The Snakehead Read online

  From Singapore the ship sailed through the Strait of Malacca and across the Indian Ocean to Kenya, Tobing continued. In Mombasa it took on two hundred more passengers. With a finger, Captain Tobing indicated the route from Kenya: south along the east coast of Africa, down around the Cape of Good Hope, then up through the Atlantic, past Brazil and Central America to the East Coast of the United States. There was something peculiar about this route. It would have been vastly easier to cross the Pacific, in a straight line from China to California. The Golden Venture had traveled the wrong way around the planet, a journey of some 17,000 miles. In total, the trip had taken 120 days, twice as long as the storied voyage of the Mayflower, which brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth in 1620.

  Even as the officers interrogated Tobing, the passengers were being led away. A convoy of blue-and-white Mass Transit Authority buses had been commandeered to transport the Chinese to an INS detention facility in a federal building at 201 Varick Street in downtown Manhattan. No one could pinpoint precisely when it had happened, but a subtle categorical shift had occurred; the passengers had been reclassified. They were no longer shipwrecked refugees, no longer the huddled masses, the wretched refuse of the teeming shore, no longer the homeless, tempest-tossed, that Emma Lazarus extolled in the 1883 poem inscribed in bronze on the Statue of Liberty a few short miles away. They were invaders. In the days and weeks to come, numerous people who were on the beach that morning would describe the arrival of hordes of Chinese as resembling the Normandy invasion—a storming of the beaches, a waterborne assault on the United States. Once the immediate logistical challenge of saving scores of people from drowning had subsided, the daunting gravity of the situation set in: some three hundred undocumented foreigners had just landed in the media capital of the United States. It was the single largest arrival of illegal aliens in modern American history, and the whole thing was unfolding in real time on national television. Before the Chinese boarded the buses, someone determined that they should be handcuffed, and every major news channel captured footage of the men being frogmarched into the buses, decked out in surgical masks and triage tags and flexicuffed together in twos. As dozens of police officers stood guard, bus after bus filled up and slowly wheezed away.

  All that remained on the beach were the strewn belongings that had washed ashore, cast-off possessions and crude souvenirs, the detritus of the crash and the rescue: discarded cardboard suitcases floating in the shallows; torn white plastic bags in which the jumpers had packed a dry change of clothes; empty gallon jugs of Taiwanese frying oil, which some had clung to for flotation; a few stray bottles of orange drink from Kenya. All this jetsam washed up through the morning, along with ragged bits of soggy blue paper: air-mail stationery, for letters home.

  The only Chinese who remained on the beach were the dead. For a time it was unclear how many they were. The initial count was eight, but that was lowered after it was determined that some of the bodies had been counted twice. Along with the two cardiac arrest victims that Bill Mundy had dealt with, the bodies of three who had drowned washed up that morning, and another later in the day. In the coming weeks, clam dredgers and fishermen would stumble upon four more bodies, bringing the total who perished to ten.

  Little was known about the dead. They were undocumented, in the most literal sense—they had no papers and offered no clues. A few had New York telephone numbers written in permanent marker on the waistbands of their underwear, which enabled authorities to track down family members in the city. Four of the bodies were identified and sent back to China for burial. But the others just lay there in refrigerated vaults in Manhattan, waiting to be claimed. Early on, two Chinatown residents who thought a relative might be among the dead ventured into the medical examiner’s office, only to be accosted by immigration officials, handcuffed, and interrogated about their own immigration status. Word spread in the neighborhood, and no one took the risk of going to identify the bodies. Ten months later, six of the bodies were still there, unclaimed and unburied. Local residents pitched in $6,000 to pay for their cremation at a cemetery in New Jersey.

  Of the survivors, thirty or so were taken to hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens and treated for hypothermia, exposure, exhaustion, and various injuries. The rest ended up in the INS holding center at 201 Varick. The facility had only 225 beds, not enough to accommodate the Golden Venture passengers. The immigration authorities were overwhelmed, ill-equipped to deal with this number of new arrivals.

  President Bill Clinton had been in office for only six months. He had not yet appointed a director of the INS. As agency officials scrambled to house and process the passengers, they had to contend with the press as well. The arrival of the ship in New York was a sensational event. The New York Times alone assigned two dozen reporters to the story. The man who stepped into the leadership vacuum at the INS and presented himself to the cameras and microphones to address the situation was the agency’s New York district director, Bill Slattery. Slattery had grown up in Newark, New Jersey, and done stints in the Marines and on the Texas Border Patrol before being assigned to the New York office of the INS, where he quickly rose through the ranks. He was extremely ambitious, and tough—tough on illegal immigrants and tough on his own subordinates. “A meat eater, not a grass eater,” one colleague said.

  “This is the twenty-fourth ship that the U.S. government has encountered since August of 1991,” Slattery told reporters. “Almost all the aliens are Chinese nationals coming from Fukien province.” (Fujian is sometimes pronounced “Fukien,” and the Fujianese are also known as Fukienese.) In the past nine months alone, two thousand illegal Chinese had been captured trying to enter the country, he said. Two weeks earlier a freighter had slipped beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and deposited 240 Fujianese on a San Francisco pier. The following day, 57 more had been discovered locked in a warehouse in New Jersey.

