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"The only thing I could do was sew": an interview with Li Qin Zhou.

Article Excerpt
My name is Li Qin Zhou. I was born in 1944. I was born in Baiyun, a rural area of Guangzhou. I only had one year in middle school, and then we were farmers. We grew vegetables on the farmland from the government. It was state-owned. My life in China was hard, especially in the 1960s. I experienced starvation and the Cultural Revolution.

I'll talk about when I came to the United States first. I came here in 1986 and worked in a restaurant in Texas, when I was 41. My husband came here in 1982 and after two years, he sponsored my son and me to the United States.

I was very happy when I came to United States. The life in China was so hard since I only could get 50-60 cents per day. It was not enough money to buy food. When I came to the United States, I worked in a restaurant for $750 a month. I worked twelve hours a day, from 9 A.M. to 10 P.M., from Monday to Saturday

My husband's daughter from his first wife owned a restaurant in San Antonio, Texas. He worked for 12 hours a day, but his daughter only gave him $450 a month. And my 14-year-old son worked there after school--he washed all the dishes and swept the floor. He only got $300 a month. He worked from...

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