The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (35 page)

The two of them drove to New York City, where a few of the men were still being held at the Varick Street facility. They picked up two
Golden Venture
passengers who had taken on American names: Ben and Rocky. The men carried their belongings in paper bags, which they loaded into the trunk. Then they climbed into the backseat for the long ride to York.

Several hours later they stopped to fill up the gas tank at a station by the side of the highway. Maruskin turned and saw Rocky fast asleep. Ben was wide awake. He watched her as she looked at Rocky and then looked back at him.

“Ben no sleep,” he said in English. “Ben sleep in prison. Ben free.”

Stories like Ben’s were the exception, however, and as the months became years in York County Prison, Sean Chen and the other detainees were insulated, somewhat, from the daily victories and setbacks of the legal maneuverings and public lobbying being undertaken on their behalf. Many of the men succumbed to despair; they had families struggling in desperate poverty back in China, families that had gone into debt to send them to America and were counting on their remittances. Several of the passengers went on a hunger strike for a week, until their supporters in York pleaded with them to stop. A prison guard caught one of the men trying to hang himself with a bedsheet in the middle of the night. Sixteen others vowed to commit suicide rather than return to China. The inmates were given paper shirts and trousers, because guards feared they would fashion nooses from their clothing. Without access to proper medical care, some of the passengers suffered from dangerous conditions that remained untreated. One man developed a tumor on his liver and began to vomit blood. Another was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and was released to the care of his
extended family in New York only when it became clear that he was dying.

As seemed so often to be the case, Sean Chen’s youth and independence allowed him to make the most of the situation. He spent his time in prison trying to learn English and study for his GED. He was excited to be able to take classes again; since his expulsion from school four years earlier, he had felt robbed of an education. “Just pretend you’re still in school,” one of his cousins suggested in a letter, and he did his best to heed that advice.

To Craig Trebilcock, Sean always seemed a little brash, a little overconfident—he had none of the mournful humility of older passengers, like Craig’s client, Pin Lin. But different people process incarceration in different ways, and Sean may simply have been unready to give up hope. Nor did he lose sight of the fact that dreadful though it might have been, the men’s imprisonment was on some fundamental level voluntary. They could submit to deportation any day. Of course there would be fines to pay, and possibly prison, or worse, in China. The
Golden Venture
episode had badly embarrassed Beijing, and any returnees would no doubt be made to suffer for the slight. One of the passengers was able to make a telephone call home and learned that another passenger, who had accepted deportation, had been thrown into prison upon his return. The authorities broke both of his legs, saying, “He won’t run away again, will he?” That story made the rounds in the prison, hardening the resolve of many of the men to stick out their indefinite jail sentence in America rather than take their chances by going home.

But perhaps the most extraordinary testament to the motivation the
Golden Venture
passengers had to forge a life in the United States was the experience of the men who accepted deportation, after the months it had taken to get as far as Bangkok, the months stuck in Mombasa, the months aboard the
Golden Venture
, and the months in an American jail, only to reach China and begin the process all over again, endeavoring
once more to reach America. One of the York detainees, a skinny forty-year-old named Wang Wu Dong, agreed to be deported to China in 1996, after three years behind bars. His asylum claim, under the one-child policy, had failed. (“You knew that if you … attempted to have another child and you already had two, most likely you would have to be sterilized or be punished?” his judge asked. “That’s not persecution. That’s punishment for not obeying the law.”)

When local officials learned that Wang would be returning to his village in Fujian, it seemed likely that he and his wife, who was still there, raising their two children, might try to have a third child. While Wang was being held in detention in the nearby town of Fuqing, the cadres hauled his wife to a birth-control clinic, administered an epidural anesthetic, and removed her uterus. Wang was devastated when he returned home and learned what had happened. He was consumed by shame and wept for days. But he still owed over $10,000 to his snakeheads; Sister Ping might have had a satisfaction guarantee for her customers, but less scrupulous smugglers demanded payment even after a catastrophe like the
Golden Venture
. The family’s small plot of land, on which they cultivated rice, beans, and sweet potatoes, would never generate enough income to cover the debts.

Wang had been home for less than two months when he and his wife made the desperate decision to turn to the snakeheads once again. From a loan shark they borrowed $5,000 and made a down payment. With the snakeheads’ help, Wang obtained a false passport and boarded a flight to Surinam, the former Dutch colony on the Atlantic coast of South America, which had become a minor hub for snakeheads. For months Wang waited in Surinam, until finally local snakeheads loaded him onto a fishing trawler bound for the United States.

Some days later, the snakeheads aboard the trawler offloaded their passengers to a 30-foot speedboat, which made its way toward the shore near Bay Head, New Jersey. But as the speedboat approached, it was enveloped in a dense fog, and, tragic and improbable though it might seem, the boat ran aground. The passengers scattered, and all of them,
Wang included, were arrested by the police. “Sent Back to China, Man Washes Up Again,” the
New York Times
marveled, in an article that noted the “cruelly flippant aptness” of the name of the speedboat Wang arrived on:
Oops II
.

The INS immediately moved to deport Wang once again. But in one final, merciful twist to the story, a federal judge in New Jersey ended up granting Wang “withholding” status, a rarely invoked designation that enabled him to live and work in the United States (though not to become a permanent resident or citizen, or to sponsor his wife or children to come to America). It may have been a limited freedom, but it would enable Wang to send money home in order to cover his family’s debts and in time, perhaps, to pay snakeheads to bring his family to America as well.

While a green card and the legal right to petition to bring family members to America was obviously preferable to an undocumented life for the passengers who arrived on the
Golden Venture
, there was among them a sense that even an illegal existence in the United States was better than a legal existence anywhere else.

