CHAPTER 7

Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People—or, The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989

If the nation hadn’t been in the midst of a kosher duck shortage, Michael Mayer’s suspicions wouldn’t have been piqued when he walked into the Moshe Dragon Chinese restaurant that fateful August morning. If the crispy, sweet taste of Peking duck hadn’t become de rigueur for upscale Jewish house parties in suburban Washington, D.C., there might not have been such an unmet appetite for kosher duck, leading to the kind of temptations that arise when demand outstrips supply. If all this had not been so, the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989 might have been averted and the community’s faith in its religious leaders might not have been shaken. Reputations might not have been sullied, careers might not have been derailed, and cover-ups might not have been alleged. Moshe Dragon might even still exist today, hosting bar mitzvahs and catering celebratory Shabbat dinners. But “if” is a word upon which history pivots into hypothesis. What happened happened. In a community filled with long memories and short tempers, the effects still reverberate today.

Until the spring of 1989, there was one—and only one—farm in the entire country that produced kosher ducks: Moriches Duck Farm, on the East End of Long Island.

In the region’s heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, there had been dozens upon dozens of family duck farms on the East End, responsible for some 75 percent of the nation’s duck production. Millions of Pekin ducks were shipped westward each year. Housewives made extra pin money by hatching duck eggs in their homes for five cents apiece.

Pekin, a breed of duck, is not to be confused with Peking duck, the delicate Chinese dish that will figure prominently in this saga, though both originated in China. Local lore has it that Pekin ducks first arrived on Long Island around 1873, either when a New York merchant named Ed McGrath hatched a clutch of eggs brought back from China or when James Palmer, a shipping captain, transported two dozen white ducks from China, nine of which survived the journey.

Pekins are the snowy white ducks with orange bills and feet of popular imagination. The most famous Pekin duck is, of course, Donald, followed by his entourage of Daisy, Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The Pekins became farmers’ favorites because they breed like bunnies (up to 150 eggs a year) and fatten up quickly. They are also not the brightest creatures, so they can be mindlessly herded, like sheep—a character trait favored by the agriculture industry.

The East End blossomed as the duck-producing capital because its environment—humid climate, sandy soil, and proximity to water—was ideal for raising Pekins.

But in the 1970s the Long Island duck industry began a precipitous decline. A combination of environmental pressures on duck farmers and tempting real estate deals brought about by eastward suburban expansion made it appealing for duck farmers to sell out and close up shop.

In 1989, a holdout, Moriches Duck Farm, closed down. The specifics are no longer clear, but it seems safe to surmise Moriches was simply following the fate of the dozens of duck farms before it. Suddenly, the nation’s kosher duck supply dried up. “There was a short period of time where kosher ducks became almost nonexistent,” recalled Tom Jurgielewicz, a third-generation duck farmer whose property once bordered the Moriches farm. It might seem that there would be at least one other kosher duck supplier out there, but truth be told, the audience for kosher duck is rather limited, given the scope of American Jewish cuisine. There was only one duck farm in the United States that processed kosher ducks, and after it closed there were none.

To combat the crisis, a group of rabbis and businessmen identified a poultry producer in South Dakota. South Dakota seemed like a safe business bet, a place with few real estate pressures to drive a farmer to sell out.

The South Dakota poultry producer normally processed geese, which are not a year-round product (think of the last time you had barbecued goose at a Fourth of July picnic), so his facility was idle for much of the year. The Jewish consortium convinced the goose processor that it would be good business to process kosher ducks when he wasn’t busy with the holiday season.

It took months for the South Dakota operation to get up to speed; processing kosher ducks is not a simple matter. In the meantime, the only remaining kosher ducks were ones already killed, frozen, and on their way down the supply chain. Prices immediately doubled. Kosher duck prices, like that of light sweet crude oil, are sensitive to the laws of supply and demand. While duck at the local Giant supermarket was $1 a pound, kosher duck was pushing $6 a pound. Of course, most people weren’t aware there was a kosher duck shortage. But it was Michael Mayer’s job to know. He was the mashgiach, or kosher cop, for Moshe Dragon, the first kosher Chinese restaurant in the Washington, D.C., area. He had been hired by the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington to oversee Moshe Dragon, which had opened during Rosh Hashanah in September 1988 in Rockville, Maryland, with much aplomb.

Washington, unlike Baltimore, to the north, did not have a deeply rooted Orthodox community. The population was too new and too transient, made up largely of transplants who worked in, influenced, or wrote about government. In the same way that having a hometown professional basketball or baseball team signals that a city like Charlotte or Phoenix has arrived, a kosher Chinese restaurant signified the establishment of the Washington Orthodox Jewish community.

Political, religious, and investment capital went into bringing Moshe Dragon to the Washington area. A charismatic young rabbi sought out two successful area entrepreneurs to provide the backing, then recruited a Chinese-Cambodian immigrant, Lenny Ung, who had experience with a kosher Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia.

The opening night of Moshe Dragon in a Rockville strip mall drew a dense, designer-clad crowd. In the first week alone, the restaurant reportedly brought in at least $30,000 in sales.

Ung, who had the chiseled features of a Hong Kong pop star, was an immediate hit with the customers. He had a charming smile, and he embraced his customers enthusiastically, making everyone feel like a regular (which, in an Orthodox community that kept kosher, nearly everyone was).

As the only nice sit-down kosher restaurant, Moshe Dragon became a magnet for the Orthodox business crowd, then a popular source for catered dinners. “Everyone wanted to have a duck party,” Mayer recalled. The obsession was striking. Mayer spent some fifty hours a week, from before the restaurant opened to after it closed, making sure that Moshe Dragon was abiding by the kosher rules. He circulated, inspected the deliveries, and kept an eye on the kitchen. No violations were going to happen on his watch.

The kosher laws, also known as kashruth, are a complex set of dietary rules rooted in religious writings; learned Jews have spent a great deal of time parsing them, with one eye on biology and the other on production. Once upon a time, most cooking was done in the family kitchen or local business, and it was relatively easy to ascertain if the product was reliably kosher. Today, industrialization, transcontinental shipping, and processed food additives have made interpreting and enforcing the dietary rules a full-time job for a phalanx of rabbis. Americans have the FDA and the USDA; the Jewish community has OK (Organized Kashrut) and OU (Orthodox Union). The kashruth regulations get deep into the physiology of creatures or the minutiae of industrial food processing. The nuances can take years of training to master.

The guidance is rooted in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, from the Torah. The most well-known rule forbids the mixing of milk and meat, an interpretation of the injunction that kids—young goats—should not be cooked in their mother’s milk. Mammals must have split hooves and chew their cud, which excludes pigs but includes giraffes. Sea creatures must have scales and fins—which means no sharks or catfish (they lack scales), no whales (which are mammals anyway), and no shellfish. While the Torah has a list of forbidden birds, the exact translation of most of these species is no longer known. Scavengers—such as vultures—are considered nonkosher. To play it safe, the rules stick with birds known by tradition to be kosher, including chicken, goose, and duck. (There is a minor controversy about whether turkey is kosher, but most authorities maintain that it is acceptable, much to the relief of those at Thanksgiving dinner tables every year.)

There are also rules regarding how kosher meat can be slaughtered and what it can touch in the kitchen and still remain kosher. Rabbis issue rulings all the time: cream of tartar was deemed kosher by some, while certain kinds of chewing gum, because of their emulsifiers, were not.

Some Jews take kosher rules very very seriously. Mayer was one of them. A redheaded man with soft features, he had spent years studying at a yeshiva in Baltimore and had mastered the rules enough to keep kosher in the harshest of conditions. In the jungles of Vietnam, where he served in the military, he existed on only berries, plants, and occasional care packages of kosher C rations from his mom. He’d told Ung, “If I could keep kosher in Nam, you can keep kosher in this restaurant.”

Being a mashgiach is like being a high-pressure security guard, with a watchfulness akin to that exhibited by aviation inspectors at airports today. Only a mashgiach doesn’t answer to the Department of Homeland Security; he answers to God.

So Mayer, having kept up with the latest kosher news, was fully aware that there was a kosher duck shortage when he walked into Moshe Dragon at around nine A.M. on August 21, 1989. What he saw baffled him. There, in the Buick-sized commercial oven, hung thirteen smoking ducks. In the freezer sat another seventeen. Where had these ducks come from?

“You couldn’t buy it for any kind of money. It just wasn’t going to be had,” he remembered. “You can’t just open the Yellow Pages and say, ‘I want to order a hundred pounds of kosher duck.’ ”

Mayer walked into the office and found three receipts lying on the desk. The letterhead was from Donald Chin, a local Chinese grocer and restaurant supplier, but the orders themselves were written in Chinese. Mayer didn’t read Chinese, though he knew where he could find someone who did. He walked a few doors down to the Chinese laundry and asked the man behind the counter what it said.

The man translated for him: Ducks. Ribs. Chicken. Substantial amounts of each.

Mayer went on a mashgiach tear. Using the waiters’ receipts, he calculated the amount of duck that had been served over the past few months. He compared it to the purchase receipts of duck from the local kosher supplier, Shaul’s and Hersel’s. There was a clear duck-accounting discrepancy, not unlike what happened more recently with Enron’s books. There was no way these amounts could be reconciled. The last duck shipment had been over a month earlier, on July 19, as both the restaurant’s and the supplier’s receipts showed. Hundreds of pounds of duck of mysterious provenance had appeared after that date.

With a sick feeling in his stomach, Mayer called one of the oldest and most conservative members of the rabbinical council, a man who had total control over kashruth certification in the Washington area. “We have a problem,” Mayer told him.

They immediately impounded the ducks.

Ung, who was in Philadelphia at the time, rushed home to face accusations. The receipts belonged to a cousin of his, he claimed. Somehow they had made their way to his desk.

The rabbical council can act with the ruthlessness of a Delta strike force should a kashruth violation call for it. In October 1989, it raided a bagel bakery at midnight, during the sandwich shift; within twenty-four hours of learning that the owner had been using its kosher kitchen to secretly package ham-on-bagel sandwiches for another vendor, it cut off the business’s kashruth certification. But the resolution to the Moshe Dragon crisis would not be that simple. There were too many vested interests at stake. The council shut down the restaurant and began an investigation into Mayer’s charges.

Moshe Dragon reopened a week later. During that time, the kitchen had been koshered and another mashgiach had been hired; Mayer had been placed on “paid vacation.”

Soon the local Jewish weekly picked up the scent of a larger story for the restaurant’s closure, not fully buying Ung’s explanation about “broken air-conditioning.” Perhaps a reporter had been tipped off by someone with an agenda, though Mayer denies that it was he. The headline of Washington Jewish Week’s first article, which continued over four pages, was a taste of what was to come over the next year: “Chinese Kosher Clash at Moshe Dragon: Food Fraud or Frame-up?”

The tectonic plates within the Jewish community began to grind against each other.

Now, if you are a non-Jewish reader, you might wonder: All this over Chinese food? A Jewish reader may read this and nod in understanding: of course, all this over Chinese food.

Six thousand miles from the Holy Land, five thousand miles from eastern Europe, eight thousand miles from China, Chinese food had become a more significant part of the Jewish-American diet than the eastern European dishes of most Jews’ immigrant ancestors. Chinese food had become, arguably, the ethnic cuisine of the American Jew.

For many Jews, Chinese food is a weekly ritual, steeped in family tradition and childhood memories. The average American Reform Jew is more likely to know how to use chopsticks than how to write the Hebrew alphabet. Chinese food on Christmas Day is as much an American Jewish ritual as the Seder on Passover (maybe even more so, once you take into account nonobservant Jews). When my friend Orli Bahcall was growing up, her family even had takeout Chinese food for family Shabbat dinner. To this day, she associates Chinese food with the religious rituals of Shabbat.

This close relationship has been the subject of at least two academic publications and hundreds, if not thousands, of standup jokes delivered by comedians from Jackie Mason to Jerry Seinfeld. Many share their favorite Jewish-Chinese joke, some variation of “According to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5768. According to the Chinese calendar, it’s 4705. That means for 1,063 years, Jews went without Chinese food.”

Of course, not all Jewish people have eyed Chinese cuisine with good-natured affinity. In 1928, a Yiddish reporter sounded the alarm at the height of the chop suey madness, saying that Jewish fans of Chinese food were destined to forget their own culinary traditions. The Der Tog reporter lightheartedly suggested that perhaps communal-minded American Jews everywhere should raise this protest sign: “Down with chop suey! Long live gefilte fish!”

A number of Jewish entrepreneurs have built their careers and fortunes on their connection with Chinese cuisine. Eddie Scher, a businessman who lives in Felton, California, developed a monstrously popular brand of Asian-themed sauces widely sold in Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Dean & DeLuca. He drives around with the company name on his vanity license plate: SOY VAY. Kari-Out, the largest distributor of soy sauce packets in the country, is owned by a Jewish family, the Epsteins of Westchester, New York.

There are even a number of Jewish-owned Chinese restaurants. Perhaps none is as impressive as Chai Peking, a glatt kosher Chinese place in Atlanta, which demonstrates the lengths Jews will go to get their Chinese food. Tucked in a Kroger supermarket in a strip mall, Chai Peking doesn’t appear any more sophisticated than a food-court joint, yet it has some of the most fiercely loyal customers in all of Atlanta, maybe even the entire Southeast. It is believed to be the only glatt kosher Chinese restaurant within a radius of almost seven hundred miles—up to Maryland and down to Miami.

Chai Peking has raised takeout and delivery to another level. Takeout often means customers making four-hour round-trip drives through multiple states to pick up huge orders. In 2003 a Nashville man flew his plane to the Atlanta airport to pick up an order for a synagogue fund-raiser back home. Included in his order, twenty-eight gallons of soup, packed in five-gallon buckets. Deliveries are often sent by FedEx, frozen and packed on dry ice to arrive in Texas, Mississippi, or North Carolina the next day for whatever anniversary, birthday party, or other celebration merited the appearance of Chinese food.

At Chai Peking, I ate one of their house specialties: a Chinese hot dog. A beef hot dog is wrapped in pastrami and egg-roll skin, then deep-fried. It had familiar sensations—the crispness of the flaky egg-roll skin, the juicy hot dog, and the cured taste of pastrami—but layered together a new way.

I had found all of this interesting information, but so far my exploration had only deepened, not clarified, the central mystery: Why is chow mein the chosen food of the chosen people?

The academic literature turned up some interesting hypotheses. For one thing, Chinese people and Jews were among the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups in the United States, which meant they didn’t share the same days of worship as the rest of the predominantly Protestant and Catholic country. Even today, Christmas is often the busiest day of the year for Chinese Restaurants in New York, Florida, and other Jewish-American urban hubs. At Shun Lee, an upscale restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the onslaught of Jewish customers begins at noon and does not stop until eleven P.M., making Christmas twice as busy as the next-busiest day of the year; Singing Bamboo in West Palm Beach expects three times the normal number of customers on Christmas. The Christmas-and-Chinese-food ritual has even been systematized. At the 92nd Street Y in New York, you can come in for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet and a movie or two. Jews in the Bay Area have launched ChopShticks, comedy shows at Chinese restaurants during the holidays that have been continuously sold out.

The academics also note that Chinese cooking uses essentially no dairy. Thus it is easy to make kosher, more so than Italian and Mexican food, the other two main ethnic cuisines in the United States.

But there are more subtle reasons for the connection, such as those put forth by two sociologists. Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine interviewed over one hundred people about their experiences with Chinese food and compiled their observations in a paper called “Safe Treyf” (“treyf” is the word for nonkosher food), so named because they found that Chinese restaurants were where many Jews felt safe in breaking the laws of kashruth. The two sociologists posit that Chinese food helped the generation of immigrant Jews feel more American, in part by making them feel more cosmopolitan at a time when they were trying to shed their image as hicks from eastern Europe. Chinese food used to symbolize worldiness. As Tuchman and Levine write: “Of all the peoples whom immigrant Jews and their children met, of all the foods they encountered in America, the Chinese were the most foreign, the most ‘un-Jewish.’ Yet Jews defined this particular foreignness not as forbidding but as appealing, attractive, and desirable. They viewed Chinese restaurants and food as exotic and cosmopolitan and therefore as good. Indeed, many Jews saw eating in Chinese restaurants as an antidote for Jewish parochialism, for the exclusive and overweening emphasis on the culture of the Jews as it had been.”

Another paper focused on a more prosaic explanation: geographic proximity. New York City’s Lower East Side, which three-quarters of all Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920 passed through, was only a fifteen-minute walk from Chinatown, notes Hanna R. Miller in a paper titled “Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food Their Ethnic Cuisine.” That proximity encouraged culinary crossover. The Eldridge Street Synagogue, erected by eastern European Jewish immigrants in 1887 as the first permanent synagogue in their new homeland, is now surrounded by Chinese restaurants and specialty stores. It has decided not to fight the inevitable: now it hosts the Kosher Egg Roll Festival.

As Jews moved out of the Lower East Side and to other New York neighborhoods, other cities, and the suburbs, Chinese restaurants followed. There was a readymade audience with readymade appreciation for their food. Over time, the two groups helped each other become more American. “Jews!” one Chinese restaurant owner enthusiastically gushed to me. “They’re our best customers!”

More subtly, Chinese restaurants emphasized Jews’ proximity to the Euro-Christian tradition, rather than its distance. Christian imagery in Chinese restaurants was almost nonexistent, in contrast to Irish or Italian establishments. A friend of mine, Brian Chirls, excitedly alerted me to a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint in which Portnoy discusses nonkosher Chinese food: “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white—and maybe even Anglo Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP! Boy, do we eat. Suddenly even the pig is no threat.”

In search of someone who spoke from the stomach rather than the head, I turned to an expert on Chinese restaurants—a Jewish man named Ed Schoenfeld from Brooklyn, who started as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant and has risen to become one of the country’s leading Chinese-restaurant consultants. We met in the dining room of one of his clients, an upscale Chinese restaurant in lower Manhattan called Chinatown Brasserie. “It was part of the secular European Jewish experience,” he said. He elaborated at length on different flavor profiles and accessibility. Then he noted: “Jews are concerned with value.”

Still unsatisfied, I sought someone who could speak with both Jewish and Chinese authority: the lost Chinese Jews of Kaifeng.

Chinese Jews appeared in the city of Kaifeng about a thousand years ago during the Song Dynasty, a period of rapid innovation in which China gave the world gunpowder, movable type, and the magnetic compass. In 1163, as part of the Jewish diaspora, the community built a synagogue in Kaifeng, once the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty. The Chinese synagogue rose and fell in Kaifeng, destroyed by fire and flood, until the last one was demolished in the 1860s. Without a gravitational center for the community’s religious heritage, the Chinese Jews largely blended in with the surrounding Chinese community. But the smattering of Chinese Jews who have remained in Kaifeng draw pilgrims from around the world.

I had received a tip from a professor who had been there months earlier: that an old Jewish woman still lived in the alley that had been the epicenter of Jewish life in Kaifeng, Jiaojing Hutong, or “Teaching Scriptures Alley.” I found her home among the narrow passageways and knocked on the screen door of her one-room home. An old Chinese woman cleaning vegetables on the floor looked up and welcomed me in. She was small, with a cheerful, round face and a belly-shaking giggle. As the remaining Jew in the hutong, she had grown used to foreign visitors over the years—mostly Jews from America or Israel, but occasionally people from Japan or Hong Kong. During peak holiday seasons, she said, she got up to three or four visits in a single day. “Sometimes there are so many that they don’t even fit in here,” she added, gesturing at the dark room, where she lived by herself; her husband had died and her five daughters were all married.

She was not a practicing Jew, but she kept on display a few menorahs that had been passed down through her husband’s family. Much of the other Jewish paraphernalia, like a Jerusalem plate and an Israeli flag, had been given to her by strangers. She was shrewd enough, however, to capitalize on her popularity. Three or four years earlier she had started selling elaborate red paper carvings that combined Jewish and Chinese themes: the star of David flanked by gently curving lotus flowers; a menorah with the Chinese character for fortune; the word “shalom” with a pair of graceful swallows; flowers with the star of David at their center, sandwiched between “I Love Israel” in English and “China Kaifeng” in Chinese.

She earned all her income from these paper carvings. “I have to make a living. I have to eat,” she said. This eighty-one-year-old Chinese woman was a professional Jew.

She invited me to sit down at the table. I explained to her at length the research I was doing about Jews in America. I was hoping that she, being one of the rare Chinese Jews in the world today, would be able to shed light on a question that had vexed academics, bolstered comedy routines, and intrigued Portnoy.

“Why,” I asked, “do Jews in America like Chinese food so much?”

With a glint in her eye, she slapped the wooden table.

She knew.

I leaned in. This was the insight for which I had traveled thousands of miles, walked along a highway at midnight, and scoured alleyways.

Her Buddhist koan–like response was profound in its simplicity:

“Because Chinese food tastes good.”

That brings us back to the psychological importance of a kosher Chinese restaurant, and why the community wanted the Moshe Dragon issue to go away.

The newspaper accounts pressured the rabbinical council into launching an intensive, three-month investigation of the restaurant. The rabbis brought in a big-time Washington lawyer to work pro bono; he, in turn, brought in a private investigator who had earned her stripes on a kashruth corruption story a dozen years earlier. Meanwhile, they fired Mayer, though officially the council said that this had nothing to do with the ruckus he had stirred up—something Washington Jewish Week reporters approached with skepticism.

