The Working Poor (48 page)

Everyone except the two girls gathered to sing “Happy Birthday” to Sarah, followed by “God Bless You” to the same tune. Then Velma scooped out the vanilla with the finger hole in it, gave it to Deandre, and made it sound like punishment: He would have the part he touched, she decreed. He started to cry again.

“Why are you crying?” Leary asked harshly in an echo of her mother. “Don’t cry!”

Then, Sarah softly intervened. She told Deandre that she would eat the vanilla that contained his finger hole, and she took over dishing out the ice cream. She asked the boy if he wanted chocolate or vanilla—the first time anybody had inquired about his wishes. Chocolate, it turned out. That’s why he was crying. He stopped as soon as Sarah put a dish of chocolate in front of him.

Whatever stresses and strains were being passed down through the generations, though, the family connections were helping to sustain Leary and keep her from falling backward. A year or so later, on Leary’s fiftieth birthday, Velma prepared a feast of foods that Leary used to love as a child, and three of her four children came to her party; she was estranged from only one at that time.

“I can’t force it,” Leary said, giving herself some advice. “Let them come to you. Just let them see that
you’re a different person.”

The dream in America is a demanding standard, the myth is a noble goal. When a man or a woman or a family fills its full measure of possibility, the nation’s virtue is affirmed. So the nation should feel very good about the Tran family of Saigon, now of Santa Ana, California, whose accomplishments have demonstrated how powerful the right combination of drive, opportunity, thrift, education, health, connections, and mutual support can be. Within four months of arriving as refugees from Vietnam in 1998, three of the five family members were working at jobs whose low wages, pooled, brought in $42,848 a year. Within five months of arrival, they had saved enough to pay cash for two used cars. Less than a year later, the two oldest children were at a community college.

Their successes demonstrated that work works at the low end of the pay scale only when everything else works: when a cohesive family has multiple wage-earners who believe in their own competence, have the skills, know how to find jobs, manage their money with care, and never retreat in the face of hardship. If this sounds heroic, it is. There is no room for mistake or misfortune—not for drugs, not for alcohol, not for domestic violence, not for poor schooling, not for illness or injury, not for anything less than high diligence. So far, so good for the Tran family.

The model is so rare that it is no model at all, just an exception that highlights the problems for the vast numbers of working poor who can’t line up every single factor in their favor. Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians are often stereotyped as brilliantly hardworking and successful in that perfect American Dream. But millions of Asians also come to the United States and fail, as the Koreans who work in Los Angeles restaurants can testify. Anyone who watches the Trans put the pieces together can see vividly the pieces that are absent for so many others.

Tran Mao, a friendly man in his late forties, wore gold-framed glasses, chinos, and sandals. A few teeth were missing from his smile, and he chopped the air with his hands as he spoke. During the war he was trained in Mississippi as an electronics technician for the South Vietnamese Air Force (hence his good English), and his rank as a noncommissioned officer brought him a year in a “reeducation camp” after the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. A few years later, he and two of his children joined thousands of other Vietnamese in a desperate escape by boat. They made their way to Indonesia and spent seven years in a refugee camp, where he
worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Denied refugee status himself, however, he was deported back to Vietnam with his family. He persisted, and two years later he finally gained the refugee designation that brought him, his wife, and their three children visas to the United States.

The Trans began their new life as if they were true Americans: in debt. Their plane tickets had been bought by the International Organization for Migration, which required repayment at $125 a month. They also borrowed $2,000 from friends for a sparse array of furniture. With their three children now twenty, nineteen, and eleven, the two oldest were part of the family’s labor force, and they quickly went to work—the son, Tuan, in a bicycle factory at $5.75 an hour, California’s minimum wage at the time; the daughter, Phuong, at 10 cents more assembling bicycle lights; the father at minimum wage packing medicine for a drug company. After a month, Mao’s fluent English landed him a counselor’s position for $9 an hour at a service agency called The Cambodian Family, which helped find jobs for new immigrants, primarily from Cambodia and Vietnam. The debts were soon paid off.

