The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  The day after the article appeared, Bill Clinton was scheduled to deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term. In the audience on Capitol Hill was a sixty-nine-year-old former school superintendent named Bill Goodling, who since 1974 had been the Republican congressman for York, Pennsylvania. After the speech, as Clinton slowly made his way out of the House chamber, shaking hands and having short conversations with the legislators lining the aisles, Goodling stepped in front of him.

  “Mr. President,” Goodling said, “you still have thirty-eight Golden Venture Chinese in my York County prison.”

  “Yes, that makes me angry,” Clinton said. “I just read about it in the New York Times.”

  Just over a week later, Clinton received Goodling in the Oval Office for a discussion of Clinton’s education plans (Goodling was chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee). Goodling took two of the sculptures with him, an eagle made of folded paper and a papier-mâché tree. He presented them to the president.

  “They’re beautiful,” Clinton marveled.

  “They’ve had four years to sit in prison and do that,” Goodling replied.

  Clinton looked at the sculptures. “Four years is an awfully long time,” he said.

  The following day Clinton telephoned Goodling. “I’ve made my decision,” he said. “They’ll be released from prison.” Clinton told Goodling that his administration was not “unanimous” in supporting his decision. But he proceeded with it, signing an executive order on Valentine’s Day 1997, four years to the day after the passengers boarded the Golden Venture off the beach in Pattaya.

  Beverly Church was at the prison visiting the men when she heard the news. She dropped to her knees, banging one of them so hard that she bruised it. Joan Maruskin received a call from Goodling and immediately went about informing the others. When the news reached Craig Trebilcock, he was at Fort Benning, Georgia, preparing to deploy for a tour of National Guard duty in Bosnia. Craig stood under a pine tree by an old barracks that dated to World War II and wondered at the fateful twists his life had taken in the years since he agreed to volunteer ten hours to represent Pin Lin. The irony had never been lost on Craig that he was an Army man who had ended up suing the government of the United States. And now, as he prepared to don the uniform of his country once again, he could scarcely believe that after nearly four years the men of the Golden Venture would finally be set free.

  On February 26, 1997, the People of the Golden Vision assembled at a local church. They had stood vigil for 183 consecutive Sundays, waiting for the men to be released, and now, finally, the day had come. Across the country Golden Venture detainees were being set free in Bakersfield, California, in Winchester, Virginia, and in New Orleans. But most of the remaining passengers were in York, and as the men entered the church, their supporters erupted in cheers. Beverly Church had dressed up in a black suit with gold earrings and a gold necklace, offset by bright red lipstick. Joan Maruskin captured the men on a camcorder as they filed through the door. They had blocky prison haircuts and blinked shyly at the camera. The supporters in York had initiated a clothing drive, and the men showed off their ill-fitting outfits: sweatshirts and sweaters and stone-washed jeans, double-breasted blazers that fell below the knee.

  It was a jubilant scene. Each man was given a shopping bag, and they wandered among a set of tables piled high with donated clothing. Each was also given a plastic crate with toiletries and a towel, and several hundred dollars from the proceeds that had been pooled from the final artwork sales. (There had been a run on the sculptures when it was announced that the men would soon be released.) Someone had brought large containers of chicken and rice from a local restaurant, Hunan East, and for the first time since arriving in the United States, the men ate Chinese food. For dessert there was a red, white, and blue cake with an inscription made of icing: “Welcome to America.” The atmosphere was warm and triumphant, though not without a certain awkwardness. For nearly four years the Americans in York had related to the Chinese men only within the strictly enforced parameters established by the prison for visiting hours. Suddenly finding themselves face-to-face in the outside world, they stumbled toward a more unfettered mode of friendship and communication, everyone overcome by a surge of deep emotion. They all prayed and embraced, and the men stood together, stifling tears and smiles, and sang “We Shall Overcome,” in Chinese and then in English.

