From Rags to Riches: The Story of Two American Immigrants

All throughout the history of America, immigrants have had it hard. In the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the U.S. was full of legislation against immigrants. In addition to governmental restrictions, they have braved a plethora of social, economic religious, and racial troubles. Imagine having to face injustices everyday simply because you were not born in the United States and in addition to all of that, the simple fear of being in a place where you barely know the language.

Throughout all of this, immigrants still come and confront countless hardships. This is why I regard my grandparents, Robert and Annie Lai, as survivors, heroes in their own right.

In 1982, Robert and Annie Lai moved from Taipei, Taiwan with their two children, Peter and Tony Lai to the United States. After skipping around Hawaii, Springfield, Dallas, and San Francisco for seven months, they settled in Stoutland, Missouri and opened their very first restaurant. With Annie knowing barely two words in English and exactly $100 to their names, Midway, a tiny highway establishment in rural Missouri, was barely alive.

“100 dollars was just enough to open a bank account,” Annie said. “We were so poor, we couldn’t afford underwear or mattresses. My cousin sold tights for a living, so we would cut them up once they were worn to use as underpants.”

Midway was open for 24 hours a day and they, along with another couple, worked for five years without taking a single day off. Annie, throughout the entire time, spoke minimal English and worked as a server. She says that she was often harassed by some of the more vicious patrons, who would deliberately place hairs in their food to demand refunds and say things like “Go back to your country!” and “You don’t know how to cook!”.

“He started yelling at me. I ran off to the bathroom and just started crying,” she said. “But for every mean person, there are a dozen nice ones, and an old lady helped me back. He seemed to really be sorry.”

After years of working, they raised enough money to start a new restaurant in Richland, called Richland Restaurant. After the first day, they arrived to find that none of their employees had shown up. They closed the restaurant for renovations for 45 days to do some scheming. Once they opened again with a brand-new facility, still no one came to the “foreigner’s” restaurant, instead going to the restaurant next door. In retaliation, they lowered the price of their buffet to $2.99 and bankrupted the neighboring establishment. Richland Restaurant became so popular, that along with their income from Midway, they were able to accomplish one of their dreams: sending their children to college.

“We came here for kids, you know, education. The good thing about American schools is that you choose what you want,” says Robert. “In Taiwan, before the education reforms, your major is chosen by test scores, not by interests.”

Although life as an immigrant is hard, it just goes to show that if you take risks and work hard, you might just get lucky. Robert and Annie say that they would never go back to Taiwan now, and that most Americans were very nice people.

“We worked hard, and had it hard for a long time,” says Robert. “But now it’s finally good.”

The Class Divide and Corporate America

The Gilded Age. A term coined by Mark Twain, it describes the period of rapid economic growth after Reconstruction, from approximately 1870 to 1900. It is also referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution, or as I like to call it, The Industrial Revolution: America Edition.

The Second Industrial Revolution brought on the rise of the United States’ place in the global economy today. Fueled by cheap and abundant resources (natural and otherwise), America’s economy exploded, producing today’s industrial and corporate legends, people like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan. Thousands of new methods and patents sprung up, furthering industry--Carnegie, himself the head of a giant steel corporation, revolutionized business by inventing the methods of horizontal integration (buying out neighboring competition) and vertical integration (buying out all supplies). The spread of railroads, most notably the Transcontinental Railroad, standardized time zones and travel across the US. Countless inventions and inventors surfaced--Edison’s lightbulb, Tesla’s AC electricity, the Wright brothers’ planes.We were simmering with ideas and quickly claimed our own spot on the global stage. Of course, all of this development and industry was only one side of the coin. And, sadly, the flip side was not a happy picture.

The industrial growth that happened in the 1870s hinged upon one especially important factor: resources. Whether it be the United States’ endless supply of land, lumber, ores, and oil, or its large influx of cheap immigrant labor, resources were key in the rise of industry. Despite this, a widespread movement called nativism against these new immigrants soon emerged amongst the “natives”. Much more often than not, immigrants, if they could get into the country, were shoved into filthy urban tenement houses, where they shared apartments meant for one family amongst several. Immigrants were quickly pushed to the bottom of the social, political, and economic hierarchy and were exploited for extra work. The vast majority of the nature of poor-ness and immigrant-ness in the United States was like rectangles and square--being poor didn’t necessarily mean you were an immigrant, but being an immigrant practically assured your status as a lower-class being. And therefore, immigrants became inherently poor. Being poor in the United States meant long hours. Think 40 hours a week is tiring? Try working 70 to 80 hours a week in a dangerous factory just to make ends meet. This was a no-holds-barred capitalist system with nothing even close to workers’ rights. With the big corporations in control, a new “scientific” idea came into being, social darwinism, the idea that human society progresses through a pseudo-evolutionary process, that the poor are meant to be poor (and “perish”) and the rich are meant to be rich (and “survive”). Social darwinism and nativism worked hand in hand to beat the life out of the poor, working class immigrants seeking a new life in America. Nativists and their government buddies worked hard to help, passing legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882 or the Page Act of 1875, making it much harder to immigrate into the country.

One of the most significant issues that this period highlighted is class differences. Although the United States was founded upon principles of equality, there has always been an abundance of discrimination. The advent of the Second Industrial Revolution brought on a stigma against immigrants so strong, that we are still facing it today. The idea of nativism appealed to the general population because of a potent combination of “they’re stealing our jobs!”, “we were here first!*”, racism, and “they’re not real Americans!”. Racial discrimination at the time was so emphasized that being not-white often became synonymous with inherent poor-ness. The struggle between the worker and the rich became blurred with the fight between the immigrants and the nativists. People need someone to feel superior to, just like bullies. And immigrants, inherently poor and weak, posed easy targets for the nativists, the very rich and very powerful bullies.