Invoices were scrutinized. Translators were hired. Suppliers were interviewed. Accountants were called in.

One particularly heated confrontation between Mayer and investigators ended with Ung collapsing on the floor. He was taken by ambulance to Holy Cross Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a stress-related condition and given sedatives. Moshe Dragon’s backers said he’d suffered a nervous breakdown, perhaps an echo of his experience in the Cambodian holocaust. Mayer scoffed: “He saw his whole thing fall apart right in front of him.”

Despite the winds of the early evidence, at the end of the investigation the rabbinical council issued a solemn two-page report clearing Ung of any wrongdoing.

The council said it had belatedly discovered that Moshe Dragon had purchased ducks from Shaul’s and Hersel’s kosher market on August 16—nearly a month after the previously presumed last sale. The council traced the ducks back to a supplier in Philadelphia that had also been a supplier to Ung’s restaurant in that city. While these experienced businessmen had somehow created no paper trail for hundreds of pounds of duck, the council found many people who vouched for the duck delivery. “This evidence supports Ung’s contention that the ducks sold at Moshe Dragon during the summer of 1989 were purchased from kosher sources,” the report stated.

In a world that tracks the provenance of kosher food with the rigor of high-end art dealers, this was the equivalent of accepting a photocopied letter and a pinky swear to vet a Rembrandt. The report hastened to add that the kitchen had been kashered—not that there was any need for kashering, given that there was no violation to begin with—back when the controversy had first started.

The private investigator retained by the council, and later dismissed for murky reasons, issued a statement to Regardie’s, a local business magazine, after the report came out: “The council’s statement supporting Ung flies in the face of facts presented to the council during mid-November,” she said.

Many in the community sensed a cover-up and boycotted the restaurant.

“The trust between the restaurant’s owner, the general public and the council has been damaged beyond repair,” read one indignant letter in Washington Jewish Week.

Others were happy to get back to their duck parties with the rabbinical blessings of their leadership.

But the local Jewish newspaper wasn’t satisfied. Were they beholden to truth or God? The Washington Jewish Week reporters kept probing. The paper ran an editorial entitled “Ung Jury.”

The council rabbis called the reporters “despicable” to their faces and cursed them under their breath. The community paper was given tongue-lashings in local synagogues. Hundreds of people canceled their subscriptions. Local businesses muttered about pulling their advertising. The community wanted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for its only Chinese kosher restaurant. Residents today still hiss at the paper’s coverage, accusing the tabloid of sensationalizing the topic. “Did you see the issue where they put the picture of the dead duck on its cover?” one person asked me. There it was: an almost life-size photograph of a glassy-eyed plucked duck, its beak fallen open, splashed across the full front cover below the headline “The Saga Continues.”

Ung’s troubles multiplied when Regardie’s magazine sent some moo shu pancakes from Moshe Dragon to be tested and they came back showing traces of whey—a dairy product that helps prolong shelf life but is strictly unkosher. Another cycle of accusation, investigation, and scandal began. Washington Jewish Week ran articles with headlines like “Rabbis Face New Questions over Kosher Pancake Flap” and “Maryland Attorney General’s Office Reviewing Moshe Dragon Charges.”

A group of Reform and Conservative rabbis tried to rescue the situation by issuing a statement saying that they believed the restaurant was kosher “at the present time.” This was like attempting to use duct tape to repair a boat that was already sinking. As they were issuing their statement, however, the restaurant’s new mashgiach complained of violations and resigned.

The months-long controversy dragged down sales at Moshe Dragon. Ung couldn’t deal with it anymore. In mid-1990, he sold the restaurant to a family of Iranian Orthodox Jews who owned a kosher Chinese restaurant in Baltimore. After less than two years of existence, Moshe Dragon was dead.

Ung, his wife, and their four children still live in the Rockville area. His wife is employed at a jewelry store on Georgia Avenue; he works long hours, including time at a grocery store. The Moshe Dragon incident remains a sore point with the family, and mention of it still draws bitter tones. Ung is working hard and too busy to do an interview, his wife explained when I called their home.

After it was sold, Moshe Dragon was reopened under a new name, Royal Dragon. It still operates today two doors down: its owners are Orthodox and Iranian, but its chefs are Chinese. It still lists duck on the menu. The kosher duck shortage of 1989 is long over now. It would be but a single asterisk in the annals of food-commodity history were it not for the scandal.

Nearly fifteen years later, Mayer told me that the scandal made him question his relationship with God. “I come from a very strong Orthodox family,” he said. “I had doubts after the incident with the rabbinical council. It really tested my faith really deeply.” He still lives in the Silver Spring area, but he maintains a frosty relationship with the rabbinical council and Moshe Dragon’s former investors. “They all pretty much shun me,” he said. “To them, it was like it was yesterday. They don’t let go.”

He believes he was scapegoated because of the Jewish love of Chinese food: “I think it got a lot of breaks because it was a Chinese restaurant. People didn’t want to see it closed down. This wasn’t like one McDonald’s out of a thousand. This was the only game in town. And people really wanted to see something like this continue. There was no way to pull that off.” He paused, then remarked, “Washington is a city that learns that if you do something bad, put it out right away. But back then obfuscation was the rule of the day.”

CHAPTER 8

The Golden Venture: Restaurant Workers to Go

Those who saw the scene later compared it to the invasion of Normandy, except with scrawny Chinese men scrambling to America’s unprotected beachy shores, some dressed only in their underwear.

As a social metaphor, an “invasion” of the United States may be apt—though it was a fragmented, haphazard one, and this group was merely a tiny piece of it. These clandestine immigrants captured the nation’s attention only because of the vivid, inescapable television imagery that accompanied them: the frantic sense of desperation as bodies were cast ashore, some conscious, others never to breathe again. Then the details trickled in: 112 days at sea; massive debts incurred; Thailand; Kenya; dark, sardine-like conditions. There were fewer than three hundred passengers on the rickety 150-foot steamer that lodged itself a hundred yards off New York’s Rockaway Beach that moonlit June night in 1993. But their sudden, stark appearance meant the public could no longer avert their eyes from the cost of the American dream.

When the passengers on the boat felt the bump, they thought they had hit land. They scurried up to the deck, a thin, wiry man leading the charge. The crew told the passengers to throw mattresses onto the rocks and to jump, that the water was only chest-high and they could wade ashore. In reality, the sand dipped, the water ran deep, and the passengers were soon in over their heads. Ten of them didn’t make it through alive.

An eighteen-year-old boy who would later take on the name Michael listened to his fellow passengers scream as the force of the waves hit them. He couldn’t swim, so he remained on board. His idea was to use some of the empty propane gas canisters as flotation devices to reach the store. When the police and the Coast Guard came aboard, he was elated. The immediate fear of death had passed. Word back home in the villages was that U.S. immigration authorities would often lock people up, but they could be bailed out within a matter of days. Then they would be given a court date that they would never appear at.

Michael welcomed the arrival of the government officials as a hopeful ending to a torturous two-year journey that had started when he was sixteen years old, when his father put him on a train heading west. It had cost more than $20,000 in smuggling fees to send the only son, the second of five children, off to the United States.

That journey, which Michael, carrying only a backpack, had started in northern Fujian Province, had taken him into the jungles of Burma, where one of his fellow villagers had died; through a year of semicaptivity in Bangkok; and on a seventeen-thousand-mile boat journey that often seemed fatal.

But the stories that Michael had heard were wrong, at least for them. That night’s well-publicized disaster changed the entire equation. It would be four years, not days, before he was free again, and only then because a congressman stepped in front of President Bill Clinton the evening of the State of the Union address and made a personal plea.

The soft, hazy rays of the early-morning sun illuminated the scene. The name of their boat, written in white block letters, became visible: Golden Venture. From the beach the passengers could also see the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

Over the next few days, investigators discovered that the boat had been deliberately crashed into the sandy peninsula. As of early that morning, the man who had instructed the captain to crash was unaware how disastrously his order had been executed. Something had gone wrong, because the captain was unreachable. But it was only hours later, when the man, Weng Yu Hui, walked into a store on East Broadway in Chinatown and saw a short, plain Chinese woman with a blunt haircut watching the early-morning news, that he became aware of the consequences of the crash. The two had known each other across two continents, having grown up in Chinese villages separated by a thirty-minute walk. In the closed tangle of rural villages where everyone is connected to everyone else, the father of Weng’s brother-in-law had been the woman’s teacher.

Weng had been the main organizer behind the doomed boat trip. But it was the woman, a business partner in the boat, whose name and face would later be splashed across the New York City tabloids, with headlines like “Evil Incarnate.” Known as Sister Ping, she was an internationally renowned businesswoman who had helped provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of financing for the boat. Two of the men on the boat, both of whom had boarded in Kenya, had been her clients.

Sister Ping looked at Weng and told him to leave New York City. With such a spectacle blowing up in the media capital of the world in the early months of a new presidential administration, law enforcement agencies would be looking vigorously for them. She was worried about her two clients. Weng told her not to fret: there had been almost three hundred people on the boat; it would be unlikely that any of hers had died. He was wrong. One of her passengers had been among those who drowned.

The most precise estimates today say there were thirteen crew members and 286 illegal immigrants aboard the Golden Venture. Some fifteen years later, advocates estimated that about half of those illegal immigrants were still in the United States. Some won asylum. Some were deported but snuck back. Some existed in a legal netherworld. The Golden Venture immigrants had fanned out from New York City along the coast and into the heartland: Virginia, Kansas, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona. They had one thing in common: Chinese restaurants. About 90 percent of the Golden Venture survivors were involved in the Chinese-restaurant business, according to their own estimates. Of the others, a handful were in construction, one was a New York City cabdriver, a few had become artists. But most of those people who washed onto the shore that day worked as cooks, delivery boys, and waiters. A lucky few owned their own restaurants.

The Golden Venture was in essence, a delivery of Chinese restaurant workers to the United States that had gone haywire.

For the past two decades, the vast majority of Chinese restaurant workers in the United States have come from a Delaware-sized region in southeastern China surrounding the coastal city of Fuzhou (roughly pronounced foo-JOE).

The average American has no mental picture of Fuzhou, or even its home province of Fujian. The area is not known for its cuisine, like Sichuan or Hunan or Guangdong (formerly Canton). It is not known for its culture or history, like Xi’an, with its terra-cotta warriors, or Beijing, with its Forbidden Palace. It is not known for its dramatic mountainscape, like Guilin, or its modern skyline, like Shanghai. In fact, the most remarkable trait of that area may be that it is the single largest exporter of Chinese restaurant workers in the world today. Of the passengers on the Golden Venture, 246 were from Fujian.

The majority of the Fujianese arrived illegally, so precise figures are hard to come by. But based on his surveys of the number of people now missing in the villages and towns around Fuzhou, and estimating conservatively, Professor Zai Liang notes that perhaps 300,000 Fujianese have migrated from China to the United States over the past two decades. If those people all got together and formed their own city (even without the children they’ve had since), they would form the sixtieth-largest city in the United States—just behind Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Toledo. And if you add the children in, the number grows. “That number is also tricky,” Zai Liang says. The typical Fujianese immigrant either paid tens of thousands of dollars to be smuggled to the United States or followed a family member who had emigrated. In the early days, in the 1980s, the going rate was about $18,000. By the time I visited China in 2006, it had climbed to upwards of $70,000. The costs needed to bribe officials and forge increasingly sophisticated identity documents in a post-9/11 world had increased sharply.

Put another way: there is a fairly good chance that the Chinese restaurant worker who cooked your roast pork fried rice, or the woman who took your order on the phone, or the deliveryman who showed up at your door paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of doing so.

It is in the region around Fuzhou, in a little fishing village called Houyu, where Michael’s journey began in 1991. Houyu, whose name means “Monkey Island,” has no monkeys and is not an island. It is located on a piece of land that juts out into a crook of the muddy Min River. It is down the road from another little town, called Xiangyu, or “Elephant Island.”

Houyu has a natural population of some 5,000 people. The village was neatly divided in two: in one half most of the people had the last name Zheng; in the other half, Zhang. Michael’s family, with the last name Chen, belonged to neither. Michael’s Chinese name was Chen Xuedian, and his given name loosely translates to “learn from the model.” It was an indication that his father, a fisherman-farmer, had educational aspirations for his only son. With five children, the family could not afford to buy books for all of them to go to school. Michael always ranked in the top three students in the class, but he got only as far as finishing ninth grade. Then Michael’s father decided that his son would head to America. He contacted some smugglers, made arrangements, and put Michael on a train one night. Michael carried a backpack containing two changes of clothes, three types of medicine, $1,000 in American currency, and about the same amount in Chinese cash. The train headed west.

Today Houyu is a village of gnarled banyan trees, languid afternoon naps, and abundant hand-caught fresh seafood. It bursts out of the grassy wetlands in a cacophony of smooth colors and glinting metal—monstrous four-story mansions with bulbous spires, ornate front gates, and tiered balconies. Many of them have stone lions out front, the females with their paws on cubs. This wonderland has been made possible with money from Chinese restaurants in America. This is what General Tso’s chicken buys in China.

But what makes Houyu strange is that many of the houses—each built with hundreds of thousands of American dollars—are empty. Except for the sound of construction and an occasional chicken clucking, few sounds of life bounce down the narrow alleys.

The residents of the town do not live there. The village has sent more than three-quarters of its population to the United States, including Michael and one of his sisters. The working-age men are missing. Old men and women, dressed in drab outfits, shuffle down the streets or sit on stoops. Chubby toddlers run about. It is like a village in a nation at war, except the men are not at war. They are working at Chinese restaurants in the United States.

The town has a busy Bank of China office but no middle school. The school shut down a few years earlier, for lack of students. It is death by prosperity. Everyone has either left, is planning to leave, or has too few years left to live to make it worth leaving.

Fujian Province, along with neighboring Guangdong Province, has an epic history of overseas migration. It is so mountainous, the locals quip that it is “eight parts mountain to one part water to one part farmland.” With many rocky hills and little arable land, the Fujianese traditionally turned to the ocean for their livelihoods.

The men were sons of the seas—among them was my grandfather, a Fujianese fisherman. When war, uprisings, and famine came—and they came with regularity in China—the Fujianese again turned to the sea, and the land that lay beyond, as an economic refuge. By the thousands, they poured onto ships headed south to “Nanyang,” a sweeping, general term that technically means “Southern Ocean” but encompasses much of Southeast Asia. Over the centuries, the Fujianese, or the Hokkien, as they called themselves, transformed the demographics and economics of many nations in that region: Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines. They became the business elite, invoking admiration and vicious, sometimes deadly backlash. Even today, many of Southeast Asia’s richest families are of Chinese ethnicity, with roots in Fujian.

The Fujianese people’s love of the ocean and their ensuing reputation as sailors brought them to the United States. They worked on foreign vessels and started jumping ship at New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. These sailors were illegal, but many managed to establish an economic foothold through hard labor. They were the beachhead for the giant waves of Fujianese soon to come. The Fuzhou illegal-immigration network was established with two strokes of a pen, both by Republican presidents. The first was Ronald Reagan’s signing of the 1986 Immigration and Control Act, which offered amnesty to any undocumented aliens who could prove, by the November 1988 deadline, that they had been living in the United States on or before January 1, 1982. Some legitimately had; others, for a fee of $500 or so, could appear to have been by buying fake backdated tax receipts and employment records. Thus opened a two-year window for the cash-rich, document-poor Fuzhou immigrants to bring their family members in from China. The second stroke came in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre when President George H. W. Bush instructed the State and Justice Departments to give enhanced consideration to individuals who expressed fear based on China’s one-child policy. While they were waiting for their asylum applications to go through, they could start earning money in the United States.

These American federal policies, signed almost ten thousand miles away from Houyu, affected the village perhaps more than any other event in its history. Soon, international consortiums of human smugglers, or snakeheads, emerged to take advantage of the demand. Village men started to disappear. Night after night, another dozen or so would simply vanish. No one needed to ask where they had gone.

Among those smugglers who rose in prominence and reputation was Sister Ping, whose family home is located across the muddy river from Houyu—fifteen minutes by ferry or about an hour by land. Even as she became a millionaire many times over, her family kept their house at No. 398 in the compact village of Shengmei, which translates to “Prospering Beauty.” Shengmei’s narrow alleys are also flanked by empty modern homes now. The village, which takes less than fifteen minutes to walk through, is contained within a larger town called Tingjiang. Of Shengmei’s natural population of 800, residents estimate that only 100 today are left. Almost all of those who left owe their passage in some way to Sister Ping. The town is not completely barren, for there has been an influx of a few hundred residents from other parts of the country, like Sichuan. A number of them are there to help tend to the empty, gargantuan homes.

Sister Ping’s family home is a modern four-story, white-tiled house with a red-capped pagoda on top and an arched entryway. It is an older home and, by the region’s standards, not anything spectacular. American prosecutors said she had sat at “the apex of an international empire” that was “a conglomerate built upon misery and greed.” But around her home, the neighbors speak enthusiastically about Sister Ping’s deeds. She was the oldest of five children—three girls and two boys. Neighbors remembered Sister Ping and her youngest sister as the talented ones of the bunch, the other three as just average.

Her sharp mind and focus were evident when she was a young girl, neighbors recalled. A natural leader, she was the head of the local Red Guard troop during the Cultural Revolution. She was also very fair-minded and would intervene when bullies picked on other classmates. She was never flashy; even as a young woman she dressed very plainly. She disliked jewelry and makeup.

Sister Ping’s imprint is everywhere in the community, from the gaudy temple being constructed a few hundred feet from her home to the shuttered elementary school that her funds built.

Within a few years, so many men were leaving Houyu that those who had been left behind were subject to the subtle glances of neighbors. The expectation was that real men went to the United States and sent what seemed like massive amounts of money back—with only a hint of the difficult conditions needed to earn that money. In order to keep up with the Zhangs, you had to send your sons and husbands abroad.

Michael joined the pipeline of Houyu men heading to America. When he boarded the train that first night, the little Michael knew about the United States had come from evening news programs. Villagers had been smuggling in color televisions from Taiwan for several years, to enjoy the limited local programming. Two years later, he would show up on news programs himself, but only in the United States. The Chinese media ignored the embarrassment of the Golden Venture.

The dirt roads have since been replaced by smooth, paved lanes running from the village to Changle, whose rampant growth earned it reclassification as a city in 1995. The brown river and the plush fields are now largely empty. The grass alongside the banks has grown so long that it bends and whispers in the wind. The villagers don’t need to work. Those who farm and fish generally do so because otherwise they become bored. In fact, the one lone farmer I found during my time there had originally moved to the United States to be with his son, but he’d returned home out of boredom and frustration. He couldn’t drive or speak English. Back in Houyu, he could tend his vegetable garden every morning. It kept him from dying, he told people.

The main economic activity in Houyu today is construction. Almost all the sounds you here are the banging, clanging, and drilling of expansive mansions being built. The construction is done mostly by waidiren, out-of-towners. Many of the men are from Shanghai and Sichuan; they come to this area because work is available. It is trickle-down economics, Chinese style.

Some Shanghainese men also come for another reason: to entertain the lonely housewives in local bars. These men, who have a reputation for being handsome and charming, are called “ducks.” In the local Chinese slang, spending time with them is called “eating duck.”

In my drive across the United States to visit the Chinese restaurants whose fortune cookies had dispensed the winning Powerball numbers, I encountered a restaurant owner from Houyu, Dong Zheng. Dong owned King’s Buffet in Lawrence, Kansas, where Joseph Macek of Paola, Kansas, got his lucky numbers and won $100,000. Dong left Houyu in 1995, when he was fifteen years old, following his father, who had come seven years earlier. Dong attended high school in the States and then studied business at Indiana State University, but he too joined the Chinese-restaurant industry. “I haven’t heard of anyone who isn’t in the restaurant business; if they are not running a restaurant, they are doing construction for restaurants,” he said. All his middle school classmates are in the United States.

His customers are primarily a mix of people from the University of Kansas and Mexican construction workers. He gestured to the workers, who had heaped their plates full of noodles. “They are like us Fuzhounese. They work very hard for money that they send back home.”

Most of the local ambitions in Houyu revolve around Chinese restaurants. At the end of one village lane, I happened upon a school that taught restaurant English to young people who were planning to go to the United States. There are many such schools scattered all across the region. This particular class met five days a week in a barren classroom with an electric fan that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t work. Were it not for the students’ spiked, colored, and elaborately coiffed hair, it could have been a Chinese classroom scene from the 1950s.

The teacher, whose last name was Zheng, was going over the vocabulary he had written on the blackboard: VEGETABLE, CAWLIFLOWER, CELERY, ASPARAGUS, BAMBOO SHOOTS, NAPA, ONION, CABBGE (which was later corrected to CABBAGE), ZUCCHINI.

The teacher drew his material from photocopies of a textbook titled Practical English for Chinese Restaurants. He drilled the students on vocabulary, first calling out the English and having them give the Chinese translation, then vice versa.

He wrote the names of a number of dishes common in Chinese restaurants on the board. Among them was “French fries.” He pointed to the board and warned the students not to pronounce it “French flies.”

