Word: englishness
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When the call came to emergency services, all the operator could decipher over the foreign voices howling in the background was a man yelling, "Sinking water, sinking water!" The operator implored the man to pass the phone to an English speaker, but he just kept shouting those two words before the line...
...police don't crack down on illegal immigration. Little Lin, who doesn't want his full name used, knows the journey will take months and cost at least $28,000, and that he will be in debt for years. But he can't wait to own a real English home, as he believes his brother living in Cambridge does. He will buy an suv, he says, red like the Chinese flag. One day, he will even open a Chinese restaurant, just like his brother has. "I cannot wait for my new life to begin," he says, pacing the beach...
...take about three years to repay the snakehead's fee, but hopes he'll be able to work off the debt more quickly. Then perhaps he and his brother will start a chain of restaurants together. It doesn't matter that Little Lin doesn't know how to cook. English people, his brother has told him, aren't too particular about what they eat. "Maybe when I return, I'll own three restaurants," he says. "Then my family will be proud of me, just like we are of my big brother...
...Chili beef," says Big Lin, ticking off the English words he can say with ease after a decade in Britain. "Lemon chicken. Garlic chicken." After that, the 32-year-old's voice trails off. There's not much more he can rattle off fluently. Life as an illegal immigrant has deflated the dreams he once had. Still, he must keep up appearances for his family back home. His brother thinks Big Lin owns his own restaurant. In reality, he sweats over a wok at someone else's takeout joint, six days a week. Nor does he own a house...
...long enough to destroy much of Africa's indigenous cultures and traditions," Godwin observes, "but not long enough to leave behind a durable replacement." Godwin's own story lends another layer of historical irony. In 2001 he learned that his father was not, as he had always believed, an English immigrant. He was a Polish Jew who had fled the Holocaust. "Being a white here," Godwin's father observes, dismayed at the rising chaos, "is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland...