The Chinese in America (48 page)

But the road out of Hong Kong was anything but smooth, even for those who had money. First, their desperation made them easy victims for con artists, as some Hong Kong families handed over outrageous fees—often in excess of $30,000—to immigration “consultants” who promised to handle the paperwork for them. Second, after settling into their new homes, some found it impossible to replicate their earlier business success. Unlike Hong Kong, a city of unbridled capitalism, the United States had far greater government regulation, higher taxes, and more stringent labor laws, all multitiered, with complex local, state, and federal mandates to be met. Some entrepreneurs lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of their life savings when they launched enterprises doomed to early failure. Yet many were surprisingly free of bitterness. They simply wrote off the losses as the price of establishing themselves in America, obtaining U.S. citizenship, and assuring themselves of American political protection.

Over time, many found it easier to conduct business in Hong Kong than in America and hedged their bets by maintaining ties in both regions. They moved their families and transferred wealth to the United States, while continuing to operate their businesses out of Asia. Soon, they came to be known as “astronauts”: international commuters who spent many hours flying back and forth between Hong Kong and North America.

Coincidentally, the Chinese term for “astronaut”—
tai kong ren
—sounds like the Chinese words for “empty wife” or “home without a husband,” an appropriate description for women who, like the nineteenth-century “Gold Mountain widows,” rarely saw their husbands on a regular basis. And to a certain degree, the lives of these Hong Kong astronauts mirrored the lives of the early Chinese immigrants in America, but with a high-tech twist. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chinese in America lived an odd paradox: their American income was too low to sustain families in the United States, yet high enough to elevate their families to the status of gentry in China. A split-family arrangement emerged, in which wives reared children in Guangdong villages while the breadwinner worked on the other side of the ocean and mailed money back. During the 1990s, the split-family tradition reappeared as the astronaut phenomenon, but the direction of cash flow had reversed: wives and children resided in North America, while the husbands earned money in Asia to support their families in fine style in America.

The number of these Hong Kong astronauts ran in the thousands, and they ranged from moderately successful executives to celebrity moguls. The most prominent ones included Jimmy Lai, a newspaper and magazine publisher and founder of the Giordano clothing empire; Ronnie Chan, a billionaire real estate developer and chairman of the Hang Lung Group, a property development corporation; Frank Tsao, a real estate and shipping magnate; and Tung Chee-hwa, another shipping tycoon. All of them regularly commuted between Hong Kong and their homes in California.

Instead of cramped quarters in Hong Kong, some astronaut families moved into larger homes in North America, such as gigantic mansions in the Los Angeles area (which locals dubbed “monster houses”), or in Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver (which natives there nicknamed “Hongcouver”). But not every family was happy with the new arrangement. In Hong Kong, where labor was cheap, many wives had servants at their disposal. Now they had to adapt to a society in which even upper-middle-class American housewives were expected to cook, clean, and chauffeur their children around. Also, in Hong Kong, most had enjoyed an adrenaline-charged social schedule, a whirlwind ritual of dim sum luncheons, karaoke parties, banquets, and nightly receptions. In the United States, some found it difficult to adjust to the slower pace of social activities, to the physical isolation and cool privacy of suburban living.

Inevitably, the loneliness caused by the prolonged absence of a spouse would lead many to adultery. According to psychologist Alex Leung, some astronauts experienced “a second bachelorhood” when they returned to Asia. “Hong Kong is a place which is famous for its materialistic glamour and night life,” he wrote. “It is very easy for these ‘single’ men to indulge themselves in these ’niceties‘—while writing off the excesses as ‘Business Entertainment.’” Meanwhile, there were reports of bored, frustrated Chinese housewives developing friendships with local men in their lives, platonic business relationships that may at times have evolved into something else. Extramarital sex—real or imagined—destroyed many astronaut marriages. The wife of a Hong Kong bank executive and mother of three children aroused her husband’s jealousy when she became close friends with an unmarried male neighbor in San Francisco. Her husband accused her of having an affair, while she confronted him with rumors of cavorting with strange women in Hong Kong nightclubs. Upon these words, he immediately left for Hong Kong and asked for a divorce a week later.

