The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (15 page)

S
ister Ping did go to prison, in upstate New York. She hated it—hated the mushy Western food, hated being separated from her family, hated being in an environment where she didn’t understand the language. She was bitter, because the couple she had helped at the airport in Toronto ended up obtaining asylum while she had to go to prison. She no doubt was also troubled by the opportunity costs of remaining in jail. Goldenberg had asked that she be permitted to serve her time in a halfway house in New York, arguing that she should be close to her four children, but also that if she was removed from her base of operations in Chinatown, “she would merely languish and her time would not be used profitably.”

She did have one regular visitor, however. Five years after brushing off Joe Occhipinti’s request for assistance on Operation Hester, the FBI was beginning to take an interest in human smuggling and Fujianese organized
crime, and the New York field office dispatched a young Cantonese American special agent named Peter Lee to interview Sister Ping. Lee had been with the FBI only since 1989; he was a rookie, no match, perhaps, for so formidable an adversary. He was born in Hong Kong in 1959 and had come to the United States when he was ten. Lee would take along photo arrays of various underworld figures in Chinatown, and he and Sister Ping would page through them, photo by photo, as Sister Ping told Lee who was who and who was doing what. She was remarkably cooperative, feeding Lee information about the illegal activities of her various competitors. She liked Peter Lee. He was the kind of fed she could talk to.

Nor was implicating the opposition the only fruitful use Sister Ping found for her time behind bars. She could still communicate with Yick Tak and the rest of the family in New York City, and as her lawyer had observed, Sister Ping was eager to use her time profitably. The nature of the alien smuggling business, after all, is that there is a pipeline. It sometimes took months to move people from Fuzhou or Changle to Chinatown, so at any given moment there were numerous people at stations along the way: in Shenzhen or Hong Kong, Guatemala or Belize, Tijuana or California, Vancouver or Toronto. “Sister Ping had to keep working from prison,” Patrick Devine explained. “Because when she went in, there were already dozens of people en route to the U.S.”

Upon her release from prison, Sister Ping continued to meet occasionally with Peter Lee. Sometimes he would go to 47 East Broadway and they would sit in an upstairs room discussing various neighborhood personalities. They became so friendly that when their daughter Monica got married, Sister Ping and Yick Tak invited Lee to the wedding. (worried about how that might look, Lee politely declined.) Then one day Lee was abruptly ordered by his superiors to terminate the relationship. In an affidavit written sometime later, Lee acknowledged that he had “learned that the defendant was continuing to engage in illegal activities even while she purported to be cooperating with the FBI.”

The Niagara runs deep in the area where the raft crossed that New
Year’s, 85 or 90 feet in places, and sometimes the bodies of the dead just disappear. Throughout the Swiftwater case, the Niagara investigator Ed Garde felt haunted by the specter of Haw Wang, the six-year-old girl who drowned. Some bodies stay submerged for months in the river, popping up only when the water warms, petrified, fish-eaten, or decomposed. And long after Yick Tak’s incarceration was reduced to zero, Garde waited for the day when someone would find the little girl’s body, when some human remains might grace the whole bleak episode with a finality that the legal system couldn’t. Garde waited. But she never washed ashore.

Chapter Six

Year of the Snake

BY THE
time the squat green tanks of the People’s Liberation Army rumbled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4, 1989, tension had been building in the capital for months. Pro-democracy students had been staging sit-ins and hunger strikes since April, and several massive demonstrations had converged on the square. Party officials were concerned by the sheer numbers of people turning out for these events, and embarrassed by the spectacle; by the end of May, they had declared martial law.

But for all the complexity of the events at Tiananmen Square, the episode would be seared into the world’s imagination in the form of a simple iconic image: a lone, unidentified man who stood on Changan Avenue, clad in dark pants and a white shirt, and faced down a column of tanks. This was the image that alerted newspaper readers around the planet to the turmoil inside China. The most widely reproduced version of the picture was taken by Jeff Widener, an Associated Press photographer who took the photograph from the sixth floor of the Beijing Hotel, about half a mile away. The clean staging of the photograph told a simple, angry story: a brave individual yearns for freedom in the face of an oppressive military dictatorship. It was a stark enactment of a certain dynamic, which would come to define the international community’s reaction to China in the wake of Tiananmen.

