The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (50 page)

6.
“like a plane crash”:
“Freighter Runs Aground with Human Cargo,” United Press International, June 6, 1993.

6
A heavyset Coast Guard pilot:
Unless otherwise noted, all material pertaining to Bill Mundy’s role in the rescue is drawn from an interview with Bill Mundy, December 7, 2005.

7
The chopper’s spotlight searched:
Archival news footage,
CBS Sunday Morning
, June 6, 1993.

8
Before long three Coast Guard boats:
Supplemental criminal incident report, Clay Rice, June 6, 1993.

8
But just as they approached:
Supplementary case incident report, P.O. G. Arthur, July 28, 1993.

10
A dozen boats:
Supplemental criminal incident report, Detective William Stray, June 9, 1993.

10
Most of the survivors:
Archival news footage,
CBS Evening News
, June 7, 1993.

10
Rescue workers unloaded:
Malcolm Gladwell and Rachel E. Stassen-Berger, “Alien-Smuggling Ship Runs Aground,”
Washington Post
, June 7, 1993.

10.
Somma approached the man:
Transcript of an interview with David Somma and Steven Divivier,
Dateline NBC
with Tom Brokaw, August 3, 2001.

11
Ray Kelly, the short:
CBS Evening News
footage, June 6, 1993.

11
Kelly was stunned:
Interview with Ray Kelly, January 6, 2006.

11
The local and national media:
CBS Evening News
footage, June 6, 1993.

11
“These are people who”:
Ibid.

11
It was there that:
Unless otherwise noted, all details relating to Dougie Lee and his experience during the rescue are drawn from an interview with Dougie Lee on February 10, 2006.

12
There were a few women:
The blankets, the triage tags, and other details of the physical surroundings are drawn from
CBS Evening News
footage, June 6, 1993, and June 7, 1993.

12
The other officers standing watch:
Richard Pyle, “Ship Carrying Chinese
Aliens Runs Aground Off NYC; at Least Seven Dead,” Associated Press, June 6, 1993.

12
They were desperate:
Diana Jean Schemo, “On the Ship; Survivors Tell of Voyage of Little Daylight, Little Food and Only Hope,”
New York Times
, June 7, 2003.

12.
Fearful of tuberculosis:
CBS Evening News
footage, June 7, 1993.

13
Many of the survivors:
Ibid.

14
A team of officers:
These details are drawn from video footage taken by the officers who boarded the ship on the morning of June 6.

14
“Slippers, purses, money”:
Malcolm Gladwell and Rachel E. Stassen-Berger, “Courts Log Tragic Seagoing Saga,”
Washington Post
, June 8, 1993.

14
Working with translators:
Unless otherwise noted, details relating to the interrogation of Amir Tobing are drawn from supplemental criminal incident reports, D. Hecimovic, June 7, 1993, and Edward M. Riepe, June 7, 1993.

15
In total:
While Kin Sin Lee and Captain Tobing had boarded the
Golden Venture
earlier, the first passengers did not go aboard until February 14, 1993. So for those passengers, the voyage to Rockaway lasted 114 days. The voyage of the Mayflower took 65 days; Nathaniel Philbrick,
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
(New York: Viking, 2006), p. 3.

16
Before the Chinese boarded:
CBS Evening News
footage, June 7, 1993.

16
All that remained on the beach:
Dwyer, “Desperate Hours,”
Newsday
, June 7, 1993.

16
All this jetsam:
CBS Evening News
footage, June 6, 1993.

16
The initial count was eight:
Joseph W. Queen, “Drowning Cause of Death for Six Victims,”
Newsday
, June 8, 1993.

16
Along with the bodies of the
two cardiac arrest victims:
Ian Fisher, “Waves of Panic Yield to Elation of Refugees,”
New York Times
, June 7, 1993.

16
In the coming weeks:
Detail about the clam dredgers is from an interview with Charles Wells, February 22, 2007.

16
Little was known about:
supplemental criminal incident report, unsigned, June 16, 1993.

16.
Four of the bodies were:
“Fear and Intimidation Slow Identification of Six Bodies,”
New York Times
, September 5, 1993.

