Wang had been home for less than two months when he and his wife made the desperate decision to turn to the snakeheads once again. From a loan shark they borrowed $5,000 and made a down payment. With the snakeheads’ help, Wang obtained a false passport and boarded a flight to Surinam, the former Dutch colony on the Atlantic coast of South America, which had become a minor hub for snakeheads. For months Wang waited in Surinam, until finally local snakeheads loaded him onto a fishing trawler bound for the United States.
Some days later, the snakeheads aboard the trawler offloaded their passengers to a 30-foot speedboat, which made its way toward the shore near Bay Head, New Jersey. But as the speedboat approached, it was enveloped in a dense fog, and, tragic and improbable though it might seem, the boat ran aground. The passengers scattered, and all of them, Wang included, were arrested by the police. “Sent Back to China, Man Washes Up Again,” the New York Times marveled, in an article that noted the “cruelly flippant aptness” of the name of the speedboat Wang arrived on: Oops II.
The INS immediately moved to deport Wang once again. But in one final, merciful twist to the story, a federal judge in New Jersey ended up granting Wang “withholding” status, a rarely invoked designation that enabled him to live and work in the United States (though not to become a permanent resident or citizen, or to sponsor his wife or children to come to America). It may have been a limited freedom, but it would enable Wang to send money home in order to cover his family’s debts and in time, perhaps, to pay snakeheads to bring his family to America as well.
While a green card and the legal right to petition to bring family members to America was obviously preferable to an undocumented life for the passengers who arrived on the Golden Venture, there was among them a sense that even an illegal existence in the United States was better than a legal existence anywhere else.
This was nowhere more evident than in the case of the women of the Golden Venture, whom the Vatican had gone to such trouble to relocate in South America. Within a couple of years, every single one of them had abandoned Ecuador and returned to live illegally in the United States.
One day in York County Prison a tall, slightly taciturn detainee named Yang You Yi tore a page from a magazine he was reading and began tearing the glossy pages and folding them into little paper triangles. He made more and more of the triangles, until he had an impressive pile. Then he started interlocking them and assembling the bound configurations that resulted in a larger sculpture. What emerged, after hours of work, was a rough, corrugated shape that was recognizably a pineapple, replete with a spiky stem. Some of the other men had gathered around Yang, watching as he worked, and in the ensuing days they copied his steps, producing a variety of pineapples of their own.
The men were painfully bored in the prison, and desperate for a way to busy themselves, and the introduction of this colorful, ambitious origami initiated a craze. Soon it was not just pineapples they were creating but paper bowls, vases, birds, and a menagerie of other creatures. The tools they had at their disposal were simple: newspaper, yellow legal pads, and old magazines discarded by the prison guards or donated by the People of the Golden Vision. But some of the men were quite artistically inclined—they had worked as carpenters and stonemasons, architects and weavers, kite makers and set designers before leaving China—and soon they were improvising new techniques. Someone realized that by mixing toilet paper, water, and toothpaste, they could produce a pasty papier-mâché, which could then be molded with a plastic spoon and colored with a magic marker until it acquired a porcelain sheen.
As the sculptures grew less experimental and more impressive, the men began sending them out to their attorneys and to the supporters attending the vigils, as humble gifts and tokens of thanks. The York residents were astonished that the men could have produced anything so beautiful from a prison cell. They negotiated with prison administrators to send in jugs of Elmer’s Glue, blunt children’s scissors, and Sharpie markers. As more and more of the men started spending their days on the artwork, the results got bigger and more impressive. They sculpted turkeys, cranes, and storks by the dozen; a family of squat, moon-faced owls; dragons and Buddhas; a muscular warrior astride a horse, his skin smooth and shiny as lacquer. They presented Bev Church with a twin-engine propeller plane made entirely of folded legal paper, the word Hope inscribed in green felt marker on its nose.
Before long the detainees were going through so much prison-issue toilet paper that the warden complained, and the People of the Golden Vision took to visiting the prison with wholesale bales of Charmin. The men developed an assembly line, so that the less experienced artisans could work on folding small components and the artists among them could assemble these pieces into ever more impressive creations.
As word spread through the community about the artworks the men were creating, they became collector’s items, and people began inquiring about whether it was possible to purchase the sculptures. Cindy Lobach obtained permission to visit the men once a week and cart out the works as they produced them. She held a sale at the local YWCA to help defray some of the costs of the men’s legal defense, and before long the sales were a regular event, and the People of the Golden Vision held cultural nights, with Chinese food, artwork by the detainees, and impassioned discussions of immigration and asylum in America.
The art was a sensation. Soon the proprietor of a New York gallery specializing in American folk art got in touch and began selling the sculptures. The press started to take note. Life ran an article about the Golden Venture immigrants with a portfolio of photos of the sculptures. The art seemed emblematic of both the work ethic and the talent of the men, who wanted nothing more than to leave prison and become productive members of the American workforce. It was a perfect calling card for those lobbying to set them free. “There’s some intelligent people here,” Bev Church told a reporter. “They’re not just some peasants who fell off a rice paddy.”
