In the Chinese circle in Canada, people who can cook are very popular. Many people who do not know how to cook will buy directly from their neighbors who know how to cook, so that people who know how to cook have a side business to earn a little money, and people who do not know how to cook do not have to go downtown to eat Chinese restaurants.
When I was working at the newspaper, I used to place orders in the office to “take care” of a nearby “Boss Shen” family’s white cut chicken. He did the white cut chicken skin crispy meat smooth, completely is the level of Cantonese cuisine restaurant. For a while, the number of orders on WeChat, for Mr. Shen home delivery of the old Jin also gradually and we got acquainted. Occasionally chatting a few words of family life, we learned that he was a restaurant chef in China, and now help in a Chinese restaurant, the boss also said he was willing to help him get a work visa for free. He said that he planned to help the boss for two years, and later he would open a restaurant in Vancouver, and when he opened the restaurant, “the old customers can get a discount in the future.
The first time I heard him say this, everyone was a little envious – it was like a “maple leaf card” squatting on a tree and hitting the chef directly on the head.
After a while, Lao Jin told us that he would go back to China and come back to Vancouver in September. But unexpectedly, after September, Lao Jin’s WeChat suddenly stopped replying to messages. The newspaper colleagues teased, “Could it be that Lao Jin doesn’t like Vancouver and wants to work somewhere else?
Finally, one day, Lao Jin reappeared on WeChat: “I was fooled! I thought too much of Canada. Are you a journalist and would like to write my story?”
Here is what Lao Jin told me about his short trip to Canada.
1
I’m a 38-year-old chef who has worked on both red and white cases. I used to work for my boss in my hometown in Shandong Province, which was enough to support my family. But these two years business is getting worse and worse, the boss in 2019 after the Spring Festival to earn a sum of money on the transfer of the store – hotel collapse is the problem of positioning: the boss must do high-end catering, but these years high-end catering who to eat, expect official consumption?
I had to entrust people everywhere to find a job. At this time, a friend of a friend, immigrated to Canada for more than twenty years Shen, was glued to me.
Brother Shen is an inspirational legend in our local chef circle. It is said that when he arrived in Canada as a young man, he moved his wife and children to Canada based on his cooking skills alone. The word of mouth is that when he was selling white cut chicken in the 90’s, he could earn 2000 Canadian dollars a day – what a concept, in RMB, a million dollar household every day!
Shen’s circle of friends, that is the Vancouver tourism promo: villas, gardens, beaches, lobster, big crabs, BMW parked in the garage. Do chef to do this level, so that our counterparts in the country a knee licking. The Chinese chef’s paradise is Vancouver. When you come to Vancouver, you can pick any job you want and get any “maple leaf card (Canadian green card)”.
Such a wealthy man, I did not dare to easily talk to in the past, it is only every New Year’s Day to ask for peace, say: “domestic what you have to say hello! It was a coincidence that the former owner’s hotel had just closed, and Shen’s wife doll was coming back to China to play. For this reason, I specifically ran to Beijing, saddle up to receive, from the Great Wall to the Forbidden City, accompanied their mothers and children played all over, afraid of not matching the eyes of foreign friends, but also borrowed a Mercedes to transport. Later, Shen was polite and wanted to make up for my money, but I was determined not to (I ran to Beijing to earn this guide money?) I just told him that I lost my job and wanted to find a chance in Canada.
Brother Shen said, “Brother, you chose a good move, you are in China as a chef, too hard, to Vancouver as a chef, three days you can fire the boss, the boss is heaped with smiles to the chef to talk, chef in Vancouver simply walk across!”
Shen’s words made me happy, many micro-signals are always saying “choice is more important than effort” well, I myself a martial arts (white cut chicken I can also do ah), choose to be a chef in Canada, but also will be able to make a fortune.
“Brother Shen, how much can a chef get in Vancouver in a year?” I asked.
“Let’s put it this way, the little girl in the restaurant, in addition to serving dishes to brush the cash register nothing, tips and wages, can get 3000 yuan (Canadian dollars, the same below) a month – chef’s salary, you think!”
Gee, “think for yourself”, the imagination is too attractive.
In March 2019, I got a tourist visa and went to Vancouver to look for a job. Shin was really enough of a friend to drive to pick me up and take me to live in his house.
