Gady A. Epstein and Stephanie Desmon write in the Baltimore Sun:
If Chen had known at that moment what he knows now, he would have wished for the plane to turn around. He did not know that, less than two years later, in 2006, he would be working more than 80 hours a week at a small Chinese restaurant in downtown Baltimore, with little chance of ever living a normal American life. He did not know that one day he would be crying on the telephone to his parents in southeastern China, asking, “Why did you send me this way?” He didn’t leave home out of desperation. The son of a businessman and a doting mother who sent him to one of the better high schools in the city, he had prospects in China that would almost certainly have been better than those he has here.
The difference between coming to the United States legally and illegally, Chen would learn, was the difference between assimilation and isolation, between a life of opportunity and a life of purgatory. He would arrive not only without the official right to be here but without the support systems and connections of extended family, guaranteed jobs or college enrollment enjoyed by those who follow the proper channels of legalized immigration.
Occasionally he tells [relatives and acquaintances still in China] a little bit about what life is like in the U.S. No one believes him.
“They think that we live a very good life here. Because people in China think that people in the States have a lot of money,” Chen said. “They wouldn’t believe it even if I told them the truth. If I told them the truth, they would say that I’m lying. I have told them life is really hard here, that I have really long working hours. And they respond, ‘What’s the big deal of long hours? I would prefer to go to the U.S. and work long hours but make a lot of money.’”
After landing in Miami, Chen told the immigration officer he didn’t have a passport, and then, following the Frenchman’s advice, refused to answer any questions except to say, “I don’t know.” He spent the night at the airport, then was booked into an immigration detention center, where he was issued an orange prison uniform. His introduction to the United States was literally as a prisoner.
There he met other prisoners - Latino and African-American but also Chinese, including Fujianese who had been picked up after many years working in restaurants in the United States, caught doing something as mundane as driving without a license. He learned there, in prison, that there was a big difference between the life he was about to lead and the life he had dared to imagine for himself.
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