The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (15 page)

—not that there was any need for kashering, given that there was no violation to begin with—back when the controversy had first started.

The private investigator retained by the council, and later dismissed for murky reasons, issued a statement to
Regardie’s
, a local business magazine, after the report came out: “The council’s statement supporting Ung flies in the face of facts presented to the council during mid-November,” she said.

Many in the community sensed a cover-up and boycotted the restaurant.

“The trust between the restaurant’s owner, the general public and the council has been damaged beyond repair,” read one indignant letter in
Washington Jewish Week.

Others were happy to get back to their duck parties with the rabbinical blessings of their leadership.

But the local Jewish newspaper wasn’t satisfied. Were they beholden to truth or God? The
Washington Jewish Week
reporters kept probing.

The paper ran an editorial entitled “Ung Jury.”

The council rabbis cal ed the reporters

“despicable” to their faces and cursed them under their breath. The community paper was given tongue-lashings in local synagogues. Hundreds of people canceled their subscriptions. Local businesses muttered about pul ing their advertising. The community wanted a “don’t ask, don’t tel ” policy for its only Chinese kosher restaurant. Residents today stil hiss at the paper’s coverage, accusing the tabloid of sensationalizing the topic. “Did you see the issue where they put the picture of the dead duck on its cover?” one person asked me. There it was: an almost life-size photograph of a glassy-eyed plucked duck, its beak fal en open, splashed across the ful front cover below the headline “The Saga Continues.”

Ung’s troubles multiplied when
Regardie’s
magazine sent some moo shu pancakes from Moshe Dragon to be tested and they came back showing traces of whey—a dairy product that helps prolong shelf life but is strictly unkosher. Another cycle of accusation, investigation, and scandal began.

Washington Jewish Week
ran articles with headlines like “Rabbis Face New Questions over Kosher Pancake Flap” and “Maryland Attorney General’s Office Reviewing Moshe Dragon Charges.”

A group of Reform and Conservative rabbis tried to rescue the situation by issuing a statement saying that they believed the restaurant was kosher

“at the present time.” This was like attempting to use duct tape to repair a boat that was already sinking. As they were issuing their statement, however, the restaurant’s new mashgiach complained of violations and resigned.

The months-long controversy dragged down sales at Moshe Dragon. Ung couldn’t deal with it anymore. In mid-1990, he sold the restaurant to a family of Iranian Orthodox Jews who owned a kosher Chinese restaurant in Baltimore. After less than two years of existence, Moshe Dragon was dead.

Ung, his wife, and their four children stil live in the Rockvil e area. His wife is employed at a jewelry store on Georgia Avenue; he works long hours, including time at a grocery store. The Moshe Dragon incident remains a sore point with the family, and mention of it stil draws bitter tones. Ung is working hard and too busy to do an interview, his wife explained when I cal ed their home.

After it was sold, Moshe Dragon was reopened under a new name, Royal Dragon. It stil operates today two doors down: its owners are Orthodox and Iranian, but its chefs are Chinese. It stil lists duck on the menu. The kosher duck shortage of 1989 is long over now. It would be but a single asterisk in the annals of food-commodity history were it not for the scandal.

Nearly fifteen years later, Mayer told me that the scandal made him question his relationship with God. “I come from a very strong Orthodox family,” he said. “I had doubts after the incident with the rabbinical council. It real y tested my faith real y deeply.” He stil lives in the Silver Spring area, but he maintains a frosty relationship with the rabbinical council and Moshe Dragon’s former investors. “They al pretty much shun me,” he said. “To them, it was like it was yesterday. They don’t let go.”

He believes he was scapegoated because of the Jewish love of Chinese food: “I think it got a lot of breaks because it was a Chinese restaurant.

People didn’t want to see it closed down. This wasn’t like one McDonald’s out of a thousand. This was the only game in town. And people real y wanted to see something like this continue. There was no way to pul that off.” He paused, then remarked, “Washington is a city that learns that if you do something bad, put it out right away. But back then obfuscation was the rule of the day.”

Golden

Venture:

Restaurant

Workers to Go

Those who saw the scene later compared it to the invasion of Normandy, except with scrawny Chinese men scrambling to America’s unprotected beachy shores, some dressed only in their underwear.

As a social metaphor, an “invasion” of the United States may be apt—though it was a fragmented, haphazard one, and this group was merely a tiny piece of it. These clandestine immigrants captured the nation’s attention only because of the vivid, inescapable television imagery that accompanied them: the frantic sense of desperation as bodies were cast ashore, some conscious, others never to breathe again. Then the details trickled in: 112 days at sea; massive debts incurred;

Thailand;

Kenya;

dark,

sardine-like

conditions. There were fewer than three hundred passengers on the rickety 150-foot steamer that lodged itself a hundred yards off New York’s Rockaway Beach that moonlit June night in 1993. But their sudden, stark appearance meant the public could no longer avert their eyes from the cost of the American dream.

When the passengers on the boat felt the bump, they thought they had hit land. They scurried up to the deck, a thin, wiry man leading the charge. The crew told the passengers to throw mattresses onto the rocks and to jump, that the water was only chest-high and they could wade ashore. In reality, the sand dipped, the water ran deep, and the passengers were soon in over their heads. Ten of them didn’t make it through alive.

An eighteen-year-old boy who would later take on the name Michael listened to his fel ow passengers scream as the force of the waves hit them. He couldn’t swim, so he remained on board.

His idea was to use some of the empty propane gas canisters as flotation devices to reach the store.

