Free The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe Page B

passed.
    With her new wealth, Sister Ping poured money into Fujian, cultivating an image not just as a capable and successful businesswoman but as something of a philanthropist as well. In Shengmei she constructed one of the biggest houses in town, Number 398, a four-story yellow-and-white confection with a horseshoe-shaped front entrance, hand-painted tile walls, balconies on each floor, and a pagoda on the roof. Inside, she hung photographs of her parents above incense burners. On her visits to Fuzhou, she would often stay not in the house but in the nicest hotels, paying for one night what the Fujianese who had not yet left the country could expect to earn in a month. The main thoroughfare in the village was renamed Qiao Xing Lu, or Overseas Happiness Road. The Chinese state had actually coined a term for villages that had benefited from migration to other countries
—qiaoxiang
, “sojourning” or “overseas Chinese” town. It was an appellation the villages wore with pride. On either side of the ornamental archway leading into Shengmei, a verse read:
    The sky is high so birds can fly
The seas are vast so fish can leap
My breast carries a patriotic feeling
My heart longs for my old hometown
.
    A cultural assumption was beginning to take hold around Fuzhou that any able-bodied young adult who hadn’t made the journey to NewYork must be shiftless, or just exceedingly dumb, and Sister Ping did nothing to discourage this view. The abstemiousness of the Fujianese in New York was bankrolling unprecedented extravagance back home. When Fujianese villagers learned that a relative had arrived safely in the States, they would unspool red banners in front of the family home, invite the relevant snakeheads, should they be in town, to a community banquet, and set off firecrackers to celebrate. As the remittance money flowed in, families constructed garish multistory houses with karaoke rooms and disco balls, polished wooden floors and shrines to their ancestors. These new money palaces rose incongruously from the rice paddies, monuments to the filial loyalty of the overseas Chinese. And in status-conscious small towns the process fed on itself, creating a fever to go abroad, to the point where many of those elaborate houses simply emptied out, becoming lavish, tenantless temples to the good life in America.
    T he first outward indications that Sister Ping and her family had established a criminal enterprise in Chinatown were evident almost as soon as they had settled in New York. But to American law enforcement these early warnings amounted to a series of confusing and apparently unrelated ciphers, and it was several years before the scope of the Chengs’ operation became clear.
    In the fall of 1983, a Fujianese man named Frankie Wong was arrested in New York City on a charge of alien smuggling. Wong was diminutive and gay, the owner of a travel agency on Canal Street. As part of a plea bargain, he gave authorities the names of several smugglers in Chinatown; who he said had been bringing people into the country via Toronto. One of those names was Cheng Chui Ping. At the time, no one followed up on the lead. Several years later Frankie Wong walked into the basement of a building on Catherine Street that was ostensibly a wholesale fish market but actually an after-hours gamblingjoint and was shot five times. (Sister Ping was never linked in any way with the murder.)
    One day in February 1985, customs officers in New York were doing a routine inspection of incoming mail when they stumbled on a mysterious package. The sender, according to the return address, was one Calgada Melchoz O’Campo, of Cuahtemoc, Mexico. The recipient was Sister Ping’s husband, Cheung Yick Tak, care of the Tak Shun Variety Store, at 145B Hester Street. The package contained six passports from the People’s Republic of China. The customs officers decided to hold on to them and see if Mr. Cheung received any more curious international mail. Sure enough,