There is one main nursery school in Houyu, located near the center of the village, and it is full of toddlers. Many of them have been brought back to be raised by their grandparents because their parents are too busy working in America to take care of them.

I picked up one pudgy five-year-old girl with thick pigtails. She felt pleasantly hefty in my arms.

“Where were you born?” I asked her in Mandarin.

“America.”

“Where are your parents?”

“America.”

“Why are they in America?”

“Zuogong,” she said. Working.

“Where is America?”

She looked up at me and blinked. “At the airport.”

Three days into his train journey, Michael arrived in the southwestern city of Kunming, about three hundred miles from Thailand. At the train station, Michael was approached by a man who had been sent his photo. He was reunited with two other customers, familiar faces from Houyu: a cousin and a tall, friendly neighbor with the last name of Zheng who had lived no more than a three-minute walk from Michael. Unlike Michael, who was young and single, Zheng had left his wife and two young children at home.

From Kunming, Michael and a few other men hid in a truck for a day-long trip to a town called Menghai, near the Burmese border. The men stepped inside a metal cage and were handed plastic bags to use if they needed to relieve themselves. Sacks of rice were then placed over the cage. They drove in the dark. At Menghai, the men put on old clothing so they could blend in with the locals. This had only a limited effect because their skin tone was noticeably paler than that of the people who lived in the area.

After a few days in Menghai, one night they were instructed to walk down a road. A truck would pick them up, they were told. At the meeting place, other Fuzhou men were also waiting. The truck brought them closer to the border, where they were met by a guide who led them to a mountainous and hilly area. There they were told to run up the slopes until they couldn’t run anymore.

Some of the men struggled. Since Michael was younger, he was in better shape. “The border is very dangerous,” Michael told me. “If someone crosses the border, the guards can open fire.”

They climbed for two hours. On the other side, they were met by a group of men wearing military uniforms and carrying machine guns. Michael, scared and homesick, wanted to turn around and go back to Houyu when he saw the men with the guns. But they told him he had no choice: either he moved forward or he died. The sixteen-year-old cried.

The smugglers were all Burmese. They earned between $3,000 and $4,000 for each person who crossed the Burmese border—a considerable sum for a pariah economy under a military dictatorship.

The men from Fuzhou began walking. They kept asking their three Burmese guides how long it would be before they got to their destination. The guides always replied that it would “only be a few more days” or promised that they would get there “tomorrow.” They were lying. If Michael and the others had known it would be a month before they would get to Thailand, none of them would have gone.

Burmese weather is strange. During the day it was so hot they had to take off their shirts. It was freezing at night, but they couldn’t light a fire because it would give them away. The Burmese jungle was like a primeval forest, like some lost era of the earth’s history. Things were moving all the time. When it rained, leeches would mysteriously appear in their shoes. Michael was never sure how that happened. Did the leeches arise from inanimate spores that sprang to life with the addition of water? Did they sneak in through tiny holes in the shoes? Did they wriggle in when he stepped into a particularly large puddle? Periodically the men had to stop to pull the leeches off. Along the way, they passed decaying bodies, people who had died on the way to the West. Some had drowned in a flash flood. Others had died from drinking the water, Michael was told.

One night, during a thunderstorm, Michael and five other men lost track of the people in front of them. It was so dark, Michael couldn’t see his fingers two feet in front of his face. Holding hands, the men kept walking until the ground gave way under one of them. They had reached a cliff. They screamed into the night, but their cries drifted into the vastness.

Human smuggling is perhaps second only to narcotics as the largest cross-border illegal trafficking in the world. It has accelerated in recent decades for two reasons. The first is that the income inequality between the world’s citizens is now perhaps the highest it has ever been in human history. The second is that transportation and communications technology has vastly improved. Both are consequences of globalization.

The greatest traffic is between the United States and Mexico, the international border that straddles the largest per capita income difference in the world. But at the turn of the millennium, the most expensive journey anywhere is the journey of the Fujianese to the United States. The sums of money needed by Fujianese to come to the United States are staggering by American standards, and even more so by Chinese. A question naturally arises: Where do these immigrants get the money? The short answer is that they borrow it—from family, neighbors, and, occasionally, from loan sharks. That this much money can change hands is surprising to Westerners, who are comfortable with the idea of borrowing from large banks, but not so much from close associates. Perhaps it is worth noting that in Chinese, the word for “lend,” jie, is the same as the word for “borrow.” There is only one word: “lendborrow.” The context of the sentence makes the meaning clear: “I lendborrow money to him” or “I lendborrow money from him.” The act of lendborrowing is a reciprocal relationship. A person who borrows one day may lend on another.

In the smuggling world, illegal Chinese immigrants are called “PRCs,” for the People’s Republic of China, the official name of the Communist-led country. In contrast, Taiwan is ROC, for Republic of China, but no one ever talks about ROCs because these days ROCs aren’t usually illegal immigrants. If you listen in on law enforcement chatter on the radio in port cities, you will often hear comments like “We got a boat with five PRCs on board.”

Illegal Chinese immigration to the United States is hardly new—especially given the long history of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The destruction of public records in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake allowed thousands of Chinese-American men to falsely claim citizenship and thus the right to bring over any “sons” (real or fictional) they had in China. What is new, however, is the rise of organized human smuggling in illegal immigration, a phenomenon that has intrigued criminologists and sociologists.

I visited one of the leading criminologists involved in investigating Chinese smuggling, Professor Ko-lin Chin, at his office at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. In Fuzhou a few years ago, he had been approached in his hotel lobby by men who had tried to recruit him to become a smuggler. He had used the opportunity to interview these snakeheads about what the job would entail. They had been especially excited when they found out Professor Chin still held a passport from Taiwan, which arouses less attention than an American passport in China. Despite the icy diplomatic relations between China and Taiwan, Taiwanese nationals have played a critical role in moving Fujianese across the world. The lure of profit trumps the pride of patriotism. Every single one of the thirty-seven smuggling boats that were intercepted by the United States government from mid-1991 to mid-1994 had some connection to Taiwan: registration, crew, ownership, or home port.

Until recently, most scholarly work had looked at Chinese criminal organizations in terms of the traditional paradigm of hierarchical, corporation-like entities like the Mafia or the drug cartels. An alternative, more entrepreneur-centered view sees criminal enterprises as networks and alliances that expand and contract with the nature of the crime at hand.

Chin, who has interviewed dozens of snakeheads, argues that the Chinese human-smuggling organizations are an amalgam of the two. In many ways, they are organized like networks, with largely horizontal groups of smugglers joining together around specific tasks—moving a particular group of people, for example. But the groups, while somewhat flat, also resemble corporations in that individual smugglers tend to take on very specific roles: investors, recruiters, transporters, debt collectors, guides. The “big snakeheads,” who are investors and arrangers, are often overseas Chinese who rarely meet their smuggled human cargo face-to-face. “Little snakeheads” handle all the day-to-day tasks.

Chin maintains that his research turned up little evidence suggesting any significant connection between these smuggling groups and traditional Chinese criminal societies such as triads, tongs, and street gangs. Since smuggling organizations are largely dynamic, the hunt for “godfathers” who run them is largely futile, he has argued. The cells will just organize themselves around other “big snakeheads.” In talking to him, I got the sense that human-smuggling organizations are like any other multinational shipping enterprise, with investors, profit margins, international divisions, hubs, and local outsourcing. The only difference is that their product is Chinese restaurant workers.

At the top of the cliff in Burma, Michael and the other five men waited for hours, certain they were going to die. Then the distant light of torches appeared. They were ecstatic. Their guides had found them.

The group was given horses to ride for one stretch of the journey. But they had to move at night, and even the horses had trouble maneuvering in the dark. Once Zheng’s horse took a bad step and it tumbled down a hill, almost bringing Zheng with it; in the nick of time he grabbed some nearby bamboo branches. It took the group two hours to go down and retrieve the horse, which, miraculously, had escaped uninjured.

The impetus for traveling only at night was not so much the government as the powerful heroin traffickers in the region. These men would not hesitate to kill anyone who seemed a threat to their poppy crops. Michael and the others had to dodge the searchlights that constantly swept the area.

Weeks into the journey, they arrived at a mountain clearing, joining between two and three hundred people, almost all from around Fuzhou. Michael looked at the faces and recognized many of them as from Houyu. From the clearing, Michael rode a series of trucks to Bangkok, where the various groups of smuggled people then headed in different directions. Some traveled toward Spain. Others, from the region of Fuqing, aimed for Japan.

In Bangkok, the men were handed passports from Singapore, Japan, and Korea. Michael was handed a Korean passport. The smugglers made him practice signing his Korean name until he could do it without hesitation. They taught him enough English so that he could say he was on vacation.

In Bangkok (the only place I’ve been where my hotel minibar included condoms), I met with Major General Krerkphong Pukprayura at his offices in the Royal Thai Police Headquarters. The general was a coordinator of an international coalition to combat the smuggling and trafficking of people in the Asia-Pacific region called the Bali Process. Bangkok, for a number of reasons, has historically served as a transit hub for illegal migrants—not just from China but from all over Asia to the West, he explained. The city is one of the main aviation hubs for Asia but two of the other primary hubs, Singapore and Hong Kong, are islands and therefore much easier to patrol. In contrast, Thailand shares a massive land border with four countries: Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Burma. It is easy to cross by land into Thailand and then continue on to Bangkok. As a result of the illegal migrants, Bangkok has also become a world capital for forged documents: stolen passports, manufactured passports, and passports in which the photographs have been changed.

The smuggling is helped by the existence of Sino-Thais, Chinese who have become very successful in Thailand over the last few generations, making up the bulk of the business establishment and adopting Thai last names. “In Thailand they have been able to assimilate to the point where they don’t consider themselves Chinese. They consider themselves Thai,” he said. Some of the younger generations barely speak any Chinese at all.

The Chinese are only part of the illegal flow in and out of Bangkok. Thailand has been drawing people from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, all of them on their way elsewhere. The most interesting migrant population in Thailand may be the North Koreans. Many of them crossed the northern border into China and then walked all the way to Bangkok, he said, running his finger down the length of China. I gawked. It was a massive distance—equivalent to walking from Maine to Texas. He had heard the stories thousands of times. “It’s human nature,” he said. “Everyone wants to better their life.”

Michael wasted a month in Bangkok after he broke his foot running from Thai government officials. He lost another month when he was captured by Thai police. It cost his father $6,000 in bribes and fees to get him out.

Bangkok became a bottleneck during the time when Michael and the others were waiting. Thai authorities had cracked down after a flood of PRCs bearing false travel documents had shown up at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It was getting too difficult to move people out by air, so the snakeheads turned their attention to the seas. A consortium of snakeheads, including Sister Ping and Weng, in New York City, were busy arranging the boat that would eventually bring Michael and his group to the United States.

One of the partners in the Golden Venture, Guo Liang Qi, was connected to Sister Ping through an odd history. He had robbed her twice. Guo, also known as Ah Kay, was a leader in a street gang called Fuk Ching who had committed multiple murders. He robbed Sister Ping for the first time in 1985, when he followed her daughter to their Brooklyn home. There was less money than he’d expected. A few months later the gang robbed Sister Ping’s home again, finding $20,000 stashed in her refrigerator.

Later on, while they were planning a smuggling venture together in September 1991, he apologized for the robberies. She waved it off, telling him on the phone, “That’s what happened in the past. We’re talking business now.” They agreed that for $750,000, Ah Kay would take 130 passengers from a boat off the coast of Massachusetts and bring them to New York City in three U-Haul trucks.

Of the sum owed to him, Ah Kay instructed Sister Ping to wire $300,000 through her banking network so he could invest it in a Panama-registered steamer, the Tong Sern, in Singapore. At sea the Panamanian flag was lowered and a Honduran flag was raised. The Tong Sern was rechristened Golden Venture.

The partners were on a nervous timetable. They were focused on retrieving a group of two hundred or so Chinese, including twenty of Sister Ping’s clients, who had been stranded in Kenya when the captain of their boat, the Najd II, decided that his share of the smuggling profit was too small and refused to go any farther. He was being paid $500,000 on human cargo he estimated to be worth $7 to $8 million. On the way to pick up their stranded passengers in Mombasa, Kenya, the Golden Venture stopped in Thailand to load an additional hundred or so passengers, including Michael’s group. Some of the men had worked as sailors in Hong Kong or Shanghai. They told Michael that 750 tons was small for a boat traveling across an ocean and refused to get on.

Michael and others were transported by speedboat out into the dark ocean at night to meet the Golden Venture.

To Michael, the steamer looked terrifyingly small bumping around on the waves. He could barely see it in the ocean. But they really didn’t have a choice. Some one hundred people boarded in Thailand. The ship then steamed through the Strait of Malacca and across the Indian Ocean to Kenya.

Human smuggling is not to be confused with human trafficking, where women or young children are moved across borders against their will and sometimes forced to do sex work. Human smuggling is used to describe the willing movement of people. This was emphasized and reemphasized to me when I met a human smuggler in the Dominican Republic, which had been a key staging point for the PRCs to enter the United States.

The meeting was arranged by a friend of a friend, who was also acting as the chauffeur. Naum, as the smuggler wanted to be called, was waiting for us on the street wearing dark sunglasses. We circled around a number of times before picking him up in an SUV. He shook my hand and said in Spanish, “Before we start, I just have one question for you.” He paused. “Do you believe in God?”

Were we going to start with an existential evaluation? I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. “But I am not Catholic.”

He smiled. “Then do you believe God put borders on this earth?”

We rode around in the SUV for an hour and a half, talking through an interpreter. “I don’t consider myself a criminal because I’m not doing anything against the natural will of God,” Naum said. “I’m just helping people who want a better future. The majority of the people I move are honest workers.” There are the good reasons to cross borders. There are the bad reasons to cross borders. The Chinos, or PRCs, are good business because they pay the highest fees of anyone not involved in anything explicitly shady. Naum said he does not move criminals, terrorists, or people from suspicious countries, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. He stays away from Chechens in particular, he said. “They kill children.”

The PRCs are a better business proposition. They have less risk of drawing the ire of the U.S. Homeland Security Department. They pay lucrative fees. And there is a steady flow of them. In addition, PRCs almost always pay in full once they reach their destination, he said.

“The trafficking of Chinese is very different from others. Most people we are smuggling are paying their own way,” he explained. So when smugglers need money to deal with unexpected problems—to bribe a police official for example—they often have to pressure the clients’ family members to come up with the cash. In contrast, with the Chinese smuggling is more centralized. Naum can make a single phone call to a snakehead boss somewhere and the boss will front the money to deal with a problem. It’s the same thing with the payments. The smugglers always get paid by the big boss, who in turn will get payments over time from his clients.

Naum had settled in the Dominican Republic, which, due to its proximity to both the United States and Puerto Rico, has often been a popular transit point for illegal immigrants. The most desperate illegal immigrants are shipped over in yolas—rickety homemade boats cobbled together from plywood and tree limbs and powered by engines. Yolas are seaworthy only in the sense that you can toss them into the high seas. By ferry, the journey from the eastern coast of the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico takes a few hours. Passengers traveling the Mona Passage by yola will get to Puerto Rico in four days if things go smoothly, twelve days if they’re less lucky, or never if the boat capsizes in the stiff winds and unrelenting waves, tossing its inhabitants into the ocean.

The highly financed PRCs traveled by boats, but seaworthy ones. Right before we met, Naum had gotten an anxious phone call from a business associate in Peru who was stuck with nineteen Chinos. The previous boat leaving Peru had been intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard. That smuggling route was now hot, and they were backing way off it. How are we going to move them out? his associate had wanted to know. Naum had spent ninety minutes calling around to other business folks so he could answer that question.

If there is one problem with PRCs, it is that, well, they have a hard time blending in. As one immigration official put it to me, “A PRC sticks out from a mile away.” Even the South Asians from India and Pakistan can be passed off as a South American, but, “A PRC is nothing but a PRC.”

On the Golden Venture, food, water, light, and space were all scarce. The passengers ate rice and vegetables until the vegetables ran out. They were given water to drink, clean, and cook with, but slowly that supply dwindled too, so they started collecting rainwater in plastic bags. There was only one bathroom for the three hundred or so people. Men started relieving themselves off the deck of the boat.

Most passengers killed time by playing poker and Chinese chess; the boredom could be mind-numbing. One passenger played a handheld computer game, punching the buttons long after the batteries wore out.

Then one night the ship’s crew warned the passengers that there would be a storm. The boat was rounding the southern tip of Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope. Waves, some fifty feet high, tossed the vessel back and forth. Bodies tumbled like rag dolls within the hull. Michael thought they were surely going to perish. Others agreed and put on their best clothes in preparation. People prayed to any deity they thought would listen: Jesus. Buddha. The Chinese Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin. The Goddess of the Seas, Mazu. The boat rocked for seven or eight hours. The skies cleared. They had survived.

Days before the Golden Venture approached American shores, the Fuk Ching gang—which had been tasked with moving the passengers from boat to shore—melted into bloody disarray. Intergang warfare erupted, resulting in a number of deaths. Ah Kay was in China. There was no one to bring the passengers off the Golden Venture.

When Weng and the others learned of this, they decided on a Plan B: to have the boat land directly on the shore. They considered the piers under the Manhattan Bridge but settled on Rockaway. If the boat lodged in the right time and place, the water would be only a little bit over three feet high, shallow enough for a person to stand in. The boat steamed between Boston and New York, unsure of where it would land. They were so close to land that Michael and the others could see the lights. “We were so excited,” he remembered.

Weng instructed the boat’s crew to run the ship aground, then tell the passengers to throw down the mattresses and jump down. Weng gave the final instruction to run aground around nine P.M. on June 5, 1993. Within hours, the boat did exactly that.

The Fuzhou region is not the only one in China that has sent an absurdly high concentration of its residents abroad. Before Fuzhou, there was the Taishan region (also known as Toisan), in the southeastern province of Guangdong, where some 80 percent of Chinese-American immigrants before the 1950s had their roots. Many of the first generation of restaurant workers and laundry owners in America came from a four-county area. If Fuzhou is the region that is supported by General Tso’s chicken, this is the area that was supported by chop suey.

Today Taishan remains a lush but depressed area about a four-hour bus ride from Hong Kong. The legacy of the sojourners is laced throughout the county, popping up in unexpected places among the verdant rice paddies and dusty roads. But as in the villages around Fuzhou, Taishan’s architecture is evidence of the people who journeyed across the ocean. Crumbling century-old Western-style castles are sprinkled throughout the villages—a faint echo through time and space.

The local museum has an extensive exhibit on overseas Chinese, in both Chinese and English, the only display on Chinese emigration I encountered during my travels across China. A life-size diorama shows two Chinese men hopping into a rickety boat as their family members tearfully bid them good-bye from the shore, an angry sea painted in the background. In the lobby, there is a huge map of the world, about thirty feet across, with a red dot in the center of each country that Taishanese have immigrated to. The little red dots freckle the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific Rim; I stopped counting when I got to fifty.

Back around Fuzhou, news of the Golden Venture crash did not reach the villages through traditional news outlets. Instead, word of mouth from New York carried back the rumors about the sunken ship and dead sons and husbands. Michael’s mother collapsed into bed and cried for more than three days. It would be a month before they received a letter from Michael saying that he was in prison and he expected to get out.

Based on what they’d heard from earlier illegal immigrants, Michael and the other Golden Venture passengers expected to be briefly detained before being released. However, they’d arrived during the Clinton administration’s first five months. The high visibility of the boat crash and the ensuing political fallout meant that the administration could not simply treat the Golden Venture passengers with the same bureaucratic anonymity it did other illegal immigrants that slipped into their net. Twelve days after the crash, President Clinton announced a shift in immigration policy. “We cannot tolerate those who traffic in human cargo,” he said. “Those who attempt to enter the United States illegally should know that they will be intercepted, detained, and returned home.” Michael invoked a popular Chinese aphorism to describe the decision. They “killed the chicken to scare the monkey,” he said, meaning that Clinton’s people intended to make a warning lesson out of them.

Michael and most of the others were sent to the York County Prison in Pennsylvania. To break up the monotony, many of them took up sports, which is how Michael got his English name: because he liked to play basketball, the guards called him Michael, after Michael Jordan.

Meanwhile, the York detainees found fervent advocates in a local coalition of anti-abortion evangelicals, pro bono lawyers, and feminists. The volunteer lawyers took a one-day crash course in immigration law and learned how to help their clients apply for asylum. Neighbors held daily vigils for the Golden Venture detainees, helping to keep the goal of their release in the public eye. Every Sunday, a group converged at the prison and sang “God Bless America.” Beverly Church, a former nurse and a staunch Republican, began visiting the prison on a regular basis.

Michael, like many others, started to learn English. He used a dictionary and would slowly and painfully translate the numerous articles that the Golden Venture passengers were writing. Others improved their conversational skills by talking to the Christians who would regularly come to chat with them, often about Jesus. Over time, many of the detainees got sick, which some of them attributed partially to the prison food: too much meat, fried food, and starch.

