The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (45 page)

F
rom their homes in cities and small towns around the country, the passengers of the
Golden Venture
followed the news of Sister Ping’s conviction with a kind of detached interest. Despite the government’s best efforts, the vast majority of the original migrants now lived in the United States, including nearly all of the hundred or so who had been deported. Still enamored of the elusive promise that America seemed to
hold, they had returned in a variety of ways, some of them legal, some of them not, and many of them were too busy to take much notice of the Sister Ping case. Those who did take an interest felt sympathy for Sister Ping. The only snakehead toward whom any of them displayed ill will was Ah Kay, and the fear and hostility that his name still managed to awaken in them seemed driven more by his predatory relationship with the Chinatown community than by his role in the voyage of the
Golden Venture
.

Of more concern to the passengers was a conspicuous shift in the mood of the country—the return of a deep-seated panic on the issue of immigration. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the kind of periodic hysteria that has occasionally gripped the nation throughout its history returned, but with a heightened element of fear. In 2003 the two sides of INS work, benefits and enforcement, were officially disaggregated, with the benefits side becoming a new agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the enforcement side joining customs to become Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. If any doubt remained about which of the competing instincts behind immigration work would prevail, the instinct to admit people to the country or the instinct to shut them out, it was surely telling that both of these new agencies were absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security. As the bureaucratic reorganization took hold, one message was unmistakable: immigration would henceforth be regarded first and foremost as a matter of national security.

Nearly a decade after the last of the
Golden Venture
detainees had been released from York County Prison, the former prisoners were still on parole. ICE had begun launching impromptu raids on restaurants and garment factories across the country and rounding up illegals; numerous cities and municipalities were beginning to pass their own strict anti-immigrant ordinances. Some of the
Golden Venture
passengers began to fear that in such a hostile climate, they themselves might be deported. They had purchased property and opened businesses. Many of them had sent for their families, or met and married people in America.
They had American-born children enrolled in elementary school. Yet in 2004 one of the men who had been pardoned by President Clinton, Zeng Hua Zheng, received a deportation order at his home in Aurora, Colorado. He was instructed to gather his belongings into 44 pounds of luggage and report on a certain date for his flight back to China.

As their fears grew, passengers all across the country started making telephone calls to York. Some of the original People of the Golden Vision had fallen out of touch with the passengers, but many had stayed in close contact, telephoning them at Christmas and the Chinese New Year and attending their weddings and the weddings of their children. Craig Trebilcock had just returned from a year spent with an Army civil affairs unit in Iraq, and he and Beverly Church began lobbying members of Congress to introduce a piece of private legislation that would finally put an end to the uncertainty and fear in which the
Golden Venture
passengers had lived for a decade, by granting them permanent resident status.

“They’re picking them off one by one,” Bev said. She was still working as a paralegal, but in her spare time, in the evenings and on weekends, she began compiling binders full of information on each of the passengers and sending them to legislators in Washington, hoping to persuade them to vote on the private bill. The catch with a private bill is that it can be approved only by a unanimous vote in Congress, and particularly on the matter of immigration, there would always be a few hardliners who would refuse to find sympathy for the men. But as long as the bill was pending before Congress, the passengers could not be deported. So at the beginning of each congressional term, Bev would work with allies in the House of Representatives to introduce the bill, and when it did not pass by the end of that term, she would make sure that it was reintroduced in the next one. “They paid the penalty but never got final status,” Todd Platts, the Pennsylvania congressman who sponsored the bill, said of the
Golden Venture
passengers. “We want immigrants to be willing to work hard and provide for themselves. These individuals have shown that they do.” Bev continued lobbying other
members of Congress, and when her earnest letters received no reply, she would drive to Capitol Hill herself and doorstep the legislators in their offices. “You should see it,” Craig joked. “They scurry into the nearest men’s room as soon as they hear her heels coming down the hall.”

In the spring of 2006, a documentary about the
Golden Venture
by the filmmaker Peter Cohn premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Bev and Craig thought it might be an ideal PR opportunity, so they persuaded the passengers whose names were on the private bill to take a rare day off work and travel by bus and car to New York. It was a happy reunion for the men, who smiled and joked and exchanged family news and baby pictures. “When we saw these gentlemen on TV, on the shores of New York State, we took these gentlemen to be heroes, not liabilities to the country,” Craig said at a crowded press conference in Chinatown. “They are the bravest men I have ever met.”

“We almost died trying to get to America, and then we were in jail for four years,” one of the passengers, the slight, bespectacled Ohio restaurant owner Michael Chen, told the newspaper reporters assembled in the room. With fluent English and a businesslike demeanor, Chen looked every bit the modern American professional, and had become something of a spokesman for the group. “We have been out of jail for almost a decade,” he continued. “We have started businesses and families, paid taxes and been good citizens. But still we are not fully legal. It’s hard for us to buy homes, get jobs, or even get driver’s licenses. We live in fear that we will be sent back to China. We ask President Bush to recognize that we have already paid a very high price to find freedom in America, and to finally grant us legal status.”

Standing among his fellow passengers, dressed in a black suit with the collar of his button-down shirt splayed over the lapels
Saturday Night Fever–
style, was Sean Chen. He had come from Philadelphia, where he had been living since 2002. He spent his days working as a manager and bartender at a Japanese restaurant and his nights tending bar at an Irish pub. He had bought his own place, a small brick townhouse on the outskirts of the city, and he was engaged to a beautiful
Fujianese woman named Dana, who was tall and had flawless skin and a giddy, infectious laugh. Dana had her green card, and she and Sean had met when she went to work at the Japanese restaurant as a cashier. On their first date, Sean took her to lunch at TGI Friday’s, then to watch the New England Patriots play the Philadelphia Eagles at a Super Bowl party at a friend’s house.

