Months ago, a reader suggested a story about a local businessman who told a harrowing tale of escape from China.
I often thought of stopping at the man’s shop, but I didn’t want to invade his privacy or pry into a painful past.
Then, on Wednesday, I heard on the radio about 22 people being held by U.S. immigration officials after apparently arriving at the Port of Seattle in a 40-foot cargo container from Shanghai, China.
So I stopped at the one-man business in Everett, pulled out a notebook and asked the man if he would be willing to share his story.
“Long story,” he said. “But never, never put my name. I just don’t like that, nothing else.”
Herald policy is to not use unnamed sources. I do it here because, while I can’t verify every detail of this man’s story, he is representative of immigration issues that have dominated the headlines in recent days. Congress is struggling to pass immigration reforms, while every day foreigners risk death for the chance to live in the United States.
“I like my people very much, but Chinese people want to come to the United States,” the man said. “We need food. We need freedom.”
“That’s why those people you heard about this morning probably paid $40,000 to come. No people swim today – too dangerous. They pay the money,” he said.
He is 57. He arrived in the U.S. in 1974, and in May, he will have been here 32 years.
Several years before that, he said, he and five friends walked, by night, to the South China Sea from his small town near what used to be Canton in Guangdong Province. They could see the lights of Hong Kong, then under British rule.
Using balloons as floats, they swam for about four hours to reach Hong Kong. He lived there several years before a man he called “an uncle, but not a good uncle” agreed to sponsor him in the United States. The man lived in Eastern Washington.
Once he arrived, the uncle put him to work, but paid only $100 a month. Then the man was jailed for overstaying his visa.
“American jail has ping-pong and television, breakfast, lunch and dinner, apples and milk,” he said. “American jail is China’s hotel.”
Before he left China during the throes of the Cultural Revolution, he said, each person was allowed “1 pound of meat per one month and 6 ounces of rice a day.”
He said he’s been a U.S. citizen for 24 years, and brought his mother here shortly after gaining citizenship. They lived in Seattle’s International District before she died nine years ago, he said. He now lives in south Everett.
I had to push to get him to talk about how he finally managed to become a citizen. He said he was briefly married to an American, but has no family now.
He’s had his Everett business, a food shop, for nearly 20 years. He works six days a week – “no employees, too much headache.” Before coming to Everett, he worked in a Chinese restaurant in Seattle.
He speaks English well but doesn’t read or write much of it. I offered to find him help with that, but he said he didn’t like school and finds everything he needs in Chinese newspapers.
In 1998, a customer brought him a Bible with the text in both English and Chinese. He showed me the book, signed by its giver. He’s read the New Testament four times, he said. “I know God, and that makes me more happy,” he said.
When he first arrived, the uncle drove him past an animal hospital. He couldn’t believe animals in the United States had hospitals when there were none for many people in China. When they saw an ad for hot dogs, he said he told the uncle, “You told me the American people don’t eat the dog.”
Asked about China’s president, Hu Jintao, visiting the Boeing Co. in Everett next week, he said, “I still don’t like the communists. Whatever they say, they never keep promise.”
Here, he said, he can say he doesn’t like President Bush or the war in Iraq.
In China, he said, “if you put up a sign that you don’t like the president, in one minute you’ll be all gone. They don’t have that freedom.
“I really enjoy this country,” he said. “It is too nice. A lot of people don’t appreciate it.”
For many who come, “the dream is easy money.”
“But they work hard,” he said. “It’s not easy to come here. Very, very tough. I’m not rich. I’m not poor. But it is better than China by 20 times.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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