Cartesianos assim vai o mundo
Leia em American-English American Dream que virou (e vira todos os dias de mnhã à noite) pesadelo para os familiares desta infeliz família Chinesa, e para muitos imigrantes espalhados elo mundo.
Aconselhamento gratuito do Cartesiano: Se é imigrante, lance-se imeidatamente na aprendizagem da língua do país onde vive. Não se deixe seduzir pelo dinheiro que poderá ganhar já, a curto prazo, comprar um popó de depois esbarrar com isso e partir aos bocados a família toda.
Lance o seu olhar mais longe do que a ponta do seu nariz, ponha uns binóculos nos olhos e aponte para longe, para as fronteiras que se lhe podem abrir quando falar a língua, e o bem-estar que isso lhe pode trazer para a sua felicidade e segurança no dia a dia, para si e para os seus. O Cartesiano a pregar sermão aos peixes. Lol.
New York Times . / Region
Published: December 29, 2013
The Death of a Family, and an American Dream
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Yilin Zhuo held a photograph
of his wife and four children at Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens Cemetery
in Iselin, N.J., on Nov. 10.
By VIVIAN YEE and JEFFREY E. SINGER
Published: December 29, 2013
His younger daughter
was the last to go into the ground. Before her had gone her sister, her
younger brother and the baby, William. Too small for his own coffin, he
lay nestled beside their mother.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Mr. Zhuo, center, at the burial of his wife and four
children, who were stabbed to death in late October in Brooklyn.
After American soil had covered his family’s coffins, Yilin Zhuo had
nothing left to stay for. In early December, he abandoned his adopted
home, Brooklyn, for the Chinese village he had come from two decades
ago.
“A father just wants to see his children grow up,” he said, hours before
his flight. “Now my children are gone. My wife is gone. Can I ever be
happy again?”
Linda was 9; Amy, 7; Kevin, 5; and William, just 1. They and their mother, Qiaozhen Li, 37, were found stabbed to death
in late October in their Sunset Park apartment. A cousin who had been
staying with the family was arrested after the police found him there,
his clothes spattered with blood, a large kitchen knife nearby.
It was family violence
on a scale rarely seen in New York City, set in motion, the cousin told
the police, by his sense of failure to find the security, stability and
family all newcomers to Brooklyn’s Chinatown seek.
Until that Saturday night, the household had been one more poor
immigrant family among the thousands who have emptied the towns and
villages around Fuzhou, in the Fujian Province in southeastern China,
for Sunset Park.
Once in New York, the men board buses for jobs in the Chinese takeout
shops and buffets that sprout improbably along neon-lit highways and
inside small-town strip malls: west to Michigan, north to Maine, south
to Georgia. America’s Chinese restaurants are a diaspora of the
Fuzhounese, nearly half a million of them hoping, like generations of
immigrants before them, that long hours and low wages will someday make
their uprooting worth it.
Mr. Zhuo, 41, was one such worker. His cousin, Mindong Chen,
25, was another. Their divergent paths — one on the way up, the other
now charged with murder — lay bare the reality of life in this Chinese
community: crushing burdens and relentless poverty, permanent for all
but a few.
Mr. Chen’s troubles were there for all to see in his postings on Qzone, a
Chinese social media service. “Why is the pressure now so great?” he
wrote. “The path has been so difficult.”
Little has been told beyond the Chinese press about the people who died
and about Mr. Zhuo, the father left behind, and Mr. Chen, the cousin. He
is awaiting a hearing on whether he is mentally competent to stand
trial for murder.
Both cousins
had come to New York the same way, as young men sent away from home to
grind away at busboy and wok-cook jobs that offer only the merest hope
of a better life. But Mr. Zhuo built his chance into a humble career,
home and family.
What little he had, his cousin — struggling, envious, desperate — is accused of shattering in one night.
Fired from yet another job and on the verge of deportation, Mr. Chen
came to stay in the family’s 57th Street apartment in October. He
gambled. He smoked. He did not act right, Ms. Li told relatives. Days
before the stabbings, Mr. Chen had argued with the children. The night
of Oct. 26, Ms. Li, in a call with her mother-in-law in China, told her
that Mr. Chen had a knife. By the time concerned relatives came to her
door and Mr. Zhuo rushed home from work, it was too late.
Soon after his arrest, Mr. Chen told detectives that “everyone seems to
be doing better than him” since he arrived in the United States in 2004,
according to the police.
His family, and Mr. Zhuo’s, had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars
from relatives and friends for Chinese smuggling rings, known as
snakeheads, to sneak their sons into New York City.
They would speak no English, have few prospects. But there was still a
chance — to support their families, repay their smuggling debts, sponsor
emigrating relatives and start families.
The restaurant workers live by two dark jokes.
One plays on the Chinese words for snakehead, stove burner and pillow,
which all end in the suffix meaning “head.” “We Fujianese have three
heads — snakehead, stove burner, pillow,” they say. Arrive by boat or
plane, cook, sleep, wake to cook again. Jobs last between a few weeks
and a few years.
