Riding the Snake (1998) Read Online Free PDF Page A

northwestern section of China, near the Pakistan border. The Turkic-speaking natives called Uighurs hated the Chinese. The dusty desert town sat on the east face of Khafa Gumbaz, the Domes of Wrath Mountains, on the edge of the vast Taklamakan Desert. Taklamakan meant "You go in, you don't come out." Fu Hai was never tempted to try.
    He had been assigned to work in the black, windowless boiler rooms of the silk factory there. The intense heat was almost unbearable. Fu Hai's job was to make sure the boiling water continued to flow across the huge metal trays on which the silk cocoons were soaked before being spun. The working conditions were slimy and dank, and Fu Hai spent almost fourteen miserable years sweating in that hell-hole. He soon realized that he could not stay in that place much longer. He had seen older laborers who had been in the boiler rooms for fifteen or more years slowly go blind; a blindness, he learned, caused by being made to stare at the white cocoons in the inky blackness, hour after mind-numbing hour, surrounded by steaming silk, screaming spindles, and unbearable heat. In a sense, the boiler room had become a cocoon of political hatred for Fu Hai . . . hatred for Mother China, which, as an innocent child in Beijing, he had once adored. He decided he would find a way, not only to leave Khotan, but to leave China. He would find a way to "Ride the Snake" to America. "Riding the Snake" was the dangerous practice of illegal immigration out of China. The criminal Tongs in Guangzhou and the newly repatriated Colony of Hong Kong provided this service for anyone willing to pay the price. Fu Hai had heard it was exorbitant, over thirty thousand American dollars. A figure so vast he could barely conceive of it. The only way a penniless worker like Zhang Fu Hai could afford it would be to sell himself into slavery to the Tongs.
    He knew this would be frightening and dangerous and that he would have to put his life at risk, but he had already decided that if he stayed in the silk factory, he would soon die from the abysmal conditions.
    The food was like nothing that he had ever before encountered: horrible concoctions that he could barely force down. Flat - bread and stinking gray mutton with raisins that, it was rumored, the Uighurs blew their noses in to show their contempt for the Chinese workers.
    By the age of sixteen, Fu Hai had already begun to save the majority of his meager wages. He lived in a one-room hovel with five other men, and at night he would sneak out of the one - street town of Khotan to the edge of the desert. There he would hide his savings in an old pot that he buried in a Muslim cemetery, under a cracked clay dome whose interior was strewn with dry bones. Twice a month, he would make deposits in his "bank of freedom."
    The captured years moved as slowly as the silkworms crawling from their annual cocoons. The boredom and wretchedness of his life stretched out behind him like a ribbon of snail slime that he could barely believe was his own personal history. When he was twenty-seven, he finally got his chance to escape in the person of a greedy, contemptuously corrupt Assistant Communist Party Secretary named Wang Ming Yang. Strangely enough, in Chinese, that name meant Bright Force. Wang had charged him three thousand yuan to sign a Party Relocation Permission slip, allowing Fu Hai to return to Beijing. The money was almost everything that Fu Hai had saved during the entire fourteen years he had been in Khotan. He gladly gave it over and watched in the Party Secretary's one - room apartment as the slip was signed and stamped with the official Chinese red government seal.
    He traveled by rattletrap bus from Khotan to Kashgar, then through the dusty oasis town of Aksu, finally arriving after three long days at Urumqi, the provincial capital.
    He waited at the train station, with his heart pounding, as the "Iron Rooster" pulled into Urumqi. The train was covered with black dust. The windows were