  A local couple, Harriet and Ray Miller, had arranged for each man to be released to a family in the area. There had been reports about snakeheads going to the prison in order to collect their fees or kidnap recently released detainees, so some effort was made to keep the precise addresses where the men were staying a secret. At the end of the evening, the men walked out into a chill rain in the dark parking lot and were greeted by camera flashes: the media had been barred from the church during the event, but reporters and cameramen had assembled outside and wanted interviews and photos. The men walked hurriedly by, smiling politely but apologetically at the cameras. “They’re learning English,” Bev Church told the reporters. “They just learned to say, ‘No comment.’” One by one the men climbed into the waiting cars, clutching their new belongings in trash bags. As the cars bore them off to the townhouses and split-levels of their sponsors, it marked the first time each man had been physically separated from all the others since they first assembled in the hold of the Golden Venture in 1993.

  The first few weeks of freedom were strange for the Golden Venture men. They telephoned their families back in China to tell them the news, ate abundant quantities of Chinese noodles, and took long walks through the gray and alien terrain of the Pennsylvania woods. Their adoptive families were eager to take them out and about, to show them the grocery store, to introduce them to people at church, to take them to Wal-Mart. The whole community in York and the surrounding area knew about the saga of the Golden Venture, and there was some resistance to having any of the passengers settle in the neighborhood. As the men wandered, awestruck, through the local supermarket, they received strange, curious, and sometimes hostile looks from the people they encountered. The families sponsoring them noticed, but the men hardly did, so great was their sense of wonderment at the sheer cornucopia of meat and produce and colorfully packaged consumer goods all laid out on display.

  A local woman named Ann Wolcott, whose son had been killed in an ambush in Vietnam nearly three decades earlier, signed on to sponsor one of the younger detainees, a sweet-natured boy in his early twenties with a basketball obsession and a toothy smile, named Zheng. When Zheng had been at her home for a day or so, Wolcott decided that he needed a decent pair of shoes. Together they drove to the Galleria Mall and went to a shoe store. Wolcott prompted Zheng to select a pair that he liked, and after some deliberation the two made their way to the cash register. As they did, a woman Wolcott had never met approached them.

  “Is he one of those Golden Venture people? From the prison?” the woman asked.

  Wolcott was prepared for hostility and held her ground. “Yes,” she replied. “He is.”

  The woman looked at Zheng. “I would like to buy his shoes,” she said.

  In generations past, the men might have headed directly to one Chinatown or another, in Philadelphia or Boston or New York, and a few of the Golden Venture passengers did just that. But even as the men had passed the years in prison, the Fujianese sense of adventure was bringing about a major shift in the way in which the Chinese settled in America. For many of the most ambitious Fujianese, especially those who wound up in the restaurant business—which the overwhelming majority of them did—remaining in Chinatown for a generation, or even a year, seemed self-defeating. Of course there was some comfort in being surrounded by fellow Fujianese, and there were a host of risks associated with venturing out of the cities and into suburban America, beyond the reach of the support networks other Fujianese had labored so long to establish. But there were benefits as well. For restaurateurs, costs were often lower outside the majo
r cities, and, more important, there was less competition: why open a Chinese restaurant on a block full of Chinese restaurants in Manhattan or San Francisco in the hopes that passersby will stumble into yours, when you could go to some strip mall or small town in Virginia or Iowa or Texas and operate the only Chinese restaurant for miles around?

  By the time the last of the Golden Venture passengers were released, America’s first-generation Chinese had become mobile to a degree that they had not been at any other time in history. The Fujianese had come all the way to America to find work; there was no reason they could not travel an additional 100 or 300 or 1,200 miles to find a job that paid a few more dollars each month. For the Golden Venture passengers, who had paid so traumatic a price for availing themselves of the services of snakeheads, there was an additional reason to travel far from Chinatown: it remained unclear whether the snakeheads would come calling. “If I can leave here, I’ll just run away,” Sean Chen told a reporter while he was still in prison. “I won’t go to New York, won’t go to any Chinese place. I’ll just find a job in some small town. It doesn’t matter what the job is. If we stay away from Chinatowns, we’ll be okay.”

