THE SNAKEHEADS ON AMERICAN SHORES

       Author Patrick Radden Keefe vividly outlines how close-knit Fujianese enclaves in the US could drift into crime in general,and human smuggling in particular By Janet Maslin

       On Jan 8,1993, in an electronics store on Allen Street,in lower Manhattan, two factions of the Fuk Ching gang squared up in a showdown that resulted in a double homicide.
       The shoot-out took place in broad daylight in a busy neighbourhood. And yet, according to Patrick Radden Keefe, author of The Snakehead , none of New York's major Englishlanguage newspapers even mentioned this violent crime. Although Keefe does not invoke the relevant movie dialogue, a "Forget it,Jake - it's Chinatown" attitude might have helped keep the press away.
       But the Chinatown described in The Snakehead is such an impenetrable place that attitudes of resignation are understandable.Keefe's book focuses on a ghetto within a ghetto, the New York community of emigres from Fujian province of China who began arriving in the US in large numbers in the 1980s.
       In a formidably well-researched book that is as much a paean to its author's industriousness as it is a chronicle of crime, Keefe outlines the way in which the Fujianese were forced out of China, driven to take desperately roundabout and dangerous travel routes and eventually arrived in the US courtesy of the lucrative human smuggling business."Snakehead" is the term for an entrepreneurial leader of that trade.
       The stories told in The Snakehead are so long and convoluted that Keefe has had to go to astonishing lengths to follow them. He has contended with formidable language barriers, convoluted global trade routes,foreign governments that take an anythinggoes approach to issuing passports, corruption in the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), rivalry between that agency and the FBI, and rogue developments like the incarceration of a large group of illegal Chinese immigrants in York, Pennsylvania.
       Keefe has also tackled a major player, a snakehead known as Sister Ping, who seems determined to stay out of public view. When Keefe, who wound up interviewing her in writing, initially approached her about his reporting, she gave an answer that validated everything his book would go on to say about her:"What's in it for me?"
       That seems to have been Sister Ping's attitude from the start. She emigrated to the US, as her father had before her, and quickly established herself as a hard-working businesswoman operating a family-run shop in New York's Chinatown with her husband,Cheung Yick Tak, a man who shares little of his wife's remarkable ability to shrug off the law. On one of the first occasions Sister Ping was interrogated by an official, she flatly told INS investigator Joe Occhipinti:"You don't have the time to get me. Or the resources."Keefe says what impressed Mr Occhipinti about this exchange was that she was right.
       Keefe has the wisdom to realise that Sister Ping, for all her flouting of US law enforcement,is not a sufficiently vivid or galvanising figure on whom to centre a book. So she becomes one of many, to the point that The Snakehead struggles to balance the many twisting story lines that fill its pages. Part of the book describes the conditions in Fujian province that prompted such a strong wave of chain migration (the kind in which one villager or family member follows another to the same overseas destination). It addresses the paradoxical way in which new prosperity in China drove away some of that country's most skilled - and most motivated - workers.
       And Keefe outlines the way in which closeknit Fujianese enclaves in the US could drift into crime in general and human smuggling in particular.
       In the process, he makes crucial distinctions between human smuggling (voluntary on both sides) and human trafficking (akin to slavery) while also demonstrating how US law has made the people-smuggling business so lucrative.
       Crackdowns at borders, Keefe says, are only more apt to drive immigrants into the hands of skilled snakeheads. And when the Chinese are willing to pay US$30,000 each to enter the US illegally, it becomes both practical and profitable for smugglers to hire lowpaid local decoys to distract border patrols.Snakeheads also put themselves at relatively low legal risk compared with drug smugglers who face stiff sentences if arrested and convicted.
       Although Keefe does an admirable job of navigating the minutiae of his story, the largerscale events and historical currents are what stand out.The Snakehead begins with the shipwreck of the Golden Venture , a vessel filled with illegal immigrants, near a New York beach in 1993.
       It describes what a ticklish matter this became for the brand-new Clinton administration, which faced the challenge of reconciling sympathy for Chinese refugees after Tiananmen Square with resistance to illegal immigration.
       And it illustrates beautifully how oddly politics can evolve. The story takes an unexpected turn once China's one-child policy - and propaganda-ready stories of forced abortions and sterilisations conducted there -made the immigrants' cause unexpectedly attractive to America's religious right.
       The way political opponents converged in York, to form the immigrants-rights group called the People of the Golden Vision and usher Golden Venture survivors into their new American lives is inspiring, but it makes sense only in the full context of Keefe's many interconnected tales.
       An all-American footnote: One Chineseborn immigrant emerged from prison, was hired by a Pennsylvania weaving company,went to live rent-free in a room at the mill's facilities and increased the company's output by 50% over his first three years. He became American enough to make fabric used in costumes for re-enactors of Civil War battles.NYT News Service