The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (17 page)

After a few days in Menghai, one night they were instructed to walk down a road. A truck would pick them up, they were told. At the meeting place, other Fuzhou men were also waiting. The truck brought them closer to the border, where they were met by a guide who led them to a mountainous and hil y area. There they were told to run up the slopes until they couldn’t run anymore.

Some of the men struggled. Since Michael was younger, he was in better shape. “The border is very dangerous,” Michael told me. “If someone crosses the border, the guards can open fire.”

They climbed for two hours. On the other side, they were met by a group of men wearing military uniforms and carrying machine guns. Michael, scared and homesick, wanted to turn around and go back to Houyu when he saw the men with the guns.

But they told him he had no choice: either he moved forward or he died. The sixteen-year-old cried.

The smugglers were al Burmese. They earned between $3,000 and $4,000 for each person who crossed the Burmese border—a considerable sum for a pariah economy under a military dictatorship.

The men from Fuzhou began walking. They kept asking their three Burmese guides how long it would be before they got to their destination. The guides always replied that it would “only be a few more days” or promised that they would get there

“tomorrow.” They were lying. If Michael and the others had known it would be a month before they would get to Thailand, none of them would have gone.

Burmese weather is strange. During the day it was so hot they had to take off their shirts. It was freezing at night, but they couldn’t light a fire because it would give them away. The Burmese jungle was like a primeval forest, like some lost era of the earth’s history. Things were moving al the time. When it rained, leeches would mysteriously appear in their shoes. Michael was never sure how that happened.

Did the leeches arise from inanimate spores that sprang to life with the addition of water? Did they sneak in through tiny holes in the shoes? Did they wriggle in when he stepped into a particularly large puddle? Periodical y the men had to stop to pul the leeches off. Along the way, they passed decaying bodies, people who had died on the way to the West.

Some had drowned in a flash flood. Others had died from drinking the water, Michael was told.

One night, during a thunderstorm, Michael and five other men lost track of the people in front of them. It was so dark, Michael couldn’t see his fingers two feet in front of his face. Holding hands, the men kept walking until the ground gave way under one of them. They had reached a cliff. They screamed into the night, but their cries drifted into the vastness.

Human smuggling is perhaps second only to narcotics as the largest cross-border il egal trafficking in the world. It has accelerated in recent decades for two reasons. The first is that the income inequality between the world’s citizens is now perhaps the highest it has ever been in human history. The second is that transportation and communications technology has vastly improved. Both are consequences of globalization.

The greatest traffic is between the United States and Mexico, the international border that straddles the largest per capita income difference in the world. But at the turn of the mil ennium, the most expensive journey anywhere is the journey of the Fujianese to the United States. The sums of money needed by Fujianese to come to the United States are staggering by American standards, and even more so by Chinese. A question natural y arises: Where do these immigrants get the money? The short answer is that they borrow it—from family, neighbors, and, occasional y, from loan sharks. That this much money can change hands is surprising to Westerners, who are comfortable with the idea of borrowing from large banks, but not so much from close associates.

Perhaps it is worth noting that in Chinese, the word for

“lend,”
jie,
is the same as the word for “borrow.” There is only one word: “lendborrow.” The context of the sentence makes the meaning clear: “I lendborrow money to him” or “I lendborrow money from him.” The act of lendborrowing is a reciprocal relationship. A person who borrows one day may lend on another.

In the smuggling world, il egal Chinese immigrants are cal ed “PRCs,” for the People’s Republic of China, the official name of the Communist-led country. In contrast, Taiwan is ROC, for Republic of China, but no one ever talks about ROCs because these days ROCs aren’t usual y il egal immigrants. If you listen in on law enforcement chatter on the radio in port cities, you wil often hear comments like “We got a boat with five PRCs on board.”

Il egal Chinese immigration to the United States is hardly new—especial y given the long history of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The destruction of public records in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake al owed thousands of Chinese-American men to falsely claim citizenship and thus the right to bring over any “sons” (real or fictional) they had in China. What is new, however, is the rise of organized human

smuggling

in

il egal

immigration,

a

phenomenon that has intrigued criminologists and sociologists.

I visited one of the leading criminologists involved

in

investigating

Chinese

smuggling,

Professor Ko-lin Chin, at his office at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. In Fuzhou a few years ago, he had been approached in his hotel lobby by men who had tried to recruit him to become a smuggler. He had used the opportunity to interview these snakeheads about what the job would entail.

They had been especial y excited when they found out Professor Chin stil held a passport from Taiwan, which arouses less attention than an American passport in China. Despite the icy diplomatic relations between China and Taiwan, Taiwanese nationals have played a critical role in moving Fujianese across the world. The lure of profit trumps the pride of patriotism. Every single one of the thirty-seven smuggling boats that were intercepted by the United States government from mid-1991 to mid-1994 had some connection to Taiwan: registration, crew, ownership, or home port.

Until recently, most scholarly work had looked at Chinese criminal organizations in terms of the traditional paradigm of hierarchical, corporation-like entities like the Mafia or the drug cartels. An alternative, more entrepreneur-centered view sees criminal enterprises as networks and al iances that expand and contract with the nature of the crime at hand.

Chin, who has interviewed dozens of snakeheads, argues that the Chinese human-smuggling organizations are an amalgam of the two.

