On American/Canadian Shores, a Wave of Immigrants Smuggled in From China
Michal Albans/Associated Press
Illegal immigrants on the beach after the ship carrying them, the Golden Venture, ran aground.
On Jan. 8, 1993, in an electronics store on Allen Street in Lower Manhattan, two factions of the Fuk Ching gang squared off in a showdown that resulted in a double homicide. The shootout took place in broad daylight in a busy neighborhood. And yet, according to Patrick Radden Keefe, author of “The Snakehead,” none of New York’s major English-language newspapers even mentioned this violent crime. Although Mr. Keefe does not invoke the relevant movie dialogue, a “Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown” attitude might have helped keep the press away.
But the Chinatown described in “The Snakehead” is such an impenetrable place that attitudes of resignation are understandable. Mr. Keefe’s book focuses on a ghetto within a ghetto, the New York community of émigrés from Fujian Province of China who began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the 1980s.
In a formidably well-researched book that is as much a paean to its author’s industriousness as it is a chronicle of crime, Mr. Keefe outlines the way in which the Fujianese were forced out of China, driven to take desperately roundabout and dangerous travel routes and eventually arrived in America courtesy of the lucrative human smuggling business. Snakehead is the term for an entrepreneurial leader of that trade.
The stories told in “The Snakehead” are so long and convoluted that Mr. Keefe has had to go to astonishing lengths to follow them. He has contended with formidable language barriers, convoluted global trade routes, foreign governments that take an anything-goes approach to issuing passports, corruption in the Immigration and Naturalization Service, rivalry between that agency and theF.B.I., and rogue developments like the incarceration of a large group of illegal Chinese immigrants in York, Pa.
He has also tackled a major player, a snakehead known as Sister Ping, who seems determined to stay out of public view. When Mr. Keefe, who wound up interviewing with her in writing, initially approached her about his reporting, she gave an answer that validated everything his book would go on to say about her: “What’s in it for me?”
That seems to have been Sister Ping’s attitude from the start. She emigrated to America, as her father had before her, and quickly established herself as a hard-working businesswoman operating a mom-and-pop variety store in New York’s Chinatown with her husband, Cheung Yick Tak, a man who shares little of his wife’s remarkable ability to shrug off the law. On one of the first occasions Sister Ping was interrogated by an American official, she flatly told the I.N.S. investigator Joe Occhipinti: “You don’t have the time to get me. Or the resources.” Mr. Keefe says what impressed Mr. Occhipinti about this exchange was that she was right.
Mr. Keefe has the wisdom to realize that Sister Ping, for all her flouting of American law enforcement, is not a sufficiently vivid or galvanizing figure on whom to center a book. So she becomes one of many, to the point that “The Snakehead” struggles to balance the many twisting story lines that fill its pages. Part of the book describes the conditions in Fujian Province that prompted such a strong wave of chain migration (the kind in which one villager or family member follows another to the same overseas destination). It addresses the paradoxical way in which new prosperity in China drove away some of that country’s most skilled — and most motivated — workers.
And Mr. Keefe outlines the way in which close-knit Fujianese enclaves in the United States could drift into crime in general and human smuggling in particular. In the process, he makes crucial distinctions between human smuggling (voluntary on both sides) and human trafficking (akin to slavery) while also demonstrating how American law has made the people-smuggling business so lucrative.
Crackdowns at borders, Mr. Keefe says, are only more apt to drive immigrants into the hands of skilled snakeheads. And when the Chinese are willing to pay $30,000 each to enter the United States illegally, it becomes both practical and profitable for smugglers to hire low-paid local decoys to distract border patrols. Snakeheads also put themselves at relatively low legal risk compared to drug smugglers who face stiff sentences if arrested and convicted.
Although Mr. Keefe does an admirable job of navigating the minutiae of his story, the larger-scale events and historical currents are what stand out. “The Snakehead” begins with the shipwreck of the Golden Venture, a vessel filled with illegal immigrants, near a New York City beach in 1993. It describes what a ticklish matter this became for the brand-new Clinton administration, which faced the challenge of reconciling sympathy for Chinese refugees after Tiananmen Square with resistance to illegal immigration.
And it illustrates beautifully how oddly politics can evolve. The story takes an unexpected turn once China’s one-child policy — and propaganda-ready stories of forced abortions and sterilizations conducted there — made the immigrants’ cause unexpectedly attractive to America’s religious right. The way political opponents converged in York, Pa., to form the immigrants-rights group called the People of the Golden Vision and usher Golden Venture survivors into their new American lives is inspiring, but it makes sense only in the full context of Mr. Keefe’s many interconnected tales.