Mao understood clearly that there were two tickets his children would need to excel in the United States: fluent English and higher education. Every day in his agency, he saw how limiting the lack of English could be for the people he tried to help complete applications and prepare for job interviews. Every evening, therefore, he tried to help his children with English, making them read and encouraging them to watch television to improve their comprehension. Since Phuong and Tuan both worked with other Vietnamese, they never had a chance to speak English on the job, so their improvement was negligible, and Mao made no effort to disguise his frustration. “Pronunciation is no good,” he said of Phuong, who bowed primly at the waist in respectful greeting. She had learned a precise, heavily accented English in the Indonesian refugee camp. “She should try to practice more and more,” her father admonished. He worried especially about her mother and her nineteen-year-old brother, who spoke very little. Soon he had everybody enrolled in English classes, himself included. He was taking a computer course as well, hoping someday to get the college degree that had eluded him because of the war, and then because of the end of the war.

So, five studying people were scheduling the use of their two desks, one in the kitchen, one in the living room. They had pictures of the Virgin

Mary around, and on one desk a Packard Bell computer and printer. Their two-bedroom apartment was crowded, but it cost $675 a month, and they could not afford more. Mao and his wife, Lang Ho, slept in one bedroom, the boys in the other, and Phuong on the living room floor. On the relaxed, pleasant street below, Asians and Latinos casually strolled to and from a run-down little shopping center, where many of the signs were in Spanish. A woman pushed a red shopping cart with a huge plastic bag overflowing with bottles and cans.

By the fall of 1999, both Phuong and Tuan had left their jobs to enroll at Santa Ana College (Phuong in college courses, Tuan to get his G.E.D.), and their mother, Lang Ho, had taken up the slack by getting work assembling pens at a local factory. She was making minimum wage with no medical insurance or other benefits. Mao’s pay rate at The Cambodian Family had gone up to $10 an hour. Every weekend the family sat together to plan the week’s spending. “We have to write down,” Mao said. “We work together. Usually we go shopping for food once a week.… We collected coupons from the newspaper…. We only buy what we think is most important for our family.” There were disagreements.

“Sometimes I want to buy my shoes,” said Phuong. “But I think again, I have not money. I don’t need shoes right now. I can save money, buy food for my family.… My father tell me, ‘You can’t buy that, you do that or do that.’ ” Then she added: “But I can decide myself: self-control.” They were saving $400 to $500 a month, Mao said, and sending money to relatives in Vietnam.

By spring 2002, the recession had hit some of Mao’s clients, who were being laid off by factories and could not get hired by temp agencies because of their limited English. But his family had been spared so far. His hourly wage had risen to $13, and his wife’s to $7. Phuong and Tuan, continuing school, were both working part-time and contributing to the family budget. “I have a credit card but seldom use it,” said Mao. “I try to manage not to use it. I don’t want to be in huge debt.”

When she arrived in 1998, Phuong had an ambition. “I want to become a doctor and help poor patients,” she declared. Her father laughed, as if embarrassed by his daughter’s foolish dream. Four years later, she still had the same goal. He laughed again, as if embarrassed by his hope.

As the people in these pages show, working poverty is a constellation of difficulties that magnify one another: not just low wages but also low education, not just dead-end jobs but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings but also unwise spending, not just poor housing but also poor parenting, not just the lack of health insurance but also the lack of healthy households.

The villains are not just exploitative employers but also incapable employees, not just overworked teachers but also defeated and unruly pupils, not just bureaucrats who cheat the poor but also the poor who cheat themselves. The troubles run strongly along both macro and micro levels, as systemic problems in the structure of political and economic power, and as individual problems in personal and family life.

