The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (7 page)

As soon as she had arrived in Chinatown and established herself, Sister Ping sent for Yick Tak and the children, and within a year the family was together again. In 1982 the great Fujianese influx was just beginning, and the family settled on Chinatown’s grubby eastern frontier. They moved into a four-room subsidized apartment at 14 Monroe Street, in a sprawling housing compound encompassing two city blocks that sat wedged between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan
Bridge on the banks of the East River. The complex was known as Knickerbocker Village. When it was constructed in the thirties, it was the first housing project in New York City to receive federal funding. It had been home to ethnic strivers of many stripes, but mainly Eastern European Jews and Italians. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had occupied an eleventh-floor apartment in the 1940s. Half of New York’s Bonnano crime family had lived there at one point or another, and a few were still resident when Sister Ping and Yick Tak moved in.

Sister Ping liked New York City immediately. It was so much bigger than Fujian and Hong Kong, and so full of opportunity. She did not take a job as a maid, as she had said she would in her interview at the U.S. consulate. Instead, she and her husband obtained a lease on the tiny storefront at 145B Hester, a cramped, narrow retail space on the street level of a fading tenement. The rent was $1,000 a month, and they opened the Tak Shun Variety Store. When they applied for a business certificate for the shop, they translated Tak Shun as “reliable.” The shop next door was owned by a family from Shengmei village, and Sister Ping and Yick Tak stocked the place with clothing and simple goods that would appeal to the local Chinese community but particularly to the homesick Fujianese, more and more of whom seemed to turn up in the neighborhood each day. When the shop opened, some kids from a local gang dropped by and demanded a red envelope full of protection money. Sister Ping gave them $100, but that night they came by the store anyway and vandalized the place, tearing down the sign she had carefully erected above the front door.

The nascent Fujianese neighborhood was in every way at odds with the entrenched Cantonese Chinatown, a ghetto within a ghetto. The Cantonese end of town was clean and full of tourists at lunchtime and on weekends, a thicket of garish billboards arrayed vertically over the street in the Hong Kong style, the glitzy storefronts festooned with gilt calligraphy, the restaurant windows lined with showcase fishtanks. The dividing line was the Bowery, the traditional eastern frontier of Chinatown, and the Fujianese settled in the warren of streets beyond it—
Eldridge and Allen, East Broadway, Henry, and Division, in the shadow of the gray slab masonry of the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. The businesses in this end of Chinatown didn’t cater to tourists so much as to fellow Chinese. The aesthetic of the restaurants was more utilitarian.

The Fujianese who arrived in those days went to work immediately, doing difficult jobs: working as seamstresses in garment sweatshops in Chinatown or Queens; washing dishes in restaurant kitchens because they didn’t speak the requisite increment of English to work as waiters; doing bicycle delivery in rough neighborhoods in the Bronx, where Fujianese cooks prepared Cantonese specialties in claustrophobic kitchens behind thick panes of bulletproof Plexiglas. During the slow daytime hours, restaurant workers were dispatched throughout the city to slide takeout menus under the doors of apartments, sneaking past doormen when the buildings had them, hovering outside until some legitimate guest was buzzed in when they didn’t.

They stayed in a range of decrepit accommodations: grimy flophouses and single-resident-occupancy hotels along the Bowery, rat-infested dwellings where men and women, segregated by floor, slept in windowless six-by-six-foot cells. They crammed into the century-old tenements of Allen Street, Essex, Chrystie, and Hester, chutes-and-ladders fire escapes of black wrought iron stenciling a zigzag geometry across the brick facades. The famous Fujianese entrepreneurialism has a tendency to feed on itself, so landlords who owned, say, a one-or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood realized that they could break up the space into bunk beds and sell it in shifts. Everybody won. New arrivals from Fuzhou could keep their housing costs to $90 a month, forfeiting their bed to other off-shift tenants for sixteen hours a day, and the landlords reaped the benefits of triple-booking the space.

