The Red-Light Runner
45-year-old Shang Ren Li (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) delivers food for GrubHub and DoorDash on a moped in Brooklyn. While at work, he only stops for two sorts of places — restaurants where he picks up a food order and customers’ home where he completes the delivery. He doesn’t stop for anything else, not even a red light.
Li ran his first red light of the day on the way to his first delivery trip, at 7th Avenue and 47th Street, next to Sunset Park. He looked around, back and forth, and decided to break the rule all in a second. Confident of his skill and vigilance riding his vehicle, he sped through. By the end of the day, the number of red lights he ran was way more than the number he stopped for.
Speed is money. Time is money. Waiting means losing out. The food delivery apps are not designed in a way that encourages waiting and obeying the rules. “Stop for every red light? How are you ever going to earn?” Li said and laughed.
There is a time limit to every delivery trip. The slower he is, the more likely it is that he will be late and receive a bad review. Those reviews are the worst thing for a delivery worker like Li, even worse than fighting off a violent customer, getting injured and calling 911 — Li has experience with that as well. He knows he could get “deactivated” because of customer complaints, though he doesn’t know how many complaints trigger the algorithm; he was deactivated in this way by UberEats earlier this year, with no explanation. And anyway, the more trips he makes, the more he earns. Li simply cannot afford to spend time waiting, either at an intersection, a restaurant or a customer’s place.
Standing in a McDonald’s on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, Li frowned at the screen showing that his order was the last of 6 that McDonald’s was making. That was at least a 10-minutes wait, Li calculated, based on experience. He accepted this order because it was on the way to another delivery. The orders popped up on his phone on a map: $7 here, $5 there. The payments were calculated mainly based on the distance plus the tip. The more orders he could pick up and deliver on the same route, the better. But if he hadn’t accepted this order, he might have received another order that was faster and of greater value. An opportunity cost occurs at every decision and every delay.
However unhappy he is with waiting, Li has no choice. On another day he accepted an order on GrubHub and headed to a pastry shop on Prospect Park West. Upon arrival, he was told to wait for 20 minutes. “20 minutes” was the only English phrase he could understand from his conversation with the pastry shop employee. But it was enough for him to grasp the bad news. Li was instantly frustrated. He frowned, looked away, walked out and sat on the bench outside the shop. He knew there was an option to cancel the order in the app. But that was a button he would never click. The app tracks couriers’ delivery behavior with a score system. Accepting and then cancelling an order is undesirable and will result in a lower score. Li did not want a reduction of his score. This option, provided by the app, was not a real option but a trap.
Ultimately, the only thing Li really had a choice to not wait for was the red light.
Li did everything he could to make every single second count. A moped sold in New York City runs on a battery that usually lasts for about five hours. Most food delivery workers on mopeds need to head home at least once to change the battery. Li did not want to be interrupted. He ended up ordering two batteries from China online; each would last him ten hours on the road. The cost came to about $1500 with international shipping. In fact, the order he placed included a complete package of a moped with batteries. But the moped was rejected at customs in China; only the batteries went through. He got a partial refund for the moped.
Before heading to work, Li lifted the fully charged battery, a solid 40-poud black box, to his vehicle locked outside his rented apartment at 47th Street in Brooklyn. 5’4” and just above 130lbs, Li stumbled a bit as he walked with the bulky battery. But the battery brought a sense of satisfaction and security. He flipped the cushion on the seat, fitted the battery to the empty compartment under the seat, and connected it to the moped’s electrical system. Having set up the powerhouse for the day, Li squatted down and pumped air into the two wheels with an electric air inflator.
Li brought two phones just in case one broke down during delivery — a smartphone is everything for an app-based delivery courier. The phone mounted to the moped’s handle was connected to a 20,000mAh portable charger sealed in the chest pocket of his jacket with a 2-foot cable. A back-up cable was in his seat storage. He had also recently installed a metal bar between the two handles. Summer was just around the corner; at that point, he would remove the cumbersome warmer box he had carried over the winter and attach hangers to the metal bar so that he could hang the food orders on them.