The detainees at York ultimately produced 16,000 sculptures and, through Cindy Lobach’s sales, earned $135,000. Pieces ended up in the collections of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and other notable personalities who took an interest in the case. A traveling exhibit of the sculptures was featured in museums and galleries around the country, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Several of the most talented sculptors were eventually released from prison and granted special visas for “aliens of extraordinary ability in the arts.”
One of the most striking aspects of the artwork the men produced during their years in York County Prison, and surely one of the reasons for the attention and enthusiasm it garnered, was the preponderance in the designs they selected of Americana. The red, white, and blue of the American flag became a recurring color scheme. The men clipped the “Made in America” stamps from Wal-Mart ads and affixed them to their work. They loved birds, especially birds of prey, and American bald eagles in particular. After one of the men created a papier-mâché eagle alighting on a white branch and inscribed the words Fly to Freedom on the branch in English and Chinese, the supporters in York began calling the sculptures Freedom Birds. There were birds in midflight, their fearsome talons clutching the air in front of them, and birds standing sentry, in repose. Many of the paper birds were captive, locked up in ornamental cages.
The sculptures that the men produced behind bars and sent to the outside world served as a form of prison letter, less articulate than those of Gramsci or Martin Luther King, perhaps, but no less eloquent. There was a kind of rough-hewn poetry to a sculpture of the Statue of Liberty that was made entirely of toilet paper and had taken a detainee three days to construct. To some extent all this was surely calculated, designed to play on the sentimentality of Americans on the outside who might be in a position to help. But at the same time the sculptures provided a kind of testimony, suggesting that for the men at York County Prison, for whom the reality of the United States had proved to be such an unmitigated nightmare, the idea of America—that beautiful idea that had launched the Ma
yflower and the Golden Venture and ten thousand other ships—remained miraculously unsullied.
Chapter Fourteen
The Goldfish and the Great Wall
AS THE Golden Venture passengers produced their prison art, American law enforcement was systematically tracking down and prosecuting the various perpetrators of the voyage. By 1995 only two figures remained at large. One was Sister Ping, who was thought to be hiding in China. The other was Mr. Charlie, the Taiwanese snakehead who along with Ah Kay and Weng Yu Hui had arranged to purchase the ship and had been one of the chief architects of the operation.
Mark Riordan, the Bangkok-based INS officer who came so close to capturing Mr. Charlie after he was arrested by the Thai Tourist Police in Pattaya in February 1993, was still on the lookout for the smuggler. But even after Weng Yu Hui had been captured and interrogated about his shadowy accomplice, Mr. Charlie remained a mysterious figure about whom little was known. After his escape from Pattaya, the Tourist Police had given Riordan a copy of the passport Mr. Charlie was carrying, which was from Laos. Riordan ran the information through the INS database and found a match: a Thai passport and a U.S. immigration file. The file contained a photograph of the handsome snakehead, and fingerprints. It also noted that Mr. Charlie had been arrested in San Francisco for alien smuggling in 1986.
Riordan took a copy of the Thai passport to the Thai police, along with the fingerprints. But they said they had no information on the smuggler, and there the trail ran cold. Nobody knew anything about Mr. Charlie: where he was from, who he worked with, where he was hiding out, what he was up to now. Over the next two years, Riordan made a point of mentioning the Golden Venture incident and the name Mr. Charlie whenever he was meeting with contacts in Thailand, to see whether anyone knew anything about the elusive smuggler. But no one ever did. Riordan began to conclude that Charlie had protection at a very high level; that was the only explanation for his ability to escape the prison in Pattaya and be released to Laos, and it was the only way he could disappear so comprehensively from the scene, leaving behind only a maddening series of nicknames and aliases, none of which ever seemed to ring a bell with the corrupt denizens of the local constabulary. It was beginning to seem that Mr. Charlie was a ghost, that he had simply evaporated and might never reappear.
Then one evening in the fall of 1995, Riordan met an attaché from the Taiwanese embassy in Bangkok for tea. Riordan liked the attaché; he had an unguarded, chatty manner. As the conversation was winding down, Riordan paused, as was his custom, and withdrew from his pocket a worn list of names. The names on the list belonged to various smugglers and fugitives and other local disreputables he was seeking information on. He ran down the list to see if any of the names might spark a reaction in the attaché. He wasn’t especially optimistic; this was a wish list, the names that no one knew anything about. But he had found that in a convivial and often corrupt place like Thailand, it never hurts to keep asking. When he read Mr. Charlie’s name, the attaché stopped him. “I’m having dinner with him Thursday night,” he said.
Riordan felt his heart skip.
The attaché told him that Mr. Charlie’s real name was Lee Peng Fei, though he went by Mr. Charlie and Charlie and Char Lee and sometimes Ma Lee. He had been a snakehead for some time and had become very wealthy. He had a wife and child at home, but he was known for enjoying Bangkok’s nightlife. He liked to spend the evenings in clubs, singing karaoke. “He’s a good singer,” the attaché said, with evident admiration. “He’s a great singer.”
“Is he Thai?” Riordan asked.