Employment agencies, many of them Fujianese-owned, began to bridge the gap between New York employers looking for cheap, exploitable labor and hungry arrivals from Fuzhou. The agencies occupied simple, brightly lit spaces where jobs were announced over a microphone or posted on little scraps of paper pinned to the wall. You could
spot the Fujianese, their eyes hungry but downcast, looking to avoid conversation, chain-smoking, eyeing the wall, milling around, waiting for the next job—delivery boy (must supply own bike), seamstress, construction, cook. It was a buyer’s market: the Fujianese were illegal, and many of them owed money to whoever had brought them over. They needed work fast, and the kind of work that wouldn’t require them to fill out a W-2 form. As such, the jobs tended to be menial and often backbreaking, with minimal pay and excruciatingly long hours. And when a job came through, it was the worker, not the employer, who owed the employment agency a fee. They usually paid a few cents on every dollar they made.

The scrappiness of the Fujianese was not lost on the existing Cantonese community, which had reigned in Chinatown for a hundred years. Nineteenth-century Cantonese had come east from California around the time of the exclusion act and established the neighborhood at the intersection of Mott Street and Pell. Their descendants looked down on the Fujianese arrivals as strivers and peasants, poorly educated and willing to sully themselves in untold squalor in order to make a buck. Sister Ping felt that the Cantonese did not show the Fujianese adequate respect. “Fujianese and Cantonese always seem like different people, not very alike,” she observed. As a result, the Fujianese stuck to themselves. “We always did our own thing,” she said. It must have been unsettling for the Cantonese to watch the traditional identity of Chinese America give way to a tidal wave of Fujianese. In 1960 there were 236,000 Chinese in America. By 1990 that number had swelled to 1.6 million. A large proportion of that growth was Fujianese, and for the vast majority of Fujianese emigrants, the first stop in America was New York City. Chinatown residents began referring to East Broadway as Fuzhou Street. They knew that most of the Fujianese arrivals were illegal and were still paying off their passage. They called them “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the going snakehead rate in the eighties.

But the fact remained that a dishwasher in Chinatown could make in a month what a farmer in Fuzhou made in a year, and the Fujianese
kept coming. They were willing to take on the debt associated with the journey because of the promise that life in America held. It was an investment, and families pooled their resources to support each émigré. The criminologist Ko-lin Chin likens the logic of the Fujianese in those years to the decision of a college graduate to take out loans for Harvard Law School; a huge debt is accumulated, but one that will exponentially increase the earning power of the debtor.

A child born on American soil is an American citizen, whatever the legal status of its parents, and many young Fujianese had children. Work left little time to raise them, so they sent their babies back to China, to the very villages the parents had fled, to be brought up by their grandparents until they were old enough for school. Whole villages in the countryside around Fuzhou emptied of men of working age. The Fujianese called them “widow’s villages,” for all of the wives who were left behind. But soon the wives started going to New York as well, and the only residents left were the aged and infirm and a profusion of fresh-faced American-born babies. Before long this reverse migration—undocumented parents sending their U.S.-citizen children back to China—struck some enterprising Fujianese as an opportunity, and businesses devoted to sending babies back became a flourishing industry in their own right.

By working long hours and living frugally, the Fujianese managed to save. Because their labor was off the books, it was also tax-free, and most Fujianese arrivals were able to pay off their snakehead debt within a couple of years. Despite, or perhaps because of, the depredations, the Fujianese forged a strong, insular, ethnic enclave on the fringes of Chinatown. After six, or often as many as thirteen, consecutive days of work, most new arrivals took a day of rest, known as a “cigarette day,” to shop, recreate, and gamble—to indulge in a few simple luxuries, like cigarettes. Monday is traditionally a slow day in the restaurant trade, and after a week of slicing broccoli or pushing a mop, young men would wend their way through the hurly-burly of East Broadway, past the fishmongers and video shops, the storefront grocers with their bushels
of fruit, their plastic vats of dried mushrooms, their mountains of red lychees.