Li prepared everything he could to minimize interruption during deliveries. Time is money. But his preparation could never be enough. There was always something beyond his control.
Back on Prospect Park West, Li went into the pastry shop after 20 minutes to check if the order was ready. He was frustrated again to find that the food had been ready for pick-up for quite a while. As he was sitting at the bench outside the pastry shop, the restaurant staff could see his back through the tall glass window. But no one bothered to let him know when the order was done.
No one but him cared about his time. He did not say anything, just strode across with the order to his moped. The clock was ticking on the app. He had to rush to deliver the cookies from the pastry shop, through the red lights and even against traffic on a one-way street.
This was just one of the many trips Li made that day. Each trip had its own problem. He missed a customer’s address with street number 968 because it only had “Nine-Sixty-Eight” on the building; Li does not read well enough for that. He zig-zagged the moped around pot-holes, for he had once been tripped up by a big hole in the street; it threw him three feet up off his vehicle. He spent another 15 minutes waiting at a restaurant with three staff members telling him to “give me a second” without even looking at him. After picking up an order, as he walked to his moped locked on the sidewalk in front of a neighboring restaurant, one of the restaurant’s employees, an older white male, possibly the manager, gave him an unfriendly stern look for more than 10 seconds. Apparently, he did not want Li parking his moped in front of his restaurant.
The fact that he cannot do anything but accept and deliver the next order keeps Li busy and numb. Over time he has become less impatient and less angry. But he is not less worried. He does not want to be late. So he has to run faster, do more trips and earn more money. But the app is never satisfied.
It is a sunny and windy day. Li’s moped runs constantly at 30 to 40mph, exceeding the state’s legal limit of 25mph. The wind presses the mask against his face, his eyes opening wide, switching his sight among the traffic lights, vehicles around him, bumps and hollows on the street. The two delivery apps constantly notify him of new orders and drive him to the next destination. He is on his own, just as every day at work, in an 8 hour to 10 hour working day, seven days a week.
The first mobile phone app was created in 1994; it was the video game Tetris, pre-installed to the Hagenuk MT-2000, an early mobile phone from Denmark. While software applications have existed and evolved on mobile devices for almost thirty years, they have only become ubiquitous since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007.
Alongside the iPhone, Apple launched its App Store and Google announced the Android Market, the predecessor of Google Play. The apps in little squares sitting on palm-sized screens have since become the building blocks of the smartphone universe. In 2010, the term “app” was listed as “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society.
Internet start-ups raced to seize the evolving opportunities. Airbnb and Uber were officially launched in 2008 and 2009, allowing people with an asset — a car, in the case of Uber; a home, in the case of Airbnb — to monetize it, starting a new way of living and earning under the so-called “sharing economy.”
Initially, Uber pitched its service to people who already had jobs — perhaps on their way to work or on their way home, they could pick someone up and earn a little extra money. As Uber expanded and rideshare became a common form of transportation, it became a full-time job for people who had either lost work or were new to the United States and looking for their first gig. While Airbnb initially appeared as a website, Uber existed as a smartphone app from its very first day.
A couple of years later, the concept of the sharing economy expanded from ride-share and room-share to labor-share, as the food delivery apps emerged.
The first food delivery app in today’s form on smartphone was DoorDash, founded in San Francisco Bay Area in 2012 by four Stanford students. Although it took shape in the app era, it was the culmination of a long process.
In the 1990s, restaurants started taking delivery orders online. In August 1994, the first-ever online order was made at PizzaNet.com from PizzaHut in a demo session at Santa Cruz in front more than 100 media people. The service was technically made possible by a local tech company called Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), which was also set as the delivery address of the first internet pizza order.
As then-SCO employee Jonathan Cohen later recalled, when everyone was waiting for the pizzas to arrive, someone asked, “Does the pizza actually come out of the computer?” The answer was no. A person brought it.
In subsequent years, online food delivery service sites such as Waiter.com, Seamless and GrubHub appeared. They aggregated restaurant menus and processed orders for the restaurants in exchange for a hefty fee. At that point, however, the deliveries continued to be done by the restaurants’ dedicated crew.