This was nowhere more evident than in the case of the women of the
Golden Venture
, whom the Vatican had gone to such trouble to relocate in South America. Within a couple of years, every single one of them had abandoned Ecuador and returned to live illegally in the United States.

O
ne day in York County Prison a tall, slightly taciturn detainee named Yang You Yi tore a page from a magazine he was reading and began tearing the glossy pages and folding them into little paper triangles. He made more and more of the triangles, until he had an impressive pile. Then he started interlocking them and assembling the bound configurations that resulted in a larger sculpture. What emerged, after hours of work, was a rough, corrugated shape that was recognizably a pineapple, replete with a spiky stem. Some of the other men had gathered around
Yang, watching as he worked, and in the ensuing days they copied his steps, producing a variety of pineapples of their own.

The men were painfully bored in the prison, and desperate for a way to busy themselves, and the introduction of this colorful, ambitious origami initiated a craze. Soon it was not just pineapples they were creating but paper bowls, vases, birds, and a menagerie of other creatures. The tools they had at their disposal were simple: newspaper, yellow legal pads, and old magazines discarded by the prison guards or donated by the People of the Golden Vision. But some of the men were quite artistically inclined—they had worked as carpenters and stonemasons, architects and weavers, kite makers and set designers before leaving China—and soon they were improvising new techniques. Someone realized that by mixing toilet paper, water, and toothpaste, they could produce a pasty papier-mâché, which could then be molded with a plastic spoon and colored with a magic marker until it acquired a porcelain sheen.

As the sculptures grew less experimental and more impressive, the men began sending them out to their attorneys and to the supporters attending the vigils, as humble gifts and tokens of thanks. The York residents were astonished that the men could have produced anything so beautiful from a prison cell. They negotiated with prison administrators to send in jugs of Elmer’s Glue, blunt children’s scissors, and Sharpie markers. As more and more of the men started spending their days on the artwork, the results got bigger and more impressive. They sculpted turkeys, cranes, and storks by the dozen; a family of squat, moon-faced owls; dragons and Buddhas; a muscular warrior astride a horse, his skin smooth and shiny as lacquer. They presented Bev Church with a twin-engine propeller plane made entirely of folded legal paper, the word
Hope
inscribed in green felt marker on its nose.

Before long the detainees were going through so much prison-issue toilet paper that the warden complained, and the People of the Golden Vision took to visiting the prison with wholesale bales of Charmin. The men developed an assembly line, so that the less experienced artisans
could work on folding small components and the artists among them could assemble these pieces into ever more impressive creations.

As word spread through the community about the artworks the men were creating, they became collector’s items, and people began inquiring about whether it was possible to purchase the sculptures. Cindy Lobach obtained permission to visit the men once a week and cart out the works as they produced them. She held a sale at the local YWCA to help defray some of the costs of the men’s legal defense, and before long the sales were a regular event, and the People of the Golden Vision held cultural nights, with Chinese food, artwork by the detainees, and impassioned discussions of immigration and asylum in America.

The art was a sensation. Soon the proprietor of a New York gallery specializing in American folk art got in touch and began selling the sculptures. The press started to take note.
Life
ran an article about the
Golden Venture
immigrants with a portfolio of photos of the sculptures. The art seemed emblematic of both the work ethic and the talent of the men, who wanted nothing more than to leave prison and become productive members of the American workforce. It was a perfect calling card for those lobbying to set them free. “There’s some intelligent people here,” Bev Church told a reporter. “They’re not just some peasants who fell off a rice paddy.”

The detainees at York ultimately produced 16,000 sculptures and, through Cindy Lobach’s sales, earned $135,000. Pieces ended up in the collections of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and other notable personalities who took an interest in the case. A traveling exhibit of the sculptures was featured in museums and galleries around the country, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Several of the most talented sculptors were eventually released from prison and granted special visas for “aliens of extraordinary ability in the arts.”

One of the most striking aspects of the artwork the men produced during their years in York County Prison, and surely one of the reasons for the attention and enthusiasm it garnered, was the preponderance in the designs they selected of Americana. The red, white, and blue of the
American flag became a recurring color scheme. The men clipped the “Made in America” stamps from Wal-Mart ads and affixed them to their work. They loved birds, especially birds of prey, and American bald eagles in particular. After one of the men created a papier-mâché eagle alighting on a white branch and inscribed the words
Fly to Freedom
on the branch in English and Chinese, the supporters in York began calling the sculptures Freedom Birds. There were birds in midflight, their fearsome talons clutching the air in front of them, and birds standing sentry, in repose. Many of the paper birds were captive, locked up in ornamental cages.

The sculptures that the men produced behind bars and sent to the outside world served as a form of prison letter, less articulate than those of Gramsci or Martin Luther King, perhaps, but no less eloquent. There was a kind of rough-hewn poetry to a sculpture of the Statue of Liberty that was made entirely of toilet paper and had taken a detainee three days to construct. To some extent all this was surely calculated, designed to play on the sentimentality of Americans on the outside who might be in a position to help. But at the same time the sculptures provided a kind of testimony, suggesting that for the men at York County Prison, for whom the reality of the United States had proved to be such an unmitigated nightmare, the
idea
of America—that beautiful idea that had launched the
Mayflower
and the
Golden Venture
and ten thousand other ships—remained miraculously unsullied.

Chapter Fourteen

The Goldfish and the Great Wall

AS THE
Golden Venture
passengers produced their prison art, American law enforcement was systematically tracking down and prosecuting the various perpetrators of the voyage. By 1995 only two figures remained at large. One was Sister Ping, who was thought to be hiding in China. The other was Mr. Charlie, the Taiwanese snakehead who along with Ah Kay and Weng Yu Hui had arranged to purchase the ship and had been one of the chief architects of the operation.