The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  There was Sterling Showers, a retired factory worker who was not a lawyer and could speak no Chinese, but who started visiting the Golden Venture passengers several times a week, talking to them through a glass partition and a formidable language barrier. He would stop by the local Chinese restaurant in York and collect any old Chinese newspapers the employees had finished reading, then take them to the prison to give to the detainees.

  There was Lena Ngo, whose grandparents had fled the Communists in China in the 1950s and moved to South Vietnam, and whose parents had fled the Communists in Vietnam in 1975. As a girl she came to America as one of the Vietnamese boat people. She had been taken in by a family she met through a church in York, and she liked to joke that if America ever turned Communist, there would be no place else for her to go. As a former refugee whose grandparents had fled the country that the Golden Venture passengers were fleeing, she felt she should show solidarity with the detainees.

  There was Rod Merrill, a high school teacher and retired Navy pilot who began composing songs about the detainees, about China, about freedom, and about immigration. He wrote a new Woodie Guthrie– style ditty for each vigil and would take his guitar and try to bolster people’s spirits, eventually composing hundreds of songs and compiling a CD, Where Is the Freedom?

  There was Demian Yumi, a New Agey singer and artist who corresponded with the detainees and developed a performance art piece in which she recited parts of their stories, explaining their reasons for leaving China. She eventually took the performance to the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

  There was Cindy Lobach, a pert and ebullient archconservative who was the wife of one of the lead lawyers working on the asylum cases with Craig. Lobach was organized and energetic and began producing a weekly newsletter on bright colored paper, which she wrote, edited, published, and distributed herself, giving updates on the legal proceedings, quoting inspirational snippets of poems or scripture, and printing translated letters from the Golden Venture detainees. Lobach proudly self-identified as a “Rush Limbaugh dittohead conservative,” and when she initially began attending the vigils, she expressed some reservations about keeping company with an aging hippie like Joan Maruskin, wondering, “How can I work on the same side of an issue with these crazy, left-wing, liberal wackos?” But on the issue of the Chinese asylum-seekers the two had found common cause. By mutual agreement, they steered clear of every other political issue, and before long they had become close friends.

  To help them communicate with the men in the prison, the group found a young reference librarian from the local college named Zehao Zhou. Known to everyone in the group as ZZ, he had grown up in northern China and spent six years in a forced labor camp before obtaining a student visa to America in 1987. Alone among the group, he was somewhat dubious of the Golden Venture passengers’ various claims about the one-child policy or political involvement in 1989. But ZZ was bitterly opposed to Beijing and felt that on some fundamental level the men had left for the same reason he had—a lack of opportunity, a sickening sense that tomorrow would not be any better than today.

  The members of the group called themselves the People of the Golden Vision and adopted a line from Margaret Mead as their motto: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” They found passages from the Bible that seemed to resonate with their feelings about the detainees. “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the stranger,” Leviticus reads. “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

  They courted the press. “The Bible is the ultimate immigration handbook,” Joan Maruskin told the Baltimore Sun. “Moses was a criminal alien who came back to Egypt to lead a nation of aliens into the promised land. Jesus was an undocumented refugee. What would have happened to Christianity if they had put him in an INS prison?” They appealed not merely to people’s sense of religion but to a deeply ingrained conception of the United States as a country in which the system retains some degree of fairness and transparency and even the most misbegotten can still expect a fair shake. People who had never been politically active in the past suddenly found themselves engaged in the most elemental, and perhaps quixotic, forms of civic expression. They telephoned their congressman and wrote impassioned personal letters to President Clinton. “It’s injustice,” Cindy Lobach told the New York Times. “It’s a complete embarrassment to be an American when people are treated like this.” The arrival of the men from the Golden Venture had awakened something in the people of York, something that none of them knew they were looking for. To Caryl Clarke, a local reporter who covered each development in the Golden Venture case and marveled at the way the event had galvanized people, it seemed that the Chinese men “have brought the world into our rather cloistered community.”

  To be sure, the people who rallied around the Golden Venture passengers were prompted by a wide range of motivations and personal, political, and above all religious predilections that in many instances had existed long before the arrival of the ship. The People of the Golden Vision counted Buddhists, Jews, agnostics, and atheists among their numbers, but the overwhelming spirit of the support they offered was unmistakably Christian. They came from different denominations, but the prayers intoned at the vigils were Christian prayers, and they tended to construe even the secular principles for which they were fighting in explicitly Christian terms. Joan Maruskin assembled a composite first-person narrative, drawn from the experiences of the Chinese detainees, called “In Search of a Better Hell,” which acted as an appeal to members of the public, the press, and the political establishment. “You, the people of America, are my only hope,” it read. “In this country I have learned about God. China is a godless country. In this country, I have learned about the love of Jesus Christ through the actions and love of his followers.”

  Maruskin insisted that she had no intention of converting any of the detainees, but the same could not be said of the chaplain at the York County Prison, a fervent evangelical who launched an aggressive effort to have the men from the Golden Venture baptized. He confided in Maruskin that it was his belief that the Chinese men had been sent to him by God so that he could convert them to Christianity and then deport them back to China, where they could spread God’s word.

