Guess the party: Pol didn’t really work in a sweatshop…
n powerful new TV ads, emotional music plays over pictures of city controller candidate John Liu as a little boy.
“He came here at 5, and by seven had to work in a sweatshop to make ends meet,” a narrator drones over images of women hunched over machines in a crowded factory.
“Working in finance taught Liu how to account for every penny, but working in that sweatshop as a kid taught him why we need to.”
There’s only one problem with the compelling story of his immigrant childhood toiling beside his mother in a sweatshop — his parents and two of his mother’s friends say it never happened.
She worked at home.
“I never go to the factory,” Liu’s mother, Jamy Liu, 69, told the Daily News of her 10 years in the garment industry.
“I just go there and pick up some material and bring home because I had to take care of my kids,” she said in an interview arranged by her son.
As a young boy, Liu helped his mother work on the knitting machine — first in the living room of the family’s Flushing, Queens, ap