What does it mean for, say, an illegal Chinese immigrant to “underlive” an American worker in Chinatown?
I remember reading about illegal Chinese apartment conversions, where bunk beds hold ten men in an apartment intended for at most two people in Walking Shadow, a 1994 Robert B. Parker Spenser detective novel, part of which is set in a Massachusetts port city which is now half Chinese.
Spenser goes to visit an apartment in this city where Chinese illegals sleep in plywood cubicles. The Chinese call it a gong si fong.
“The building had all the usual public housing charm. No expense had been spared on cinder block and linoleum and wire mesh over the ceiling fixtures. We knocked on a blank door with no number, and a slight Chinese man in a white shirt and black pants opened the door and smiled at us and bowed. Mei Ling spoke to him in Chinese.
“My cousin’s name is Liang,” Mei Ling said to me.
Liang bowed again and put his hand out.
“How do you do?” he said.
I shook his hand. He backed away from the door and gestured us in. For a minute I was disoriented. The entry door led almost at once to a blank plywood wall. A hallway ran right and left, parallel to the outside corridor, punctuated with plywood doors, padlocked shut. The only light came from the bare bulb in a wall sconce at the far end. Liang led us along the plywood hallway to the last door and into his room. It was so narrow I could have touched both walls with my fingertips. It was maybe seven feet long and was filled almost entirely with a pair of bunk beds, one above the other. There were two suitcases under the bed, and several shirts and pants on hangers flat against the wall. Light came from one of those portable construction lights with spring clamps attached to the head frame of the bunks. I had seen better-looking graves.
“How much you pay for this?” I said.
Liang looked at Mei Ling. She translated. He answered.
“Liang pays one hundred dollars a month,” she said. “So does the other man.” She nodded at the top bunk.
“And there’s four other cubicles like this?” I said.
Mei Ling translated. Liang nodded.
“Rent-controlled, the place costs the landlord maybe two, two fifty a month,” I said more to myself than to Mei Ling. There were no surprises here for Mei Ling. “Gives her seven fifty, eight hundred a month profit.”
That’s fiction, but it’s based on fact. Parker’s acknowledgements said that
“Most of what little I know of Chinese-American culture I learned from Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society, by Gwen Kinkead. It is an informative book, and, even better, a great pleasure to read.”
I looked up Kinkead’s 1991 book, which started out as a New Yorker article, and she talked about going to one of these apartments:
“Lin and I met on a street near the East River. He was eager to show me the gong si fong, but, he said, we must hurry. The other bachelors in the apartment were waiters, and were out working now. Lin was worried that one might return unexpectedly and find him with a low faan [Chinese for “barbarian”—Kinkead is a white American woman.] in the apartment. I agreed not to mention the location of the gong si fong, because it is in a city-subsidized housing project, and is illegal.
The place, originally a one-bedroom apartment, was dark and close-smelling. A twenty-foot-long corridor that ended in a grimy window ran along one side of it. The left wall of the corridor, made of rough, unpainted plywood, enclosed what used to be the living room. It had been subdivided by more thin plywood partitions into three bedrooms, for six people. The bedrooms had sliding plywood doors, each secured with a tiny padlock, like cabins on a ship. The landlady had come from China in 1981, gone into business, and made good. She had put up the partitions and then moved on, and she now charged her sublessees a total of $850 a month for a $317 rent-subsidized apartment.
Lin showed me his bedroom, the compartment nearest the windows. It was seven feet by six-smaller than many closets in New York City apartments. A bunk bed took up most of the space. The top bunk had a straw mat over bright sheets. The bottom bunk was Lin’s. The distance from the bed to the windows was two steps. Two people could not pass in the space.”
$850 in 1991 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $2,083.92 today. And here’s another thing to know about these bunkhouses/apartments—some guys sublet their bunks and sleep in shifts:
“Tens of thousands of Chinese live spartan, insular lives like Lin’s, never mixing with outside society, renting beds in basements or in gong si fong, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with ten or fifteen people, or doubled up with other families in tiny apartments in lower Manhattan. Almost no one in Chinatown lives alone. Some sub-sublet their bunks to others and sleep in shifts. They work, work, work. Working six days a week, from sixty to eighty hours, is typical. In Chinatown there is no TGIF. Everyone wants, like Lin, to save a pile of money. The expressions I heard most often in Chinatown as I talked to its residents were “big money,” “U.S. dollar,” “easy money,” and dozens of other variations on the theme of money.”
And of course what they’re trying to do is save enough money so that they can import relatives, open businesses and, like the landlady with the subsidized apartment above, exploit the next crop of Asian immigrants.
Trump’s HUD is trying to get illegal aliens, and “mixed status” families (illegals with anchor babies) out of public housing—but unfortunately, that wouldn’t affect this particular landlady, who seems to have been a legal alien.
What would stop that would be enforcing normal zoning laws in Chinatown—but as Jack Nicholson was told in the movie Chinatown, that generally doesn’t happen.
Let’s return to the fictional version in Robert B. Parker’s book. Spenser is explaining to his longtime girlfriend why there are so many Asians in small Massachusetts town:
“A lot of them are illegal, so they don’t complain about anything. They’re suspicious of labor organizers and safety inspectors, and they take the wage you give them.”
“A factory owner’s dream,” Susan said.
Right! But the American Dream is not to have to compete with that. And that’s why, as I wrote last Labor Day, it’s good to have an Administration that “openly takes the side of American workers.”
