City scope: snake angel

One day last month, close to 1,000 people lined East Broadway, a road in New York's Chinatown dominated by businesses run by immigrants from Fujian province.

When a procession of 100 black cars came through, the crowd pushed forward. The road was blocked. Cameras flashed. Some people wept. Some shouted, "Sister Ping, have a nice trip."

The woman these people had come to say goodbye to was lying in a coffin in one of the cars. Her picture, surrounded by wreaths, was placed on top of the vehicles. The high-profile ritual looked like a funeral for an adored celebrity.

To her supporters, Sister Ping was indeed a hero; a modern Robin Hood, no less. But she was also a convicted criminal, who had succumbed to cancer while serving a 35-year sentence in a Texas prison for having run a human-smuggling ring that brought thousands of Chinese from Fujian to the United States in the 1980s and 90s.

Many of those lining the street that day were, in the eyes of the law, her victims.

Sister Ping, whose real name was Cheng Chui-ping, was born into a peasant family in Fujian in 1949. Barely educated but smart and ambitious, she moved to Hong Kong in 1974 and, in 1981, to New York.

To get by in their adopted hometown, Cheng and her husband opened shops, but she soon discovered a more lucrative line of work, in the hordes of people wanting to get into the US but lacking the means to do so legally.