Appearing in the age of the sharing economy, DoorDash came up with a different model for its app — it not only processed the order, but also took care of the delivery. It all began when its Palo Alto-based founders learned that most restaurants around them did not provide delivery service. Their new app aimed to fill that gap. The first app-based food delivery workers were the people with smartphones and cars or bikes in the Bay Area, who wanted to make some money in their spare time.
DoorDash was soon joined by GrubHub’s app in 2014 and UberEats in 2015. The food delivery apps quickly expanded beyond their initial markets to include more restaurants, more cities, and eventually many more couriers.
The apps all aggregate restaurant and potential deliverers and assign restaurant orders through an algorithm to the nearest courier. For every order, the apps charge both the restaurants a commission as high as 30% and their customers a delivery fee. They pay the couriers for each order based on the miles they cover, although it is unclear how exactly the price is calculated.
As with Uber drivers, the delivery workforce for the apps soon transformed from a part-time to a full-time one, especially for low-skilled immigrant workers who seek income mainly from manual jobs with a low entry requirement. In order to grow their markets and delivery capacity, the app companies usually do not maintain a strict bar on their couriers’ immigration status. Neither do they conduct interviews or require any sort of educational qualifications. That provides an easy earning gateway for immigrant workers, many of them undocumented, who constitute the majority of app delivery labor now.
Even as the food delivery apps expand, their revenues have fluctuated. Mostly depending on venture capital to survive, these companies have not yet neared the point of profitability. For instance, in 2019, DoorDash reported a $667 million loss; in 2020, it was $461 million.
As Covid hit hard in 2020 and people stayed at home, app-based food deliveries surged. In 2020, Uber observed a 224% growth in its food delivery sector while its rideshare revenue shrank by half. DoorDash raised more than $34 billion and put up one of the largest IPOs of the year. However, even with that spectacular growth in revenue and investment, food delivery apps are still far from profitability. UberEats, the largest food delivery app in the market with 66 million users, reported a $145 million loss.
While all the major food delivery apps publicized their growths in every other aspect in the pandemic year, none of them published statistics about their couriers. It is still hard to get a precise estimate of how many delivery workers there are in the United States or how many have joined app delivery since the start of Covid. But there was one piece of information reported by the New York Times — in New York alone, Uber observed an increase in food delivery couriers by 36,000 from March to November 2020.
Shang Ren Li, who joined UberEats in July, was one of them. But a few months later, his account was deactivated, likely because of several negative customer reviews; he does not know for sure as he was not provided with an explanation when he was “fired.” After that, he turned to DoorDash and GrubHub.
Shang Ren Li was born in a rural fishing village at Zulu Island of Fujian Province which is located at the southeast coast of China. It was August 10, 1976, not a wonderful day to come to the world, said Li — not only was it a typhoon day, but also the day of the traditional Zhongyuan Festival, known as Ghost Festival, when Chinese people burn joss paper to comfort the spirits of their ancestors.
Death and birth, to Li’s family, converged on the same day of 1976.
Giving birth to this fourth child after she underwent intrauterine-devised birth control, Li’s mother gave him the two-character name Shang Ren to honor him as a gift from God. Shang means virtuous in Chinese whereas Ren means gracious. A Christian family was not common in 1976, the last year in the decade of Cultural Revolution under Mao whereby religions of all kinds had been devastated in China. Li was raised believing in God.
The entire country was struggling with poverty in 1970s. So was Li’s family. His father made barely one US dollar a day through sea fishing. Li recalled that as the youngest and only male child, he was the only one in the family to eat white rice, which was regarded as better food than the sweet potato rice that his parents and three sisters ate.
Li went to school at eight and quit at twelve. The next year, he learned how to operate a fishing boat and went out to the sea with his father and other fishermen in the village.
The rest of Li’s adolescence was spent on the sea. He became a proficient fisherman, like his father. Sometimes they would go out for weeks at a time. But having one more fisherman in the family did not make them any richer.
There was a fishermen’s proverb in their village: “If the propeller dries, your mouth will also dry.” The fishermen would only have food to eat if they worked every single day; whenever they were not fishing, they were left in hunger. There were no leftovers, no savings.