An all-American footnote: One Chinese-born immigrant emerged from prison, was hired by a Pennsylvania weaving company, went to live rent-free in a room at the mill’s facilities and increased the company’s output by 50 percent over his first three years. He became American enough to make fabric used in costumes for re-enactors of Civil War battles.
THE SNAKEHEAD
An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream
By Patrick Radden Keefe
414 pages. Doubleday. $27.50.
Sai Sriskandarajah
Patrick Radden Keefe
In a formidably well-researched book that is as much a paean to its author’s industriousness as it is a chronicle of crime, Mr. Keefe outlines the way in which the Fujianese were forced out of China, driven to take desperately roundabout and dangerous travel routes and eventually arrived in America courtesy of the lucrative human smuggling business. Snakehead is the term for an entrepreneurial leader of that trade.
The stories told in “The Snakehead” are so long and convoluted that Mr. Keefe has had to go to astonishing lengths to follow them. He has contended with formidable language barriers, convoluted global trade routes, foreign governments that take an anything-goes approach to issuing passports, corruption in the Immigration and Naturalization Service, rivalry between that agency and theF.B.I., and rogue developments like the incarceration of a large group of illegal Chinese immigrants in York, Pa.
He has also tackled a major player, a snakehead known as Sister Ping, who seems determined to stay out of public view. When Mr. Keefe, who wound up interviewing with her in writing, initially approached her about his reporting, she gave an answer that validated everything his book would go on to say about her: “What’s in it for me?”
That seems to have been Sister Ping’s attitude from the start. She emigrated to America, as her father had before her, and quickly established herself as a hard-working businesswoman operating a mom-and-pop variety store in New York’s Chinatown with her husband, Cheung Yick Tak, a man who shares little of his wife’s remarkable ability to shrug off the law. On one of the first occasions Sister Ping was interrogated by an American official, she flatly told the I.N.S. investigator Joe Occhipinti: “You don’t have the time to get me. Or the resources.” Mr. Keefe says what impressed Mr. Occhipinti about this exchange was that she was right.
Mr. Keefe has the wisdom to realize that Sister Ping, for all her flouting of American law enforcement, is not a sufficiently vivid or galvanizing figure on whom to center a book. So she becomes one of many, to the point that “The Snakehead” struggles to balance the many twisting story lines that fill its pages. Part of the book describes the conditions in Fujian Province that prompted such a strong wave of chain migration (the kind in which one villager or family member follows another to the same overseas destination). It addresses the paradoxical way in which new prosperity in China drove away some of that country’s most skilled — and most motivated — workers.
And Mr. Keefe outlines the way in which close-knit Fujianese enclaves in the United States could drift into crime in general and human smuggling in particular. In the process, he makes crucial distinctions between human smuggling (voluntary on both sides) and human trafficking (akin to slavery) while also demonstrating how American law has made the people-smuggling business so lucrative.
Crackdowns at borders, Mr. Keefe says, are only more apt to drive immigrants into the hands of skilled snakeheads. And when the Chinese are willing to pay $30,000 each to enter the United States illegally, it becomes both practical and profitable for smugglers to hire low-paid local decoys to distract border patrols. Snakeheads also put themselves at relatively low legal risk compared to drug smugglers who face stiff sentences if arrested and convicted.
Although Mr. Keefe does an admirable job of navigating the minutiae of his story, the larger-scale events and historical currents are what stand out. “The Snakehead” begins with the shipwreck of the Golden Venture, a vessel filled with illegal immigrants, near a New York City beach in 1993. It describes what a ticklish matter this became for the brand-new Clinton administration, which faced the challenge of reconciling sympathy for Chinese refugees after Tiananmen Square with resistance to illegal immigration.
And it illustrates beautifully how oddly politics can evolve. The story takes an unexpected turn once China’s one-child policy — and propaganda-ready stories of forced abortions and sterilizations conducted there — made the immigrants’ cause unexpectedly attractive to America’s religious right. The way political opponents converged in York, Pa., to form the immigrants-rights group called the People of the Golden Vision and usher Golden Venture survivors into their new American lives is inspiring, but it makes sense only in the full context of Mr. Keefe’s many interconnected tales.
An all-American footnote: One Chinese-born immigrant emerged from prison, was hired by a Pennsylvania weaving company, went to live rent-free in a room at the mill’s facilities and increased the company’s output by 50 percent over his first three years. He became American enough to make fabric used in costumes for re-enactors of Civil War battles.
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