The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (8 page)

When Susan was satisfied that her customers might pass for passport-holding international travelers, she escorted them to a two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong. She said it belonged to her father, and had them all sleep on the floor in one bedroom while she occupied the other. The next day they went to Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport and boarded a flight to Guatemala City.

Sister Ping’s brother, Cheng Mei Yeung, met them when they arrived. A squat Fujianese man with nervous eyes and a receding chin, Mei Yeung escorted the group to a hotel where another dozen Chinese passengers were waiting, some of them people Weng had encountered at the hotel in Shenzhen. Eventually Sister Ping herself appeared. It was immediately clear from her demeanor that she was the boss of the operation; she was aloof with the customers, speaking only to her brother. But she did approach Weng. There was a “money matter” that needed to be resolved, she said. Weng’s brother-in-law, whom she had recently smuggled, had failed to pay the balance of his debt upon arrival in America. Weng had better get on the telephone and make sure someone paid up, Sister Ping said, because if he didn’t, she had no reason to believe that Weng would honor his own debt when the time came. She might be forced to leave him stranded in Guatemala.

Weng’s brother-in-law eventually settled his debt, but Weng ended
up spending a month in the hotel. Sister Ping would visit every so often, and many passengers seemed to pass through the hotel, some coming, some going; it appeared to be one way station in a complex logistical network. When Weng finally left, it was with a group of others who were transported overland to Tijuana. Sister Ping was waiting for them in Mexico when they arrived. She told them that they had reached the final leg of the journey, and that the group that preceded theirs had arrived safely. “Have faith,” she said.

At daybreak the following morning, Weng and the others were loaded into the trunk of a taxi, which delivered them to a van. The van had a false bottom, and ten of them squeezed into it for the ride across the border. Eventually they arrived in Los Angeles, and once again Sister Ping was there to meet them, this time accompanied by her husband, Yick Tak. “Congratulations, everyone,” she said. “You have arrived.” She issued them all plane tickets, and the group boarded a flight from LAX to Newark. Sister Ping and Yick Tak were careful to sit a few rows apart from the customers, lest any of them be caught.

When they reached Manhattan, Sister Ping placed Weng and the others in an apartment on Market Street and started telephoning their relatives to demand the balance of her fee. One misconception about the snakehead business is that the smugglers will bring people over and then force them to work as indentured servants for years in order to pay off their debt. Such an arrangement would make very little sense from the smuggler’s point of view. A busy smuggler like Sister Ping didn’t want to keep track of scores of debtors at various stages of repayment, any of whom might skip town during the months, or more often years, that it took them to come up with $18,000. Instead, the smugglers would hold passengers once they arrived in the United States, giving them thirty-six or seventy-two hours to satisfy the debt. Such an arrangement might be unimaginable in any other ethnic community, but familial and communal ties among the Chinese in America were so strong that a new arrival could count on a guarantor cobbling together a five-figure fee by borrowing small amounts from many people—$1,000
here, $500 there. The immigrant was thus indentured not so much to the snakehead as to his own family.

Once Weng’s nephew had assembled the money Sister Ping was owed, she let Weng leave the Market Street apartment and look for work. He found a job working in an American restaurant Monday through Friday, and Sister Ping introduced him to an uncle of hers who ran a Chinese takeout in the Bronx. Weng could work there on weekends to supplement his income, she said. Weng threw himself into paying off his debts, and on his occasional days off he would make his way to Sister Ping’s shop and hang out. “She smuggled me here,” he later observed. Between the snakehead and the customer there was a peculiar kind of bond.

O
ne dilemma Weng soon faced, which was shared by other undocumented Fujianese in the neighborhood, was how to send money home. Few of them had bank accounts; they took their payment, and hoarded it, in cash. Western Union charged expensive commissions and didn’t have outposts in the areas surrounding Fuzhou. The Bank of China’s money remittance service was notoriously slow and paid out remittances in Chinese yuan, always at an unfavorable exchange rate.