“No. He’s Taiwanese,” the attaché said. “I’ll give you a copy of his military record.”
Riordan was flabbergasted. Mr. Charlie had been in Bangkok all along. On a muggy day not long afterward, a team of Royal Thai Police officers assembled and headed to a high-end condominium complex near Bangkok Airport. When they arrived at the building, they found Mr. Charlie standing outside polishing a brand-new forest green Mercedes, which glistened in the tropical sun.
In Thailand it is not uncommon for criminals with wealth to pay poor surrogates to serve jail sentences in their place, and when Mark Riordan heard that Mr. Charlie had been arrested, he wanted to see the man in person to be certain it was him. The smuggler had managed to slip out of police custody in Pattaya, and Riordan didn’t want to see it happen again. When he entered the room where Mr. Charlie was being held, he immediately recognized the well-groomed, slightly sporty young man who had appeared to be so helpful in the police station in Pattaya nearly three years before. Riordan asked Mr. Charlie how he had managed to get some two hundred passengers onto the Golden Venture before the Tourist Police stopped the operation. The smuggler responded, very casually, that in that particular instance he had enjoyed the assistance of the Royal Thai Navy. Riordan asked about the Golden Venture’s arrival in Rockaway and Charlie said that he had been standing on the beach, waiting for the ship to come in. What he couldn’t understand was how anyone could blame him for the deaths of people who decided by themselves to jump overboard.
Mr. Charlie was eventually extradited to the United States, where he admitted that he had given the order to run the Golden Venture aground and pleaded guilty to charges of alien smuggling and manslaughter at sea. He was sentenced to the maximum, twenty years in prison. It was a major triumph for American law enforcement. Mr. Charlie was the twenty-second person charged in relation to the voyage, and the one who had played the most important role in the botched logistics that led to the deaths at Rockaway. “This case demonstrates our resolve to strike at the very heart of international alien smuggling,” Attorney General Janet Reno announced. At the same time, however, a suggestion endured that Mr. Charlie’s capture might not signify the absolute conclusion of the Golden Venture investigation. “He is not a general but a top lieutenant,” Mr. Charlie’s protégé, the onboard enforcer Kin Sin Lee, had told investigators. There was a lingering suggestion that the case was not yet closed, that some elusive twenty-third suspect might still be at large.
Sister Ping’s movements during these years remain somewhat mysterious, but it is known that when she left New York and flew to Hong Kong in 1994, she continued on to Beijing for an anniversary celebration of the Communist Party, where she was to be honored, along with other notable overseas Fujianese. But when she arrived in Beijing, she was arrested. She was not held for long; she managed to bribe her way out of custody. But it was clear at that point that with the FBI’s investigation of the Golden Venture intensifying in New York, it was only a matter of time before the agents ascertained that it had been she who helped finance the purchase of the ship by wiring Ah Kay’s money to Thailand, and that one of the ten dead passengers was a customer she had put on board. She could not return to the United States.
Instead, just as federal prosecutors in New York prepared to indict her, Sister Ping returned to her native village of Shengmei and took up residence once again in the palatial house she had constructed at Number 398. During the thirteen years she had been living in the United States, the village had prospered, as she had facilitated the passage of more and more of her neighbors to New York City. Other grand houses had sprung up in the area, some of them even dwarfing her own. Another side effect of Sister Ping’s successful relocation of so many of her fellow villagers was that the area had grown conspicuously quiet. The narrow alleyways were empty, save for the occasional grandparent walking hand-in-hand with an American-born toddler. Eventually the village saw the introduction of what was by Chinese standards a novelty: an old folk’s home. So many of the young and middle-aged residents of Shengmei had left the village that there was no one left behind to take care of the older generation. A placard in the lobby heralded the various New York–based Fujianese whose contributions had underwritten the construction.
In the wake of the Golden Venture incident and the negative publicity it generated for Beijing, the Fujianese authorities launched a far-reaching anti-snakehead campaign, vowing to hunt down and
prosecute the smugglers and discourage local people from leaving illegally. “Illegal Emigration Is a Crime,” banners in Fuzhou read. “Resolutely Clamp Down on the Crime of Snakehead Activities.” In Sister Ping’s village, officials erected a sign that said, “It seriously damages the reputation of our party and our country, undermines border security, destroys public stability, and ruins the general social atmosphere.”
But in reality the campaign and its placards amounted to so much lip service. For the Fujianese who could now afford refrigerators and televisions, who could purchase cars or throw decadent wedding banquets or build new homes, no amount of propaganda or persuasion could diminish the widely held conviction that the snakehead trade was a fundamental social good—that it had enabled hundreds of thousands of people to pull themselves out of poverty and indulge in material comforts that would have been unimaginable to the generation before them. At a major intersection in downtown Changle, an imposing monument was erected, which dispelled any ambiguity about the role of outmigration from the region. The monument was a gleaming, soaring sail, from the base of which sprouted a set of angular wings, like the wings of an airplane. It was built to symbolize the debt that Changle owed to the people who had left the city on boats and planes.
The Snakehead Page 27
