The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (39 page)

“How much will you pay?” Yang wondered.

“Seven dollars an hour,” Kline replied.

As they were talking, Yang knelt down and picked up a length of thread from the floor. He toyed with it for a moment, then skillfully tied a weaver’s knot.

“Okay,” Kline said. “Eight dollars an hour.”

In the coming years, Kline and his family essentially adopted Yang, allowing him to live rent-free in a room in an old cigar factory that they had converted into a weaving mill. Yang worked sixty hours a week at nine looms, bringing an extraordinary degree of dexterity and skill to his weaving and increasing the output of the mill by 50 percent over his first three years. He made garments for Civil War reenactors and upholstery fabric and period drapery for historic residences; the mill produced materials that would be used in the restored houses of nine former presidents. When the movie
Cold Mountain
needed hundreds of authentic-looking costumes and uniforms from the American Civil War era, it was Yang You Yi who produced the fabric. Yang called David Kline “Dad-Boss,” and Kline credited him with turning the business around. Kline decided that when he retired, he would sell Yang half the company.

W
hen the first thrill of freedom had worn off and the men had begun to adjust to their new American lives, paying taxes on their income, clipping coupons and shopping at Wal-Mart, and beginning to think about saving some money for a lease to open their own business or for a down payment on a house, they also began wondering about whether and when they could send for their family members. Many of them had left behind wives and children in China, family they had not seen, in some cases, since 1991. But in the general euphoria and exhausted relief that had attended the final release from prison, the men and their supporters
had effectively failed to read the fine print. Immigration policy seems always to entail compromise, and when President Clinton signed the order to set the
Golden Venture
passengers free, the gesture included a subtle wrinkle that would seriously curtail their abilities to live full lives in the United States. Clinton had used his power to parole the passengers out of prison, which meant that they were free to live in America, to work, pay taxes, and own property. But technically they had no ironclad right to remain in the country, nor any of the rights that come along with a green card or naturalization. They were not allowed to petition for family members to join them. They had to check in with an immigration officer, who functioned in more or less the manner that a criminal parole officer would. And they could remain only at the whim of the United States. If some official in some future administration decided, during a period of alarm over immigration, to deport them, they would have no procedural defenses. Worst of all, parole operates as a kind of limbo: there is no graduation from parole to legal status. It is a nebulous state, but a permanent one.

Still, some of the men found ways, both legal and illegal, of arranging for their family members to join them. As husbands were reunited with their wives and fathers with their children, they struggled to reconstruct the families they had left behind. When Yang You Yi’s wife was finally able to bring his three children to Pennsylvania in 2002, it had been a decade since the children had seen their father. He worried that he would not recognize them when they got off the plane. Yang had purchased a new home in Red Lion, installing soft blue carpeting upstairs and down. After a joyful reunion at the airport, he took his family home. But in the ensuing weeks and months he found that his children did not always heed the father who had been absent for so many years. In the village in Fujian they had enjoyed a certain autonomy, walking wherever they needed to go. But in suburban America they relied on their father to drive them, and soon, like any other American kids, they were hounding Yang for rides. The children “give me a lot of headaches,” Yang said. “They don’t listen.”

For some of the older
Golden Venture
passengers, the sons and daughters who arrived in America and proved so much more adept at the tricky process of cultural assimilation eventually became a kind of crutch, helping their parents navigate an English-speaking world. Beverly Church remained close to the shy, middle-aged cook Zheng Xin Bin. While he was detained in York, Xin Bin had charmed Bev, and the two had become good friends. “We don’t take any skinny people here,” she would tell him, worried by the weight he had lost in prison. “You have to eat, to stay strong, so you can work hard.” Xin Bin was released when President Clinton issued the pardon, and Bev drove him into Philadelphia to obtain his working permit, a laminated card the size of a driver’s license. Finally released from detention and in a position to repay the kindness Bev had shown him, Xin Bin was a gentleman, always insisting on picking up the tab after a meal and volunteering to pay the highway toll anytime the two were driving. “Car hungry,” he would joke, offering a $20 bill.