In her early years in New York, Sister Ping observed this dilemma and saw a business opportunity. More and more Fujianese were coming to the city every day. Along the border between Mexico and California, precisely the stretch where Weng had crossed, apprehensions of Chinese aliens increased by 500 percent in 1984 alone. The number of immigrants stopped was only a fraction of the number who got across, and when these Fujianese got to New York’s Chinatown, they started sending money home. They sent money in such quantities, in fact, that one theory for why the Chinese government tended to turn a blind eye to the snakehead trade in the 1980s involves the enormous sums of American currency being pumped into the Fujianese economy by the overseas Chinese. The Fujianese city of Changle alone eventually received several hundred million dollars a year in remittances from America.

Drawing on the connections she had made in New York, in Hong Kong, and around Fuzhou, Sister Ping started offering a sideline service out of the Tak Shun Variety Store. For a commission that steeply undercut the Bank of China, she would remit U.S. currency to Fujian. A restaurant worker could take her his weekly pay on a Monday and receive a special code number, which he would relay over the phone to his mother in a remote village outside Fuzhou. Sister Ping would make a telephone call or send a fax to her contacts in China, and within a day a courier on a motorbike would arrive at the mother’s door and, provided she supplied the code, turn over the money—in U.S. dollars, not yuan.

Various underground banking systems, sometimes known as
feich’ien
, or “flying money,” date back centuries in China, and probably came into existence when tea traders needed to be able to send money from place to place but did not want to run the risk of carrying large sums of currency on dangerous roads. The genius of Sister Ping’s system was that the money itself did not actually move. “Sister Ping keeps stores of money in the United States as well as Hong Kong and the Fujian Province as a base for the crediting,” an FBI investigative report would later explain. When migrants wanted to send money back to China, she would pay the money out of her reserves in China. When the families of new arrivals wanted to send money to America to satisfy a relative’s snakehead debt, Sister Ping could pay that sum out of her reserves in New York. The only trick was balancing the books occasionally and correcting any disparities that might emerge between the currency reserves in one place or the other. Such periodic corrections were easily made, generally by bulk-carrying a suitcase full of cash from one place to the next.

The business thrived, in no small measure because Sister Ping’s smuggling efforts were supplying a steady stream of new customers. Once Weng Yu Hui had paid off the various family members who covered his snakehead fee, he wanted to send his restaurant wages home to his wife and child and to his parents. “If I send money home through
the bank, it has to be money that I have paid taxes on, or money that can see the sunlight,” he explained. “With her, there is no need for any identification. All you need is the address and the name, and in two, three days, the money would be there.” For every thousand dollars, Sister Ping charged a 3 percent commission. This was a good deal cheaper than the Bank of China, and more and more Fujianese made the switch to Sister Ping. “Her clients are extremely comfortable having their money in her hands, because she has such an impeccable reputation,” a fellow Fujianese snakehead explained. “People know that she will never take the money and run.” Soon the Bank of China was losing so much business that it took to running advertisements in the neighborhood’s Chinese-language newspapers, reminding people that using underground banks was illegal. The bank announced raffles and special prizes for people who used its service. But it was of no use.

The remittance market was growing rapidly, almost exponentially. According to the Fujian Statistical Bureau, in 1990 the total foreign capital investment in the province amounted to $379 million. By 1995 it was $4.1 billion. With her snakehead fees and 3 percent commissions, Sister Ping soon became so successful that she and Yick Tak outgrew the Tak Shun and relocated to a handsome five-story brick tenement at 47 East Broadway, in 1990. The building’s title was not in her name, and the price she paid for it was underreported in order to avoid taxes—a standard practice in Chinatown. But it was rumored in the neighborhood that she had paid $3 million for the building. It may have merely been a coincidence, but people did not fail to notice that she had established her new operation directly across East Broadway from the glass-and veined-marble building that housed the Chinatown headquarters of her chief competitor, the Bank of China.

