In 1993, a cargo ship called the Golden Venture ran aground on a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York. The ship, which had set off four months earlier from Bangkok, had stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach America. It carried a desperate cargo: 286 undocumented people from Fuzhou in China, who had made the voyage in the clothes they stood up in, without any kind of adequate sanitation on board, and little food or water. With the ship stranded offshore, most of the migrants, stick-thin and delirious, jumped into the freezing sea – it was 2am – to try to reach the promised land, the lights of Coney Island visible across the bay. Ten people drowned, the rest were picked up by the quickly scrambled authorities on the beach to be held in various prisons, some for four years, while they sought asylum. About half were eventually deported.
The New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe used that tragedy as the embarkation point for his landmark “deep dive” into the criminal underworld that brought – and brings – vast numbers of Chinese people to the US. The going rate at the time of the Golden Venture tragedy was about $18,000, paid to people smugglers or “snakeheads”. At the heart of this trade was a woman, Sister Ping (real name Cheng Chui Ping), who ran a shop, the Tak Shun variety store, in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sister Ping, who had grown up during the Cultural Revolution and first come to New York to work as a nanny, was responsible for bringing at least 3,000 people from Fuzhou to America, making herself a fortune of $40m. When she was eventually apprehended by the FBI in the millennium year, she was described as perhaps “the most successful alien smuggler of all time”. It was Sister Ping who, a rival gang leader and FBI informant alleged, commissioned the Golden Venture.
