Bus Crash in the Bronx Ends a Man’s Fight for His Family
By KIRK SEMPLE and JEFFREY E. SINGER
The authorities were at Wang Jianhua’s door in Fujian Province, China, intent on taking his wife away. Her crime: She already had a child and she was pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy.
As Mr. Wang would later recount to his friends, he stepped between the officials and his wife. A scuffle ensued, Mr. Wang’s wife escaped, and the officials hauled Mr. Wang, the son of poor rice farmers, to a jail where he was held for several days and severely beaten, his friends said.
The confrontation was apparently a turning point in Mr. Wang’s life, which had already been marked by poverty and hardship. Within months, his wife still pregnant, he would set off alone for the United States with the aid of smugglers, taking a chance that a better life awaited him — and eventually his family.
But on March 12, three years after his arrival in New York City, his aspirations were dashed in a sudden crash of steel and asphalt on Interstate 95 in the Bronx. Mr. Wang, who had been working as a restaurant deliveryman, was one of the 15 passengers who died when their bus overturned and was sliced open by a sign post as they were returning to New York’s Chinatown from a casino in Connecticut.
There were a few threads that tied these victims together. Many were first-generation, working-class immigrants, many were Chinese, and many were seeking some kind of solace and hope, however illusory, in the parallel universe of the Mohegan Sun casino. This is a portrait of one of those victims.
From interviews with Mr. Wang’s friends, relatives and co-workers, both in the city and in China, a profile emerged of a man who was guided by a deep devotion to his family and who lived a life of continual struggle, embodying many of the hallmarks of the immigrant experience among the latest Chinese newcomers to New York.
Mr. Wang grew up in Gui’an, a rural village in a mountainous region of Fujian Province; he dropped out of school when he was about 13 to join his relatives in the rice paddies.
“He told jokes, even on the hardest days,” his older sister, Wang Wenzhen, recalled in a telephone interview from the family’s home in Gui’an. “But he was also an introverted, reserved person; didn’t share his true feelings.”
As a young man, Mr. Wang never talked about career plans, his sister said. “We are in a very backward village,” she explained. “All they can think about is making more money. What else can we dare to wish for?”
She added: “I am sure he had his own dream, but he never talked about it. He knew that’s impossible.”
His father died of a stomach ailment when Mr. Wang was 19, tipping the family deeper into poverty. Mr. Wang left home in search of better work to help support the family and, through his 20s and 30s, chased opportunities for work in Fujian Province, mostly manual labor. For several years he drove a taxi, often taking the night shift so he could help with household chores during the day and take his mother, who was chronically ill, to the hospital, Ms. Wang said.
He was a perfectionist. “Whatever he did,” Ms. Wang said, “he wanted to make sure every detail was fine.”
Work and Love Struggles
During those years, he saw many friends and neighbors leave for the United States, often with the help of smugglers. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of young people from villages in Fujian have made the trip; many headed for New York City. But according to Ms. Wang and several of his friends, Mr. Wang never talked about taking the journey himself.
Mr. Wang struggled not only with work but also with love. As his friends successfully found mates, married and started families, Mr. Wang, a thin man with close-set eyes and a crop of thick black hair, met failure. His sister blamed the family’s economic straits.
“Nobody wanted to pick him,” she said. “Which girl would want to marry into poverty?”
When he was about 30 — old to be a bachelor by the standards of his village — he married Lin Yaofang and they had a baby, a girl. When Ms. Lin became pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy, the authorities made her get an abortion, relatives and friends said.
When word of her third pregnancy reached the government, he later told friends, officials went to their house to take Ms. Lin away, leading to Mr. Wang’s detention and beating. The account could not be verified with the Chinese authorities.
His decision to try his luck in New York came quietly and suddenly. He did not share his deliberations with many relatives or friends. Only when he had made up his mind did he turn to the rest of the family: he needed their help raising $75,000 to pay smugglers for his passage.
The task was a group undertaking, with all his closest relatives appealing for loans from everyone they knew. Ms. Wang said she herself raised more than half the amount he needed. It took her more than a month. “You borrow $1,500 from one person, another $3,000 from another person,” she said. “One by one.”
