Free The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe

precisely the stretch where Weng had crossed, apprehensions of Chinese aliens increased by 500 percent in 1984 alone. The number of immigrants stopped was only a fraction of the number who got across, and when these Fujianese got to New York’s Chinatown, they started sending money home. They sent money in such quantities, in fact, that one theory for why the Chinese government tended to turn a blind eye to the snakehead trade in the 1980s involves the enormous sums of American currency being pumped into the Fujianese economy by the overseas Chinese. The Fujianese city of Changle alone eventually received several hundred million dollars a year in remittances from America.
    Drawing on the connections she had made in New York, in Hong Kong, and around Fuzhou, Sister Ping started offering a sideline service out of the Tak Shun Variety Store. For a commission that steeply undercut the Bank of China, she would remit U.S. currency to Fujian. A restaurant worker could take her his weekly pay on a Monday and receive a special code number, which he would relay over the phone to his mother in a remote village outside Fuzhou. Sister Ping would make a telephone call or send a fax to her contacts in China, and within a day a courier on a motorbike would arrive at the mother’s door and, provided she supplied the code, turn over the money—in U.S. dollars, not yuan.
    Various underground banking systems, sometimes known as
feich’ien
, or “flying money,” date back centuries in China, and probably came into existence when tea traders needed to be able to send money from place to place but did not want to run the risk of carrying large sums of currency on dangerous roads. The genius of Sister Ping’s system was that the money itself did not actually move. “Sister Ping keeps stores of money in the United States as well as Hong Kong and the Fujian Province as a base for the crediting,” an FBI investigative report would later explain. When migrants wanted to send money back to China, she would pay the money out of her reserves in China. When the families of new arrivals wanted to send money to America to satisfy a relative’s snakehead debt, Sister Ping could pay that sum out of her reserves in New York. The only trick was balancing the books occasionally and correcting any disparities that might emerge between the currency reserves in one place or the other. Such periodic corrections were easily made, generally by bulk-carrying a suitcase full of cash from one place to the next.
    The business thrived, in no small measure because Sister Ping’s smuggling efforts were supplying a steady stream of new customers. Once Weng Yu Hui had paid off the various family members who covered his snakehead fee, he wanted to send his restaurant wages home to his wife and child and to his parents. “If I send money home throughthe bank, it has to be money that I have paid taxes on, or money that can see the sunlight,” he explained. “With her, there is no need for any identification. All you need is the address and the name, and in two, three days, the money would be there.” For every thousand dollars, Sister Ping charged a 3 percent commission. This was a good deal cheaper than the Bank of China, and more and more Fujianese made the switch to Sister Ping. “Her clients are extremely comfortable having their money in her hands, because she has such an impeccable reputation,” a fellow Fujianese snakehead explained. “People know that she will never take the money and run.” Soon the Bank of China was losing so much business that it took to running advertisements in the neighborhood’s Chinese-language newspapers, reminding people that using underground banks was illegal. The bank announced raffles and special prizes for people who used its service. But it was of no use.
    The remittance market was growing rapidly, almost exponentially. According to the Fujian Statistical Bureau, in 1990 the total foreign capital investment in the province