A Chinese photographer captures his family’s immigration journey to America
When it was time to leave Beijing, Li Qiang gave away thousands of books and attended numerous farewell dinners, already beginning to miss the city he and his wife had always called home.
They crammed as much as they could into seven suitcases and boarded a 22-hour flight from Beijing to New York City. When they arrived late on the night of May 5, 2022, the Manhattan skyline guided the path to their hotel.
For the next 45 days, the couple and their two children — Shuishan Li or Ben, 9, and Xintian Li or Sweet Pea, 1 — lived amid their luggage, first in a hotel in Manhattan and then in Brooklyn.
“It was the first time our family lived permanently in a foreign country,” Qiang, 38, said through his wife Siqi Yang, 39, who interpreted this interview.
They spent busy, wondrous days walking the city’s streets, looking for apartments, contacting their son’s new school (a Chinese-English bilingual public school), buying furniture and kitchenware, and admiring the pigeons and street performers. They kept walking even after their feet were sore, stopping in Chinatown in lower Manhattan to buy Chinese spices, then Costco for diapers and other day-to-day essentials they needed for a fresh start in their new country.
Qiang’s son, Ben, embraced his new home, including the rush of the subway, which they rarely rode in China, and street performers. In one image, Ben climbs and swings wildly on the bars in the subway, while another passenger remains glued to his phone.
“I felt it’s worth recording our life in America,” he said. “I have seldom documented my family cohesively, and observed them closely enough. They were water and air to me in the past, important, but sometimes unnoticeable.”
He called the project “Fresh off the Boat” — the name of a sitcom following a Taiwanese family who has immigrated to the United States.
Unlike most immigration stories Qiang’s says he has seen filled with uncertainty, trauma and suffering, many of his photographs buzz with happiness and color, documenting the playful and painful everyday moments of family life over the last year.
“The daily life of my family members reflects the conflict and fusion of two different cultures and lifestyles, which are often ignored by mainstream media,” he said.
Qiang and his wife say they didn’t feel settled until their first night in their new empty apartment in the Lower East Side a month after their arrival.
On one of their first nights there, three of them squeezed onto a queen size mattress on the floor, the only furniture they had received. Their son, Shuishan Li, slept on top of two suitcases.
The image documented a moment of newness, he said. Soon the largely empty home would be filled with furniture and books and the daily energy of family life. “I felt we finally settled down,” Qiang said.
Although there was no light or WiFi, they listened to the soundtrack of the city’s police and firetruck and ambulance sirens. All four of them drifted off to sleep more quickly than usual.
“Our stomachs were full with the first meal we cooked, the smoke detector was triggered by the shrimp and cabbage I fried, four of us sat on a cardboard table, but the smell of familiar Chinese food brought us back to our hometown,” he said.
Qiang says he plans to continue documenting his family’s new life in the United States.
“I want to share it with people who have had similar experiences, like moving to a new place or meeting new challenges,” he said, adding “When I watched a soccer game in Yankee Stadium with my family, enjoy pizza, Popeyes and Shake Shack or a hot pot in Flushing — even after a long, tiring day walking around parks, museums and galleries in Manhattan, I feel fulfilled every day, and life is fresh and colorful.”