The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (19 page)

One piece, an idyl ic foot-and-a-half-high model of the
Golden Venture,
seemed much more pleasant in the artist’s rendition than it had ever been in actuality.

The prisoners eventual y made over ten thousand sculptures. A number of the most elaborate and gripping, from the dozen or so most skil ed artists, were exhibited from Santa Fe to the Smithsonian. Some of the pieces were sold in gal eries and at auctions. The money was sent back home or used to pay the detainees’ lawyers.

In 1996, the Immigration and Naturalization Service did something unprecedented. It reclassified one of the
Golden Venture
prisoners, Wu Luzhong, as an “alien of extraordinary ability in the arts”—the first time this agency had ever done so with an imprisoned il egal alien. Four more of the prisoners would also be granted the rare artists’ visa.

A few members of Congress mounted a private lobbying campaign to get the
Golden Venture
detainees freed. On the third anniversary of their detention, in June 1996, Congressman Bil Goodling, a Republican whose district included the York County Prison, phoned Clinton to plead for the prisoners’

release, with limited success. At the State of the Union address in February 1997, Goodling took the opportunity to step into the path of President Clinton as he was making his way out of the House of Representatives chamber. Eight days later, Goodling met with Clinton in the Oval Office. He brought two elaborate pieces of the prisoners’ paper sculptures, a pine tree and a “freedom bird.”

The president admired them.

A few days after that, Goodling got a cal from the president. The prisoners would be freed.

This was not a unanimous decision in the administration, Clinton warned.

On February 26, Michael and the others—

wearing identical blue sweatshirts, gray pants, and sneakers—stepped out of the York County Jail and onto a prison bus. They were taken to the nearby Codorus Church of the Brethren, which was packed with the local activists and national media.

At the church, they were served their first Chinese meal in nearly four years: General Tso’s chicken, a broccoli-shrimp dish, steamed rice, egg rol s, and fortune cookies from the Hunan East restaurant in York. Most of them had never seen such strange Chinese food: General Tso’s chicken and the fortune cookies were unrecognizable. But soon enough, for most of them that food would become their lifeblood.

It took more than five years after the arrest warrant was issued for law enforcement to catch up with Sister Ping.

In April 2000, Hong Kong police were waiting for her when she showed up at the Korean Airlines counter. At the time of her arrest Sister Ping was carrying in her purse over $60,000 in American and Hong Kong currency, several Belizean passports with different names, and airline tickets. The American currency was wrapped in newspaper, in packets of $8,000 each. Law enforcement officials found a genuine passport from Belize issued in the name of Lily Zheng; it used Sister Ping’s photo and listed her occupation as “housewife.” (At the trial American prosecutors would ask, What kind of housewife makes over fifty trips to foreign countries within a three-month time period?)

Sister Ping fought extradition for three years, but in 2003 she took a United Airlines flight back to the United States, arriving in San Francisco on June 20. She was confident she could get out. The trial lasted over a month in the late spring of 2005. On June 22, 2005, Sister Ping became the twenty-third person convicted in conjunction with the
Golden
Venture.
A jury found her guilty of conspiracy to smuggle aliens and take hostages, money laundering, and trafficking in ransom proceeds. By that time, most of her co-conspirators had been released, many because they had cooperated with the government in her trial.

The next day, a New York tabloid blared the headline “Snake is Hiss-tory.”

At the hearing for her sentencing, Sister Ping made a plea in Chinese. “I would like to explain to the judge I am not the kind of person that they depicted me and charged me with being,” she said through a translator. “In the way that I have led my life, I have always gone to kindness and uprightness because since I was young my father had instructed me that one has to be a good human being.” She went on for an hour, saying how she had been a victim and that evidence in the trial had been faked. “I love the United States because it is a society of laws,” she said.

In the shadow of her sentencing, the boat survivors reunited in New York City at the opening of
Golden
Venture,
a documentary by Peter Cohn that showed at the Tribeca Film Festival. Beforehand, the group held a press conference at the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas to highlight the precarious legal situation they were in: they stil could be deported.

Craig Trebilcock, a personal-injury lawyer who had become one of their most fervent advocates, compared the
Golden Venture
passengers to the East Germans he saw while stationed with the military in West Germany. “They had risked their lives for freedom,” he said. “Their misfortune was arriving at a certain point in our nation’s history.” There is “no such thing as immigration law,” he added. “There is real y only immigration politics. It may be wrapped up in law, but it’s real y politics.”

Michael, who had become quite media savvy by that time, also took the podium. Under the bright lights, the television reporters tried to coax the
Golden Venture
passengers into producing a usable sound bite. Michael was one of the few whose English was good enough for the chal enge. “This is a lovely country. This is a free country,” he said. The cameras rol ed.

By the time I met up with Michael at his restaurant, a few weeks after Sister Ping’s sentencing, he had been out of York County for nine years. He owned his own 150-seat Chinese restaurant in an upscale suburb of Columbus, Ohio, cal ed Dublin—a town ful of families with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and 2.3

kids.

Michael’s restaurant is located in a classy strip mal (if that isn’t an oxymoron) that looks like a quaint European town from one vantage point and spil s into a sprawling parking lot from another. His restaurant does a brisk business, mostly at lunch; a large professional population works in Dublin. He and his wife have two children. A few years ago, just after their son, Al en, was born, he bought a four-bedroom house in a new development two miles away from the restaurant. Their yard stil had the spindly sycamore and weeping wil ow trees that are common in new developments, but he already was building a new house in another subdivision a few miles away. It had one more bedroom, but more important, it was in a better school district. His son was only three years old, but Michael was thinking ahead. “First off I want them to be wel educated for sure, not like us in a restaurant,” he said.

