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The Accused
One afternoon in the fall of 2009, Jie Chen and Ariel Chi walked into the
headquarters of Abacus Federal Savings Bank, near Canal Street, to inquire
about a mortgage. Chi, who was twenty-four and worked in customer service at
a pharmaceutical company, had spent nearly her entire life in the United
States, after her family came from Taiwan. Chen, her husband, who was a year
younger, had arrived in his late teens and spoke little English. They had
been married for a year and spent almost all their time in New York’s
various Chinese enclaves, especially Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Chen
worked at a hair salon. They’d been living in Chen’s studio apartment, not
far away, but Chi was now pregnant with their first child and they needed a
bigger place.
The plan was to buy a two-family house and rent out one of the units.
Looking around the neighborhood, they found one with a small garden out
front. The asking price was seven hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and
they began putting together a down payment with money from savings and
relatives. The difficulty was getting a loan. The subprime-mortgage crisis
of 2008 had exposed lax lending standards throughout the banking industry
and credit was tight. Chen had no credit history and was paid largely in
cash. “We were asking everywhere,” he told me in Mandarin when I visited
him recently at the salon. Many people he knew in Chinatown had similar
problems. His co-workers at the salon suggested a solution. “People said go
to Abacus. Go to Abacus,” he recalled. A hair washer told him, “It
approves loans without too much fuss.”
....
全文链接
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-accused-jiayan
One afternoon in the fall of 2009, Jie Chen and Ariel Chi walked into the
headquarters of Abacus Federal Savings Bank, near Canal Street, to inquire
about a mortgage. Chi, who was twenty-four and worked in customer service at
a pharmaceutical company, had spent nearly her entire life in the United
States, after her family came from Taiwan. Chen, her husband, who was a year
younger, had arrived in his late teens and spoke little English. They had
been married for a year and spent almost all their time in New York’s
various Chinese enclaves, especially Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where Chen
worked at a hair salon. They’d been living in Chen’s studio apartment, not
far away, but Chi was now pregnant with their first child and they needed a
bigger place.
The plan was to buy a two-family house and rent out one of the units.
Looking around the neighborhood, they found one with a small garden out
front. The asking price was seven hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, and
they began putting together a down payment with money from savings and
relatives. The difficulty was getting a loan. The subprime-mortgage crisis
of 2008 had exposed lax lending standards throughout the banking industry
and credit was tight. Chen had no credit history and was paid largely in
cash. “We were asking everywhere,” he told me in Mandarin when I visited
him recently at the salon. Many people he knew in Chinatown had similar
problems. His co-workers at the salon suggested a solution. “People said go
to Abacus. Go to Abacus,” he recalled. A hair washer told him, “It
approves loans without too much fuss.”
....
全文链接
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-accused-jiayan
