The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (16 page)

Houyu has a natural population of some 5,000 people. The vil age was neatly divided in two: in one half most of the people had the last name Zheng; in the other half, Zhang. Michael’s family, with the last name Chen, belonged to neither. Michael’s Chinese name was Chen Xuedian, and his given name loosely translates to “learn from the model.” It was an indication that his father, a fisherman-farmer, had educational aspirations for his only son. With five children, the family could not afford to buy books for al of them to go to school. Michael always ranked in the top three students in the class, but he got only as far as finishing ninth grade. Then Michael’s father decided that his son would head to America. He contacted some smugglers, made arrangements, and put Michael on a train one night. Michael carried a backpack containing two changes of clothes, three types of medicine, $1,000 in American currency, and about the same amount in Chinese cash. The train headed west.

Today Houyu is a vil age of gnarled banyan trees, languid afternoon naps, and abundant hand-caught fresh seafood. It bursts out of the grassy wetlands in a cacophony of smooth colors and glinting metal—monstrous four-story mansions with bulbous spires, ornate front gates, and tiered balconies. Many of them have stone lions out front, the females with their paws on cubs. This wonderland has been made possible with money from Chinese restaurants in America. This is what General Tso’s chicken buys in China.

But what makes Houyu strange is that many of the houses—each built with hundreds of thousands of American dol ars—are empty. Except for the sound of construction and an occasional chicken clucking, few sounds of life bounce down the narrow al eys.

The residents of the town do not live there.

The vil age has sent more than three-quarters of its population to the United States, including Michael and one of his sisters. The working-age men are missing.

Old men and women, dressed in drab outfits, shuffle down the streets or sit on stoops. Chubby toddlers run about. It is like a vil age in a nation at war, except the men are not at war. They are working at Chinese restaurants in the United States.

The town has a busy Bank of China office but no middle school. The school shut down a few years earlier, for lack of students. It is death by prosperity. Everyone has either left, is planning to leave, or has too few years left to live to make it worth leaving.

Fujian Province, along with neighboring Guangdong Province, has an epic history of overseas migration. It is so mountainous, the locals quip that it is “eight parts mountain to one part water to one part farmland.” With many rocky hil s and little arable land, the Fujianese traditional y turned to the ocean for their livelihoods.

The men were sons of the seas—among them was my grandfather, a Fujianese fisherman.

When war, uprisings, and famine came—and they came with regularity in China—the Fujianese again turned to the sea, and the land that lay beyond, as an economic refuge. By the thousands, they poured onto ships headed south to “Nanyang,” a sweeping, general term that technical y means “Southern Ocean”

but encompasses much of Southeast Asia. Over the centuries, the Fujianese, or the Hokkien, as they cal ed themselves, transformed the demographics and economics of many nations in that region: Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines. They became the business elite, invoking admiration and vicious, sometimes deadly backlash. Even today, many of Southeast Asia’s richest families are of Chinese ethnicity, with roots in Fujian.

The Fujianese people’s love of the ocean and their ensuing reputation as sailors brought them to the United States. They worked on foreign vessels and started jumping ship at New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. These sailors were il egal, but many managed to establish an economic foothold through hard labor. They were the beachhead for the giant waves of Fujianese soon to come. The Fuzhou il egal-immigration network was established with two strokes of a pen, both by Republican presidents. The first was Ronald Reagan’s signing of the 1986 Immigration and Control Act, which offered amnesty to any undocumented aliens who could prove, by the November 1988 deadline, that they had been living in the United States on or before January 1, 1982.

Some legitimately had; others, for a fee of $500 or so, could appear to have been by buying fake backdated tax receipts and employment records. Thus opened a two-year window for the cash-rich, document-poor Fuzhou immigrants to bring their family members in from China. The second stroke came in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre when President George H. W. Bush instructed the State and Justice Departments to give enhanced consideration to individuals who expressed fear based on China’s one-child policy. While they were waiting for their asylum applications to go through, they could start earning money in the United States.

These American federal policies, signed almost ten thousand miles away from Houyu, affected the vil age perhaps more than any other event in its history. Soon, international consortiums of human smugglers, or snakeheads, emerged to take advantage of the demand. Vil age men started to disappear. Night after night, another dozen or so would simply vanish. No one needed to ask where they had gone.

Among those smugglers who rose in prominence and reputation was Sister Ping, whose family home is located across the muddy river from Houyu—fifteen minutes by ferry or about an hour by land. Even as she became a mil ionaire many times over, her family kept their house at No. 398 in the compact vil age of Shengmei, which translates to “Prospering Beauty.”

Shengmei’s narrow al eys are also flanked by empty modern homes now. The vil age, which takes less than fifteen minutes to walk through, is contained within a larger town cal ed Tingjiang. Of Shengmei’s natural population of 800, residents estimate that only 100 today are left. Almost al of those who left owe their passage in some way to Sister Ping. The town is not completely barren, for there has been an influx of a few hundred residents from other parts of the country, like Sichuan. A number of them are there to help tend to the empty, gargantuan homes.

Sister Ping’s family home is a modern four-story, white-tiled house with a red-capped pagoda on top and an arched entryway. It is an older home and, by the region’s standards, not anything spectacular.

American prosecutors said she had sat at “the apex of an international empire” that was “a conglomerate built upon misery and greed.” But around her home, the neighbors speak enthusiastical y about Sister Ping’s deeds. She was the oldest of five children—

three girls and two boys. Neighbors remembered Sister Ping and her youngest sister as the talented ones of the bunch, the other three as just average.

