Customer Reviews

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream Smuggling Empire

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When then-president Jimmy Carter reproached Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping with the latter's reluctance to allow his citizens the 'freedom of departure' from China, the latter famously responded, "Certainly, Mr. Carter. How many millions would you like?"

This excellent book is the story of how untold thousands -- and possibly millions -- of Chinese migrants, particularly from the rural coastal areas of Fujian province, have made their way from China to the United States, despite the fact that it's still hard for them to get official permission to leave and still harder for them to enter the United States legally than it once was. The starting point for the narrative and the discussion of the underlying issues is the misadventures of the passengers on the Golden Venture, which ran aground on a spur of land on Rockaway Beach in New York City, which drew everyone's attention to the magnitude of the illicit business of smuggling humans. Ten died; 300 landed or were rescued by local law enforcement -- people who up until then had had so little cause to use their handcuffs that they had to oil them to prevent them from rusting. Now they ran out of handcuffs when the decision was made to arrest the new arrivals.

On the surface, the story that Keefe is telling is that of Sister Ping, the snakehead (or people-smuggler) of the title, who had helped finance the Golden Venture's voyage and who was owed smuggling fees by two of the hapless passengers. She's essentially a boring character -- a middle-aged, unremarkable woman with a single-minded focus on making money the best way she knows how. But the business she selects is anything but boring, and it makes Sister Ping a heroine in her Fujianese hometown, for her role in scooping up peasants from the Chinese countryside and magically transporting them to the streets of lower Manhattan, where -- after repaying her $18,000 fee -- they can set about carving out new and more prosperous lives for their children, working seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. Sister Ping, as Keefe points out, isn't a morally complicated person -- she has a 'reckless devotion to the economies of scale'. But the issues that lie behind her action -- and the broader issue of migration, poverty and economic opportunity, at the end of the 20th century are about as morally complicated as issues can become these days, particularly in the United States, which was founded as a nation of immigrants, whose people cherish not only their own motley backgrounds but also the ideal of a society that is open and welcoming.

Keefe does an excellent job of laying out for the reader the tug of wars between ideals and pragmatism in immigration policy, as seen in the case of the Golden Venture passengers and that of immigration from China more broadly. He moves between the general and the specific, the conceptual and the anecdotal, with enviable agility, making this book not only fascinating but a pleasure to read. He himself is clearly torn. On the one hand, he feels empathy for the Golden Venture's passengers, who have spent twice as long reaching America on a horrific voyage as did the passengers of the Mayflower in their 17th century trip via sailing ship. The passengers arrived with rashes due to showering weekly with saltwater; rations on the long trip were so poor that one man had a bowel movement only once a week. "At times, the journey seemed so harrowingly unforgiving, so calculated to test and break the spirit and enduracne of the passengers on board, that the Golden Venture took on the aspect of ... an aimlessly floating madhouse." But Keefe is also keenly aware of the dilemma of INS officials, most of whom are all too aware that they hold the power of life and death over asylum seekers. If they fail to identify a well-founded fear of persecution, the asylum claimant can end up imprisoned or dead on their deportation. And their task isn't easy -- a limp handshake, a garbled timeline, a failure to meet the eyes of their questioner, can send even those with a solid case back to the country they fled. Keefe shows how that affected the Golden Venture's passengers.

This is a remarkably good book in that it helps make sense of the complex issues surrounding both the concept of migration and immigration laws, bringing together the violent and chaotic world of the smugglers and their 'clients' with the policymakers and law enforcement personnel who must try to impose some kind of order on that chaos. Keefe also does an excellent job of capturing the experience of the participants in this human smuggling chain at each stage along the way, from the beaches near Bangkok in Thailand, to the police in upstate New York trying to crack down on smuggling across the Niagara River. Above all, he has a deep understanding for what it is that drives migrants like Chung Sing Chau -- now known as Sean Chen -- to make this arduous trip, and how both the trip and their experiences transform them. "Like generations of foreign people with foreign names from all over the world who had peopled this country and made it what it was, Sean Chen had become, unmistakably and irreversibly, American."

I'm rating this 4.5 stars and rounding down only because of the relatively skimpy attention paid to the long and troubled history of Chinese immigrants in time, and their later experiences assimilating. It would have been fascinating -- and, I think, within the scope of the book -- to have juxtaposed the experiences of the descendants of those earlier arrivals with those of the Golden Venture passengers in a more explicit manner. Also, while the Fujianese community has been a prime mover in global people smuggling (of the economic variant, rather than the forced prostitutes, child slaves, etc), a glimpse of how this fits into the bigger picture of the overall immigration debate would have been helpful. For instance, I find it hard to believe that the furor surrounding the illegal immigrants of Latin American origin slipping across the Mexican border has not had an impact on immigration policy that has affected those coming from further afield, such as Chinese.

