The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  One day in 1991 a local education official visited the family and said that Sean’s father owed 5,000 yuan. He didn’t have the money, and Sean grew angry and shouted at the official. The official shouted back, and Sean grew angrier. Then, without knowing what he was doing, really, he lashed out, his right fist connecting with the official’s face. The official staggered backward, startled—and then furious. He went after Sean, but Sean’s father stood between them, apologizing profusely and preventing the official from striking his son. Eventually the official stormed off, but the family was in a panic. Sean had insulted a powerful man, and with three children in a one-child system, the family was already at the mercy of the local government.

  Sean’s father had taught a generation of children who had gone on to various jobs in the area, and after the incident with the official, a former student who now worked with the police paid the family a visit. He said that Sean was being targeted for arrest. There was no telling what he would be charged with or how long he would be held. His father might lose his job, and if Sean was locked up, there would be no one to support the family. It was decided: Sean would journey to America. The family made a down payment to a local snakehead. Sean’s parents gave him 3,000 yuan; they didn’t have any U.S. dollars. The snakehead told him they would travel overland through Burma to Thailand and then by plane from Bangkok to the United States. Sean placed some extra T-shirts and underwear in a small backpack; he had few belongings and wanted to travel light. Then he bid his parents farewell and set out for Yunnan Province, near the border with Burma. He embarked on the trip without any documents—no passport, no visas, not even a driver’s license or ID of any sort. After several days he reached the southwestern city of Kunming. There he met with another group of snakeheads. The snake, as the route is sometimes called, is actually a long relay, in which customers are passed from hand to hand, escorted each step of the way by local subcontractors. Close to the border, Sean connected with several local snakeheads who shepherded him, along with several other Chinese customers, across the wire fences and into Burma.

  Kunming was the great jumping-off point for Chinese fleeing the country in those days. In order to reach Thailand, migrants had to trek over the dense jungle-covered mountains of eastern Burma, through tangled undergrowth and malarial swamps, into remote stretches inhabited only by hill tribes and ultimately across the opium country of the Golden Triangle, where the borders of Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. This was Burma’s isolated Shan State, which was administered as a kind of renegade principality by Khun Sa, the fearsome warlord turned drug runner who was known as the Prince of Death. Khun Sa was nominally the world’s most wanted man—American drug officials estimated that he produced 60 percent of the world’s heroin. But he had little to fear. (“When the DEA gives the Thais money, they come and attack me,” he once joked. “When I give them money, they go away again.”) Khun Sa’s army of 20,000 men roamed the countryside, and his mountain ponies formed a long caravan through the jungle, bearing opium and morphine base to refineries on the Thai border, where it could be converted into heroin.

  Sean joined another clandestine caravan, of Chinese migrants headed for Thailand, who stole across the poppy fields by night, dodging the roving searchlights of Khun Sa. Burma was wild country, sweltering hot and humid during the day, then perishing cold at night, the air aswarm with mosquitoes, the soaring trees draped with thick curtains of tangled vines. The battering monsoon rains churned the ground into mud, and the path was unmarked by any kind of signage. Sean’s group split up, with the older men taking a slower, less arduous route and the younger ones taking a more direct but difficult one. The local snakeheads in the area had developed some ingenious methods for getting their customers across the hostile terrain. When they had to traverse a treacherous river, they would send a scout across first, carrying a length of rope. When he reached the other side, they would thread the rope through the center of a length of bamboo, which the travelers could cling to as they went across the rapids. Still, it was not unusual for these small expeditionary groups to get lost, or to run out of water or provisions in the mountains. For many Chinese, the journey to the Golden Mountain ended before they had even made it to Thailand; they succumbed to exhaustion or malnutrition, malaria, or some other unnamed tropical malady. It was not uncommon for Fujianese trekkers making their way over the mountains to pass the bodies of others who had preceded them, laid out by the side of the jungle path, their stick-figure corpses draped in banana leaves.

  When they had been in Burma for less than a week, the group stopped at a small hill station buried deep in the jungle, because the snakeheads had not managed to get money to the Burmese guides. The station was ruled by a local warlord named Lian, who dressed and acted like a military man and ruled a small irregular army in the forest but had no loyalty to the Burmese army and operated the area as a personal fief. Lian took a liking to Sean and let him stay in his own wooden house, which was larger and more comfortable than the other accommodations in the camp. Lian was ethnic Chinese and spoke Mandarin but had lived in Burma his whole life. He never said as much, but Sean was certain he was running drugs. Lian had two older brothers in prison in Thailand for carrying heroin across the border, and in that corner of the world, with the porous jungle borders of China and Thailand so close, Sean figured there wasn’t any way to make a living but to dabble in the drug trade.

  The camp was so secluded that for weeks the snakeheads were unable to send money so that Sean and his companions could continue their journey. Lian did not seem to mind having them in the village. He had a sister a few years younger than Sean who was as yet unmarried. She had dark eyes and very pale, milky skin. Sean thought she was beautiful. Because it grew so cold at night and the camp had no electricity, everyone from the surrounding area would gather when dark fell and huddle around a big communal bonfire. Sean and Lian’s sister would flirt and exchange glances across the flickering flames. He wondered what life would be like if he stayed in the camp, marrying Lian’s sister and becoming a brother to him. But it was only a passing thought. Deep in the jungles of Burma, Sean knew he had only one destination: New York, a metropolis he could scarcely imagine, a world more remote from this jungle dwelling than any place on earth.