On June 5, the day the photograph was taken, a top-secret State
Department summary describing the events circulated in Washington. It was titled “After the Bloodbath.” The crackdown by the Chinese government created extraordinary pressure for President George H. W. Bush, who had been in office for less than six months. Bush had assumed the presidency with a goal of forging closer relations with China, a country with which he had some history. In 1974, Gerald Ford had offered Bush his choice of ambassadorships, raising prestige assignments like London and Paris. But Bush had something else in mind. “I asked him if he would send me to China—the big new challenge,” he recalled. Richard Nixon had reestablished ties with China only two years earlier, creating liaison offices in the respective capitals. Formal diplomatic relations were not reinstated until 1979, but Bush spent over a year in China, learning about the people, the culture, and the history and attempting to establish allegiances with the leadership in Beijing. He and his wife, Barbara, purchased bicycles and pedaled around the city in the manner of the local Chinese.

As president, Bush worried that Tiananmen would undo whatever goodwill China had been able to develop in the West since 1972. “To many, it appeared that reform was merely a sham,” he concluded, “that China was still the dictatorship it had always been.” Bush was reluctant to alienate the Chinese leadership, or punish the Chinese population, by initiating broad economic sanctions, but on June 5 he authorized military sanctions, halting any sales of military equipment to the People’s Liberation Army. He also announced that the administration would encourage a sympathetic review of any requests for visa extensions by Chinese students in the United States. He met with some of these students, in a gesture of solidarity.

What kinds of allowances the United States should make for those fleeing the carnage and repression on display in Beijing was a sensitive question from the beginning, and central to America’s response to Tiananmen. Even as the crackdown unfolded, one well-known dissident, the Beijing astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, appeared at the gates of the U.S. embassy and asked for refuge. He had been a vocal critic of the
government, and China put immediate pressure on the embassy to turn him over to authorities. But he stayed. “We have no choice but to take him in,” Bush wrote in his diary on June 10, “but it’s going to be a stick in the eye of the Chinese.” The president was torn. “I want to preserve the relationship, but I must also make clear that the U.S. cannot condone this kind of human rights brutality.”

What Bush did not realize in the summer of 1989 was that his tortured posture on whether and when the United States should offer refuge to those fleeing China would unwittingly facilitate the snakehead trade and set the stage for an epic influx of undocumented Chinese. Bush’s commitment to harboring those fleeing political persecution by the Chinese government eventually found its way into a directive, Executive Order 12711, which would serve as a kind of founding document for the Fujianese community in America. Signed on April 11, 1990, and titled “Policy Implementation with Respect to Nationals of the People’s Republic of China,” the directive held that any Chinese citizen who was in the United States before the crackdown should not be forcefully removed by immigration. (There were roughly 80,000 Chinese students studying in the United States at the time, and the provision effectively offered them safe haven.)

But Bush’s executive order contained another clause as well, one that had nothing to do with the events at Tiananmen Square. In the aftermath of the crackdown, Washington was seized by a broad antipathy toward the repressive Communist regime in Beijing, and one matter of particular concern to legislators was the sometimes brutal manner in which China was enforcing its one-child policy. Reports from inside the country indicated that in some rural areas a low birthrate was being achieved by forcibly sterilizing couples who had more than one child—and in some cases by compelling women to have late-term abortions. In the mid-eighties President Ronald Reagan had withdrawn American support for the United Nations Population Fund because of concerns that the fund was supporting Chinese programs that involved coercive sterilization and abortion. Republican legislators, pro-life groups, and
the Catholic Church had been especially vocal in opposing China’s use of draconian measures in its efforts to limit population growth. Following Tiananmen, members of Congress pushed to withdraw China’s most-favored-nation trading status, but Bush refused. As a consolation, he included a significant provision in the executive order that dealt with China’s population-control tactics. In Section 4 of the order, Bush directed the secretary of state and the attorney general to provide for “enhanced consideration” under the immigration laws for individuals “who express a fear of persecution upon return to their country related to that country’s policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization.”

