The Chinese in America (53 page)

The adoption process sensitized thousands of parents to subtle racism in America. Suddenly they noticed the often cruel stereotypes of the Chinese in the media, even in children’s television programs like
Sesame Street,
which featured a female worm-puppet named “Lo Mein.” They became more attentive to the treatment of foreign aliens by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and aggressively lobbied for citizenship rights for their children. Annoyed by the red tape required to naturalize their Chinese babies, adoptive parents have demanded legislation to allow citizenship immediately and retroactively for all adopted foreign-born children. As a consequence, these children are serving as bridges between the Caucasian and ethnic Chinese communities in the United States. “I began to see children and their ‘differences’ in a new light,” one mother explained. “Suddenly the nonwhite kids weren’t ’nonwhite,‘ they were ’like my daughter.’”

 

 

It is ironic that some infants who had been discarded like garbage in the PRC ended up in some of the most affluent households in the United States, while thousands of adult Chinese worked for years to earn their passage to America. These nonstudent, nonprofessional adult immigrants were the group least visible to the white community, a group largely made up of illegal menial laborers hidden in the nation’s Chinatowns.

Some started as part of a “floating” migrant population of peasant workers in China, a population estimated to be as high as 200 million to 250 million people for the year 2000. Drifting from the countryside into the cities, they serviced the needs of the urban Chinese nouveau riche, and, treated like second-class citizens, many yearned to migrate abroad, in order to secure better wages and a better future for their children. Others came from the small business or entrepreneur class in China, frustrated by a system that favored those with political clout and by the incessant need to bribe the powerful in order to survive. A factory owner from Fuzhou claimed that when he refused to pay extortion money to local officials, they accused him of a crime he had not committed. “That’s why I left in a hurry,” he later said. “I made up my mind in a few days.” Others echoed similar dissatisfaction. According to Xiao Chen, formerly an illegal alien from Fuzhou, “In China today, unless you are the child of an official, or know how to open back doors, it’s hopeless.”

For many ambitious Chinese, only three choices seemed open: to resign oneself to one’s station in life; to master the game of politics; or to leave. The globalized Western media made the third alternative the most enticing. During the Deng era, the glamorous lives of Hollywood celebrities reached the Chinese masses through satellite dishes and VCRs.
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By the early 1990s, the prospect of unlimited wealth in America had infected the Fuzhou region with immigration fever. One cause for the perceived differences in national wealth was the exaggerations of movie and television dramas, but the greatest reason could be found in hard numbers. In 1991, the per capita income in the United States was $22,204, compared to a figure that ranged between $370 and $1,450 in China, leading many Chinese to become obsessed with the prospect of making a quick fortune in America. “Everyone went crazy,” the
Sing Tao Daily
reported. “The area was in a frenzy. Farmers put down their tools, students discarded their books, workers quit their jobs, and everyone was talking about nothing but going to America ... If people found out someone had just successfully arrived in the United States, his or her home will be crowded with people, both acquaintances and strangers, to come to collect information about going to America.”

Even though the United States granted an annual quota of twenty thousand immigration slots to the PRC, these usually went to the Chinese with education, official connections, or relatives in the United States. Consequently, many of the poorer or less-educated Chinese had to emigrate illegally, turning to the underworld for help, to achieve their Western dream. No one knows how many resorted to such methods, for it is not the nature of illegal operations to maintain records. Estimates range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand people a year, but an exact figure is impossible: “It’s like trying to pin jello to a wall,” said one FBI agent in New York.

These arrivals bore a striking resemblance to the first wave of Chinese who arrived during the nineteenth century. Both émigré waves consisted largely of young, able-bodied adult men with wives and families remaining in their native land. According to a survey conducted by Ko-lin Chin, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, most illegal Chinese immigrants in New York City were married men between the ages of twenty and forty, former laborers with an elementary or junior high education. But instead of originating from Canton like the early waves, they came mostly from Fuzhou, a commercial and fishing city of five million in Fujian province in the south of China.

