(BCTV) - Part 4

Only time will tell whether any of the boatloads of Chinese migrants will be able to stay and whether they'll find the new life they came looking for. But as we've been reporting in our News Hour investigation this week, if any of them head for what was probably their intended destination, New York City, the odds are against them.

Ted Chernecki reports on one migrant's escape from Fujian and how his new life at his journey's end has him yearning for the life he left behind.

Ted Chernecki, reporting: "New York, the city that never sleeps. A dazzling skyline brightly lit and full of life. But this is not the life in New York's Chinatown.

On this particularly dreary night at Joe's Shanghai restaurant, we find Cin Wen Zhang, a kitchen worker. He, like most workers here, is an illegal immigrant from China's Fujian province."

Peter Lam, translator: "Most people want to come to the United States or Canada because they think they have the chance to make more money. Most of the people who live over there are very poor. Some of them here from relatives how good it is in the U.S. and Canada...They want to come to have a better life."

Ted Chernecki, reporting: "Cin arrived by plane nine years ago. He left from Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, the same point of departure for all the boat people now arriving in B.C. And if you thought by looking at these pictures that he left nothing behind, you would be wrong. At the time he had a wife, their three-year-old daughter and son on the way."

Peter Lam, translator: "They had more than one child. If they found out, they would lock him up...He never saw the second child..."

Ted Chernecki, reporting: "Does he cry because he misses his children?"

Peter Lam, translator: "Yes...sometimes he cries and sometimes he feels sad."

Ted Chernecki, reporting: "The human cost incalculable. The living conditions insufferable. In this the financial capital of the world, Cin's world is meager. Very long hours at very low wages and then most of his earnings are spent on crammed living quarters. The rent for just one of these cubicles ranges from a thousand to two-and-a-half thousand dollars Canadian a month. And what ever's left, he doesn't keep anyway."

Peter Lam, translator: "Of all the money they make...most of it they send back to China."

Ted Chernecki, reporting: "He's had nine long years to think about the decision he made. And his conclusion: that if he could wind back the clock, he would've never come to New York."

Peter Lam, translator: "He thinks it is not worth it...If he had known he would miss his family so much, for that long, they can not see each other...(He wouldn't have come?) Yes."

Ted Chernecki, reporting: "But they keep on coming..."