Last October, about 250 people packed the indoor gymnasium at the Muslim Center of New York in Flushing, Queens, for a town hall organized by the Flushing Workers Center to oppose Met Park, a proposed casino and entertainment complex at nearby Citi Field.

Baojin Qiu, a small Chinese woman in her seventies with light-brown hair, sharp eyes, and a fierce temper, was the first to testify.

The targets of her anger were the $8 billion Met Park, developed by Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, and State Senator John Liu, whose district includes Flushing and part of the Citi Field area. Met Park was one of the finalists to win the first three casino permits in the New York City area. Senator Liu earlier last year had sponsored the alienation bill that reclassified the Citi Field parking lot from public to private use, enabling it to be used for Met Park.

“John Liu, you are breaking my family,” Qiu said, speaking in Mandarin with the heavy accent of the southern-Chinese dialect she grew up speaking before she emigrated to the U.S. in 1993. “I’m telling you, you asshole, you are sucking the blood of the common people.” 

For Qiu, the casino was welcoming gambling into a community vulnerable to its risks. Her husband and three sons had been lifelong gamblers who racked up overwhelming debts, forcing her to abandon her old life in China and restart in New York. 

“Shame on you, John Liu,” she concluded, and the gymnasium roared. 

Qiu said later that her speech had been entirely impromptu. “[The organizers] asked me for a script, but I don’t have one because I’m illiterate. All the words grew out of my body and from all the bitterness I’ve swallowed,” Qiu said.

At that point, Met Park was two approvals away from becoming a reality, headed to the state Gaming Facilities Location Board in December. But could this new coalition move fast enough to stop it?

A life embittered by gambling

Qiu was born in a coastal village near Fuzhou, China, in the 1950s. After marrying at 20, she worked long days at a bakery and a hair salon to escape poverty. But her income kept disappearing.

One day, Qiu’s aunt burst through the doors of the hair salon and pulled her aside. “I just saw your husband gambling!” she whispered. Mahjong gambling in Fuzhou was widespread, but it was an after-work entertainment. Gambling during the day told Qiu that something was wrong.  

That night, Qiu confronted her husband and asked to accompany him to work. He refused and scolded her for prying, but Qiu knew that he had gone gambling again the next day. After failed business attempts, he gambled more and became abusive.

When her oldest son turned 15, Qiu was already working three jobs while raising three sons and one daughter. They owed so much money that she couldn’t possibly cover their debts anymore.

One day in early 1993, after an intense argument with her husband, Qiu decided to leave. She remembered her relatives saying that people earned big money in the U.S. She took her only two changes of clothes and 30 yuan (about $4) and headed to the U.S.

With help from relatives, Qiu traveled to the coastal city of Guangzhou. After three days of hiding in nearby mountains, she and 100 others descended to the coast at night, waded into the sea, and boarded fishing boats that ferried them to a cargo ship bound for Maryland.

“My daughter was just one year old then, and I never got to see her grow up,” Qiu lamented. 

For three months, they crammed in a dark cabin, oblivious to what was happening outside as the ship crossed the Pacific. A storm hit Maryland as the ship approached the shore, forcing it to stay in open water for days. The undocumented travelers couldn’t wait any longer: the food stock was just enough for the journey, and with the unexpected delay, people were starting to starve. 

Eventually, the crew sent a fishing boat to take the stowaways ashore. One by one, they climbed out of the cargo ship’s window and jumped down into the boat below. Qiu says many of her companions broke their legs, ankles, or arms, but she was fortunate to have landed unharmed. 

After she arrived, Qiu was detained for three months before being granted asylum and settling in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, in the city’s predominantly Fuzhounese “third Chinatown.” She worked at a restaurant, obtained her green card, and in 2000, sponsored her husband and four children to join her. All three sons, despite being barely adults, had already followed their father’s example and started gambling. 

She made a pact with her husband: when he got to the U.S., he needed to find a job and stop gambling. But he failed to secure one, and spent entire days calling his friends in China. In a few weeks, he asked Qiu where the closest gambling venue was. She refused to tell him, but, she recalls, he simply shrugged and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find out.”

He started gambling again, traveling to nearby casinos with other elderly Chinese. Eight years later, in 2008, she decided to leave him again.

“I can live by myself and earn my money. I can be independent, and I don’t need a husband,” she told him. She moved to Flushing with the children. 

Gambling addiction among Chinese Americans

In many ways, Qiu’s story is an epitome of the gambling addiction that disproportionately haunts Chinese Americans. According to Professor Wooksoo Kim of Buffalo University, a scholar of Asian immigrant welfare, the rate of gambling addiction among Asian Americans is estimated to be double that of the general population. In her research in Manhattan Chinatown, every elderly Chinese interviewee was either personally involved or knew someone with gambling addictions.

A 2021 Massachusetts Gaming Commission report attributed the higher percentage of addiction among Asians to both a more permissive gambling culture and the social isolation of living in a foreign country. According to Kim, while gamblers in China mostly play private games, their immigration to the U.S. coincided with the expanding legalization of gambling since the 1980s. New migrants, typically working-class elders with limited English, often seek comfort in casinos. 

The industry also reinforced these patterns. Fion Chong, managing director of Honor Global Entertainment & Consulting in Hong Kong, said that casinos typically select sites in underprivileged communities to bring in economic development. She said that while gambling is “in the blood” of the Chinese people, responsible services and interventions could prevent it from becoming an addiction. 

Asked if Met Park could realistically uphold that level of social responsibility, she firmly shook her head and said no. 

