MILPITAS, Calif. — The dining room lights are dimmed at the A&J Restaurant, a tiny strip-mall eatery where a handful of Chinese kitchen workers relax at tables during the lull between the lunch and dinner rush.
The customers gone, the owner away running errands, the place is as quiet as a chapel. The only noise is the hum of the cooler chilling the green bottles of Tsingtao beer and slabs of brown tofu.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday June 21, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 30 words Type of Material: Correction
Chinese restaurant: A front-page article June 14 about a minister who tends to Chinese restaurant workers referred to the A&J Restaurant in San Jose. The establishment's name is ASJ Restaurant.
It's time to pray with Esther Lou.
She breezes in saleswoman-friendly, a onetime Chinese restaurant owner turned religious crusader who knows her way around a professional kitchen and the exhausting lives endured by legions of low-paid food workers.
Pulling up a chair, she zeroes in on chef De Bin Hong, a thin man in a dirty white shirt and pants, a gold chain around his neck. She asks about his health and family. Then it's down to business: How is he coping with his gambling addiction?
Over time, Hong says, he has lost enough money "to buy two Mercedes." He has left work to gamble all night, returning just in time for the next day's shift.
In a flash, Lou's Bible is out, her glasses discarded onto the Formica table. Along with volunteer Li Xun, she lays her hand on Hong's shoulder. The three clamp their eyes shut.
"Please, God," Lou whispers, "when the urge to gamble comes again to this poor man, protect him from himself."
At 56, the Taiwan-born Lou is a restaurant shepherd of sorts, an evangelist who brings the holy word directly to her disparate flock: the stir-fry cooks, dumpling-makers and dishwashers who toil in the greasy confines of Chinese kitchens.
Nationwide, more than 1 million immigrants work in 41,350 Chinese restaurants -- from mom-and-pop takeouts to mammoth buffet enterprises employing hundreds, according to the Fremont, Calif.-based Chinese Restaurant News.
Though many restaurants hire non-Asian workers, Lou's ministry concentrates on the Chinese -- the people she knows best.
It's a subculture hidden from most Americans. Speaking little or no English, many Chinese immigrants must settle for dispiriting kitchen work -- laboring 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
Many, here illegally, have no access to labor unions or social service networks. They live in cramped restaurant-owned dormitories or in rented garages without cooking facilities, bathrooms or running water.
To cope with their harsh living conditions and mind-numbingly mundane work, many fall prey to gambling, drugs, alcohol and prostitution.
