The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe Read Free Book Online Page B

drive migration: income disparities, the experience of watching your neighbor do better than you. So, ironically, economic development sometimes causes people to leave rather than stay put. Some did better than others when the economic reforms came to Fujian, and those who did not fare as well—the subsistence farmers and schoolteachers, the local Party officials who had fallen out of favor—were suddenly able to glimpse the kinds of material comforts they had lived without their whole lives. What’s more, Deng’s commendable efforts to loosen the household registration system, which had locked the Chinese peasantry in place, eventually unleashed a substantial internal migration and gave birth to a floating population of migrant workers that numbered in the tens of millions. The area around Fuzhou was flooded by eager odd-jobbers from the hinterland. For the local unskilled labor base, it became more and more difficult to find work.
    For this frustrated, largely uneducated population (fewer than 10 percent of Fujianese completed high school), the United States developed an irresistible allure. They might have been excluded from the economic growth in China, but America was ripe with possibilities. Fantastical stories abounded about America and the wealth that could be had there. American markets sold a thousand types of bread, peoplesaid. The very tapwater tasted sweet—you could gain weight just by drinking it. Above all, America seemed to hold the promise of upward mobility. Not overnight mobility, by any means; it was understood that you went to America to work, and work had, just as the gold rushers had done in California over a century earlier. But the promise was that the work would bear fruit—that your children would live an incrementally better life than you did; that one generation’s toil would secure comfort for the next. “Here, they’re working like slaves,” a Chinatown journalist in New York explained. “But there is hope for them to change everything.” But in Fujian, he went on, “you work like a slave, and there is no hope to change anything. For a fisherman? For a farmer with a little piece of land? They’ll never change their life. Never.”
    S ister Ping believed in America as ardently as, if not more than, her fellow Fujianese. When she was a little girl, her father told her it was a great country, full of opportunity. By the time her father returned to China, she was twenty-eight and already a mother. In high school she had met a mild-mannered young man from a neighboring village, Cheung Yick Tak, and the two were married in 1969. Short and shy, with sloping shoulders, a high forehead, and nervous, heavily lidded eyes, Yick Tak had little of his young wife’s intelligence, determination, or fire. But he was devoted to her, and seemed happy to defer decisions large and small to the more assertive Sister Ping. Their first daughter, Cheng Hui Mui, who would later adopt the name Monica, was born in 1973, and the following year the whole family relocated to Hong Kong. Many Fujianese were fleeing to Hong Kong during those years, some of them going so far as to swim across the Shenzhen River. With a free-market economy and British administration, Hong Kong was a tempting bastion of capitalism just a short way down the coast, and the ever entrepreneurial Fujianese moved there and thrived.
    Sister Ping and her family moved into an apartment in a new high-rise on Hong Kong Island, overlooking Stonecutter Island and theskyline of Tsim Sha Tsui. It is not clear how Sister Ping first arrived there—it may have been through the good offices of her father—but she and Yick Tak promptly opened up a small variety shop nearby, on Des Voeux Road West. The Cantonese majority in Hong Kong looked down on the Fujianese, and the Fujianese tended to cluster together, in the neighborhood of North Point, on Hong Kong Island, and in small enclaves in the New Territories. Sister Ping catered to this expatriate