The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (26 page)

Weng suggested that they look up a part of New York called Rockaway The area was on the outskirts of the city, and remote. It faced out
into the Atlantic, and on the charts, at any rate, the beach looked sandy. If Lwin could run the
Golden Venture
aground at Rockaway Weng said, he would send vans to the beach to pick up the passengers as they came ashore.

The following day, June 5, Mr. Charlie and Weng drove out to Rockaway to inspect the site. People come from all over the city to visit the beach, especially during the summer months. None of the locals would have given much thought to the Chinese men looking out to sea and taking note of the sand on the beach, the depth of the water, the force of the currents offshore. Satisfied with the location, the snakeheads reached Lee on the ship-to-shore. Charlie instructed him to slow the ship so it would arrive at Rockaway late that night, when the locals were sleeping and the beach was completely dark. When he approached the shore, Charlie continued, he should gun the ship at full speed and run it aground on the sandy beach. At Charlie’s urging, Kin Sin Lee and the crew began destroying all the documents they could find on the boat: passenger lists, registration documents, Captain Tobing’s log. They tore them up and threw them overboard.

Sean Chen was huddled in the hold, overtaken by excitement. Word had spread among the passengers that they would be landing soon. Some people claimed to have been above deck long enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of the lights of the United States. Then, around midday, the passengers whom Kin Sin Lee had deputized as his onboard enforcers clambered down the ladder and into the hold.
We will soon be landing in America
, they said.
When the ship lands, you will need to brace yourselves, because it will land hard. If you know how to swim, you should get off the ship first and swim to shore
.

According to some accounts, it was announced that those who did not know how to swim should stay on board and someone would arrange to pick them up later. But according to others, the passengers were told that even those who did not know how to swim should jump and try to swim for shore, because everyone who remained on board would be arrested.

I
t may never be clear how it was that the Coast Guard, which had spotted the
Golden Venture
and was monitoring the ship, ultimately failed to prevent the catastrophe that followed. It is a frequent refrain of those in the business of actually keeping track of ships that the ocean is a very big place, crisscrossed at any moment by all manner of craft large and small, and it is not as easy as it sounds to monitor a ship continuously. But the
Golden Venture
was quite close to shore, and as it approached New York its course took it on a trajectory that ran directly perpendicular to the shipping lanes in the area—a dangerous move, and one that might have attracted some notice. What we do know is that on that Saturday evening, as the
Golden Venture
followed its slow course toward Rockaway the Coast Guard dispatched boats to intercept it. But they couldn’t find it.

When the ship reached the water off Rockaway, at around 11 P.M., Kin Sin Lee tried calling Charlie, but he couldn’t make contact. He instructed the crew members and onboard enforcers to take flashlights and start giving light signals to confirm that Weng and Charlie were waiting on shore and would be ready to transport the passengers. There were many lights along the shoreline: streetlights, house lights, the occasional headlights of passing cars. But nothing answered their signal. Shortly after midnight, Lee turned to Lwin. “Nobody is picking up,” he said. “We have to go to shore.”

They consulted the chart to try to identify a sandy portion of beach that they could use as a target.

“Do we really have to do this?” Lwin asked.

“Yes,” Kin Sin Lee replied.

As darkness fell, the weather had grown stormy. The wind had picked up, and the waves were choppy now, and very rough. The aggressive tide was actually a good thing, Lwin said. As the ship approached the beach, the surge of the strong waves would push it farther up onto the shore. When Lwin had selected the appropriate angle for their final
approach, Kin Sin Lee pulled a bell which sent a command to the engine room:
full speed ahead
.

“Let’s do it,” he told Lwin.

Overcome by adrenaline, Lwin hugged Lee. “God bless you,” he said. Then, as the ship picked up speed, he instructed Lee to sit down and hold on tight.

“Let’s give New York a surprise,” he said.

I
n the last moments at sea, Sean could feel the
Golden Venture
pick up speed. They had been warned to brace themselves, and he had grown accustomed, during the months in the hold, to clutching his belongings and positioning his limbs in such a way that he did not roll helplessly with every undulation. The hold was electric with excitement and anticipation: it had all been worth it, the sacrifice, the danger, the hunger, seasickness, and storms; the treks through Burma, the lonely months in Bangkok, the terrors of the
Najd II
, and the hopeless interlude in Africa. It was over. They had triumphed. They were about to set foot on American soil.

A huge
thwump
sent a shudder through the hold as the bow plowed into a sandbar. Everyone around Sean was thrown by the impact, rolling and sprawling, then trying to get purchase on the plywood floor, grab their belongings, and get out of the hold. They mobbed the ladder leading to the deck. Sean joined the throng, eventually getting his hands on the ladder and climbing up and out into the night. The wind was strong, the air salty, the lights of New York a glimmer in the distance. The small deck of the ship was chaotic—people were shouting and screaming, gathering their few belongings and jumping overboard into the sea. Sean could swim. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he had learned how to swim growing up and knew that if he kept moving all four limbs in the water, he would stay afloat. He made his way to the front of the
Golden Venture
, took off his T-shirt and his pants, summoned his nerve, put a leg over the edge, and jumped.

His first sensation was the severe, terrible coldness of the water, the kind of chill that saps any strength or energy you have, seeming literally to freeze your limbs, turning them brittle and useless, paralyzing you. Sean found the strength to move his arms and legs. He swam, eyes on the lights of the shore. He could have been in the water for ten minutes, or it could have been an hour—he didn’t know. He just kept pushing against his exhaustion, buffeted by the surf, one arm over the other, until his feet hit sand. He half walked, half crawled the last remaining yards until he reached the beach, where others were coming ashore around him. Then he straightened, took a few more steps, and collapsed.

