The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  But the war had scarcely ended when the Communists took over in China and closed its borders, so the de facto consequences of the exclusion endured long after the law itself was repealed. In the 1950s, Beijing introduced a household registration system that tied the various entitlements of the welfare state to individually registered family residences. The policy was designed in part to prevent tens of millions of rural Chinese from flooding major cities in search of food and work. In practice it meant that if an individual wanted to relocate within China, he needed permission from Party officials both in the place he was leaving and in the place he was heading to. If you moved without permission, you lost your allotment of grain and the other benefits that the welfare state provided. The policy effectively rooted rural Chinese citizens to the land, preventing them from leaving the village of their birth. It became very difficult even to relocate to the neighboring province, much less to leave China altogether.

  Sister Ping was born on January 9, 1949, ten months before Mao established the People’s Republic of China. She grew up in a village in northern Fujian Province called Shengmei, or Prospering Beauty, a hardscrabble settlement of farmers and fishermen by the banks of the Min River, where chickens roamed a network of dirt lanes that turned muddy during the monsoon months of August and September, and rice farmers worked their modest paddies with water buffalo. She was one of five children born to a farmer from Shengmei, Cheng Chai Leung, and his wife, who had grown up in a neighboring village. As a girl, Sister Ping would leave the village elementary school when her classes were done for the day and return home to a long list of chores. She was responsible for chopping wood and for tending to a small plot of vegetables. She helped raise the family’s pigs and rabbits. “I never went out to play. I always worked,” she would later explain. “And I liked working.”

  During her formative years, Sister Ping bore witness to a procession of tragically misguided policy initiatives from Beijing. When she was barely ten, Mao’s Great Leap Forward reassembled China’s peasantry into communes in an effort to reinvent centuries-old agrarian communities as industrial proletariats. The result was severe food shortages, and ultimately the greatest famine in recorded history, which between 1958 and 1960 killed nearly 38 million people. All across China, peasant families like Sister Ping’s suffered almost unimaginable hardship during these years, struggling to ward off starvation and eke out a living despite the frailty of their malnourished bodies and a government whose incompetence was matched only by its indifference in the face of civilian death. It was Mao’s view that in a country as populous as China, individual human lives were anything but sacred. One incidental cost of the Great Leap Forward, he conceded, was that “half of China may well have to die.” The millions of people who collapsed and died in the countryside were simply doing their part, he suggested. “They can fertilize the ground,” he said. In a country where filial piety and veneration of the dead had been cornerstones of the Confucian tradition for over two thousand years, the grieving families of the dead were instructed to plant crops atop their burial plots.

  While she was still a pigtailed child, Sister Ping encountered a world in which human life could be casually extinguished at any moment, and in addition to fostering a slightly callous, unsentimental view of death, the experience seems to have forged in her a survivalist instinct—a fierce conviction that only through hard work could she and her loved ones prevail over adversity and escape the kind of fickle end that others had in store. One day when she was twelve years old, Sister Ping left the village to go cut wood for kindling. In order to reach a remote grove of trees on the far side of the Min River, she joined eight other people in a rowboat. There were only seven oars, and though she was still just a child, Sister Ping took one and did her part to row. But before they could reach the other side, the current picked up and the boat flipped over. Sister Ping was thrown into the water and managed to swim to shore. Afterward she learned that everyone who had been carrying an oar had survived the accident. The two who had not been rowing drowned. The incident made an indelible impression on the little girl, one that she would remember for the rest of her life. “The two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead,” she would later reflect. “This taught me to work hard.”

  If in her later life Sister Ping harbored a suspicion, bordering on contempt, of the authority of government and the laws and edicts of officials, her attitude here again may have been developed at an early age. When she was a teenager and attending the local high school, it was announced one day that the school was closing. Schools and universities across China were being shuttered and young people were being sent to work in the fields under the banner of the Cultural Revolution. Mao announced that “rebellion is justified” and encouraged the young to overturn the decadent “old culture” of China. Children turned on their elders, branding them reactionaries, class traitors, and capitalists. Students pilloried their teachers in the schoolyard, dousing them with black ink, jeering at them, and in some cases torturing them, forcing them to eat excrement or kneel in ground glass. Soon marauding bands of teenage Red Guards were burning books, destroying artworks, defacing monuments, and assaulting scholars and intellectuals. It was a bizarre, dystopian interlude in China’s history, a bout of state-sanctioned madness in which the young indulged in a destructive kind of Clockwork Orange frenzy.

  Sister Ping was not an especially political person. But she was a natural leader, and before long she had donned green, military-style work clothes and a red armband and become a leader of the Red Guard. No record exists of her activities during these cataclysmic, often violent years, and in later life she would be reticent about discussing it. “That was the trend. I had to go with the trend” was all she would say of her participation. “Gone with the old to welcome the new.”

