Coming to America

By Terry McCarthy/Fuzhou and New Jersey

It was the most dangerous thing Chen Canting had done in his life. But as he crouched in a small fishing boat in the south China province of Fujian, he had no idea just how perilous. A dozen others huddled in the boat. Some of their faces were familiar, but the 20-year-old knew none of them by name. They had just one thing in common: all were bound for America. Illegally.

Chen told no one he was going except his father. The 50-year-old farmer from Meiyou village was not really surprised. Canting, the second oldest of his five children, was the most ambitious. Slightly built but with a surprisingly deep voice and an earnest air of self-assurance, No. 2 Son always wanted more than the village offered. Instead of carousing in the karaoke bars, he tried to set up his own business. He went south to Xiamen to trade seafood, but ended up losing money in the fickle, seasonal business. Undaunted, he was now attempting something far more audacious. He would entrust his fate to the "snakeheads" who illicitly spirit thousands of Chinese out of their homeland and into the promised land of America.

Canting's father could give his departing son nothing but a few warnings: be careful; stay out of fights; remember, plenty of people die on the ships or are caught at the other end and sent back. Father and son agreed not to tell the young man's mother. She would try to stop him. The night before he left, Chen took over from her as usual at the noodle stall he helped her run. After she went home, he quickly closed up the stall and made his way into Fuzhou, 15 miles away. At the main railroad station, the snakeheads were waiting for him, just as they said they would be.

A friend had introduced Chen to the snakeheads--Chinese gangsters who run human smuggling syndicates with links to Chinese communities all over the world. Shifty, violent men with a liking for gold watches and rings the size of plumbing fixtures, the snakeheads have a ruthless reputation throughout Fujian. Chen was scared of them, but he was also exhilarated at the prospect of going to the U.S. and earning "big money." (His name, village and some identifying details have been changed to protect him and his family.) For $37,000 the snakeheads promised to transport Chen to New York City. He didn't know how long it would take, what the route would be, what kind of risks he would endure. It was with a mixture of fear and excitement that he sat in the boat as it pulled away in the early hours of Sept. 3, 1999.

The fast-growing traffic in Chinese illegal immigrants is a modern-day kind of slave trade, harsh, uncertain and expensive--except there is freedom and opportunity at the end for those who survive it. Thousands of Chinese pay huge sums to cram into ramshackle ships and sealed containers in the hope of sneaking into the U.S. Rough estimates put the number at 10,000 for 1999. Some are caught--1,500 were repatriated last year--but most succeed in joining the estimated global tide of 275,000 illegals entering the U.S annually. A significant percentage also die trying. In January a container ship docked in Seattle with 18 Chinese in the hold. Three were dead in the filth at the bottom of a container; the others were on the verge of starvation. Still, like Chen, they keep coming.

The ship that would take Chen across the Pacific was waiting off the coast in the darkness. It was a rusty old Korean freighter with three holds. Chen was among 100 people packed into the rear hold; 60 more were loaded into one of the front holds, and the third held food and water for the voyage. When the hatches were slammed shut, Chen felt as if he were on a prison ship.

Life inside the hold was nightmarish. There were no windows; only one fan worked to suck out the stale air. "We were cold all the time," recalls Chen. The toilets were two buckets, one for men and one for women. Hygiene was impossible in such cramped conditions. "Everyone got eye infections. For a week my eyes were all red, and I couldn't see anything." The snakeheads periodically handed out water, rice, peanuts and some vegetables to their human cargo, but no meat, fish or tea.

Half a dozen snakeheads and three armed Cambodians stood guard. "They were Khmer Rouge--you know, assassins," says Chen. They allowed the inmates onto the deck once a week to wash in salt water. Otherwise Chen and the others were confined to the hold 24 hours a day. Once when he tried to sneak out, he was caught and beaten before being thrown back into the hold. The snakeheads would sit on deck and drink beer at night. Then they would go into the holds and select young women to come up on deck. "Nothing was said, but when they came back, everyone knew what had happened," says Chen.

The snakeheads did not waste much sympathy on their cargo. Several weeks into the trip, a man who was traveling with his wife and three-year-old daughter fell ill. For three days, the man was dizzy and experienced a sense of nausea and didn't know where he was. On the fourth day, the man died. The captain of the boat had his body tossed overboard.

Chen thought the journey would never end. In fact, it would take the aging freighter five weeks to cross 9,000 miles of ocean. Modern container ships are faster and cheaper, but the windowless boxes are locked from the outside, and nobody can get out until the container is unloaded. Immigrants can starve or be asphyxiated, especially if the crew of the ship doesn't know it has stowaways. Even on Chen's cramped ship, though specially fitted for human smuggling, there were no bunks, and people slept cheek by jowl on the floor.