In many ways, they are organized like networks, with largely horizontal groups of smugglers joining together around specific tasks—moving a particular group of people, for example. But the groups, while somewhat flat, also resemble corporations in that individual smugglers tend to take on very specific roles: investors, recruiters, transporters, debt col ectors, guides. The “big snakeheads,” who are investors and arrangers, are often overseas Chinese who rarely meet their smuggled human cargo face-to-face. “Little snakeheads” handle al the day-to-day tasks.

Chin maintains that his research turned up little evidence suggesting any significant connection between these smuggling groups and traditional Chinese criminal societies such as triads, tongs, and street gangs. Since smuggling organizations are largely dynamic, the hunt for “godfathers” who run them is largely futile, he has argued. The cel s wil just organize themselves around other “big snakeheads.”

In talking to him, I got the sense that human-smuggling organizations are like any other multinational shipping enterprise, with investors, profit margins, international divisions, hubs, and local outsourcing. The only difference is that their product is Chinese restaurant workers.

At the top of the cliff in Burma, Michael and the other five men waited for hours, certain they were going to die. Then the distant light of torches appeared. They were ecstatic. Their guides had found them.

The group was given horses to ride for one stretch of the journey. But they had to move at night, and even the horses had trouble maneuvering in the dark. Once Zheng’s horse took a bad step and it tumbled down a hil , almost bringing Zheng with it; in the nick of time he grabbed some nearby bamboo branches. It took the group two hours to go down and retrieve the horse, which, miraculously, had escaped uninjured.

The impetus for traveling only at night was not so much the government as the powerful heroin traffickers in the region. These men would not hesitate to kil anyone who seemed a threat to their poppy crops. Michael and the others had to dodge the searchlights that constantly swept the area.

Weeks into the journey, they arrived at a mountain clearing, joining between two and three hundred people, almost al from around Fuzhou.

Michael looked at the faces and recognized many of them as from Houyu. From the clearing, Michael rode a series of trucks to Bangkok, where the various groups of smuggled people then headed in different directions. Some traveled toward Spain. Others, from the region of Fuqing, aimed for Japan.

In Bangkok, the men were handed

passports from Singapore, Japan, and Korea.

Michael was handed a Korean passport. The smugglers made him practice signing his Korean name until he could do it without hesitation. They taught him enough English so that he could say he was on vacation.

In Bangkok (the only place I’ve been where my hotel minibar included condoms), I met with Major General Krerkphong Pukprayura at his offices in the Royal Thai Police Headquarters. The general was a coordinator of an international coalition to combat the smuggling and trafficking of people in the Asia-Pacific region cal ed the Bali Process. Bangkok, for a number of reasons, has historical y served as a transit hub for il egal migrants—not just from China but from al over Asia to the West, he explained. The city is one of the main aviation hubs for Asia but two of the other primary hubs, Singapore and Hong Kong, are islands and therefore much easier to patrol. In contrast, Thailand shares a massive land border with four countries: Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Burma. It is easy to cross by land into Thailand and then continue on to Bangkok. As a result of the il egal migrants, Bangkok has also become a world capital for

forged

documents:

stolen

passports,

manufactured passports, and passports in which the photographs have been changed.

The smuggling is helped by the existence of Sino-Thais, Chinese who have become very successful in Thailand over the last few generations, making up the bulk of the business establishment and adopting Thai last names. “In Thailand they have been able to assimilate to the point where they don’t consider themselves Chinese. They consider themselves Thai,” he said. Some of the younger generations barely speak any Chinese at al .

The Chinese are only part of the il egal flow in and out of Bangkok. Thailand has been drawing people from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, al of them on their way elsewhere. The most interesting migrant population in Thailand may be the North Koreans. Many of them crossed the northern border into China and then walked al the way to Bangkok, he said, running his finger down the length of China. I gawked. It was a massive distance

—equivalent to walking from Maine to Texas. He had heard the stories thousands of times. “It’s human nature,” he said. “Everyone wants to better their life.”

Michael wasted a month in Bangkok after he broke his foot running from Thai government officials. He lost another month when he was captured by Thai police. It cost his father $6,000 in bribes and fees to get him out.

Bangkok became a bottleneck during the time when Michael and the others were waiting. Thai authorities had cracked down after a flood of PRCs bearing false travel documents had shown up at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It was getting too difficult to move people out by air, so the snakeheads turned their attention to the seas. A consortium of snakeheads, including Sister Ping and Weng, in New York City, were busy arranging the boat that would eventual y bring Michael and his group to the United States.

One of the partners in the
Golden Venture,
Guo Liang Qi, was connected to Sister Ping through an odd history. He had robbed her twice. Guo, also known as Ah Kay, was a leader in a street gang cal ed Fuk Ching who had committed multiple murders. He robbed Sister Ping for the first time in 1985, when he fol owed her daughter to their Brooklyn home. There was less money than he’d expected. A few months later the gang robbed Sister Ping’s home again, finding $20,000 stashed in her refrigerator.

Later on, while they were planning a smuggling venture together in September 1991, he apologized for the robberies. She waved it off, tel ing him on the phone, “That’s what happened in the past.

We’re talking business now.” They agreed that for $750,000, Ah Kay would take 130 passengers from a boat off the coast of Massachusetts and bring them to New York City in three U-Haul trucks.

Of the sum owed to him, Ah Kay instructed Sister Ping to wire $300,000 through her banking network so he could invest it in a Panama-registered steamer, the
Tong Sern,
in Singapore. At sea the Panamanian flag was lowered and a Honduran flag was raised. The
Tong Sern
was rechristened
Golden
Venture.