The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe Read Free Book Online

country within a short span of time, is actually not so unusual. In New York’s Little Italy, the Calabrians who settled along Mulberry Street at the turn of the twentieth century self-segregated block by block, and even building by building, according to the particular village in southern Italy from which they came. Social scientists who study migration have observed the pattern in countries around the world: a few early pioneers venture out and lay roots in a faraway land; if they find it agreeable, they send first for their immediate family, then for their extended family, then for friends and fellow villagers. It is one of the peculiar ironies of global migration that an immigrant community in a given country is often highly atypical of the country from which the people came. If youput yourself in the shoes of the person contemplating where it is that he or she wants to resettle, it makes perfect sense: you go to the place where you have a sister or a cousin or an old friend from school. Of course, this model works only if you have a sending community that is close-knit to begin with, but that is where the traditional Fujianese devotion to family comes in. Those first explorers who left the village bore little resemblance to the impetuous young men of Western literature who turn their backs on family and society and leave to seek their fortunes. Migration, at least in Fujian Province, was anything but selfish or misanthropic. The family was regarded as an economic unit, and the first pioneers to leave the village generally did so with the aim of establishing a beachhead on a foreign shore and eventually sending for the family. Demographers call this process “chain migration” and use the concept to explain how it is that half the residents of crowded urban ghettos from Boston to Berlin often hail from the same few villages in whatever country they left behind. A more evocative Fujianese expression captures the same dynamic: “One brings ten. Ten bring a hundred.”
    Moreover, everywhere the Fujianese went, they seemed to succeed, often besting the local population and controlling a disproportionate amount of wealth. More than half of Asia’s forty billionaires of Chinese ancestry in the year 2000 had roots in Fujian Province. What the Fujianese did best, it sometimes seems, was leave. They were fiercely independent by nature, wily, and doggedly entrepreneurial. When opportunity beckoned, from any remote corner of the earth, they followed, often against staggeringly difficult odds, and established enclaves in foreign lands.
    Sister Ping might be described as one of the Fujianese pioneers who struck out for the unknown and settled in New York. But that would be an oversimplification. In fact she was not the first in her family to make the journey to America: her father was. Because Fujian is all mountains and coast, with little arable land, Fujianese men grew upknowing how to fish and sail, and opportunity could always be found at sea. For generations of Fujianese men, the sea offered a sometimes perilous but always reliable option: if you couldn’t make ends meet on land, there was always work to be found on one of the merchant ships going in and out of the port at Mawei. During the 1960s, in the midst of the upheaval of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Sister Ping’s father, Cheng Chai Leung, left the family and joined the crew of a merchant ship bound for the United States. He faced a bitter reality: he could do more for his family by turning his back on them and finding work outside China than he could by staying put.
    In those years, very few Chinese made it to America. Leaving China was forbidden, and in any event, Beijing and Washington had no diplomatic relations, so there was no legal process for applying to enter the United States. Those few who did manage to make it to America tended to arrive the way Cheng Chai Leung did: they either found jobs as sailors or simply stowed away, and when