Xin Bin had left a wife and a young son and daughter behind when he boarded the
Golden Venture
, and in August 2000 he was finally able to send for them. The family settled in Washington, D.C., and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Xianjuan, enrolled in a local school and quickly established herself as a star: she learned English with ease and became an A student. She adapted more quickly than her older brother to American life and became a sort of manager for the family, a liaison to the outside world: she paid the bills, oversaw the banking, and handled the family’s credit cards. By 2005 she was an eighteen-year-old senior at Northwestern High School and had decided to apply to college and study law. Xin Bin was fifty years old. He was reunited with his family, and the horrors of the voyage and the years in prison were beginning to recede. He and his wife were dependent on Xianjuan to assist them in their everyday affairs, and to some extent, by allowing them to continue functioning in a primarily Mandarin idiom, she may have served as a kind of buffer between the two of them and the English-speaking world, an impediment to their own assimilation. But at the
same time she was in a very real sense the literal embodiment of their commitment to a life and a future in the United States. They were enormously proud of her.

Xin Bin was working as a cook at a nondescript Chinese restaurant in a strip mall in a rough corner of Washington. One evening his children came to pick him up at work. It was after ten o’clock, near the end of his shift, and Xianjuan filled a cup with seafood soup and went outside to wait for her father in front of the restaurant. As she sipped her soup, a car entered the parking lot, and two men got out. They walked toward Xianjuan. Then one of them pulled out a gun and shot her twice in the head.

“All of a sudden I heard
pang, pang—
two gunshots—and I went outside,” Xin Bin said through tears not long afterward. “Ayah, my daughter had fallen there.”

She lay by a blue mailbox, dead. Xin Bin collapsed on the ground beside her, his body convulsed by sobs. “I only have this one daughter,” he said later. “She was so beautiful. She was such a good student.”

No suspects were ever apprehended; the crime remained unsolved. Police speculated that it may have been a botched robbery, or a case of mistaken identity. Xin Bin was distraught, and his wife was even more so. She had a breakdown and remained in the house for weeks, catatonic with grief. Without Xianjuan the family became isolated from the outside world, and their despair deepened. Eventually Xin Bin’s wife announced that she wanted to return to China. “She wants nothing to do with America,” Bev said. “They killed her baby.”

Before Xianjuan died, Xin Bin had been trying to obtain a green card for her. After her murder, he tried to explain to the people from Citizenship and Immigration Services that they should discontinue the application, because his daughter was no longer alive. But without Xianjuan to act as interpreter, he struggled to make himself clear, and for over a year after her death the agency continued sending him notices and forms, insisting that the family send them information that was
necessary for Xianjuan to become a permanent resident of the United States.

S
ean Chen had been luckier than the other detainees at York. He had walked out of the prison over a year before the other men did, after his lawyer, Ann Carr, managed to persuade a federal judge with a complex legal argument over whether or not the men who jumped off the
Golden Venture
had technically succeeded in entering the United States. If, as Carr contended, the passengers had indeed managed to enter the country, then there was a time limit on how long the government could keep them in jail (whereas if they had been caught before formally entering, they were “exclusion” cases and could be detained more or less indefinitely). The judge’s ruling was ultimately reversed by an appeals court, but not before Sean had a chance to telephone relatives in China and the United States and assemble the $10,000 he needed for bail. On the day he was set free, Bev Church went to the prison. She had always admired Sean’s fearless swagger, and she took him a pair of sunglasses as a gift. He wore them as he walked out.

