The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (5 page)

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 customs 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.

But the war had scarcely ended when the Communists took over in China and closed its borders, so the de facto consequences of the exclusion endured long after the law itself was repealed. In the 1950s, Beijing introduced a household registration system that tied the various entitlements of the welfare state to individually registered family residences. The policy was designed in part to prevent tens of millions of rural Chinese from flooding major cities in search of food and work. In practice it meant that if an individual wanted to relocate within China, he needed permission from Party officials both in the place he was leaving and in the place he was heading to. If you moved without permission, you lost your allotment of grain and the other benefits that the welfare state provided. The policy effectively rooted rural Chinese citizens to the land, preventing them from leaving the village of their birth. It became very difficult even to relocate to the neighboring province, much less to leave China altogether.

S
ister Ping was born on January 9, 1949, ten months before Mao established the People’s Republic of China. She grew up in a village in northern Fujian Province called Shengmei, or Prospering Beauty, a hardscrabble settlement of farmers and fishermen by the banks of the Min River, where chickens roamed a network of dirt lanes that turned muddy during the monsoon months of August and September, and rice
farmers worked their modest paddies with water buffalo. She was one of five children born to a farmer from Shengmei, Cheng Chai Leung, and his wife, who had grown up in a neighboring village. As a girl, Sister Ping would leave the village elementary school when her classes were done for the day and return home to a long list of chores. She was responsible for chopping wood and for tending to a small plot of vegetables. She helped raise the family’s pigs and rabbits. “I never went out to play. I always worked,” she would later explain. “And I liked working.”

During her formative years, Sister Ping bore witness to a procession of tragically misguided policy initiatives from Beijing. When she was barely ten, Mao’s Great Leap Forward reassembled China’s peasantry into communes in an effort to reinvent centuries-old agrarian communities as industrial proletariats. The result was severe food shortages, and ultimately the greatest famine in recorded history, which between 1958 and 1960 killed nearly 38 million people. All across China, peasant families like Sister Ping’s suffered almost unimaginable hardship during these years, struggling to ward off starvation and eke out a living despite the frailty of their malnourished bodies and a government whose incompetence was matched only by its indifference in the face of civilian death. It was Mao’s view that in a country as populous as China, individual human lives were anything but sacred. One incidental cost of the Great Leap Forward, he conceded, was that “half of China may well have to die.” The millions of people who collapsed and died in the countryside were simply doing their part, he suggested. “They can fertilize the ground,” he said. In a country where filial piety and veneration of the dead had been cornerstones of the Confucian tradition for over two thousand years, the grieving families of the dead were instructed to plant crops atop their burial plots.

While she was still a pigtailed child, Sister Ping encountered a world in which human life could be casually extinguished at any moment, and in addition to fostering a slightly callous, unsentimental view of death, the experience seems to have forged in her a survivalist instinct—a fierce conviction that only through hard work could she and
her loved ones prevail over adversity and escape the kind of fickle end that others had in store. One day when she was twelve years old, Sister Ping left the village to go cut wood for kindling. In order to reach a remote grove of trees on the far side of the Min River, she joined eight other people in a rowboat. There were only seven oars, and though she was still just a child, Sister Ping took one and did her part to row. But before they could reach the other side, the current picked up and the boat flipped over. Sister Ping was thrown into the water and managed to swim to shore. Afterward she learned that everyone who had been carrying an oar had survived the accident. The two who had not been rowing drowned. The incident made an indelible impression on the little girl, one that she would remember for the rest of her life. “The two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead,” she would later reflect. “This taught me to work hard.”

If in her later life Sister Ping harbored a suspicion, bordering on contempt, of the authority of government and the laws and edicts of officials, her attitude here again may have been developed at an early age. When she was a teenager and attending the local high school, it was announced one day that the school was closing. Schools and universities across China were being shuttered and young people were being sent to work in the fields under the banner of the Cultural Revolution. Mao announced that “rebellion is justified” and encouraged the young to overturn the decadent “old culture” of China. Children turned on their elders, branding them reactionaries, class traitors, and capitalists. Students pilloried their teachers in the schoolyard, dousing them with black ink, jeering at them, and in some cases torturing them, forcing them to eat excrement or kneel in ground glass. Soon marauding bands of teenage Red Guards were burning books, destroying artworks, defacing monuments, and assaulting scholars and intellectuals. It was a bizarre, dystopian interlude in China’s history, a bout of state-sanctioned madness in which the young indulged in a destructive kind of
Clockwork Orange
frenzy.

