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers

115 points by throwaway344 12y ago

marktangotango 12y 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 12y 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/perfect-grilled-steaks-with-these-3-must-do-tricks http://americastestkitchen.tumblr.com/post/86246187118/perfe...
cordovas 12y 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.
- jacquesm 12y 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 12y 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.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      It's usually not the immigrants not paying taxes, it is their employers not paying taxes. Under the table work is not because they don't want to pay taxes, they'd be happy to. It is because they get paid by employers that prefer to hire cheap immigrants rather than to pay wage taxes and other withholdings. One mans freeloading is anothers profiteering. They are also quite limited in what government provided benefits they can partake in. Mostly the stuff that is already there for everybody else (infrastructure) as soon as they need more than that they are usually discovered and deported. Cheap labour is only good as long as it is cheap.
      - moggflunkies 12y ago
        I'm lol'ing about your post. 1) If an employee doesn't pay taxes its because the employer doesn't retain it & report it. So it cannot be the immigrants "usually" paying the taxes but the employer failing to. One begets the other. The rate of employers paying will always be higher than the employee paying. 2) You imply that under the table work pay isn't an agreement between employer/employee. Nobody wants to pay taxes. Especially once you are making at or near minimum wages. At this level every cent counts as a larger percentage of income relative to someone like you. 3) Often times in practice, non-reported compensation is a benefit to both parties. The worker retains ~15% of his income that would otherwise be lost to taxation. The employer does the same. One mans profiteering is another mans profiteering. The overarching problem is the rate of taxation on lower income individuals. Think beyond federal income taxes and into state income taxes, sales tax, land tax, license renewals, vehicle registration, traffic tickets, etc. Rapidly you realize that individuals are constantly making payments to various entities that are generating income for the government. This impacts low income, low skill workers the most. Consider the disparity of a low income worker and a middle income worker as a percentage of income per week lost to taxes. $100 for vehicle registration or 10% in federal taxes or 9% sales tax on purchases. What is 4% of your income could easily be 20% of someone else.
pessimizer 12y ago
If this story were about prostitutes, it would be read differently.
- mpthrapp 12y ago
  >If this story were about something else, it would be about something else. Wow. Can't say that I thought of that.
  - jkaunisv1 12y 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.
    - zorpner 12y ago
      While not impossible, it's less common for someone (who is nearly always female) to be abducted as a child, forcibly addicted to heroin, then sold into kitchen labor. Yes, if this article were rewritten word-for-word to reference prostitution it would be a fictional story which could be compared to the existing article. However, it would badly misrepresent the state of global sex trafficking and the victimhood of people affected by it.
      - pessimizer 12y ago
        I think that your fantasy version of sex trafficking is common, but is certainly not representative. Many (most?) women are trafficked in exactly this way, knowing generally what they will be employed to do, just not knowing how terrible the conditions and pay are, and that they will never be able to pay off their 'debt' to the traffickers. The vast majority of human trafficking is to provide house servants and manufacturing workers, but we don't care because sex. Judging by this thread, stories of human trafficking that don't involve sex are heartwarming and inspirational.
nlh 12y 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 12y 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_Americans_in_Houston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_American...
  - nlh 12y ago
    Even more fascinating. Thanks for the correction and link.
  - dozy 12y 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.
    - dogecoinbase 12y ago
protonfish 12y 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 12y 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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - humannature 12y ago
    not sure what you being abc has anything to do w/ your comment
- dozy 12y 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.
incision 12y 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 12y ago
Anyone who's interested in a more in-depth look should check out Fortune Cookie Chronicles. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446698970 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 12y ago
A heartwarming story of conspiracy to violate immigration laws, the tax code, and employment discrimination law.
JoblessWonder 12y 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.

115 points by throwaway344 12y 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 12y 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/perfect-grilled-steaks-with-these-3-must-do-tricks http://americastestkitchen.tumblr.com/post/86246187118/perfe...

cordovas 12y 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.

jacquesm 12y 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 12y 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.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    It's usually not the immigrants not paying taxes, it is their employers not paying taxes. Under the table work is not because they don't want to pay taxes, they'd be happy to. It is because they get paid by employers that prefer to hire cheap immigrants rather than to pay wage taxes and other withholdings. One mans freeloading is anothers profiteering. They are also quite limited in what government provided benefits they can partake in. Mostly the stuff that is already there for everybody else (infrastructure) as soon as they need more than that they are usually discovered and deported. Cheap labour is only good as long as it is cheap.
    - moggflunkies 12y ago
      I'm lol'ing about your post. 1) If an employee doesn't pay taxes its because the employer doesn't retain it & report it. So it cannot be the immigrants "usually" paying the taxes but the employer failing to. One begets the other. The rate of employers paying will always be higher than the employee paying. 2) You imply that under the table work pay isn't an agreement between employer/employee. Nobody wants to pay taxes. Especially once you are making at or near minimum wages. At this level every cent counts as a larger percentage of income relative to someone like you. 3) Often times in practice, non-reported compensation is a benefit to both parties. The worker retains ~15% of his income that would otherwise be lost to taxation. The employer does the same. One mans profiteering is another mans profiteering. The overarching problem is the rate of taxation on lower income individuals. Think beyond federal income taxes and into state income taxes, sales tax, land tax, license renewals, vehicle registration, traffic tickets, etc. Rapidly you realize that individuals are constantly making payments to various entities that are generating income for the government. This impacts low income, low skill workers the most. Consider the disparity of a low income worker and a middle income worker as a percentage of income per week lost to taxes. $100 for vehicle registration or 10% in federal taxes or 9% sales tax on purchases. What is 4% of your income could easily be 20% of someone else.

pessimizer 12y ago

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

mpthrapp 12y ago
>If this story were about something else, it would be about something else. Wow. Can't say that I thought of that.
- jkaunisv1 12y 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.
  - zorpner 12y ago
    While not impossible, it's less common for someone (who is nearly always female) to be abducted as a child, forcibly addicted to heroin, then sold into kitchen labor. Yes, if this article were rewritten word-for-word to reference prostitution it would be a fictional story which could be compared to the existing article. However, it would badly misrepresent the state of global sex trafficking and the victimhood of people affected by it.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      I think that your fantasy version of sex trafficking is common, but is certainly not representative. Many (most?) women are trafficked in exactly this way, knowing generally what they will be employed to do, just not knowing how terrible the conditions and pay are, and that they will never be able to pay off their 'debt' to the traffickers. The vast majority of human trafficking is to provide house servants and manufacturing workers, but we don't care because sex. Judging by this thread, stories of human trafficking that don't involve sex are heartwarming and inspirational.

nlh 12y 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 12y 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_Americans_in_Houston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_American...
- nlh 12y ago
  Even more fascinating. Thanks for the correction and link.
- dozy 12y 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.
  - dogecoinbase 12y ago

protonfish 12y 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 12y 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.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- humannature 12y ago
  not sure what you being abc has anything to do w/ your comment
dozy 12y 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.

incision 12y 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 12y ago

Anyone who's interested in a more in-depth look should check out Fortune Cookie Chronicles. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446698970 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 12y ago

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

JoblessWonder 12y 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.