Looking around, Li saw that most of his contemporaries were leaving town, working in another country and sending money home to their families. The coastal Fujian province had had a long history of emigration since the 19th century because of its geographical convenience of getting onboard a ship and venturing across the Ocean Pacific to a new land. Although China had opened up since 1980s and observed a huge economic leap, it was far from a balanced and nationwide growth for a population of more than a billion, the vast majority of whom were still rural. For Li and many others, life in the “first world” was way more attractive than being a fisherman in their village.
When Li was 17 years old, in 1993, he made two attempts to migrate to a developed country. On his first trip, he was to be smuggled mostly overland into the United Kingdom. But he only got as far as in Xi’an, a city in western China, because the “snakehead” — the professional human smugglers in Southeast China — had an internal financial dispute and cancelled the trip. Li went back to Fuzhou. Another snakehead had him scheduled for a ship traveling across the Pacific to the west coast of the United States. But Li was arrested by the police even before he saw the ship and was fined 5,800 Chinese Yuan, or about 800 US dollars, an amount he has remembered specifically for many years. His “immigration dream” was crushed. He went back to fishing.
Turning 20 in 1996, Li decided to seek a different livelihood. Having scraped together about $1,000 to buy a GaoDeng brand motorcycle made in Taiwan, he started taking passengers around town on his motorcycle. At that time, he could never imagine that one day, he would be riding a moped more than 10 hours a day on the other side of the globe.
From then to his early 30s, Li worked in all sorts of businesses ranging from selling clothes, foot massage to repairing mobile phones in wealthier cities like Guangzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou. None of these jobs stuck. Intermittently, he came back to his old business of sea fishing before switching to the next gig.
Li loved to be at sea, but it could be dangerous. In December 1999, he was out on the sea with his father. One night, the fishing net became entangled underwater with the boat’s propeller. It was dark out, and they were far from home. Without hesitancy, Li jumped into the freezing water with a waterproof torchlight. He dived down, untangled the net and climbed back to the deck, drenched inside out, shivering from head to toe. He wrapped himself in bed on the ship with heavy quilts. And then passed the long night.
That same year, Li got married to a young woman from his village even though he did not have enough money for the traditional betrothal gifts to her family. A year later, they welcomed their first child, adding to the already-stringent financial status of the family. He wanted more earnings and a better life so badly. But it seemed to him impossible to attain in China. In 2008, his father died and his second child was born, making his financial situation even more difficult.
Li decided in 2010 to embark on his third attempt to go overseas. The fee for an all-inclusive smuggling package to America was now $82,000 — more expensive than a master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School. But it included visas to other countries, flight fare, smuggling across the U.S. border, and then part of the bail money for when he would most likely get apprehended. Li borrowed money from friends, relatives, and a loan cooperative based in New York. Sink or swim, Li had to make it to America.
In April 2011, Li, now 35, took a bus to Hong Kong, then flew to Amsterdam, then to Panama and Honduras. Illegal immigrants from different countries gathered here and then made the trip to the U.S. border. From Honduras to Guatemala, Li traveled in the trunk of a car; from Guatemala to Mexico and then to the border, they were sometimes dispersed in smaller groups of four in a car and other times more than thirty of them were packed into a truck. “We were piled up,” Li recalled.
On their way, all their personal belongings and cash were extorted by the smuggling agents. By the time they reached the border with Texas, all Li had left was his clothes and shoes.
It was around 3am on May 8, 2011, a clear black night, when Li arrived at the heavily patrolled U.S. border with a few others on a steamboat after crossing a river whose name Li did not know. They spotted a huge fallen tree trunk of about 20 feet long and hid behind it. The dream land was just around the corner. Now the Border Patrol found them.
As he was escorted to detention, Li walked past a room with a few dozen monitors that showed all different angles of the border he had just tried to cross. How could sneaking in be possible? But Li was not too nervous when he was arrested. It was just part of coming to America — being arrested and bailed out — included in the package.
