The Immigrant Advantage

What We Can Learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness and Hope

Claudia Kolker

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781416587118
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Do you have a relative or friend who would gladly wait on you, hand and foot, for a full month after you had a baby? How about someone to deliver a delicious, piping hot home-cooked meal, just like your mother's, right to your front door after work? Do you know people you'd trust enough to give several hundred dollars a month to, with no receipt, on the simple promise that the accumulated wealth will come back to you a year later? Not many of us can answer "yes" to these questions. But as award-winning journalist Claudia Kolker has discovered, each of these is one of a wide variety of cherished customs brought to the United States by immigrant groups, often adapted to American life by the second generation in a distinctive blending of old and new. Taken together, these extraordinary traditions may well contribute to what's known as "the immigrant paradox, " the growing evidence that immigrants, even those from poor or violence-wracked countries, tend to be both physically and mentally healthier than most native-born Americans. These customs are unfamiliar to most Americans, but they shouldn't be. Honed over centuries, they provide ingenious solutions to daily challenges most of us face and provide both social support and comfort. They range from Vietnamese money clubs that help people save and Mexican cuarentenas —a forty-day period of rest for new mothers—to Korean afterschools that offer highly effective tutoring at low cost and Jamaican multigenerational households that help younger family members pay for college and, eventually, their own homes. Fascinated by the success of immigrant friends, Claudia Kolker embarked on a journey to uncover how these customs are being carried on and adapted by the second and third generations, and how they can enrich all of our lives. In a beautifully written narrative, she takes readers into the living rooms, kitchens, and restaurants of immigrant families and neighborhoods all across the country, exploring the sociable street life of Chicago's "Little Village, " a Mexican enclave with extraordinarily low rates of asthma and heart disease; the focused quiet of Korean afterschool tutoring centers; and the loving, controlled chaos of a Jamaican extended-family home. She chronicles the quests of young Indian Americans to find spouses with the close guidance of their parents, revealing the benefits of "assisted marriage, " an American adaptation of arranged marriage. And she dives with gusto into some of the customs herself, experimenting to see how we might all fit them into our lives. She shows us the joy, and excitement, of savoring Vietnamese "monthly rice" meals delivered to her front door, hiring a tutor for her two young girls, and finding a powerful sense of community in a money-lending club she started with friends. The Immigrant Advantage is an adventurous exploration of little-known traditional wisdom, and how in this nation of immigrants our lives can be enriched by the gifts of our newest arrivals.

1

How to Save:

The Vietnamese Money Club

Pay first and then get what you have paid for.

—VIETNAMESE PROVERB

FROM THE CORNER of a banquet table strewn with empty dishes, I watched large-denomination bills change hands. A Vietnamese man in a porkpie hat strolled from seat to seat. Smiling, he leaned toward one guest, then another, clasping shoulders and collecting.

Three crisp hundreds from a skinny man with glasses.

Six fifties from a chic matron in gray pumps.

Altogether more than fifty people crowded at the tables in the Houston restaurant. All had come from Vietnam, and all had known each other more than thirty years, since first arriving, penniless, after Saigon’s fall. Their faces rounder now, their bellies gently paunched, they plucked morsels of fried squid and catfish off lazy Susans. When the man in the hat came round to take their cash, they each embraced him.

This could easily be dues time at a class reunion or Rotary dinner. But something unusual was happening with all that money. Instead of tucking it into a box or money pouch, Cao Do, the man in the hat, slipped the bills into an envelope. He passed it to the oldest woman at the table. Putting down her chopsticks, she licked a forefinger and counted. Then she opened her handbag and dropped the cash into it.

I was witnessing a hui. Pronounced to rhyme with “boy,” it is a centuries-old Vietnamese tradition that harnesses peer pressure to force its members to save. A bit book club, a bit Weight Watchers, the hui hinges on one transaction.

