Summary

The underground rule of illegal immigration in New York’s Chinatown run by a middle-aged grandmother with no education from Fujian Province, China. Develops into a full portrait of the immigration experience from the 70s-90s in the United States, mostly from the perspective of the Fukinese people coming over. Strong recommend.

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The original The Snake Head article in The New Yorker
Notes from Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Notes

“My name Benny Ong,” he said.

“Are you also sometimes called Uncle Seven?” the investigator asked, as a stenographer transcribed.

“They call me Uncle Seven,” the old man said. Born the seventh of nine sons to a poor bricklayer in China in 1907, he had immigrated to New York’s Chinatown in the early 1920s. Over the next seven decades, he rose from an illiterate teenager working in a laundry on Pell Street to become one of Chinatown’s most revered grandees. The name Uncle Seven, like Sister Ping, was both familiar and respectful, an honorific. Everyone knew Benny Ong, and people saw him strolling each morning from his walkup apartment to the Hong Shoon restaurant on Pell Street. The only sign of his influence was the young men who attended to him, carrying cell phones and walkie-talkies. He passed his days playing mahjong or pai gow and reading the Chinese newspapers. He as an august figure, a village elder, a pillar of the community.

“Is it true that you were convicted of a homicide sometime in the 1930s?” (pg. not shown)

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Upon arriving in Chinatown, Ong had joined the Hip Sin, one of two tongs that dominated what was in those days a tiny neighborhood, consisting of a mere handful of streets. The word tong means “assembly hall,” and these organizations sprang up almost as soon as the Chinese began arriving in America in the nineteenth century. For an alienated and often reviled Chinese population in the United States, the tongs played several roles: they functioned as credit unions and job agencies, an indigenous dispute resolution system, and a mutual aid society. Tongs were occasionally likened to triads, the highly ritualized secret societies with a long history in China, but the Chinatown tongs were very specifically the creation of an expatriate community: they afforded a shield against the hazards of being an immigrant in America, and preserved cultural and familial bonds among displaced Chinese. They offered loans and legal help and a social refuge for the ragged diaspora — a slice not just of China, but of the very village you left behind, the soothing music of your mother tongue.

In addition to these laudable activities, the tongs served another function. Dating back to the nineteenth century, when the Chinese in America were mainly male sojourners, the tongs oversaw the vice industries: the brothels, the opium dens, and above all the gambling parlors. These activities were just another business interest, albeit an especially lucrative one, and to stay profitable and orderly they needed to be policed with a firm hand. The tongs did this, and did it well, and for tolerating and regulated the unsavory side of the local economy, they drew substantial commissions which they funneled back into the community. In this manner these fraternal organizations became deeply entrenched in San Francisco and New York, welcoming migrants to the United States and accruing the loyalty of generations of new arrivals. They became a dominant fact in Chinatown’s political and economic landscape — the bedrock of the local civic society. And before long they had history on their side. After all, they two oldest tongs in New York, the (pg. not shown)

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On Leong and Hip Sing, predated the Communist government in Beijing by half a century. When New York’s tongs were first established, an emperor ruled China.

That history was not without friction, of course, and at the turn of the twentieth century, the On Leong and the Hip Sing went to war. Because the rackets they controlled were lucrative, the tongs were seized by a feudal preoccupation with territory, and their skirmishes were extraordinarily violent. In The Gangs of New York, Herbert Asbury’s colorful, apocryphal account, the “fat, moon-faced” Hip Sing named Mock Duck wore a chain-mail shirt and dispatched On Leong members with two guns, “squatting on his haunches in the street with both eyes shut, and blazing away.” The short elbow crook of Doyers Street became known as the Bloody Angle for the massacres that unfolded there. It was Chinatown’s cleaver-wielding assassins during these years that gave us the expression hatchet man.

By the time the teenaged Benny Ong arrived from China, the worst of the tong wars were over. But clashes continued as the tongs jockeyed over control of one illicit enterprise or another, and in 1935 Ong was arrested along with several Hip Sing associates after they stuck up a gambling operation. The robbery had gone awry, and shots were fired. Ong was found guilty of murder and served seventeen years in an upstate prison.

