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132 Chapter 5 Surviving Poverty in an Ethnic Social Hierarchy Baoshan Li, a stocky, self-employed construction worker in his mid-thirties, gained permanent resident status under the 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act. Nevertheless, he has not gathered the courage to apply for U.S. citizenship: the thought of being questioned by non-Chinese immigration officials is too intimidating. After twenty years in the United States, Li knows very little English, and he speaks Mandarin with a strong Cantonese accent. For that reason he is not entirely independent. Highly skilled in wood floor and ceramic tile installations, he gets work through Bob, the owner of a company selling carpet, wood flooring, and ceramic tiles. Like Li, Bob is also from China. Having immigrated to the United States from Guangdong province with his family as a teenager, he finished high school in California and graduated from a community college. His American education and the ability to communicate with people in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin give him the versatility that Li lacks. Starting as a construction worker himself a decade ago, Bob was able to get a job as a salesman for a building material company before going into business for himself. “You can say that I have been in the trade for a long time,” he said. “To do well one needs to know the materials, the labor involved in installation, and the clients. Not everyone has that kind of knowledge; I had worked with all types of materials with my own hands.”1 In Diamond Bar in Los Angeles County, Bob’s flooring materials have been in high demand since the boom of the housing market in the late 1990s. He is not Li’s employer, but rather a labor contractor. Most of his merchandise is sold to homeowners , with labor performed by crews of construction workers like Li, and these workers give Bob a share of their earnings. Li thinks it is a fair Surviving Poverty in an Ethnic Social Hierarchy 133 arrangement; it saves him the trouble of finding the work himself, and because he is a little shy, Li does not feel comfortable bargaining with the customers.The money Li makes is not bad, especially because most of it comes in cash. He lives in a rented room, goes to work in the morning in an old Toyota truck, and picks up take-out Chinese food for dinner in the evening. He sends money regularly to his parents in China and is saving more so that his brother there can get married.After that, Li said he might go home for a visit—his parents are eager to find him a bride.2 That Li has a green card makes him a very eligible bachelor in China. Li works at his customers’ job sites, moving from one to another with his apprentice Lao Wu (old Wu), a former factory worker from Tianjin.The apprentice is about ten years Li’s senior, but he treats Li with unquestionable respect, addressing him as “master” (shifu). The skinny Wu likes to talk, if the subject is not about himself; up to now, he is not sure whether the move to the United States was a wise one.To finance their trip,Wu and his wife Fei sold their own apartment and that of her parents, and they borrowed a substantial amount of cash from friends and relatives.3 The travel documents they purchased to gain entry to the land of opportunity have long expired. With neither marketable skills nor work permits, they depend entirely on jobs within the ethnic community.The couple went to NewYork City first, where Wu worked in restaurants. By the time they moved to Los Angeles two years later, he had made up his mind to never go back to restaurant jobs again. “Hardship I can endure,” he said, “but at my age, being bossed around and bullied day after day is difficult, mentally. So here I am, learning a trade from Master Li, humbly.”4 Wu’s wife, Fei, is a yuezi gong—a live-in nanny for women with newborn babies. Chinese tradition requires women to be confined in bed for a whole month to recover after they deliver their babies. Middle-class women whose parents or in-laws are unavailable in the United States often hire domestic workers during this period, and undocumented women like Fei come in handy. A yuezi gong gets paid twenty percent more than a regular...

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