But the more I drove the car, the shorter the house – Vancouver’s urban construction disappointed me and felt dumped a few blocks by Zibo. When I arrived at the place, I saw the villa that Shen often shows in his circle of friends, which is physically old and short. The lawn at the entrance is big, but the grass grows up high and full of dandelions in the stars, which is very different from the well-kept garden of the surrounding houses.
The street looked like a Chinese “Western community”, on both sides of the street are two-story houses, each house garden beautiful red, house painted carefully, only Shen’s house like a patch on a flower cloth.
Shen took me upstairs – it turned out that he was renting the second floor of the house. My heart was cold: why is the house is rented? Since so many years ago can earn two thousand dollars a day, should not have bought half a street every day to collect rent? Is it possible that the rich actually have a hard to read, living a tight life?
The first week, Shin said I should get jet lagged and get used to it. He works 3 days a week at the restaurant, and the rest of the time he is at home, he also makes some white cut chicken and sells it to the Chinese neighbors nearby. The king crab and lobster, which are very expensive in China, are not expensive in Vancouver, so Shin took me to stir-fry a king crab or salt and pepper lobster to drink every now and then. After three bottles of wine, I asked this house question politely.
“You domestic people, it’s the landlord mentality, you want to buy a house when you have money.” Shen glanced at me and said, “I not only do not buy a house, I also do not save money, in a few years, I have to take out all that money in my bank account before I retire, squander it all, when the tax office takes a look, ouch, this person is so poor and does not have a house to live in, then give him more pension! If I have a house and money, the pension will be a few hundred less every month – the Canadian government is not turning around, robbing the rich to help the poor, stupid! That’s why I’m not so dumb as to buy a house to serve ……”
A few days later, I found out, the other tenants on this street, the sun came out to weed and fertilize to serve the garden, while Shen and I were drinking wine and smoking cigarettes on the second floor, blowing cattle and getting high on lobster to see them busy, random feet of grass in the garden to the high scurry. We spent the day drinking, the white people in the face of the soil back to the sky, feeling that we are the bourgeoisie, the waistline bulging, life idle.
Shen also took me to the casino, I simply did not dare to bet. I just saw a stack of hundred yuan bills in his bag, changing chips does not hurt at all, just like “God of Gamblers” inside Chow Yun Fat, in the green table to push out a few hundred a night win or lose, without blinking an eye.
2
The next week, seeing that I was jet-lagged, Shin took me to the restaurant where he works.
He and another chef worked shifts. The owner of the restaurant had wanted to hire another chef, so he had already told the owner that his cousin from mainland China was coming to bring the owner to try out the job – this “cousin” was me.
The restaurant is in a small town in the Greater Vancouver area. Before I entered the door, I didn’t like the owner in my heart – the level of decoration of the restaurant is about equivalent to the domestic Shaxian snack, with only two tables in the hall, and the frying pan and wok in the back kitchen are only three feet apart, and the white case and red case are mixed together, and the moving lines are in a mess. The good thing is that the sink is still clean, the fire is not bad, and the power of the range hood is okay.
At the entrance, the owner’s wife was writing and drawing by the cash register. The owner spoke Cantonese, and after exchanging pleasantries with me in vernacular, he sent me a menu and asked me to read it myself.
Once I looked at the menu, half of the fried rice and the other half was fried food – I bet this is a fast food restaurant!
Shen is familiar with the way to take out a bunch of ingredients from the refrigerator, shouted: “pack crab corner!” The boss and the boss’s wife automatically gathered around and wrapped them together.
I later learned that in Canada, I’m afraid only Chinese restaurants need so many hands to do the preparation. Chinese restaurants are different from Western fast food like McDonald’s, where the chicken is ready-made, the burger skin is ready-made, the potato sticks are ready-made, and they just need to be heated and oiled when they are sold. Chinese restaurant son stir-fry and sell food is lunch and dinner that two hours, the most time-consuming manpower is sidework (piecemeal work, including the preparation of ingredients, placing dishes, cleaning, etc.), because the raw materials bought to be processed. The only “machine” in the entire kitchen of the restaurant is the meat slicer, which can slice the frozen meat into different thicknesses.
