“I must tell you one thing first,” insists Kemer Gao, a 28-year-old undocumented Chinese immigrant, before beginning his story of how he came to America. “God helped me to come here. Without God, I could never be here.” Gao says this emphatically, drumming his hand over his heart as he searches for the words in English, his right thumb stiff to his hand, now months after it was smashed to pieces in a work accident. When Gao left his home in Tsingtao, China, as a struggling college graduate, after making it to the United States last year, he felt welcomed by the opportunity, pride and most importantly, the faith of his new home.
“America is a Christian country,” Gao says. “God blessed America and that is why America is so powerful.” While God may have blessed Gao with faith and hope he’d never known before, it wasn’t until he came to Utah that his newfound faith would be tested. Gao toiled for months at a Sandy-area Chinese grocery store where, he says, he worked for an under-the-table wage at a brutal work pace: 12-hour-plus shifts, six days a week, with no rest breaks during the day, working fast and hard on the loading dock at the back of the market. This past October, Gao was scrambling at the end of a long night to unload a diesel truck when he accidentally smashed his thumb between a wall and a pallet jack loaded with hundreds of pounds of merchandise.
Gao claims the “Boss Man,” Eugene Han, owner of the Super China Market told him he would have to tell doctors that the accident happened at home and not at work. Gao listened to his boss, only to have his boss withhold months of wages from Gao because the injury kept him from working at his pre-accident pace.
“I had no reason to say “no” to him,” Gao says. “At the time, I had been in America less than one year; he [Han] had been in America 10 years.” Han repeatedly refused to comment on Gao’s allegations.
Gao, like other undocumented laborers at the Super China Market, lived in a world far removed from home, isolated by language and culture. All any of them could do was what the Boss Man told them.
But Gao could do more, and he did. Because of his English skills, he found a way to receive workers compensation benefits for the time he would spend recuperating after two surgeries on his thumb. But, once the compensation checks started to come in, it wasn’t long until Han fired Gao and kicked him out of his employee housing. Gao wasn’t the first. A few months before Gao lost his job, so did his friend, WanZhi Zhu.
“Uncle” Zhu lost his job after getting into a fight with another employee. The work quarrel spiraled into a fight at the mobile home where several employees lived. Sandy Police were dispatched, and the fight ended with blood spilled. Zhu was taken away in an ambulance after being stabbed twice. When Zhu came back from the hospital, his job was gone, and he was kicked out of the house onto the streets. The middle-age Chinese man settled into the Road Home downtown shelter, speaking no English and having no friends or family in the city, the state or even the country.
Lost in a world where he had no idea where to turn for help or even how to speak the language, Zhu joined many others of Utah’s undocumented immigrants, lost by the law and its protection. But, for Asian immigrants like Zhu and Gao, the challenges of immigration are especially trying: dramatically different language systems, fear of government authority and a lack of a strong safety net for legal advocacy—leave little hope in the minds of these immigrants of a better tomorrow.
Far From Home
Gao didn’t understand what America was about until he made it into the country. “I was in Los Angeles when I saw a man with a shirt that says, ‘Be proud of America,’” Gao says. “He was right.”
As a graduate of Shan Dong University in China, Gao had been living a simple life finding work where he could with his computer-science degree. And, thanks to the English he had learned in his spare time, he did translation work. In China, he had heard a lot about America—part myth, truth and lies. It was like another world he never needed to worry about.
“The [Chinese] government talked too many bad things about America. But they just try to fool us,” Gao says. “But I was a university student, I was open-minded. I could check the Internet.”
Gao responded to an ad from a man willing to pay someone with English skills who could help get his girlfriend into America. Soon, Gao was flying across the ocean, with a man and a woman from his hometown, traveling to see for themselves what America was about.
Landing in Los Angeles in January 2007, Gao acted as an interpreter for the U.S. consulate where he explained the trio was seeking a business visa for a short-term visit to a concrete expo in Las Vegas. Gao was the interpreter and his companions were “company representatives.” Their visa was granted, but they never made it to Las Vegas. After leaving the consulate, the trio split up, the woman to New York City and the man to Miami. Without a work permit, Gao stuck close to the large Chinese community in Los Angeles.