About a year after the press conference in New York City, Dana gave birth to their first child, a son, whom they named Brian. The baby was several weeks old before Sean’s mother, who was living in Taiwan, insisted on giving him a Chinese name. In the excitement of the birth and those first few days of fatherhood, Sean had not gotten around to it.

On a lovely, crisp morning in March 2006, Judge Michael Mukasey’s courtroom filled once again with members of the press and law enforcement officers, and with the many friends and relatives of Sister Ping. Sister Ping entered, wearing a prison-issue gray T-shirt and blue pants, her long hair falling down her back. The casual clothing made the snakehead seem especially small; the T-shirt was too big for her, dropping almost to her knees. She turned to acknowledge her family, then put on her headphones so that she could hear the translation.

After perfunctory statements by the prosecution and defense, Judge Mukasey went through the standard practice of offering the convicted an opportunity to address the court. When defendants choose to make these statements, they tend to involve brief apologies to victims or their families, some sort of show of contrition, and a request for leniency in the sentencing.

Hochheiser stood and said that he had advised Sister Ping not to speak. “She is not a lawyer, aware of the legal issues,” he said. “Having said that, I have told her that if she wishes to make a statement to the court, she may.”

Mukasey turned to Sister Ping. “Is there anything you want to tell me before I impose sentence?” he asked.

For a moment Sister Ping was silent, sitting straight-backed behind the defense table. Then, slowly, she rose. She gestured to her interpreter, a slim Chinese woman with short hair who sat several feet away. Then she spoke.

“I cried once in court,” she began. “That was when Ah Kay robbed my home twice and I was too afraid to report it to the police … The witnesses against me have all gone home, and they have received a light sentence as a result of testifying against me,” she continued. “I’m happy for them. The way that I lead my life and also my personality is that I wish the best for people. I was a small businesswoman in Chinatown. If Ah Kay had come and robbed my home twice, you can imagine how many other people took advantage of me.”

What followed was an extraordinary hour-long monologue as Sister Ping expounded and free-associated on her personal history and the events and personalities that had arisen in the trial. Everyone in the courtroom except her family members, who had perhaps been exposed to such Castro-style feats of digressive oratory in the past, sat rapt, amazed that the woman who had waited so silently over the course of the proceedings had suddenly hijacked an opportunity to sound a few words of regret and was instead delivering a stump speech. “Everybody can tell you that Mrs. Ping was working in the store every day, especially people from my hometown,” she continued. “I am not the kind of person that they depicted me and charged me with being.” She pointed to the fact that for years other snakeheads had claimed to be associated with her and done business “using my name;” she seemed to be implying that some of her alleged associates were not associates at all, that she was merely the victim of guilt by association.

“Do you think that Mrs. Ping has some kind of psychological—some abnormality? That wasn’t the case. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any money. And the things that people have said, is it … is it logical?”

She quickened her pace, speaking so rapidly that the interpreter struggled to keep up, the words tumbling out, her indignation rising, pausing only to jot a character on a piece of paper from time to time to
clarify her meaning. She retold each event that had come up at trial, but from a different vantage point, in which she was the victim of the narrative. When she was arrested in Buffalo, she had merely been helping a pregnant relative in need. She said she had always known Weng Yu Hui was trouble, that he was “too wily.” She complained that the Fuk Ching gang had exploited her, robbed her, demanded extortion. “I am deathly afraid of these people,” she said. She maintained that the evidence against her had been manufactured.

One reason an attorney might not want his client to speak freely in court is that she could make the mistake of alluding to crimes for which she has not been charged, and sure enough, despite the fact that government lawyers had made no mention of the contract on the journalist Ying Chan, Sister Ping brought the incident up, saying that the Fuk Ching had approached her and suggested that they take care of the writer for a fee.

Relentlessly she portrayed herself as a victim, a hardworking small-business owner who had wanted nothing more than to look after her family. “Everyone can tell you I work fourteen hours in the restaurant every day,” she said. She pointed to her relatives in the back rows. “Every single one of my relatives, when they arrived, they borrowed the whole sum from me in order to pay the snakeheads.” She would not admit to having smuggled the family members herself, but there was no mistaking the responsibility and pride she felt when it came to the presence in this country of so many of her kin. “It was my choice to bring them over—all of them—to the United States,” she said.

It was not entirely clear whether Sister Ping actually believed any of what she was saying—whether she was delusional and had persuaded herself of her own martyrdom or whether the whole thing was a misguided charade, a last-ditch effort to persuade authorities to buy the cover she had been so assiduously cultivating for so many years. At one point she seemed to accept the idea that she would have to serve time in jail and began describing the role that someone like her could play there. “In jail I can help people,” Sister Ping said. “People who are ill,
people who just arrived, people who are in a bad state of mind … As a fellow passenger, I can lift their mood … because new arrivals usually do not have a happy state of mind. And I can also buy clothes, as well as daily supplies, for people who are poor, who have no money, and I can help those who are ill, who are pregnant.” It was an extraordinary image, a creative adaptation of the mythology that surrounded Sister Ping. In her rendering, prison was just another Chinatown, a hard-luck ghetto in which Big Sister Ping could minister to the disenfranchised and the displaced. “My life remains valuable,” she said defiantly. “It remains valuable.”

But no sooner had she seemed to accept the idea of a life in prison than she changed course, blasting the FBI. “The FBI should be helping me,” she exclaimed. “I was taken advantage of a lot in Chinatown.” She seemed obliquely to suggest that she might be willing to cooperate. “I would like to speak privately with the prosecutors and with the FBI,” she said. In particular, she expressed an interest in talking with her erstwhile handler from the Bureau, Peter Lee.