The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [194]
By early 2000, American immigration authorities found that smugglers had turned to hard-topped shipping containers. As U.S. immigration officials grew more aggressive—using dogs to sniff out humans in cargo containers—so did the smugglers, who invented even more daring tactics. In Los Angeles, investigators found fifteen Chinese stowaways in a hard-topped container with two doors cut in the sides. The smugglers had camouflaged the doors with epoxy and paint, attached hinges inside the container, and created ventilation systems and escape hatches with fans and car batteries. The danger of a hard-topped container is that stowaways can be entombed alive. If there are no secret doors, the Chinese have to wait until the snakeheads cut open a door—or slowly suffocate to death.62
Often the greatest threat to the Chinese emigrants was the snakeheads themselves. One twenty-four-year-old Fujianese who spent four months crossing the Pacific in a freighter said the smugglers withheld food and water from all females who refused to have sex with them. Another man reported a case in which the crew gave female passengers drinking water spiked with sleeping pills in order to rape them. On a rickety fishing boat intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1995, authorities discovered signs of severe mental and physical abuse among the 147 Chinese on board. The crew had sexually assaulted many of the male passengers, including boys as young as ten, forcing them to endure oral and anal intercourse, even group masturbation sessions. By the end of the trip, some were so seriously traumatized that they considered suicide.
Most Chinese, however, survived the journey—only to find that the worst was still to come. The snakeheads hid migrants in “safe houses” as they awaited payment from relatives for the journey. During their stay, the enforcers often charged exorbitant rates for basic necessities like food and water so that their debt would increase. Illegal aliens reported being charged a hundred dollars for a single international phone call.
Although many Chinese immigrants signed IOUs sealed with their own blood, upon arrival some were shackled and handcuffed to metal bed frames or heavy objects, kept in basements without light, and fed a little rice gruel. If their relatives were unable to pay in time, the smugglees might be doused in icy water, beaten, and starved. In 1991, the FBI broke into a Brooklyn apartment and found a Chinese man handcuffed to a bed, scarred with cigarette burns, and bludgeoned by crowbars. In 1994, the police arrested eight gangsters from Fuzhou who had chained prisoners to a ceiling and tortured them by yanking out their fingernails and thrusting red-hot irons into their backs. One woman whose family could not pay on time was raped and assaulted for months, an ordeal that left her paralyzed. Some Chinese reported being so abused in captivity that they grew desensitized to violence and lost all emotion. As one described his experience in the hands of the snakeheads, “After being there for a period of time, I had no sense of fear anymore because being punished became a daily routine.”
The snakeheads often promised aspiring migrants that “they can make a fortune—maybe a million dollars—in two, three or five years,” according to Yu Shuing, a spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington. The reality was quite different. Without the government protection legal status afforded, Chinese laborers were at the mercy of their employers, and typically they found menial work through Chinatown employment agencies, jobs such as dishwasher, waiter, or factory worker. Reluctant to pay minimum wage when they could hire a Chinese illegal alien for half