What this book did contain, however, was a solid and dramatic narrative of the struggles of a particular community trying to better their economic and social fate by taking the same kinds of risks our ancestors took to reach the United States -- but in a different century and with different results. If you're interested in the experiences of the asylum seekers and the INS officers who have to make the Solomon-like judgment of whether their claims of persecution are just or invented, I'd urge you to take a look at an excellent (although pre-9/11) documentary film, Well-Founded Fear. It puts some faces behind the kind of stories that Keefe tells in this book.

If you are going to read one book this summer, the Snakehead should be
it. This is a beautifully told story with many twists. We learn about
the elusive Sister Ping, the Snakehead that gives the book its title;
Chinatown gangsters; hardnosed FBI agents and tough NY prosecutors; a
small but fierce community of activists in York, PA; and most
importantly, we learn the very poignant story of the Golden Venture
passengers who endured unimaginable hardship to come to America just
to be put in jail for almost four years. Parts of the book are so
touching, they will make you tear up.

Keefe does not take sides in the polemic illegal immigration debate,
but instead he presents illegal immigration as it is - complex without
easy answers. Keefe, shines a light on the actors, describes their
actions and analyzes their motivations without deciding which side is
right. The Snakehead is a rarity in that it reads like a thriller but
leaves the reader with a much more nuanced understanding of one of
this generation's greatest challenges. A recent review in the
Washington Post said it best - "This is one of the freshest accounts
of modern-day migration I've read, one filled with moral ambiguity,
one that doesn't pretend to have the answers, one that in these times
feels like essential reading."

I picked up this book hoping to learn more about the human smuggling business that I had heard about here and there, and instead was pleasantly surprised to find myself engrossed in a book that weaves complex characters and events together as fluidly as if it were a novel. The author does a great job of intertwining immigration law and policy within the story without making it boring or interrupting the suspenseful pace of the book. This book was enlightening - it has this enhanced my understanding of the Chinese underground world, the Chinese immigrants that were indirectly a part of that world, and the US and foreign law enforcement that attempted to shake that world, and it did so in a way that was more engaging than I thought possible given the subject matter.

Is human smuggling--when the participants want to be smuggled--fundamentally evil or only evil when it goes all wrong.

Interesting question, but not really addressed here? This is a fascinating look into the machinations of a woman who intends to profit -- substantially -- from what she sees [or perhaps merely tries to justify] as a near charitable act. Is she corrupted by the amazing amounts of money it generates or were her motives always merely money? The book does tell the story of the illegal immigration of thousands of Chines. The ones who were successfully transported are, regardless of cost, happy to be in America. The naivete of lawmakers shouldn't surprise us anymore, but once again what was intended as a beneficial change in the law becomes twisted out of recognition.

But if you put aside the "larger issues", the author does manage to cast light into complex (and surely continuing) world of smuggling willing cargo. This is closer to a long magazine article --and an interesting one -- than an exploration of the larger issues. It is worth the read as it becomes entangled in international politics, local gangs, and a horrific abandonment of an entire ship of sick and starving immigrants on the beach. The various threads of the story are well handled, and while the reader might have wished for more, what is there keeps the pages turning.

The Snakehead is a book that demands to be read. Once I picked it up, I didn't want to put it down. The story is true, and it's far more than just a book about a fatal shipwreck that happened off the NY Coast.


The book is about the American Dream, and the immigrant drive to succeed in their adopted country, legally, illegally or otherwise. 'The Snakehead' is also a story about the way a small town and the people who live there found their lives forever transformed when a group of Chinese immigrants arrived in their community.

I also didn't realize there were such distinct cultural variants among the Chinese people until I read this book. There's an entire group of Chinese known as the Fujianese, who speak their own language and have a separate culture from the mainstream Chinese culture. For this reason alone, the book was worth reading, as it gave me a new understanding of people from China.

This book is worth reading.

First off, it's worth reading because it's entertaining. It tells a compelling story of international crime, rife with gangsters and murders and shootings and human smuggling and even a major shipwreck. It trails off a little in the latter half of the book, as the action winds down and the book gets more contemplative, but it's still a compelling read throughout.

And it's the second, more contemplative half that really makes this book worth reading, because the latter portions of the book give the reader a well-balanced, fair, and detailed picture of the horrible mishmash of U.S. immigration policies that have created criminals like Sister Ping. While never hiding or eliding over the deaths and horrors caused by the international human smuggling trade, the author also clearly shows how byzantine, illogical, and contradictory U.S. political decisions have created the human smuggling trade. Sister Ping never regarded herself as a criminal, and if the Chinese and American governments had had more sensible policies, she might never have had the opportunity to become one.