Every month, cash in hand, members meet to contribute their dues. And each month a different player takes that lump sum home, interest-free. In Vietnam those dues might be pitifully small, the equivalent of one or two dollars. High rollers, businessmen who don’t talk to people like me, deal in the tens of thousands.

The guests at Cao Do’s table that day contributed $300 each. It was the pool of all their cash that the woman with the chopsticks stuffed in her purse as I watched. After paying dutifully to the hui for months, she had reached her turn to collect.

Though everyone calls them by different names—Cambodians have tontines, Mexicans tandas, and Nigerians esusus—rotating loan clubs exist in nearly every traditional culture. In each system, peer pressure interwoven with social pleasure compels people to save what they otherwise might spend. The same forces, transformed into a fear of humiliation, discourage them from defaulting.

Among Asians, money clubs date back at least to the thirteenth century; one Japanese document cites a hui-like club that operated in 1275. Nearly a millennium later, the parched economic landscape that gave birth to huis still prevails in much of the world. For smalltime merchants and farmers who don’t have access to modern banks, and whose only other options are loan sharks or a jar buried in the garden, money clubs, along with jewelry and land, are still the safest methods to raise or store wealth.

But money clubs have also played a considerable role in the U.S. economy. Japanese and Chinese immigrants relied on them heavily to build businesses in the nineteenth century; in 1988, Time reported that Korean immigrants had used clubs called kyes to raise up to $10 million for houses and small businesses in the San Francisco Bay area. Eleven years later, another survey calculated that 80 percent of Korean households in the United States still took part in a kye, and that around Washington, D.C., kyes held approximately $100 million at any one time.

In the three decades since they arrived here, America’s estimated 1.1 million Vietnamese immigrants have deployed thousands of huis in the same way, launching businesses here and providing for families left behind in Vietnam. Huis helped seed Houston’s seemingly magical burgeoning of tiny nail salons, convenience stores, and pocket-size restaurants within months of their owners’ arrival—often in blasted neighborhoods where other poor residents found jobs and business ownership out of reach. Fifty miles away, on the Gulf of Mexico, money clubs with payouts from hundreds of dollars to $20,000 or more allowed refugees to buy boats and gain a foothold in the shrimping industry.

Until recently, Western scholars wrote about huis and other rotating credit groups with a certain dismissiveness. They were the last-ditch tool of the very poor, they said. And, indeed, Muhammad Yunus borrowed from the revolving loan tradition in developing the Grameen Bank, insisting that its microloans would more likely be repaid if guaranteed by a peer group.

But the money club mechanism is more commonly a tool for the stable and aspirational. After all, you need some sort of surplus before you can join. In Houston, most Vietnamese refugees had to wait a few years to emerge from dire poverty before they could join. Today, Cao Do’s hui includes military officers, engineers, and business owners who use banks and credit cards as well.

I can’t say I ever worried about finding a safe place for my wealth. But I had been hearing about huis, and the lore surrounding them, since first arriving in Houston. A hui, my Vietnamese friends would tell me, is much more than a poor man’s substitute for a bank. It alters behavior, they claimed. And it somehow manages to make frugality fun.

It’s 1:00 p.m. on the second Saturday of the month: the day after payday, and two weeks before the next bills arrive. Time again for the hui.

Freshly lipsticked, ties straight, Cao Do’s friends file into the banquet room. Kim Son restaurant sits in a strip mall, but its foyer recalls the Library of Congress. It’s a fitting look for this seat of communal power.

Houston boosters, not just the Vietnamese ones, sometimes boast about Kim Son’s success as if it were a municipal achievement. In a way it is. When Son La arrived here as a refugee in 1975, he found a subtropical climate that felt like Vietnam. He also found a state economy unfettered by state income tax and a distinctly Houstonian willingness to ignore social origins. That is, if you could get rich.