“Is it true that was convicted in the 1970s of bribery?” the investigator asked.

“Invoke the Fifth Amendment again,” Ong said.

Upon his release in 1952, Ong was welcomed back to the Hip Sing and began a fast ascent through the organization. By 1977, when was caught on a wiretap bragging about payments he made to an immigration official, he was the leader of the Hip Sing and he had assumed the grandiose title he would hold for the rest of his days: adviser for life to the tong. Law enforcement had begun to refer to him as something else: the Godfather of Chinatown.

“Have you ever heard of a street gang called the Flying Dragons?” (pg. 59)

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As a leader of the Hip Sing, Ong oversaw both the licit and the illicit activities of the organization. But during the 1970s, perhaps in an effort to legitimize the tong, he pioneered a new model, which would soon be adopted by tongs throughout New York. He subcontracted the gambling rackets, debt collection, and other illegal activities to an enforcement cadre, in this case a street gang called the Flying Dragons. In order to remain viable as ostensibly legitimate organizations, the tongs needed some measure of plausible deniability when it came to some of their traditional revenue streams. So in a fiction designed more to avoid prosecution than to actually persuade anyone — because at least in Chinatown, the truth was never in doubt – the tongs began to distance themselves from the traditional vice crimes that had been their bread and butter for nearly a century. Despite his murder conviction and his racketeering, Ong reinvented himself as a legitimate businessman, the head of a prominent and powerful civic organization. The Flying Dragons did the dirty work in order to keep Ong and the organization clean. The rival On Leong association also sought legitimacy. Its head, Eddie Chan, invested in a jewelry store, a funeral parlor, and restaurants and reportedly hired a PR firm, all the while outsourcing the tong’s criminal activity to his own affiliated gang, the Ghost Shadows.

It was an effective ambiguity. Inside the neighborhood, it was known that the tong’s word in all things should be taken seriously, because it was backed by a roving gang of armed thugs. But on the occasions when violence did break out, the tong could simply deny the relationship. In 1982 an associate of Ong’s left the Hip Sing and started a rival tong, whose members congregated at the Golden Star Tea Room, on East Broadway. One December night four masked gunmen burst into the restaurant and began firing indiscriminately, killing three customers, including a thirteen-year-old boy. Benny Ong denied any role in the shooting at the time and insisted that the Hip Sing and the Flying Dragons were separate entities. In a later interview with New York magazine (pg. 60)

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that others had in store. One day when she was twelve years old, Sister Ping left the village to go cut wood for kindling. In order to reach a remote grove of trees on the far side of the Min River, she joined eight other people in a rowboat. There were only seven oars, and though she was still just a child, Sister Ping took one and did her part to row. But before they could reach the other side, the current picked up and the boat flipped over. Sister Ping was thrown into the water and managed to swim to shore. Afterward she learned that everyone who had been carrying an oar had survived the accident. The two who had not been rowing drowned. The incident made an indelible impression on the little girl, one that she would remember for the rest of her life. “The two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead,” she would later reflect. “This taught me to work hard.”

If in her later life Sister Ping harbored a suspicion, bordering on (pg. not shown)

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sixteen. The snakehead trade and America’s accommodating asylum policies meant that thousands of new children arrived in Chinatown every year. Many of them had been uprooted from a claustrophobic, sheltered childhood of agrarian poverty only to be thrust into the riotous urban scrum of Chinatown. They lived in cramped quarters with older relatives who were largely absent, working day and night to pay off snakehead debts or raise money to send for more relatives. They spoke little or no English and attended substandard schools. It was from these schools that the gangs plucked their recruits.