All of the problems have to be attacked at once. Whatever remedy is found for one may help but not cure unless remedies are found for most of
the others. Granting a Section 8 housing voucher helps a family move into a better apartment, which may ease a child’s asthma and lead to fewer days of missed school. But it won’t carry the family far if the child is abused, or if the parent has few skills, works near minimum wage, spends huge amounts on transportation and day care, and can’t get affordable credit. As long as society picks and chooses which problem to resolve in crisis—usually the one that has propelled the family to a particular agency for help—another crisis is likely to follow, and another. If we set out to find only the magic solution—a job, for example—we will miss the complexities, and the job will not be enough.

The first question is whether we know exactly what to do. What problems do we have the skills to solve, and where do our skills reach their outer limits? What territory of intractable problems lies unmapped, beyond our abilities?

The second question is whether we have the will to exercise our skill. Would we spend the money, make the sacrifices, restructure the hierarchy of wealth to alleviate the hardships down below?

We lack the skill to solve some problems and the will to solve others, but one piece of knowledge we now possess: We understand that holistic remedies are vital. So, gateways to addressing a family’s range of handicaps are needed, and they are best established at intersections through which working poor families are likely to travel. Dr. Barry Zuckerman at the Boston Medical Center has shown how it can be done there, with social workers and lawyers. Principal Theodore Hinton at the Harris Educational Center in Washington has tried to do it there, with scarce resources, by opening his school into the evening, offering parenting classes, and providing information on health insurance. Public housing projects in Los Angeles have referred residents to English classes and job training.

These are embryonic forms of a big idea. If hospitals, schools, housing authorities, police departments, welfare offices, and other critical institutions were bold and well enough financed, they could reach far beyond their mandates, create connections of services, and become portals through which the distressed could pass into a web of assistance. It is a question of skill and will.

Will is a function of power, and the people who work near the edge of poverty don’t have very much power. They do have more than they use, however. They have power in their personal lives that many of them leave untapped. They have power in the marketplace that is not organized effec-
tively. They have power in politics that they practically ignore: the power of the ballot.

Whenever liberal Democrats criticize tax cuts for the rich or program cuts for the poor, conservative Republicans raise the fearsome specter of “class warfare” as if they and their supporters in business were not reinforcing class differences by structuring tax breaks and pay scales. In 2003, for example, the Bush White House and Republican congressional leaders excluded millions of low-wage families, with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625, from a $400-per-child payment being made under an increase in the child tax credit, part of a big tax bill that brought immense benefits to the wealthy. But the poor do not fight back. The lower the income, the lower the rate of voter turnout. In the 2000 presidential election, 60 percent of all American citizens over eighteen went to the polls. Three-quarters of those with family incomes over $75,000 voted, 69 percent of those earning $50,000 to $75,000, and so on down to a mere 38 percent of those whose households took in less than $10,000 a year.
¹
In addition to those who disenfranchise themselves, about two million citizens over eighteen in prisons, plus ex-convicts, are disqualified in most states from voting. An overwhelming majority of them are from low-income ranks. Twelve percent of all black men between eighteen and thirty-four are in jail.
²

Therefore, although nobody needs government more than the poor and the nearly poor, they have little influence on its policies. Neither the Democratic Party nor anti-poverty organizations have mobilized sufficiently to encourage low-income Americans to find their voices. In one modest effort, a small sign was placed on the counter of an office in Imperial Courts, a public housing project in the Watts section of Los Angeles:

Mumble
Grumble
Complain
Wallow
Hope
Despair
Worry
Vote

Just a reminder: the one on the bottom changes things a lot faster. Call 1-800-343-VOTE to register.

The message was clever but probably ineffectual, because Census Bureau surveys show that the lower their income and education, the less inclined Americans are to believe that voting makes a difference. That doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Consumed with the trials of their personal lives and cynical about the power structure, most tell pollsters that they find elections uninteresting and politicians untrustworthy. Without getting candidates’ attention at the polls, then, low-income Americans rely on the more affluent to represent their interests. This the affluent do with various degrees of inadequacy, depending on the party in power, the health of the economy, and the current state of the nation’s altruism. When it comes to benevolence, we are a moody society.