The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (18 page)

The partners were on a nervous timetable.

They were focused on retrieving a group of two hundred or so Chinese, including twenty of Sister Ping’s clients, who had been stranded in Kenya when the captain of their boat, the
Najd II,
decided that his share of the smuggling profit was too smal and refused to go any farther. He was being paid $500,000 on human cargo he estimated to be worth $7 to $8 mil ion. On the way to pick up their stranded passengers in Mombasa, Kenya, the
Golden Venture
stopped in Thailand to load an additional hundred or so passengers, including Michael’s group. Some of the men had worked as sailors in Hong Kong or Shanghai. They told Michael that 750 tons was smal for a boat traveling across an ocean and refused to get on.

Michael and others were transported by speedboat out into the dark ocean at night to meet the
Golden Venture.

To Michael, the steamer looked terrifyingly smal bumping around on the waves. He could barely see it in the ocean. But they real y didn’t have a choice. Some one hundred people boarded in Thailand. The ship then steamed through the Strait of Malacca and across the Indian Ocean to Kenya.

Human smuggling is not to be confused with human trafficking, where women or young children are moved across borders against their wil and sometimes forced to do sex work. Human smuggling is used to describe the wil ing movement of people. This was emphasized and reemphasized to me when I met a human smuggler in the Dominican Republic, which had been a key staging point for the PRCs to enter the United States.

The meeting was arranged by a friend of a friend, who was also acting as the chauffeur. Naum, as the smuggler wanted to be cal ed, was waiting for us on the street wearing dark sunglasses. We circled around a number of times before picking him up in an SUV. He shook my hand and said in Spanish, “Before we start, I just have one question for you.” He paused.

“Do you believe in God?”

Were we going to start with an existential evaluation? I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. “But I am not Catholic.”

He smiled. “Then do you believe God put borders on this earth?”

We rode around in the SUV for an hour and a half, talking through an interpreter. “I don’t consider myself a criminal because I’m not doing anything against the natural wil of God,” Naum said. “I’m just helping people who want a better future. The majority of the people I move are honest workers.” There are the good reasons to cross borders. There are the bad reasons to cross borders. The Chinos, or PRCs, are good business because they pay the highest fees of anyone not involved in anything explicitly shady. Naum said he does not move criminals, terrorists, or people from suspicious countries, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. He stays away from Chechens in particular, he said. “They kil children.”

The

PRCs

are

a

better

business

proposition. They have less risk of drawing the ire of the U.S. Homeland Security Department. They pay lucrative fees. And there is a steady flow of them. In addition, PRCs almost always pay in ful once they reach their destination, he said.

“The trafficking of Chinese is very different from others. Most people we are smuggling are paying their own way,” he explained. So when smugglers need money to deal with unexpected problems—to bribe a police official for example—

they often have to pressure the clients’ family members to come up with the cash. In contrast, with the Chinese smuggling is more centralized. Naum can make a single phone cal to a snakehead boss somewhere and the boss wil front the money to deal with a problem. It’s the same thing with the payments.

The smugglers always get paid by the big boss, who in turn wil get payments over time from his clients.

Naum had settled in the Dominican Republic, which, due to its proximity to both the United States and Puerto Rico, has often been a popular transit point for il egal immigrants. The most desperate il egal immigrants are shipped over in
yolas
—rickety homemade boats cobbled together from plywood and tree limbs and powered by engines.
Yolas
are seaworthy only in the sense that you can toss them into the high seas. By ferry, the journey from the eastern coast of the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico takes a few hours.

Passengers traveling the Mona Passage by
yola
wil get to Puerto Rico in four days if things go smoothly, twelve days if they’re less lucky, or never if the boat capsizes in the stiff winds and unrelenting waves, tossing its inhabitants into the ocean.

The highly financed PRCs traveled by boats, but seaworthy ones. Right before we met, Naum had gotten an anxious phone cal from a business associate in Peru who was stuck with nineteen Chinos. The previous boat leaving Peru had been intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard. That smuggling route was now hot, and they were backing way off it.

How are we going to move them out? his associate had wanted to know. Naum had spent ninety minutes cal ing around to other business folks so he could answer that question.

If there is one problem with PRCs, it is that, wel , they have a hard time blending in. As one immigration official put it to me, “A PRC sticks out from a mile away.” Even the South Asians from India and Pakistan can be passed off as a South American, but, “A PRC is nothing but a PRC.”

On the
Golden Venture,
food, water, light, and space were al scarce. The passengers ate rice and vegetables until the vegetables ran out. They were given water to drink, clean, and cook with, but slowly that supply dwindled too, so they started col ecting rainwater in plastic bags. There was only one bathroom for the three hundred or so people. Men started relieving themselves off the deck of the boat.

Most passengers kil ed time by playing poker and Chinese chess; the boredom could be mind-numbing. One passenger played a handheld computer game, punching the buttons long after the batteries wore out.

Then one night the ship’s crew warned the passengers that there would be a storm. The boat was rounding the southern tip of Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope. Waves, some fifty feet high, tossed the vessel back and forth. Bodies tumbled like rag dol s within the hul . Michael thought they were surely going to perish. Others agreed and put on their best clothes in preparation. People prayed to any deity they thought would listen: Jesus. Buddha. The Chinese Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin. The Goddess of the Seas, Mazu. The boat rocked for seven or eight hours. The skies cleared. They had survived.