To wrap crab horns is to use wonton skin to wrap the filling: the four sides of the skin are glued with egg white and the four corners are pinched together in the middle, and the four corners are spit out like a flower. After wrapping, the crab corners are frozen in the refrigerator and then deep-fried in a deep pan when they are ready to sell.
I got started easily and wrapped them quickly and well. After wrapping the crab horns and spring rolls, after wrapping the spring rolls, cut kale and onions and shredded green onions. When the ingredients were almost ready, Shen freed up his hands to make three soups – hot and sour soup, wonton soup and egg flower soup.
The boss and the boss’s wife looked at each other and withdrew from the preparation table. The boss went to clean up, the boss’s wife took the order – she spoke either Cantonese or Cantonese Mandarin, basically no English: “Xi (yes) la, two barbecued pork fried rice, a Benro fried rice la, a total of XX yuan, tip is extra, only cash oh!”
I can hear that the order (order) calls are almost all from the nearby office buildings, it seems that each single, the boss’s wife to follow a “cash only oh”.
However, I also found that this restaurant is more concerned about the quality of the meal – the fast food restaurant in Shandong home are fast and simple, fried a few large pots of rice placed there, to receive the order directly into a bowl of packaged; here is an order fried a rice, so that the rice, of course, fresh and delicious, pot gas, but time and manpower naturally also have to spend more.
I just stepped into the door still in doubt: “a fast restaurant can afford two or three chefs?” But after listening to the owner’s wife take a few orders, I knew – really can afford: fried rice here is not cheap, Yangzhou fried rice 9.5 yuan, barbecue fried rice 15.6 yuan – this is Canadian dollars, it seems that the restaurant really need to keep a few more chefs to keep frying.
I took the initiative when Shen went to roast barbecue, picked up the wok, slid the wok, scooped up the overnight white rice in the barrel, added ingredients to a stir-fry, turned the wok upside down, the open fire came up a ruffle, and handed it into the combo (combo box) lined up by the boss’s wife, who packed it.
The boss saw me in one go, directly a clap: “Chef Shen’s cousin, when the salt (Ran) line!”
I thought to myself: my specialty dish nine turn large intestine or something, you do not have the ingredients here, so I can not show you a hand. Fried rice, crab roe, spring rolls – a hairy chef can do it all.
The boss’s wife receives the most orders is fried rice, fried rice, fried rice, Shen get a good barbecue, then fried rice, 2 frying pan, 1 frying pan, 3 soup pot, is all the “process”. Soon the four of us will cooperate on – the boss’s wife to take orders, Shen fried rice, I packaged, the boss delivery, driving a small Toyota to and from.
Until 4 o’clock in the afternoon, we sat down to eat. I fried the rice, stir-fried kale and sesame chicken.
The boss ate while speaking to me in vernacular: “Young man is very striking ah, you English point solution ah?”
Shen answered for me: “I went to high school, I can speak a little life language.”
The boss swallowed a mouthful of rice: “Okay! I’ll tell Lao Shen about the procedures later, you just follow them.”
Thus, my interview was over.
3
In the following week, Shen relayed to me the conditions offered by the restaurant owner: the restaurant can give me a work visa, free of charge, and I don’t have to pay the fee, the boss himself will find a lawyer; the salary is not high, can only give me 12.5 knife / hour, 40 hours a week, a month, after deducting taxes, to get a hand will be a thousand seventy-eight like; the store includes food, not housing; the only one constraint is –After the boss gave me a work visa, 3 years can not increase wages, can not resign.
Brother Shen gave me an analysis in the tone of “you really found a treasure”.
“Canadian work visa is very valuable, you can ask yourself, any immigration agent to help you find an employer to do work visa, you have to charge you 170,000 Canadian dollars a, you get a job for nothing, simply will let people envy dead. Do not look at the chef’s salary is not high, in fact, very affordable! You do not have to calculate the accounts to China, you have to calculate the Canadian accounts: you work here as a chef, a year salary open 24,000, the second year after you file a tax return, the tax office immediately refund you four or five thousand; and then bring the children to study, other people’s dolls to study abroad as international students, to the school to pay a year of 15,000 tuition fees, your dolls, all free; and then after a year or two, the dolls get ‘milk money ‘, about 7,000 a year! (Editor’s note: Milk money is a tax-free benefit paid monthly by the Canadian government to eligible applicants to help support the growth of children under the age of 18. 2019, the base amount of milk money for Canadian families with children under the age of 6 was increased to $6,639; for children aged 6 to 17, the base amount of milk money was increased to $5,602.) (The base rate for children aged 6 to 17 was raised to $5,639)! That’s an annual income of nearly $50,000!”