“I would have my kids go to a high school in Chinatown and look for the turkey right off the boat,” David Chong recalled. Chong was a New York cop who infiltrated the Flying Dragons in the 1980s. He was so effective that he soon became a dai lo, “big brother,” or leader, in the gang, running his own crew of twelve. “You want him in ninth or tenth grade, he can’t speak English, he’s got a stupid haircut. And when you find this kid, you go beat the shit out of him. Tease him, beat him up, knock him around. We isolate this kid; he’s our target. What will happen, one day I’ll make sure I’m around when this kid is getting beaten up, and I’ll stop it with the snap of my finger. He’ll look at me — he’ll see that I have a fancy car, fancy girls, I’m wearing a beeper– and I’ll turn around say, “Hey, kid, how come these people are beating on you?’ I’m gonna be this kid’s hero, this kid’s guru–I’m gonna be his dai lo.” (pg. 65)

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Wisconsin Law School, he wanted to become a prosecutor, and a professor told him the only place to do it was at the Manhattan DA’s office.

Rettler joined the office in 1983, around the time Ah Kay joined the Fuk Ching. He found himself working in the trial bureau for a short, hard-charging attorney named Nancy Ryan, who had started prosecuting Asian gangs in New York and was known in Chinatown as “the Dragon Lady.” Luke was detailed to the Jade Squad, the interagency Asian gang unit, where he worked with Dougie Lee, the young Cantonese American detective whose family had come to America from Hong Kong when he was a child. The crime wave was starting to sweep Chinatown and Luke was beginning to believe that the community was growing unpolicebale, completely out of control. Extortion was rampant, and when the restaurant owners and convenience store clerks didn’t pay the painstakingly polite gangsters who visited once a month, they would be dragged into the back room and beaten with a pipe. Some would show up for work the next day to find that their business had been burned to the ground. One problem with the extortion cases was that it was almost impossible to get victims to cooperate. Frightened merchants, many of them with dubious immigration status, were reluctant to go to the authorities. In China the police were corrupt, and there was no reason to believe that New York cops would be any different. The gangsters knew this and preyed upon it. How do you explain to a terrified witness from a corrupt country the concept of posting bail? The gangster he has risked his life to inform the police about is locked up but makes bail and is released. How do you convey to a potential witness that the gangster has not simply bribed his way out? (pg. 71)

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The gang had operated a modest casino on Eldridge, but when Ah Kay assumed leadership in the spring of 1990, he decided that it was too small. He elected to open a bigger gambling parlor in the basement of a massive red-brick building at 125 East Broadway. Gang members oversaw the conversion of the space, insulating the casino with a succession of five locked doors and a series of closed-circuit television cameras. The change of venue was deliberately provocative: that stretch of East Broadway was Tung On territory, and Ah Kay told his underlings to expect trouble.

The grand opening was scheduled for October 1, 1990, and that afternoon, as predicted, a posse of Tung On members sauntered up to the casino entrance. Ah Kay walked out of the building and asked what they wanted. The Tung Ons demanded lucky money. Ah Kay informed then that he would not be paying and held his ground. “If you want to fuck around here, “ he added, “I’ll shoot your fucking ass.” With that he turned his back on the Tung Ons and entered the casino. A phalanx of Fuk Ching members remained guarding the door, and with no further preamble both sides drew weapons and started shooting. Ah Kay’s little brother Ah Wong took and bullet and was dragged into the vestibule as the Tung Ons ran down the crowded street, the Fuk Ching members still firing wildly after them. (pg. 75)

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For no other nationality is the disparity between grant rates on asylum cases as high as it is for the Chinese. One reason for this is simply that by virtue of its huge population, China represents an area in which the principle-driven platitudes of asylum and refugee law inevitably collide with more pragmatic concerns. With one fifth of the world’s population, some 900 million of whom are peasants, China has a way of dousing any humanitarian assumptions with a colder demographic reality. There is a famous story about Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Washington in January 1979, when President Jimmy Carter scolding him about China’s restrictions on the “freedom of departure” – the right to emigration–and suggested that more people should be permitted to leave China. According to the story, Deng fixed Carter with his slightly beady gaze and said, “Why, certainly, President Carter. How many millions would you like?”

China’s population was one major factor bedeviling determinations of whether and when to grant asylum to people fleeing the country. The other major, and not unrelated, factor was China’s one-child policy. One month before the massacre at Tiananmen Square, these issues came to a head in a landmark court case called Matter of Chang.