  Eventually the money came and a new set of Burmese guides prepared to walk Sean and the others to the border with Thailand. Before Sean left, Lian summoned him to say farewell. He handed Sean a gun, for his safety. It was a small handgun of German make. Sean hid it in his backpack. They set out, traveling sometimes by foot, sometimes in the back of a covered truck. There were checkpoints along the road, but the guides knew where they were located. When the truck was a mile from a checkpoint, it would stop and Sean and the others would get out and make their way around the checkpoint in the jungle so the empty truck could pass through the inspection, only to pick up the travelers on the other side.

  It took Sean and his companions over a month to get to Thailand. When they reached the border area, one of the Burmese guides demanded that they turn over more money, saying that the trip had taken longer than anticipated. Sean objected, angrily pointing out that they all had contracts with their snakeheads; any dispute over the fees should be raised not with the customers but with them. Besides, he added, none of the customers had any money. The guide shouted back, and the argument escalated until the guide suddenly pulled out a gun and pointed it at Sean’s head. Just as quickly, Sean reached into his backpack, produced Lian’s gun, and pointed it back at the guide. For a long, intense moment Sean and the guide stood there. Then the Thai smuggler who controlled the area intervened, separating the two of them and confiscating Sean’s gun.

  In the border town of Chiang Rai, wedged between Burma and Laos, they met a bus that drove them the final 500 miles to Bangkok. It was the biggest city Sean had ever seen. He thought that it looked like Hong Kong, or at any rate, the way he imagined Hong Kong looked. Some people in Changle and Fuzhou drove cars, but not many; most people
still got around by bicycle. But Bangkok was one sprawling, snarling traffic jam—cars, buses, motorcycles, and tuk-tuk taxis, choking smog and blaring horns. Soaring high-rises glittered in the sun along the curling banks of the muddy Chao Phraya River. Among the elevated highways and the stolid apartment blocks of chipped concrete the occasional colorful temple would protrude, the glimmering gold curvature of its roof like a licking flame.

  Sean was taken to a studio apartment in a high-rise building, which he was to share with three other people. Several other apartments in the building were leased by snakeheads; sometimes it seemed that the whole establishment was full of Chinese passengers waiting to go to America. It was February 1992, and the crackdown at the Bangkok Airport had just begun. The snakeheads informed Sean that they were experiencing delays and that it might be some time before they could get him on an airplane. To further complicate matters, they were having trouble finding phony documents for Sean, because he looked so young. The source of most black market passports was travelers who were in their twenties or older, and Sean looked younger even than the teenager he still was.

  A more mature, responsible traveler might have become concerned at this point, and some of Sean’s fellow passengers did grow uneasy as the prospect of the final flight to America became uncertain and they found themselves stranded in a foreign city with no way forward, no way home, and little money to spare. They had families to support, and every month they languished in Bangkok was a month they were not sending money back to Fujian. But Sean was a teenager with an independent streak who was away from home for the first time. He telephoned a cousin in the United States to get some money wired to him and decided to make the most of his time in the city. He didn’t worry about his predicament; on the contrary, he felt excited, liberated, and thrilled to be young and exposed to Bangkok in all its vibrancy and sordid glitz. Some snakeheads kept a close watch on their customers, confining them to the safe houses for weeks at a stretch. Thai police officers demanded kickbacks in return for not reporting safe houses full of migrants, and when those payments were late the cops would launch a raid, throwing the Fujianese into filthy Thai jails, where they were held for weeks or months, suffering beatings and contracting contagious skin diseases from the other inmates in their cells. But Sean’s snakeheads must have paid their bribes in a timely fashion, because he was not hassled by the police, and they permitted him to come and go as he pleased, knowing, perhaps, that he wanted above all to get to the United States, and that because he needed them in order to do that, he was unlikely to disappear. He ventured out and explored the city—the frantic street life, the Bacchic nightlife, the moneyed tourists from around the world. It may have been limbo, but to Sean it felt like a bizarre, extended vacation. He got hold of a Chinese-English dictionary and spent the days reading through it, learning the language he knew he would need in America. He made solitary trips to the movies.

  Five months had passed in this manner, with the possibility of a flight out receding every day, when the snakeheads told Sean that there was another option. A ship was coming to the Gulf of Thailand. Chinese customers who were waiting to get on planes were all being offered the option of traveling to America by ship instead. It was a big ship, the snakeheads explained. The voyage would take a month at most. Sean didn’t have to go, they told him. He could stay in Bangkok if he wanted. But they didn’t know when they would be able to get him on a plane.