At the beginning of October, Chen's ship encountered a big storm. As the rickety bucket rolled from side to side, waves poured into the holds. Suddenly the daily fear and uncertainty escalated into full-scale terror, and the holds echoed with screams. "Everyone on the ship thought we were going to die," remembers Chen. But the ship plowed on, and on Oct. 8 reached its destination--not America, as Chen had assumed, but Guatemala, well away from the U.S. Coast Guard.

Bad weather hampered a landing, and on the first night only half the Fujianese, including Chen, were unloaded. The Fujianese were forced to stand on a shallow reef, with water up to their thighs, waiting for small boats to come out from the shore to pick them up. Finally five boats manned by Taiwanese gangsters ferried them to land. The Fujianese trudged through fields for several hours before they reached a road where vans awaited them. The next night the Taiwanese boats went out again, but this time the Guatemalan police were waiting at the landing site. Chen thinks peasants who saw the first group tipped off the law. Most of the second batch of Fujianese were arrested as soon as they reached shore, but one boat capsized in the choppy water. Chen says a dozen people drowned.

Chen and about 100 others were taken to the house of a Taiwanese who lived with his Guatemalan wife on the outskirts of Guatemala City. "He was a big boss. His house was like a mansion, and there were 100 servants." Chen quickly discovered that local peasants had "much worse lives" than farmers in China. He and his fellow illegals were not fleeing desperate poverty. Their coastal province is relatively well off for China: Fujian gets investment from Taiwan, just across the strait, and the land is fertile enough to feed everyone. But Fujianese have a centuries-old tradition of emigration, peopling many Chinatowns around the world; the young grow up with the idea of emigrating to join their rich overseas relatives. What China denies many is opportunity. At home Chen was making $120 a month wholesaling fish and running the noodle stall. But he knew that in the U.S. he could earn much more.

At the house of the Taiwanese, Chen and the others were told to keep out of sight. The Guatemalan police were searching for them, so they spent a month holed up inside, waiting to resume their journey. They were not allowed to call home. For the snakeheads, who get paid only on arrival, the trip had now gone badly wrong. A dozen of their human cargo were dead, 38 others arrested, and the U.S. immigration authorities had been alerted.

What Chen did not know was that news of the deaths and the arrests had made its way back to Fujian. In their small red brick house at the end of a dirt road, Chen's parents were deeply worried. "We would make food and then just sit at the table looking at it, with no appetite to eat it," says his mother, a thin woman with a weather-beaten face from years of working in the fields. She wished bitterly that she had been able to stop him from going.

At the beginning of November, a white truck pulled up to the Taiwanese gangster's house. Chen and 24 others were pushed into a tight crawl space under a false floor in the back of the truck. The truck was loaded with grapefruit and driven north into Mexico. "It took 40 hours; we had no water, very little air, lying down all the time. For sure if it had lasted even another hour or two, I would have suffocated," says Chen. "By then I was more scared of dying than of being caught and sent back." Lying there, all he could think of was his home and his family, and he wished he had never left.

But now there was no going back. Chen was scared too about what would happen when he arrived in the U.S. He hoped his family would be able to borrow enough money to pay off the snakeheads, but he wasn't sure. "If your family has no money to pay, they throw you into the black market. I have heard that could be selling heroin." Or worse. Snakeheads have no compunction about killing if their bills are not paid.

Chen and his companions were finally released from the truck in the middle of a forest in Mexico. They were given into the care of three armed "coyotes" who would be their guides across the border. The Mexican leader spoke Chinese; this was not the first group of Fujianese he had seen. Chen found out from one of the men that they would earn $5,000 for each Chinese they got into the U.S. alive. But because immigration authorities were on the lookout for Chen's group, they camped in the forest until the end of December. The Chinese would be much more conspicuous to informers on the Mexican side of the border than Hispanic immigrants, and the coyotes worried that their smuggling routes for the Chinese would be betrayed. Chen and his comrades had no idea where they were. They had little choice but to hunker down and eat the unfamiliar Mexican food they were served. Chen picked up a few Spanish words, notably cigarrillos; cigarettes were his only antidote to the tension. At New Year's the anxious band was driven north to a town full of bars near the border, only to wait some more, presumably while the coyotes contacted accomplices on the U.S. side of the border. On Jan. 10 they headed out on foot across the desert.