Of course, many if not most astronaut marriages withstood these tensions and survived, but the special pressures of split-home arrangements caused other fissures in family relationships. To allay their guilt over their extended absences, some Chinese fathers tried to express their love through expensive gifts—trendy toys, luxury cars, enormous allowances. But no matter how much money they spent, they learned that a father’s obligation to his children could not be satisfied solely in terms of dollars. Some sons and daughters came to view their fathers more as money machines than as loving advisers and reliable role models, and over time many fathers found themselves psychologically and emotionally estranged from their families. Alex Leung described a Mr. Lee whose children preferred to converse in English, not Chinese; when he insisted they speak to him in his native tongue, they often found it easier not to talk to him at all. In another home, a Mr. Wong, when staying with his wife and children, obsessively checked his stock quotes on the other side of the planet through fax and cell phone, often in the middle of the night, North American time. When they grew annoyed and asked him to stop, he warned he would never visit them again if they continued to complain about his behavior.

Without a strong father presence, troubled behavior among young people increased. One daughter of a Hong Kong astronaut confided to an interviewer that she was deeply worried about her brother: “He starts gambling and smoking, being involved with the gangs in Chinatown, having sex with a lot of bad girls. He has been caught once for breaking and entering. I try to cover for him as much as possible. My parents do not know yet and I am sure they will be devastated.”

But surely the ones who paid the greatest price for the astronaut lifestyle were the astronauts themselves, suffering the cumulative health risk of long flights, daily restaurant meals, and sleep deprivation caused by jet lag. A typical day for them might consist of meetings in a city far from home, sending e-mails from the airport, eating and sleeping onboard a red-eye flight to the next destination. Some astronauts trained themselves to work continuously for several days in a row before collapsing in deep slumber during the flight across the Pacific. In the long run, as Alex Leung noted, the astronaut risked losing all that was important to him: “his marriage, his children, and even his legal immigration status in the host country as a result of his long and frequent absence.”

Hong Kong was not the only place in Asia troubled by the renewed hard-line posture of the People’s Republic. During the 1990s, the Taiwanese felt new pressure to move themselves and their capital to the safety of the United States. The brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square raised concerns that the gains achieved during the Deng years might be suddenly reversed. Then, in 1996, the island’s first direct presidential elections challenged the four-decade reign of the Kuomintang. Fearing that pro-Taiwan independence groups would declare the island a separate nation, not an integral part of China, the PRC resorted to a show of saber-rattling. Conducting a series of military exercises near the coast of Taiwan that included the firing of several missiles, it sent a message that it was prepared to act militarily if Taiwan tried to present it with a fait accompli on the issue of independence. The Taiwan stock market plunged, and many residents fled to the United States. But no formal steps to establish independence were taken, and eventually the crisis passed. Economic investment returned to Taiwan, and diplomatic relations between the island and mainland China reverted to their previous status. Nonetheless, many Taiwanese families were shaken, and some found it prudent to keep bank accounts, homes, and even relatives in the United States, in case a quick move became necessary.

Largely because of these fears, Taiwan, like Hong Kong, suffered its share of fractured families in the 1990s. In Taiwan, the most common split-family lifestyle was the “parachute children” phenomenon. Unlike youths who were plunked down in the suburbs with their mothers while their “astronaut” fathers lived in Hong Kong, the parachute children lived in the United States without supervision from either parent. The motivating force behind this choice was not solely concern over the island’s political future, but also the wish to spare children the cutthroat academic competition in Taiwan.

The pressure to be admitted to a good college in Taiwan started as early as grade school. To increase their chances of getting into the island’s most prestigious middle schools, students enrolled in special preparatory programs and private cram courses. At the secondary school level, the competition for college admission became even more fierce. “You may be the best in your class but many still flunk the entrance exams for college,” one parachute child told an interviewer. “In Taiwan, people almost have to kill themselves to survive annual comprehensive entrance examinations for high school and college.”