Days

before

the
Golden Venture
approached American shores, the Fuk Ching gang—which had been tasked with moving the passengers from boat to shore—melted into bloody disarray. Intergang warfare erupted, resulting in a number of deaths. Ah Kay was in China. There was no one to bring the passengers off the
Golden Venture.

When Weng and the others learned of this, they decided on a Plan B: to have the boat land directly on the shore. They considered the piers under the Manhattan Bridge but settled on Rockaway. If the boat lodged in the right time and place, the water would be only a little bit over three feet high, shal ow enough for a person to stand in. The boat steamed between Boston and New York, unsure of where it would land. They were so close to land that Michael and the others could see the lights. “We were so excited,” he remembered.

Weng instructed the boat’s crew to run the ship aground, then tel the passengers to throw down the mattresses and jump down. Weng gave the final instruction to run aground around nine P.M. on June 5, 1993. Within hours, the boat did exactly that.

The Fuzhou region is not the only one in China that has sent an absurdly high concentration of its residents abroad. Before Fuzhou, there was the Taishan region (also known as Toisan), in the southeastern province of Guangdong, where some 80

percent of Chinese-American immigrants before the 1950s had their roots. Many of the first generation of restaurant workers and laundry owners in America came from a four-county area. If Fuzhou is the region that is supported by General Tso’s chicken, this is the area that was supported by chop suey.

Today Taishan remains a lush but

depressed area about a four-hour bus ride from Hong Kong. The legacy of the sojourners is laced throughout the county, popping up in unexpected places among the verdant rice paddies and dusty roads. But as in the vil ages around Fuzhou, Taishan’s architecture is evidence of the people who journeyed across the ocean. Crumbling century-old Western-style castles are sprinkled throughout the vil ages—a faint echo through time and space.

The local museum has an extensive exhibit on overseas Chinese, in both Chinese and English, the only display on Chinese emigration I encountered during my travels across China. A life-size diorama shows two Chinese men hopping into a rickety boat as their family members tearful y bid them good-bye from the shore, an angry sea painted in the background. In the lobby, there is a huge map of the world, about thirty feet across, with a red dot in the center of each country that Taishanese have immigrated to. The little red dots freckle the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific Rim; I stopped counting when I got to fifty.

Back around Fuzhou, news of the
Golden Venture
crash did not reach the vil ages through traditional news outlets. Instead, word of mouth from New York carried back the rumors about the sunken ship and dead sons and husbands. Michael’s mother col apsed into bed and cried for more than three days. It would be a month before they received a letter from Michael saying that he was in prison and he expected to get out.

Based on what they’d heard from earlier il egal immigrants, Michael and the other
Golden
Venture
passengers expected to be briefly detained before being released. However, they’d arrived during the Clinton administration’s first five months. The high visibility of the boat crash and the ensuing political fal out meant that the administration could not simply treat the
Golden Venture
passengers with the same bureaucratic anonymity it did other il egal immigrants that slipped into their net. Twelve days after the crash, President Clinton announced a shift in immigration policy. “We cannot tolerate those who traffic in human cargo,” he said. “Those who attempt to enter the United States il egal y should know that they wil be intercepted, detained, and returned home.” Michael invoked a popular Chinese aphorism to describe the decision. They “kil ed the chicken to scare the monkey,” he said, meaning that Clinton’s people intended to make a warning lesson out of them.

Michael and most of the others were sent to the York County Prison in Pennsylvania. To break up the monotony, many of them took up sports, which is how Michael got his English name: because he liked to play basketbal , the guards cal ed him Michael, after Michael Jordan.

Meanwhile, the York detainees found fervent advocates in a local coalition of anti-abortion evangelicals, pro bono lawyers, and feminists. The volunteer lawyers took a one-day crash course in immigration law and learned how to help their clients apply for asylum. Neighbors held daily vigils for the
Golden Venture
detainees, helping to keep the goal of their release in the public eye. Every Sunday, a group converged at the prison and sang “God Bless America.” Beverly Church, a former nurse and a staunch Republican, began visiting the prison on a regular basis.

Michael, like many others, started to learn English. He used a dictionary and would slowly and painful y translate the numerous articles that the
Golden Venture
passengers were writing. Others improved their conversational skil s by talking to the Christians who would regularly come to chat with them, often about Jesus. Over time, many of the detainees got sick, which some of them attributed partial y to the prison food: too much meat, fried food, and starch.

Meanwhile, in New York, investigators were accumulating evidence against Sister Ping and her role in the
Golden Venture
fiasco. Ah Kay was arrested in Hong Kong in August 1993. Federal agents executed a search warrant on Sister Ping’s restaurant on East Broadway in September 1993 and found a cash-counting machine, a lamination machine, airline-ticket receipts, and passports belonging to various individuals. By December 1994, federal officials had enough to indict Sister Ping and issue a warrant for her arrest.

It was too late. By then Sister Ping had already ceased to exist. She had last used her own passport three months earlier, on September 20, 1994, when she’d departed Hong Kong. After that, her trail effectively disappeared.

At York, the detainees eventual y latched on to an unusual activity: creating elaborate paper sculptures.

It started when one man taught the others how to make origami pineapples out of recycled paper.

Within the tightly confined spaces of the prison, this activity afforded an acceptable creative outlet; production exploded.

The first pieces were rough-hewn and given to attorneys and friendly prison workers as gestures of thanks. But over time, the creations became startlingly sophisticated: a twisting dragon with an outstretched claw and a slithering tongue; a family of snowy-white owls, the adults hovering over two babies; a grinning Buddha lounging like Jabba the Hutt; a lobster with delicately outstretched antennae.