Meanwhile, in New York, investigators were accumulating evidence against Sister Ping and her role in the Golden Venture fiasco. Ah Kay was arrested in Hong Kong in August 1993. Federal agents executed a search warrant on Sister Ping’s restaurant on East Broadway in September 1993 and found a cash-counting machine, a lamination machine, airline-ticket receipts, and passports belonging to various individuals. By December 1994, federal officials had enough to indict Sister Ping and issue a warrant for her arrest.

It was too late. By then Sister Ping had already ceased to exist. She had last used her own passport three months earlier, on September 20, 1994, when she’d departed Hong Kong. After that, her trail effectively disappeared.

At York, the detainees eventually latched on to an unusual activity: creating elaborate paper sculptures. It started when one man taught the others how to make origami pineapples out of recycled paper. Within the tightly confined spaces of the prison, this activity afforded an acceptable creative outlet; production exploded.

The first pieces were rough-hewn and given to attorneys and friendly prison workers as gestures of thanks. But over time, the creations became startlingly sophisticated: a twisting dragon with an outstretched claw and a slithering tongue; a family of snowy-white owls, the adults hovering over two babies; a grinning Buddha lounging like Jabba the Hutt; a lobster with delicately outstretched antennae. One piece, an idyllic foot-and-a-half-high model of the Golden Venture, seemed much more pleasant in the artist’s rendition than it had ever been in actuality.

The prisoners eventually made over ten thousand sculptures. A number of the most elaborate and gripping, from the dozen or so most skilled artists, were exhibited from Santa Fe to the Smithsonian. Some of the pieces were sold in galleries and at auctions. The money was sent back home or used to pay the detainees’ lawyers.

In 1996, the Immigration and Naturalization Service did something unprecedented. It reclassified one of the Golden Venture prisoners, Wu Luzhong, as an “alien of extraordinary ability in the arts”—the first time this agency had ever done so with an imprisoned illegal alien. Four more of the prisoners would also be granted the rare artists’ visa.

A few members of Congress mounted a private lobbying campaign to get the Golden Venture detainees freed. On the third anniversary of their detention, in June 1996, Congressman Bill Goodling, a Republican whose district included the York County Prison, phoned Clinton to plead for the prisoners’ release, with limited success. At the State of the Union address in February 1997, Goodling took the opportunity to step into the path of President Clinton as he was making his way out of the House of Representatives chamber. Eight days later, Goodling met with Clinton in the Oval Office. He brought two elaborate pieces of the prisoners’ paper sculptures, a pine tree and a “freedom bird.”

The president admired them.

A few days after that, Goodling got a call from the president. The prisoners would be freed. This was not a unanimous decision in the administration, Clinton warned.

On February 26, Michael and the others—wearing identical blue sweatshirts, gray pants, and sneakers—stepped out of the York County Jail and onto a prison bus. They were taken to the nearby Codorus Church of the Brethren, which was packed with the local activists and national media.

At the church, they were served their first Chinese meal in nearly four years: General Tso’s chicken, a broccoli-shrimp dish, steamed rice, egg rolls, and fortune cookies from the Hunan East restaurant in York. Most of them had never seen such strange Chinese food: General Tso’s chicken and the fortune cookies were unrecognizable. But soon enough, for most of them that food would become their lifeblood.

It took more than five years after the arrest warrant was issued for law enforcement to catch up with Sister Ping.

In April 2000, Hong Kong police were waiting for her when she showed up at the Korean Airlines counter. At the time of her arrest Sister Ping was carrying in her purse over $60,000 in American and Hong Kong currency, several Belizean passports with different names, and airline tickets. The American currency was wrapped in newspaper, in packets of $8,000 each. Law enforcement officials found a genuine passport from Belize issued in the name of Lily Zheng; it used Sister Ping’s photo and listed her occupation as “housewife.” (At the trial American prosecutors would ask, What kind of housewife makes over fifty trips to foreign countries within a three-month time period?)

Sister Ping fought extradition for three years, but in 2003 she took a United Airlines flight back to the United States, arriving in San Francisco on June 20. She was confident she could get out. The trial lasted over a month in the late spring of 2005. On June 22, 2005, Sister Ping became the twenty-third person convicted in conjunction with the Golden Venture. A jury found her guilty of conspiracy to smuggle aliens and take hostages, money laundering, and trafficking in ransom proceeds. By that time, most of her co-conspirators had been released, many because they had cooperated with the government in her trial.

The next day, a New York tabloid blared the headline “Snake is Hiss-tory.”

At the hearing for her sentencing, Sister Ping made a plea in Chinese. “I would like to explain to the judge I am not the kind of person that they depicted me and charged me with being,” she said through a translator. “In the way that I have led my life, I have always gone to kindness and uprightness because since I was young my father had instructed me that one has to be a good human being.” She went on for an hour, saying how she had been a victim and that evidence in the trial had been faked. “I love the United States because it is a society of laws,” she said.

In the shadow of her sentencing, the boat survivors reunited in New York City at the opening of Golden Venture, a documentary by Peter Cohn that showed at the Tribeca Film Festival. Beforehand, the group held a press conference at the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas to highlight the precarious legal situation they were in: they still could be deported.

Craig Trebilcock, a personal-injury lawyer who had become one of their most fervent advocates, compared the Golden Venture passengers to the East Germans he saw while stationed with the military in West Germany. “They had risked their lives for freedom,” he said. “Their misfortune was arriving at a certain point in our nation’s history.” There is “no such thing as immigration law,” he added. “There is really only immigration politics. It may be wrapped up in law, but it’s really politics.”

Michael, who had become quite media savvy by that time, also took the podium. Under the bright lights, the television reporters tried to coax the Golden Venture passengers into producing a usable sound bite. Michael was one of the few whose English was good enough for the challenge. “This is a lovely country. This is a free country,” he said. The cameras rolled.

By the time I met up with Michael at his restaurant, a few weeks after Sister Ping’s sentencing, he had been out of York County for nine years. He owned his own 150-seat Chinese restaurant in an upscale suburb of Columbus, Ohio, called Dublin—a town full of families with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and 2.3 kids.

Michael’s restaurant is located in a classy strip mall (if that isn’t an oxymoron) that looks like a quaint European town from one vantage point and spills into a sprawling parking lot from another. His restaurant does a brisk business, mostly at lunch; a large professional population works in Dublin. He and his wife have two children. A few years ago, just after their son, Allen, was born, he bought a four-bedroom house in a new development two miles away from the restaurant. Their yard still had the spindly sycamore and weeping willow trees that are common in new developments, but he already was building a new house in another subdivision a few miles away. It had one more bedroom, but more important, it was in a better school district. His son was only three years old, but Michael was thinking ahead. “First off I want them to be well educated for sure, not like us in a restaurant,” he said.

Like many from the region, Michael spoke highly of Sister Ping, praising her character. “She is more trustworthy and she is willing to help people,” he told me. Of Ah Kay, he said, “His hands are covered with blood.” The people around Fuzhou remember Sister Ping for being generous, for giving money to people in need, and for charging less for people who couldn’t afford the full smuggling fee. “If a family had four or five children, she would make sure that one of them could go to America,” one neighbor told me. Her neighbors related that they would have gladly done some of her prison time, to repay some of their karmic debt to her. “If you do a good deed for someone else, it is a good deed for yourself,” one neighbor said.

Michael has picked up some Americanisms. He drinks coffee in the morning as he reads the local paper. He’s a big football fan. But he has other habits that are still very Chinese—like clearing his throat and spitting.

Of all the Golden Venture survivors, in 2006 Michael was among the most well off. He bought a three-bedroom apartment in a new development in Fuzhou for his parents to retire in. He acts as a translator when other survivors run into problems. His success is due to a convergence of factors: his youth when he came, his fierce desire to learn English, his entrepreneurial spirit, and—no small matter—his luck.

I asked Michael if, looking back now, it was worth it: the thirty days through the Burmese jungles, the year in semicaptivity in Bangkok, the 112 days on the Golden Venture, and the nearly four years in detention. Was what he had now worth all that?

He hesitated.

“If you had told me to do it again, I wouldn’t do it again,” he said. “You are gambling with your life.” He looked up. “It’s half and half. For right now, it’s worth it. If you think back, it’s not worth it to risk your life to cross the Atlantic Ocean.”

But it wasn’t about him, was it?

No, he said softly. They don’t gamble with their lives for their own sakes. They do it for their parents—and their children.

CHAPTER 9

Takeout Takeaways

The white takeout carton is an amazingly elegant product. It is a simple design, yet it connotes so much: Chineseness, harried lifestyles, working mothers, cheap yet filling, late night, transience, eating together without dining together, meal as afterthought. When FedEx started delivering to Beijing, it showed ads with a Chinese takeout carton emblazoned with the purple-and-orange FedEx logo. Continental Airlines followed suit: when it began offering nonstop flights from new York to Beijing, the company made thousands upon thousands of blue-and-white takeout boxes that said “We deliver too.” Avenue Q, a Tony-winning Broadway musical, used the boxes in its street ads to represent the Upper West Side of Manhattan—the original milieu for delivery. All this captured in a single piece of white industrial cardboard, neatly folded, held by a single wire with no seams and no glue.

Pick up a white carton sometime, and you’ll likely see the name Fold-Pak inscribed unobtrusively on the bottom; this is the company that makes some two-thirds of the takeout containers in the country. The industry calls the cartons “food pails”—which seems more Little House on the Prairie than House of Peking.

Tim Roach, a vice president who started his career with Dixie cups, explained why when I visited the company’s largest factory, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania: in the early twentieth century, the cartons were used to hold shucked oysters. “Many people still refer to it an oyster pail even though, to our knowledge, it’s not used anymore for that,” he said. At various points, Tim explained, the carton was used to hold ice cream, deli goods, and even goldfish at carnivals. (“Now they put them in a bag,” he said.) Around World War II, the box found a different audience. “Somehow, I don’t know how, it worked its way into Chinese restaurants as the takeout container and it became the dominant package for Chinese takeout,” he said. “Once it evolved into a container for Chinese food, the company put a generic Chinese design on it. Pagoda was it,” he said. They also added “Thank you” in an ersatz Chinese font.

The demand for takeout boxes across the country is considerable, so the factory operates three shifts, twenty-four hours a day, nonstop. During my visit the factory floor was a spinning, whirring, rhythmic hubbub of pneumatic tubes, printing presses, and wire-snapping machines. On the sides of the manufacturing floor were bins of discarded takeout containers from the production line: ones where the wire was misaligned, or the printing was faded, or where the cardboard had failed to separate properly.

I found something depressing about the piles of takeout boxes that had been thrown away. Takeout cartons are meant to be thrown away; but these virginal white boxes, which had never seen garlic sauce or roast pork grease, seemed almost free of original sin. Suddenly I understood why their loss was so unsettling: these boxes were stillborn—purposeless.

Fold-Pak doesn’t exist as a separate company anymore. It has a complicated corporate family tree, tangled by buyouts, mergers, bankruptcies, and joint ventures. Today, suffice it to say, Fold-Pak has become a unit within a company called GSD Packaging. The splintered history may explain one puzzling phenomenon: Fold-Pak boxes from the East and West Coasts of the United States are made slightly differently. On the East Coast, the wire always runs the short length of the box; on the West Coast, it runs the long way. In Texas you’ll see both. I placed the two different cartons from the two different coasts side by side and felt the same disoriented sense as when someone tells you that water rotates one way around the drain north of the equator and in the opposite direction south of the equator.

The white takeout containers are a fairly mature market item, so aside from the industry itself, there’s not a lot of outside opportunities for growth. “It’s so identified with Chinese food that delis and other places could use it—it’s a great package—but they identify it with Chinese food,” Tim explained. So the company adapted, pushing a new upscale product called Bio-Pak. These flatter, wireless versions of the traditional takeout carton, available in neutral, warm colors, are preferred by classier food establishments that don’t want the connotation of the white carton. Whole Foods, for example, uses them at the salad bar.

Decades ago, Fold-Pak company executives visited China to see if there was an opportunity there for the takeout boxes but decided against moving into the market. “It really would have been an uphill climb,” Tim said.

Why? I asked.

“Because the Chinese takeout phenomenon in the United States doesn’t exist in China.”

The takeout cartons aren’t even sold in Canada, he told me. I was surprised, given Canada’s geographical and cultural proximity to the United States. “We’re still trying to get into the Canadian market,” he said. “They do the foam and the aluminum.”

But international buyers spring up in unexpected places. Fold-Pak often gets telephone calls and e-mail messages from distant parts of the world. “We’ll get inquiries from different countries in Europe and Africa, wanting to get the product they see in Seinfeld,” he said. American television shows have a worldwide audience. Viewers see the box as hip and glamorous, he explained. “They’ll say, ‘We saw this on Seinfeld or Friends—where do we get it?’”

When Americans look at the box they see something Chinese. When others look at the box, they think of America.

CHAPTER 10

The Oldest Surviving Fortune Cookies in the World?

Most fortune cookies from the Los Angeles area are now made by Mexican labor, as is a surprising amount of the Chinese food in the area: noodles, wonton wrappers, egg-roll skins—even the handmade dumplings in some of the most famous dumpling houses around Los Angeles. Your waitress up front may be Chinese, but there’s a good chance a cook in the back is Chicano.

A large source for Mexican-made Chinese food is one of the largest fortune cookie factories on the West Coast today, Peking Noodle, founded in 1922.

Stephen Tong, a sprightly ninety-year-old man whose family owns Peking Noodle, greeted me in the company’s office. He had plump cheeks and wore a newsboy cap, producing the overall effect of a man from Mao-era China. But when he spoke, instead of a barrage of rural Chinese aphorisms, I heard a native southern California accent; he has lived in the area more or less continuously for eighty-six years, since arriving from China in 1921 as a toddler, to join his father. His daughter Beverly hurried in and chided her father to put in his teeth before our interview.

As a child in the 1930s, Stephen had to fold fortune cookies after school. “I burned my fingers to a crisp,” he barked. But he did it to earn money for dates.

“In those days, we sold directly to the restaurants. Business was pretty small-scale,” he said. Were fortune cookies Chinese or Japanese in origin? I asked him point-blank. “Japanese,” he said without hesitation. By his recollection, the first dominant fortune cookie manufacturer in the Los Angeles area was the Hamano family, whose company, Umeya, was one of the earliest mass producers of fortune cookies. By the 1930s, Umeya was distributing fortune cookies to more than 120 Japanese-owned restaurants throughout central and southern California. “A lot of Chinese restaurants were owned by Japanese,” Stephen said, noting that there wasn’t a lot of demand for sushi back then. “They opened Chinese restaurants as a means to an income.”

One day, Stephen was in his car when the radio reported that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. He immediately drove home. “When you hear news that your country has been attacked, there is a fear in you that you may not survive this, because the attack was massive, sort of like 9/11,” he recalled. His Japanese neighbors were forced to evacuate. “They had to dispose of their businesses and their automobiles. It was frightening. The Japanese had to give up everything,” he remembered. Umeya closed down shop and relocated to Denver, where it continued to make Japanese sweets. After the war, Umeya moved back to Los Angeles and started producing fortune cookies again. The company divvied up the national fortune cookie territory with its sister company in New York City, called Twixt, owned by the Okuno family.

But things had changed. Beverly added, “The relationship between the Chinese and Japanese was very different after the war than before the war.”

Eighty-five years ago, Peking Noodle splintered off from the Hong Kong Noodle Company, one of the longest continuously running Chinese businesses on the West Coast today—and a candidate for the originator of the fortune cookie. Though much has changed around the Hong Kong Noodle Company, little about the factory itself has. It is still located in the same flat-roofed building in the same nook of a street where it was founded in 1913. It still makes noodles, wonton skins, egg-roll wrappers. The biggest change may be its Mexican employees.

Merlin Lowe, whose father bought the company from David Jung’s family, met me outside the building and led me inside, where he sat down at a desk that had been in the building for four generations. As company lore had it, fortune cookies were invented by David Jung as an appetizer, not a dessert, Merlin explained. There used to be a restaurant around the corner attached to the Hong Kong Noodle Company, and it had some very impatient customers. “When they used to wait, they would get—I wouldn’t say ‘violent,’ that’s a strong word,” he told me. “They would get restless because they had to wait such a long time.”

David Jung’s son George Cheng had long claimed that his father had gotten the idea of fortune cookies from an ancient game played among the upper classes in China. Individuals would be given pen, paper, and a twisted cake that contained a scrap of paper with a subject written on it. Using the pen, the paper, and the subject, the writers were expected to compose a narrative of wisdom.

Hong Kong Noodle Company stopped making cookies around 2000. For Merlin, the decision was emotional and traumatic. “That really hurt. Not only is it part of my childhood, it’s part of the history of Hong Kong Noodle Company,” he said. But the finances demanded it—the competition from the larger companies, the same as that faced by Lotus, in San Francisco, was vicious. “We were losing money,” he said. “If we were breaking even on it, I would have kept it going.”

As we were talking, Merlin’s father looked in the office door, said nothing, and moved past. Merlin explained that his father didn’t like to talk about the fortune cookie or make a big deal about Hong Kong Noodle’s role in its origins; it’s a Chinese approach not to talk about things. Merlin, on the other hand, thought it was good to share their history.

Back then, the residents of the surrounding neighborhood, a mix of Chinese, Japanese, blacks, whites, and Latinos, easily intermingled. “Around this neighborhood, Chinese and Japanese were all friends,” he said. Ideas were freely shared. “David Jung had a Japanese friend that helped him make the first fortune cookie machine,” Merlin told me.

I asked him about a widespread story that had been printed in the New York Times and used in the 1983 trial: that David Jung had invented the cookie to cheer up downtrodden men on the streets of Los Angeles and that a minister had written the messages inside. Merlin didn’t buy it. “If it were true then I would have heard it from my dad, but since we are Chinese, things like that wouldn’t be ‘bragged’ about,” he explained. “So, yes, the cookies could have been made for that purpose, but I have a hard time believing it.” (That widely shared story, it turns out, has a sketchy provenance. Some digging in library archives turned up paperwork that traced it back to a library researcher in the San Joaquin Valley who was a friend of the Jung family.)

As we were sitting there, Merlin fished among the debris on the ancient desk and pulled out a brightly colored tin can whose yellow, green, and red label read “Hong Kong Brand Tea Cakes.” Beside the name was a drawing of two fortune cookies lying side by side.

“Tea cakes?” I asked. Why were the cookies called tea cakes?

Merlin shrugged. “In my experience, they were just called tea cakes,” he told me. He also showed me a baker’s hat imprinted with the words “Fortune tea cakes.” “Tea cake” and “fortune tea cake” were common names for the cookie early on, before it became known as “fortune cooky” and ultimately, with a modern spelling, “fortune cookie.” During World War II, “Chinese fortune tea cakes” were brought under the control of the Office of Price Administration. They were freed in August 1946.

Merlin guesstimated that the tin can must be at least sixty years old, because the company had stopped using such cans by the 1950s. Based on the style of the art, which was something I associated with children’s books from the 1930s, I would have guessed so too.

The next thing out of his mouth astounded me.

“It’s never been opened,” he said.

I inspected the top of the can and saw that, indeed, it was still sealed. I held it up to my ear and shook. There was the rustle of crunchy confectionery against metal. While the cookies had not all disintegrated to powder, they were definitely not entirely whole anymore. I looked in amazement at this tin of sixty-year-old fortune cookies that had sat in this office all this time. They may very well be the oldest surviving fortune cookies on the planet.

Later in the conversation, I moved my arm and accidentally knocked over the tin can. Horrified, I envisioned the final cookie fragments disintegrating from the jolt. I began effusively apologizing to Merlin.

“It’s okay.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to open it now anyway.”

Less than a mile from the Hong Kong Noodle Company was yet another artifact attesting to the fortune cookie’s origin. This one came from the oldest surviving store in Little Tokyo, a small Japanese sweetshop called Fugetsu-do. The shop, originally started by a Japanese immigrant named Seiichi Kito in 1903, had been passed down through three generations. At one time, the store had displayed black iron molds in the window, ones that had supposedly been used to make the original fortune cookies.

I walked inside Fugetsu-do and was confronted with glass cases containing a whole array of treats: colorful rice taffy called mochi, steamed red bean cakes called manju, and round and curved Japanese crackers of various shapes called senbei.

Brian Kito, the founder’s grandson, still made the Japanese sweets by hand in the back rooms of the shop, where a light dusting of flour stuck to everything that passed through (including me). Fugetsu-do’s clientele had a strong geriatric bent. Old Japanese-American men shuffled in on canes; old Japanese-American women with wispy gray hair and liver spots approached the counter. This was a candy store filled with the elderly rather than children. To broaden the appeal of the traditional Japanese desserts, the store had started making rice cakes in grape, orange, and lemon flavors, hoping to attract the generation that had grown up with Blow Pops and Sour Patch Kids. It even sold a version of strawberry-flavored mochi filled with crunchy peanut butter instead of red bean paste, which made it seem like an eccentric cousin of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

When he was growing up in Los Angeles, Brian was skeptical about his father’s stories about his grandfather’s role in the fortune cookie creation. After all, everyone knew that fortune cookies were Chinese. Then, as a teenager, he watched an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not that said the fortune cookie was actually invented by the Japanese in Los Angeles. Once he had seen it on television, he thought his father might actually be telling the truth.

