For the past three years, as a researcher of legal consciousness in Asian and Canadian societies, I have interviewed Chinese immigrants and the lawyers who represent them, trying to understand why predatory practices — deceptive rental agreements and exploitative work arrangements — remain so common within this community. The advice from lawyers was always the same: sign a written contract, and carefully review all contractual terms and clauses before you do.That advice is important because, without it, cases tend to fall apart. Studies reveal that judges and lawyers alike report struggling with a lack of documentary evidence in cases involving Chinese immigrants. When disputes arise, there is little in terms of paperwork to settle things, only agreements made on a handshake and terms remembered differently by each side.Why do so many Chinese immigrants overwhelmingly choose not to sign contracts or discuss terms openly? The answers offered by previous research have been culture — specifically, Confucian values that favour informal trust over legal formality.To some extent, culture does play a role, but it is not a determining factor. My research points instead to structural inequalities, such as unrecognized foreign credentials and the disadvantaged footing immigrants occupy in the rental market.Challenging ‘the culture’ reasoningIt is common for Chinese immigrants to encounter landlords who encourage them to sign unfavourable rental agreements, and small business owners who fail to provide written employment contracts at all. The more stories I heard, the more I realized they had no choice but to forgo formality under those situations.Story after story drew the same line between limited opportunities and a reluctance to insist on contracts. Take Ling Chen, who arrived in Canada in 2018. Like many newcomers, she found that her overseas credentials and years of professional experience didn’t necessarily translate. And the industry she’d built a career in back home was effectively closed to her.Chen ended up working in a small Chinese restaurant instead. When that job ended abruptly without any explanation or notice, she suffered emotional distress from what she felt was unfair treatment. Knowing that she was disadvantaged without a written employment contract, Chen decided to move on without confronting the owner in any way. Chen told me that she had never thought about asking for a contract because she worried insisting on one might cost her the job before it started.Additionally, since the Canadian rental market generally favours tenants with local connections and credit scores, new Chinese immigrants often struggle to find housing upon arrival. When Mei Tan was trying to find an apartment for her family, she had no luck on mainstream rental platforms. Eventually, she finally got a reply from a landlord on a social media platform. She rushed to sign the lease without reviewing it carefully. The lease turned out to be exploitative and contradicted the verbal agreement.Tan’s experience captures something larger: marginalization in the rental market breeds anxiety, and anxiety is precisely what keeps new immigrants from pausing long enough to negotiate the terms in front of them.Contracts fuel predatory practices?While the law generally assumes that a reasonable person is always capable of entering contracts freely, I found that this neoliberal view of contracts does not always hold true.For the Chinese immigrants I spoke with, desperation for work and housing led them to forgo legal formality. As legal scholar Hila Keren argues, it is “not because they ‘freely’ choose to do so but because they did not have, or could not have found, a better alternative.”The neoliberal framing does real damage: it keeps victims of predatory practices outside the legal system that is meant to protect them. Legal professionals, and, painfully, Chinese immigrants themselves, tend to blame the victims who failed to take contracts seriously. And even when the victims go to court, the lack of documentary evidence often turns the process into a maze most can’t navigate alone.As a result, ill-intentioned landlords and employers manage to get away after repeatedly taking advantage of this vulnerable population because nothing stops them. They are emboldened to continue their predatory practices, as they know that it is unlikely for courts and authorities to intervene and hold them accountable. The strong need to trustWhen Chinese immigrants are “grasping at straws” in desperate situations, they have a strong desire to trust those who offer help. This makes them vulnerable to predatory practices.Although I focused on Chinese immigrants, the reluctance to rely on contracts is a phenomenon that is evident across cultures. Many people outside of the Chinese community also prefer to rely on a person’s word, a handshake or common honesty and decency than a signed document. Humans, in general, tend to want to trust.The solution is far more complicated than educating Chinese immigrants about the importance of contracts. Rather, one possible starting point would be asking Canadian courts, lawyers and the public to rethink the myth at the centre of all this — that entering a contract is always, for everyone, a free and equal choice.Because in the end, “choice” isn’t always available. Not when you’re under enough pressure, and not when every alternative has already run out.Qian Liu receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research.