Until the mid-1990s, many Chinese were smuggled into the United States in large ships, hundreds at a time. But in the face of crackdowns, smugglers began developing other methods and routes, and in recent years, officials say, most Chinese have been smuggled into the country in small groups or individually, often by way of Latin America or the Caribbean, many across the Mexican border.
Mr. Wang set off in late January 2008, leaving behind his daughter and pregnant wife. There was no going-away party, no ceremony, his sister said. He just said goodbye and was gone. His friends and family said they did not know what route he took — he had never told them, and they had never asked.
That March, following a path carved by so many Chinese before him, he surfaced in New York’s Chinatown and contacted Fujianese acquaintances who were already here. He had an immediate network to plug into. Many Fujianese have settled outside the historic core of Chinatown, west of the Bowery, clustering instead around East Broadway and north of Canal Street on the Lower East Side.
Mr. Wang moved into a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side with five other men, including a friend from Fujian. They slept in bunk beds and the place was loud with the constant rumble of traffic from the nearby off-ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Mr. Wang bought a bicycle and found a job as a deliveryman at Iron Sushi, a restaurant in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. He worked six days a week, his friends said, often in 12-hour shifts. Mr. Wang quickly fell into a grueling routine, his life pared down to its simplest components: work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep.
He ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and maybe a slice of pizza for dinner. He splurged on occasion by going to McDonald’s. He made about $500 a week, and after paying basic expenses like rent, he sent home most of whatever was left to pay his creditors and support his family, which had grown by one: his wife had given birth to a son. But he also managed to set aside enough to buy an inexpensive laptop to call his family in China at low rates on Internet telephone networks by piggybacking on a neighbor’s wireless signal.
The calls were apparently the highlight of his life. He called every day, usually before he went to sleep. When his family managed to get a computer, they were able to make video calls. His mother would hold up her grandson to a webcam and Mr. Wang would light up with pride, a roommate recalled. “Say, ‘Daddy,’ ” Mr. Wang would implore his son. “Say, ‘Daddy.’ ”
In his spare time, Mr. Wang washed his clothes or lay in bed streaming films online — he preferred historic war movies, the roommate recalled. Their Saturday workday started an hour later than usual, so on Fridays, he and his roommates often played cards in their apartment — they preferred a Fujianese card game resembling poker — and drank red rice wine fermented locally by Fujianese store owners.
Riding to the Casinos
Then Mr. Wang discovered the inexpensive buses that traveled from Chinatown to the region’s casinos, and he started taking them on Friday nights.
Mr. Wang’s friends insisted that he did not wager, but sold the free food and gambling vouchers that were included with the bus ticket and pocketed his profit, usually about $30.
When asked if he had any other recreational outlets or hobbies, several of his friends laughed as if the question were preposterous. “When can we play?” said Mr. Liu, one of his roommates, who asked that his full name not be used because of his illegal immigration status. “We can work. That’s all we do.”
Mr. Wang’s friends and co-workers in New York said he was quiet and polite. When he talked, they said, his conversation never wandered far afield from the matters of work and money. It was his single-minded obsession, all in the service of his family and his debts, they said. “At night he talked about money worries,” Mr. Liu said, “but that’s what we all talk about.”
At the same time, Mr. Wang was apparently banking much of his hope on an asylum application he had filed in November 2008. Lee Ratner, an immigration lawyer who represented him, said the petition was based on “problems with the family planning policy in China,” but offered no further information, citing attorney-client privilege. The policy is commonly used as justification for asylum petitions by Chinese immigrants.
Mr. Wang told his friends that his asylum claim, which was still pending when he died, stemmed from his run-ins with the government over his wife’s pregnancies. Dennis Lau, the manager at Iron Sushi, said Mr. Wang had told him that if he was granted asylum, he would invite Mr. Lau to celebrate at a karaoke bar — “because he knew I liked karaoke.”
But another friend, Lin Feng, said that Mr. Wang’s stoical resolve had started to crack and that he had begun to express regret about emigrating from China. “The pressure was so much,” Mr. Lin said.
Late last year, Mr. Wang had a severe setback when he fell off his bicycle during a delivery and shattered his arm. The injury kept him out of work for four months, and he lived on worker’s compensation payments of about $200 a month, his friends said.
During this time, he was so broke that he started to borrow the money to send to his family and help cover his debts in China, friends said.
