The Chinese who struggled in US and their classmate who made it at home
In the 1980s and ’90s, thousands of young men from a single county in Fujian risked life and limb for a shot at the American dream. Some turned back and are living the Chinese dream instead
When Chen Jihua learned, during lunch, on a steamy August day in 1992, that a boat would pick him up that very night from his village, Meihua, in Fujian province, and take him to the United States, he was nervous. He had been seeking the opportunity for a while, but had expected some advance warning.
He hadn’t packed. He had no idea what to take on such a long journey.
A distant relative, who helped the snakeheads (as human smugglers are called) to organise clients in Fujian, assured Chen everything would be fine.
“She said, ‘You don’t have to bring anything. The boat is very big. It has everything, even a bar,’” Chen recalls, with a bitter grin, when we meet for lunch at a restaurant in Queens, New York.
Not only was there no bar on the ship, as Chen would soon discover, there was not even enough food. He and 100 or so passengers from other villages in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces had to hide in a hold that was normally used to store fish. The ship was supposed to arrive in Hawaii after a 20-day voyage, but took 10 days longer. The canned fish and drinking water the snakeheads had prepared for their charges didn’t last that long. At the end, the passengers were cooking bowls of congee with ballast water.
In Hawaii, the ship was intercepted by US officials and the passengers were arrested. After a short detention, Chen was bailed by the snakeheads and took a plane to New York, landing with nothing more than a change of clothes. But it didn’t matter; he was met by a former classmate, who took him to a supermarket, bought him some necessities and a winter coat, and offered him a job at the New Jersey restaurant the classmate owned.