Blessing scams in New York’s Chinatowns – immigrants see their life savings spirited away

Wang Jing is so ashamed of what happened to her that, for the first hour of our conversation, at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office in New York, she makes no eye contact, as if doing so will break some spell and prevent her from finishing her story.

She speaks haltingly in Mandarin, the only language we share; she would be more comfortable in Cantonese or Taishanese, the dialect of the small city in China’s Guangdong province on whose rural outskirts she was born.

But, more than that, she seems unused to being listened to in any language. She asks me not to use her real name and has brought along her son, who is in his late 20s. He sits impassive but watchful, accustomed – like many children of immigrants – to making sure that his mother is not taken advantage of.

Wang, who works as a health aide for elderly Chinese, is 61 and careworn. Since coming to the United States 32 years ago, she has been outside New York just once, and the only places she has lived in are the Manhattan Chinatown and the Brooklyn one, in Bensonhurst.

One afternoon in late April of 2016, she was leaving a store in Bensonhurst when an agitated woman in her early 40s rushed up to her. “I’m looking for a doctor called Xu,” the woman said, in rapid-fire Cantonese. “It’s urgent – for my daughter.”

Wang had been to plenty of traditional Chinese-medicine practitioners in the neighbourhood, but she had never heard of a Dr Xu. “He is very well known here,” the woman went on. “I think he’s my daughter’s only hope.”