More Frequent Trips
Until his bicycle accident, his visits to the casino had been once a week or less, his friends said. But unable to work a conventional job, he started to ride the bus several times a week, sometimes even taking two round trips a day, selling his free vouchers to other passengers, his friends said.
But this new routine was apparently a source of embarrassment: he never mentioned the casinos to his family, his sister said, and he rarely talked about them to his roommates.
Several months ago, Mr. Wang moved into a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a dingy tenement building on Chrystie Street on the Bowery. He shared one of the rooms with three other men; his share of the rent was $200 a month. Two women rented the second room.
The apartment was cluttered, every corner stuffed with the roommates’ belongings: clothing, cooking equipment, suitcases, a spare mattress for short-term residents. Roaches climbed the walls and pigeons were roosting in a makeshift exhaust vent that snaked along the wall. The only decorative touches were colorful Chinese-language characters hanging on the front door and in the kitchen; the characters appealed for good fortune and riches.
Last week, Mr. Wang’s belongings were piled on his bunk, mostly clothes and travel bags. Sitting on a makeshift bedside table was his laptop, a bottle of Chinese herbal medicine — for a toothache, Mr. Liu said — and an old plastic takeout container in which Mr. Wang kept some of his valuables: loose change, his employee identification card from Iron Sushi and a small address book full of telephone numbers. The container also held a players’ club card from Mohegan Sun and several $1 chips from Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, items that suggested he had gambled at least a bit.
After the bus crash, Mr. Lin called Mr. Wang’s family to break the news.
“The family just collapsed overnight,” Ms. Wang said. “My head may explode at any minute.” She said her mother fainted several times a day from crying so much. The family has not yet begun to think about how they will assume the burden of Mr. Wang’s debt.
“Creditors don’t know what happened yet,” she said. “They won’t treat us nicely.”
Contacted by telephone, Ms. Lin, Mr. Wang’s widow, could barely formulate sentences amid her sobs. “What can I do?” she pleaded. “Everything is a mess. And he just died.”
A group of Mr. Wang’s friends and relatives in New York have hired a lawyer to explore litigation in the case. The lawyer said he was also trying to secure a temporary visa for Ms. Lin and her two children to travel to the United States and view Mr. Wang’s body one last time before it was buried.
Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.
The authorities were at Wang Jianhua’s door in Fujian Province, China, intent on taking his wife away. Her crime: She already had a child and she was pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy.
As Mr. Wang would later recount to his friends, he stepped between the officials and his wife. A scuffle ensued, Mr. Wang’s wife escaped, and the officials hauled Mr. Wang, the son of poor rice farmers, to a jail where he was held for several days and severely beaten, his friends said.
The confrontation was apparently a turning point in Mr. Wang’s life, which had already been marked by poverty and hardship. Within months, his wife still pregnant, he would set off alone for the United States with the aid of smugglers, taking a chance that a better life awaited him — and eventually his family.
But on March 12, three years after his arrival in New York City, his aspirations were dashed in a sudden crash of steel and asphalt on Interstate 95 in the Bronx. Mr. Wang, who had been working as a restaurant deliveryman, was one of the 15 passengers who died when their bus overturned and was sliced open by a sign post as they were returning to New York’s Chinatown from a casino in Connecticut.
There were a few threads that tied these victims together. Many were first-generation, working-class immigrants, many were Chinese, and many were seeking some kind of solace and hope, however illusory, in the parallel universe of the Mohegan Sun casino. This is a portrait of one of those victims.
From interviews with Mr. Wang’s friends, relatives and co-workers, both in the city and in China, a profile emerged of a man who was guided by a deep devotion to his family and who lived a life of continual struggle, embodying many of the hallmarks of the immigrant experience among the latest Chinese newcomers to New York.
Mr. Wang grew up in Gui’an, a rural village in a mountainous region of Fujian Province; he dropped out of school when he was about 13 to join his relatives in the rice paddies.
“He told jokes, even on the hardest days,” his older sister, Wang Wenzhen, recalled in a telephone interview from the family’s home in Gui’an. “But he was also an introverted, reserved person; didn’t share his true feelings.”
As a young man, Mr. Wang never talked about career plans, his sister said. “We are in a very backward village,” she explained. “All they can think about is making more money. What else can we dare to wish for?”
She added: “I am sure he had his own dream, but he never talked about it. He knew that’s impossible.”