Instead, though, because America almost completely prohibits legal immigration, she was able to exploit that restriction for millions; because China's currency policies ignored the actual exchange rate for so long, she was able to make millions converting currency internationally as well.

The author never flinches from showing the evils that Sister Ping caused or had part in -- the deaths in transit, the gangsterism she participated in and gave rise to. But he also is careful to show how well-liked she was among her own communities, and how thousands of people were immensely grateful to her for giving them an opportunity (however risky) to come to America.

What the book ultimately shows is a portrait of injustice, primarily to the immigrants themselves (who spend years detained, or become citizens in a trice, or find themselves deported, or who die on jungle trails in Thailand or end up with three kids and a two-car garage in Middle America -- all seemingly at random, based on the whim of individual immigration judges or the luck of their particular transit), and to the "Snakeheads" themselves, who seem as likely to get a dismissed or commuted sentence (like the case of Jerry Stuchiner, now practicing law in Nevada, who used to be an INS agent charged with investigating human trafficking until he was found selling fake passports to Chinese immigrants) as they are to spend the rest of their lives in prison (like Sister Ping).

This book does a great job of telling compelling stories about human smuggling and those involved with it, while also aiding the reader to understand the breaks, gaps, and flaws in America's immigration system, and the price paid in human lives for those flawed policies. Highly recommended.

This book opens with a gripping, cinematic description of a signal event: The crash-landing of the Golden Venture on a sandbar outside New York Harbor in June 1993. Many of the 300 Chinese passengers hidden inside came out on deck and began leaping into the churning surf, desperate to swim to dry land and win asylum. Park police patrolling a nearby beach heard screams coming from the ocean. A Coast Guard helicopter soon circled overhead, followed by TV crews, with spotlights capturing men and women on deck, some jumping and some scared to try.

To the officers on site and to viewers watching on TV, it was equally stunning and mysterious: Who were these people? Who brought them here? How vast was this Asian migration?

This opening scene in "The Snakehead," a brilliant account of illegal immigration, is just a first taste. What emerged that dark night was really the latest iteration of a classic American story: Passage from a distant homeland to this place of promise, replete with a harrowing journey across the sea, life-and-death risks, gritty determination and acts of desperation. The story endures, even if the circumstances change.

In this telling, the Chinese ordeal of immigration has many fresh dynamics. Powerful smugglers who arrange passage and violent street gangs that manage the chattel split a lucrative take of $35,000 a head. There are edgy immigration agents, like the pugnacious Jerry Stuchiner, and savvy Chinese mob informants, like "The Fat Man." There are idiotic immigration procedures, allowing felons to walk free while the vulnerable remain locked up. Patrick Radden Keefe grasps many complex themes and weaves them into a compelling narrative.

At the heart of his story lies a crafty woman known as Sister Ping (though she, and this book, might have been called "The Godmother"). An immigrant from Fujian province, she opened a small shop in New York's Chinatown in 1982. Dressed like a shabby grandmother, with a hangdog expression, she hardly looked like a criminal mastermind. Yet she became adept, and then unmatched, as a "snakehead," or smuggler of her compatriots. Using fake passports, cheap flights, blow-up rafts to cross rivers, and underground connections throughout Asia and Central America, she created an extensive assembly of operators who shepherded thousands of Chinese to America.

Sister Ping achieved mythic status in Chinatown by granting favors and lending cash, convincing the helpless that she was a compassionate mobster. In her store, she also concocted a sideline money-transfer business, enabling immigrants to remit U.S. dollars to China without the annoying forms or restrictions of the Bank of China (whose branch sat across the street). From those laboring hard to send money home, she earned millions more.

China's economic bonanza, among other things, fueled a mania in Fujian for spending newfound money on elaborate ways to sneak into America. Demand for passage grew so fast that in the early '90s Sister Ping began contracting out logistics. Middlemen packed people inside old freighters like the Golden Venture, with conditions akin to a slave ship. Keefe writes perceptively about how Sister Ping and other Asian gangsters differed from the Sicilian model that the FBI was used to following. Asian organized crime "did not adhere to any fixed hierarchies or organizational structures," Keefe notes. "Alliances and coalitions were fluid, ever-evolving." Sister Ping reeled through a series of partners, none more fateful than a ruthless thug named Ah Kay.

Ah Kay began as a common hood and had even robbed Sister Ping. When they met again in 1992 to coordinate a smuggling operation, Ah Kay apologized for his previous misdoing. "That happened in the past," she said. "We're talking business now." Business aplenty.