  One particular animating issue for many of the York supporters was the notion that the detainees had fled from China in order to avoid forced abortion or sterilization. The group had ardent pro-choicers and pro-lifers, and Craig Trebilcock wryly observed that forced abortion and sterilization might actually be one issue upon which the two groups could agree. But Craig had moments when he grew cynical about the outpouring of support for the Golden Venture passengers, and he wondered to what degree they had simply become the latest front in the long-standing abortion wars of the United States—to what degree, indeed, the pro-life lobby might be using the detainees for the publicity they generated and the issues they appeared to symbolize. At one point Craig filed a brief in which he used the expression “reproductive freedom” in a strictly neutral, descriptive sense. He received a furious telephone call from a representative of a prominent Catholic group that had been supporting the effort, who accused him of employing the phrase as a coded pro-choice message. Still, Craig was a pragmatist. He was happy to have whatever support he could find.

  The two dozen women who had arrived on the Golden Venture proved to be an especially significant cause for pro-life groups. The women were housed in a detention facility in New Orleans, where Joan Maruskin and an assortment of York supporters went to visit them. Many of the women told harrowing stories about the birth-control tactics employed by the cadres in China. In the summer of 1995, the conservative New Jersey congressman Chris Smith held a hearing on Capitol Hill and invited several of the women to testify about their experiences. Craig and the Y
ork supporters drove to Washington to attend the hearing, and the women were escorted into the Capitol building in shackles. “The cadres of the local government were trying to catch women,” a soft-spoken detainee named Chen Yun Fei recalled. “So you could hear the sound of crying, you know, everywhere. And they used the tractors to put on this big loudspeaker to tell people that those people who are pregnant, you have to go to have it born immature.”

  Chen Yun Fei recounted how she was compelled to have a late-term abortion at the hands of an inexperienced medical student, which led to an infection. After the abortion, she found an abandoned baby girl by the side of the road, she continued. The baby was crying and hungry. She took it home, which angered the cadres, and she was forced to flee. She hid in the countryside, she said, subsisting on sorghum and maize. But when she returned to her village, the cadres captured her and sterilized her.

  The other women’s stories were equally horrific. “The crimes that have been committed against you and against the women of China are no less serious than the crimes that were committed by the Nazis,” Representative Smith said. “It is even more appalling when we realize that the Clinton administration wants to send you back to your oppressors.”

  But because of the altered posture on claims of persecution under the one-child policy, the women were unable to secure asylum, and when their legal options were exhausted, they were transferred from New Orleans to a facility in Bakersfield, California, as preparations were undertaken to deport them back to China. In Bakersfield they caught the attention of Tim and Terri Palmquist, who ran a local anti-abortion group, Life Savers Ministries. Twice a week Terri Palmquist walked the sidewalk in front of a local abortion clinic; the family’s Dodge Caravan bore a bumper sticker reading “Abortion: One Dead, One Wounded.” When they learned that the women were being held in Bakersfield and would soon be returned to China, the Palmquists began organizing prayer vigils like the ones in York. They broadcast news about the women on the local Christian radio station.

  On February 29, 1996, when the women marked their thousandth day of confinement, the Palmquists led a 13-mile walk from a replica of the Liberty Bell in downtown Bakersfield to the Lerdo Detention Facility, where the women were being held. Terri did the walk dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Six months later, with the women still detained and their future uncertain, Tim Palmquist announced that five of them had converted to Christianity. A visitor had explained the differences between Buddhism and Christianity to the women, Palmquist said. The detainees had begun attending Mandarin-language chapel services and had each been given a Chinese Bible.

  Just as it appeared that the women would be deported, they found help from a most unlikely corner. Word of their predicament had spread around the world and reached the Vatican, where the Office of Resettlement suddenly took an interest. By some accounts, the decision to help the women went as high as Pope John Paul II. They could not remain in American jails, but neither could they return to China, so the Vatican persuaded Ecuador to take the women in. In order to secure the deal, Ecuador needed a guarantee of financial support for the women. In three weeks of outreach among local supporters, the Palmquists raised $50,000.

  The women were flown to Quito. “They have a well-founded fear of practices that are contrary to their moral convictions and their religious beliefs,” an Ecuadorian official said. The church helped the women settle in their unfamiliar new surroundings, and before long three of them had opened a restaurant. Another three aimed to start their own boutique.

  With the expedited schedule that had been imposed on the asylum proceedings of the Golden Venture passengers, it was only a matter of months before Craig Trebilcock and the network of forty or so lawyers in York and around the country who were representing the detainees had learned that very few of the appeals filed before the Board of Immigration Appeals were successful. There was one last option available to prevent, or at least forestall, the deportation of Sean Chen and Pin Lin and the other passengers: they could sue the Clinton administration in federal court. It would be a daunting undertaking, as Craig and his colleagues endeavored to argue that because of the highly publicized arrival of the Golden Venture, a decision had been made in Washington to make an example of the passengers, denying them the kinds of procedural protections that had been available to Chinese asylum-seekers in the past, detaining them, expediting their cases, and adopting a presumption against granting them asylum. The suit was procedurally complex, and ultimately unsuccessful. But it represented one last opportunity to keep the passengers in the country, and it armored Craig with the power to depose officials from the Clinton administration and question them about the decision-making process in the hours and days after the arrival of the ship.