Crossing the border took six days. The Chinese had little water and less food. At night, when the temperature dropped below freezing, they could do nothing but hold each other for warmth. Their Mexican guides would not allow them to light fires, and Chen still had only the two thin shirts and one pair of trousers he had been wearing since he left Fujian. On the sixth night they reached a chainlink fence. The Mexicans sliced it open, and Chen pushed his way through. After 10,500 miles and 135 days, he had finally made it to the U.S.

But there was no time to savor the moment. If ever the immigrants were in danger of being captured, this was the time, with the U.S. Border Patrol on the prowl. The Chinese were lucky that night. A minivan with darkened windows was waiting for them, with a Chinese driver. The snakeheads' far-flung networks had delivered. The driver drove them through the night to a large city, which Chen discovered was Houston, though he had only the vaguest idea of U.S. geography. All he had was the telephone number of a distant cousin in someplace called Flushing, N.Y.

The snakeheads were not finished with Chen anyway. After a day in Houston, he was driven to Los Angeles, locked in a room and told to phone his family in Fujian for the passage money. The price had suddenly increased because of the Chinese who died or were arrested en route. The snakeheads now demanded $50,000 for delivering Chen to the U.S. That represented a fortune, more than 30 years' earnings for Chen back in Fujian. The amount was not negotiable.

Chen called home on the night of Jan. 18. It was already the next morning in Fujian when his mother answered the phone and burst into tears. For more than four months, the family had had no idea whether he was alive or dead. The only thing they knew was that he had not been among those reported arrested.

That day Chen's father began the onerous search to collect the money, borrowing from friends and relatives, and moneylenders--who demanded an interest rate of 2% a month. As he brought each portion home, he hid it underneath his wooden bed. "We were very nervous. We had never had so much money before. I told Eldest Son to stay at home all the time to watch the money," says the father. After two weeks he had acquired the full amount. On the night of Feb. 1, two local snakeheads went to the house to pick it up. The next day the L.A. snakeheads put Chen on a plane for New York City.

"New York was great, like playtime," says Chen. His cousin in Flushing gave him a bed, and for a week he wandered around Manhattan, gaping at the skyscrapers and the aircraft carrier Intrepid, which made him realize how small his own ship had been. "That was the most amazing thing. I had never seen a ship that big."

But Chen's cousin, who had U.S. residency, did not want him to stay indefinitely, and after a week she kicked him out. Chen now learned the meaning of being alone. He didn't know a single other person in the country. The only place he felt comfortable was Manhattan's Chinatown, once he knew how to get there by subway. Wandering the streets, he came across a window sign in Chinese advertising a job agency. For a $40 introduction fee and a $12 bus fare--almost the last of the small amount of savings Chen had brought with him from home--Chen was soon on his way down the New Jersey Turnpike, bound for the Dragon King Chinese Buffet Restaurant--an "all-you-can-eat crab legs, sweet-and-sour pork and 'plenty more' for $12.95 plus fortune cookies with your check" kind of place. The food bore little resemblance to anything he had eaten at home, but he knew how to chop vegetables, wash dishes and mop the floor. Today, for a 13-hour workday six days a week, Chen makes $1,400 a month, and as an illegal he pays no taxes. He sends most of the money back to his family to repay the snakehead debt.

Chen has been working at the Dragon King for more than two months. He is happy to be in the U.S. and seems to identify naturally with the American can-do mentality. "The best thing about America? You can work without ID," says Chen, smiling broadly. He likes Americans: "When you bump into someone on the street, they will smile and apologize, not like China, where people snap at you all the time." But it bugs him that he can't buy cigarettes or beer, because "they need ID, and I don't have any."

Chen has come of age in the course of his long odyssey. He cannot hide his pride when he says he will keep sending money to support his family in China, even after he has paid off his debt. For the time being he works with 17 other Chinese, all from Fujian, as well as five Bangladeshis and one Indian--not a green card among them. Finding proper papers will come. "I haven't had time to work that out yet," he says, implying it will not be that hard. Meanwhile, he is trying to learn English so he can climb out of the dishwashing level of the economy. He has already dreamed up a business plan to import crabs from China. And at the right time he plans to get married, to some Chinese woman who also came over by boat. "They are tough and don't cry much, so they make good wives," he thinks.

His family is delighted that No. 2 Son made it safely to the U.S. When TIME shows his parents pictures of Canting standing outside his restaurant and sitting in a car, the mother rushes off to show all her neighbors, as proud as American parents displaying college graduation photos of their children. Like the knight who slayed the dragon, Chen Canting overcame the dangers challenging him, risking death on the high seas, imprisonment in four countries and abandonment in a nation where he knew nothing of the language or the culture. He broke the law and remains an illegal immigrant, which still poses a problem if he is ever caught. But for now he is here. And that, as he says, is the strangest, most wonderful thing of all.