Brian brought me to Fugetsu-do’s warehouse, located a few blocks away in downtown Los Angeles. He gestured to a disassembled fortune cookie machine in the center. Fugetsu-do had bought it from a Japanese bakery when it went bankrupt a few decades ago. What was left was crumpled mechanics: a large wheel, gas pipes, and various gears. Rummaging in the dark crevice beneath the wheel, Brian pulled out a set of black iron molds—similar to the ones that Sally Osaki must have exhibited at the trial. Two round black discs were connected to handles that separated them, like a pair of pliers. I eyed them. Could these be the original fortune cookie molds?

A lot of things had been lost during the war, Brian said. The family had stored their confectionery equipment in a warehouse before they were interned. But at the end of the war they could not get their belongings out, because either someone had stolen the equipment or the landlord had demanded several years of back rent. It took them years to reestablish their store.

A few blocks down from Fugetsu-do lived Gary Ono, the amateur historian of the family that owned the Benkyodo store in San Francisco, one of the claimants to the invention of the fortune cookie.

Gary dug around and pulled out his set of black grills, similar to the ones at Fugetsu-do, called kata. They were heavy. I looked at the inside of the discs and saw the letters “HM” etched there.

“Makoto Hagiwara,” Gary said, referring to the man who’d originally overseen the Japanese Tea Garden.

The mirror image of “HM”—the way the letters would read on a cookie—was “MH,” Makoto Hagiwara’s initials. Gary said that a few years back he had found them, rusting, on the floor of a room used to store Benkyodo equipment behind a family garage.

A Japanese researcher had come to San Francisco a while ago, asking probing questions about fortune cookies. Her research showed that fortune cookies were Japanese, based on something called tsujiura senbei, which she had traced to shrines outside Kyoto.

This was the first I had heard of such a researcher. Gary pulled out a binder and showed me her paper, which, unfortunately for both of us, was written in Japanese. I could at least read a little bit of the Japanese characters, because they were based on Chinese written language. The Chinese word jianbing (“grilled biscuit”) appeared often—I assumed that was senbei in Japanese, a term that could be used to describe a cookie or cracker, often served with tea.

Gary couldn’t read any of the writing. His first language was English and, like many third-generation Japanese-Americans, he had never developed strong Japanese reading and writing skills. But there was something that neither of us needed language ability to translate. On one page of the paper was a Meiji-era wood-block print of a man in a kimono, his hair swept up in a bun. He was working in a Japanese shop and manipulating what appeared to be about a dozen fortune cookie grills over a fire—similar to the kata grills that belonged to Gary and Brian. But it was the date that grabbed my attention. Amid the Japanese cutline was a single year, 1878—decades earlier than any of the claims of other would-be fortune cookie inventors in the United States. My quest to understand the phenomenon of Chinese fortune cookies in America had suddenly pointed me to Japan.

CHAPTER 11

The Mystery of the Missing Chinese Deliveryman

Crime reporters in New York City quickly become versed in the vocabulary of death. A “DOA” is a dead body. A “floater” is a body found in the water. A “jumper” is a person on the verge of committing suicide, usually from a building, a bridge, or in the subway. A “likely” is someone likely to die. A “not likely” is someone injured but likely to survive. A police rundown of a multiple shooting might go: “We have two DOAs, one likely, and one not likely.”

Each of the cramped newspaper offices in the headquarters of the New York Police Department has an old-school beige telephone. The public relations office of the police department makes calls—referred to as hotline calls—when, late in the day, it has something pressing to announce to the media en masse. When nothing is pressing, the police simply send out summaries of the crimes.

One slow Saturday April afternoon, I was working when the beige phone, the hotline phone, rang. We all picked up.

“We have a missing person,” said the police sergeant on the other end.

A police hotline call about a missing person is unusual. People go missing all the time in New York, especially teenagers. With a burgeoning population of Alzheimer’s patients, the city is finding itself with an increasing number of people who simply wander off, misled by their own dementia. (In one recent case, an elderly man passed through immigration at John F. Kennedy Airport but disappeared before he got to the curb.) Others run away because of debt, or bad marriages. Usually the police simply send out a sheet with an attached photo, asking for the public’s help in locating the person. For the police to do a late-afternoon hotline call meant that the investigators thought this was a bad situation. Then we found out why.

It was a Chinese deliveryman.

The sergeant gave a quick rundown of what the investigators knew: a Chinese deliveryman had gone missing Friday night in the Bronx while making a delivery to a big apartment building. He had left for the Tracey Towers apartment complex, a few blocks from the restaurant, with an order of large curried shrimp with onion and a small shrimp fried rice. He never came back. His worried restaurant coworkers went to look for him and found his bike still locked up outside the building. They called the police.

The investigators started treating the case seriously when they realized that he had none of the debts or conflicts that generally explain why people disappear. By the time the sergeant called the reporters, the search had been going for some eighteen hours.

The police subsequently sent out a sheet, written in the department’s standard terse, capitalized style, with the missing man’s name misspelled:

ON APRIL 1, 2005 AT 2200 HRS, THE FOLLOWING PERSON WAS REPORTED MISSING BY A FAMILY MEMBER:

MISSING: MING KUNG CHEN M/A/35

4211 THROGS NECK EXPRESSWAY

BRONX NY

MISSING WAS LAST SEEN V/O WEST MOSHOLU PKWY AT 2030 HRS WHILE HE WAS WORKING AS A FOOD DELIVERY PERSON. ANYONE WITH INFORMATION ON HIS WHEREABOUTS IS ASKED TO CALL POLICE AT 800 577-TIPS. ALL CALLS WILL BE KEPT CONFIDENTIAL. NO PHOTO AVAIL AT THIS TIME.

I called a young freelance reporter, Rachel Metz, and sent her up to the takeout Chinese restaurant in the Bronx. It turns out that Rachel, who is Jewish, has a longtime family connection to Chinese restaurants; her grandfather owned and operated one in Syracuse for years. Rachel called me back with some information from the restaurant. Chen had paid $60,000 to emigrate from Fujian Province two years earlier, where he had left behind his wife and their twelve-year-old son. After adding further details from Rachel’s reporting, I tapped out a brief story. Things didn’t look good for Mr. Chen.

Chinese deliverymen are one of the most vulnerable species in the urban ecosystem. Homicide is a leading cause of on-the-job deaths; the motive is nearly always robbery. Five New York City Chinese deliverymen were killed between 1998 and 2003 alone, simply for free food and a handful of cash. None of their killers was even old enough to drink. Three teenagers, a girl and two boys, were sentenced for the 2002 murder of Jian Lin-Chun, a Chinese deliveryman in the Bronx. The girl had called in an order to Happy House Chinese restaurant. The two boys pulled a gun on the deliveryman when he showed up and shot him when he pulled out a knife to defend himself. He had twelve dollars in his pocket. The girl took no share of the cash; all she wanted was the Chinese food: thirteen dollars’ worth of General Tso’s chicken, chicken and broccoli, chicken wings, and fries. Two years earlier, in Queens, a forty-four-year-old Chinese deliveryman, Jin-Sheng Liu, was brutally murdered; five teenagers beat him to death with a brick to get sixty dollars’ worth of Chinese food. After they killed him, they went back to one home and ate the Chinese food. But perhaps the most callous of all was the 2004 murder of an eighteen-year-old student named Huang Chen, who was helping out at his parents’ restaurant in Queens. His older sister Yvonne had told him he needed to do well in school or he would also be forced to work in the Chinese-restaurant business. His killers, who were sixteen years old at the time, later told police that they wanted money to buy Air Jordan sneakers. Though he pleaded for his life, they stabbed him with their knives; to prevent his body from being recognized, they beat his head in with a hammer and a baseball bat. Then they wrapped his body in a piece of plastic and dumped it in a pond three miles away. When police found the teens, they still had the blood-soaked dollar bills on them; they’d aroused suspicion when one of the killers had asked a friend if dead bodies float.

The violence doesn’t always grab headlines. There is a constant hum of low-level assaults. During a stop in Hutchinson, Minnesota, on my Powerball restaurant tour, I met Ting Young Zheng, the owner of King’s Wok, a huge buffet restaurant where one of the winners had gotten his lucky numbers. “When I hear of New York, my head still hurts,” said Ting, who had been robbed three times as a New York City deliveryman, once at gunpoint. “Sometimes you get through half the route and you are robbed,” he said, shaking his head. In 1992 he was kidnapped and held for ransom. As a deliveryman, he was beaten so severely that his bones still ache when the weather changes.

The NYPD carried out a massive search for Ming Kuang Chen. Helicopters conducting aerial searches hovered overhead. Dogs trained to smell cadavers spread out over an area encompassing Van Cortlandt Park and Woodlawn Cemetery. Divers were sent to the bottom of the Jerome Park Reservoir in case the body, like Huang Chen’s, had been submerged in water. And over one hundred police officers and detectives fanned out to search the 871 apartments in the two high-rise towers.

On Sunday, the police sent out another update.

*****UPDATE 4-3-05 LC*****

ATTACHED IS A PHOTO OF THE MISSING ASIAN MALE MING KUNG CHEN. THE MISSING WAS LAST SEEN ON FRIDAY 4/01/05 AT APPROX. 2030 HRS AT 40 WEST MOSHOLU PARKWAY SOUTH. MR. CHEN IS DESCRIBED AS A M/A/35, 5′8″, THIN BUILD, BLACK HAIR, LAST SEEN WEARING A GREY BASEBALL CAP, WAIST LENGTH BLUE JACKET WITH STRIPES ON THE SLEEVES, BLUE JEANS, BLACK SHOES. THE BICYCLE THE MISSING USED TO MAKE DELIVERIES WAS FOUND CHAINED TO A FIXED OBJECT OUTSIDE THE LOCATION. THE INVESTIGATION IS ONGOING.

Officially it was still a missing-persons report. Off the record, investigators were saying he was probably dead. “It’s only a matter of time before they are going to find a body,” one officer confided to me on the phone.

It is unusually difficult to hide a corpse in New York City. Nearly everything is paved, so you can’t bury it. Only a fraction of people have cars, so the odds are slim that a killer can toss a body in a trunk and drive far away. Ordinary people are about during all hours, so it’s hard to lug a large, bulky package around without attracting attention. And there aren’t that many woods to go dumping bodies in. Murderers aren’t, in general, the sharpest pencils in the box. Nor are they necessarily forward thinkers. With such a high-density population, the bodies are almost always discovered, sometimes in unpredictable locations—wrapped in carpets, in suitcases, in giant Rubbermaid winter storage boxes.

Death is only the lowest point in what is almost universally the miserable existence of a Chinese restaurant worker. As many told me, “What choice do we have when we don’t speak English?” They are treated like farm animals or machines. Their purpose is simply to feed Americans: frying, delivering, waiting tables, stirring, bussing, chopping. They may be fathers, daughters, cousins, uncles, brothers. But when in front of most Americans, they simply become an anonymous, all-purpose Chinese restaurant worker. They work twelve-hour days and six-day weeks. The abuse is not limited to violence at the hands of Americans; in fact, the average Chinese restaurant worker’s misery is actually caused by restaurant owners. Some owners treat their workers respectfully. Others try to get away with as much as they can. In a world inhabited by illegal immigrants afraid of authorities, what they can get away with is a lot: underpaying, overworking, sexual harassment. In recent years, workers have been fighting back with a number of lawsuits spearheaded by advocacy groups.

Restaurant workers live a nomadic existence, bouncing from state to state, restaurant to restaurant, region to region. A chef who’s cooking in Connecticut today could be stir-frying in Louisiana next week. The woman who answers the takeout phone today in North Carolina could be in Ohio in a few months. Every week they arrive in Chinatown from all corners of the United States.

The largest and most efficient distribution hub for these restaurant workers lies some seventeen miles south of where Mr. Chen disappeared—under the Manhattan Bridge in New York City’s Chinatown. While other urban centers like Boston, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta have employment agencies, New York still remains the dominant source of Chinese restaurant workers, particularly east of the Rockies.

Unlike a McDonald’s or a Burger King, which can find employees from its local population, many Chinese restaurants operate in small cities and out-of-the-way towns where there simply isn’t a local Chinese population to draw from. The solution: they import workers from other areas. At the beginning of every week, a steady stream of phone calls from restaurants needing workers flows into the agencies under the Manhattan Bridge. To match them, Chinese workers begin streaming into the Chinatown employment agencies: young men with spiky hair barely out of their teens, smooth-skinned girls who still giggle about their crushes, and stocky older men who left their families behind in China years ago. They are deliverymen, cooks, waitresses, kitchen helpers. They work in restaurants, they say, because they have no choice.

As the deep rumble of the subway passes overhead, the job seekers walk in and out, through the dozens of dusty single-room employment agencies, focusing on the whiteboards and walls of Post-it notes that list the hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese-restaurant job openings that pass through the area each week. Three numbers identify a job to a restaurant worker: the monthly salary, the area code where the restaurant is located, and the number of hours by bus from New York City. To these Chinese restaurant workers, who can barely read English, the United States is not a series of towns or states. It is a collection of area codes, almost all of which have dozens upon dozens of Chinese restaurants looking for help. Rent and cost of living are not usually considered when relocating. The restaurant owners feed their workers, and it is standard to provide dorm-style housing.

A job could be summed up thus: $2,400, 440 near Cleveland, 10 hours.

The interviews, done by phone, are practical and blunt. These are jobs, not careers. Instead of “What do you see yourself doing in five years?” it’s “Can you leave tonight?”

If the parties agree, the job seeker then pays the agency, and the agency tells him where to catch the bus that night. A network of Chinese bus companies has sprung up to shuttle these restaurant workers between Chinatown and the rest of the country. A typical bus advertisement: “Minnesota (612, 651, 952, 763) $150, Wisconsin (920, 715, 608, 414) $120.” The destinations are written by people familiar with American geography but unfamiliar with American spelling: Detrot, Harford, Frankfort, Ann Arbol, Louisuille, Evansiue, Coumbus, Beltimore, Willmington, Teledo.

These Chinese-restaurant buses are not entirely unfamiliar to the American mainstream. The budget “Chinatown buses” that shuttle between New York and Boston and New York and Washington originally started out as routes for Chinese restaurant workers, before college students and the Lonely Planet crowd caught on. The buses exploded in popularity in the late 1990s, and the competition sparked violence between rival bus companies.

I have bussed through Indiana, Ohio, Chicago, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Seen from the window of a Chinese-restaurant bus, America looks entirely different: a large web of highways connecting little towns, modest cities, and sprawling suburbs, all of which have Chinese restaurants or will have Chinese restaurants. In one overnight trip, I woke up from my position curled on the bus seat and gazed out into the early-morning light streaming through the smoggy haze. We had stopped at a gas station in Toledo, a transfer point. Half the people got off the bus and were shuttled off in waiting vans. They were being taken to other Ohio cities—Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati—and from there to smaller suburbs. Like a river splitting into streams.

The police found their suspect.

A neighbor reported hearing screams from apartment 34A. Police rapped on the door. No one home. The emergency services unit kicked down the door, leaving boot marks on the paint. They overturned the furniture. They ransacked the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. Drawers, cabinets, freezer—everything was searched.

They found nothing. Then the apartment’s inhabitant, Troy Smith, a twenty-one-year-old aspiring rapper, returned. He was shocked to find officers with flak jackets and automatic weapons standing in his apartment.

They noticed a suspicious red stain on his gray T-shirt.

What is that? The detectives asked him.

Barbecue sauce, he replied. It was three days old and from a Chinese restaurant.

Right.

Unfortunately for Troy, he had a five-year-old outstanding warrant; he’d failed to show up for a disorderly conduct summons when he was a teenager. That provided the opening the police needed.

They handcuffed him.

His mother, who had been alerted at work by a phone call from a detective, returned home and was horrified to find her son in handcuffs. In front of gaping neighbors, the police dragged Troy and two friends of his to the police car and drove them to the precinct. They grilled him for hours.

“Where is the Chinese man and what did you do with him?” the detectives growled at Troy.

Troy insisted that he had no idea what they were talking about.

Then you won’t mind if we take your shirt in for testing, they said.

Go ahead, he told them. He signed a release for his gray T-shirt. It said, “I’m Troy Smith. You can have my shirt for testing.”

Meanwhile one of his friends, a stout man with a goatee, was being questioned in another room.

Don’t go down with your friend with the so-called barbecue sauce on his shirt, the detectives cajoled.

Troy’s friend insisted he had no idea what had happened to the Chinese deliveryman.

The test came back from the lab.

It was barbecue sauce.

Troy’s friend told me, after his release, “Every black man who orders Chinese food is under suspicion.” Not only is there DWB, there’s also OWB—Ordering While Black.

Within the dreariness of the Chinese restaurant worker’s life, there is one day that is different from all the others. For many it is the happiest and most romantic day of the year, full of reunions and laughter and joy. It is not Valentine’s Day, with its plump cupids, or New Year’s Eve, with its furtive midnight kisses, or even Christmas, with its fresh mistletoe and family dinners.

For Chinese restaurant workers, romantic bliss culminates on Thanksgiving.

More weddings take place in Chinatown on that one single day than any other for one simple reason: it’s the only day that the nation’s Chinese restaurant workers can consistently get off. “Americans don’t eat Chinese food on Thanksgiving. They eat turkey,” said Hong Yi Yuan, the owner of the Wedding Garden bridal shop and one of the main beneficiaries of the Thanksgiving boom.

On the fourth Thursday of each November, you can spot a steady stream of white gowns rustling down the streets of Chinatown, daintily shuffling past the herb shops, acupuncturists’ offices, and open seafood markets hawking live crabs and mussels. The brides have glitter in their hair and fake lashes on their eyelids. If you look carefully, you can see that some women are wearing jeans underneath their dresses to keep warm in the chilly weather. Each year, tens of thousands of people, almost all Chinese restaurant workers or former workers, flood into Chinatown on Thanksgiving for hundreds of weddings. Banquet halls are booked more than a year in advance, instead of just a month or two, as is standard for the rest of the year. The marital marathon of multiple simultaneous seatings starts before noon and stretches well into the night.

The chances that Mr. Chen would be found alive seemed more and more remote. I left town for two days. Tuesday morning, as I was stepping off the plane in La Guardia Airport, my phone rang. It was my editor.

“They found him,” he announced.

I was confused. Found who? I asked.

“The Chinese deliveryman. They found him in the elevator.”

“Alive?”

“Yes, alive.”

He had been stuck for three days in an elevator in the building where he’d made his delivery.

My editor commanded: Get to the hospital.

*****UPDATE 04-05-05 0745 HOURS KC*****

AT APPROXIMATELY 0605 HOURS THE ABOVE LISTED MISSING WAS LOCATED IN AN ELEVATOR 40 WEST MOSHOLU PARKWAY IN THE CONFINES OF THE 52 PRECINCT. HE WAS REMOVED TO MONTEFIORE HOSPITAL IN STABLE CONDITION.

Almost eighty-one hours after he had disappeared, Mr. Chen had reappeared, safe and sound—in the very building where he was last seen.

Crime reporters in New York City are a roving pack, a human spotlight that every day lands on another corner of the city. One of the nice things about this is that various reporters in the polyglot swarm will usually take turns translating, depending on the victim. There is the Russian reporter from the Daily News, the Dominican-American from Newsday, and me, the Mandarin speaker. So that night, we tracked Chen back to the restaurant owner’s house in the Bronx, near where Chen himself lived. He recounted his story in Mandarin.

He said he had stepped into the elevator on the thirty-seventh floor on Friday night after making his delivery; the tip, from a retired police officer, had been modest. A man and a woman got into the elevator with him, but then got off at the thirty-fifth floor. As the elevator started moving again, it lurched and then plunged. He felt his body floating off the elevator floor and grabbed the handrail to anchor himself. As he fell to what he thought was certain death, the elevator suddenly slowed, decelerating until it stopped between the third and fourth floors. The car had dropped more than thirty stories.

He banged on the door and screamed, but no one heard him. The elevator, an express, was in a part of its shaft that had no doors between the first floor and the twentieth. He positioned himself in front of the camera. He pressed the emergency button and talked to the security guard. But he didn’t speak English. All he could say was “No good! No good!”

Nevertheless, the security guards and the police insisted that they had not known of any of his efforts to contact the outside world.

Three days later, the fire department got a call about a stuck express elevator in the building. There seemed to be a drunk man in it, the security guard said. Using a key, the fireman guided the elevator from its perch to the bottom floor.

The men pried open the door.

There Chen stood, dehydrated but alert.

Improbable as it seems, despite all the dogs, divers, and detectives, no one had ever checked the express elevator. Even though there was a working video camera pointed in the elevator, no one had noticed Chen on the screen.

He had been invisible.

After his brush with the media spotlight, Ming Kuang Chen disappeared. He was afraid the immigration services would come after him, so he found work through the employment agencies in Chinatown. There would be no more delivering for him. He took a kitchen job in another town.

Few stories that start with a Chinese deliveryman as the subject end happily. Several months later another deliveryman, Fa Hua Chen, was shot in the face after making a nine-dollar delivery to a Bronx apartment building and was admitted to the hospital in critical condition. A few days later Chen died from the massive brain injury caused by the bullet. At the time of his death, his daughter, who was studying at the University of Leicester in England, had not seen him in a decade. His wife, who was back in Fujian, China, had not seen him for years either. Bureaucratic red tape threatened to prevent them from attending his funeral in the United States. But John Liu, a Chinese-American New York City Council member from Queens who jumps into all discussions concerning Asian-Americans, lobbied hard to get expedited visas for them.