  Occasionally the hopes of the People of the Golden Vision were bolstered by the release of a man here or a man there—the lucky ones whose asylum cases or appeals were so persuasive that they prevailed. Those detainees who were released often found themselves ejected by prison guards in the middle of the night, with no money, no civilian clothes, no directions, and just the few words of English they had managed to pick up in prison.

  On these occasions, Beverly Church or Joan Maruskin would often receive a call. “You want a Chinese guy?” Maruskin asked the retired factory worker Sterling Showers after one of these calls. “Sure,” Showers replied.

  The two of them drove to New York City, where a few of the men were still being held at the Varick Street facility. They picked up two Golden Venture passengers who had taken on American names: Ben and Rocky. The men carried their belongings in paper bags, which they loaded into the trunk. Then they climbed into the backseat for the long ride to York.

  Several hours later they stopped to fill up the gas tank at a station by the side of the highway. Maruskin turned and saw Rocky fast asleep. Ben was wide awake. He watched her as she looked at Rocky and then looked back at him.

  “Ben no sleep,” he said in English. “Ben sleep in prison. Ben free.”

  Stories like Ben’s were the exception, however, and as the months became years in York County Prison, Sean Chen and the other detainees were insulated, somewhat, from the daily victories and setbacks of the legal maneuverings and public lobbying being undertaken on their behalf. Many of the men succumbed to despair; they had families struggling in desperate poverty back in China, families that had gone into debt to send them to America and were counting on their remittances. Several of the passengers went on a hunger strike for a week, until their supporters in York pleaded with them to stop. A prison guard caught one of the men trying to hang himself with a bedsheet in the middle of the night. Sixteen others vowed to commit suicide rather than return to China. The inmates were given paper shirts and trousers, because guards feared they would fashion nooses from their clothing. Without access to proper medical care, some of the passengers suffered from dangerous conditions that remained untreated. One man developed a tumor on his liver and began to vomit blood. Another was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and was released to the care of his extended family in New York only when it became clear that he was dying.

  As seemed so often to be the case, Sean Chen’s youth and independence allowed him to make the most of the situation. He spent his time in prison trying to learn English and study for his GED. He was excited to be able to take classes again; since his expulsion from school four years earlier, he had felt robbed of an education. “Just pretend you’re still in school,” one of his cousins suggested in a letter, and he did his best to heed that advice.

  To Craig Trebilcock, Sean always seemed a little brash, a little overconfident—he had none of the mournful humility of older passengers, like Craig’s client, Pin Lin. But different people process incarceration in different ways, and Sean may simply have been unready to give up hope. Nor did he lose sight of the fact that dreadful though it might have been, the men’s imprisonment was on some fundamental level voluntary. They could submit to deportation any day. Of course there would be fines to pay, and
possibly prison, or worse, in China. The Golden Venture episode had badly embarrassed Beijing, and any returnees would no doubt be made to suffer for the slight. One of the passengers was able to make a telephone call home and learned that another passenger, who had accepted deportation, had been thrown into prison upon his return. The authorities broke both of his legs, saying, “He won’t run away again, will he?” That story made the rounds in the prison, hardening the resolve of many of the men to stick out their indefinite jail sentence in America rather than take their chances by going home.

  But perhaps the most extraordinary testament to the motivation the Golden Venture passengers had to forge a life in the United States was the experience of the men who accepted deportation, after the months it had taken to get as far as Bangkok, the months stuck in Mombasa, the months aboard the Golden Venture, and the months in an American jail, only to reach China and begin the process all over again, endeavoring once more to reach America. One of the York detainees, a skinny forty-year-old named Wang Wu Dong, agreed to be deported to China in 1996, after three years behind bars. His asylum claim, under the one-child policy, had failed. (“You knew that if you … attempted to have another child and you already had two, most likely you would have to be sterilized or be punished?” his judge asked. “That’s not persecution. That’s punishment for not obeying the law.”)

  When local officials learned that Wang would be returning to his village in Fujian, it seemed likely that he and his wife, who was still there, raising their two children, might try to have a third child. While Wang was being held in detention in the nearby town of Fuqing, the cadres hauled his wife to a birth-control clinic, administered an epidural anesthetic, and removed her uterus. Wang was devastated when he returned home and learned what had happened. He was consumed by shame and wept for days. But he still owed over $10,000 to his snakeheads; Sister Ping might have had a satisfaction guarantee for her customers, but less scrupulous smugglers demanded payment even after a catastrophe like the Golden Venture. The family’s small plot of land, on which they cultivated rice, beans, and sweet potatoes, would never generate enough income to cover the debts.