  Sean needed little persuading. It sounded like an adventure. On the evening of July 16, 1992, he boarded a tour bus in Bangkok with dozens of other people—Chinese men and women of various ages, Fujianese like him, some looking about them curiously after months cooped up in a safe house, most toting a single item of luggage. The buses headed south, wending their way along an elevated highway until the apartment blocks and the high-rises fell away and they reached a palm-fringed stretch of beach on the Gulf of Thailand. There were other buses there, and hundreds of passengers—240 all together—assembled on the beach before a small fleet of fishing boats that bobbed quietly on the water. They boarded the boats and headed out to sea, where Sean saw a massive vessel awaiting them, a 370-foot ferry with two long decks wrapping around it. The ship’s hull was painted red and bore a name in white letters: Najd II.

  Many snakeheads were represented on the Najd II. Even the most successful smugglers could not arrange to transport and then collect fees from hundreds of passengers at a go, so when they smuggled by ship, they preferred to join forces, distributing both the expense of the voyage and the risk that something might go awry. But the chief snakehead behind the Najd II was Weng Yu Hui, the pudgy Fujianese man who had been an early client of Sister Ping’s, back in 1984. Weng had worked in a restaurant to pay Sister Ping’s fees. He got a green card in 1987, under the American amnesty for anyone who had been living in the country illegally since before 1981. (Weng had arrived in 1984, but he supplied fraudulent paperwork and became a legal permanent resident.) He got a job in construction for a while, and every week or two, whenever he had a day off, he would go and hang around Sister Ping’s shop—first the little shop on Hester Street, then the bigger one on East Broadway.

  Weng was curious about the snakehead business. When he saw Sister Ping he would ask her about it—who the big snakeheads were, how the business worked. Then in 1991, seeing the industry explode, with so much demand in mainland China that no amount of supply in the United States seemed able to satisfy it, Weng decided to enter the business himself. He had contacts in Thailand and arranged to start smuggling passengers by plane, supplying them with passports purchased on the black market. Weng needed to pay for these materials up front, and he assembled $30,000 and went to Sister Ping’s store on East Broadway. Sister Ping was behind the counter, and Weng asked her to send the money to Bangkok. Weng had sent small amounts of money through Sister Ping for years, but never a sum like this. “Oh,” she said jokingly as he handed over the cash, “now you’re my competitor.”

  Weng’s new business grew quickly, but when the bottleneck at Bangkok began, he was unable to get any of his passengers on planes. He was maintaining an apartment in Bangkok, and his customers accumulated there until there were thirty people waiting to make the last leg of their journey. This wasn’t good for business. It was expensive to maintain customers in Bangkok—they had to be fed and guarded—and there was always the risk that a safe house would be raided, resulting in new bribes to officials in Thailand and the possible loss of lucrative clients, who might disappear into the Thai prison system and never pay the balance of their fees. It also looked bad, having customers stranded in Thailand for months at a time. Success in the snakehead trade was driven largely by word of mouth; Weng had studied Sister Ping’s success, and it was her reputation for a safe, efficient service that drove customers to select her from among the many snakeheads now offering passage. So unmatched was Sister Ping’s reputation, in fact, that some snakeheads had taken to claiming they were working on her behalf or were affiliated with her in some way, in an effort to lure customers. Weng had heard about the use of ships as an alternative to planes, and he decided to arrange for a ship to transport his passengers.

  Sister Ping may have perceived Weng as her competitor, but he knew that she faced the same problem he did when it came to the backlog in Bangkok. Her younger brother was based in Bangkok at that time, representing her interests in the region, and Weng flew there to meet with him. It was a fateful meeting: the two men were joined by a third individual, a shadowy Taiwanese bucket man who was known as Mr. Charlie. Mr. Charlie said he could arrange to charter a ship large enough to carry several hundred passengers from Thailand to America, and seaworthy enough to endure the voyage. It was agreed that Weng, Sister Ping’s brother, and a third snakehead, Lau Xing Bau, would work on recruiting passengers for the voyage and Mr. Charlie would provide the vessel. Weng would put the thirty passengers who had been in his Bangkok apartment on the ship, and Sister Ping’s brother would arrange for twenty of her customers to board.
The rest of the space they would lease to other snakeheads who had passengers stranded in Thailand. Mr. Charlie found a Saudi-owned, Singaporean-registered ship that had ferried cars between the north and south islands of New Zealand and borne Muslim pilgrims across the Red Sea to Mecca. The ship was the Najd II.

  As smuggling ships went, the Najd II was comfortable. There were over a hundred small cabins running around the two main decks. Each cabin had two beds, and the passengers moved into these. When Sean walked into one of the cabins, he found it stuffy and claustrophobic. He moved on, exploring a big recreation room at the front of the ship. Couches and chairs were scattered about, and Sean claimed two couches, pushing them together to serve as a bed.

  The ship sailed south to Singapore, but before long problems arose. They ran aground briefly off the coast of Malaysia, and the passengers began to realize that the Najd II was on its last legs. The ship was thirty years old; the decks reeked of diesel; the engine noise was deafening. They managed to make their way through the Strait of Malacca, between the Malaysian peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and out into the Indian Ocean. But there the engine troubles intensified, and their westward journey slowed to a crawl.