Her sharp mind and focus were evident when she was a young girl, neighbors recal ed. A natural leader, she was the head of the local Red Guard troop during the Cultural Revolution. She was also very fair-minded and would intervene when bul ies picked on other classmates. She was never flashy; even as a young woman she dressed very plainly. She disliked jewelry and makeup.

Sister Ping’s imprint is everywhere in the community, from the gaudy temple being constructed a few hundred feet from her home to the shuttered elementary school that her funds built.

Within a few years, so many men were leaving Houyu that those who had been left behind were subject to the subtle glances of neighbors. The expectation was that real men went to the United States and sent what seemed like massive amounts of money back—with only a hint of the difficult conditions needed to earn that money. In order to keep up with the Zhangs, you had to send your sons and husbands abroad.

Michael joined the pipeline of Houyu men heading to America. When he boarded the train that first night, the little Michael knew about the United States had come from evening news programs.

Vil agers had been smuggling in color televisions from Taiwan for several years, to enjoy the limited local programming. Two years later, he would show up on news programs himself, but only in the United States.

The

Chinese

media

ignored

the

embarrassment of the
Golden Venture.

The dirt roads have since been replaced by smooth, paved lanes running from the vil age to Changle, whose rampant growth earned it reclassification as a city in 1995. The brown river and the plush fields are now largely empty. The grass alongside the banks has grown so long that it bends and whispers in the wind. The vil agers don’t need to work. Those who farm and fish general y do so because otherwise they become bored. In fact, the one lone farmer I found during my time there had original y moved to the United States to be with his son, but he’d returned home out of boredom and frustration. He couldn’t drive or speak English. Back in Houyu, he could tend his vegetable garden every morning. It kept him from dying, he told people.

The main economic activity in Houyu today is construction. Almost al the sounds you here are the banging, clanging, and dril ing of expansive mansions being built. The construction is done mostly by
waidiren,
out-of-towners. Many of the men are from Shanghai and Sichuan; they come to this area because work is available. It is trickle-down economics, Chinese style.

Some Shanghainese men also come for another reason: to entertain the lonely housewives in local bars. These men, who have a reputation for being handsome and charming, are cal ed “ducks.” In the local Chinese slang, spending time with them is cal ed “eating duck.”

In my drive across the United States to visit the Chinese restaurants whose fortune cookies had dispensed the winning Powerbal numbers, I encountered a restaurant owner from Houyu, Dong Zheng. Dong owned King’s Buffet in Lawrence, Kansas, where Joseph Macek of Paola, Kansas, got his lucky numbers and won $100,000. Dong left Houyu in 1995, when he was fifteen years old, fol owing his father, who had come seven years earlier. Dong attended high school in the States and then studied business at Indiana State University, but he too joined the Chinese-restaurant industry. “I haven’t heard of anyone who isn’t in the restaurant business; if they are not running a restaurant, they are doing construction for restaurants,” he said. Al his middle school classmates are in the United States.

His customers are primarily a mix of people from the University of Kansas and Mexican construction workers. He gestured to the workers, who had heaped their plates ful of noodles. “They are like us Fuzhounese. They work very hard for money that they send back home.”

Most of the local ambitions in Houyu revolve around Chinese restaurants. At the end of one vil age lane, I happened upon a school that taught restaurant English to young people who were planning to go to the United States. There are many such schools scattered al across the region. This particular class met five days a week in a barren classroom with an electric fan that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t work. Were it not for the students’ spiked, colored, and elaborately coiffed hair, it could have been a Chinese classroom scene from the 1950s.

The teacher, whose last name was Zheng, was going over the vocabulary he had written on the b l a c k b o a r d : VEGETABLE,

CAWLIFLOWER,

CELERY,

ASPARAGUS, BAMBOO SHOOTS, NAPA, ONION, CABBGE (which was later corrected to CABBAGE), ZUCCHINI.

The teacher drew his material from photocopies of a textbook titled
Practical English for
Chinese Restaurants.
He dril ed the students on vocabulary, first cal ing out the English and having them give the Chinese translation, then vice versa.

He wrote the names of a number of dishes common in Chinese restaurants on the board. Among them was “French fries.” He pointed to the board and warned the students not to pronounce it “French flies.”

There is one main nursery school in Houyu, located near the center of the vil age, and it is ful of toddlers.

Many of them have been brought back to be raised by their grandparents because their parents are too busy working in America to take care of them.

I picked up one pudgy five-year-old girl with thick pigtails. She felt pleasantly hefty in my arms.

“Where were you born?” I asked her in Mandarin.

“America.”

“Where are your parents?”

“America.”

“Why are they in America?”

“Zuogong,”
she said. Working.

“Where is America?”

She looked up at me and blinked. “At the airport.”

Three days into his train journey, Michael arrived in the southwestern city of Kunming, about three hundred miles from Thailand. At the train station, Michael was approached by a man who had been sent his photo. He was reunited with two other customers, familiar faces from Houyu: a cousin and a tal , friendly neighbor with the last name of Zheng who had lived no more than a three-minute walk from Michael. Unlike Michael, who was young and single, Zheng had left his wife and two young children at home.

From Kunming, Michael and a few other men hid in a truck for a day-long trip to a town cal ed Menghai, near the Burmese border. The men stepped inside a metal cage and were handed plastic bags to use if they needed to relieve themselves. Sacks of rice were then placed over the cage. They drove in the dark. At Menghai, the men put on old clothing so they could blend in with the locals. This had only a limited effect because their skin tone was noticeably paler than that of the people who lived in the area.