On the ground floor, the couple opened a larger version of the Tak Shun, calling it the New Hong Kong Variety Store, and in the basement they opened a restaurant, the Yeung Sun, which specialized in the simple staples of Fujianese cuisine. These businesses weren’t fronts, exactly. To have a front business that wasn’t turning a profit in its own
right would be, to a Fujianese way of thinking, deeply wasteful. So the family members sold their fair share of seafood and clothing. But to the Fujianese in the neighborhood, there was no mistaking the dominant revenue streams. You could see it when a line stretched out the door on Chinese holidays, as people queued to send money home to their families. Weng would go in every couple of months and send $1,000 back to Fujian. Sister Ping would be at the counter, or Yick Tak, or sometimes their oldest daughter, Monica. “There were always people there sending money,” Weng remembered.

Nor was it just the shop and the restaurant and the money transfer business and the human smuggling that Sister Ping and Yick Tak engaged in. They diversified, opening the Long Shine Travel and Trading Agency and the 47 East Broadway Realty Corp. In the waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, they opened a poultry shop, which sold live chickens and ducks and supplied the restaurant. They continued to operate the garment factory in Shenzhen, and they opened a video arcade and import-export business in Hong Kong. Because property transactions in Chinatown were often done in cash, no one knew the extent of the family’s holdings. In the early 1980s, the immigration code was amended to allow foreigners who worked ninety days a year in agriculture to obtain green cards and remain in the United States. The measure was designed to guarantee a steady supply of cheap Latino labor in California. But it was rumored that Sister Ping had identified a loophole in the policy and developed an interest in several farms in New York and New Jersey. The farms would allow her to become a key supplier to the insular and profitable restaurant economy in Chinatown while providing jobs, and immigration cover, for each new wave of Fujianese she escorted into the country.

One thing was clear: Sister Ping’s greatest advantage seemed to be the immigration policies of the United States government. On November 6, 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, took effect. The act contained an amnesty provision, which stipulated that any undocumented person who could prove that he or she had been
resident in the United States prior to January 1, 1982, was eligible for employment authorization, the right to leave the country and return, and, ultimately, a green card. The law created a burgeoning industry of document vendors in Chinatown, who could whip up backdated leases, bills, pay stubs, or employment records. It was no trick to persuade officials you had been working off the books in Chinatown since 1981, so in addition to spawning another lucrative sideline for immigration profiteers, the amnesty provision extended the promise of a green card to future potential customers, who left China in the care of snakeheads long after the legislation passed.

With her new wealth, Sister Ping poured money into Fujian, cultivating an image not just as a capable and successful businesswoman but as something of a philanthropist as well. In Shengmei she constructed one of the biggest houses in town, Number 398, a four-story yellow-and-white confection with a horseshoe-shaped front entrance, hand-painted tile walls, balconies on each floor, and a pagoda on the roof. Inside, she hung photographs of her parents above incense burners. On her visits to Fuzhou, she would often stay not in the house but in the nicest hotels, paying for one night what the Fujianese who had not yet left the country could expect to earn in a month. The main thoroughfare in the village was renamed Qiao Xing Lu, or Overseas Happiness Road. The Chinese state had actually coined a term for villages that had benefited from migration to other countries
—qiaoxiang
, “sojourning” or “overseas Chinese” town. It was an appellation the villages wore with pride. On either side of the ornamental archway leading into Shengmei, a verse read:

The sky is high so birds can fly
The seas are vast so fish can leap
My breast carries a patriotic feeling
My heart longs for my old hometown
.

A cultural assumption was beginning to take hold around Fuzhou that any able-bodied young adult who hadn’t made the journey to New
York must be shiftless, or just exceedingly dumb, and Sister Ping did nothing to discourage this view. The abstemiousness of the Fujianese in New York was bankrolling unprecedented extravagance back home. When Fujianese villagers learned that a relative had arrived safely in the States, they would unspool red banners in front of the family home, invite the relevant snakeheads, should they be in town, to a community banquet, and set off firecrackers to celebrate. As the remittance money flowed in, families constructed garish multistory houses with karaoke rooms and disco balls, polished wooden floors and shrines to their ancestors. These new money palaces rose incongruously from the rice paddies, monuments to the filial loyalty of the overseas Chinese. And in status-conscious small towns the process fed on itself, creating a fever to go abroad, to the point where many of those elaborate houses simply emptied out, becoming lavish, tenantless temples to the good life in America.