Dreams of Leaving

(4 of 4)

For the last decade, Big Lin's life has involved little more than the peanut oil, soy sauce and cornstarch that coagulates British Chinese food into indistinguishable glop. "The food I cook isn't really Chinese," he says in Mandarin. "It's English food with soy sauce." With his broken English and shy demeanor, Big Lin has never graduated beyond stirring the wok. In 2005, as his relationship with his common-law wife, another illegal Chinese, disintegrated, Big Lin moved from London to Cambridge. Wages, he had heard, were slightly better there, and for a man who slept during the day and worked at night, Cambridge or London or Liverpool — it was all interchangeable. His wife remained in London with their young daughter. "Because we're illegal, our lives don't feel real," she says. "[Big Lin] felt like he could start another life. But that life won't be real, either. Everything feels fake here."

Sure enough, Big Lin's days in Cambridge pass with the same monotonous unreality as they did in London. "I live in England, but what I think about when I wake up is Fujian," he says. It's like a decade-long stretch of jet lag, his body in one place, his mind in another. The rent for his room eats up one-third of his salary, but that's O.K., since Big Lin long ago stopped sending money back home. Besides, he now has something else to spend cash on. Shortly after moving to Cambridge, Big Lin met Hai, a 23-year-old woman with a taste for pastel eyeshadow, Colman's mustard and laconic cooks from Fujian. Unlike Big Lin, she's in Cambridge legally, part of an influx of students who are dispelling the image of Chinese as a dishwashing underclass. Hai came to study marketing at Cambridge — a university Big Lin had never even heard of when he moved up from London. But, as it turned out, the institution to which Hai's parents had sent the tuition fee wasn't part of the renowned university. That discovery demoralized Hai, as did the task of conjugating English verbs in class. Falling in love with the guy who delivered her Chinese takeout has taken her mind off things.

The room Big Lin and Hai share in a Cambridge suburb is littered with her things: camisoles, dried plums, hair spray. There's little evidence of Big Lin, save a small fish tank with four chubby goldfish. In China, goldfish are auspicious, an augury of riches to come. But the fish also remind Big Lin of the pond near his village in Fujian, where he used to dunk his head in the moss-colored water. For six years, he's had these fish, and he's kept them alive far longer than the man at the pet shop said they would last. "It's an accomplishment, right?" he says, in a rare moment of enthusiasm. "When I look at them still swimming around, I feel like I've done something a little special."

If he had to do it all over again, Big Lin says he never would have left. "Most of my friends from Fujian want to go home," he says, "but they don't know how to do it." His routine — sleep, work, nightcap, perhaps a spot of gambling — isn't so different from that of thousands of people eking out quiet lives in Britain. But for a Chinese, for whom family is everything, the separation must feel like an amputation. "You get numb," he says. "You can't think about it too much or you will go crazy." Yet if the family bonds are what keep Big Lin tied to Fujian after a decade away, they are also what have stopped him returning. "If you go back to Fujian, people expect you to return in a glorious way," he says. "You have to have lots of money and success."

Today, sitting in his cramped room, watching his goldfish, Big Lin wonders about all his classmates who went overseas and never returned. People at home said they must have been leading such wonderful lives abroad. But Big Lin knows better now. Early last year, Big Lin says he thought seriously about going back to Fujian. But the urge to return passed. Big Lin has heard that his hometown is now filled with lavish villas from all the overseas money. He shakes his head. How can he go back and see how magnificent his village is when it's not his money that has contributed to the development? "Maybe one more year," he says. "Then I can go home."