Almost everybody who moved to the city in those days had done so for jobs. For a man like La, Houston offered promising ground. Starting with a pocket-size soup joint, La and his family slowly turned Kim Son into a mainstream dining empire. Their secret was pampering the Texan palate. Houstonians, they found, appreciated jalapeños and cilantro. But they wanted their food clearly identifiable, light on the fish sauce, and free at all times of fat globules, exoskeletons, and eyeballs.

Once La got the hang of these predilections, Houston fell in love with his cooking. It’s common now to pop into a Kim Son at lunch and see Latinos, blacks, and sixth-generation Texans happily wrapping their spring rolls in lettuce. As their fortune grew, the Las built another restaurant, and another. Finally they built the pièce de résistance—the marble and red velvet palace where Cao Do’s friends meet for their hui.

As Do’s guests settle in at their tables, waiters begin ferrying rice, soft drinks, and platter after platter of garlicky catfish and squid. Twenty years after starting this club, Do’s friends have finally mustered the financial security for nice meals out. Accordingly, each month’s winners—there are always two—agree to buy the Kim Son lunch for everyone. Also by consensus, the club no longer pays out anyone in the first month; instead, the players bank the money in an emergency account. Last year they used it to help a member pay for his wife’s funeral. Other groups donate one month’s winnings to a charity.

These are common money club variations, but the xeroxed sheet that Do now hands to each table was his own innovation. It’s a copied image of a Texas Powerball ticket. Vietnamese tend to relish gambling, and this hui decided to spend a few dollars from the communal fund on playing the lottery. The smidgen of extra risk reflects their trust in Do.

Do is sixty-six, medium height, but seems younger and much taller thanks to a very round, almost pumpkinish head. He is dressed a little more casually than his guests, in an elegant charcoal jersey shirt, sleek loafers, and the porkpie lid. He has the smile and antic grace of a Rat Packer, and I like him right away.

“Without Do, we always say, we wouldn’t do this,” says the slender woman who is translating for us. Do, joining us at an empty seat, smiles modestly. It’s clear the tribute delights him. “Where did you learn your management skills?” I ask. “Boy Scouts,” he replies. “And, when I became an adult, the Vietnamese navy.” Displacement and language barriers sidetracked those talents. In this country, Do is two years from his pension as a custodian for a public school district.

Do’s money club has been running continuously for twenty years, but its focus has changed enormously. “We’d just arrived, we didn’t have anything. We needed new cars, deposits for houses,” he says. “That’s why we started it—we needed the money.” Do’s original cofounder, an old friend from the military, was the one who launched the group. He needed to raise money fast for a house deposit. Between them, he and Do recruited eighteen other families, all of them scrambling for a toehold in the new country.

Because, back then, no one had either money or leisure to spend a whole Saturday afternoon at a restaurant, the club members squeezed into each other’s apartments. They switched places in the rotation often and graciously in those first years, accommodating their fellow refugees’ fast-changing lives. Almost each month, someone would ask to collect, to buy suddenly available shop space or finance a wedding for a child who assumed, unlike her parents, that Houston was her permanent home.

As more refugees found their footing, the hui grew fast: from two dozen, to three dozen, to fifty families. People joined now for the fun of it, lured by friends, and friends of friends. They ventured out to Kim Son, and resolved to raise monthly dues from $200 to $300. For efficiency, Do came up with the idea of splitting the group in two, to keep the cycle from dragging out fifty months. Finally, in a sign of the members’ new financial stability, they decided to add an extra $15 to their monthly payment, money they’d never recoup. It would go instead to a general fund for charity, emergencies—and more parties.

Now that most are in their sixties and seventies, few really want to talk about work, or trying to buy a car, or scaring up a house payment. Instead they chatter about pleasures: favorite old foods and places in Vietnam, or the entertainment at their upcoming New Year’s celebration here at Kim Son.

“This is just like our club now,” Do says. “We meet together to have friends to invite to weddings, to help when we have problems.” Even their problems are different now—like other Americans, the hui members have to struggle not to fritter away what they have.

