Low wages in US build mansions in China

Nov 11, 2009, 10:45 GMT

Washington - There's a peculiar sort of ghost town in Fujian province on the south-eastern coast of China. Many houses sit vacant and shuttered, and the working-age adults have left. Only the older generation remains, raising their young grandchildren.

The twist, according to US author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, is that the grandparents are living in extravagant mansions - vast structures that sprouted from rice paddies.

The houses were built by their grown children, who work low-wage jobs - often in restaurants or garment factories - in the United States and send their earnings home.

The grandchildren being raised in China are actually US citizens, sent to China because their parents work too much to care for their own offspring. Straddling two cultures, the children stay until they're old enough to return to the US for school.

Keefe, whose new book, The Snakehead, explores migration and human trafficking from China to the US, attributes the odd arrangements to a fierce work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit among Fujianese immigrants and an equally strong motivation to keep up with the Joneses back in China.

At a lecture in Washington, Keefe traced the roots of this social competition and the migration that resulted in economic growth in Fujian in the 1980s.

'I had initially assumed that these people must be destitute. ... In fact the economy was growing about 10 per cent a year in that region,' Keefe said.

This growth made people very conscious of their economic status. 'Suddenly, your neighbour has a refrigerator or a car and you don't,' he said. 'That was what initially drove people to leave.'

A vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the US since the mid- 1980s have come from Fujian, many of them illegally shepherded by professional people smugglers.

These smugglers, called snakeheads, would lead their Chinese clients on a dangerous journey that often involved a month-long trek across the mountains of Myanmar - where they had to avoid dangerous opium growers - and sneaking into Thailand.

In Bangkok, a few forged papers and bribed officials later, snakeheads would arrange for their clients to get to the US, often on old, rickety ships barely large enough to attempt an ocean crossing. Sometimes hundreds of people could be crammed into a 6-by-12-metre compartment with little food and only one bathroom.

The province's proximity to the sea made many Fujianese passengers better prepared for the journey than inland Chinese. They knew the sea, and were well acquainted with the risks - going to the US was like just another fishing trip.

The snakehead trade came into the spotlight in 1993, when one ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground off the coast of New York City with nearly 300 Chinese illegal immigrants on board.

The chief snakehead connected with the voyage - a Fujianese woman nicknamed Sister Ping - was finally convicted and sent to prison in 2005.

With their keen business sense, many Fujianese spread out across the suburban US.

'That generic Chinese restaurant in the strip mall near your house? Almost certainly run by Fujianese,' Keefe wrote in 2008, during a trip to Fujian to research his book.

Those no-frills Chinatown-to-Chinatown buses? A Fujianese innovation.

Fujianese in America saved money to pay for family members to follow and sent back more cash to pay for the mansions in their home villages.

'These houses became status symbols, the taller and gaudier the better,' Keefe wrote.

One such house had faux-marble floors, gold-painted columns and multiple flat-screen TVs. Villagers were quick to show Keefe how much bigger their houses were than those of the neighbours.

When the first migrants sent money home, just a few families showed off their children's success with big, new houses. But it caught on. Soon, everyone wanted to send their children abroad.

Keefe described the phenomenon with a Fujianese proverb: 'One brings 10. Ten bring 100.'

No one has exact numbers, but the CIA estimated that in 1994 as many as 100,000 Chinese were coming to the US illegally every year, and by the mid-1990s smuggling people from China to the US was a 3.5- billion-dollar industry, Keefe wrote in The New Yorker.

By 2006, ships no longer deposited smuggled Fujianese directly onto US shores, but officials said there was 'no evidence to indicate that the total number of Fujianese entering the country illegally has diminished (since the mid-1990s),' Keefe wrote.

The practice of having the Fujianese grandparents essentially act as babysitters for a few years has created a second wave of migrants. This one is wholly legitimate - the children are US-born citizens, after all - but is fraught with its own obstacles and challenges.

Many of the children have trouble adjusting to the move and act out in disturbing ways - such as banging their heads against walls, refusing to speak and wandering aimlessly in class. These signs of trauma are often mistaken as symptoms of autism, The New York Times reported in July.

The migration from Fujian has slowed recently, Keefe said, but the workforces in some Fujianese villages have all but disappeared. One man Keefe spoke to planned to build a second mansion but was having trouble finding local men to do the construction because so many had left town.

Nonetheless, economic opportunities in the area have grown, and parts of the province are booming.

'People there were saying to me, why would I want to go and work as a dishwasher in New York,' Keefe said, 'when I can stay here and start a factory?'