“I’m not from here, can my doll come here to study too? Not necessarily Canada is stupid and has to pay ‘milk money’ to my dolls?” I asked, somewhat puzzled.
“You have a work visa, your doll is here, you can study here, it’s all free! How much does your international school in Shandong cost per year? It can’t be less than 100,000 RMB, right? And later, when the doll goes to university in Canada, it will also be a local student, and then the international students will pay 40,000 tuition fees a year, and your doll will pay 10,000.” Shen looked at my unenlightened look and was very anxious, “Your wife came over to do a short job, cleaning, to earn cash, you have a very free life! In Canada, find a job is to earn ah, in two years you put the ‘maple leaf card’ to the bag head a tuck, is Canadian – that is, you have a wife, if you do not have a wife, and so you get the identity, back home to a ‘business marriage ‘, to people who want to immigrate to do identity, 100,000 Canadian dollars to charge, right? How much is a Canadian identity worth? Not a few people are willing to buy it with a million RMB!”
It seemed that Shen was sorry that I was married, and I felt that he was about to pull someone out of his address book to “negotiate” with me and sell the “maple leaf card” hanging in front of me. He also seems to have realized that it is not right to say so, the tone of voice quickly changed: “have a wife is also good, you and your wife to have another! The second child a year is also 7000 ‘milk gold’.”
Shen talked a lot, but I did not dare to believe it all, so I asked a friend in China to introduce a migration agent, to ask the other side, is not with a Canadian work visa can go through the immigration road. After hearing the whole story, the agent asked, “Why did your boss agree to give you a work visa? Why didn’t he charge you?” .
“Oh, it’s a friend, it’s a friend ……”
Unexpectedly, a few days later, this agent asked me on WeChat, “Can you introduce me to a Canadian employer? You know, the kind that is bigger and can handle work visas.”
I was vague, but in my heart I realized – this job is really a meat and potatoes, I can’t give out the information to others.
When my parents heard the news, they were also very grateful to Shen, saying how could they meet such a good thing? After I could go to the mall by myself, I rushed to buy Shen two or three jackets and a good pen. After he made the white cut chicken at home on weekdays, I took the initiative to take up the job of delivering to the surrounding neighbors.
4
After following Shin to help out at the restaurant a few more times, the owner gave me a business card in May and told me to go to a lawyer’s office in Richmond.
The lawyer was on the second floor of a small shopping street, dilapidated and old, without even a receptionist, and the lawyer spoke Mandarin and did not give me a hard time in English. He asked me to write a resume first, and after reading it, he said, “Okay, you are a Lu Cuisine chef, I will put an ad in the newspaper here, saying that I want to recruit a Lu Cuisine chef – just a Lu Cuisine chef. You have to go back to your home country and send me your resume from home, then your boss will hire you, I will do the work visa, and you will come back. About 10 months, the work visa will be done.”
It turned out that the work visa was tailored to my conditions and went through a process. But when the boss heard that the process would take 10 months, he was immediately upset: “Throw it! You have to go back home and wait for so long?”
He scoffed at the lawyer’s rigidity and gave me a countermeasure: “We need manpower, we can’t wait that long. Just go back to your country and do your business. Don’t you have a tourist visa? I’ll give you the cash while you work and wait for the lawyer to do the work.”
Vancouver may be old and worn out, but there is no other place in the world where you can make a fortune as a chef. I also want to bring my wife here, she works in the supermarket in my hometown, also willing to suffer, I think, after she came to help the boss cashier ah, delivery ah, these things are not skilled, earn some change is also very good?
But when I went back to the restaurant to help, I mentioned twice that I wanted my wife to help, and the boss and the boss’s wife said perfunctorily, “It’s too much trouble for you, no need.”