His father died of a stomach ailment when Mr. Wang was 19, tipping the family deeper into poverty. Mr. Wang left home in search of better work to help support the family and, through his 20s and 30s, chased opportunities for work in Fujian Province, mostly manual labor. For several years he drove a taxi, often taking the night shift so he could help with household chores during the day and take his mother, who was chronically ill, to the hospital, Ms. Wang said.
He was a perfectionist. “Whatever he did,” Ms. Wang said, “he wanted to make sure every detail was fine.”
Work and Love Struggles
During those years, he saw many friends and neighbors leave for the United States, often with the help of smugglers. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of young people from villages in Fujian have made the trip; many headed for New York City. But according to Ms. Wang and several of his friends, Mr. Wang never talked about taking the journey himself.
Mr. Wang struggled not only with work but also with love. As his friends successfully found mates, married and started families, Mr. Wang, a thin man with close-set eyes and a crop of thick black hair, met failure. His sister blamed the family’s economic straits.
“Nobody wanted to pick him,” she said. “Which girl would want to marry into poverty?”
When he was about 30 — old to be a bachelor by the standards of his village — he married Lin Yaofang and they had a baby, a girl. When Ms. Lin became pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy, the authorities made her get an abortion, relatives and friends said.
When word of her third pregnancy reached the government, he later told friends, officials went to their house to take Ms. Lin away, leading to Mr. Wang’s detention and beating. The account could not be verified with the Chinese authorities.
His decision to try his luck in New York came quietly and suddenly. He did not share his deliberations with many relatives or friends. Only when he had made up his mind did he turn to the rest of the family: he needed their help raising $75,000 to pay smugglers for his passage.
The task was a group undertaking, with all his closest relatives appealing for loans from everyone they knew. Ms. Wang said she herself raised more than half the amount he needed. It took her more than a month. “You borrow $1,500 from one person, another $3,000 from another person,” she said. “One by one.”
Until the mid-1990s, many Chinese were smuggled into the United States in large ships, hundreds at a time. But in the face of crackdowns, smugglers began developing other methods and routes, and in recent years, officials say, most Chinese have been smuggled into the country in small groups or individually, often by way of Latin America or the Caribbean, many across the Mexican border.
Mr. Wang set off in late January 2008, leaving behind his daughter and pregnant wife. There was no going-away party, no ceremony, his sister said. He just said goodbye and was gone. His friends and family said they did not know what route he took — he had never told them, and they had never asked.
That March, following a path carved by so many Chinese before him, he surfaced in New York’s Chinatown and contacted Fujianese acquaintances who were already here. He had an immediate network to plug into. Many Fujianese have settled outside the historic core of Chinatown, west of the Bowery, clustering instead around East Broadway and north of Canal Street on the Lower East Side.
Mr. Wang moved into a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side with five other men, including a friend from Fujian. They slept in bunk beds and the place was loud with the constant rumble of traffic from the nearby off-ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Mr. Wang bought a bicycle and found a job as a deliveryman at Iron Sushi, a restaurant in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. He worked six days a week, his friends said, often in 12-hour shifts. Mr. Wang quickly fell into a grueling routine, his life pared down to its simplest components: work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep.
He ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and maybe a slice of pizza for dinner. He splurged on occasion by going to McDonald’s. He made about $500 a week, and after paying basic expenses like rent, he sent home most of whatever was left to pay his creditors and support his family, which had grown by one: his wife had given birth to a son. But he also managed to set aside enough to buy an inexpensive laptop to call his family in China at low rates on Internet telephone networks by piggybacking on a neighbor’s wireless signal.
The calls were apparently the highlight of his life. He called every day, usually before he went to sleep. When his family managed to get a computer, they were able to make video calls. His mother would hold up her grandson to a webcam and Mr. Wang would light up with pride, a roommate recalled. “Say, ‘Daddy,’ ” Mr. Wang would implore his son. “Say, ‘Daddy.’ ”
In his spare time, Mr. Wang washed his clothes or lay in bed streaming films online — he preferred historic war movies, the roommate recalled. Their Saturday workday started an hour later than usual, so on Fridays, he and his roommates often played cards in their apartment — they preferred a Fujianese card game resembling poker — and drank red rice wine fermented locally by Fujianese store owners.