After 45 days in detention, Li was released. The police had taken his clothes when he was detained and now gave them back to him freshly laundered. He flew to New York City with a fellow villager who had come on the same trip to America. They had a picture taken together in downtown Manhattan, with the friend putting his arm around Li’s shoulder, both smiling. A serious-looking New York policeman on a horse was passing by; he looked into the camera too. In the photo, Li was dressed in his only outfit — a zebra patterned long-sleeve with a pair of jeans, the only properties he had managed to bring over to the US from his home.
Li found his first job in the kitLi of a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, which paid cash to its workers, a common starting point for illegal low-skilled immigrants from China. Working 13 hours a day in the kitLi, he peeled shrimp and sorted vegetables. He was paid $1450 the first month, an amount he had never earned in a month in his life. Li sent back $500 to his mother, and spent the rest paying his rent and a tiny bit of the $82,000 debt. He worked tirelessly every single day and called his mother, wife and children once a week.
In 2012, Li’s mother died of esophagus cancer. He could not go back for the funeral. His home in Zulu Island was left with his wife, 11-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.
Li moved to Philadelphia and worked as a delivery worker at a restaurant for three years. In 2015, he was robbed at a gunpoint and quit. He then found temporary jobs in renovation, laundry services, and cooking. In July 2015, Li lost his case at an immigration court and failed to get rid of his undocumented status. In 2017, he came to New York City to work as a delivery worker for a Japanese restaurant in Brooklyn run by a fellow Fuzhou immigrant. In 2018, seven years of non-stop labor after his arrival to the new land, he had cleared his $82,000 debt. In 2017 and 2019, Li’s wife and daughter were smuggled into the US one after the other. Their little son was still too young to go make the journey and was left alone in their hometown to a caregiver for children of emigrated parents. A thousand U.S. dollar has been wired to the caregiver every month ever since.
In 2018, Li switched to a nail salon as a male artist and then to work as a driver at his friend’s small rideshare company, until the outbreak of Covid in March 2020.
As the pandemic hit, all of a sudden, the cash businesses that used to hire him — restaurants, renovation teams, laundry services, nail salons and rideshare firms — were closing down or experiencing a sharp drop in businesses. Up to this moment, Li had had a total of four years’ experience in food delivery, and many more years on a two-wheeled vehicle since owning his first motorcycle in 1996. Out of the need to survive and provide for his family, Li decided to go back into food delivery.
Immediately after he started, Li found app-based delivery nothing close to his past experience as a delivery worker hired by a restaurant, except for the fact that he was delivering food. Li has enjoyed the flexibility of work with apps. He feels that he can decide when or when not to work — something that never appeared in his mind for the past nine years in America.
But that comes with a cost that has been way too frustrating and beyond his control. An UberEats customer might give him a bad review for him being late during busy hours, putting his account at risk as he could be terminated at a simple notice. That never happened when he was a courier for a restaurant as both the owner and the customers knew him in person and would understand the situation. Even if a customer complained to the owner, there would be no consequence for him.
On the flip side, when a customer constantly ordered and tipped him, he could ask the restaurant owner to give him a canned drink for free so that he could slip it into the customer’s order as a little token of appreciation. Exchanges of gratitude like this used to be a common practice among restaurant delivery workers but are extinct now with the apps. Li had been stripped off almost all the interpersonal relationship that he used to have with his bosses, colleagues, and regular customers as he does not belong to anywhere, neither the apps, nor the restaurants. He is on his own.
The problem has been exacerbated during Covid when all apps have been promoting the idea of “contactless delivery.” Delivery workers are instructed to drop the order at the customer’s doorstep or to hang it on the doorknob, take a picture of it and then leave.
Contact is unnecessary. Contactlessness is way more honored.
“There’s no human touch,” said Li.
He bought his new moped and installed the powerful batteries at the beginning of this year and has run over 4,000 miles back and forth in Brooklyn in three months. But he has not been able to acquaint himself with anybody on the 4,000 miles.
Although they essentially work alone, app-based delivery workers do have a way to socialize virtually on their smartphone. Spanish-speaking delivery workers connect with each other on WhatsApp groups; Chinese delivery workers usually interact on WeChat.
