The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (6 page)

Moreover, everywhere the Fujianese went, they seemed to succeed, often besting the local population and controlling a disproportionate amount of wealth. More than half of Asia’s forty billionaires of Chinese ancestry in the year 2000 had roots in Fujian Province. What the Fujianese did best, it sometimes seems, was leave. They were fiercely independent by nature, wily, and doggedly entrepreneurial. When opportunity beckoned, from any remote corner of the earth, they followed, often against staggeringly difficult odds, and established enclaves in foreign lands.

Sister Ping might be described as one of the Fujianese pioneers who struck out for the unknown and settled in New York. But that would be an oversimplification. In fact she was not the first in her family to make the journey to America: her father was. Because Fujian is all mountains and coast, with little arable land, Fujianese men grew up
knowing how to fish and sail, and opportunity could always be found at sea. For generations of Fujianese men, the sea offered a sometimes perilous but always reliable option: if you couldn’t make ends meet on land, there was always work to be found on one of the merchant ships going in and out of the port at Mawei. During the 1960s, in the midst of the upheaval of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Sister Ping’s father, Cheng Chai Leung, left the family and joined the crew of a merchant ship bound for the United States. He faced a bitter reality: he could do more for his family by turning his back on them and finding work outside China than he could by staying put.

In those years, very few Chinese made it to America. Leaving China was forbidden, and in any event, Beijing and Washington had no diplomatic relations, so there was no legal process for applying to enter the United States. Those few who did manage to make it to America tended to arrive the way Cheng Chai Leung did: they either found jobs as sailors or simply stowed away, and when they arrived in the bustling port of Los Angeles, or Baltimore, or New York, they jumped ship, disappeared amid the dockhands and stevedores and all the chaos of unloading one cargo and loading another, and ventured into town. If they could find their way to a Chinatown, there would be people who spoke Cantonese or Mandarin, and they could find a place to stay and a job that paid cash, washing dishes in a restaurant or working in a Chinese laundry.

Cheng Chai Leung worked as a dishwasher for a decade. He wrote letters every few months—the family received three letters a year—and he sent money home. But he was largely absent during Sister Ping’s youth. He left the family when she was fifteen and stayed in America for thirteen years. Eventually he slipped up somehow and alerted American authorities to his illegal status. They discovered that he was a deserted crewman, and he was deported back to China in 1977. According to authorities in Hong Kong and New York, it was upon his return to China that Sister Ping’s father went into business smuggling people.

T
he origins of the term
snakehead
are shrouded in mystery. Some believe that the snake symbolizes a circuitous smuggling route, with the snake’s head leading the way. Smuggled migrants are referred to as “snakes,” or sometimes “snaketails.” But they’re just as often known as “ducks,” or simply “customers.” As smuggling operations grew more complex, a certain hierarchy evolved, with “little snakeheads” doing recruitment in Chinese villages and “big snakeheads” arranging financing and logistics, and pocketing the bulk of the profits, from the safety of New York or Hong Kong or Taipei. Historical records indicate that the indigenous Fujianese once venerated snakes as totems. The Fujianese were originally known as the Min, and the Mandarin character for the Min is composed of a symbol for a gate with a worm or a snake crawling underneath it. When emigrants slither through the wire fences strung along the border between one country and another, one of Sister Ping’s snakehead associates once explained, “the shape of it looks like a snake.”

One curiosity of the growth of the snakehead trade in Fujian Province during the 1980s and 1990s is that at the time Fujian had one of the fastest-growing economies in China. Mao died in 1976, and by the time Sister Ping’s father returned from America the following year, Deng Xiaoping was already ushering in a period of critical reflection on the errors of the Mao era and moving toward a series of sweeping economic reforms designed to open up China somewhat to the outside world and experiment with a more market-based economy. In 1980 Beijing established a number of special economic zones, which were permitted to be more open to international trade and given certain tax incentives to lure foreign investment, and the southern Fujian city of Xiamen was selected. In 1984 fourteen other coastal cities were designated, and Fuzhou made the list.

Xiamen and, to a lesser extent, Fuzhou reinvented themselves as
shipping and manufacturing centers in the 1980s, and the economy started to improve. It would seem that this development should have discouraged emigration from China. A rising tide lifts all boats, supposedly: why leave the province just as it is discovering prosperity? But as these changes swept through the region, many Fujianese who had for generations devoted themselves to subsistence fishing or tending a farm suddenly began to feel dislocated in the new economy—left behind. Demographers who have researched migration find that it is not actually absolute poverty that drives people to leave one country for another. The poorest provinces in western China have rarely been a source of outmigration. When everyone around you shares your own meager lifestyle, there is actually less of an inclination to leave. Instead, it is “relative deprivation” that tends to drive migration: income disparities, the experience of watching your neighbor do better than you. So, ironically, economic development sometimes causes people to leave rather than stay put. Some did better than others when the economic reforms came to Fujian, and those who did not fare as well—the subsistence farmers and schoolteachers, the local Party officials who had fallen out of favor—were suddenly able to glimpse the kinds of material comforts they had lived without their whole lives. What’s more, Deng’s commendable efforts to loosen the household registration system, which had locked the Chinese peasantry in place, eventually unleashed a substantial internal migration and gave birth to a floating population of migrant workers that numbered in the tens of millions. The area around Fuzhou was flooded by eager odd-jobbers from the hinterland. For the local unskilled labor base, it became more and more difficult to find work.