The attitude of the boss and his wife made me vaguely feel that I was touching something taboo. When I think back, it seems that when I was shopping, Western restaurants here often have a “no cash” sign, but Chinese restaurants often put up a sign saying “cash only” and always add the phrase “cash only” when taking orders. “
When Shin saw that I did not know what I was doing, he reprimanded me in private, just like the boss: “Throw it! Do you think you are water (who) ah, water (who) can cashier? Can’t you see that the cash registers in the restaurant are two? The cashier in the store hit the invoice to be reported to the tax, the boss delivery take out the one, is to collect the money after only a fake ticket not reported to the tax.”
See my stunned expression, Shen continued: “the cheapest fried rice 9.5 yuan, the boss sent over, charge 2 yuan tip, and then charge 15% tax, which is 1.5 yuan, the guests gave 13.5 yuan, the boss all tucked into the bag – most guests do not invoice after giving money, the boss sold fried rice a year Can sell 400,000, but only reported more than 100,000 turnover, after paying the tax also earn 300,000 per year – so, the cash register is outsiders can touch? That’s the core secret!”
A Chinese chef’s short-lived dream of immigration
I then realized that the boss and the boss’s wife, who drive a small car and shabby clothes, actually earn much more a year than the white-collar workers in and out of the office building – this small restaurant really needs more cooks to fry rice, Vancouver supermarket, 9.5 knife a packet of Japanese pearl rice, 7.6 knife two dozen eggs, the cost of raw materials and China is about the same, and the boss a fried rice received 10 times more money than the Chinese domestic. Domestic small restaurant owners, high costs and overhead, how many dare to say that the annual income of 1.5 million yuan?
Since the words have come to this point, Shen simply drank two more cups and talked about his own history of making a fortune back then.
“Back then I opened a small restaurant, the morning into 200 light chicken. A bucket of ice water, a large pot of boiling water, a frying pan. Just a little equipment, enough. Boil water, turn off the fire, the chicken to the water a stew, 40 minutes after fishing up, over ice water, frozen in the refrigerator for 1 hour, chopped! 7 yuan a three-yellow chicken, it became an authentic Cantonese white cut chicken, and cool and popping. This skill, enough. Half a chicken 12 knives, the whole 24 knives, ginger and scallions cut with hot oil a pour, put salt and MSG, half a small box attached, and then to add a box, are charged 1 yuan a, 2000 yuan a day cash, stable – how far customers are driving to buy a chicken home for wine.”
“Since the practice is so simple, why do so many people buy it? Won’t they make their own at home?”
“All the people who come to Vancouver are rich Chinese, and which rich people are willing to cook at home? They hire nannies in Vancouver, and they don’t like their nannies’ skills – they just miss the old taste of China. The fried rice is even simpler, why do the white-collar workers in the office building have to pay one or two dozen dollars to order our single? It’s not the money of the dolls in the nearby office buildings, just want to eat some smooth Chinese food.” Shen lamented, “The best business in Vancouver is the Chinese restaurant, look at Richmond a stir-fry restaurant, do not want to do out can charge 300,000 to 400,000 transfer fees. I have calculated, if you open a restaurant, like our boss so operation, 1 year and 3 months to recover the cost of playing the restaurant, the next is to earn the pure profit!”
“Then brother why do not you open a restaurant yourself?”
“In front of the frying pan stand a day more tired? If my wife and I were ten years younger, we would definitely open a restaurant and give future generations a chance to make a profit!”
So, now Shen’s life is very dashing. His ideal in life is to earn enough cash now to gamble when he wants and spend when he wants.
5
One day, we were in the restaurant “touch shrimp (shrimp head wrapped in batter ready for deep-frying)”, another chef who was not working came. He cried and begged us to help: “My house was stolen by thieves, you guys hurry to find me some invoices!”
So, the boss boss Shen together, donated their own buy headphones, buy cell phones, buy clothes tickets, I also donated to Shen to buy jackets and pens tickets, soon, that chef in front of a small pile of invoices.
When we put together the invoices, Shen told me the reason: this chef lives in a low-cost housing, this side of doing anything to buy insurance, encounter thieves, more invoices to the insurance company, said the property theft more blackmail money, if the insurance company are recognized, the light is more to recover some losses, if the loss of things less, that is a small fortune.
That chef sadly said: “Grandma, I pressed 10,000 yuan cash under the bed, all touched away. The police asked me if I had dropped the money, I didn’t dare to say.”