  The fee to reach America was $35,000, with a small down payment due before the trip began and the balance owed if the migrants survived the journey. Strictly speaking, this was “human smuggling” rather than “human trafficking.” Though the terms are often used interchangeably, they describe two different crimes. Human trafficking generally involves some form of deception or exploitation, where an individual is misled about where she is going or what she will be doing when she gets there and is often pushed into sex work or forced labor. Human smuggling is a risky and often extremely dangerous undertaking, but migrants generally enter into it with their eyes open; no one is telling them they will be models or waitresses when they arrive, and incidents of smugglers forcing migrants into prostitution, while not unheard of, are exceedingly rare. Still, human smuggling is a rough and exploitative business. Slattery explained that the poor Chinese undertook enormous debts to make the journey and then spent years working as indentured servants, turning over their earnings to the shady underworld entrepreneurs who financed their passage.

  “In effect, slavery here in the U.S.,” one reporter prompted.

  “That’s right,” Slattery replied.

  Several miles away, inside a small shop at 47 East Broadway, in New York’s Chinatown, a woman watched the news unfold on television. She was short and pudgy, with a broad face, small, wide-set eyes, and a hangdog expression. She spoke almost no English; her hair was cut in a sensible shoulder-length bob; and she favored the cheap, utilitarian apparel of her countrymen from Fujian Province. She worked long hours in the store, selling clothing and simple goods, and in a restaurant downstairs, which served Fujianese specialties like oyster cakes and fishball soup to the newly arrived Chinese peasants who had settled in the neighborhood. When a truckload of supplies came, neighbors saw her hauling the goods into the shop. She could have been mistaken for one of those destitute peasants herself.

  But in fact she was a very wealthy woman, the owner of the shop and the restaurant and the five-story brick building that housed them. Her name was Cheng Chui Ping, but everyone in the neighborhood called her Ping Jie—Big Sister Ping, or s
imply Sister Ping, a casual honorific, a gesture of respect. At the age of forty-four, she wasn’t just a shopkeeper and restaurateur but something like a village elder in the claustrophobically intimate corner of Chinatown where she resided. She was a banker of sorts, and something else as well. She was what the Chinese call a shetou, or snakehead, a kind of immigration broker who charges steep fees to smuggle people out of China and into other countries. She had pioneered the China-to-Chinatown route in the early 1980s, and from her humble shop on East Broadway she had developed a reputation as one of the most reliable—and successful—snakeheads on the planet. In Chinese communities from Europe to South America to the United States, Sister Ping had become a well-burnished brand name, one that connoted safe, illicit delivery from point A to point B; the Cadillac of global human smuggling.

  But as she watched the news that morning, she brooded, and grumbled that she had come in for a run of bad luck lately. She had helped arrange the financing for the voyage of the Golden Venture, and she had personally received fees from two of the passengers on board. Sister Ping didn’t know it yet, but one of those passengers was among the dead.

  Chapter Two

  Leaving Fujian

  NO ONE knows precisely how many ethnic Chinese live outside of China, but estimates range from 40 to 50 million or more. After the descendants of African slaves, the overseas Chinese, as they are often called, represent the largest diaspora on the planet. America no doubt saw the occasional Chinese trader prior to the mid-nineteenth century, but the history of the Chinese in the United States did not really get under way until one January day in 1848, when a foreman at John Sutter’s mill, on the south fork of the American River in northern California, fished several pieces of glittering metal from the water, metal that “could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.” It was gold that first drew the Chinese to America, and it was visions of a paradise where backbreaking labor was lavishly repaid that led the nineteenth-century Chinese fortune-seekers who first came to this country to call it Jinshan, or Golden Mountain. The colloquialism somehow managed to survive the actual privations that the pioneer experience held in store, the eventual disappearance of the gold itself, and the shifting fortunes of Chinese Americans over the ensuing decades. The name just stuck. So much so, in fact, that it still endures today.

  China was in a state of upheaval during the mid-nineteenth century, demoralized by the Opium Wars with Great Britain. The first Chinese to arrive in California sent word back across the Pacific of a nation of unclaimed land, plentiful timber, and gold that you could pluck from the ground. At that time America was a sparsely populated country; only 23 million people lived in the United States, compared with 430 million in China. Young Chinese men began abandoning their villages and leaving for America in droves. Two thousand arrived in 1848; four years later, 20,000 entered through the port of San Francisco alone. But for all their numbers and the vastness of the nation in which they were born, the nineteenth-century Chinese who came to the Golden Mountain originated from a remarkably small corner of China—a handful of counties on the west side of the Pearl River Delta, around the southern city of Canton (or, as it’s known today, Guangzhou). In fact, until the 1960s, most Chinese in America could trace their roots to an area roughly half the size of the state of Delaware.