Li is now one of the top earners in a WeChat group named Niu Yue Wai Song (“New York Delivery”). The group has more than 400 members. Most of the active members are immigrants from Fujian and Guangdong, two southeast provinces of China. It was started in 2017 by Van Li, 38 this year, a longtime restaurant delivery worker in New York who wanted to communicate with other app delivery workers, to share information and to socialize. In the beginning, there were just seven or eight members; over the years the group has grown.
Every single day, hundreds of messages are sent to the group chat. The workers share the day’s trips and rewards from various apps. They compare tips from customers. They also swear the apps play tricks to manipulate them, complain about customers who have complained about them, and exchange stories about other encounters.
“Extra $2 for four more trips? Are we beggars?” one delivery worker scoffed at UberEats’ “Quest,” a reward system the app uses to incentivize them to run more trips.
“I always go to this Burger King to pee!” another delivery worker wrote in, sharing a rare resource in the time of the pandemic, when most restaurants shut their bathroom.
“There are rats in this restaurant,” someone wrote, posting a picture of a restaurant that other delivery workers should be mindful of.
One day in March, someone posted in the group chat a picture of a restaurant and its owner who called a Chinese delivery worker “Chino.” About five delivery workers immediately responded that they were treated the same in that and other restaurants. Then more pictures were posted, and more stories were shared. The topic went on for an hour in the group, from 11:44pm to 12:50am. Some encouraged the group to take a more assertive approach: “Ask them to fuck off!” Li, the group creator and still its moderator, said, “If it’s in Brooklyn, let’s gather our brothers and go there tomorrow!” But a larger portion of the group was telling people to calm down and just ignore what happened: “It’s useless. Discrimination is everywhere in America.”
While delivery workers have found some sense of belongings and support in this virtual space, sometimes things can turn sour, especially when people shared their earning statement from the apps. About a month ago, Li sent a screenshot showing his earning of the day, about $400, to the group chat. Some from the group doubted its authenticity and others asked him to share his “secrets.” Li was annoyed and replied, “Have you ever thought about the cost those who earn more than you have paid?”
Typically, Li earns about $30 an hour, sometimes $40, occasionally up to about $50. The group members casually called Li Da Shen, which literally means “big god” in Chinese, showing admiration for Li’s ability to earn.
The WeChat group creator Van Li came to the United States from Guangdong province, China, in 1998. He spent most of his early years at restaurants, similar to Li, turning from a helper in the kitLi to a deliveryman. In 2017, he quit the restaurant and started delivering with UberEats. With almost twenty years in food delivery with restaurants and apps, Li is a well-respected big god in the group. One month during the peak of the pandemic when app orders surged, Li made $12,000 working day and night. For Li, Li is the “real god.” For that month, he worked 12 hours a day for thirty days, juggling among three delivery apps. He knew it was time to work harder during the pandemic when New Yorkers were all staying at home waiting for food.
Li likened app delivery to a pyramid, where most delivery workers stay at the bottom, barely making more than $100 a day, some in the middle, making around $200 plus, and a few at the top, making more than $300 a day. His secret to earning is completing at least four delivery trips every hour no matter what, which is harder than it sounds.
While discussions about earnings are common in the group chat, protection and insurance are rarely brought up. I asked both Li and Li if the apps provide any insurance coverage for them. Both said no and explained, “This is like you are your own boss.”
Ironically, instead of functioning as their own “boss,” both had a frustrating experience after UberEats permanently terminated their delivery accounts at the beginning of this year, with a simple email notice. No explanation was provided. It could have been customer complaints. It could have been an algorithmic decision that no one bothered to explain. Over and over again, they were told by UberEat’s support hotline: “You have permanently lost the ability to deliver with UberEats.” They found that there was no one to raise the issue to, no real serious human effort put into justifying the action of firing them from a job they had been doing every day.
Li has since found steady income at DoorDash and GrubHub. But what if these apps deactivate him too? This worry is never far from his mind. Every other full-time app delivery worker shares the same concern.