17.
Word spread in the neighbor hood:
Chris Dobson, “Community Buries Six Unidentified
Golden Venture
Victims,”
South China Morning Post
, March 20, 1994. Following the burial, the
New York Times
interviewed a number of the passengers from the
Golden Venture
, who were by then being detained, and learned the identities of the dead—which the passengers knew, but the authorities had not thought to ask. Ashley Dunn, “Nameless Dead in Sea Tragedy Now Identified,”
New York Times
, March 31, 1994.

17
Of the survivors:
Supplemental criminal incident report, Edward M. Riepe, June 7, 1993.

17
The facility had only:
Vivienne Walt, “Aliens at the Gate,”
Newsday
, November 29, 1993.

17
The
New York Times
alone:
Seth Faison,
South of the Clouds
(New York: St. Martins, 2004), p. 116.

17
The man who stepped:
Unless otherwise noted, material on Bill Slattery is drawn from an interview with Bill Slattery on July 7, 2008.

17
He was extremely ambitious:
Interview with James Goldman, formerly of the INS, May 23, 2007.

17
“This is the twenty-fourth ship”:
CBS Sunday Evening News
, June 6, 1993.

17
In the past nine months alone:
Gladwell and Stassen-Berger, “Courts Log Tragic Seagoing Saga.”

18
The fee to reach America:
During the 1980s the standard fee was $18,000; by 1993 it had risen to $35,000; today it is often as high as $70,000. Interview with Special Agent Bill McMurry and Supervisory Special Agent Konrad Motyka of the FBI, December 15, 2005. (These figures are generally accepted by law enforcement, academics, and members of the Fujianese community I spoke with both in New York City’s Chinatown and in Fujian Province, China.)

18
Strictly speaking, this was:
The distinction between human smuggling and human trafficking is vexing in large part because questions of what constitutes coercion, deception, free will, and exploitation become difficult to resolve in many particular instances. In my conversations with immigration advocates and anti-trafficking experts, I sometimes got the impression that there is an almost willful muddying of the categories, in part because it may seem easier to rouse the indignation of jaded donors and members of the press with suggestions that
all
smuggled and trafficked individuals are being subjected to a contemporary form of slavery. I can see how this might be a useful strategy, but from an analytical point of view it is deeply counterproductive. The fact that individuals are trafficked in great numbers for sex or forced labor is a devastating phenomenon. But human smuggling of labor migrants is also a widespread phenomenon, and a different one: these migrants tend to know what they are getting themselves into, and to suggest that they are exploited in the same manner that teenaged sex workers from Cambodia or Moldova are, or that they are in any meaningful sense “slaves,” is to overlook the free will they are exercising in volunteering for the risks of the journey and the debts they will owe upon arrival. On the categorical distinction, see U.S. Department of State, “Fact Sheet: Distinctions Between Human Smuggling and Human Trafficking,” January 1, 2005; Brian Iselin and Melanie Adams, “Distinguishing Between Human Trafficking and People Smuggling,” United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, April 10, 2003.

18
“In effect, slavery here in the U.S.”:
ABC World News Sunday
, Bill Blakemore reporting, June 6, 1993.

18
Several miles away:
Details from this scene are derived from Weng Yu Hui’s testimony in Sister Ping’s extradition proceedings in Hong Kong in 2000. See Vicki Kwong and Chow Chung-Yan, “Sister Ping’s Bad Luck Fears,’”
South China Morning Post
, August 22, 2000.

19
She had helped arrange:
The fact that one of the dead was a passenger of Sister Ping’s is from an interview with Deirdre Gordon and Martin Ficke of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, March 29, 2006.

CHAPTER 2: LEAVING FUJIAN

This chapter is based primarily on Sister Ping’s written responses to my interview questions, on her remarks at the sentencing hearing in her trial, and on research and interviews conducted on trips to Hong Kong in March 2007 and February 2008 and to Fujian Province in February 2008. In addition, I relied on the scholarly work of several academics who have written about Chinatowns, the Fujianese, the snakehead trade, and Chinese migration, in particular Peter Kwong and Dušanka Miščević, Ko-lin Chin, Mette Thunø, Zai Liang, and Wenzhen Ye.

