The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream Read Online Free PDF

shop and the restaurant and the five-story brick building that housed them. Her name was Cheng Chui Ping, but everyone in the neighborhood called her Ping Jie—Big Sister Ping, or simply Sister Ping, a casual honorific, a gesture of respect. At the age of forty-four, she wasn’t just a shopkeeper and restaurateur but something like a village elder in the claustrophobically intimate corner of Chinatown where she resided. She was a banker of sorts, and something else as well. She was what the Chinese call a shetou , or snakehead, a kind of immigration broker who charges steep fees to smuggle people out of China and into other countries. She had pioneered the China-to-Chinatown route in the early 1980s, and from her humble shop on East Broadway she had developed a reputation as one of the most reliable—and successful—snakeheads on the planet. In Chinese communities from Europe to South America to the United States, Sister Ping had become a well-burnished brand name, one that connoted safe, illicit delivery from point A to point B; the Cadillac of global human smuggling.
    But as she watched the news that morning, she brooded, and grumbled that she had come in for a run of bad luck lately. She had helped arrange the financing for the voyage of the Golden Venture , and she had personally received fees from two of the passengers on board. Sister Ping didn’t know it yet, but one of those passengers was among the dead.

Chapter Two
    Leaving Fujian
    NO ONE knows precisely how many ethnic Chinese live outside of China, but estimates range from 40 to 50 million or more. After the descendants of African slaves, the overseas Chinese, as they are often called, represent the largest diaspora on the planet. America no doubt saw the occasional Chinese trader prior to the mid-nineteenth century, but the history of the Chinese in the United States did not really get under way until one January day in 1848, when a foreman at John Sutter’s mill, on the south fork of the American River in northern California, fished several pieces of glittering metal from the water, metal that “could be beaten into a different shape, but not broken.” It was gold that first drew the Chinese to America, and it was visions of a paradise where backbreaking labor was lavishly repaid that led the nineteenth-century Chinese fortune-seekers who first came to this country to call it Jinshan, or Golden Mountain. The colloquialism somehow managed to survive the actual privations that the pioneer experience held in store, the eventual disappearance of the gold itself, and the shifting fortunes of Chinese Americans over the ensuing decades. The name just stuck. So much so, in fact, that it still endures today.
    China was in a state of upheaval during the mid-nineteenth century, demoralized by the Opium Wars with Great Britain. The first Chinese to arrive in California sent word back across the Pacific of a nation of unclaimed land, plentiful timber, and gold that you could pluck fromthe ground. At that time America was a sparsely populated country; only 23 million people lived in the United States, compared with 430 million in China. Young Chinese men began abandoning their villages and leaving for America in droves. Two thousand arrived in 1848; four years later, 20,000 entered through the port of San Francisco alone. But for all their numbers and the vastness of the nation in which they were born, the nineteenth-century Chinese who came to the Golden Mountain originated from a remarkably small corner of China—a handful of counties on the west side of the Pearl River Delta, around the southern city of Canton (or, as it’s known today, Guangzhou). In fact, until the 1960s, most Chinese in America could trace their roots to an area roughly half the size of the state of Delaware.
    By 1867, nearly 70 percent of all mineworkers west of the Rockies were Chinese. When the railroad barons elected to stitch together the fractious country with a single transcontinental