After the funeral, the mother and daughter went to see the Bronx apartment where the shooting had taken place. They stood there for several minutes. The wife put her hand over the bullet hole in the glass.

Among those at the funeral was Ming Kuang Chen. He slipped in and out of the city quietly. After all, he was only a bus ride away.

CHAPTER 12

The Soy Sauce Trade Dispute

If visitors from another planet landed in the United States, they would be intrigued by the little transparent packets of brown-black liquid that accumulate in the crevices of households and workplaces across the country. Our visitor would notice that Americans treat the packets with a certain level of carelessness, tossing them aside. Then again, it could be surmised that the packages are precious, because of the way people hoard them for years upon years.

Because Americans are reluctant to throw them away, these visitors might think, the packets must be serving some greater purpose. Perhaps they are stored in preparation for the day when there is a great shortage of the brown-black liquid—in the same way that crude oil will one day run dry. Or perhaps our guest would come to a different conclusion: given that the packets appear in a broad range of households—old, young, black, white, urban, suburban, interior, coastal—the guest might hypothesize that the packets contain an antidote should the nation ever come under a massive biochemical attack.

The vast majority of those clear packets in the United States actually come from a single source: a low-slung soy sauce factory in a quasi-industrial town in New Jersey called Totowa, located about half an hour outside New York City. The factory is owned by a company called Kari-Out, which supplies the things that Chinese restaurants give away: soy sauce packets, fortune cookies, trapezoidal white cartons, wooden chopsticks. I had been led to Kari-Out on the trail of the lucky Powerball numbers.

You have probably never noticed Kari-Out, and you probably aren’t familiar with its logo, a ditzy, wide-eyed panda. After all, there’s not really much point in a company spending a lot on consumer brand marketing when its entire business model is built on things that are distributed for free. Kari-Out, which is owned by a Jewish family, rose to its prominence in the Chinese-restaurant business from a humble start in soy sauce. Today the factory operates seven days a week, three shifts a day, churning out millions of packets a year.

Look at the label on a bottle of soy sauce from an Asian company, and you’ll probably find that the chief ingredients listed are water, soybeans, wheat, and salt. But look at the ingredients on Kari-Out soy sauce—or almost any other American company’s soy sauce—and you’ll generally find that the most common ingredients are water, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, caramel coloring, and corn syrup.

You may wonder, Where’s the soy? Exactly, Asian manufacturers say.

They claim that American soy sauce is not real soy sauce. Soy sauce, the Asians say, should be brewed from soybeans. It’s like the difference between vanilla and vanilla extract made from vanilla beans, or real mayonnaise versus the mysterious coagulated substance called Miracle Whip.

Asian “natural-brewed” soy sauce is made by a process not unlike that used with vodka or sake. It requires fermenting a mix of wheat, soybeans, and a particular mold for weeks or even months, then refining, pressing, and pasteurizing it. In contrast, the crudest type of American soy sauce is basically salted water mixed with a flavor enhancer distilled from vegetable proteins. (That flavor enhancer is related to the little flavor packets that come with ramen noodles.) The food coloring and corn syrup give the liquid a vaguely soy sauce–like appearance.

At Kikkoman, the world’s largest producer of soy sauce, the managing director of soy sauce operations in Japan, Hiroshi Takamatsu, explained to me what was wrong: “Soy sauce is soy. It comes from soybeans. So the first thing is you have to use soybeans.” The Asian companies charge that American processed soy sauce is a Frankensauce chemical counterfeit created by modern science.

Because they believe that it isn’t a natural-brewed soy sauce, in 1998 they began a global campaign to prevent it from being classified as such.

The forum for international food-definition battles is the Codex Alimentarius Commission, one of those international regulatory organizations whose actions are barely noticed by the outside world. Yet the bureaucratic jujitsu performed there exercises great influence over many industries and countries. Created in 1962 by two U.N. organizations, Codex sets the international standards for foodstuffs around the world. For instance, international regulations have limited the term “champagne” to sparkling wine from a particular region in the north of France, and “Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese” to a particular region and production method in Italy. These labels are important in cases of exporting and importing as the global food-supply chains become more far-reaching. Codex makes the de facto rules for the World Trade Organization’s trade-dispute court. It is where hummus is defined as hummus, mineral water as mineral water, and cottage cheese as cottage cheese. The agenda for a Codex meeting often reads like a shopping list from Dean & DeLuca: whole dates, dried figs, table olives, shredded coconut.

In Japan, I paid a visit to Natsuko Kumasawa, a food advocate from Tokyo who was involved in pushing the soy sauce labeling campaign. The problem with Codex, Natsuko-san explained as she poured me green tea in her stylish living room, was that it was dominated by foods from European and North American countries. “We feel sort of isolated. Many Asian countries felt we need some standards for Asian food. We thought of some Asian foods and we thought of soy sauce,” she said. After all, what could be more quintessentially Asian than soy sauce?

The dark seasoning’s history stretches back over several millennia. By legend it began to spread internationally when a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk discovered it during his studies in China. He brought a version back to his native country in the thirteenth century, where he adapted it. In various forms soy sauce spread widely through East and Southeast Asia. Today, it’s a staple used in Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, albeit with local varieties. Western cuisine was introduced to soy sauce primarily through Dutch explorers in the seventeenth century.

The Japanese were not alone in trying to codify their Asian culinary products at Codex. Around the same time, the Koreans applied for a standard for kimchee, their famed spicy pickled cabbage. The dish is such an essential part of the country’s cultural identity that Korean supermarkets in United States sell $600 kimchee refrigerators, not unlike the private wine fridges for chardonnay connoisseurs. Kimchee has a fairly narrow audience around the world. Only a smattering of countries took a vigorous interest in the kimchee standard that was proposed in 1996. After some minor tussling that beat back a Japanese attempt to get pickled kimuchi, as it is called in Japan, included in the standard, Codex passed a kimchee regulation in 2001.

Soy sauce, however, was of a different order of magnitude. It may have been created in China, but by the turn of the second millennium A.D. it had made its way not only across Asia but around the world as one of civilization’s most popular condiments. In Japan it is known as shoyu. In Peru it is called sillao. In China it is jiangyou. Malaysia and Indonesia use a version of sweetened soy sauce called kecap manis; that term is often credited as the precursor to “ketchup.” (The Asian varieties are tomatoless, however. Culinary historians surmise that the tomato was added when the condiment hopped over to Europe.)

In a way, Asian soy sauce manufacturers had pushed the very mainstreaming that was now causing their problems. Since Kikkoman’s earliest days in the United States, it had made grainy black-and-white television commercials urging housewives to use Kikkoman when cooking steaks, pot roasts, chicken, or hamburgers. Executives back then realized that Asians in America were going to buy soy sauce anyway; growth would have to come from convincing mainstream American cooks that soy sauce should be part of their culinary arsenal. Today, an entire department in Kikkoman’s American headquarters in San Francisco is devoted to developing recipes for women’s magazines, labels, and press releases. Kikkoman recommends adding the product to spaghetti sauce, barbecue sauce, salad dressings, and salmon marinade. The only significant resistance the public relations people ever encountered occurred after they suggested incorporating soy sauce in Thanksgiving recipes.

For the Codex regulations, the Japanese were hoping to adapt a standards system long used in Japan. It would divide soy sauce into long-term brewed, short-term brewed, nonbrewed, and mixed. Natsuko explained that they first tried to build consensus among the Asian countries, so that they would arrive as a united front. The Japanese didn’t have nonbrewed soy sauce, but they added the category to accommodate the other Asian nations’ concerns. “It’s an Asian food,” she said. “First we thought no countries except Asian ones will be interested in it.”

They were wrong. As politicians would delicately put it, by this point, the soy sauce industry had a lot of stakeholders.

You wouldn’t think that American soy sauce manufacturers would care about labels used in exporting soy sauce. But they do. For example, La Choy, the largest American bottled soy sauce manufacturer, exports its soy sauce to fifty-six countries around the world. The top five markets are Jamaica, Haiti, Greece, St. Martin, and Belize.

“They didn’t think that this kind of confusion would come up,” Natsuko told me. “Because many countries in Europe and North America are interested, we decided to move it to the Processed Foods and Vegetables Committee at the International Association of Consumer Food Organizations.” That’s where things got more and more hairy, Natsuko said: “The discussion, it became too heated.”

What makes Chinese food taste so good?

Part of the answer lies in soy sauce. Brewed soy sauce naturally has what is known as the “fifth flavor.” After the easily identified ones—sweet, bitter, salty, and sour—comes “umami,” which means “savory” in Japanese. It’s hard to describe umami; it is a hearty or meaty taste. It’s the low note on a three-note chord. Or, to use another metaphor from music, umami is the subwoofer of taste. It’s what gives Parmesan cheese, ripe tomatoes, and mushrooms their hearty flavor. Umami was first identified by Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University, who found it while probing the strong taste in seaweed broth in 1908. That flavor, which came from glutamates, was isolated as a salt and patented in 1909 by the Ajinomoto corporation as the chemical monosodium glutamate, more familiar to Americans as MSG. Today Ajinomoto is the world’s largest MSG producer, controlling about one-third of the global market.

MSG’s reputation has since become tainted. Fear of it began in 1968, when the concept of “Chinese restaurant syndrome” was introduced in the New England Journal of Medicine in a chatty piece by Dr. Ho Man Kwok. “I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food,” he wrote. “The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations.”

Finally, in 1992 the FDA asked the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, an independent body of scientists, to review the available scientific data on adverse reactions to MSG. The report identified two groups of people who might develop “MSG symptom complex.” One group was made up of people who couldn’t tolerate large doses of MSG, generally more than three grams. The second group included people with severe, poorly controlled asthma who experienced temporary worsening of their asthmatic symptoms after consuming MSG. But for most people, MSG was safe at normal levels, the report concluded. Scientific studies following the test have not been able to fully support the report’s conclusions.

Despite the fact that the nonbrewed soy sauce category would include the processed American version, the American delegation began a protest. Suddenly, the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council appeared on the horizon. The United States Department of Agriculture, the lead American agency at Codex, argued against any labeling at all.

Natsuko and the other Asian representatives were dumbfounded. “The International Hydrolyzed Protein Council and the American government thought the distinction was not necessary,” she said.

Martin J. Hahn, a Washington lobbyist for the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council, explained the situation to me quite reasonably: “We were trying to make certain that the Codex standards would allow and maintain some degree of flexibility.” The products had been manufactured and sold as soy sauce in the United States and in other parts of the world for decades without complaints. Why shake up the system now? Washington lobbyists have a way of sounding incredibly reasonable while simultaneously making new regulations seem unreasonable. He added, “Let’s maintain some flexibility. Let’s recognize that in different countries, it is common to use hydrolyzed proteins and call it soy sauce.”

The Japanese delegation was confused by hydrolyzed vegetable protein, which they had never heard of in the context of soy sauce. They asked for a sample and were confused when they saw it was just a white powder. As Natsuko explained, “We didn’t think it [was] a food.”

America has simplified—or corrupted, depending on your perspective—and mass-processed many refined foods from around the world: beer (ask Germans what they think of American beer); chocolate (the Swiss grimace when they bite into a waxy Hershey’s chocolate bar); cheese (whoever branded the processed orange substance with “American” should be boiled in it). But it was quite another matter for Americans to apply their industrial standards to a product that was so distinctively Asian.

“That’s black water with salt,” Natsuko said about the sauce in a packet. Real soy sauce is actually reddish-brown. It becomes more brown and less red the more contact it has with oxygen. Soy sauce traditionalists point out that the brewed product has a different chemical profile than the nonbrewed stuff. The brewing process also generates alcohol and aroma-contributing esters that contribute a refined tartness to a good soy sauce.

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is actually a chemical and industrial relation to MSG, only without the stigma of that acronym. (The connections run deep. When I mentioned to the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council representative that I was looking for a contact for the MSG industry group, he told me it was he.) To create hydrolyzed vegetable protein, a combination of corn, wheat, and soybean meal is boiled in hydrochloric acid for the better part of a day, to isolate the amino acids. American food companies explain that this is simply a sped-up version of what happens during the natural fermentation process. This acid stew is then neutralized with sodium carbonate or sodium hydroxide. When it is filtered, the result is hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

To be fair, at one point Japan also made so-called chemical soy sauce, but that was after World War II, when many supplies, including soybeans, were scarce. Other countries have also depended on the shortcut process now and then. But as Asian economies have grown, food manufacturers have shied away from such additives. That has left the United States as the largest such soy sauce producer in the world. The largest American bottle brand is La Choy, founded in 1922 by two men, neither of whom had Chinese roots. Wally Smith, a Detroit businessman, and Ilhan New, who was born in Korea, met as students at the University of Michigan and joined forces to form a business that would sell the bean sprouts that had become so popular in chop suey. By the late 1930s La Choy was distributing a broad array of Chinese food products, including kumquats, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, brown sauce, chow mein noodles—and soy sauce. La Choy has since been acquired by the gigantic food conglomerate ConAgra.

But as for the little packets, that market is dominated by Kari-Out. The company was founded in the late 1960s by Howard Epstein, a lanky Bronx-born businessman who had a passion for what he called “small-unit packaging.” At different points in his career, he experimented with packaging dry soup mixes, frozen ice pops, hotel toiletries, and chemicals before discovering the joy of soy sauce in 1968. His timing was fortuitous: Chinese takeout started its explosion shortly after President Nixon returned from China and Americans fell in love with pandas. Kari-Out was right behind, pushing packaged soy sauce on a national scale with its newly designed panda logo. Chinese restaurants were among the first to adapt to working women and two-career families by pioneering takeout and delivery. Patronage at “Oriental takeout” restaurants jumped during the 1980s, growing 131 percent between 1982 and 1987 alone, according to a survey by the National Restaurant Association. During that same period, fast-food restaurants grew only 26 percent. Today, about 60 percent of Chinese restaurants in the country are takeouts.

Chinese takeout’s biggest rivals for speed and convenience have historically been pizza and fast food. But Chinese food has one advantage: the significant presence of vegetables makes parents feel a bit less guilty about ordering in for dinner. Once upon a time, the whole point of eating restaurant food was going out—dining out was a luxury. Somewhere along the line, however, with more singles and more working mothers, home cooking from scratch instead became the luxury—though judging by the number of richly photographed cookbooks and the popularity of the Food Network, you wouldn’t guess how little we actually do of it.

The packets were such a success that by 1972 Howard had added duck sauce and hot mustard to his Kari-Out lineup. He handed the company down to his three sons, who helped grow the business into the largest Chinese-restaurant supplier in the country. Perhaps no single family is as intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of American Chinese takeout as the Epsteins. The sons talk about industry minutiae with the joy that comes from a family-run business. They can discuss the subtleties of the Chinese takeout container. They know fortune cookie shelf life. They converse knowledgeably about the shades of fried rice favored in different parts of the country, and the food coloring that is needed to create those shades. Fried rice tends to be brown in Boston, yellower in New York, and darker in Miami.

A visit to Kari-Out’s soy sauce factory naturally produced no soybeans. But their product is still soy sauce, Paul Epstein explained, pointing out that it’s actually more sanitary. The natural version involves mold, he said, shaking his head.

Indeed, I encountered both a lot of small organisms and a lot of soy when I visited Kikkoman’s main soy sauce factory in the United States. It is even located in the middle of soy and corn fields in Walworth, Wisconsin—a site the company chose in 1970 for its confluence of access to water, soybeans, transportation, and labor. “Microorganisms working every day,” said Masaaki Hirose, a senior vice president, with a smile as he gave me a tour. The Kikkoman soy factory looks a lot like a petrochemical factory—massive tanks, running pipes, and glaring fluorescent lights—only with the musky aroma of soy sauce permeating the air. A display case hangs on the wall in the manufacturing area. It has three jars: one each of soy, wheat, and salt. “These are the three main ingredients of soy sauce,” said Mr. Hirose. “Unlike chemical soy sauce.” Next to the display was a large flowchart of how the soy sauce is made, with boxes featuring the koji culture, the shikomi fermentation, and soy cakes, a by-product that is turned into cattle feed.

We walked into a room filled with rows of large tanks that reached to the ceiling. This was the fermentation room, where the soy sauce changed color. “Sugar gives color to soy sauce,” Kuniki Hatayama, the general manager, said. “They discovered more than three hundred flavors in the soy sauce,” he told me. “It’s naturally occurring.” He ticked some of them off: vanilla, coffee, fruit flavors. He noted that it is possible to extract vanilla flavoring from soy sauce, adding, “These flavors are different than chemical soy sauce.”

When air is pushed in from underneath the fermenting moromi sludge, it looks like bubbling lava. The moromi paste is then layered in a zigzag formation between pieces of cloth, where it spends three days having the soy sauce pressed out of it. During that time, a stack of moromi that starts out at more than thirty feet high is compressed down to about six feet.

What is left after the soy sauce is extracted is soy cake, which looks like a cross between wood chips and beef jerky. “Is this edible?” I asked, picking up a few of the brown flakes in my fingers.

“Edible, yes, but it doesn’t taste so good,” Hatayama said.

I put some into my mouth. It tasted like salty cardboard.

Kikkoman personnel served as unofficial advisers to the Japanese government during the great soy sauce debate. At the Kikkoman headquarters in Tokyo, Hiroshi Takamatsu explained what was wrong with the American chemical soy sauce world.

“For me it’s not soy sauce, for the Japanese it’s not soy sauce. Because if you look at the ingredients, it’s not soy,” he said. He didn’t understand what had happened when soy sauce first went overseas. “These places have no history of soy sauce. Real soy sauce, the fundamental soy sauce, came from China and Japan. Then people have started adding things, changing things.

“There is a breakdown,” he said sadly.

The discussions dragged on. In October 2004, the Codex Processed Fruits and Vegetables Committee decided to move the soy sauce discussion to the Cereals, Pulses, and Legumes committee—a bureaucratic punt.

In 2005, Mr. Takamatsu explained, the Japanese government looked at the resistance the Americans were putting up. They looked at the ever-expanding definition of soy sauce and realized it would take a long time to sort out all the competing standards. “It would take decades,” he said. At this point, they decided it was better to wait. They quietly withdrew their proposal, biding their time until Americans understood the subtleties of soy sauce. The Americans lobby and its allies had triumphed. There was no need for whole soybeans to make soy sauce.

Natsuko said there was an odd, comforting irony in having the definition of soy sauce wrestled away from them: “We should be proud of it in one way: soy sauce became an international food.”

To be fair, Americans are also pushing the envelope on the soy sauce front. Kari-Out introduced its own significant innovation in 2005: gluten-free soy sauce for people who suffer from celiac disease, a digestive condition. And it’s not as though the American companies haven’t considered the virtues of naturally brewed soy sauce. In 2004, when ConAgra was thinking of reinvigorating the La Choy brand, it conducted a series of blind taste tests across the country, according to Shannon Bridges, the brand manager.

The results of the soy sauce taste tests were somewhat surprising, she told me during my visit to ConAgra offices in Naperville, Illinois. Despite Kikkoman’s significant inroads into the United States, half of the consumers liked La Choy, and half liked the naturally brewed soy sauce. Further research led the team to come to a conclusion: “When you think about preferences, it’s really what people grew up on and what they know and love,” she said. Since lots of people had grown up with La Choy in the household, there was a built-in consumer demand and comfort level. Shannon herself had grown up with La Choy products in her home.

La Choy’s soy sauce formula stayed the same.

When told of La Choy’s taste test, Kuniki Hatayama, of Kikkoman’s Wisconsin factory, nodded sagely. “Taste is a funny thing,” he said. “If you grow up with it you tend to like it.”

CHAPTER 13

Waizhou, U.S.A.

By the time John and Jenny heard about the modest Chinese restaurant for sale in Georgia, it had already been through the hands of at least four different owners. The restaurant had first opened as Wong’s Kitchen, though Mr. Wong had long since moved to Temecula, California, where he now worked as a high school physics and chemistry teacher. Still, its various owners had changed little but the restaurant name in eight years. The staff played the same tape of Chinese zither music as customers ate on the same Chinese zodiac place mats, which lay atop the same seven dark wooden tables. Before diners left, their waiters brought them fortune cookies, which were still stored in a big box under the cash register.

You can learn a lot about a community by reading its advertisements and seeing which goods and services are for sale. Chinese newspapers, like their English counterparts, have classified ads for real estate, used cars, and jobs. Unlike their English counterparts, they have an additional section devoted entirely to the buying and selling of Chinese restaurants. Sometimes the ads will cover half a page, sometimes a full page. But they are always there.

Much as there is a natural churn in the housing market—job relocations, empty nesters, divorces—there is a natural churn for Chinese restaurants. It is considered easier to buy a restaurant than to start one. Construction permits, credit card merchant accounts, and health department inspections mean you need to know English to open a Chinese restaurant. You don’t necessarily need to know English to run one. Some entrepreneurs move around the country opening Chinese restaurants and then selling them.