Like many from the region, Michael spoke highly of Sister Ping, praising her character. “She is more trustworthy and she is wil ing to help people,” he told me. Of Ah Kay, he said, “His hands are covered with blood.” The people around Fuzhou remember Sister Ping for being generous, for giving money to people in need, and for charging less for people who couldn’t afford the ful smuggling fee. “If a family had four or five children, she would make sure that one of them could go to America,” one neighbor told me. Her neighbors related that they would have gladly done some of her prison time, to repay some of their karmic debt to her. “If you do a good deed for someone else, it is a good deed for yourself,” one neighbor said.

Michael has picked up some Americanisms. He drinks coffee in the morning as he reads the local paper. He’s a big footbal fan. But he has other habits that are stil very Chinese—like clearing his throat and spitting.

Of al the
Golden Venture
survivors, in 2006

Michael was among the most wel off. He bought a three-bedroom apartment in a new development in Fuzhou for his parents to retire in. He acts as a translator when other survivors run into problems. His success is due to a convergence of factors: his youth when he came, his fierce desire to learn English, his entrepreneurial spirit, and—no smal matter—his luck.

I asked Michael if, looking back now, it was worth it: the thirty days through the Burmese jungles, the year in semicaptivity in Bangkok, the 112 days on t h e
Golden Venture,
and the nearly four years in detention. Was what he had now worth al that?

He hesitated.

“If you had told me to do it again, I wouldn’t do it again,” he said. “You are gambling with your life.”

He looked up. “It’s half and half. For right now, it’s worth it. If you think back, it’s not worth it to risk your life to cross the Atlantic Ocean.”

But it wasn’t about him, was it?

No, he said softly. They don’t gamble with their lives for their own sakes. They do it for their parents—and their children.

The white takeout carton is an amazingly elegant product. It is a simple design, yet it connotes so much: Chineseness, harried lifestyles, working mothers, cheap yet fil ing, late night, transience, eating together without dining together, meal as afterthought. When FedEx started delivering to Beijing, it showed ads with a Chinese takeout carton emblazoned with the purple-and-orange FedEx logo. Continental Airlines fol owed suit: when it began offering nonstop flights from new York to Beijing, the company made thousands upon thousands of blue-and-white takeout boxes that said “We deliver too.”
Avenue Q,
a Tony-winning Broadway musical, used the boxes in its street ads to represent the Upper West Side of Manhattan—the original milieu for delivery. Al this captured in a single piece of white industrial cardboard, neatly folded, held by a single wire with no seams and no glue.

Pick up a white carton sometime, and you’l likely see the name Fold-Pak inscribed unobtrusively on the bottom; this is the company that makes some two-thirds of the takeout containers in the country. The industry cal s the cartons “food pails”—which seems more Little House on the Prairie than House of Peking.

Tim Roach, a vice president who started his career with Dixie cups, explained why when I visited the

company’s

largest

factory,

in

Hazleton,

Pennsylvania: in the early twentieth century, the cartons were used to hold shucked oysters. “Many people stil refer to it an oyster pail even though, to our knowledge, it’s not used anymore for that,” he said. At various points, Tim explained, the carton was used to hold ice cream, deli goods, and even goldfish at carnivals. (“Now they put them in a bag,” he said.) Around World War I , the box found a different audience. “Somehow, I don’t know how, it worked its way into Chinese restaurants as the takeout container and it became the dominant package for Chinese takeout,” he said. “Once it evolved into a container for Chinese food, the company put a generic Chinese design on it. Pagoda was it,” he said. They also added “Thank you” in an ersatz Chinese font.

The demand for takeout boxes across the country is considerable, so the factory operates three shifts, twenty-four hours a day, nonstop. During my visit the factory floor was a spinning, whirring, rhythmic hubbub of pneumatic tubes, printing presses, and wire-snapping machines. On the sides of the manufacturing floor were bins of discarded takeout containers from the production line: ones where the wire was misaligned, or the printing was faded, or where the cardboard had failed to separate properly.

I found something depressing about the piles of takeout boxes that had been thrown away.

Takeout cartons are meant to be thrown away; but these virginal white boxes, which had never seen garlic sauce or roast pork grease, seemed almost free of original sin. Suddenly I understood why their loss was so unsettling: these boxes were stil born—

purposeless.

Fold-Pak doesn’t exist as a separate company anymore. It has a complicated corporate family

tree,

tangled

by

buyouts,

mergers,

bankruptcies, and joint ventures. Today, suffice it to say, Fold-Pak has become a unit within a company cal ed GSD Packaging. The splintered history may explain one puzzling phenomenon: Fold-Pak boxes from the East and West Coasts of the United States are made slightly differently. On the East Coast, the wire always runs the short length of the box; on the West Coast, it runs the long way. In Texas you’l see both. I placed the two different cartons from the two different coasts side by side and felt the same disoriented sense as when someone tel s you that water rotates one way around the drain north of the equator and in the opposite direction south of the equator.

The white takeout containers are a fairly mature market item, so aside from the industry itself, there’s not a lot of outside opportunities for growth.

“It’s so identified with Chinese food that delis and other places could use it—it’s a great package—but they identify it with Chinese food,” Tim explained. So the company adapted, pushing a new upscale product cal ed Bio-Pak. These flatter, wireless versions of the traditional takeout carton, available in neutral, warm colors, are preferred by classier food establishments that don’t want the connotation of the white carton. Whole Foods, for example, uses them at the salad bar.