  By 1867, nearly 70 percent of all mineworkers west of the Rockies were Chinese. When the railroad barons elected to stitch together the fractious country with a single transcontinental rail network, constructing the Central Pacific Railroad to connect the Union Pacific with the existing eastern lines, Chinese workers dynamited the tunnels and laid the rails. Charlie Crocker, the chief contractor for the Central Pacific, was a big believer in Chinese labor and deployed recruiters to Canton, observing that a race of people who had managed to build the Great Wall could certainly build a railroad. It was thankless work. The Chinese were paid a pittance, less even than their Irish counterparts, and many died from accidental blasts, disease, abuse at the hands of their employers, or attacks from Native Americans, who may have recognized the railroad for what it was: an incursion upon their homeland that once established would be impossible to undo. More than one of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age was built on Chinese labor. But the endeavor took a devastating toll on the Chinese. Over a thousand Chinese workers perished while building the railroad. Twenty thousand pounds of bones were shipped back to China.

  If analogies to slave labor spring to mind, they were hardly lost on Americans at the time. When the Civil War ended, some southern newspapers began explicitly editorializing that one way to compensate for the emancipation of black slaves was to shift agricultural work to imported “coolies” from China. “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro,” the Vicksburg Times remarked. “We therefore say let the Coolies come.” The demand for Chinese laborers was so intense that it gave rise to a highly efficient apparatus for importing them. Chinese “travel agencies,” some of them affiliated with triads, the secret societies that dominated organized crime in China, sprang up in San Francisco and went into business securing transportation to America for migrant workers. Penniless gold rushers could book passage on American ships bound for California without putting any money down. In lieu of a fee they simply pledged a portion of their income once they arrived. The means of conveyance was so-called coolie clippers, which bore more than a passing resemblance to slave ships and confined their Chinese cargo to the hold, occasionally in chains or bamboo cages. Once they arrived, the workers paid their dues to the travel agencies, and when debtors failed to pay, the Chinese brokers sometimes arranged to hold their families hostage, as a form of human security.

  One sorry irony of the early Chinese experience in America was the unintended consequences of the trans-American railroad the Cantonese laborers helped to construct. The euphoria of the gold rush began to dissipate almost as quickly as it had begun, when what surface gold could be easily snatched had already been snatched and what was left proved difficult to retrieve. Taxed as “foreign miners” and then driven out of the mining business altogether, and cut loose by the railroad once the golden spike joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines in Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1863, the Chinese took up menial jobs in settlements throughout the West. But the very railroad tracks the Chinese had built enabled white homesteaders to traverse the continent in a mere eight days. As the post–Civil War recession set in, easterners began crossing the country in greater and greater numbers, arriving on the West Coast in search of work. Often willing to take any job and work for meager wages, largely unintegrated into frontier society, and present in daunting numbers, the Chinese were almost too easy a scapegoat for West Coast labor leaders and politicians and the embittered unemployed of the white working class. Before long, resentment blossomed into violence. “In San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death,” Mark Twain wrote in 1872. “Although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.” Bloody anti-Chinese purges began occurring in settlements throughout the West.

  On May 6, 1882, the anti-Chinese animus was codified in the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law, which strictly limited any further immigration from China and excluded Chinese already in the country from citizenship, was a landmark piece of legislation: the first broad restriction on immigration to the United States. Coming as it did at the end of a century of extraordinary growth and industrialization, and on the heels of a war that had questioned but ultimately solidified the concept of a coherent, unitary, sovereign America, the act created, in a very real sense, the concept of illegal immigration. In 1887, one Chinese laborer who had lived in San Francisco for the past twelve years sailed to China to visit his parents. When he returned the following year, he was denied reentry at the port of San Francisco. He challenged his exclusion, and the controversy made it as far as the Supreme Court. In the famous “Chinese Exclusion Case,” the Court described the Chinese as “strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves, and adhering to the cus
toms and usages of their own country.” The ruling established Congress’s plenary power over immigration and upheld its right to pass legislation that excludes noncitizens. In 1891 the United States appointed the first superintendent of immigration to process arriving immigrants. Ellis Island was established the following year.

  The sudden reversal—from recruiting laborers in the 1850s to forcibly excluding them three decades later—was not the last instance when the Chinese in America would be the victims of larger circumstance, at the mercy of the capricious ebb and flow of this country’s economic needs. The Chinese who remained here were obliged, for their own survival, to withdraw from direct economic competition, retreating into two undertakings, the restaurant business and the laundry business, where they might be regarded as less of an economic threat. By 1920 fully half of the Chinese in America were engaged in one of these two occupations. The exclusion lasted six decades, halting further legal immigration and largely freezing the United States’ Chinese population in place. But when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought Chinese support against the common enemy, and the ban on Chinese immigration suddenly seemed a bit awkward. Roosevelt wrote to Congress, asking lawmakers to “correct a historic mistake.” They repealed the exclusion act in December 1943.