The precarity of income and circumstances at work with the delivery apps has formed an ironic narrative against Li’s theory of the “pyramid.” Even if the “big gods” seem to have reached the pyramid’s top, it is only a temporary result of the apps rewarding them for doing what their algorithms aim to incentivize, without providing them any protection or stability. The irony also exists in Li’s love for the job’s flexibility while being manipulated on a daily basis by the system to run faster, to wait less, and to not do what the system does not desire.
Working for food delivery platforms, as Niels van Doorn, a professor at the University of Amsterdam and the principal investigator of the Platform Labor research project, noticed, is “simultaneously a site of degradation and opportunity.”
Since the moment Li left his hometown in 2011, he has no longer had a single chance to go fishing at the sea. He has missed the sea, boundless and free. The moments when he was with his father on the ship, or when he was alone, have occasionally come back to his mind. He wants to work as a fisherman in New York City so badly, not only for the earning prospects, but also for the sense of joy and security he had with the sea. “Sea fishing is safer than food delivery,” said Li.
It is hard for someone who has only lived on the land to imagine that sea is a safer place. But for Li, that is where he belongs to. There are no apps overseeing how many fish you catch and driving you to catch more. And even if he seems to be bold and fearless in the way he rides his moped, he knows the risks.
However, Li has not found a way to become a fisherman in New York. On the one hand, it requires a license in sea fishing. Li does not understand English well enough to pass the test in obtaining the license although he knows perfectly how to operate the boat and how to fish. On the other hand, he is undocumented. He is stuck in app delivery.
“Do you still think of sea fishing?” I asked.
“No. There is no use thinking. It’s like you love someone who would never love you back,” said Li.
But apparently, fishing, if not sea fishing, recreational, if not commercial fishing, has played a huge part in his life outside food delivery in the city. Every year, Li follows the weather closely in spring. As it gets warmer, he goes to fishing near the bay.
April 7 this year, he drove to the south bay of Staten Island at 9pm night, cast the net and captured his first harvests of fish for the year and came back at 4am. The basses he captured would be on the dining table for a week. April 14, he went to fish again, the fourth time in the past week, and captured bass of around 5 pounds. He knew as the weather gets warmer, he would get bigger ones. Last May, he took home a 20-pound bass. “That could be worth almost $200 if I sold it in Brooklyn,” Li said.
Standing at the American Veterans Memorial Pier, end of the Bay Ridge Ave in Brooklyn, facing the sea, Li pointed towards the direction among the ships and high buildings along the coast. “Statue of Liberty,” Li said. I tried hard to locate it and was finally able to identify the tiny pale green statue from a distance.
“Have you been there?” I asked.
Li said he took ferry to visit it once in 2017, but he did not land on it and tour around. “I didn’t know we could get off because I didn’t understand what they were saying. I stayed on the ferry.”
This May will mark his tenth year landed in America. In the past decade, he paid back the huge debt and supported two children. Travelling back to his home has never been an option for him even when he lost his mother because once he left the United States, he would never be able to come back again without having obtained a legal status here; all his effort in searching for a new and better life would have been wasted.
Smuggling from Fuzhou now only costs less than $20,000, Li told me. The push-factor of illicit immigration from China has weakened due to the country’s economic development and less people feel motivated to step on the dangerous and sweating path. Some of Li’s acquittances in China had asked him to go back for the plenty of opportunities in China now where he may earn a better life.
“Are you going then?” I asked.
“No,” Li shook his head, looking away to the vast sea in front of him and said, “I don’t want to start from scratch again.”
“Where’s your hometown?” I asked another time when we met at the bay at the end of 58th Ave in Brooklyn. His moped was parked about ten feet away, all ready to go out for a full work day of food delivery after our brief meet-up.
He took out his phone, closed the delivery app on the screen and clicked on Google Maps. His two fingers, prematurely wrinkled from all his time outdoors and at sea, swiped the map across the Ocean Pacific, zoomed, zoomed and finally zoomed to a place at southeast China called “Do’an Village, Zulu Island,” a place where the typhoon and the Ghost Festival witnessed his birth, and a place he does not know if he will ever visit again before he dies.
This story was reported and written in April 2021.