20.
No one knows precisely:
On the numbers of overseas Chinese, see
Dudley L. Poston, Jr., Michael Xinxiang Mao, and Mei-Yu Yu, “The Global Distribution of the Overseas Chinese Around 1990,”
Population Development Review
20, no. 3 (September 1994); Cheng Xi, “The Distinctiveness’ of the Overseas Chinese as Perceived in the Peoples Republic of China,” in Mette Thunø, ed.,
Beyond Chinatown: New Chinese Migration and the Global Expansion of China
(Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Societies, 2007), p. 50. Part of the difficulty in sorting out these numbers is determining who to count—whether sojourners, settlers, the assimilated, the unassimilated. See also Thomas Sowell,
Migrations and Cultures: A World View
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 180.

20
America no doubt saw:
The first documented instances of Chinese in North America were in the eighteenth century, though it has also been suggested that some came before that. See Sowell,
Migrations and Cultures
, p. 220. The “beaten into a different shape” quote is from Owen Cochran Coy,
Gold Days
(Los Angeles: Powell, 1919), p. 344.

20
China was in a state of upheaval:
See Jack Beeching,
The Chinese Opium Wars
(New York: Harcourt, 1975).

21
At that time America:
Iris Chang,
The Chinese in America: A Narrative History
(New York: Viking, 2003), p. 20.

21
Young Chinese men began:
Martin Booth,
The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 296–97.

21
But for all their numbers:
Peter Kwong and Dušanka Miščević,
Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community
(New York: New Press, 2005), pp. 19–20. (Kwong and Miščević suggest that 3,000 square kilometers is roughly half the size of Rhode Island. It’s actually more than that.)

21
By 1867, nearly 70 percent:
Booth,
The Dragon Syndicates
, p. 296.

21
Charlie Crocker:
Chang,
The Chinese in America
, pp. 56-57.

21
Over a thousand:
Ibid., pp. 63-64.

21.
When the Civil War ended:
Kwong and Miščević,
Chinese America
, p. 61.

22.
The demand for Chinese laborers:
Booth,
The Dragon Syndicates
, pp. 296–97. On the origins, history, and current role of the triads and their role in Chinese migration both in the nineteenth century and today, see Yiu Kong Chu,
The Triads as Business
(New York: Routledge, 2000).

22
Penniless gold rushers:
Kwong and Miščević,
Chinese America
, p. 36.

22.
Once they arrived:
Ibid., pp. 76-77.

23.
“In San Francisco”:
Mark Twain,
Roughing It
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003 [1872]), p. 208.

23
Bloody anti-Chinese purges:
See Jean Pfaelzer,
Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
(New York: Random House, 2007).

23
The law, which strictly:
There had been smaller, state-based limitations on immigration before, often barring paupers, lepers, prostitutes, and the like.

23
In 1887, one Chinese laborer:
See Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889).

23
In 1891 the United States:
The position was established in the Act of March 3, 1891 (26 Stat. 1084; U.S.C. 101). See Michael C. LeMay and Elliott Robert Barkan, eds.,
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), p. 66. On Ellis Island, see p. 44.

24
By 1920 fully half:
Sowell,
Migrations and Cultures
, pp. 224-25.

24
But when Japan attacked:
Kwong and Miščević,
Chinese America
, pp. 202–3.

24
In the 1950s:
See Tiejun Cheng and Mark Seldon, “The Origins and Social Consequences of Chinas Houkou System,”
China Quarterly
, no. 139 (September 1994).

24
Sister Ping was born:
Unless otherwise noted, biographical material related to Sister Ping is drawn from written responses from Sister Ping, July 2008. The description of Shengmei is drawn from my visit to the village in February 2008 and from conversations in Fujian Province with people who remember what the village was like in earlier times.