  Toward the end of the 1990s, local entrepreneurs in Chinatown, many of them Fujianese, were beginning to realize that the labor market in Chinese restaurants in Boston and New York was very fluid—that demand seemed to fluctuate not just seasonally but weekly, and owners could never predict in advance how many people they would need to wait on tables or fire the woks. Soon a no-frills passenger van was shuttling restaurant workers from New York to Boston and back again for a few dollars each way, allowing undocumented busboys and dishwashers to save on the cost of a ticket and avoid having to navigate their way from Port Authority or South Station to their ultimate destination. The Chinatown bus, as it came to be called, formed a direct transit link from one Chinatown to the other, from the ornamental arch on Harrison Avenue in Boston to Confucius Plaza or the foot of the Manhattan Bridge.

  The Fujianese are great imitators of business ideas that seem to work, and before long there were multiple Chinese-owned minivans tearing along the highways between New York and Boston, and new routes were devised to the Chinatowns in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The proprietors invested in full-sized, air-conditioned coaches and gave their companies names like Fung Wah Transport Vans, New Century, Dragon Coach, and TravelPack. A price war between several of the companies drove the cost of a ticket lower and lower, until even on the larger buses the one-way fare to Boston was a mere $10—a 200-mile journey for the price of a cross-town cab. As word spread of the cheap new bus route that managed so dramatically to undercut Greyhound and Peter Pan, college kids began entering Chinatown and queuing with their Walkmen and backpacks to join the restaurant workers for the trip.

  In no time the major bus lines were seeing their numbers dip and realizing that they were being undercut by the scrappy upstarts in Chinatown. Some pointed out, correctly, that the Chinatown buses seemed quite frequently to get into accidents: a bus hit a woman on a busy street, a bus rolled over on the highway, a bus’s engine spontaneously burst into flames. At least initially the Chinatown bus market had been somewhat unregulated, and even after the larger services began obtaining licenses and submitting to inspections, they still obliged their drivers to work typically Fujianese shifts; it seemed inevitable that someone suffering from acute exhaustion and piloting a many-ton bus would occasionally slip up. There were other reasons the cautious passenger might steer clear of the Chinatown buses: some of the bus lines were controlled by organized crime, and before long the price wars became literal physical clashes, with the occasional bus owner shooting or stabbing a rival. Even so, the buses became more and more popular as the years went by. Eventually mighty Greyhound was obliged to slash its prices on routes where it was competing with the Chinatown bus.

  The buses facilitated the explorations of a generation of Fujianese restaurant workers. Soon Chinatown buses were making trips to cities that didn’t have Chinatowns and depositing restaurant workers in Richmond, in Pittsburgh, in Nashville. Any place that a quorum of ticket-buyers was willing to go to became a viable destination, and the bus companies hired touts to stand on the street corner at Eldridge and East Broadway in New York and try to entice random pedestrians to abandon whatever plans they might have had that day and take an impromptu eighteen-hour bus trip. It was not uncommon to stroll through Chinatown at any hour of the day or night and pass flush-faced Fujianese women, fanny packs cinching their puffy winter coats, who would spot you and gamely shout, “Hey, boy you want go Ohio?”

  In Chinatown buses and in cars, the Golden Venture passengers spread out across the country. They ended up in Salem, New Hampshire, and Normal, Illinois. They went to work in Dublin, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri. They put down roots in small towns in Massachusetts and in Florida, and most of them went into the restaurant business in one form or another. In fact, the relative success of the Golden Venture passengers can be measured to some extent along the continuum from dishwasher or deliveryman to restaurant manager or proprietor. Michael Chen, one of the most ambitious passengers released from York in 1997, went on to own his own restaurant in an upscale strip mall outside Columbus. Less successful was Dong Xu Zhi, a mild-mannered Christian who moved into a cramped two-room apartment that he shared with several other people on the Lower East Side, and worked as a deliveryman for a Chinese restaurant in a rough part of the Bronx.

  Not all of the men went into the restaurant business, and not all of them left York, Pennsylvania. Yang You Yi, the detainee who first folded a paper pineapple in prison, had run a weaving company in China, using old looms to manufacture mosquito nets. Through Joan Maruskin and Sterling Showers, he was introduced to a local man named David Kline, a gentle weaver with an Amish-style beard who had worked in mills most of his life and operated a company, Family Heir Loom Weavers, in a small town near York called Red Lion. Kline agreed to meet with Yang and said he could offer him work.

