Feature | Afraid to Talk: Undocumented Chinese workers struggle for justice 

Page 2 of 5

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.