Like Canton, Fuzhou enjoyed a tradition of citizens migrating abroad and establishing overseas communities in other countries. Close-knit family relationships provided émigrés with international capital and extensive business networks. Fujian province, like Guangdong, was also renowned for its independence and entrepreneurial spirit. Historically, it had been a frontier country overrun by outlaws and adventurers, something like the Wild West in the United States. The Chinese stereotyped the Fujianese as ruthless and ambitious, obsessed with making their fortunes. It is notable that among the forty billionaires of Chinese heritage in Asia, over half either came from Fujian or were descended from Fujianese people.

The story of illegal Fujianese immigration to the United States was not new. Some of the first Fujianese arrivals were sailors who served as staff on ships of the American armed forces during World War II. Many jumped ship, then settled secretly in New York City or other areas along the East Coast. Almost six thousand Chinese crewmen, many of them Fujianese, deserted and entered the United States between 1944 and 1960. As a result, the first links—kinship ties—so helpful in establishing immigration patterns, were forged between the United States and the Fujian region, especially the city of Fuzhou. By the end of the twentieth century, some PRC officials estimated that the vast majority of illegal Chinese aliens in the United States were natives of Fuzhou.

Clearly, some had left to escape political repression. Rutgers professor Ko-lin Chin, who surveyed dozens of illegal Fujian aliens, published some of their reasons for leaving. “During the Cultural Revolution, I was wrongfully labeled as a ‘counterrevolutionary’ and tortured,” one said. “I was victimized under the one-child policy, and I am disgusted with the Communist regime,” reported another. “When my wife was pregnant with our second child, she was forced to have an abortion five days before she was to give birth.”

But the most popular reason for emigration was not political but economic. According to Ko-lin Chin, 61 percent of the people in his study cited one dominant reason: money. Dreams of riches abound in the responses collected in his survey. “I heard that everything was so nice in America, you can even find gold in the streets.” “Before I came, I thought America was a very prosperous country, that it was a heaven filled with gold.” “When overseas Chinese came back, they spent money like water ... That’s why I envied the American lifestyle before I came here.” “When I was in China, I considered going to America as going to heaven.” “For us, it doesn’t mean freedom,” a Chinese villager told a reporter when describing the Statue of Liberty. “It means opportunity.”

To fill an insatiable demand for illegal immigration, organized crime figures—known as “snakeheads” for their stealth and speed—ran elaborate smuggling enterprises. By the end of the 1990s, the industry had become highly lucrative, earning up to $8 billion a year. Indeed, some international gangs came to favor human smuggling over narcotics, because the former was low-risk but highly profitable.

Smuggling was largely a game of cat-and-mouse played between the smugglers and the authorities. The first stage was routine. The snakehead would negotiate a fee for bringing the client to the United States (in the year 2000, the going rate was about $60,000 to $70,000). After receiving part of the fee as a deposit, the smuggler would secure a list of telephone numbers and addresses of relatives in both Fujian province and the United States who could provide down payments for the journey.

The second stage—preparing the paperwork—was also relatively easy. The snakeheads secured exit visas by bribing PRC officials, and once out of China, the émigrés waited in safe houses in cities like Hong Kong or Bangkok while the snakeheads procured the travel documents necessary for their entry into the United States. Fake passports would be created by professional forgers, bought as stolen goods on the black market, or obtained from corrupt officials in North America.

For some émigrés, the wait was long and agonizing. One man from Fujian province said he was locked in a motel basement for six months in Bangkok before the smugglers placed him and others on a tiny boat headed for Africa, en route to the United States. Another immigrant, a farmer, was forced to hide in a pigsty for months in rural Thailand before the snakeheads flew him to Frankfurt and then Miami.

The actual journey was the most difficult part of all. With no one single route to the United States, Chinese illegal aliens could arrive from all directions, by air, sea, or land. A review of internal INS documents revealed Chinese smuggling rings in countries like Australia, Japan, Guam, Brazil, Spain, and Russia. Sometimes the Chinese were flown directly into the United States, and in the early 1990s about one in five illegal Chinese aliens entered the United States by plane. But a much safer strategy was to fly the Chinese immigrant into Canada or Mexico instead. Once in Canada, the immigrant could hide in the airport bathroom, flush his documents down the toilet, and then claim political asylum. After his release by immigration authorities, he could sneak over the border with counterfeit papers, hide in the trunk of a car, or travel by boat, inflatable raft, or snowmobile to New York State. Immigrants could also slip across the border from Mexico, in refrigerated trucks or tourist buses.