They all nodded in agreement: “You can’t tell, and if you do, you don’t want to live in low-cost housing, and maybe the tax office will ask you where you got so much money.”
“Damned thieves, they’re just staring at our low-cost housing. Our building has been stolen three times this year, and he knows that we people who earn cash are afraid to deposit it in the bank, only to hide it under the bedpan.”
It turns out that Canadian banks are “nosy”, you go to deposit money, more than 10,000 knives, the bank should first ask you where you came from the money, you said, it has to report the tax office. The chef earns 4,000 yuan a month, but only reports 2,000 yuan of income, so it meets the conditions of living in low-cost housing – a normal monthly rent of 1,200 yuan of housing, low-cost housing to 500 yuan on the line. But this relies on tax evasion on the rent to take advantage of, are stolen by thieves.
“You know there is a big star in the country, he does not know that the United States banks receive cash to report the state, he took 300,000 to 400,000 dollars to deposit, but also to change the bank to deposit, open several bank cards to deposit, deposit money everywhere every day, he thought the bank is to deposit 10,000 to report, each time to deposit 9,000 – the result was still He was caught, deposited 400,000, and was fined 320,000, which is equal to nothing.” The boss said in a serious way.
(Author’s note: This refers to the time between April 2011 and March 2012 when Chinese entertainer Ying Da deposited a total of $444,400 in cash, divided into 50 deposits of less than $10,000 each, into six bank card accounts he and his wife opened at four U.S. banks. (He was later charged with money laundering by the IRS and eventually pleaded guilty to paying back taxes, interest and penalties, totaling $320,000.)
I thought to myself: so, the boss earned so much money can not be deposited in the bank, but also a stack of pressed to the head of the bed board? No wonder he closed every night is to let us chefs go first, never let anyone to touch the cash register, the original is to count slowly with the boss’s wife ah. Shen said the boss’s house is also rented, old clothes broken car, it turns out that the bun has meat not on the fold ah.
Later, I told Shen that I felt that the Chinese people I met in Vancouver were all low-key cash millionaires.
Shen said with national pride, “It’s good that we don’t discriminate against foreigners, where do they get the chance to discriminate against us? They are so poor that they pay taxes on a little money to pay for the house, and are eaten to death by the tax office, and can’t save two hundred dollars a month.”
However, Mrs. Shen said she did encounter racial discrimination: “During the election, the candidates came to pay their respects, knocking on each door, shaking hands, greeting and hugging each other, and they were very cordial. When they saw a Chinese New Year scroll hanging in front of my house, they turned around and left! Go away! Make me more embarrassed.”
Later, I talked to someone else and realized that the politicians here know that many Chinese don’t vote and simply skip it – but the ballots are all hypocritical democracy, I don’t care. Since Vancouverites like the taste of their hometown so much, and Chinese food is so expensive, I just calculate my future income: now I earn 100,000 is almost enough to spend, the key is the identity; after I get the identity, I don’t need to earn 300,000 to 400,000 a year like the boss, I will earn 200,000 Canadian dollars, 1 million RMB, it’s already very beautiful!
I was already familiar with Vancouver, and all the aspects of getting a work visa had been implemented. I returned home to Shandong with a dream of making a fortune, and gave my resume to a lawyer and went through the application process.
During that time, I thought of being a Canadian from now on, and my son could study abroad for free, and I walked all day long. Although I warned myself every day to keep a low profile, I couldn’t help but tell my best friends about it, and we drank countless glasses of wine.
As a result, there was a line of people who came to buy me drinks and tea, and I didn’t even finish the drinks until I got on the plane.
It was September when I arrived in Vancouver again, and Shin’s circle of friends continued to show off the maple leaves. But I know that the road under that maple leaf is old, that single house is rented, and the restaurants in Vancouver are like the level of China 30 years ago. Vancouver is actually not as good as Shandong, just because it is expensive in labor and can make money, I don’t mind it.
A few days before I got on the plane, my boss “trained” me again and again on WeChat: “You should pay attention when you go through customs, if customs asks you: ‘Why did you come to Vancouver again? You just say: ‘Last time there was something at home, did not finish the attractions to go back, this time to continue to play. Remember, never say you want to work, never say you want to work! In addition, you remember to delete all the records of WeChat, in case the customs turn over, it will not be good!”