“They told us we were very lucky,” Gao says. “Someone said it is maybe 99 percent impossible that I could get [a business] visa at my age. “That’s why I think God helped me.”
For Gao, Los Angeles (like many U.S. cities) was an “employment center,” a place where the friendly Chinese community could link up immigrants with jobs all across the country—for wages above the table and under. Soon, Gao had a phone interview with a man named Eugene Han, who owned a market in Utah. By August 2007, Gao had left California for his new home in Sandy.
Market Conditions
Just off the eastbound 9000 South exit of Interstate 15, between a state liquor store and a trailer park, the Super China Market can be hard to spot if you’re not looking for it. The authentic Chinese grocery-store aisles are packed with Eastern imports: rice, fish oil, hoisin sauce. A cookware section has woks and pans for sale, while a butcher shop in the back offers an array of beef hearts, duck feet, live crabs in dingy tanks, 2-foot long catfish, frozen swamp eels and fresh pork lungs.
The store even has a small pharmacy stocked with Chinese medicines. And just behind the medicine counter, a cracked door reveals Han’s office—where a large screen fills a wall with images from a dozen security cameras that constantly monitor the entire store. From the clerks up front to the warehouse in back, nothing slips past the Boss Man.
“You always have to be moving,” says “Yu,” an employee who asked that his real name be withheld for fear of retribution. “Every minute, every second, you have to be moving. If you are not moving, he is instantly out [of his office] yelling at you.”
“It makes you very nervous in your mind,” Gao says, adding that taking a brief rest break, even if there was nothing do at the moment, would result in a confrontation. Pausing to say more than a few words to a fellow employee would result in an enraged tirade from the boss.
The fear of being fired and cut from their only lifeline in a foreign land hung over them all the time. “Threats of being fired is a constant,” Yu says. “He tells you to do one thing, and if you’re not doing it instantly, he yells at you.”
Gao notes, “The most important thing maybe you can’t understand, the first time I came to work, the Boss Man always forced me to do work very quickly. So, in my mind, I thought I had to do everything high speed. That was a mistake. I should take my time, but the Boss Man always push me, so I have to work hard without stopping.”
Gao put in an average 12 hours of frantic work every shift, but it was in late October 2007 that he was pushed to the limit. The Super China Market depends on numerous truck deliveries from California for many of its imports. This past fall, when wildfires raged in California, truck deliveries backed up to the point that, instead of one truck coming in on Oct. 25, four arrived all at once. Where Gao might have worked to unload and inventory 15 to 20 pallets of groceries, on this night, he found himself winding down after a long day by scrambling to unload nearly 40 pallets, which arrived hours later than usual.
His co-workers darted back and forth from the trucks loading pallets onto a special jack that Gao would then use to drive the supplies into the back of the warehouse. In the midst of this, with Han barking orders, an exhausted Gao miscalculated a turn on the awkward three-wheeled jack and nearly pinned his body between a concrete wall and the fully loaded jack. He dodged much more serious injury, but still had his thumb caught and crushed by the force of the quickly turning jack.
Gao says Han took him to the hospital but told him that he must tell the doctors the accident happened at home, with his thumb getting caught in an iron gate.
The doctors soon performed corrective surgery on Gao’s thumb, but upon Gao’s return from the hospital, Han put Gao right back to work.
“Many friends told me I shouldn’t work, but the Boss Man asked me to,” Gao says. “I didn’t know anything about the law. [At the time, I thought] what happened is bad for me and Boss Man, so I think I will help him. Later on, I learned he did not want to pay the medical expenses.”
While still recovering, Gao continued unloading trucks in the warehouse section of the market through the busy November and December season. But at the end of December, when Gao finished another surgery on his thumb, he could no longer work like before. Instead, he stayed at the employee trailer home and helped prepare meals for the others living there.
Gao alleges Han withheld his wages starting in mid-October, before his accident. He considered that compensation for having to pay Gao’s medical expenses. Gao’s anxiety gnawed at him at night. He knew his lost wages would hurt his parents in China the most. Gao’s family, like all in China, lived under a “one-child” policy enacted in the late ’70s that permitted families only one child if their firstborn were male; two, if their firstborn were female. Being the firstborn in his family, Gao is an only child to his aging parents and their only substantial means of support. His father has only worked off and on as a janitor, and his mother didn’t work at all—the last time he checked.
