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Deliveryman relives the fear of 81-hour elevator ordeal
By NINA BERNSTEIN (The New York Times)
Updated: 2005-08-17 14:41
In the first sit-down interview since he was belatedly rescued in April and
then promptly dropped from sight, Mr. Chen spoke yesterday about the lasting
results of his confinement: his crippling fear of the dark, his terror of
immigration authorities, and the stomach pains that have plagued him since he
was trapped in a brightly lighted 4-by-6?-foot box without food or water,
thinking that he was going to die.
Ming Kuang Chen
after his rescue. He would not allow photographs Tuesday. [The New York
Times] | "I'm afraid to go anywhere dark now,"
said Mr. Chen, 35, speaking through an interpreter in the office of City
Councilman John C. Liu, who has become one of the few people he trusts. "I have
to get about in the daylight hours." As for elevators, he added, he has yet to
enter one alone.
Now, after months of moving from place to place, mainly out of state, to
avoid being picked up as an illegal immigrant, he said he had returned to New
York for one day, for medical help.
Psychiatrists call such symptoms classic hallmarks of post-traumatic stress
disorder, and spoke of barriers to treatment like language, culture and money.
But for Mr. Chen, who is deeply indebted for his passage to the United States
and supports a wife and son in his home village in the Fujian province of China,
his illness mainly represents a disastrous obstacle to delivery work in the
nationwide network of Chinese restaurants where illegal immigrants like him are
dispatched from New York to toil night and day, six days a week.
Last spring, aspects of his elevator ordeal came to seem strangely symbolic
of the status of illegal immigrants in New York - omnipresent in the everyday
economy of shrimp-fried-rice deliveries, yet virtually invisible in their legal
no-man's land. A security camera had been operating in the elevator car the
whole time that he was stuck there, even as the police, fearing the worst, were
conducting an aggressive door-to-door search of the Bronx apartment tower and
sending scuba divers into a nearby reservoir to search for his body.
To Dr. Lynne Tan, a Montefiore Medical Center psychiatrist who has helped
arrange treatment for Mr. Chen at no fee, there is also wider symbolism in his
traumatic experience of helplessness in the elevator, where his cries went
unheard, misunderstood or unheeded for so long.
In that sense, it is the immigrant experience at its worst. "He can't speak
English," she said. "He was trying to speak through the intercom and couldn't
communicate. This is to be completely helpless and not to be able to ask for
help."
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