Newspaper readers accustomed to the sterile language of American commerce find the ads astoundingly personal. Owners try to explain why, if the restaurant is so desirable, they are selling it: “Had a fight with my partner, so must sell the restaurant.” Or:

“New wife. New kid. Must move.”

“It’s too lonely in this town for a single person, but it would be good for a family to run.”

“Old. Retiring. Must sell.”

“Death in family. No money down.”

And unlike cars or houses, the buying and selling of Chinese restaurants is a nationwide market. Even in the New York City edition of the World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States, the restaurants listed for sale are as far-flung as Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.

Chinese restaurants are like hermit-crab shells: the owners come and go; the restaurants, like the shells, are passed along—largely indifferent to the identity of their occupants. Oftentimes when they are sold, there is no remodeling or “Grand Opening” sign announcing a change in ownership. One day, the customers look up to see a different girl behind the cash register and a different cook banging on the wok. A few years later, the faces may change again.

John and Jenny hadn’t read about the seven-table restaurant through a newspaper ad. They’d learned of it by word of mouth, the other way that restaurants are commonly bought and sold. In the country-sized village of the Fuzhounese community, someone always knows of someone who was just working at a restaurant and heard about another restaurant being put up for sale. The two were divided on whether to buy the restaurant, because like many couples they differed on the trade-off between money and lifestyle. Jenny had come to America to make money. She had been the first of the pair to leave China, at a time when village women heading overseas was still rare. Focused and excitable, Jenny spoke in a sharp, shrill voice that pierced the air even when I moved the cell phone away from my ear. With her slight frame and her hair always up in a ponytail and bangs, she resembled a high school student. You had to look closely to see the slight lines around her mouth, the hints that she was in her mid-thirties and a mother of three.

In contrast, John had pale skin, large limpid eyes, and a soft delicateness that was unusual in people from rural China. He considered himself a learned man and always spoke in flowery language punctuated with Chinese idioms characteristic of the well-read. John was not out to get rich. He wanted a comfortable life. His immigration to America had produced the opposite effect. In China, he had been a local government accountant; he’d held a predictable, low-stress, relatively well-paying job in an economy where money was tracked by an incessant shuffling of pieces of paper—and the occasional and emphatic red stamp. To this day, Chinese accountants still often use the abacus to calculate transactions.

John hated New York City. He was tired of traveling hours by bus to work in Chinese restaurants every week. He hated the mind-numbing, leg-numbing hours waiting on ungrateful, scornful customers. He’d had it with the crowds, the clutter, the smells. He was sick of their five-person family living in a single room and eating meals cooked in a makeshift kitchen in the bathroom. Life in America was not supposed to be this hard.

If they were successful in Georgia, he reasoned, they could buy a bigger restaurant and move away. If not, they could comfortably spend the rest of their lives there. With expansive mountains, trees, and clean lakes, Georgia was more like their village in China than New York ever would be.

Looking at the two, I guessed immediately who had been the aggressor in their courtship. Jenny had been a seamstress, and had taken a liking to her handsome, scholarly neighbor. She had converted to Christianity and joined John in the clandestine Baptist church services that were held in private homes, away from the watchful eye of the local government. During services the worshippers always harbored the background fear of being caught. When someone knocked, they scurried.

Now Jenny wanted to make money. A tiny restaurant in a tiny town was not going to lead to financial prosperity.

But the two did agree on at least one thing: the restaurant would be a chance to bring the entire family together. Their three children—all of whom had been raised in different households—and the parents would be in one home at last. And they could live as a family.

I believed that too, up until the moment I got the phone call telling me about the first arrest. The price of the seven-table restaurant, set in a mountain town, had been listed at $60,000. In reality, the price was the stability of their family.

Jenny still clearly remembers the night she left behind her oldest daughter, Jolene, in the village outside Fuzhou. Jolene remembers it too. “I cried for three days,” she told me. Even though she was only six years old at the time, she knew instinctively that her mother was not coming back. She chased her to the doorway and watched her mother being chauffeured away in a put-putting motor cart. It was the beginning of Jenny’s $30,000, illegal journey to New York City. For years after, Jolene communicated with her mother through her drawings. From the time she could pick up a pencil, it was clear that Jolene had been blessed with the hands and grace of an artist. She mailed her mother sketches of the Beijing opera that her grandparents took her to see. She liked to copy Japanese anime characters, with big, luminous eyes like those Jolene herself had inherited from her dad. The drawings always came folded inside handwritten letters from Jenny’s father. Jenny taped Jolene’s drawings to the wall above her bed so she could look at them as she fell asleep.

A few years later, Jolene also lost her father to America, but his journey was not as smooth as Jenny’s. His was a boat trip that took him past the Dominican Republic. The United States Coast Guard scooped up him and the other passengers as they were trying to get to shore under the cover of night. For John, that ended up being a blessing. With the help of an immigration lawyer he applied for religious asylum. He had, after all, been raised Baptist. In the post–Tiananmen Square atmosphere of the early 1990s, the United States was generous in Chinese asylum cases. The Immigration and Naturalization Service tested his knowledge of the Bible: Who was Jesus Christ? What is the Holy Spirit? Who were the twelve disciples? He passed and was given asylum.

As his wife, Jenny was also granted asylum. (In September 2000, the federal government handcuffed their immigration lawyer, Robert Borgas, and charged him with colluding with Chinese snakeheads to help more than six thousand Chinese illegal immigrants get papers so that they could stay in New York. The government estimated that Mr. Borgas had earned $13.5 million in fees. Selling the American dream can be a very lucrative business.)

Jolene’s parents did eventually send something back from New York: a baby sister who’d been born in Beekman Downtown Hospital, in Manhattan. They had given her an English name, Nancy; her Chinese name, Nanxi, had been chosen to match.

Her parents were too busy working in restaurants and garment factories, too busy to raise her. Nancy was taken care of by the other set of grandparents in China. Even though the two girls were sisters, they were hardly brought up as such.

The bonds of a Fuzhounese family are expansive yet fragile. At times they seem incredibly elastic, stretching across the oceans, and deep, as relatives can always be summoned from far corners to help out at a restaurant or with the kids. The same way that Eskimos have a multitude of words for snow, the Chinese have a multitude of ways to describe family relationships. In English, there is the single word “cousin,” but in Mandarin Chinese, there are eight words. There are at least four words for “aunt” and five words for “uncle”; the fifth word indicates whether your uncle is older or younger than your father. Siblings, cousins, great-uncles, in-laws—in the end they are all qinqi: relatives. Many of John and Jenny’s relatives came to their aid when they were trying to get their children back. Some moved to Georgia, to help at the restaurant. There are few broken families among the Fuzhounese, few divorces or single mothers or foster children.

Yet I was discomforted by Fuzhounese parents’ willingness to send their children back as babies to be raised by other relatives. Once Nancy found a picture of her nanny, the woman who had raised her in China from the time she was a baby living with her grandparents until she left for the United States when she was old enough for school. She brought it to Jenny, who took it away from her. Nancy cried.

Only one child had stayed in New York with Jenny and John: the youngest, a boy named Jeffrey. Everyone called him Momo, for “nohair” in Fuzhounese, because he had been born with a big, round head that never seemed to fit his body. Among the Chinese, sexism is such an entrenched part of the culture that there is a common idiom for it: Zhongnan qingnu. Translated literally, it means to “emphasize boys and discount girls.”

I first met Jolene in the spring of 2002, about five months before the family bought the restaurant. A photographer and I had been exploring a New York apartment building inhabited by Chinese restaurant workers because he wanted to do a photo essay; I acted as his translator. We stumbled upon a group of children playing with a Hacky Sack on the eighth floor. That is what children who don’t have playgrounds or backyards do: they play in hallways and lobbies, under fluorescent lights and against the backdrop of peeling paint.

Jolene had arrived in the United States just a few months earlier. It had taken that many years for her immigration visa to be approved. In the meantime she had been treated like a princess by her grandparents, who doted on her and allowed her to get by without doing many chores around the house. Like many teenage girls, Jolene was shy, lonely, and awkward. Unlike many teenage girls, she had just been thrown into a foreign country where she barely spoke the language and did not understand the social hierarchy. The family lived on the ninth floor of the building in a one-room apartment with a bathroom and without a real kitchen; but it rented for less than $550 a month, an unbelievable bargain by Manhattan standards. For a fourteen-year-old girl, however, the problem with living in a single room is that there are no doors to slam when you fight with your mother.

Nancy had arrived three months after Jolene, brought in the arms of her grandmother. The grandparents stayed in the apartment for a three-month visit, but they were eager to return to China. Despite the rivers of money that were sent back home to build new houses and pay for new appliances, the quality of life in New York City was miserable, the grandparents thought; let their children slave away at the restaurants and in the garment factories if they wanted to. I liked Jolene and the somber way she held herself. I liked the confidence in her drawings, which was sometimes absent in the girl herself. So I offered to teach her English. That’s when she told me she liked the English name Jolene.

Although Jenny had lived in the United States for over a decade, she’d been unable to help Jolene improve her English. When I met Jenny, I was surprised that someone could maneuver so adeptly in American society without speaking the language. And I don’t mean she spoke broken English—she didn’t speak English at all; nor could she read it. She and others like her paid various Fuzhounese individuals to fill out forms for them: $200 for visa applications, $70 to renew refugee status, $30 to help with FEMA applications after September 11, and so on. Back then, I never saw John. He was always off somewhere, working at a Chinese restaurant.

One day Jenny surprised me by saying they were going to buy a small restaurant in Hiawassee, Georgia, that cost $60,000.

Chinese restaurants are like gas, in that they expand to fill a vacuum. They have an enviable ability to take root in any community—urban or rural, cosmopolitan or isolated. If an environment can support life, then, like bacteria, a Chinese restaurant will find it.

A century and a quarter ago, the Cantonese spread eastward from San Francisco, carried by railroad, over dirt roads, and on foot. Today, the Fuzhounese spread westward from New York City, carried by interstate highways and airplanes.

Before telephones and automobiles, they were guided by word of mouth—rumors about which towns were virgin territory for Chinese restaurants. At the turn of the twentieth century, a Chinese man walked into a Chinese-goods store in the Twin Cities and mentioned that there was money to be made in Des Moines for a restaurant that had good food, good prices, and good cleanliness. A man named Lee Din took his suggestion, traveled south, and opened the first chop suey restaurant in Des Moines. King Ying Low, Lee Din’s restaurant, celebrated its centennial in 2007, having passed through numerous owners. Outside, a large sign still draws customers with the words CHOP SUEY.

Today, restaurateurs have become shrewder, and more technical in their approach. Every year, Chinese Restaurant News and its editor, Betty Xie, publish an inch-thick booklet listing the top places to open a Chinese restaurant. By cross-referencing zip codes, census data, and their own database of existing Chinese restaurants, the magazine’s staff generates a long list of markets with the greatest growth potential. The booklet notes the ratio between the local population and the number of Chinese restaurants. It also cites income growth as one of the best predictors for demand. Its recommendations range from very broad (best states) to general (promising towns) to pinpoint (specific zip codes). In 2003, Chinese Restaurant News generated a list of three thousand zip codes that didn’t have Chinese restaurants, including 23024 (Bumpass, Virginia), 38852 (Iuka, Mississippi), and 99022 (Medical Lake, Washington).

In 2001, if you were looking for a good small city, the top choice was Rochester, Minnesota, which, the magazine noted, was home to the Mayo Clinic and IBM facilities. As for the top states, it suggested that readers consider Indiana, ranked third, pointing out that there had been a lot of manufacturing growth there, specifically in Kokomo, where both GM and Daimler-Chrysler had opened factories.

Today, the driving force of restaurant growth is the Fuzhounese. They were behind a striking number of the Powerball restaurants I visited across the country—more than half. In Boise, a Chinese restaurant manager named Peter wryly explained to me, “First they learned East Broadway and they became familiar with the rest of New York City. Then they kept on going: New York State, New Jersey. Then we went to Tennessee, Missouri, Montana, Idaho.” Peter was the manager of No. 1 China Buffet in Ontario, Oregon, just over the Idaho border, where a woman named Jackie Mangum had gotten a fortune cookie with a number that won $100,000 in the Powerball drawing. Peter, who himself was Fuzhounese, had an epic perspective on the saga of his people and Chinese restaurants. “It’s the reverse of the Chinese movement after the gold rush,” he said. “We are going from the East Coast to the West Coast. After that, what are we going to do?”

In the meantime, the patterns of Chinese migration have crossed in the middle of the country. The Cantonese who came a generation or two ago are now retiring and selling their restaurants to the Fuzhounese, who are eager to take their turn at a wok-fueled American dream.

The Fuzhounese have been converting many of these restaurants into all-you-can-eat buffets or building their own places from scratch. The all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet is an interesting phenomenon in the South and the Midwest, an economic product of the shifts of capital and labor skills. The food costs for a buffet are significantly higher, but the labor costs are lower. In particular, buffets place a low demand on workers in one important way: you don’t need as much English to serve a buffet. There are few waiters and waitresses, and they essentially only have to ask you what you want to drink. (“Diet Coke?”) Meanwhile, Americans don’t have to fumble through the names of Chinese dishes. They can simply take what looks good.

Driving across the United States in my Powerball quest, I came across a Chinese restaurant called Golden Dragon in Spearfish, South Dakota, not too far from Mount Rushmore. The red vinyl booth and ornate dragons screamed a Happy Days–era Cantonese restaurant, but inside the owners were a Fujianese family with three children, the youngest of whom was a five-year-old named Nina. (A Chinese girl in America with a Spanish name?) They’d bought the restaurant from its Cantonese owner, Martin Yeung, who had moved to Denver, proudly leaving behind the business card for his son, who worked for a senator on Capitol Hill. For the new family, South Dakota was nothing like their Fujianese hometown, Changle, which was near the ocean. Michelle, the mother, said, “When I first got here, I felt like I was in Mongolia. There is a lot of grass. They eat a lot of meat. There is a lot of sky. There is lots of livestock.” Before I left, I asked her husband if they had ever visited Mount Rushmore, the monument to four revered American presidents. They hadn’t. He shrugged, saying, “It doesn’t have much meaning to us. It’s just rock.”

The little restaurant in Hiawassee was also started by a Cantonese family, the Wongs; they had settled in northern Georgia for some undetermined reason and needed a family business. It then sold to another Cantonese owner, a Taiwanese owner, and a Fujianese owner before John and Jenny learned of it.

At that point, Jenny wasn’t even sure of the name of the restaurant. (It was then called China Grill.) But she knew the name of the town: Hiawassee. She wasn’t able to spell Hiawassee, and she wouldn’t be able to find it on a map, but she knew it was about fifteen hours by bus from New York City, from Chinatown, from East Broadway—the origin of all things Fujianese in America.

For the Fujianese, there are only two places in America. There is New York City; then there is everywhere else. Places are not called Indiana or Virginia or Georgia. Instead they are collectively known as waizhou—Mandarin Chinese for “out of state.” Waizhou is more than a geographic description. It is the white space left over where there is no New York, no Chinatown, no East Broadway. Even upstate New York, including the state’s capital, Albany, can be considered waizhou to the Fujianese. Waizhou is where fathers and sons go for weeks and months at a time to sweat twelve-hour days in Chinese restaurants. Waizhou is crisscrossed by interstate bus routes and dotted with little towns, all of which either already have or could use a Chinese restaurant. Waizhou schools are better, and the paper towels there are cheaper. The bus system is the Fuzhounese connection to waizhou. If the Fujianese had a Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover to denote their vision of the world, it would show East Broadway, then the rest of New York City, followed by waizhou.

Hiawassee, to Jenny, was as waizhou as you could get: a small Georgia town, population 850, nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Located far away from the lush soil that once gave rise to plantations, Hiawassee was a white province of Georgia. It was in an area where the Ku Klux Klan gave out business cards with their Web site URL embossed on it.

Yet there was little, if any, overt racism—just the subtle oppressiveness of shared experience. The current owner wanted to sell the restaurant because he and his two employees were going crazy with no one to talk to but each other. The Wongs, too, had left because they’d found the town too small.

By the time I heard about the restaurant, John had gone down to Hiawassee to evaluate it. He found it on the town’s one main road, in a strip mall sandwiched between a Dairy Queen and a Subway shop that advertised “Senior discount every day.” The town is located some two hours of twisting, mountainous road from anywhere: Atlanta, Chattanooga, Asheville. Lush green mountains and crystalline lakes surround it. CNN rated it one of the best towns to retire in. Later on, the beautiful place became full of sad memories, the root of a family’s nightmare.

Hiawassee is a place where residents keep police radio scanners on at home to stay abreast of the news more quickly than they can by reading the weekly newspaper. If someone needs an ambulance one night, the next day everyone asks around about their condition.

Chinese restaurants are so plentiful and so common, they’re priced and sold almost like commodities. One rule of thumb is that a single restaurant should sell for three times its monthly revenue. So if a Chinese restaurant brings in $30,000 a month, or an average of $1,000 a day, it should sell for roughly $90,000.

Knowing this, Chinese-restaurant owners will sometimes try to artificially inflate their monthly sales figures—or to sell in times when they are busiest. And as so much business is done in cash, it’s sometimes hard for the buyer to discern what the true figures are. Due diligence includes asking the suppliers how much the restaurant orders each week or month, though restaurants preparing for a sale will often beef up their orders. So shrewd buyers watch something that is hard to fake: the number of bags of garbage that are produced.

A restaurant sale is not like a home sale, where one family empties the house before the other family moves in. The transition is gradual. The buyer arrives, checks out the restaurant, and works for a few weeks to learn the ropes before deciding whether to buy. It’s like two families sharing the house before one family decides to make a bid. Then, if the sale is made, one family moves in as the other leaves.

John liked Hiawassee. The landscape reminded him of the mountainous vistas of home. On the phone, he told Jolene that she could go fishing in the nearby lake. They could scoop small live crabs right out of the water.

Since moving to New York, she hadn’t seen any natural bodies of water—no oceans, no ponds, no lakes. (Glimpses of the gray urbanized East River didn’t count.) Only buildings and streets and subways. Jenny hated the idea of living in the middle of nowhere, but she relented. Hiawassee seemed safer than a big city, where stories of men being beaten or killed while delivering food were common among the Chinese immigrants. A relative of Jenny’s had been shot and killed in a restaurant holdup a few years ago in Philadelphia. Hiawassee wouldn’t present those problems. Small towns come with different problems.

So in September 2002, they bought the restaurant for $60,000, borrowing money from friends and family. They paid cash, as is usual for many of these restaurant transactions, which tend to be handled discreetly. John also bought a bumbling blue Cutlass Ciera for $1,300. Then he learned to drive.

I watched the family make the journey by Greyhound in pieces. Jenny’s older brother moved down to work as the restaurant’s cook. Nancy and Jolene were brought down to Hiawassee in October by an aunt.

It would be a long time before they saw their mother and brother. Jenny kept dragging her feet. She was reluctant to leave New York. She wanted to catch a thief who had burglarized her home. In August, they had been robbed of a lockbox that contained $10,000 in cash, the family jewelry, and many legal papers—including birth certificates, passports, and work visas. Jenny was convinced that the culprit was a Malaysian Chinese woman with a big mole on her face to whom she had once lent money.

Jolene had been home alone at the time. She received a telephone call saying there was someone who wanted to meet her downstairs. She went down, saw no one, and came back up. When she returned to the apartment, it was too late. Someone had broken in and dragged out the safe. When Jenny found out she yelled at Jolene for being stupid. Jolene was frozen with guilt. Jenny became obsessed with catching the woman. She had an artist draw the woman’s picture, complete with the mole; then she made flyers offering a reward and hung them on lampposts all around Chinatown. Occasionally she would drag me to the police precinct, where I would act as her translator.

Meanwhile, John was in Hiawassee running the business and trying to raise two daughters who rarely talked to him because they barely knew him. John urged Jenny to hurry up and get down to Hiawassee. He had no idea how to raise children. The children agreed.

Packing to leave a city after a decade, to move eight hundred miles away, is hard. Leaving via Greyhound gives one extra pause. Life has to be collapsed into bags that do not exceed seventy pounds—carefully and cleverly, so that it can be expanded at the other end. Jenny stuffed their belongings into the durable red, white, and blue plaid plastic bags that feel like rice sacks. They are made in China but are the universal symbol of the transience of the developing world: you see them tied with cord to the tops of buses, looking dusty and frayed. In went the rice cooker, clothes, a washboard, frying pans, oranges, even a VCR. Jenny went to Chinatown to stock up on supplies, returning home with orange and red shopping bags teeming with pickled radishes, dried mushrooms, shredded pork, and soy milk. She considered the fourteen video cassettes of a popular Chinese serial drama. The tapes were bulky, but Jolene had complained about boredom in the mountains. Jenny put them in the bag. She took them out. She put them back in.

When the Lincoln Tunnel spit the bus into New Jersey, Jenny held her son, Momo, and looked back at the fading Manhattan skyline. She had paid $30,000 to snakeheads to move to New York. Now she had paid $59 to Greyhound to leave. What was supposed to be a fifteen-hour bus ride stretched into twenty-four when she missed a connection in Danville, Virginia. She arrived in Atlanta after midnight, at the start of Thanksgiving Day.