When the police and the Coast Guard came aboard, he was elated. The immediate fear of death had passed. Word back home in the vil ages was that U.S. immigration authorities would often lock people up, but they could be bailed out within a matter of days. Then they would be given a court date that they would never appear at.

Michael welcomed the arrival of the government officials as a hopeful ending to a torturous two-year journey that had started when he was sixteen years old, when his father put him on a train heading west. It had cost more than $20,000 in smuggling fees to send the only son, the second of five children, off to the United States.

That journey, which Michael, carrying only a backpack, had started in northern Fujian Province, had taken him into the jungles of Burma, where one of his fel ow vil agers had died; through a year of semicaptivity in Bangkok; and on a seventeen-thousand-mile boat journey that often seemed fatal.

But the stories that Michael had heard were wrong, at least for them. That night’s wel -publicized disaster changed the entire equation. It would be four years, not days, before he was free again, and only then because a congressman stepped in front of President Bil Clinton the evening of the State of the Union address and made a personal plea.

The soft, hazy rays of the early-morning sun il uminated the scene. The name of their boat, written in white block letters, became visible:
Golden
Venture.
From the beach the passengers could also see the Statue of Liberty for the first time.

Over the next few days, investigators discovered that the boat had been deliberately crashed into the sandy peninsula. As of early that morning, the man who had instructed the captain to crash was unaware how disastrously his order had been executed. Something had gone wrong, because the captain was unreachable. But it was only hours later, when the man, Weng Yu Hui, walked into a store on East Broadway in Chinatown and saw a short, plain Chinese woman with a blunt haircut watching the early-morning news, that he became aware of the consequences of the crash. The two had known each other across two continents, having grown up in Chinese vil ages separated by a thirty-minute walk. In the closed tangle of rural vil ages where everyone is connected to everyone else, the father of Weng’s brother-in-law had been the woman’s teacher.

Weng had been the main organizer behind the doomed boat trip. But it was the woman, a business partner in the boat, whose name and face would later be splashed across the New York City tabloids, with headlines like “Evil Incarnate.” Known as Sister Ping, she was an international y renowned businesswoman who had helped provide hundreds of thousands of dol ars of financing for the boat. Two of the men on the boat, both of whom had boarded in Kenya, had been her clients.

Sister Ping looked at Weng and told him to leave New York City. With such a spectacle blowing up in the media capital of the world in the early months of a new presidential administration, law enforcement agencies would be looking vigorously for them. She was worried about her two clients. Weng told her not to fret: there had been almost three hundred people on the boat; it would be unlikely that any of hers had died. He was wrong. One of her passengers had been among those who drowned.

The most precise estimates today say there were thirteen crew members and 286 il egal immigrants aboard the
Golden Venture.
Some fifteen years later, advocates estimated that about half of those il egal immigrants were stil in the United States. Some won asylum. Some were deported but snuck back. Some existed in a legal netherworld. The
Golden Venture
immigrants had fanned out from New York City along the coast and into the heartland: Virginia, Kansas, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona. They had one thing in common: Chinese restaurants. About 90 percent of t he
Golden Venture
survivors were involved in the Chinese-restaurant business, according to their own estimates. Of the others, a handful were in construction, one was a New York City cabdriver, a few had become artists. But most of those people who washed onto the shore that day worked as cooks, delivery boys, and waiters. A lucky few owned their own restaurants.

T h e
Golden Venture
was in essence, a delivery of Chinese restaurant workers to the United States that had gone haywire.

For the past two decades, the vast majority of Chinese restaurant workers in the United States have come from a Delaware-sized region in southeastern China surrounding the coastal city of Fuzhou (roughly pronounced foo-JOE).

The average American has no mental picture of Fuzhou, or even its home province of Fujian.

The area is not known for its cuisine, like Sichuan or Hunan or Guangdong (formerly Canton). It is not known for its culture or history, like Xi’an, with its terra-cotta warriors, or Beijing, with its Forbidden Palace. It is not known for its dramatic mountainscape, like Guilin, or its modern skyline, like Shanghai. In fact, the most remarkable trait of that area may be that it is the single largest exporter of Chinese restaurant workers in the world today. Of the passengers on the
Golden
Venture,
246 were from Fujian.

The majority of the Fujianese arrived il egal y, so precise figures are hard to come by. But based on his surveys of the number of people now missing in the vil ages and towns around Fuzhou, and estimating conservatively, Professor Zai Liang notes that perhaps 300,000 Fujianese have migrated from China to the United States over the past two decades. If those people al got together and formed their own city (even without the children they’ve had since), they would form the sixtieth-largest city in the United States—just behind Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Toledo. And if you add the children in, the number grows. “That number is also tricky,” Zai Liang says.

The typical Fujianese immigrant either paid tens of thousands of dol ars to be smuggled to the United States or fol owed a family member who had emigrated. In the early days, in the 1980s, the going rate was about $18,000. By the time I visited China in 2006, it had climbed to upwards of $70,000. The costs needed to bribe officials and forge increasingly sophisticated identity documents in a post-9/11 world had increased sharply.

Put another way: there is a fairly good chance that the Chinese restaurant worker who cooked your roast pork fried rice, or the woman who took your order on the phone, or the deliveryman who showed up at your door paid tens of thousands of dol ars for the privilege of doing so.

It is in the region around Fuzhou, in a little fishing vil age cal ed Houyu, where Michael’s journey began in 1991. Houyu, whose name means “Monkey Island,” has no monkeys and is not an island. It is located on a piece of land that juts out into a crook of the muddy Min River. It is down the road from another little town, cal ed Xiangyu, or “Elephant Island.”