Growing up amid rice paddies in a village outside Fuzhou, China, former Zen restaurant sushi chef Lin Geng said he and his family were treated like “second-class citizens.”
Coming to the United States 14 years ago, Lin hoped for something better. He found a succession of restaurant jobs that featured 72-hour weeks and pay that until recently ran well below the legal minimum.
In China, Lin said he and his family didn’t have enough money to live. In the states, he said, he doesn’t have enough time to live.
“Here, you don’t have a life,” he says. “It’s like prison.”
Now 33, Lin says he almost didn’t make it here.
The journey began in Lin’s late teens, with a 15-hour plane ride from China to Bogota, Colombia. The journey to America ended up taking two months in 2002, costing him $60,000 — and nearly his life.
In Colombia, a 12-hour boat ride stood between the 30 Chinese travelers and Panama. There, Lin said, the human smugglers known as snakeheads could more easily bribe officials into overlooking missing paperwork and put the immigrants on a plane to Miami.
When the group first tried to land on Panamanian shores, he said, they were caught and turned around by that country’s coast guard. When they arrived again in Colombia, he said, the snakehead bosses began to fight, delaying the plans and forcing the group into hiding.
In their second attempt, said Lin, he and the others had to cross a mountain to reach a river that meets the Colombian coast. While scaling the mountain in the darkness, he said, they met a pair of locals who — with fearful expressions and index fingers pressed to their lips — stopped the group.
Colombian guerilla fighters were nearby, the locals whispered, pointing to footprints nearby.
“We almost met them,” Lin recalled. “If we had, I wouldn’t be here.”
By the time he arrived in Panama, he said, he and the others were exhausted, starving, dehydrated and badly sunburned.
“Everybody’s skin was peeling off,” he said.
The Colombian smugglers were so afraid of getting caught by Panamanian authorities that they dropped off the 30 immigrants so far from shore they had to walk hand-in-hand through the surf to avoid drowning.
Once they made it ashore, they stayed at the home of a snakehead boss, where they waited for about a month before getting onto a plane bound for Miami. There, the troubles continued.
The immigrants flushed the fake visas they were carrying down toilets at Miami International Airport, but were still caught by officials and placed in a detention center. Still, Lin said he applied for political asylum and was released after 10 days.
He flew to LaGuardia Airport, went to a job agency in Chinatown and, two days after arriving in New York City, was working as a dishwasher in a New Jersey restaurant.
After his first shift, Lin broke down crying because the hours and conditions were so draining.
“‘That’s your life here,'” he recalled his uncle sternly telling him.
“You just take it, you know?” Lin continued. “All you can do is work hard.”
Working in Chinese restaurants, Lin might have expected to at least savor the flavors of his home country. But he found the sauces were seasoned differently and loaded with sugar. Even the rice wasn’t the same.
That first job, he said, came with housing that was two hours away from the restaurant. He recalled spending four hours a day riding in his employer’s car, on top of his 12-hour days at the restaurant. Now, when he hears the sound of a car directional, the rhythmic ticking reminds him of the piercing loneliness of that time.
“You don’t really make friends in the restaurant,” he said.
Since then, he has worked at about 15 restaurants in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The “restaurant English” Lin learned before making the trip, he said, often instilled jealousy in his superiors and only brought him more trouble, as bosses heaped on demands.
At one, the housing provided was a living room floor shared with five others. At another, he lived in a restaurant owner’s backyard shed. And at another, the bunk bed he shared was so close to the ceiling that he couldn’t sit upright.
At one point, Lin said he was working at a Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh when he was unexpectedly fired. His boss handed him a brown paper bag with just enough money to buy a bus ticket back to Chinatown.
The memory of emerging from the subway onto 42nd Street that day still makes him wince.
“It started raining and I was carrying bags and it was windy,” he said, one hand gripping an imaginary umbrella. “I just started crying — you’re on your own, you know?”
Broke and out of a job, Lin said he dined on bread and water that night.
“I think that’s why I don’t like New York, because it reminds me of that feeling,” he said. “I always feel lonely. Even still, right now, I feel lonely.”
Lin sometimes refers to China as home, and other times refers to New York City as home. Asked where he considers his real home to be, he said, “I don’t know. I haven’t found it, yet.”
“It’s just as much home here as China,” he said. “I don’t feel like I belong to them, either.”
On the phone with family in China, he said they tell him, “You’re American now.”
“But I don’t know what that means,” he said.
Lin says the way citizenship works seems arbitrary. He’s watched his co-workers who know no English over the years get fast-tracked for visas and green cards, while he’s had no such luck. He thinks marrying an American may be his only path to citizenship.
In phone conversations with his parents, Lin says they stick to the everyday. They ask if he has a girlfriend, if he’s eating enough fruits and vegetables.
“They are just so not open at all,” he said of his family, and of Chinese culture in general. “I don’t blame them. It’s just a different way of thinking.”
Now, Lin said he’s disenchanted with the restaurant industry, and though he returned to the employment agencies of Chinatown to help his former Zen co-workers, he did not search for a restaurant job himself. He’s landed a landscaping position in Northampton.
He dreams of being a writer, a photographer or a teacher.
“Is there really an American dream?” he asks.
While life here hasn’t been easy, Lin said he has few regrets. For one thing, he said, he enjoys the opportunity to speak up for immigrants who, like him, have suffered from the underground economy. He volunteered at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, which last spring sparked a public discussion about worker underpayment.
“I don’t think I could be as critical as I am right now if I lived in China,” he said, explaining that living in the U.S. has enabled him to be “independent — mentally and economically.”
“(In China) I was never being encouraged to be an independent person. You had to be a good kid, listen to your teachers and your parents. Be a good citizen, don’t challenge the government. Don’t make trouble, be a good person. We’re always pretending everything’s fine. There’s always good news in the newspaper and television — it’s just pretend.”
In the U.S., “you’re taught to be who you are,” he said. “Parents here squat to talk to their kids,” said Lin. “That never happens in China — we teach fear. Here, we teach kids to be happy.”
For his part, he said, he’s still learning.
“I also had to learn how to be happy,” he said, looking off into the distance. “I’m still trying.”
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.