Eventually, the cash flowed too fast. Rivalries within Ah Kay's gang led to shootings. Ah Kay had to go hide in China. Two of his brothers were killed outside a safe house in Teaneck, N.J., ruining Ah Kay's plans to off-load a ship that was about to land, which turned out to be the Golden Venture, which is why it went awry and reached our TV screens.

As a reporter who covered the Golden Venture and its aftermath, I was mystified by its many unanswerable riddles. The early rumor that smugglers had ordered the ship's crew to deliberately run it aground, for instance, made no sense. But now, with Keefe's painstaking reconstruction of the sequence of mishaps that led to that night, the crash-landing and other aspects of human trade become clear. As it turned out, 10 people died fleeing the ship, a handful escaped, some won asylum after years in detention and many others were sent back to China.

Ah Kay was arrested in Hong Kong in August 1993, instantly dissolving his alliance with Sister Ping. Now it was her turn to hide in China. It took the feds several years to track her down and finally nab her in a sting operation at Hong Kong's airport, which Keefe describes with brio.

In custody, Sister Ping was no match for Ah Kay. Facing charges related to human smuggling and many lesser counts, she claimed innocence. Ah Kay, who confessed to multiple murders and became a master informant about unsolved crimes, was the star witness at her trial in 2005. Sister Ping was found guilty and sentenced to 35 years. Ah Kay was set free.

Keefe's mastery of this chapter of our ongoing immigration saga is impressive. He muses thoughtfully about its many conundrums and highlights how our ethos of welcoming the persecuted gets soured by bad policy and the pervasive exploitation of the helpless. There will be more chapters, no doubt, but this one was pretty riveting.

In trying to think up one word to describe Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead the only word that comes to mind is epic. Begining with the wreck of the smuggling ship the Golden Venture, Keefe works his way backward charting the rise of Cheng Chui Ping, a woman who immigrated to America in the eighties and with her husband Cheung Yik Tak set up a human smuggling ring transporting people from the Fujian province of China to America for a fee. She earned so much money from her endeavors that she able to set up her own money wiring service. Theres more to it than that involving killers, with innocents and a myriad of law enforcement officials who were working against each other due to country borders and customs. Theres a lot of issues raised with topics ranging from human rights violations in China (specifically the one child only policy that had a lot of people fleeing rural villages to avoid sterilization) to the rights of undocumented aliens living in America and their attempts at clemency. Personally like every good nonfiction novel the best thing Keefe does is present his work without over embellishing things with his viewpoint. Every thing is presented in a gray with suppositions made upon deals that got murderers lenient sentences from American courts to the exploits of an American INS agent who worked to bring Ping to justice, embellishing stories He told and eventually being caught in Hong Kong with Honduran passports, a criminal in the system He had once enforced.
In the end the book is a good nonfictional crime novel that studies not just the crime element but the lives of people affected, focusing as well on the story of the immigrants from the Golden Venture who survived the long arduous journey only to end up in sort of flux gaining support of townspeople and lawyers who were horrified at the treatment they were recieving from the American justice system which wanted to process them quickly. Its all interesting material told in an even manner by Keefe who's obviously put a lot of work into what He wrote. For me the book was definitely a great novel and well worth the time to read if You feel inclined to do so.

If you had told me that the one of the most prominent figures in human smuggling was a little Chinese lady, I'd not have believed you. Snake Head (the name comes from the title given to people who serve that function, as traders and smugglers of men), is about such a woman. Sister Ping, as she's known, who filled large barges full of human cargo and smuggled them into the US. It's a fascinating and tragic tale, amazement coming at the sheer scope of her operations and efficiency, and sadness at what the people she trades have gone through. This book is an excellent commentary on immigration laws and purpose, as well as an intriguing side into american Chinese culture. If you are a huge fan of "lost history" vignettes, this is a must-have. Highly recommended.

The story is captivating - it's a page turner, which isn't always easy with ambitious non-fiction. I found it's not the best book to curl up with if you want to go to sleep, but it's a great book to get to sucked into. The subject - human smuggling - is a fascinating one. I read the book knowing very little about the subject. The book provides a memorable education. Immigration is a complex, charged topic, and you get the sense he comes to the topic with an open mind. Ultiamtely, he has his opinions, and he makes them explicit in the epilogue, but he lets the story tell itself. But the main appeal is the author's distinctive voice. It's hard to describe fully. All of the cliches about good writing come to mind - as transparent as a pane of glass, as comfortable as a friend telling you a story, as authoritative as a judge (while still being self-aware enough to know the limits of his knowledge). He's a hell of a writer.