STORY

Reporting on Human Snakes in China

August 22, 2017 | Field Notes (https://pulitzercenter.org/publications/field-notes)

BY RONG XIAOQING

The bridge across the Min River. Image by Rong Xiaoqing. China, 2016.

The bridge across the Min River, unveiled in 2014, is called Langqi Minjiang
Bridge. On one end of the bridge (the one closer to the viewers) is Tingjiang
County, where Tingjiang Middle School is located.  On the other end is an island
called Langqi, where the Min River, the major river in Fujian Province, bifurcates
and then flows into the ocean.  In the early 1990s, when ships became a major way
to smuggle immigrants from Fujian to the U.S., thousands of Chinese, including
most graduates from the high school, said farewell to their loved ones and took the
precarious trip to the land of opportunities. Such trips often took months and in
some cases even more than a year, including numerous life and death moments.

The community of ce in Chang'an. Image by Rong Xiaoqing. China, 2016.

When the Chinese immigrants were successfully smuggled in, they normally went
to work in a restaurant on day one. With tens of thousands of dollars in smuggling
fees owed to the snakeheads [smuggling gangsters], they had no time to explore
the U.S., which is literally translated as “the beautiful country” in Chinese.
When Guangda was calling on the alumni to get together to form an association, a
former student immediately answered the call by promising a $40,000 initial
donation. Her name is Cheng Chui Ping, or Sister Ping, the most notorious
snakehead in America’s contemporary history. Sister Ping was sentenced to 35
years for human smuggling in 2005 and died in a Texas prison in 2014.

In this video, Guangda recalls some details of Sister Ping, who despite her
violations of the law, remained a hero in the minds of many immigrants from
Fujian. Guangda may not be able to appear in many more video clips. He was
recently diagnosed with lung cancer.

Reporter: Do you remember what Sister Ping was like when she was a student?

Guangda: Her academic performance was average. But it was clear that she was
not very money driven. She was kind to her classmates. Her father once brought
her a new bicycle from Singapore (a rare luxury in those days). And she lent it to
her classmates who wanted to learn how to ride a bike. She was also very a bold
person. When the students worked on the farmland, they often saw earthworms.
Other girls would be scared but she would hold the worms in her hands and play
with them.

Reporter: Could you see she would become who she was then?

Guangda: Not necessarily. She was a girl, after all.

Reporter: When she got ill in prison, you did visit her, did you?

Guangda: I visited her many times in prison.

Reporter: Do you remember what did she say when you saw her the last time?

Guangda: The last time I saw her she didn’t tell me she was ill. She was still
confident that she would be out of the prison soon. She knew I wanted the alumni
association to set up a fund for scholarships for our younger generations. She said
she’d collect all the money other people owed her when she was out of prison and
donate it all to set up the fund. Who would know she’d die soon after that? This
made me very sad. I thought the hopes for establishing the alumni association
But after a few years, many of them would not only be able to pay back the debts
but also open their own take-out restaurants. Then, when their businesses got
bigger and they were no longer pinching the pennies, they’d start to make
donations to their hometowns. Many villages in Tingjiang County owe their
modern roads, kindergartens, and senior centers to the donations of smuggled
villagers living overseas. This building, located in the village called Chang’an, is
one such facility. It hosts the office for the village committee, a community center
where people play mahjong, a senior center, and a branch of the Green Earth
Volunteers, a Chinese NGO focusing on environmental protection.

The Teacher

The Tingjiang Middle School Alumni Association in the U.S. was officially formed
at the end of 2015 after many years of preparation. A major force behind the
association is an 81-year-old man named Zheng Guangda. He was a teacher at the
school for about 30 years before he retired. He came to the U.S. in 1993, sponsored
by his son who was smuggled there in the 1980s, and then naturalized.
were slim. At a get-together event of former students, I told them now Sister Ping
has died I am afraid it [the plan of setting up an alumni association] may have died
with her...

Graduates of Tingjiang Middle School, pictured many decades after their matriculation. Image by Rong Xiaoqing.
China, 2016.

Many graduates from Tingjiang Middle School came to the U.S. in the 80s and 90s.
They had to work 12 or 14 hours a day to make ends meet. Many lost touch with
their classmates even though they were almost all in the U.S.

Only in recent years, with the help of WeChat, the most popular social media
platform in China, have they started to reconnect. Many of them didn’t even get a
high school education. So the middle school classmates basically are their only
childhood friends. Once they find one another, they really try to stay close. In
addition, many are middle aged and running established businesses. They
frequently travel between China and the U.S. Dinner gatherings of former
classmates happen as often as every few weeks in both their hometowns and in
the U.S.

Different from the younger versions of themselves decades ago, they all have rich
experiences now. In this picture of a gathering of a group of students who
graduated in 1983, taken on June 11 at a restaurant in Tingjiang, those who
enjoyed meals and Karaoke together include a woman who runs two restaurants
in the U.S. and who recently went back to China visit her family, a man who went
back to explore business opportunities for an American company, a man who was
deported back to China a few years ago because he didn’t have proper immigrant
status, and a woman who was among the very few students from those days who
decided not to come to the U.S.

A village in Tingjiang County. Image by Rong Xiaoqing. China, 2016.

Tingjiang County, a 41-square-mile area or less than two Manhattans, hosts 17
small villages. Many of them are nestled in the mountains around the edges of the
Min River, and some have a history dating back more than 1,000 years. With
picturesque landscapes and historic relics, these villages could possibly be turned
into tourist attractions. But the immigration wave in the 1980s and 1990s took
away most of the original villagers. Now these villages are eerily quiet most of the
time, give-or-take the occasional chitchat among a few idling seniors.
A school visit turned into a local news story. Screenshot courtesy Rong Xiaoqing. 2016.
I visited Tingjiang Middle School on May 20. I arranged this trip by directly calling
the school without being completely sure whether interview requests by
journalists working for overseas media have to go through some special
procedures in China (such as going through the propaganda department). But
everything went well. I interviewed the principal and some teachers. And to my
surprise, they even allowed me to randomly interview some students I bumped
into on the campus without even standing nearby to monitor the interviews. This
kind of freedom is not even possible at schools in the U.S. where you may have to
at least get consent from the parents.

But another surprise came a few days later when the school sent me a link of an
article on a local news website. My visit to the school became a news story in itself
with a picture of me interviewing the principal.  Before I wrote about them, they
wrote about me. I thought this was amusing. So I sent the links to a few friends just
for fun. But the link soon couldn’t be accessed, though a few days later the link was
mysteriously back up. At the same time, I got a message from the school: “Per the
request of our supervising governmental agency, can we read the story before it is
published?”

So here you have censorship 101 in China: It is not as bad as you may think. But it
is definitely there.

This Story is a part of:

China's Human Snakes Return

(https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/chinas-human-snakes-return)
AUTHOR

RONG XIAOQING (https://pulitzercenter.org/people/xiaoqing-rong)

Grantee

Rong Xiaoqing is a reporter for the Chinese language Sing Tao Daily in New York. She also writes for various
English and Chinese language publications in the U.S. and China, including the...

PUBLICATION

RELATED INFORMATION

REGION: Asia (https://pulitzercenter.org/region/asia), North America

(https://pulitzercenter.org/region/north-america)

COUNTRY: China (https://pulitzercenter.org/country/china), United States

(https://pulitzercenter.org/country/united-states)

TAGS: Human Rights (https://pulitzercenter.org/topics/human-rights)

MEDIA: Field Notes (https://pulitzercenter.org/podcast), Photo

(https://pulitzercenter.org/slideshows)

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