Though the executive order was prompted by the events at Tiananmen, the breadth of the provision led to the de facto result that any fertile Chinese person, whether a parent or not, suddenly became a potential political refugee in the United States. Snakeheads and the uneducated migrants who made up their clientele had always shown an ingenious knack for identifying loopholes in immigration law, but the 1990 directive was an unambiguous invitation: the Bush administration had announced a posture of deference to asylum claims brought by individuals fleeing a nationwide planned birth policy in the largest country in the world. Bush’s effort to placate anti-China Republicans in Congress could amount, perversely, to a free pass to a fifth of the world’s population. The effects of the order were unmistakable; in 1992 political asylum was granted to roughly 85 percent of the undocumented Chinese immigrants who requested it, a rate almost three times higher than for immigrants from other countries. “The Fujianese thank two people,” a Chinatown real estate broker who emigrated in the 1980s observed. “One is Cheng Chui Ping. And one is George Bush the father.”

Word of the change in American policy spread to the smallest villages of rural Fujian. If you could set foot on American soil, even if you had phony documents, or no documents at all, no matter how obvious it was that you had made the trip illegally, you were entitled to a hearing of your asylum claims. And if you uttered the words
one-child ‘policy
and
rehearsed a tale of woe—a tale the snakeheads began coaching their passengers to commit to memory and recite on command—there was a good chance the Americans would let you stay. The other word of choice was
democracy
, and many Fujianese who had never felt any particular commitment to democratic freedoms, who had never been to Tiananmen Square or even to Beijing, claimed that they or their friends or their family members had played some role in the protests. It was said in New York’s Chinatown that some of the actual student leaders from Beijing, who had been offered asylum and prestigious fellowships at universities in the United States, would come to town from time to time to make a little money, charging would-be asylees a few hundred dollars to pose alongside them for Polaroid pictures, which could then be included in an application as proof of involvement in the democracy movement. The number of Chinese nationals arriving at JFK Airport in New York who requested asylum jumped from 205 in 1988 to 1,287 in 1990—an increase of over 500 percent—and continued to grow. The peculiar dynamics of America’s abortion politics that created the loophole were of little interest to the emigrants. What mattered was getting to America and making your claim. The Fujianese countryside was suddenly gripped by a fever to leave, an epidemic of outmigration. “Everybody went crazy,” a
Sing Tao Daily
journalist reported from Fuzhou in the mid-nineties. “The area was in a frenzy. Farmers put down their tools, students discarded their books, workers quit their jobs, and everybody was talking about nothing but going to America.”

O
ver the past half-century more refugees have found new homes in America than in any other country in the world. In the past thirty-five years alone the United States has welcomed some 2.6 million people fleeing famine, persecution, and upheaval. In fact, of the top thirteen countries accepting refugees in 2005, the United States took in two times as many refugees as the next twelve countries on the list combined. Haunted by the memory of the
St. Louis
, an ocean liner carrying
nearly a thousand Jewish refugees that came within sight of Florida during the spring of 1939, only to be turned away by the United States and sent back to Europe, where many of the passengers subsequently perished in the Holocaust, the United States has at least in principle embraced the notion of asylum. The United Nations established a convention in 1951 and a protocol in 1967 to guide governments in the formulation of national legislation on refugee and asylum issues. But the system for determining who should or should not be granted refuge in this country was codified only in 1980, when Congress passed a sweeping new refugee law in response to a surge of displaced people from around the world—Haitians, Soviet Jews, Southeast Asians unmoored by the wars in Cambodia and Vietnam. More people were seeking permanent resettlement outside their homelands in 1979 than at any time since the end of the Second World War. With the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress replaced a system that had been largely ad hoc and prone to favor refugees from some countries over others with a uniform test: anyone who could show a “well-founded fear” of persecution in the country they were fleeing would be eligible for resettlement in the United States.