The rigidity of the system ensured that some capable students would fall through the cracks, never to climb out again. Many working-class families in Taiwan, unable to afford tutors and the extra coaching required, gave up hope of having all their children attain university degrees. And without those degrees, opportunities on the island were limited. Barred from applying to graduate school, they had few chances to travel abroad. Worse still was the prospect of leaving school without a high school diploma. Typically, dropouts entered low-skilled, labor-intensive industries, such as assembly work in home-based factories. Knowing the odds, some Taiwanese families threw all of their resources behind only one or two children, in hopes that they might achieve the success that was sure to elude their siblings.

Other Taiwanese families shrewdly decided to avoid the exam system entirely by sending their children to the United States. They viewed the American education system as a shortcut to success, offering a dual advantage: less-competitive high schools, and more prestigious universities. But unlike the émigrés who owned their own international businesses, the fathers in these families could not leave their careers and start over in the United States. And with the rising number of two-career families on the island, many mothers could not abandon their jobs to accompany their children to America. So they sent them alone, either to live with caretakers or relatives, or to remain completely unsupervised. Amazingly enough, such parents would typically visit their children in the United States only a couple of times a year.

According to a 1990 study conducted by Helena Hwang and Terri Watanabe, some thirty thousand to forty thousand Taiwanese students between the ages of eight and eighteen were living as unaccompanied minors in the United States. The majority were boys, because Taiwanese parents wanted to protect their sons from mandatory military service. (In Taiwan, all males over the age of twenty were required to serve in the military for two years, a tour of duty that could be postponed if they enrolled in college.) While these parachute kids could be found in urban areas across the country, approximately ten thousand of them lived on the West Coast, mostly in affluent neighborhoods in either Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area.

In those neighborhoods, some lived in what seemed like a teenager’s paradise: no parents, no curfew, unlimited expense accounts. The wealthiest enjoyed the services of maids and housekeepers, received allowances of $4,000 or more a month, and cruised the streets in their BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. But even with these luxuries, many were desperately unhappy.
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Some youths told investigators that they missed their parents, feared their new surroundings, and wept often. A 1994 study of 162 Taiwanese adolescents in southern California found that parachute children suffered from higher levels of anxiety, distress, oversensitivity, depression, and paranoia than American-born Chinese youths who lived with their parents. One girl who had lived with relatives in California since the age of twelve told the
Los Angeles Times,
“It looks happy on the outside, but inside the kids are hurting. I wish people wouldn’t do this to their kids.” She admitted that “in my heart there was a dark place.” Occasionally, her fourteen-year-old brother came to her room, sobbing, “Patty, I want Mommy.” She did her best to comfort him: “Sometimes we hug each other and we cry; it’s all we can do.”

The behavior of these parachute children followed a typical pattern: first, hysterical phone calls home, weeping and begging their parents to join them in the United States (many ran up thousands of dollars in phone bills during the first few months away from home); then, signs of resignation and numbness; and finally, emotional alienation. Some parents recalled a chill creeping into conversations with their children—long pauses over the telephone, robotic “yes” and “no” replies to questions—as if strangers had taken their place.

Many parents believed that this sacrifice of intimacy was necessary in order to give their children better futures. Nonetheless, most remained guilt-ridden by the separation and, like the Hong Kong astronaut fathers, used money to compensate for their absence. During the 1990s, the average expense account for a Taiwanese parachute child was about $15,000 a year, and when the cost of domestic services was tallied, the total was much greater. In 1993, the Los Angeles Times estimated the total annual cost to support a single parachute child in the United States at about $40,000. Accustomed to a regular cash flow, some youths became adept at manipulating parental guilt for larger allowances, especially when resentment gave way to a sense of entitlement. “If they’re going to dump me here and not take care of me, they owe me something,” one parachute kid told an interviewer. “That’s my right.”