When he came to, he was lying in a bed in a brightly lit room. He was wearing an unfamiliar garment: a simple cotton shift, a hospital johnny. He looked around. He was in the hospital. There was a black man standing above him, in a uniform—a police officer. The officer was speaking to him in English.

Sean tried to remember the English he had learned from his dictionary in Bangkok and practiced over the months at sea with anyone who could speak it.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re in New York City,” the cop replied.

Sean felt an enormous, almost overwhelming sense of relief. But the relief was tempered somewhat by one especially strange detail of his new surroundings. As Sean lay there in his johnny in the hospital with the police officer and slowly took it all in, he made an alarming discovery. He was handcuffed to the bed.

Chapter Eleven

A Well-founded Fear

FOR MUCH
of its history the United States has suffered from a kind of bipolarity when it comes to matters of immigration. The country’s growth has been fueled by successive waves of strivers from other shores, who helped animate the westward push across the continent, fuel the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and accelerate the high-tech boom of the late twentieth century. The notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” is an enduring cliché. Yet while a steady demand for cheap labor and a sense that the United States should welcome the downtrodden of the world have led to a generally liberal immigration policy, American history has also been punctuated by periods of acute xenophobia and hostility to outsiders, particularly during difficult economic times, and a recurrent suggestion that the American dream will remain attainable only so long as the country fends off the fortune-seeking hordes and limits the number of people who can obtain access to the opportunities the country has to offer.

Whether through some accident of history or because of the industriousness with which they have answered America’s siren call, or perhaps because their foreignness is written so indelibly on their faces, the Chinese seem to have suffered more than other immigrant groups at the mercy of the pendulum swing of American attitudes toward immigration. One historian referred to the Chinese as “the indispensable enemy”—needed for the labor they can provide, but also feared—and it
does seem that the history of the Chinese in America serves as an object lesson in this country’s fickle indecision on the subject of immigration. The Chinese who had the misfortune to be lured with the promise of work in the gold mines or on the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, only to arrive and experience anti-Chinese pogroms and the advent of Chinese exclusion, experienced (and perhaps precipitated) one of these moments of sharp nativist reaction. The passengers aboard the
Golden Venture
happened to arrive during another.

In the summer of 1993, the mood in the United States had shifted perceptibly against immigrants, and perhaps especially against those immigrants who came seeking asylum. Six months before the
Golden Venture
arrived, in January, a Pakistani named Mir Aimal Kasi had gone on a shooting spree outside the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, after applying for political asylum and using his work authorization documents to obtain a driver’s license and purchase an AK-47. In February, five months before the ship ran aground, the World Trade Center was bombed in an operation masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had entered the country without a visa the year before and applied for political asylum, and by the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, whose own asylum case was pending at the time of the bombings. Connecting these sensational examples of murderers who slipped through the system with the uptick in asylum applications from China, the press sounded the alarm: the United States had an immigration problem, and it was growing out of control. In March the
New York Times
warned of “a new boomtide of political asylum seekers that is swamping the process.”

One person who was feeding the hysteria, in frequent interviews with the press, was Bill Slattery, the brash, determined head of the INS office in New York. Slattery felt that America’s immigration policies were encouraging illegal immigrants to undertake the journey. The asylum system was broken, in his view, and the backlog was making it impossible to process migrants once they arrived. He sounded dire warnings to reporters that fraudulent asylum-seekers were “taking control of U.S. borders away from the U.S. government.”

Slattery was hard-nosed and not given to self-doubt. He had volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1965, while he was still in high school, hoping to be sent to Vietnam. Instead he was sent to a training command in Yuma, Arizona, where he became fascinated by the Border Patrol. America’s schizophrenia about immigration plays out in the culture of immigration officials. Historically, in the INS, one side of the job was known as “benefits” and involved accepting people—who we let into the country and under what circumstances, how long they can stay, whether they can send for their families. The other side of the job was “enforcement”—fighting to keep people out or to send them back where they came from. The benefits/enforcement dichotomy is a matter of professional specialization for immigration officials, but also, on a deeper level, of philosophy. And from his early years with the Border Patrol, when Slattery was assigned to an outstation in the town of Hebbronville, east of Laredo, in what he thought of as “the tit” of Texas, he regarded his relationship with Mexicans as essentially an adversarial one. He learned to “cut for sign,” stalking groups of migrants through the brush, noting each disturbance in the undergrowth, judging the age of a footprint by whether dew had settled on it or it had been traversed by bugs. The illegals were determined to outsmart Slattery, and he didn’t want to let them.

After stints in Philadelphia and Newark, Slattery joined the New York office, rising through the ranks until he was made district director. His appointment, in 1990, coincided with the snakehead boom, and he spent the early nineties contending with the overwhelming numbers of Chinese who began disembarking from planes at JFK Airport. Slattery complained to his superiors, and also to the press, that as long as he was obliged to release asylum-seekers pending resolution of their claims, people would abuse the system. He wanted the authority to detain undocumented immigrants when they arrived in New York and to hold them while their asylum applications made their way through the system. If they were deprived of the opportunity to get out and work, Slattery
guessed, word of the policy would make its way to China, and there would be fewer asylum-seekers in the future.