  Mao had always been suspicious of Fujian, for reasons that perhaps were understandable. It is one of China’s smaller provinces, a mountainous sliver of coast far from the official influence of Beijing and directly across the strait from Taiwan. It has always been one of China’s most outward-looking regions, home to seafarers and traders, smugglers and explorers: a historic point of embarkation. Over a millennium of isolation from the rest of China and exposure to the outside world, the region and its people developed an adventurous, somewhat maverick sensibility. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo visited the port of Fuzhou and remarked on the great quantities of its chief exports, galangal and ginger. (He added that the people of Fuzhou were “addicted to eating human flesh, esteeming it more delicate than any other,” but Marco Polo was not famed for his accurate reporting.) According to legend, a seven-foot-tall admiral named Zheng He set sail from Fuzhou a half-century before Columbus with an armada of 3,000 white-hulled junks and some 30,000 sailors, and ventured deep into the South Seas and as far away as Africa. By the 1570s, Fujianese merchants had established trading posts in Manila and Nagasaki. Seed communities of Fujianese traders were established throughout Southeast Asia, and today, centuries later, vast numbers of ethnic Fujianese are scattered throughout the region. Eighty percent of the Chinese in the Philippines can trace their roots to Fujian, as can 55 percent of the Chinese in Indonesia. Taiwan was a mere hundred miles across the strait, and the Fujianese settled there as well. So many made the crossing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that modern Taiwanese speak a dialect similar to that spoken in the southern Fujianese port of Xiamen. Well over a million Chinese in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan have roots in Tingjiang commune, which contains Shengmei village, where Sister Ping grew up.

  It was from Fujian that the second great wave of Chinese came to America, in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, even Fujian is too broad a description of the point of origin of this explosive population displacement. It was really just from northern Fujian that they came, where the regional capital of Fuzhou sits, 30 miles from the ocean, on the edge of the coastal plain, hemmed in on three sides by mountains and on the fourth side by the sea. When the Fujian
ese talk about Fuzhou, they tend to include not just the city but the main population centers of the surrounding countryside: the nearby city of Changle, the historic port of Mawei, and a string of townships along the northern banks of the Min River, where it flows into the ocean and meets the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea. The mountains surrounding Fuzhou have preserved a subdialect, Minbei, or Northern Min, which differs from the language spoken in Xiamen and Taiwan; it’s not so much Fujianese as Fuzhounese. Minbei was Sister Ping’s mother tongue.

  This peculiar type of population displacement, in which the people of a handful of villages seem to relocate en masse to another country within a short span of time, is actually not so unusual. In New York’s Little Italy, the Calabrians who settled along Mulberry Street at the turn of the twentieth century self-segregated block by block, and even building by building, according to the particular village in southern Italy from which they came. Social scientists who study migration have observed the pattern in countries around the world: a few early pioneers venture out and lay roots in a faraway land; if they find it agreeable, they send first for their immediate family, then for their extended family, then for friends and fellow villagers. It is one of the peculiar ironies of global migration that an immigrant community in a given country is often highly atypical of the country from which the people came. If you put yourself in the shoes of the person contemplating where it is that he or she wants to resettle, it makes perfect sense: you go to the place where you have a sister or a cousin or an old friend from school. Of course, this model works only if you have a sending community that is close-knit to begin with, but that is where the traditional Fujianese devotion to family comes in. Those first explorers who left the village bore little resemblance to the impetuous young men of Western literature who turn their backs on family and society and leave to seek their fortunes. Migration, at least in Fujian Province, was anything but selfish or misanthropic. The family was regarded as an economic unit, and the first pioneers to leave the village generally did so with the aim of establishing a beachhead on a foreign shore and eventually sending for the family. Demographers call this process “chain migration” and use the concept to explain how it is that half the residents of crowded urban ghettos from Boston to Berlin often hail from the same few villages in whatever country they left behind. A more evocative Fujianese expression captures the same dynamic: “One brings ten. Ten bring a hundred.”

  Moreover, everywhere the Fujianese went, they seemed to succeed, often besting the local population and controlling a disproportionate amount of wealth. More than half of Asia’s forty billionaires of Chinese ancestry in the year 2000 had roots in Fujian Province. What the Fujianese did best, it sometimes seems, was leave. They were fiercely independent by nature, wily, and doggedly entrepreneurial. When opportunity beckoned, from any remote corner of the earth, they followed, often against staggeringly difficult odds, and established enclaves in foreign lands.

  Sister Ping might be described as one of the Fujianese pioneers who struck out for the unknown and settled in New York. But that would be an oversimplification. In fact she was not the first in her family to make the journey to America: her father was. Because Fujian is all mountains and coast, with little arable land, Fujianese men grew up knowing how to fish and sail, and opportunity could always be found at sea. For generations of Fujianese men, the sea offered a sometimes perilous but always reliable option: if you couldn’t make ends meet on land, there was always work to be found on one of the merchant ships going in and out of the port at Mawei. During the 1960s, in the midst of the upheaval of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Sister Ping’s father, Cheng Chai Leung, left the family and joined the crew of a merchant ship bound for the United States. He faced a bitter reality: he could do more for his family by turning his back on them and finding work outside China than he could by staying put.