“Since my thumb got hurt, I haven’t called them,” Gao says, looking to the ground. “Because I don’t know what to say. When I get better, get some kind of job and everything is better, I will call them.”
For many undocumented Asian immigrants like Gao, the trouble is knowing just whom to trust. “A lot of these people oftentimes come from authoritarian governments which makes them very distrustful of authority,” says Roger Tsai, a Salt Lake City immigration attorney and member of the minority bar association.
“Many of them come from countries where they don’t even have labor laws,” Tsai says. For Asian immigrants, another obstacle is the language, where character systems are so different from the roman alphabet, the language barrier is more difficult for Asians than other immigrants. Tsai worries the larger problem, however, is just linking up the diverse Asian community with the resources its members need in tough situation, like the kind that would make Gao ashamed to call his parents back home.
Gao did, however, call his parents once since his accident—during Chinese New Year in early February—just to wish them well and keep them from worrying. He wanted to keep his worry to himself. No need to share his anxieties about his stiff and aching thumb and lost wages nor his worries about his friend “Uncle” Zhu, who right before the Chinese New Year, was hauled away from the employee “house” in an ambulance.
A Chaotic Scene
While Gao had struggled to describe in English the living quarters Han provided for a number of his employees next to the market, when the Sandy police rolled up to the scene of an aggravated assault on Feb. 2, 2008, they found the employee “house”—a dilapidated double-wide trailer which had been holding eight employees of the Super China Market.
Sandy Police Sgt. Jeffrey Duvall, the lead investigator at the scene, entered the trailer to find it sparsely furnished, except for eight twin beds. His police report also describes “several crates of food that appeared to be rotting in the kitchen.” Duvall says he was told that food that could not be sold at the market was given to the employees to eat.
Inside the trailer, the scene was chaotic. Zhu laid on his bed groaning from his two stab wounds, one to his chest and one to the upper back side of his left arm. While the wounds weren’t serious, that didn’t calm the mood in the cramped quarters as medics swarmed around Zhu with Gao acting as translator for both police and EMTs.
No one witnessed the stabbing, but in an interview with Han, police discovered that Zhu had fought with a co-worker, the suspect, who worked with Zhu in the meat department of the store. The two had a bitter argument in the store the previous day. Apparently, the stabbing suspect had quarreled with Zhu over matters of seniority. Their tensions boiled to the point that Zhu challenged the suspect in the freezer at work by grabbing a knife by the blade and jabbing him with the handle. According to the police report, Zhu challenged the suspect to stab him if he did not like what he was doing. The suspect complained to Han. Zhu was disciplined by Han and told he would have to check with him the following morning to see if he could still work through the busy season.
What happened next is unclear, but Sandy Police say by the end of that day, investigators were presented with two stories: Kemer Gao and Zhu said the suspect had attacked Zhu that morning, picking up their fight where it left off from the previous day, with the suspect apparently taking Zhu up on his challenge and stabbing him twice.
Later that day, however, Sgt. Duvall found that the store owner, the suspect, Gao and another witness seemed to disagree. While the other witness did not see the stabbing, he did say it was Zhu who was grappling with the suspect. The suspect then claimed that Zhu stabbed himself. The motivation, presumably, was to set up the boss and the suspect with whom Zhu was not happy.
Gao believes that Han favored the suspect, simply because he was a senior worker and said the suspect and Zhu did not get along because the suspect (who shared a room with Zhu) would gossip about other co-workers at the end of the work day.
“He always talk bad things about people when they aren’t around,” Gao says.
“Zhu told him he shouldn’t do so because we are all working in America; we don’t have friends or relatives here. It’s very hard for us to live here; we should help each other instead of gossip about each other.”
The results of the police investigation were conflicted. The wounds on Zhu, Duvall deduced, could possibly have been self-inflicted, though whether an undocumented Chinese laborer would stab himself in order to set up his enemies is fairly speculative. Especially if it means involving a police investigation, which might lead to deportation.
