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High price of a passport to misery

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THE Chinese vernacular for human smuggling - toudu or ''stealing passage'' - is a misnomer. Freedom seekers and fortune hunters may steal across the US border, whether under cover of night or a fake passport. But they don't steal their passage. They payfor it.

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Xiao Chen almost paid with his life. Many have.

His journey from Changle county in Fujian province to the South Bronx in New York is one man's extraordinary story. But it is also an archetype of the recent Chinese-American immigrant experience: for every mainland Chinese who has emigrated to the US legally in the past 10 years, at least two have come as he did, by riding the ''snake''.

Xiao remembers the day he decided to come to the US. It was 1988, and he had just turned 18. By then, the first generation of illegal emigrants were returning after an absence of four or five years to flaunt their success in Meiguo (''beautiful country''), the land of milk and money. Everything about them said: ''Come, it's easy.'' If that was the pull, there was also a push. Though young, Xiao had already tasted the capricious lash of local power. ''When I was 16 I broke a man's nose after he hit my mother,'' he recounts. ''It turned out the guy's uncle was the chief of police. Boy, did they beat me up in jail.'' But it was a conversation with a former middle-school teacher, not the beating, which clinched his decision. ''When I told him I was looking for a job, he said, 'I am 30 years old. I have a university degree. But I earn so little I can't even cover the cost of getting married'. It's true. In China today, unless you are the child of an official, or know how to open back doors, it's hopeless.'' Xiao paid a US$100 (HK$773) finder's fee to get in touch with a smuggler's agent, or ''snakehead'', who in turn accepted a US$250 downpayment for a Chinese passport to be bought under the table from the police.

In February 1989 Xiao received his passport and paid the US$750 balance.

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The next step was to sign a contract. The terms were simple: Xiao was to pay US$2,500 up front and US$25,000 within three days after arriving in New York, or, if apprehended at the airport, after being released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The passage was not to take longer than three months. A dozen relatives contributed to the US$2,500 downpayment, a decade's earnings in rural China.

As Xiao received his visa - to ''visit relatives'' - for Thailand, anti-government demonstrations engulfed Beijing. The massacre on June 4, 1989, and the subsequent crackdown blocked his exit. He had to wait.

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