Pete Hamill - Piecework

That was the basis for my feelings of envy. These young people were the most fortunate of all Americans. While some of them continued arguing the gnarled social issues of the postwar period, their century was being shaped by the great change sweeping across the Soviet Union and Central Europe. The wasteful ideological contests that had mauled my generation were swiftly becoming obscure. That meant these young people were free to enter a new century that might be infinitely better than the dreadful one now coming to its exhausted end. And they could only make that exciting passage with the intellectual tools they acquired at places like Brown. With any luck, in their time even the new idiocies of racism would become a wan memory.

So I envied them that splendid prospect as I did their certainties, and their passion, and yes, the red-brick buildings and those libraries, and all the fine young women coming across the quad in the wintry light with snow melting in their hair.

ESQUIRE,

April 1990

That morning, my wife and I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to talk radio. We could have been in any of a hundred other cities in America because, on the radio, the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid was already hammering away at the remnants of our common civility. Whites slandered blacks and blacks returned their oratorical volleys, while the host fueled the ugly duel. As we plunged deeper into Brooklyn, news bulletins fed the talkers: The trials of two whites charged with killing a black youth in Bensonhurst moved toward verdicts; a black boycott of two Korean grocery stores continued into its fifth month; a Vietnamese man was in critical condition, his head broken by a black kid who called him a “Korean motherfucker” while beating him senseless with a claw hammer. Ah, the melting pot. O ye gorgeous mosaic.

We parked beside the second-oldest church in the city, its Dutch stolidity and simple, combed lawns summoning images of a time long gone, and then walked a few blocks to the boycotted Korean store. My wife, Fukiko, was uneasy. She is a Japanese writer; if Vietnamese could be mistaken for Korean, so could Japanese. There have been signs that Asians are increasingly becoming targets of various forms of American resentment. In 1982 two Detroit autoworkers beat to death a Chinese American named Vincent Chin, thinking he was one of those terrible Japanese who had “ruined” the American auto industry. All through the 58os, other patriots burned crosses or tossed bombs at the homes of Vietnamese in Texas, Florida, and California. Cambodians have been attacked in Boston. Last year, in Stockton, California, a man walked into a school yard with a machine gun, murdered five children from Southeast Asia, and wounded many more. If you’re Asian, it can get scary out there.

But on this morning, there was more posturing and rhetoric than danger. About fifteen picketers were in the gutter outside the Red Apple grocery store. They were protesting because one of the Korean shopkeepers had quarreled with a fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman over the price of some plantains and limes and then — the woman claimed — assaulted her. The picketers occasionally chanted slogans (“Koreans out! Shut ’em down!”), screamed at blacks who were breaking the boycott (“Traitor! Traitor!”), glowered for TV cameras, and refused to speak to reporters, including my wife. “They think all reporters are racists,” said a black TV reporter. “Even me.” The racism charge was amusing — in a ghastly way. The black picketers had spent weeks shouting slogans about chopsticks and fortune cookies at their Korean targets; they had called them “yellow monkeys”; one of their major supporters was a race hustler named Sonny Carson, a convicted kidnapper who insisted last year that he wasn’t antisemitic, he was antiwhite. The Legion of the Invincibly Stupid is an equal-opportunity employer.

And yet none of this was surprising. Any student of American history knows that nativist and racist movements have been part of our social fabric since the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party. And when “real” Americans didn’t blame Catholics, Jews, Italians, Greeks, or Irishmen for their own inadequacies, they blamed Asians. First the Chinese, then the Japanese. I thought of all those old hurts, insults, and humiliations as my wife and I talked to the Koreans about their lives. They told stories as old as the immigrant tradition: how they arrived without language, full of hope, first laboring for others in the same immigrant group, finally buying their own businesses, starting families, working. And working. And working.

“I buy a book, with English word,” a man named Kyung Ho Park said, after explaining that his average workday (before the boycott) was fifteen hours long. “No time for school. …”

When I was growing up, Italians, Eastern European Jews, and Greeks told these stories. There were resentments then too from the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid; ethnic quarrels; even more brutal racism than now. But well into the 1950s, cities like New York were still manufacturing centers, and there were jobs for almost anybody who wanted to work, including people like my father, an immigrant with an eighth-grade education. The city’s traditional liberalism was made possible by an economy in which more than 30 percent of the jobs were in manufacturing; that figure has dropped to 10 percent, and the town’s great generous liberal spirit is as frayed and tattered as an old coat.

One result: Immigrants like Kyung Ho Park are working in a city obsessed with fixing blame for its social and economic woes. New York is home to people of immense wealth, and they live well-defended lives in the gaudy canyons of Manhattan. But in spite of the Reagan-era economic boom, New York also contains 840,000 people who live on welfare, more than every man, woman, and child in San Francisco. They don’t often see millionaires in their neighborhoods; they do see immigrants. And in the American tradition, the wrath of some is falling upon the newest arrivals, of whom the Koreans are the most visible. Sadly, the Asian immigrants frequently look upon those customers who are welfare clients with more contempt than pity.

“I work,” one Korean said to me on Church Avenue. “They don’t work. Why do I must feed them?”

That is to say, why must I pay taxes, why must I work long hours at a difficult job, while so many will not do what I do? For years, the children and grandchildren of older immigrants have sung the same blurry refrain: We made it, why don’t they? Now you begin to hear it from the Koreans too. “You don’t like my store,” one angry Korean immigrant said to me, “then go to your own store. But they don’t have store. Too hard. Too much work.”

Such complaints can’t be dismissed glibly as the latest examples of newcomers picking up the American racist virus. On the crudest level (down on the streets), they have a certain validity. In New York, as in other American urban centers, the Third World city within the larger city depends upon the taxes and energies of others for its food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, police, fire, and sanitation services. This year’s budget for New York City is more than $27 billion, and some estimate that fully half of that immense sum is used for servicing the poor. It’s inconceivable to think of this happening in Tokyo or Seoul or Singapore.

The persistence of the virtually permanent welfare-supported underclass is the most disgraceful measure of the decline of America’s once all-powerful manufacturing plants. But most Americans don’t want to talk anymore about root causes; they just see people sitting on the stoop while they go to work. Even the most orthodox liberals now understand that welfare degrades those who receive it and infuriates those who pay for it. So it is no surprise that some poor Americans mutter paranoid theories while others look for scapegoats. More and more these days, our favorite scapegoat is the Asian.