For this frustrated, largely uneducated population (fewer than 10 percent of Fujianese completed high school), the United States developed an irresistible allure. They might have been excluded from the economic growth in China, but America was ripe with possibilities. Fantastical stories abounded about America and the wealth that could be had there. American markets sold a thousand types of bread, people
said. The very tapwater tasted sweet—you could gain weight just by drinking it. Above all, America seemed to hold the promise of upward mobility. Not overnight mobility, by any means; it was understood that you went to America to work, and work had, just as the gold rushers had done in California over a century earlier. But the promise was that the work would bear fruit—that your children would live an incrementally better life than you did; that one generation’s toil would secure comfort for the next. “Here, they’re working like slaves,” a Chinatown journalist in New York explained. “But there is hope for them to change everything.” But in Fujian, he went on, “you work like a slave, and there is no hope to change anything. For a fisherman? For a farmer with a little piece of land? They’ll never change their life. Never.”

S
ister Ping believed in America as ardently as, if not more than, her fellow Fujianese. When she was a little girl, her father told her it was a great country, full of opportunity. By the time her father returned to China, she was twenty-eight and already a mother. In high school she had met a mild-mannered young man from a neighboring village, Cheung Yick Tak, and the two were married in 1969. Short and shy, with sloping shoulders, a high forehead, and nervous, heavily lidded eyes, Yick Tak had little of his young wife’s intelligence, determination, or fire. But he was devoted to her, and seemed happy to defer decisions large and small to the more assertive Sister Ping. Their first daughter, Cheng Hui Mui, who would later adopt the name Monica, was born in 1973, and the following year the whole family relocated to Hong Kong. Many Fujianese were fleeing to Hong Kong during those years, some of them going so far as to swim across the Shenzhen River. With a free-market economy and British administration, Hong Kong was a tempting bastion of capitalism just a short way down the coast, and the ever entrepreneurial Fujianese moved there and thrived.

Sister Ping and her family moved into an apartment in a new high-rise on Hong Kong Island, overlooking Stonecutter Island and the
skyline of Tsim Sha Tsui. It is not clear how Sister Ping first arrived there—it may have been through the good offices of her father—but she and Yick Tak promptly opened up a small variety shop nearby, on Des Voeux Road West. The Cantonese majority in Hong Kong looked down on the Fujianese, and the Fujianese tended to cluster together, in the neighborhood of North Point, on Hong Kong Island, and in small enclaves in the New Territories. Sister Ping catered to this expatriate community and soon became quite successful, selling cheap clothing, fabric, and calculators. The twin pillars of independence and an equity stake were enormously important to most Fujianese. Even if the business itself was modest, what mattered most was that you owned it. Better to be in front of a chicken, a Fujianese saying goes, than behind a cow. Sister Ping had a sharp, flinty mind and a good head for numbers, and before long the shop was doing well enough for her to begin to expand her business interests. In 1979 she opened a clothing factory in Shenzhen, just across the border in the People’s Republic.

But for all her success in Hong Kong, Sister Ping was restless, and eager to get to America. Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping had met in 1978 and agreed to some limited immigration between China and the United States. University students and scholars were permitted to participate in exchanges, and measures were taken to allow the estranged family members of Chinese in America to emigrate legally. But Sister Ping was no scholar; she had barely finished high school. And in a cruel twist, the new policy coincided with her father’s forced repatriation to China. Because education in Fujian was so poor and so few of the Chinese who had settled in America were Fujianese, very few of her countrymen were eligible to make the trip. Chinese census bureau figures indicate that in the early 1980s, the Fujianese represented less than 2 percent of China’s emigrant population. And those few who did go tended to follow the pattern Sister Ping’s father had: the men left and then, if they prospered, sent for their families. “Every man in the town had to be in New York before one woman would come,” a New York lawyer who represented the Fujianese in Chinatown recalled.

Sister Ping’s husband, Yick Tak, did make the trip to the United States first. Before their children were born, he followed her father’s lead, joining the crew of a ship in Hong Kong and sailing to the United States, then jumping ship and finding work. But with a haplessness that would become his trademark, Yick Tak was arrested and deported by the INS after two short years. He returned to Hong Kong and settled in to his old life with his wife and her family. Sister Ping was curious about America and intrigued by the things her husband had to say. It was easy to survive there, Yick Tak told her. Food and living expenses were cheap; the dollar was a strong currency. Education was common; most children in America seemed to go to college.

One day in June 1981, Sister Ping strode into the American consulate in Hong Kong and applied for a visa to the United States. She spoke little English but said she intended to work as a domestic. She was an established businesswoman in Hong Kong by then. Why would she go to the United States just to become a servant? a consular officer asked.

“When I was young and attending school, I knew that the United States is a civilized country,” Sister Ping explained. In the United States, “one could make a living.” Besides, she added, with a flash of pride, “I would make a very fine servant.” She explained that her hope was someday to take her children to the United States. “It is for the sake of my children’s future that I am willing to be a servant,” she said.

Chapter Three

Eighteen-Thousand-Dollar Woman

THOUGH SHE
would eventually become known as the very avatar of illegal immigration, when Sister Ping initially entered the United States, she had a legal right to do so. Several months after her meeting at the American consulate in Hong Kong, she was granted a visa, for “needed skilled or unskilled” work, and on November 17, 1981, she flew to the United States. She entered via Anchorage, Alaska, and wasted no time moving to Chinatown in New York. “The reason most Fujianese came to New York first is it’s the center of everything,” one of her Fujianese contemporaries in the neighborhood explained. “There are lawyers here, doctors, people who speak your dialect. Even in Brooklyn, I cannot get the herbs I want at a reasonable price. Chinatown, New York, is really the starting place. You’ll always come here first for herbs, advice, jobs. People come here, they make it, then they move on. The next wave of immigrants say, where can I go? Where will they speak my language? Where can I find a job? Where can I buy bok choy and roast duck?”