Most of the time, the Chinese illegal aliens were required to make the journey across water and land. Many hid aboard Taiwanese fishing boats or cargo ships that sailed for Central America, or traveled by rail to cities with lax or corrupt security, such as Moscow or Budapest. Some immigrants endured long train rides to Eastern Europe, during which they subsisted on scanty meals of rice and nuts, then attempted to cross the border into Western European countries. This might involve climbing mountains and swimming across rivers. “It is arduous and taxing—many don’t make it,” Beng Chew, a London solicitor, told a reporter in June 2000. “Last year, I heard one woman in her early 30s died from exhaustion in the mountains. Some of the others didn’t want to leave her but the agent insisted that they carry on.”

The dangers of the journey equaled or surpassed what nineteenth-century Chinese émigrés endured. Smuggling often entailed lethal conditions, such as boats made of rotting, crumbling wood; illegal Chinese aliens have described trips in which they were forced to bail water out of sinking ships. In one case, crew members abandoned a disabled vessel and considered dynamiting it with hundreds of passengers on board. In July 1995, the U.S. Coast Guard discovered 147 illegal aliens from China on a fishing boat that one American authority called “the most incredibly screwed-up, rusted-out vessel I’ve ever seen.” The immigrants had squeezed into a room no larger than the width of two cars. Contaminated water filled the hold, and the air was fetid because the portholes were covered with plywood.

Not surprisingly, the journey for some Chinese ended in the morgue. In June 1993, the
Golden Venture,
a ship with more than 260 illegal Chinese passengers, ran aground two hundred yards from Rockaway Peninsula near New York City. The crew urged the immigrants to jump overboard and swim for shore. So close to reaching their America, the Chinese took a last risk. Ten drowned, while hundreds of others were rescued by the New York City police, the Immigration Service, and the Coast Guard. Some Chinese émigrés died in Europe, which presumably many saw as a way station to the United States. In 1995, eighteen Chinese died of asphyxiation in a sealed trailer en route to Hungary. The following year, five Chinese corpses were discovered in a truck crossing the Austrian border. In the summer of 2000, authorities found one of the most grisly human smuggling tragedies yet: fifty-eight Chinese suffocated in a giant refrigerator of rotting tomatoes in Dover, England. When officials swung open the doors, they were met by the putrid stench of decay, and two survivors reaching out with torn bloody fingers, gasping,
“Bang wo! Bang wo!”
(Help me! Help me!)

The most frightening voyages occurred within sealed cargo containers on freight ships. Some illegal immigrants were literally boxed in for weeks, enduring the entire trip in near-darkness. Some were given a certain measure of comfort, such as fans, mattresses, and cell phones, while others arrived “awash in human waste,” in conditions so filthy that immigration authorities had to don hazardous materials gear before entering. Many survived on starvation-level food and water rations: one Chinese boy who spent twelve days and nights in a cargo container said he had eaten nothing but water and crackers during the entire journey. He and his fellow passengers huddled under blankets on a mattress, used plastic bags as toilets, and played poker by flashlight to while away the time.

By early 2000, American immigration authorities found that smugglers had turned to hard-topped shipping containers. As U.S. immigration officials grew more aggressive—using dogs to sniff out humans in cargo containers—so did the smugglers, who invented even more daring tactics. In Los Angeles, investigators found fifteen Chinese stowaways in a hard-topped container with two doors cut in the sides. The smugglers had camouflaged the doors with epoxy and paint, attached hinges inside the container, and created ventilation systems and escape hatches with fans and car batteries. The danger of a hard-topped container is that stowaways can be entombed alive. If there are no secret doors, the Chinese have to wait until the snakeheads cut open a door—or slowly suffocate to death.
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