The stabbing victim, Zhu, told police he would be leaving after the incident for Los Angeles, so police conducted only one interview. Duvall concluded his report: “At this time, there is the victim and one witness stating that the suspect stabbed the victim, and one witness stating no stabbing took place. Both the victim and his witness have issues with the owner of the business who employs all of them.”
On March 19, the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office cleared the case of further action, citing a lack of evidence. But, well before then, when Zhu returned from the hospital, he was kicked out of the employee trailer, where Gao and other employees say Han had police officers escort him to a downtown homeless shelter, although Sandy Police records don’t confirm this. According to Yu, the employee who allegedly stabbed Zhu continued to work through March.
No Man’s Land
Last month, Gao succeeded in getting Workers Compensation to help offset lost pay due to his injury. Despite this victory, soon after, Gao received a termination letter from Han, saying that he must remove all of his belongings from the trailer by March 18. The notice gave no reason for his being fired, but Gao is certain it was a result of his reporting the accident to the State Labor Commission.
Gao wanted to move back to California where it would be easier to find work. But he needed to stay and complete physical therapy for his hand. In the meantime, Gao found himself negotiating with the bureaucracy of the Utah Workers Compensation Fund (WCF), the state’s largest private insurer for business owners.
While he was grateful the insurer would help support his post-operative recuperation, Gao found that the amount offered was much less than his previous wage. He says he had earned more than $2,500 a month at the market, but the compensation came to only two-thirds that amount.
The communication with insurance officials was especially confusing for Gao, a nonnative and complete outsider to the system. In one e-mail, a WCF representative informed Gao he would be compensated $654 every two weeks; a subsequent e-mail indicated he would receive $491 a week.
Gao was upset the compensation was insufficient for caring for his parents. “They ask you if you have wife or children,” Gao says. “But they never ask if you have parents. Maybe it’s just the culture, but in China, one of the merits of a good man is taking care of the old. Still, I don’t believe no one in America cares about their parents.”
Gao also found resistance to his getting a second medical opinion on the condition of his thumb. The WCF representative informed him in an e-mail: “At this time, WCF has no reason to seek a second opinion regarding your current medical care.” A follow-up e-mail insisted that Gao work out any problems he might have with his current doctor and added, “After your appointment [with your current doctor], we will keep a second opinion in mind, but only if it is necessary.”
Salt Lake Country veteran labor attorney Mike Martinez says, “It’s very complicated for individuals who aren’t represented. They [employee applicants] don’t know the rules. The problem with the WCF doctors is they’re reluctant to take on these patients. They get paid by a schedule, and it’s usually a lot less than the doctor would normally charge in regular practice.”
Martinez believes the larger problem for undocumented workers is getting fairly compensated for wages lost. Martinez believes money is being taken from the pockets of Utah’s ever-growing population of undocumented laborers—Latino, Asian, every underrepresented group.
“Wage claims are being discouraged, especially from undocumented labor. More than blue-collar or white-collar workers, the immigrants are getting stiffed the most,” Martinez says.
Mr. Dungua and the Snake
The last time Gao saw his friend, Zhu, was at the Salt Lake City Main Library, several days after the stabbing. Zhu had been lingering in town, trying to get by at a homeless shelter without understanding any English and barely able to stomach the food served at local soup kitchens. When Zhu met Gao, he could only think of revenge upon his boss. Zhu said he had thought of setting the market on fire or of following the Boss Man to his home and “punishing him.”
A nervous Gao urged Zhu to remember he must think of the family he had to support, and he accepted Zhu’s futile rage as just talk. Gao
For Gao, the injustice he perceives were wrought upon Zhu hit him hard. “Every time I see him, I think of my father,” Gao says.
Gao is beginning to recover from some of the trials he has faced and is looking into getting a final surgery on his hand. He is optimistic that he will receive a work permit within the next few months. He hopes to one day study in an American university. With the help of many Christian friends he has made, from a Chinese pastor in Los Angeles to those he met at a local LDS testimony meeting, Gao hopes to one day study theology in the United States.
“I have a pastor in L.A. I think he is the best man that I have ever met,” Gao says. “He is always ready to help anybody whether they are good or not. If the opportunity comes, I will try to help others just like him. But for me, I would just like to help those good persons, not the evil.”
