In The Snakehead, Patrick Keefe masterfully tells the story of mass illegal migration from China to the United States through the lens of the Golden Venture ship disaster and master smuggler, Sister Ping. Keefe details the unbelievable feats and prices that impoverished individuals are willing to undertake to make it to America.

Sister Ping serves as an unlikely queen of the underworld. She is the mob boss of Chinatown in New York City, and she leads a global network to finance and smuggle immigrants to the United States. She charges families $30,000 to bring an individual into the United States, and she provides a comprehensive suite of documentation services so these individuals can immediately begin working at the lowest rungs of the Chinatown economy.  Chinese residents pay her price because she is the most reliable and effective Snakehead, and she guarantees her clients entry to the United States. 

The book follows multiple threads between The Golden Venture ship disaster, Sister Ping’s entreprise, the chase for Sister Ping, the nuanced legal challenges faced by U.S. authorities, and the vacillating United States immigration/asylum policy. Despite the depth and scope of the book, I found it compelling and a fast read. 

Sister Ping is a thought provoking character. On one hand, she is helping vast numbers of Chinese improve their lives by making it into the United States. Conversely, she is handsomely compensated for the risk of her business, and she forces her clients into brutal situations and a mountain of debt. She willfully breaks U.S. law and operates in a shadow economy filled with corruption. Her entrepreneurial creativity is incredible as is her ability to corrupt foreign officials globally.

Quotes

“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.”

“Sister Ping’s business was inherently risky, and her clients understood those risks and accepted them. The key to understanding the snakehead trade was the concept of “acceptable risk,” Yu concluded. “Acceptable risk, acceptable cruelty, acceptable lousy treatment, acceptable long trip, there’s no toilet. It’s acceptable. Because of the comparison: the life there, and the life here.”

“Chinatown residents began referring to East Broadway as Fuzhou Street. They knew that most of the Fujianese arrivals were illegal and were still paying off their passage. They called them “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the going snakehead rate in the eighties. But the fact remained that a dishwasher in Chinatown could make in a month what a farmer in made in a year, and the Fujianese kept coming.” 

“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.”

“Throughout the 1990s, asylum caseloads were exploding, and immigration judges were often under resourced and overworked. As a result, this most solomonic determination—who should be saved and who should be sent back—became an arbitrary and erratic activity.”

“Any international effort to regulate clandestine international trade, whether of drugs, guns, or people, will be only as good as the least vigilant nation in the system. If the community of nations relies on official documents issued by countries to denote who is entitled to travel where, it takes only one spoiler country, like Honduras, to undo the whole thing. What’s more, the better the rest of the system works—the more harmonized and efficient the international regulatory architecture is—the higher the rewards will be for the one country willing to cheat, offering an illicit back door into the licit international system.”