  “How much will you pay?” Yang wondered.

  “Seven dollars an hour,” Kline replied.

  As they were talking, Yang knelt down and picked up a length of thread from the floor. He toyed with it for a moment, then skillfully tied a weaver’s knot.

  “Okay,” Kline said. “Eight dollars an hour.”

  In the coming years, Kline and his family essentially adopted Yang, allowing him to live rent-free in a room in an old cigar factory that they had converted into a weaving mill. Yang worked sixty hours a week at nine looms, bringing an extraordinary degree of dexterity and skill to his weaving and increasing the output of the mill by 50 percent over his first three years. He made garments for Civil War reenactors and upholstery fabric and period drapery for historic residences; the mill produced materials that would be used in the restored houses of nine former presidents. When the movie Cold Mountain needed hundreds of authentic-looking costumes and uniforms from the American Civil War era, it was Yang You Yi who produced the fabric. Yang called David Kline “Dad-Boss,” and Kline credited him with turning the business around. Kline decided that when he retired, he would sell Yang half the company.

  When the first thrill of freedom had worn off and the men had begun to adjust to their new American lives, paying taxes on their income, clipping coupons and shopping at Wal-Mart, and beginning to think about saving some money for a lease to open their own business or for a down payment on a house, they also began wondering about whether and when they could send for their family members. Many of them had left behind wives and children in China, family they had not seen, in some cases, since 1991. But in the general euphoria and exhausted relief that had attended the final release from prison, the men and their supporters had effectively failed to read the fine print. Immigration policy seems always to entail compromise, and when President Clinton signed the order to set the Golden Venture passengers free, the gesture included a subtle wrinkle that would seriously curtail their abilities to live full lives in the Uni
ted States. Clinton had used his power to parole the passengers out of prison, which meant that they were free to live in America, to work, pay taxes, and own property. But technically they had no ironclad right to remain in the country, nor any of the rights that come along with a green card or naturalization. They were not allowed to petition for family members to join them. They had to check in with an immigration officer, who functioned in more or less the manner that a criminal parole officer would. And they could remain only at the whim of the United States. If some official in some future administration decided, during a period of alarm over immigration, to deport them, they would have no procedural defenses. Worst of all, parole operates as a kind of limbo: there is no graduation from parole to legal status. It is a nebulous state, but a permanent one.

  Still, some of the men found ways, both legal and illegal, of arranging for their family members to join them. As husbands were reunited with their wives and fathers with their children, they struggled to reconstruct the families they had left behind. When Yang You Yi’s wife was finally able to bring his three children to Pennsylvania in 2002, it had been a decade since the children had seen their father. He worried that he would not recognize them when they got off the plane. Yang had purchased a new home in Red Lion, installing soft blue carpeting upstairs and down. After a joyful reunion at the airport, he took his family home. But in the ensuing weeks and months he found that his children did not always heed the father who had been absent for so many years. In the village in Fujian they had enjoyed a certain autonomy, walking wherever they needed to go. But in suburban America they relied on their father to drive them, and soon, like any other American kids, they were hounding Yang for rides. The children “give me a lot of headaches,” Yang said. “They don’t listen.”

  For some of the older Golden Venture passengers, the sons and daughters who arrived in America and proved so much more adept at the tricky process of cultural assimilation eventually became a kind of crutch, helping their parents navigate an English-speaking world. Beverly Church remained close to the shy, middle-aged cook Zheng Xin Bin. While he was detained in York, Xin Bin had charmed Bev, and the two had become good friends. “We don’t take any skinny people here,” she would tell him, worried by the weight he had lost in prison. “You have to eat, to stay strong, so you can work hard.” Xin Bin was released when President Clinton issued the pardon, and Bev drove him into Philadelphia to obtain his working permit, a laminated card the size of a driver’s license. Finally released from detention and in a position to repay the kindness Bev had shown him, Xin Bin was a gentleman, always insisting on picking up the tab after a meal and volunteering to pay the highway toll anytime the two were driving. “Car hungry,” he would joke, offering a $20 bill.