Gao still struggles with his experiences in Utah. While a unique faith in America and an optimism grows within him, some truths from the Old World hover over Gao, and he takes them to heart.
In Chinese folklore, a lesson tells of a man—Mr. Dungua—who saw a snake dying on the road, the winter chill slowly killing the serpent. Mr. Dungua respected life in all its forms and picked up the snake and cradled it like a baby, warming the cold-blooded creature against his chest. The snake slowly stirred, brought back from near death. When it was fully revitalized, the snake bit Mr. Dungua and killed him.
“Maybe, after time, I will be able to help everybody just like my pastor in Los Angeles, but right now, I am young and that is my experience,” Gao says. “I don’t want to help evil people do more evil things.”
Jordan Riley aided in translations for this story.
Under the Radar
Not all of Utah’s undocumented are Latinos
“Immigration affects all groups the same,” says Claudia Nakano of the Governor’s Department of Community and Culture. “Latino, Asian, African all the same issues apply.”
While the challenges of immigration may be equal for all undocumented immigrants, the resources they have at hand are not. The large Latino population undoubtedly allows for greater community resources including numerous legal advocates. But other ethnic groups don’t have nearly the same networks.
“We don’t have the same emphasis on immigration,” says Roger Tsai a local immigration attorney and member of the Minority Bar Association. “[But] we don’t lack resources, that’s not the problem.”
For Tsai the problem as mentioned in this week’s feature, is organizing a unified network of people who can reach out to the diverse community of Asian immigrants in Utah. According to the Office of Ethnic Affairs 2000 survey, there was 37,108 Asian individuals in Utah, or 1.7 percent of the state population (excluding Pacific Islanders). But within that demographic the largest segments are Chinese (21 percent), Japanese (16 percent), Vietnamese (16 percent), Korean (9 percent) and Phillipino (8 percent).
The sheer diversity of the population makes it difficult for resources to be organized that can help specific groups out. That’s why Tsai and the rest of the Minority Bar Association are seeking to create an organized database of all the minority attorneys in Utah.
“When there are folks who do need help they can then find somebody who can speak their native language,” Tsai says. “Whether it’s Chinese, Korean or Hmong [they can find help] and can receive that trust that is necessary for clients to ask for help.”
Salt Lake City currently is among one of 15 cities that accepts refugees and out of that service of helping provide education, housing and other resources to refugees, Utah already has some advantages to provide Asian (and non) immigrants with helpful resources. But as far as state assistance goes to the undocumented Asian, Latinos etc…there are essentially no programs out there available to them.
“Almost every nonprofit will say no we can’t help you,” Tsai says. “All the nonprofits, wherever their dollars are coming from, there are restrictions on how the dollars can be spent.”
Shu Cheng Director of the Utah Asian Association recognizes this challenge, and finds the best way to help out these vulnerable segments of the Asian population, whether they’re refugee or undocumented, is to just try and spread the word to the community itself.
“There is a network,” Cheng says. “For most of the community there are groups that come together [for assistance].”
Cheng notes that in some situations if a particular family is struggling or having difficulties, they will come to the Utah Asian Association who will then try to spread the message to ethnic groups in the community, to donate money or time. Cheng worries one unique problem for Asian immigrants has to do with the small communities in some areas, like Utah. Relying on the informal community might not solve the problem, especially if an individual is being exploited by somebody else in that same community.
“The Asian community is very limited in numbers,” Cheng says. “So they may turn to a mutual assistance network-- go to their own community for help. But that maybe is where the exploitation might be happening. [Individuals] getting paid minimal or unreasonable wages, for example, that is one disadvantage.”
While Cheng sees that as one challenge for non-Latino immigrant communities, he like others agree that some difficulties are always tough no matter what the ethnic group is that faces them.
“Immigration for undocumented workers is always hard,” Cheng says. “Behind each of those families there are incredible stories if people care to listen to it. It is a struggle for everything that you can think of.”
If you are a minority law professional interested in helping the minority bar association out with its database please contact the association at umbalaw.org. And if you are a member of Utah’s Asian population and have fallen hard times don’t hesitate to look up the Utah Asian Association at 801-467-6060 or aau-slc.org.