“Some people cannot save,” Do adds. “This makes you do it.”

* * *

Hen Le needed $16,000 in cash and had run out of places to find it.

When I first met fifty-seven-year-old Le at the money club, he was turned out like the other guests: closely shaven, in a beautifully tailored European-style suit and discreet tie. Yet Le looked subtly unlike his peers, more broad-shouldered, athletic, forearms rounded with muscle. He resembled a bond trader who invests in spinning classes, massage, and a trainer. What Le’s physique really reflected was more than thirty years of manual labor. He had joined the money club to stop being someone else’s employee and launch his own business.

Le grew up well-to-do in Tay Ninh Province, South Vietnam, where his father owned a regional bus service. Ambitious, Le studied agriculture and landed a scholarship to earn an MA in the United States, but was vanquished by the English requirement and in the end couldn’t go.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Your English is perfect.”

“It is now,” he said, shrugging.

One year after his failed move to America, Vietnam fell to the Communists and Le got out on a military ship.

“I followed the stream of people,” he said. Arriving in Houston, Le worked twelve years for a mechanic before a well-to-do woman friend offered to partner with him in an auto shop. As Le tells it, she didn’t like it when he married someone else three years later. They dissolved the business. With the $22,000 from the settlement, Le grabbed a bargain parcel of land outside Houston. He vowed it was time to work for himself.

Halfway through the process, the well ran dry. Though he owned the property, Le still needed to construct the building and buy machinery. He borrowed $40,000 from friends and former neighbors in Vietnam, many of whom didn’t charge interest. “They’ll lend to you now—you’ll lend to them one day,” Le shrugged. Another $20,000 went onto credit cards, some nimbly swapped every six months—zero-interest accounts—and some at steep interest. But the mix of individual and corporate loans still didn’t cover Le’s needs. The business was slipping out of his hands. And that is when the hui lifted him onto its strong, supple back.

Several years before he’d begun building, Le and his wife signed on with three separate money clubs, at $200 apiece. They knew they would need lump sums of cash. Between all three clubs, two of which extended several years, Le theoretically could get access to $16,000, with no interest, no balloon payment, and no collateral required beyond his good name.

But you can’t build a mechanic’s shop with three chunks of money scattered over three years. So when the time came to build, Le exercised the hui’s ancient friendship clause. He asked to change his place in the rotation. Le wanted all three of his shares, from all three clubs, in the same month. The players were glad to comply.

Everyone knew this was what huis were for.

To the entrepreneur who wants to collect early, a money club creates capital. For the prudent or the impulsive, collecting late gently enforces savings. But money clubs also help members unexpectedly tapped on the shoulder by some stroke of luck, whether a car accident, a death—or an opportunity. That understanding is what makes a hui distinct from, and in certain moments even more powerful than, a savings account or a bank loan.

“That’s why it’s called a friendship loan,” Le said.

A few months after visiting Cao Do’s club, I drove to the outskirts of Houston to see what Le had done with his loan. When I pulled into the shop, he was sitting alone in front of a worn turquoise-colored counter. A plastic bottle filled with green tea sat nearby. On a wall-mounted TV screen, a Vietnamese youth and a little girl in traditional clothes were scrambling up a mountain away from pursuers.

Le tipped back in his chair.

He was still fit and good-looking, with the casual manners of someone twenty years younger. But he sounded weary as he described the years since he’d gathered his loans. Though he had owed as much as 20 percent interest on his credit cards, he completed all his hui payments first, within twenty-five months. Next he paid off his friends.

“But why?” I asked, surprised. Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay off the cards, with their compounding interest? Le tapped both hands to his chest. “They trust me to loan me money. Why wouldn’t I pay them first?”

A call lit up his cell phone, and Le stepped into the workshop to talk. I waved my thanks and slipped out. My car waited amid the herd of bashed junkers, near a white sign that had taken thirty years of work and friendship to ho...