Chang was a Fujianese migrant who had fled to the United States and requested asylum, saying that the authorities in China had wanted to sterilize him and his wife following the birth of their second child. Chang lost his bid for asylum before an immigration judge. Traditionally, asylum-seekers must demonstrate that they have been persecuted in the past, or might be in the future, on the basis of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Coerced sterilization may have been a brutal practice, but it did not fit neatly in the established categories of persecution. Shortly after Chang’s claim was rejected, however, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, issued guidelines to the INS suggesting that asylum could be granted to applicants who expressed a well-founded fear of persecution based on China’s family-planning policies. In Meese’s view, if the emigrants had refused to have an abortion of be sterilized, that refusal could itself be (pg. 188)

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Meese’s guidelines seemed to offer Chang new hope, but when he appealed his case to the Board of Immigration Appeals, in Falls Church, Virginia, the board was reluctant to bow to a standard that would in principle make any fertile Chinese parent eligible for asylum in the United States. Instead, the board held that even if Chang or his wife faced possible sterilization by the government, that would not constitute “persecution,” because it was not directed at them specifically. They weren’t being singled out. The one-child policy applied to everyone. And they had violated it.

Matter of Chang was not a case that made headlines when it was decided. But for U.S. officials concerned about the number of asylum applicants coming from China, it served a valuable purpose. The opinion went on the books and could be pointed to by future immigration judges. Chang’s attorney, a lanky Brooklyn-born immigration lawyer names Jules Coven, who represented many Fujianese clients, could see the impact the ruling would have: if Matter of Chang took hold as a precedent, it would allow the government to deny thousands of asylum applications by Chinese fleeing the harsh tactics of the population enforcement cadres. Coven want to challenge the decision in federal court. But when he met with the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case, he realized how important it was to the government that the precedent established by Matter of Chang remain uncontested. In something of a backroom deal, the government lawyer assured Coven that if he let the matter go and opted not to appeal the ruling, Chang himself would be quietly granted asylum. Coven knew the momentous impact that the ruling would have on the cases of his other clients, and it gave him pause. But as an attorney, his first duty of loyalty was to his client Chang. So he took the deal, and Matter of Chang established the precedent that a well-founded fear of forced abortion or sterilization under China’s one-child policy was not an adequate ground for asylum in the United States. (pg. 189)

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raised speaking Chinese until he attended kindergarten. He went to public schools and was a scholarship kid at Yale before moving on to law school and a career in politics. “My grandfather came to this country from China nearly a century ago and worked as a servant, he said in his address that evening. “Now I serve as governor just one mile from where my grandfather worked. It took our family one hundred years to travel that mile. It was a voyage we could only make in America.”

The Snakehead is a story of that mile. Migration scholars and refugee advocates tend to overlook the business of human smuggling, out of an understandable fear that the illicit means through which many immigrants reach the United States might further stigmatize the estimated 12 million illegal aliens who live in the country today. But the business of human smuggling is now a pervasive and sophisticated reality – a $20 billion criminal industry, by some estimates, second only to the global trade in drugs. To ignore it is impossible, and irresponsible as well. The greatest favor we can do for the Fujianese and other migrant groups is to comprehend the complex and often misunderstood networks that bear them from one country to another. Doing so can shed light on how best to combat the trade but also on the extraordinary sacrifices that many of these men and women have undertaken to find a new life in the United States.

In the minds of many of the Fujianese I spoke to over the past three years, the ultimate success or failure of a single act of emigration can be measured only in generations: if the individual who transplants herself or her family to the United States undertakes extraordinary, or even irresponsible risks in order to do so, or commits some crime or other along the way, those lapses will eventually be justified by the upward mobility of her children and their children, and the notion that some later generation will be born in America and have no solid grasp of how it was precise that their grandmother or great-grandmother first crossed the oceans but simply know that she did. For all the extraordinary freedom and comfort and opportunity that being born in America entails, it will seem to that later generations like some happy accident of geography or (pg. 324)