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

they arrived in the bustling port of Los Angeles, or Baltimore, or New York, they jumped ship, disappeared amid the dockhands and stevedores and all the chaos of unloading one cargo and loading another, and ventured into town. If they could find their way to a Chinatown, there would be people who spoke Cantonese or Mandarin, and they could find a place to stay and a job that paid cash, washing dishes in a restaurant or working in a Chinese laundry.
    Cheng Chai Leung worked as a dishwasher for a decade. He wrote letters every few months—the family received three letters a year—and he sent money home. But he was largely absent during Sister Ping’s youth. He left the family when she was fifteen and stayed in America for thirteen years. Eventually he slipped up somehow and alerted American authorities to his illegal status. They discovered that he was a deserted crewman, and he was deported back to China in 1977. According to authorities in Hong Kong and New York, it was upon his return to China that Sister Ping’s father went into business smuggling people.

    T he origins of the term snakehead are shrouded in mystery. Some believe that the snake symbolizes a circuitous smuggling route, with the snake’s head leading the way. Smuggled migrants are referred to as “snakes,” or sometimes “snaketails.” But they’re just as often known as “ducks,” or simply “customers.” As smuggling operations grew more complex, a certain hierarchy evolved, with “little snakeheads” doing recruitment in Chinese villages and “big snakeheads” arranging financing and logistics, and pocketing the bulk of the profits, from the safety of New York or Hong Kong or Taipei. Historical records indicate that the indigenous Fujianese once venerated snakes as totems. The Fujianese were originally known as the Min, and the Mandarin character for the Min is composed of a symbol for a gate with a worm or a snake crawling underneath it. When emigrants slither through the wire fences strung along the border between one country and another, one of Sister Ping’s snakehead associates once explained, “the shape of it looks like a snake.”
    One curiosity of the growth of the snakehead trade in Fujian Province during the 1980s and 1990s is that at the time Fujian had one of the fastest-growing economies in China. Mao died in 1976, and by the time Sister Ping’s father returned from America the following year, Deng Xiaoping was already ushering in a period of critical reflection on the errors of the Mao era and moving toward a series of sweeping economic reforms designed to open up China somewhat to the outside world and experiment with a more market-based economy. In 1980 Beijing established a number of special economic zones, which were permitted to be more open to international trade and given certain tax incentives to lure foreign investment, and the southern Fujian city of Xiamen was selected. In 1984 fourteen other coastal cities were designated, and Fuzhou made the list.
    Xiamen and, to a lesser extent, Fuzhou reinvented themselves asshipping and manufacturing centers in the 1980s, and the economy started to improve. It would seem that this development should have discouraged emigration from China. A rising tide lifts all boats, supposedly: why leave the province just as it is discovering prosperity? But as these changes swept through the region, many Fujianese who had for generations devoted themselves to subsistence fishing or tending a farm suddenly began to feel dislocated in the new economy—left behind. Demographers who have researched migration find that it is not actually absolute poverty that drives people to leave one country for another. The poorest provinces in western China have rarely been a source of outmigration. When everyone around you shares your own meager lifestyle, there is actually less of an inclination to leave. Instead, it is “relative deprivation” that tends to drive migration: income disparities, the