In Atlanta, an accented voice rang out in the bus terminal. “Hello! Hello!” It was John. He grabbed Momo and swung the boy around. Jenny stood by, watched, and smiled tightly.

Arriving that late meant that Jenny wasn’t able to appreciate the sweeping landscape surrounding Hiawassee. But she could see the points of light scattered across the night sky.

Stars. It had been a long time since she had seen stars. New York’s luminescence was so competitive, it had long drowned out the constellations.

The 1984 blue Ciera crept down the two-lane road and turned left into a plain strip mall. It was nearly three A.M. by the time Jenny saw the restaurant for the first time. At one end of the strip mall was an extinguished neon sign that read CHINA GRILL in chop suey–style writing.

She opened the glass door and stepped into the darkness. The lights came on. She was struck by how much red there was: red carpet, red chairs.

As of that moment, Jenny had never seen a fortune cookie, never eaten General Tso’s chicken, and never heard of crab Rangoon. Those things would soon become a central part of her livelihood.

They continued down the road to the three-bedroom apartment John had rented. He turned on the second bedroom’s light and shook his daughters, who were sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Jolene woke up and immediately hugged her brother. She hadn’t seen him in two months. “He smells,” she said.

“He vomited and peed on himself on the bus,” Jenny explained.

The mother looked at her still-sleeping younger daughter. “She’s gotten chubbier,” she observed. Nancy’s uncle had been feeding her snacks from the restaurant. It was the most she had been doted upon since moving to America.

Jolene dragged the bags in from the car. She eagerly seized the videotapes; they would break the monotony of days split between school and work at the restaurant. For the first time in their lives, all the pieces of the family puzzle were together. Only in Hiawassee was the family finally fully assembled: a mother who had immigrated illegally to work in garment factories, a father who’d been often forced to live apart from his wife to find work as a waiter outside New York City, a teenage daughter raised from the age of six by her maternal grandparents, an American-born preschool daughter who’d been sent back to her paternal grandparents in China, and a toddler who had always lived by his mother’s side.

It was a family of strangers, but now, in Hiawassee, all they had was one another, and the restaurant.

That was supposed to be the end of the story, a happy ending. Later on, it would become hard to untangle the strands of responsibility for the complications that followed. It is tempting to run one’s finger down a chronology and try to pick out the decision that could have changed everything afterward. Did the fault lie with Jolene, for kicking her mother in the stomach and then laying the blame for the injuries—either inadvertently or purposely—on her father? Or did it lie within an overzealous child welfare agency stymied by language and cultural barriers? Or with the anonymous neighbors who reported Momo and Nancy playing in the parking lot, unsupervised, while their parents worked in the restaurant? Or with John and Jenny, whose marriage had become somewhat tenuous? It was watching a car wreck in slow motion. You could not pull your eyes away even though you expected it to end horribly.

The restaurant was a struggle. Business was slow now that the summer tourist season was over. There is only so much demand for Chinese food in a town of 850. John and Jenny had bought the restaurant during a peak season. Perhaps the sellers had exaggerated its revenues, or perhaps the customers grew less loyal once they realized the food had changed.

It was hard running a Chinese restaurant. Jenny had been a skilled seamstress, but she had never worked in a restaurant. John had worked as a waiter, but now he was also a chef. Jolene joked that everything he cooked tasted the same.

The couple had a binder with them, an instruction book on how to run a Chinese restaurant. It came with recipes like General Tso’s chicken, and it taught them how to roll the napkins around the silverware. But still they called relatives to ask questions about proportions and ingredients.

They worked continuously until eleven P.M. every night, then staggered home and collapsed into bed. Even when there were no customers in the restaurant, there was an unrelenting succession of tasks. They had to roll the egg rolls, fold the crab Rangoon triangles, coat and prefry the meat for General Tso’s chicken, devein the shrimp, simmer the brightly red sweet-and-sour sauce, chop the broccoli, prepare the fried rice. They didn’t have a babysitter, so they kept Nancy and Momo at the restaurant. Jolene would come to help out after school.

Jenny’s sister, who came down to Hiawassee to help out, told me, “In New York, you can still work if you don’t speak English. Here, you can’t do anything.” She also noted, “You are worthless if you can’t drive.” But some of the neighbors were really kind, including Jane, a retired New York City schoolteacher with an adopted daughter from China, who lived down the road from them.

A family-run Chinese restaurant is a seven-days-a-week enterprise. I came across many restaurant owners who had not taken a single day off for decades. But it was Jenny’s pregnancy in 2003 that made me realize the hard calculus of being the owner of a Chinese restaurant. She thought about having an abortion, which was what she had done with previous pregnancies when she was too busy working in New York City. Abortion in China does not involve the moral dilemma it does in the United States. The culture is not Christian, so life is not considered to begin at conception. Sometimes an individual life doesn’t even begin at birth. In certain parts of China, babies weren’t named until well after they were born—thirty days, one hundred days, or a year. It’s easier to deal with an infant’s death if the baby didn’t have a name.

Jenny calculated the amount of time needed to get an abortion in Chinatown. She didn’t trust the doctors in Georgia; nor were abortions readily available in the rural South. It would take her four weeks to travel there, recover, and get back to Hiawassee to work at the restaurant. If she actually gave birth, she would be out of work for only two weeks. She decided to carry the baby to term.

The last names of the settlers who built Hiawassee, 150 years ago, are now thick in the town telephone book, having multiplied over many generations. There is a thin, invisible barrier separating insiders and outsiders—even for those who speak English and are from other places in the South.

Jolene made few friends among her high school classmates. After all, many had known each other since they were toddlers, and many shared the same last names. Occasionally they regarded her with mild curiosity, since she was from two places that were exotic to them: China and New York City. On Jolene’s first day of school, a boy asked her if she’d been in New York on September 11. She couldn’t understand the question. So the boy went up to the board and drew two buildings and a plane, a universal hieroglyphic for the ages. She nodded. Yes, she had been in the city.

Math class was the easiest for Jolene, but civics class, required by Georgia so that students would learn the rights and responsibilities of citizens, was the most difficult. There were so many words and concepts she didn’t understand, like “Congress,” “citizen,” and “Constitution.” Her civics teacher started with the basics. On the Internet, he found the list of one hundred questions and answers from the United States citizenship test. It was the same list of questions that my parents had studied before they took the citizenship exam, after almost thirty years of living in the United States. For months before the test, my mom kept the three verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” stuck to the refrigerator door. Though I was in my mid-twenties, until then I hadn’t even been aware there were three verses to the song.

Jolene hated living in Hiawassee. She loathed putting on the little black waitress vest and working in the restaurant, but her parents insisted because her English was better than theirs. Working at the restaurant became a never-ending set of chores. Among Jolene’s most dreaded tasks was deveining shrimp. If she was not careful, their sharp tails would prick her fingertips, causing them to bleed. It was like Cinderella, only with a deep fryer and a walk-in refrigerator.

In Powerball restaurant after Powerball restaurant, I found dutiful children helping out their parents—dealing with an English-speaking vendor, learning to handle a wok so the father could take a rest; taking orders by phone and at the tables. At the modest thirty-seat China Buffet in Caledonia, Minnesota (the “wild turkey capital” of the state), a ten-year-old boy with gold hoop earrings and dimples named Andy cleared plates, worked the cash register, and watched his baby brother in the corner. “We could open a big store, but it’s hard if you don’t speak English,” Andy’s father explained to me in Mandarin. “In ten years, when the boys are older, we can open a larger restaurant. They can speak English for us.” Until then? They found other ways to survive. After our conversation ended, he asked me to make a call to an English-speaking vendor to get a new dishwasher installed.

At Lucky Garden in Dover, New Hampshire, teenagers Tony and Jenny had been helping out for as long as they could remember. The two spent more time in the restaurant than in their own living room; they even did their homework there. “It’s like home here,” said the daughter, who was still helping out although she was now in college. The family loved cars. Their father had bought them each a BMW when they turned sixteen. If you didn’t know the family, you would be tempted to call those cars the accoutrements of spoiled teenagers; if you knew how hard they worked, you wouldn’t. Helping out, in Chinese restaurant families, is simply part of the deal of being part of the family. But no one had explained the deal to Jolene. She would fall asleep in class after working nights in the restaurant. Her grades slipped, and she struggled to balance schoolwork and late nights at the restaurant. She resented having been dragged down to Georgia, forced to be the outsider. “They think you’re strange because of the way you look,” she said. “I’d rather go back to my own culture so people don’t think of the way you look.”

To break the monotony, she painted. She painted pictures of cranes and of the mountains and the lake in Hiawassee. The paintings were placed casually around the restaurant. A customer offered to buy one.

Instead of other girls, she found company among older women, Jehovah’s Witnesses. One woman bought her a Chinese Bible, and an alarm clock so she could wake up in the morning. On one visit, I was surprised when she informed me, matter-of-factly, that “God is named Jehovah.”

Whenever I visited Hiawassee, she wanted me to take her to Atlanta—or anywhere, as long as she could get away from the restaurant. For her first shopping trip, we drove to Atlanta for Chinese groceries. The winding roads were a shock to her system. Jolene vomited three times. Of course Atlanta, unlike many older cities, doesn’t have a Chinatown. We headed to Atlanta’s Buford Highway, the immigrant landing strip of the South, a giant multicultural jukebox filled with Mexican taquerias and Vietnamese pho houses. When we pulled into the strip mall with the Chinese Ranch 99 supermarket, I shook her awake. Jolene emerged groggily from her motion-sickness-induced nap. Where was Chinatown? she asked. “Chinatown is straight. It has streets,” she insisted. She squinted at the U-shaped strip mall and sniffed, “It’s not round like this.”

On our way back that night, we merged from Atlanta’s Interstate 285 perimeter highway into the fourteen lanes of I-85. Jolene gazed out at the two rivers of densely packed car lights—one red, one white—that flowed to and from the horizon.

She was entranced. “They look like ants moving up a mountain,” she marveled. In her year and a half in America, she had known only the concrete of New York City and the mountains of Hiawassee, nothing in between. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, staring at the traffic-clogged highway full of thousands of cars, Atlantans hurrying to get back to their homes in subdevelopments and cul-de-sacs. “It’s prettier than New York.”

The first overt signs of trouble came the February after they moved to Hiawassee. One night, Jenny phoned me, hysterical. The police had taken the children away, she said.

We found out that someone had reported that Momo and Nancy had been playing, without supervision, in the parking lot. After three days, Jenny and John got the two younger children back and promised not to leave them alone. But Jolene chose to stay with a foster mom for three more months. She had managed to escape working at the restaurant.

It was the next phone call, one that came a year later, the night that John was arrested for the first time, that the big problems began. That night, the police took all three children away and arrested John on a curious charge of domestic abuse. The officers pointed to the burn scars from cooking oil on the parents’ arms and said that was evidence that the couple had a history of fighting. Someone had also reported that Jenny had a sprained finger.

In fact, the aggressor had not been John. The two who’d been fighting had been Jolene and Jenny, everyone said. That day, as always, they’d fought over Jolene’s working in the restaurant. Jenny argued that it was the obligation of the daughter to help out, since her family had raised her. The fighting grew violent. At some point, Jenny fell and Jolene kicked her three times in the stomach. Jenny injured her finger in the process and had to be taken to the hospital. But that sprained finger raised people’s suspicions.

So the night after the police came, Jenny found herself alone. She walked back and forth between the restaurant and her apartment in the dark, too scared to go home by herself. Finally she knocked at the door of Jane’s house, down the road, and slept in her spare bedroom that night, alone.

In jail, John became friends with his cellmate, a twenty-two-year-old drug addict who worked at the local Burger King. Later he told me, “When I was in jail for two days, it was really relaxing.” He was away from the restaurant and his wife.

This time, on the second offense, the children were not given back. Once a family is caught in the bull’s-eye of the legal system, nothing is simple anymore. The complaints the agency had compiled about the children were small but numerous. Any one of them would have seemed patently ridiculous as a reason to take children away from their parents. But together, they gathered momentum. Momo had shown up at school dressed in girl’s clothing; Jenny told me he’d insisted on wearing one of Nancy’s shirts. The children were often late to school; the parents sometimes drove them in from Atlanta in the morning after a weekend away. Then there was the issue with the children’s teeth. Were they getting proper dental care? Jenny and John told me that in China, you take the children to the dentist only when there is a problem.

John and Jenny’s lives become consumed by something they called Difeh. Difeh had taken control of their lives much more than the authoritarian regime in China ever had. Difeh could trigger police cars to come and take away their children. Difeh controlled when and where they were allowed to visit the kids. Difeh could ask the most private questions about their lives, including their sleeping arrangements and how often they hugged their children. Difeh could order them to see a psychiatrist. “Isn’t this a violation of my human rights?” John once asked me in frustration.

Difeh was DFACS, or Georgia’s Department of Family and Children Services—an overwhelmed bureaucracy in which government employees were trying to make bad situations a little bit better. On a visit to the office, I heard one worker say softly, apologetically, to Jenny, “We don’t have the people or the resources to get everything right.”

The Chinese restaurant seemed empty without the sound of children’s laughter to break up the rhythmic swish and clang of cooking. The yellow school bus no longer came after three o’clock. Instead, every weekday between three and four P.M., John and Jenny brought home-cooked Chinese food to the DFACS office, located in a modest strip mall next to a “God Bless America” sign, in hopes that the food would be passed to the children. They worried that the kids would not be used to the American food. It was a sad ritual. Sometimes, if no one answered the door, they would just hang the plastic bag on the office’s doorknob.

Jenny’s weight dropped to eighty-six pounds, a massive loss given her original, already slight 110-pound frame. She began wearing multiple pairs of underwear, including men’s boxers, in order to keep up her once-tight jeans. John became haggard-looking.

Business at the restaurant trailed off, in part because the parents had to close it so many days of the week in order to go to counseling and deal with the agency.

As will happen in a small town, rumors clouded the restaurant. At the courthouse, I overheard a group of lawyers talking about the family. One remarked that the Chinese-restaurant case was going on. Another replied, “Oh, I can’t eat there anymore—that’s the DV case.” DV? Domestic violence.

Trying to get the children back was a tangled process involving translators, lawyers, caseworkers, and psychiatric evaluations. It turned out that John and Jenny needed separate lawyers, in part because of the domestic abuse charge. Neither of their lawyers spoke Chinese.

Newspapers are always filled with accounts of how child welfare agencies ignored the warning signs and failed to protect the life of some fragile kid who ended up dead. It’s less common to hear about the flip side, when the government intervention makes things worse. Outside observers agreed that the family had its share of problems: parents who had barely been parents and were overwhelmed with running a restaurant, a rebellious teenager who loathed the rural Appalachian town where she had few friends, a Chinese culture that favored sons over daughters. Tempers often flared. Yes, the family had its problems, acknowledged friends and neighbors. But enough so that the children should be taken away for months? One of the neighbors later observed, “You know, it’s like the lion looks for the easy mark, the ones that can’t defend themselves.” Jenny, pregnant during the ordeal, miscarried; the stress of running the restaurant, combined with other health issues, had proved too much for her constitution. When the doctors removed the fetus, they told her it had been a boy.

The courts wanted the parents to attend counseling classes, but that meant they would have to drive to Atlanta and back. They would have to close the restaurant for the whole day. Grudgingly, they agreed to attend a limited number of sessions.

In the agency’s eyes, Jenny’s mental stability was in doubt. She would sob hysterically during meetings. From her perspective, she was becoming unstable because the agency had kept her children away from her for months upon months. But Jenny was also infuriated with the sheer unfairness of it all, and she resisted as retaliation. When they were due at a counseling session and the car happened to break down and they missed it, she was gleeful.

Over time, everyone gradually realized that it was not only Jenny who was resisting but Jolene. It was taking so long to get the children back in part because Jolene didn’t want to go home. In her own way, she was using the family court system to punish her mother by keeping the other two children away. Finally, during a weekend family visitation, John took Jolene outside. “It’s my fault,” he said. The restaurant had been all his idea, he explained. Come back and we’ll sell the restaurant, he told her. He pleaded with her.

Jolene was confused. She didn’t know what to think. “I don’t think I can ever work this out with my mother,” she cried. She picked up Nancy and held her.

Jenny placed an $88 ad in the Atlanta edition of the World Journal. A Chinese couple from Birmingham responded. They appeared suddenly one day to help out at the restaurant. It was the first step in the transition.

The situation seemed to be slowly improving. Then one day at work, I got a call from Jane, the neighbor. John and Jenny had been arrested. They had violated court rules by driving near their children’s foster home. Because they had sold their restaurant, they were considered a flight risk. Their bail was set exorbitantly high. This time, John and Jenny couldn’t afford to bail themselves out, and neither could their neighbors.

Guardian angels come in strange forms. Jim Crawford was a land developer with a salt-and-pepper beard who rode a Harley-Davidson and had found religion late in life. He’d skipped college because he was too focused on making money when he was a young man. But slowly, as he had more time (and more money), he had come to find God. He was never sure if he should call himself Christian or just religious.

He had first seen John and Jenny at McConnell Baptist Church, where they went to pray for the return of their children. From the back of the room, their dark hair stood out against the silvery heads lining the pews. Jim had heard the whispers about their family problems. One day, he rode his Harley to the restaurant. “I’m here to see if I can help you,” he told John, who was behind the counter.

What made him step in when so many people didn’t or couldn’t help? He shrugged. He couldn’t explain it. It was an odd thing for him to do, he admitted. He had never been particularly charitable, but there was something about the sadness of this story that drew him in. John and Jenny started visiting him regularly. Sometimes Jim would come home from work and find them there, waiting in their car.

It was weeks into this routine when Jim rode his motorcycle to the restaurant and asked the woman behind the cash register where John and Jenny were. She hesitated. Then she picked up a little computerized dictionary, punched a couple of keys, and held it up so he could read the screen.

“Jail.”

Jim was shocked. He headed over to the county jail—a stark, boxy building on the outskirts of town. John and Jenny looked forlorn in their orange jumpsuits. He bailed them out, posting a bond with his property as collateral.

Jim helped John make an impassioned plea in stilted English in front of the church congregation, telling their story with a speech he had laboriously written out in English. Soon church members deluged the judge and the child welfare agency on behalf of the family. There were letters, and Jim personally lobbied the district attorney. Slowly, DFACS’s grip on the children loosened. Afternoon-long visits became overnight visits and then weekend visits. In late October, seven months after they were taken away, the kids were returned home. When I met them again at their apartment, Momo and Nancy barely spoke Chinese anymore. At their welcome-back party at the restaurant, a neighbor brought a cake she had bought. The children’s names wouldn’t all fit, so instead she’d had the supermarket clerk write, “Welcome back, y’all.”

With the family whole again and the restaurant sold, the family had to decide where to move next. Jenny’s cousin had a restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. John’s sister had a takeout on Long Island, east of New York City. With no sense of permanence and only a car’s worth of belongings, the family could head anywhere the car could take them. The kids would go to school in whatever neighborhood they ended up in.

Jenny briefly spoke about the possibility of running another restaurant, but Jolene reminded her parents that they’d promised there wouldn’t be any more Chinese restaurants. “It’s like a big hole. A lot of people jump into it and can’t get out anymore,” she said angrily. “First generation does it and second generation does it again and third generation. They do it because they think they don’t have a choice.” Never again, she told herself. She wanted to apply to an arts program at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

That night the family packed up the car. They returned books to the library and bade cursory farewells to their neighbors. After this two-year-long, tumultuous, failed experiment in owning a restaurant, they decided to head back to New York.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” John said, ushering everyone into the car. With the engine roaring, they left in the middle of the night, the car’s headlights cutting through the fog. The car sped off, as though to escape the demons that had plagued the family. If they drove fast enough, perhaps the demons would be left behind in Hiawassee.

They stopped only once during the night, so that John could nap in the parking lot of a convenience store in Virginia. The clerk there wore a cap with a Confederate flag on it.

The next time they stopped was to eat at a McDonald’s in Hagerstown, Maryland. Jenny peeled the golden crust off her McNuggets and fed it to Momo. “Wherever there are people, there is McDonald’s and a Chinese restaurant,” she observed.

When the Empire State Building appeared on the horizon, the entire family cheered. They were home. They were uncertain about where they would go once they got to the city. First they tried to find Jenny’s brother in Chinatown. He wasn’t home, so they headed out to Long Island to find John’s sister at her family takeout, which had a red Christian cross taped to the wall near the cash register.

I haven’t seen them since they made that drive home. John found a job at a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey. He hinted once that they were separated—though given how often Fuzhounese husbands work apart from their wives, I wasn’t sure if there was much of a lifestyle difference. Jenny told me she’d seen the thief, the Malaysian woman with the big mole, on the street and had attacked her. She also told me they had bought a house in Philadelphia. The Fuzhounese were moving to Philadelphia in droves—it was close enough to New York, only two hours away, but had cheaper real estate.

They changed their cell phone numbers. Jane, their neighbor from Hiawassee, called me once to ask if I had heard from them. I hadn’t. Neither had she.

I suppose it’s a good thing that the frantic phone calls stopped. This is a family where no news can be interpreted as good news. As the months, then years, passed by, I wondered about them, imagining that they had found their happy ending somewhere.