Riding to the Casinos
Then Mr. Wang discovered the inexpensive buses that traveled from Chinatown to the region’s casinos, and he started taking them on Friday nights.
Mr. Wang’s friends insisted that he did not wager, but sold the free food and gambling vouchers that were included with the bus ticket and pocketed his profit, usually about $30.
When asked if he had any other recreational outlets or hobbies, several of his friends laughed as if the question were preposterous. “When can we play?” said Mr. Liu, one of his roommates, who asked that his full name not be used because of his illegal immigration status. “We can work. That’s all we do.”
Mr. Wang’s friends and co-workers in New York said he was quiet and polite. When he talked, they said, his conversation never wandered far afield from the matters of work and money. It was his single-minded obsession, all in the service of his family and his debts, they said. “At night he talked about money worries,” Mr. Liu said, “but that’s what we all talk about.”
At the same time, Mr. Wang was apparently banking much of his hope on an asylum application he had filed in November 2008. Lee Ratner, an immigration lawyer who represented him, said the petition was based on “problems with the family planning policy in China,” but offered no further information, citing attorney-client privilege. The policy is commonly used as justification for asylum petitions by Chinese immigrants.
Mr. Wang told his friends that his asylum claim, which was still pending when he died, stemmed from his run-ins with the government over his wife’s pregnancies. Dennis Lau, the manager at Iron Sushi, said Mr. Wang had told him that if he was granted asylum, he would invite Mr. Lau to celebrate at a karaoke bar — “because he knew I liked karaoke.”
But another friend, Lin Feng, said that Mr. Wang’s stoical resolve had started to crack and that he had begun to express regret about emigrating from China. “The pressure was so much,” Mr. Lin said.
Late last year, Mr. Wang had a severe setback when he fell off his bicycle during a delivery and shattered his arm. The injury kept him out of work for four months, and he lived on worker’s compensation payments of about $200 a month, his friends said.
During this time, he was so broke that he started to borrow the money to send to his family and help cover his debts in China, friends said.
More Frequent Trips
Until his bicycle accident, his visits to the casino had been once a week or less, his friends said. But unable to work a conventional job, he started to ride the bus several times a week, sometimes even taking two round trips a day, selling his free vouchers to other passengers, his friends said.
But this new routine was apparently a source of embarrassment: he never mentioned the casinos to his family, his sister said, and he rarely talked about them to his roommates.
Several months ago, Mr. Wang moved into a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a dingy tenement building on Chrystie Street on the Bowery. He shared one of the rooms with three other men; his share of the rent was $200 a month. Two women rented the second room.
The apartment was cluttered, every corner stuffed with the roommates’ belongings: clothing, cooking equipment, suitcases, a spare mattress for short-term residents. Roaches climbed the walls and pigeons were roosting in a makeshift exhaust vent that snaked along the wall. The only decorative touches were colorful Chinese-language characters hanging on the front door and in the kitchen; the characters appealed for good fortune and riches.
Last week, Mr. Wang’s belongings were piled on his bunk, mostly clothes and travel bags. Sitting on a makeshift bedside table was his laptop, a bottle of Chinese herbal medicine — for a toothache, Mr. Liu said — and an old plastic takeout container in which Mr. Wang kept some of his valuables: loose change, his employee identification card from Iron Sushi and a small address book full of telephone numbers. The container also held a players’ club card from Mohegan Sun and several $1 chips from Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, items that suggested he had gambled at least a bit.
After the bus crash, Mr. Lin called Mr. Wang’s family to break the news.
“The family just collapsed overnight,” Ms. Wang said. “My head may explode at any minute.” She said her mother fainted several times a day from crying so much. The family has not yet begun to think about how they will assume the burden of Mr. Wang’s debt.
“Creditors don’t know what happened yet,” she said. “They won’t treat us nicely.”
Contacted by telephone, Ms. Lin, Mr. Wang’s widow, could barely formulate sentences amid her sobs. “What can I do?” she pleaded. “Everything is a mess. And he just died.”
A group of Mr. Wang’s friends and relatives in New York have hired a lawyer to explore litigation in the case. The lawyer said he was also trying to secure a temporary visa for Ms. Lin and her two children to travel to the United States and view Mr. Wang’s body one last time before it was buried.
Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.
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