Sister Ping was not an especially political person. But she was a
natural leader, and before long she had donned green, military-style work clothes and a red armband and become a leader of the Red Guard. No record exists of her activities during these cataclysmic, often violent years, and in later life she would be reticent about discussing it. “That was the trend. I had to go with the trend” was all she would say of her participation. “Gone with the old to welcome the new.”

M
ao had always been suspicious of Fujian, for reasons that perhaps were understandable. It is one of China’s smaller provinces, a mountainous sliver of coast far from the official influence of Beijing and directly across the strait from Taiwan. It has always been one of China’s most outward-looking regions, home to seafarers and traders, smugglers and explorers: a historic point of embarkation. Over a millennium of isolation from the rest of China and exposure to the outside world, the region and its people developed an adventurous, somewhat maverick sensibility. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo visited the port of Fuzhou and remarked on the great quantities of its chief exports, galangal and ginger. (He added that the people of Fuzhou were “addicted to eating human flesh, esteeming it more delicate than any other,” but Marco Polo was not famed for his accurate reporting.) According to legend, a seven-foot-tall admiral named Zheng He set sail from Fuzhou a half-century before Columbus with an armada of 3,000 white-hulled junks and some 30,000 sailors, and ventured deep into the South Seas and as far away as Africa. By the 1570s, Fujianese merchants had established trading posts in Manila and Nagasaki. Seed communities of Fujianese traders were established throughout Southeast Asia, and today, centuries later, vast numbers of ethnic Fujianese are scattered throughout the region. Eighty percent of the Chinese in the Philippines can trace their roots to Fujian, as can 55 percent of the Chinese in Indonesia. Taiwan was a mere hundred miles across the strait, and the Fujianese settled there as well. So many made the crossing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that modern Taiwanese speak a dialect
similar to that spoken in the southern Fujianese port of Xiamen. Well over a million Chinese in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan have roots in Tingjiang commune, which contains Shengmei village, where Sister Ping grew up.

It was from Fujian that the second great wave of Chinese came to America, in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, even
Fujian
is too broad a description of the point of origin of this explosive population displacement. It was really just from northern Fujian that they came, where the regional capital of Fuzhou sits, 30 miles from the ocean, on the edge of the coastal plain, hemmed in on three sides by mountains and on the fourth side by the sea. When the Fujianese talk about Fuzhou, they tend to include not just the city but the main population centers of the surrounding countryside: the nearby city of Changle, the historic port of Mawei, and a string of townships along the northern banks of the Min River, where it flows into the ocean and meets the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea. The mountains surrounding Fuzhou have preserved a subdialect, Minbei, or Northern Min, which differs from the language spoken in Xiamen and Taiwan; it’s not so much Fujianese as Fuzhounese. Minbei was Sister Ping’s mother tongue.

This peculiar type of population displacement, in which the people of a handful of villages seem to relocate en masse to another country within a short span of time, is actually not so unusual. In New York’s Little Italy, the Calabrians who settled along Mulberry Street at the turn of the twentieth century self-segregated block by block, and even building by building, according to the particular village in southern Italy from which they came. Social scientists who study migration have observed the pattern in countries around the world: a few early pioneers venture out and lay roots in a faraway land; if they find it agreeable, they send first for their immediate family, then for their extended family, then for friends and fellow villagers. It is one of the peculiar ironies of global migration that an immigrant community in a given country is often highly atypical of the country from which the people came. If you
put yourself in the shoes of the person contemplating where it is that he or she wants to resettle, it makes perfect sense: you go to the place where you have a sister or a cousin or an old friend from school. Of course, this model works only if you have a sending community that is close-knit to begin with, but that is where the traditional Fujianese devotion to family comes in. Those first explorers who left the village bore little resemblance to the impetuous young men of Western literature who turn their backs on family and society and leave to seek their fortunes. Migration, at least in Fujian Province, was anything but selfish or misanthropic. The family was regarded as an economic unit, and the first pioneers to leave the village generally did so with the aim of establishing a beachhead on a foreign shore and eventually sending for the family. Demographers call this process “chain migration” and use the concept to explain how it is that half the residents of crowded urban ghettos from Boston to Berlin often hail from the same few villages in whatever country they left behind. A more evocative Fujianese expression captures the same dynamic: “One brings ten. Ten bring a hundred.”