Qiu has lived in a small, stifling apartment in downtown Flushing for the past 16 years with four others, including two of her sons. In 2011, she began doing 24-hour shifts as a home health-care worker. Her mental and physical health deteriorated, forcing her to quit in 2019. But the job also placed her in contact with the Flushing Workers Center, which was fighting against the system of wage theft in which home-care workers get paid for only 13 hours of a 24-hour shift. Sen. Liu has sponsored several bills to prohibit 24-hour shifts. 

Qiu worked as a street vendor, waking up at 5 a.m. to peddle clothing before the 11 a.m. police patrol. For the rest of the day, she would visit clinics for her health problems. Although her husband occasionally asked to borrow money, she could mostly ignore his requests. Her sons grew out of gambling and started working at factories and restaurants. Her daughter got married. Qiu felt like her life had finally begun to settle, and she could imagine a peaceful retired life in Flushing.

When she learned from Flushing Workers Center organizers that a new casino would be built right next to Flushing, she saw the troubles from her old life coming back. She was worried that it would lure her sons into gambling again. More importantly, she said, she couldn’t bear to see gambling destroy other families in the way it destroyed hers.

The fight for casinos in New York City

Conquering New York City has long been the dream of the casino industry. In 2013, New York State legalized casino businesses and authorized seven commercial casino licenses, with three reserved for the metropolitan area.

In 2023, Met Park entered the race with six other bidders. By last October, it was one of the last three, along with Resorts World in Jamaica and Bally’s Casino in the Bronx, as community boards rejected proposals elsewhere in the city.

The proposals envisioned great economic benefits. Met Park was projected to generate 6,000 permanent jobs and $3.9 billion in annual revenue. Hard Rock described it as an “economic engine,” transforming an old parking lot into a casino, a food court, a public park, and a daycare center. According to the Gaming Facilities Location Board, the three new casinos would generate $13 billion in tax revenue from 2027 to 2036, most of which would be allocated to education and public transportation. Even in a $115 billion casino industry, these projections stand out.

“There is no safer bet in our city than Queens and its unparalleled promise,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said in a recent statement, praising the casinos’ prospects “to connect tens of thousands of Queens families to good-paying union jobs and millions of residents and tourists alike to world-class entertainment.”

After two public hearings last September at Queens Borough Hall, where an overwhelming majority testified in favor of Met Park, the Community Advisory Committee unanimously voted to advance the proposal.

But dissident voices were brewing. Religious leaders issued statements against gambling. The Urban Institute warned that property values in Flushing are expected to rise, displacing a neighborhood already undergoing heavy gentrification. A Jackson Heights resident said the casino would induce so much development that it would kill Queens diverse immigrant culture. A mother said she could not trust her kids to take the same subway to school with gamblers who have just lost everything. An activist said the approval process was unjust: Cohen spent millions to lobby for Met Park, which she believed explained the support from big nonprofits like Hamilton-Madison House and the Chinese American Planning Council.

When Flushing Workers Center launched the anti-casino campaign last year, it brought together an unlikely mix. Alongside Queens residents who were first-time activists were retired Chinese home care workers and international students from China, most of whom were not even U.S. citizens.

One of the core organizers was Y.C., an international student from China who asked to be identified by her initials for fear of retaliation. She said the question was painfully simple: “who really benefits from a casino?”

To her, the answer was not Flushing. She believed the casino’s location near the Asian community was no accident. Instead, it tells a story of developers colluding with powerful politicians to target an immigrant community.

Flushing as the “perfect” casino target

Mae Ngai, a prominent historian of Asian American immigration, described the Gold Rush Chinese immigrants of the 1850s as “impossible subjects”: vital to the construction of American society, but systematically denied legal citizenship. Despite dramatic shifts in the status of Chinese immigrants today, exclusion has persisted in new forms.

These dynamics play out prominently in Flushing, one of the fastest-growing Chinatowns outside Asia over the past two decades. Dr. Shaolu Yu, an urban geographer who’s studied Flushing, wrote that ethnic enclaves often develop self-regulating boundaries that keep them politically peripheral. Some Chinese people have risen out of these enclaves to become the national image of the “model minority.” Others, especially newer, working-class immigrants, were trapped and disappeared in them. 

This isolation is what makes Flushing a target for the casino industry, Y.C. says. The neighborhood has Asian Americans with a higher rate of gambling addictions, and working-class immigrants are politically underrepresented and easy to overlook. 

Senator Liu’s office did not respond to multiple requests from The Indypendent for comment.

On a freezing mid-November afternoon, protestors gathered outside the Flushing Queens Library for another rally. The crowd was small at first, with about 100 people holding signs like “Don’t Gamble with Our Community!”. Qiu stood among them, clustered with other former home care workers.

“Our elected officials and community leaders, instead of standing with the working class, have decided, hey, it might be a good idea to bet on a casino as a way of investing in this community,” Y.C. shouted into the mic in Mandarin. “We stand here today, and we are the proof that these people are lying. Flushing does not need a casino. Flushing opposes the casino!”

The pavement filled with a dense crowd in heavy winter jackets. Organizers later estimated that 800 to 1,000 people had shown up.

On Dec. 5, the Gaming Facility Location Board approved all three casinos. On Dec. 14, Flushing Workers Center organized a small rally amid three inches of snow at Corona Plaza, demanding that Governor Kathy Hochul stop the Met Park casino. The next day, Met Park received its license. 

From the outside, it would seem that the fight over the casino ended when the legal battle was over. But it will require multiple permits before construction, and activists still see opportunities to challenge those decisions and stop the project. 

Jack Hu, one of the speakers of the November rally, said the turnout showed him what the community could do. It proved that Flushing is not a politically apathetic community destined to accept gentrification and gambling, but a neighborhood capable of mobilizing and defending itself.

Maybe the fight came too late to stop the casino, but the struggle for a growing political voice in Flushing has just begun, Y.C. said.

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