TaoHeng Chen: When I was little, my mom would tell me I was good luck. She always said, “You have a big nose and big ears, which means you bring big luck.” She always took me along when she went to play cards with her friends. She would meet them in basements or apartments in Chinatown, behind creepy metal doors, where they have to know you to let you in.
[Sounds of someone knocking on a door, a door creaking open. Chatter once inside the room.]
TaoHeng: These rooms are filled with cigarette smoke and chit-chat. People sit around tables playing cards and passing around tens and twenties. It’s almost like a family game night – but with money involved. To this day, whenever my mom’s not working, she meets her friends to gamble at one of these apartments. She works long hours and she says this is her way of relieving stress. My parents moved here from China when I was five and they’ve worked hard ever since. My mom found a job at a beauty supply store and my dad works at a restaurant. They just wanna make enough money to live a comfortable life. But gambling has gotten in the way of that. When I was 12, my dad lost 30,000 dollars in one month in Atlantic City. When he broke the news to my mom, they almost got a divorce. And it took them seven years to pay off the debt. I thought my family was the only one dealing with this. But as I got older, I realized we weren’t alone. A lot of families in our community have been hurt because of gambling.
Kaitlin Mui: It’s not necessarily putting us in poverty but it’s definitely taking a significant amount of our income.
TaoHeng: That’s my friend Kaitlin Mui. She’s also Chinese and she grew up going to Atlantic City all the time with her parents. She told me casinos give out gifts, and incentives.
Kaitlin: They offer, you know, free hotel rooms, free buffets. So much of the stuff we own is from these casinos. Like, I have a projector and it literally says the name of the casino we got it from, Borgata. Our pots and pans might even be from there, I’m not even joking.
TaoHeng: Kaitlin and I are youth organizers. And we’re passionate about issues that affect our communities. Since last year we’ve been fighting against a proposed casino in Flushing, Queens. Ultimately, three new casino licenses will be issued next year for the New York City area. And whether the new casinos end up in Flushing or Times Square or Coney Island, they’ll all be dangerously close.
Kaitlin: Even, like, my family, who’s super into gambling, I mention this and they’re like, it’s not a good idea to put a casino near us. Like, even they're a bit self aware.
TaoHeng: And we aren’t alone in our concerns. Earlier this year, State Assemblymember Grace Lee and State Sen John Liu hosted a roundtable discussion at City Hall.
Audio from roundtable: Now for quite some time I’ve been somewhat aware of the harmful impact that gambling and specifically addiction to gambling has had disproportionately on the Asian American community
TaoHeng: The conversation brought together experts and researchers, including Yi-Ling Tan, who works on health equity policy at NYU Langone Health.
Audio from roundtable: Research suggests that Asian Americans are at greater risk of problem gambling than the general population.
Simona Kwon is an NYU professor who researches health outcomes in ethnic and racial communities. She said certain factors make Asian American immigrants, and low income people in general, drawn to gambling.
Audio from roundtable: Gambling represents a way to make money, is an outlet for stress, and casinos are often the only recreations that are open late at night after work shifts, when other types of recreation are closed.
TaoHeng: This reminded me of my parents. How my mom said she gambles to relieve stress. How my dad was hoping to win money to open his own restaurant one day. What I was more surprised to hear from Simona Kwon – is that casinos specifically target Asian Americans.
Audio from roundtable: Asian themed games, foods, musical acts and designs are key strategies to reaching and engaging East Asian gamblers. There is targeted and marketed free casino buses with voucher distributions daily in Chinatowns in Manhattan and Queens.
TaoHeng: When Resorts World Catskills casino opened, the Times Herald-Record reported on the ways the casino was hoping to “wow” the Asian market. Things like hiring a feng shui consultant to help design the building. And including games that originated in China, like pai gow and sic bo. These elements can make casinos a place where many Asian Americans feel welcome. Which is significant because about 80 percent of Asian Americans here in the US say they do not feel like they belong. That’s from an annual survey by the Asian American Foundation.
Ben Hires: Mainstream society isn’t always geared towards immigrant communities, right, in terms of sort of just basic language access, basic feeling welcome and so forth.
TaoHeng: That’s Ben Hires. He leads the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, a social services group that helped put together a research report on problem gambling. It found that gambling is often tied to a sense of isolation that Asian immigrants feel in the US.
Ben Hires: People are just bored. They're not engaged. They don’t have a big family network perhaps, or they don’t have a big friend network or, you know, they don’t feel connected to their communities. And so again, the casino understands that and kind of says, hey, we can fill that gap.
TaoHeng: The Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center is now trying to create alternatives for people.
Ben Hires: So we’re doing ping pong. We’re doing karaoke. We don’t necessarily market it as like, you know, this is an anti-gambling ping pong night, right? It’s more of like: Build a place where people do feel like they belong. People can have a good time. People feel like they’re welcome.
TaoHeng: I always looked at gambling as a problem my parents struggle with. Now I know the real problem is the sense of isolation they feel. This is all much bigger than fighting against casinos in our neighborhoods. People will always be able to find some place to gamble .. as long as they feel that lack of belonging. And we need to find solutions for that. For WNYC, I’m Radio Rookies reporter TaoHeng Chen.