Despite his suggestion in prison that he would avoid Chinatown at all costs, Sean moved to Philadelphia and found work in the Chinese community there. He owed his bail money to the various family members he had borrowed from, and needed to start earning in a hurry, so he found a job as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant. Next he worked at a garbage processing center, which paid him $8 an hour, and at a parking lot. Sean traveled light—he always had—and he was always in search of a new experience and a better paycheck. Through a Fujianese employment agency he found a job in New York City working as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant on Forty-ninth Street. He moved to New York and took the job, but he lasted there only one month before he relocated to the Bronx and found work as a cashier at a takeout restaurant. He didn’t like that job either, and after another month or so he
received a call from a cousin who owned a Chinese restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut. She needed a cashier, so Sean moved once again.

Sean liked Hartford. He helped wait on tables at the restaurant and slowly began accruing more and more experience in the business. He figured if he could work as a chef, cashier, delivery boy busboy waiter, bartender, and manager, he would become a kind of indispensable jack-of-all-trades in the Chinese restaurant world. He enrolled in bartending school and found that he loved tending bar: he was a naturally outgoing, gregarious person, and he liked practicing his English with customers. He liked having regulars. He liked having friends.

Still, the fact that he was not technically a legal immigrant rankled Sean. He still had to check in with an immigration officer on a regular basis, an imposition that he began to resent. He had been in the United States for years. He was working hard, paying taxes, making decent money. Why was he still being treated like a criminal?

When he wanted to start his own restaurant in Hartford, there was an additional challenge: because borrowing and lending money are so ingrained in Fujianese culture and contracts and debts tend to be honored, Fujianese people are a decent credit risk. But undocumented aliens are not, and it is difficult for a parolee, who could be deported next year or next week, to obtain a loan from a bank. Instead Sean borrowed from friends and relatives and made the mistake of running up debts on credit cards in order to open his own place. For a while it seemed he had achieved that first crucial milestone for the Fujianese: he owned his own business. But before long the restaurant folded. Sean had borrowed so heavily from everyone he knew that when he failed to find customers and cover his bills, he was forced to close the place. He was devastated, and felt like a failure. He spoke with his parents in China. “Son, it’s okay,” his father reassured him. He tried to put Sean’s trials in perspective. “You’ve been through so much,” he said. “So much more than I have.”

But the worst aspect of Sean’s quasi-legal life was feeling like a man without a country. Eventually his parents and siblings moved to Taiwan,
and he had no immediate family left in China. He had no Chinese passport, no Chinese identity papers. He felt that there was less and less connecting him to the country every day. When he spoke with his mother on the telephone, she complained that his Fujianese had become corrupted by English and by Cantonese, which he was obliged to pick up in the Chinese restaurant trade. Apart from his parents and Beverly Church, whom he still telephoned once a week, no one ever called him by his Chinese name, Chung Sing Chao, anymore. He was Sean Chen now; it was how others thought of him, and how he thought of himself. But he suffered from a gnawing anguish at the thought that he might be sent back to the country he had left in 1991, despite the fact that like generations of foreign people with foreign names from all over the world who had peopled this country and made it what it was, Sean Chen had become, unmistakably and irreversibly, American.

Chapter Sixteen

Snakeheads International

ONE SUMMER
day in 1995 a yellow school bus tore along the potholed surface of Highway 8 in Honduras, en route to the Guatemalan border. The bus held fourteen Sikhs who had paid to be smuggled from India into the United States. They were customers of one of Sister Ping’s chief competitors, a Peruvian woman named Gloria Canales, who now worked out of Costa Rica. Canales transported migrants from India and China to Central America, then on to the United States. She was not accompanying the Sikhs herself; like Sister Ping, she had long since subcontracted her operational logistics. Instead, a hired driver was guiding the Sikhs to Guatemala so that they could rendezvous with
coyotes
, as Mexican human smugglers are known, and steal across the border.

Earlier in the day the bus had been tailed by a car containing immigration agents, but the driver seemed to have lost the pursuers on the back roads, and the agents were stymied when their government-issue radios stopped working. The transmitter at the airport had been mysteriously switched off, quite possibly by someone hoping the Sikhs would make it to Guatemala unmolested.