Then, the lawyer also called and said similar words again in the same way.
I spit in my heart: would I be this stupid?
6
Before the plane landed, my boss had thoughtfully rented me a single room in the small town where the restaurant was located, with a shared kitchen and bathroom. The owner noted the date of my arrival in Vancouver and sent the chef of the restaurant to pick me up, “Hurry up with the fried rice when you are jet lagged, the business is so good that you are too busy!” I felt like my new life was waiting for me outside the airport, and once I left this airport, I was a Canadian.
The customs declaration at the airport went smoothly, and when I was going through customs, the customs officer asked me in very slow English, “Why are you here again?”
I answered in English, word for word, just as my boss had taught me.
He asked, “Did a friend come to pick you up?”
I answered honestly, “Yes, just outside.”
He then asked, “Do you have his phone number?”
If I said “no,” how could I contact the chef later – I had to honestly hand over a small card with the chef’s name and cell phone number handwritten on it.
Then this customs officer called – and he, he spoke Chinese!
“Are you XXX?”
“Yeah.” I could hear the cheerful voice of the chef from the counter.
“You’re here to pick up Jin XX?”
“Yes!”
My blood rushed to my head, my vision blurred, and my ears buzzed – I hope that’s all the gringo asked! That’s all he asked!
“He said he came to work for you, where do you work?”
The chef, unsure, continued to answer cheerfully, “We’re at the XX restaurant on X street in X city!”
“What is the address of the restaurant?”
The chef gave the detailed address again.
My legs and feet began to get weak to stand, as if the floor of the airport turned into a big pit and the ceiling above my head turned into smoke – I wish I could also vaporize from the roof, or wake up from this nightmare right away ……
The officer turned his head, his eyes like a hawk. My lips were shivering and I couldn’t say a word: Who could believe that a foreigner, who suddenly spoke Chinese, had tricked us Chinese?
Two customs officers escorted me around the corner and into a room inside the airport. This room may have a film, from the outside it looks like a glass wall, and when I went in, the inside is all mirrors. There was a lone stool in the room, and there were cameras in the ceiling.
A man in uniform came over, said a bunch of things to me, opened another folder, and gestured for me to sign a document. He told me to take out everything I had on me, even my shoelaces, and give them to him.
I only understood the word “sign”, and I had to sign it obediently. I didn’t dare to say I wanted to hire a lawyer, but I didn’t know where to hire a lawyer in Vancouver. If I hired my boss’s lawyer, the lawyer would come to the airport and strangle me if he knew I had been caught and dared to give him up.
I don’t know where my luggage is, but luckily I have deleted all my WeChat records.
I was like a worm caught in a spider’s web, afraid to sit on a stool, only to cower in the corner, so that I could feel safe. I don’t know how long it took for someone to deliver a boxed lunch, and when I opened the door, I saw that the door was always guarded. I knew they could see exactly what I was doing in the house. I was shaking from head to toe, the cold air was coming through the walls to me, my intestines and stomach were cramping. I was just a good citizen who wanted to get rich, just a little anxious, without a work visa, I came here first to sell hard labor. I didn’t want to go to jail, I didn’t want to be convicted. I wanted to go home so badly that “motherland” used to be an abstract word in my mind, but at that moment it was my home, the only place in the world that would never reject me.
Every hour or two, someone would come and question me, and I would shake my head and say I didn’t understand – and I didn’t understand. Then along comes a policewoman who speaks Chinese. She showed me my phone in a plastic bag, pointed to the recorder and told me she was recording.
Then she showed me the printed screenshots of my phone – all the conversations I had deleted had come back with some advanced technology, and all the dialog boxes where the boss and the lawyer were discussing with me how to “get through” had been screenshotted.
She said, “What you did was a fraud, a misrepresentation, and you, and others, were trying to defraud Canada.”
I had to bow my head and confess.
She made me sign a bunch more papers and then pointed to a piece of paper and announced, “You are deported and cannot enter Canada for five years. Your tourist visa is null and void.”
I said I wanted my shoelaces.
“No!”
What about a cell phone?
“No! “
She simply asked me: would I buy the ticket with a credit card or with cash, and would I have enough money?