(Page 2 of 2)
The other saying, “ka che dian,” or “card, car, store,” refers to the green card,
property and business that young men must possess before they are
considered eligible to marry. But before saving for the future, they
must toil for years to repay their snakehead debts, which can top
$80,000.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
The bodies of Mr. Zhuo’s wife, Qiaozhen, and their
children, Linda, Amy, Kevin and William, were found in their apartment.
Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times
Mr. Zhuo’s cousin, Mindong Chen, is awaiting a
hearing on whether he is mentally competent to stand trial for murder.
“Work is our entire life. We don’t have any choice,” said James Zheng,
31, who bounced between more than 10 different restaurants across the
country before opening an employment agency off Sunset Park’s Eighth
Avenue, the heart of Brooklyn’s Chinatown. “They think if they keep
working so hard, they can own a restaurant or own a house.”
“What they’re pursuing and what they’re living are completely different,” he added. “This is the American dream: There’s nothing to it.”
Mr. Zhuo’s father died when he was 12. When he was 21, he was smuggled out of China for $40,000.
By 2006, he had secured a long-term position as a stir-fry cook at Best
Wok, a takeout shop in Rosedale, Queens, preparing dish after dish of
chicken and broccoli. After he struggled to find a wife in New York, his
mother set him up with a friend’s daughter in China, Ms. Li.
As his family grew, Mr. Zhuo worked harder. Knowing he could not afford
cigarettes, he never smoked. He declined his boss’s invitations for
nights out. He saved up to help a brother pay his smuggling debts.
To avoid the lengthy commute from eastern Queens, Mr. Zhuo lived like an
out-of-town worker, sharing a room provided by his boss with other
employees. He went home on Sundays. After 12-hour shifts ended at
midnight, he and others watched TV or video chatted with their families.
Over time, the couple found some security. They paid off their snakehead debts two years ago. Both gained legal status.
While others sent their children to be raised in China, Ms. Li stayed
at home with their four children. They rented part of their apartment to
relatives, crowding into the remaining two rooms.
When Mr. Chen knocked on their door this fall, he had just been fired
from a job in Chicago. They offered him a meal, then a bed.
Since arriving in the United States as a 16-year-old, Mr. Chen had had
trouble holding down work. Between jobs, he gambled and smoked marijuana
in illegal slot machine parlors, said his friend of several years, Tony
Chen. Often agitated, he would pound his hand against the machines when
he lost.
He was usually broke, earning little but his family’s disapproval. His father, Chen Yixiang,
had paid nearly $100,000 to his son’s smugglers, and still owes half
that to lenders, he said. “I will never be able to see my son again,”
Mr. Yixiang said, speaking from China. “I am worse off than my son is
now. My head is a mess.”
The stream of Fuzhounese immigrants has slowed in recent years. But New
York still exerts a powerful pull for those who might earn $2,000 a year
at home, compared with $1,500 or $3,000 a month in a restaurant, said
Kenneth J. Guest, a Baruch College anthropologist who studies the city’s
Fuzhounese population.
In the employment agencies, men study grids of yellow Post-it notes
fluttering on the walls. Each announces a job, monthly pay and a
three-digit number, the restaurant’s telephone area code. For many, the
names of the cities and states where they work mean little. What they
know are numbers: highway exits, area codes and the time it takes to
ride back to Chinatown.
On days off, or between jobs, they return to New York. Some keep small rooms in subdivided apartments,
sharing them with as many as six roommates. Others stay with relatives.
The less fortunate pay a few dollars to spend the night in Internet
cafes, playing computer games until they fall asleep.
Although Mr. Chen did not have much money or a green card, he got
engaged a few years ago, Tony Chen said. But after he paid the customary
bride-price — a prerequisite that can top $50,000 among the Brooklyn
Fuzhounese — the woman disappeared, a not-uncommon type of marriage
fraud that left Mr. Chen devastated.
“Looking at one couple after the next. Why do I feel so lonely?” he
wrote on Qzone in August 2012. “I want to shout out loud: I love you.”
In this environment, anxiety and depression run rampant. But mental
illness is both stigmatized and not well understood in the community,
said Paul P. Mak, the president of the Brooklyn Chinese-American
Association, who recently organized a series of mental health workshops
at the Zhuo children’s school. Mr. Chen has undergone psychiatric
evaluation, said his lawyer, Danielle V. Eaddy. A hearing on whether he
is fit to stand trial is scheduled for January.
Speaking little English and afraid of immigration authorities, many
immigrants do not turn to the police when they feel they are in danger,
Mr. Mak said. It is unclear whether Ms. Li sought help for Mr. Chen
before Oct. 26.
Too late to save her, her family flew to New York last month for the
funeral. They scattered daisies and carnations over the coffins — white
flowers, the Chinese color of grief.
Then it was time to leave. In his lap, Mr. Zhuo held a photo of his
smiling wife and children as the black car pulled away.
Starmer in victim treatment review
Email