For some families, even minimum wage was an unattainable American dream, and some émigrés made desperate, almost pathetic attempts to learn English, to help them break out of a ruthless job market. In San Francisco and New York, they enrolled in federally funded adult education courses to study English, but their age and physical exhaustion from sixty-hour work weeks made it difficult to concentrate. More significant, their isolation isolation from native-speaking Americans prevented them from practicing English on a daily basis. (Chang 267)