Falling through the cracks of the American Dream

January 28, 2022 3:00 PM

Low-wage workers in Chinese immigrant communities often lack access to the social safety nets intended to help people living in poverty — in part because of “model minority” stereotypes. Since the pandemic began, it's had disastrous consequences in New York City.

(Yao Pan Ma has, tragically, since died.)

Previously on Mefi: Criminalizing Victims
Exploitation is still rampant in NYC nail salons

posted by praemunire (21 comments total)

Is the main link supposed to be the same as the NPR link?
posted by kittensofthenight at 3:03 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Crud! It's this link: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/chinatown-new-york-city-working-class-safety-net

Can a mod please fix? Thanks!
posted by praemunire at 5:05 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Care to explain how a homeless shelter is a "civic burden"? And no, other communities rejecting them doesn't make them a burden, because the problem is that our society treats the homeless horrifically.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:20 PM on January 28, 2022 [12 favorites]

Mod note: Fixed the link, carry on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:41 PM on January 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Homelessness is a complex topic, and sometimes living next to a shelter is fine, and sometimes, yes, it's a burden.

No way to tell how these planned projects are gonna go at this point. Hope they have enough funding to be successful.
posted by keep_evolving at 6:08 PM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure this needs to turn into a screed against the homeless, especially considering the struggle of unstably-housed restaurant workers in Chinatown during the pandemic and the awful murder of Chuen Kwok (along with three other homeless men) just before.
posted by praemunire at 6:09 PM on January 28, 2022 [9 favorites]

"Asian American" is a pretty puzzling term, to me. I live here, so I guess I'll get categorized into a group along with other people who came from the same... continent?

The entire "model minority" thing doesn't make sense to me, because it seems like it sits on top of trying to group all of Asia together, not that stereotypes give a fig about what I think of them.
posted by bring a tuba to a knife fight at 6:21 PM on January 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 9:40 PM on January 28, 2022

Mod note: A couple deleted. Let's not go way off the rails in this discussion to uselessly debate a misstatement / misapprehension. (that mentally ill people who commit violent crimes are released into homelessness versus non-mentally ill people, who are sent to prison.)
posted by taz (staff) at 11:47 PM on January 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mod note: And on review, another comment deleted. The accusation that there are too many homeless shelters planned for Asian immigrant communities in NY is really a significantly different topic and has become pretty much a complete derail from the posted article, which is about the lack of a social safety net in Chinese immigrant communities experiencing poverty.
posted by taz (staff) at 12:12 AM on January 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

Chinatown got hit hard and early, and there's no question they've suffered. If you want to help, businesses are looking for customers, and nonprofits are looking for donations and volunteers, including: Welcome to Chinatown, which offers pro bono assistance to small businesses in need. Send Chinatown Love, which works one on one with businesses. Think Chinatown, which helps foster intergenerational support within Chinatown through the arts as well as other initiatives.

Finally, businesses like Asian-Veggies.com transformed into a delivery service during the pandemic, and now provides services to NYC, Long Island and New Jersey.
posted by Puppetry for Privacy at 2:25 AM on January 29, 2022 [10 favorites]

The scale of the suffering among Chinese immigrants in NYC is of course staggering, but these same stories are playing out everywhere. I teach at a minority serving institution here in metro Atlanta that's specifically identified by the US government as an "Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander serving school" (I know that's preposterously broad and contradictory, but that's the official federal classification). Many of my students live exactly this kind of precarious, off-the-book life. It makes things hard in all kinds of ways. So much of the pandemic relief that has been available has relied on already being in the system and online. Rent relief assumes you live in a residence that's being rented legally and not an illegally divided house in a strictly single family zoning area. Small business loans assume the small business you work for is properly registered, etc.

Random inconveniences, too. Our Barnes & Noble run campus bookstore has gone cashless during the pandemic, but many of our students use cash for everything, are not able to get bank account or credit cards, and didn't have a way to buy their books. (The problem was finally solved by installing a new machine right outside the bookstore where students could load cash onto their student IDs.)

And yes, one of our students was the son of one of the victims of the massage parlor mass shooting hate crimes.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:38 AM on January 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

When businesses go cashless, they are explicitly excluding un/underbanked people. I hate it - and it shouldn't be legal. Cash is legal tender and should be accepted everywhere.
posted by jb at 7:05 AM on January 29, 2022 [12 favorites]

One thing I hadn't realized is how much small-scale garment manufacturing had clung on in Chinatown (in NYC, but also I believe in other cities). It was 9/11 (which basically shut down traffic to and from the area) that was its death knell.
posted by praemunire at 7:47 AM on January 29, 2022

Just for another example of this happening all over the place - here's an article about the lack of social safety net for Chinese seniors in Vancouver, Canada and some of the organizations trying to help them out.
posted by thebots at 11:12 AM on January 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

What I appreciated about this article is shining a spotlight on the issues of class and inequality within the Chinese American community. Poor and lower-income Chinese immigrants living in SROs or illegal in-laws have nothing in common with Google developers or tech CEOs, but they all get lumped together. It is precisely this lack of attention to the unique challenges the community faces, particularly with the language barrier and a lack of resources.

For instance, in San Francisco, it is Chinatown that is the city's poorest and lowest-income neighborhood, but it never comes up in issues of low-income neighborhoods in the city.

Han Li of the SF Standard is doing fantastic, and bilingual! work on how COVID is affecting these lower-income Chinese communities here.

- For SRO Residents in SF’s Chinatown, Getting Covid Is the Start of a Nightmare (本文有中文譯版)
- Hunger in Chinatown: Meal Programs Among Few Pandemic Lifelines for SRO Residents (本文有中文譯版)

On another note, I very rarely participate in threads on Asian American or Chinese American issues on Metafilter -- I have another account -- and this thread shows exactly why. Derails, minimizing the community ("lots of people are facing the same"), ignorance about how the term "Asian American" came to be (hey tuba, you could have literally just googled that to understand its activist origins) ALL right in a short thread about the unique challenges that Chinese immigrants face, and just overall shittiness. Many of you need to do way, way better.
posted by hello my sockpuppet at 12:11 PM on January 29, 2022 [21 favorites]

Yeah, another Chinese American chiming in to say, Thanks for trying, praemunire, but this and the Stuy thread and the Michelle Go thread all went about as well as I expected.

If there are any other Asian Americans lurking here, I'd love to hear where else on the internet you hang out. MeMail's open.
posted by d. z. wang at 7:55 PM on January 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

What an eye-opening story. Thanks for posting this praemunire.
posted by storybored at 8:18 PM on January 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thank you for posting, praemunire.

Echoing storybored - the BuzzFeed link especially is eye-opening, and these stories don't often make it to the mainstream media narrative.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 5:43 AM on January 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Great reporting from Buzzfeed. Digging into multiple individual stories takes more work than generalized reporting, but does so much to humanize issues and inspire empathy. Also I knew the NYC science schools had very high Asian American enrollment but did not know that most of those kids are from low income families. That’s a critical detail I have not seen in other discussions about school admission policies.
posted by freecellwizard at 9:07 AM on January 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've typed and re-typed a lot, but basically this looks like it should be a story from 100 or more years ago. The lack of safety net is appalling. The (explicit and implicit) racism is appalling. The living conditions that people are enduring are beyond appalling.
posted by plonkee at 7:53 AM on January 31, 2022 [1 favorite]