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September 26, 2008
 Jennifer 8. Lee Meet Joe 2. Guzzardi
By Joe
Guzzardi
While I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan of
Jennifer 8. Lee, the liberal New York Times reporter,
I do admire certain of her traits.
Lee has made a splash in
Manhattan
and
Washington DC social circles. So outrageous are Lee’s
shindigs that her former landlord is suing her for $150,000 in
damages.
Yet as boisterous as Lee’s parties are,
they don’t keep her from retiring early. Friends say Lee excuses
herself in mid-sentence to go to bed.
(Not only do I approve of and practice this
seemingly rude gesture, I long ago added a variation. From time
to time when I’m a guest, if the company bores me I find
a comfortable spot in front of the television and fall asleep.
No one seems to mind.)
-
Lee’s a talented
wordsmith, having coined the term “man date” in
reference to straight males who are confident enough in
their sexuality to go with each other to, for example, the
Museum of Modern Art.
[
The Man Date, by Jennifer 8. Lee, New York Times, April 10, 2005]
-
And, most of all, Lee is clever.
The “8”
thing has, I’m sure, been an immeasurable boon to Lee’s career.
Accepted at Harvard University and once an intern for the
Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the
Boston Globe, Lee’s now a high visibility media star. (See
Lee interviewed on Comedy Central
here)
But a debate about the origin of the “8”
in her name follows Lee wherever she goes.
According
to some, Lee’s birth certificate has no middle name. She
added the numeral to jazz up her profile.
I relate to Lee’s ingenuity because, although
my father’s name is
Giuseppe, my birth certificate identifies me as “Joseph
R. Guzzardi, II”
After my father died, I dropped “II”
Inspired by Lee and with the hope that I
can duplicate her success with “8” to finally achieve the
fame I so richly deserve, I have created my alter ego:
“Joe 2. Guzzardi” You may contact him
here.
You’ve no doubt been wondering when I’m
going to get around to my immigration-related point.
We’ve arrived!
Several months ago, Lee published her first
book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in Chinese Food.
Anyone who is interested in food will find a
lot to like including this mind-boggling statistic:
America
has more Chinese food restaurants than all the
McDonald’s,
Burger Kings and
KFC’s
combined.
(Important note: I did not buy Lee’s book,
because I refuse to contribute to the financial success of a
Times reporter. A friend who is an
ABC—American-born Chinese—loaned me her copy.)
Inadvertently, Lee’s greatest revelations
are not about
Chinese food, but about immigration—especially
chain
migration.
In (appropriately) Chapter 8, titled
“The Golden Venture:
Restaurant Workers To Go”,
Lee provides fascinating insights into
human smuggling and, fifteen years after the
rickety
150-foot steamer smashed into the rocks off New York’s
Rockaway Beach, the impact of a mere 300 alien arrivals on
American society.
Conversely, Lee tells how their departure
from their rural Ho Yu Xiang village left it empty.
Although we followed the
Golden
Venture details
when they unfolded fifteen years ago, they take on a different
significance when looked back on in their totality.
The passengers traveled 112 days from China’s
Fujian Province to New York via Thailand and Kenya. Some paid
up to $20,000 to be crammed into tiny living quarters.
By actual count, the Golden Venture had
a crew of 286 illegal immigrants on board when it departed.
After the aliens were captured, the minors
were released. About half of those remaining were deported. But
most of the Golden Venture passengers were sent to Pennsylvania’s York
County Prison.
Almost immediately, the aliens became
celebrities.
Today, Lee estimates that at least half still
remain in the US: some won asylum, others were
deported but snuck back, and still others remain in what she
calls the “legal netherworld.”
They live in
Virginia, Kansas, Ohio,
Arkansas,
Texas and Arizona.
Not surprisingly, you’re most likely
to encounter them in Chinese
restaurants
where they earn a meager living as cooks, waiters and delivery
boys.
Using rough calculations, Lee, with the help
of Chinese Migration and Immigration
Professor Zai Liang from the State University of New York,
estimates that via legal chain migration triggered by the
Golden Venture passengers, and the children of those
migrants, nearly 250,000
additional Fujianese have taken up residence in the US over
the last two decades—a population that would rank it close to
Pittsburgh, Toledo and Cincinnati.
And what of the
village the migrants left behind?
Lee writes that it is an unusual place filled
with “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 the cubs.”
No one lives in them.
These garish homes have been built with
money sent from Chinese restaurant employees living in
America—remittances,
in other words.
What America got out
of the Golden Venture fiasco is hundreds of thousands of
Chinese taking your to-go order on the telephone or showing up
at your door carrying cardboard containers.
The ultimate irony in the Golden Venture
tale is that the Chinese food the former passengers serve—General
Tso’s chicken, broccoli
and shrimp, steamed rice, egg rolls and fortune cookies—were
totally unknown to them before they arrived in America.
When Lee traveled to
China
to do research, she found that no one had ever heard of a dish
called General
Tso’s chicken.
The Golden Venture case served as the
prototype for all the amnesty appeals to come.
Here’s the cast of characters, the same
then as now:
To measure the absurdity of it all, just ask:
what are the chances are that, from 53 random Chinese aliens, 10
percent of them have “extraordinary ability in the arts?”
Then, as a follow-up question: what are the
odds that if your child were to submit crude figurines created
from recycled prison materials to the Smithsonian that the
museum would be put them on display and that eventually they
would be sold for hefty sums?
Answers: the odds are impossibly long. And
the chances are zero.
The Golden Venture provides an ugly
look at the impact of
chain migration on our society.
And since chain migration is legal, it
provides yet one more reason all those immigration reform
advocates
who claim that they have no objections to
legal immigration should take a harder look at the big
picture.
[Email
Jennifer 8. Lee]
Joe Guzzardi
[email
him] is a California native
who recently fled the state because of over-immigration,
over-population and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. He
has moved to Pittsburgh, PA where the air is clean and the
growth rate stable. A
long-time instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School,
Guzzardi has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It
currently appears in the
Lodi News-Sentinel. |