I bought a full-price ticket, one-way, for more than 10,000. I didn’t dare to say I didn’t have enough money, so what if Canada refused to buy me a ticket and held me up and shouted at me to eat jail time?
After a few more hours, a customs officer came and took me on the plane. I tried to get my luggage and passport back, but the customs officer said that the passport would be kept by someone else until I got off the plane.
For the first time in my life, I wore shoes without laces and followed the customs officer with one foot deep and one foot shallow. The walk from the small dark room to boarding seemed so long that I felt like I was being paraded around, and I felt like a layer of skin was scraped off my face when the other flight attendants looked at me.
7
I sat dumbfounded on the plane, worried that I would be handed over to the police directly into the airport police station back home, my head was all rumbling, more than the roar of the plane’s engine. When I arrived in the country, the flight attendant handed me back my passport with my ticket and luggage ticket – she actually didn’t hand me over to the police, so grateful I almost wanted to kneel down to her.
The phone was also handed back to me, turned on and it was full of voices from the boss, the lawyer, the chef and Shin.
Boss: “Throw! People call you to give the phone you give the phone? Why didn’t you say you were taking a taxi to go? I was killed by you! You have to pay for it! You messed up my business, you told you not to talk nonsense but you said nonsense, you gave up my restaurant, how can I still have the law to give people a work visa in the future?”
Lawyer: “You immediately deleted my WeChat, deleted my phone, deleted my email. You’ve never been my client.” Shen: “Little brother (chef) is also too stupid, people ask what you say, why don’t you report all your ancestors once?”
Chef: “He told the customs first! He said so much that I couldn’t stop talking!”
They didn’t know that all these words were recorded by customs. We were on the same rope, and when I was deported, the sword was hanging over their heads. It’s just that the various Canadian government departments are slow, and the sword doesn’t know how sharp it is, or when it will fall.
As Shen mourned: “The loss is heavy!”
The boss endured the pain to double the turnover of the tax return, see who is a “throw!” Walking to meet the stool are going to kick a foot. He also said, “I should have known that I should have sold my work visa, at least there are still tens of thousands of dollars to earn. Honestly recruiting people, causing a riot!”
Shen originally only received 6 months of salary checks a year in the restaurant, and the other 6 months he reported unemployment with the tax, and the boss gave him a cash paycheck. After my incident, the boss also dare not cash, Shen capitalist wool can not be gleaned – in case one day the immigration people like a wolf pounced in, look at the unemployed Shen is fried rice, a count of the boss’s wife received a large number of orders, and then look at the bags of rice and ingredients, will understand this year after year “If the tax office comes again, from the boss to Shen, we will all see each other in jail.
I have no face to go out in my hometown in Shandong, those who were I wrote a blank cheque, to me as the future boss compliments of the brothers, those who grabbed the bill, I have no face to see. Only the agent who envied me for getting a work visa at that time was still persistent in asking me to have tea.
“I don’t know how much the chef in Vancouver pays, but I think your salary is cheaper than the chef’s salary, which is 20,000 to 30,000 dollars a year. 3 years of no salary increase, no resignation, that’s a saving of nearly 100,000 dollars, which is better than selling the work permit! If you sell a work permit, your boss will charge you at most $10,000 to $20,000.
“But his operation is so unprofessional – he gives you such a low salary, the immigration office will think how can you be such a cheap cook, a bagman? After you go over there, there is a good chance that you won’t get a work visa either. Can not get a work visa, you can only work with a tourist visa, is a cheap labor.
“Now get into this, the least you have to worry about, Canada does not go is, that is, for nothing to spend two plane tickets. Lawyers if you have already handed the material, from then on you are blacklisted by the immigration bureau. The boss should beware of checking the accounts, but also beware of checking the illegal employment, they go to jail are possible.”
Speaking of which, the agent began to enthusiastically recommend: “In the domestic work visa, or to find a professional immigration company like us, we operate everything properly, do a good work visa before sending you out, send you out will not be sent back to the airport. Canada can not go, you can go to Australia ah, chefs are always the most sought-after! I also have a restaurant in Chinatown, you can pay 500,000 RMB to go, and in the third year you can apply for a green card!
But these words are no longer tempting to me, now I still shiver when I think of the airport and customs. Fried rice can be fried in China, why do you have to go to a foreign country to fry this fried rice that will put you in jail?
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