As often as not, they would end up at the Tak Shun Variety Store, on Hester Street, where Sister Ping presided, asking after family members, advising youngsters to learn English (though she wouldn’t do so herself), and generally accumulating relationships, or
guanxi
, the Chinese expression that entails connections—the kind of interlocking favors and dependencies that bind a community together. Local Fujianese began to visit Sister Ping when they needed help or advice. A restaurant worker named Ming Wang, who had lost his job because of an injury and could expect no compensation from his employer, once visited Sister Ping and explained his predicament. “Little brother, take this,” she said, handing him $2,000. “Pay me back when you can.” Three times a year she made trips to Hong Kong to buy merchandise, and often she was accompanied on the plane by the American-born babies of illegal Fujianese from the neighborhood. “These were parents that didn’t have legal INS status in the U.S.A. and needed someone to bring their children to China,” she explained. “I would do it for them free of charge.”

Sister Ping ran the store and oversaw the books. She was the dominant partner, with Yick Tak always hovering in the background. Almost as soon as she arrived in Chinatown in 1981, it seemed, she became a well-known, well-respected figure, notable for working hours in her store that were long even by Chinatown standards, for demonstrating a distinctly Fujianese interest in and acumen for business, and for maintaining a modest demeanor and a simple, indulgence-free way of life even as she became an entrepreneurial success story. “I was credible,” she would later say, when asked about her status in the neighborhood. “I had a conscience. I did things for free, as favors. I treated relatives and friends well. I know it’s difficult for people to be in a foreign land with few acquaintances.”

She also developed a reputation during these years as someone who could move people.

I
n 1984 a young man named Weng Yu Hui wanted to leave his village in Fujian, not far from Shengmei, and move to the United States. Weng was grim-faced and stocky, with black hair that he parted to one side and a hint of a double chin. He had left school in the third grade, during the Cultural Revolution, and farmed sweet potatoes and rice with his family before getting into construction work. Weng had a wife and child, and his reason for wanting to leave was simple: “To make more money. To improve my family’s living condition.” There were very few snakeheads operating in Fujian in 1984, but Weng’s brother-in-law had recently paid a woman who went by the name Sister Ping to smuggle him to New York, and she had gotten him there successfully. Weng asked around and eventually tracked down a villager who had been Sister Ping’s teacher in school. The man told Weng he would need to pay $2,000 up front, and that if he made it to the United States, he would owe a further $16,000. Weng would also need a guarantor: someone already in America who would agree to pay the balance of his fee when he arrived. Weng turned over the down payment and the telephone number of a nephew who lived in the United States. He called the nephew to warn him: “If someone named Cheng Chui Ping calls, you have to agree to the terms.” Shortly thereafter, Weng received a letter that purported to be an invitation to visit relatives in Guatemala. (Because the coolie trade transported many thousands of Chinese to work the plantations of Central America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, this ruse was not altogether implausible; small Chinese communities are a feature of many cities in that part of the world.) Weng took the letter to the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou, told them about his family in Guatemala, and applied for a permit to leave the country. They issued him a passport.

Passport in hand, Weng made his way to the port city of Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. There he was met by Sister Ping’s younger sister, a short Fujianese woman named Cheng Tsui Wah, who
also went by Susan. A dozen other Fujianese customers were already waiting in a Shenzhen hotel, and after several weeks Susan obtained entry visas for Hong Kong and accompanied Weng and a half-dozen others on the short trip into the city. It was the Chinese New Year, and the city was given over to fireworks, lion dances, and revelry. The problem was, Weng and the others were dressed like farmers, with their shopworn cotton clothing and country-bumpkin haircuts. Susan led her wide-eyed charges through the bustle of Hong Kong and enacted a hasty makeover: she outfitted them with Western-style suits and slacks, got their hair cut, bought them watches, toothbrushes, and toothpaste. Snakeheads occasionally refer to themselves as “tour guides,” and that is unquestionably one component of the job.