  In those years, very few Chinese made it to America. Leaving China was forbidden, and in any event, Beijing and Washington had no diplomatic relations, so there was no legal process for applying to enter the United States. Those few who did manage to make it to America tended to arrive the way Cheng Chai Leung did: they either found jobs as sailors or simply stowed away, and when they arrived in the bustling port of Los Angeles, or Baltimore, or New York, they jumped ship, disappeared amid the dockhands and stevedores and all the chaos of unloading one cargo and loading another, and ventured into town. If they could find their way to a Chinatown, there would be people who spoke Cantonese or Mandarin, and they could find a place to stay and a job that paid cash, washing dishes in a restaurant or working in a Chinese laundry.

  Cheng Chai Leung worked as a dishwasher for a decade. He wrote letters every few months—the family received three letters a year—and he sent money home. But he was largely absent during Sister Ping’s youth. He left the family when she was fifteen and stayed in America for thirteen years. Eventually he slipped up somehow and alerted American authorities to his illegal status. They discovered that he was a deserted crewman, and he was deported back to China in 1977. According to authorities in Hong Kong and New York, it was upon his return to China that Sister Ping’s father went into business smuggling people.

  The origins of the term snakehead are shrouded in mystery. Some believe that the snake symbolizes a circuitous smuggling route, with the snake’s head leading the way. Smuggled migrants are referred to as “snakes,” or sometimes “snaketails.” But they’re just as often known as “ducks,” or simply “customers.” As smuggling operations grew more complex, a certain hierarchy evolved, with “little snakeheads” doing recruitment in Chinese villages and “big snakeheads” arranging financing and logistics, and pocketing the bulk of the profits, from the safety of New York or Hong Kong or Taipei. Historical records indicate that the indigenous Fujianese once venerated snakes as totems. The Fujianese were originally known as the Min, and the Mandarin character for the Min is composed of a symbol for a gate with a worm or a snake crawling underneath it. When emigrants slither through the wire fences strung along the border between one country and another, one of Sister Ping’s snakehead associates once explained, “the shape of it looks like a snake.”

  One curiosity of the growth of the snakehead trade in Fujian Province during the 1980s and 1990s is that at the time Fujian had one of the fastest-growing economies in China. Mao died in 1976, and by the time Sister Ping’s father returned from America the following year, Deng Xiaoping was already ushering in a period of critical reflection on the errors of the Mao era and moving toward a series of sweeping economic reforms designed to open up China somewhat to the outside world and experiment with a more market-based economy. In 1980 Beijing established a number of special economic zones, which were permitted to be more open to international trade and given certain tax incentives to lure foreign investment, and the southern Fujian city of Xiamen was selected. In 1984 fourteen other coastal cities were designated, and Fuzhou made the list.

  Xiamen and, to a lesser extent, Fuzhou reinvented themselves as shipping and manufacturing centers in the 1980s, and the economy started to improve. It would seem that this development should have discouraged emigration from China. A rising tide lifts all boats, supposedly: why leave the province just as it is discovering prosperity? But as these changes swept through the region, many Fujianese who had for generations devoted themselves to subsistence fishing or tending a farm suddenly began to feel dislocated in the new economy—left behind. Demographers who have researched migration find that it is not actually absolute poverty that drives people to leave one country for another. The poorest provinces in western China have rarely been a source of outmigration. When everyone around you shares your own meager lifestyle, there is actually less of an inclination to leave. Instead, it is “relative deprivation” that tends to drive migration: income disparities, the experience of watching your neighbor do better than you. So, ironically, economic development sometimes causes people to leave rather than stay put. Some did
better than others when the economic reforms came to Fujian, and those who did not fare as well—the subsistence farmers and schoolteachers, the local Party officials who had fallen out of favor—were suddenly able to glimpse the kinds of material comforts they had lived without their whole lives. What’s more, Deng’s commendable efforts to loosen the household registration system, which had locked the Chinese peasantry in place, eventually unleashed a substantial internal migration and gave birth to a floating population of migrant workers that numbered in the tens of millions. The area around Fuzhou was flooded by eager odd-jobbers from the hinterland. For the local unskilled labor base, it became more and more difficult to find work.

  For this frustrated, largely uneducated population (fewer than 10 percent of Fujianese completed high school), the United States developed an irresistible allure. They might have been excluded from the economic growth in China, but America was ripe with possibilities. Fantastical stories abounded about America and the wealth that could be had there. American markets sold a thousand types of bread, people said. The very tapwater tasted sweet—you could gain weight just by drinking it. Above all, America seemed to hold the promise of upward mobility. Not overnight mobility, by any means; it was understood that you went to America to work, and work had, just as the gold rushers had done in California over a century earlier. But the promise was that the work would bear fruit—that your children would live an incrementally better life than you did; that one generation’s toil would secure comfort for the next. “Here, they’re working like slaves,” a Chinatown journalist in New York explained. “But there is hope for them to change everything.” But in Fujian, he went on, “you work like a slave, and there is no hope to change anything. For a fisherman? For a farmer with a little piece of land? They’ll never change their life. Never.”