CHAPTER NINETEEN

High Tech vs. Low Tech

For the United States, unanticipated success in the international sphere during the 1980s paved the way for unbridled prosperity at home in the 1990s. A forty-year nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union had ended in 1989 not with a bang but with a series of cheers across Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall was demolished by people using nothing more than sledgehammers and bare hands. When one satellite state after another broke away from the Soviet bloc, and when in 1990 and 1991 the republics of the Soviet Union declared themselves to be independent nations, the United States found itself the winner of the cold war by default. Miraculously, the long-dreaded and seemingly inevitable nuclear apocalypse had never materialized. The disintegration of America’s former antagonist brought to Americans a new era of confidence born of the fact that the United States was now the world’s number one economic and military power.

Supporters of Ronald Reagan like to say that he ended the cold war not by backing off from the arms race but by accelerating it. According to this scenario, he engaged the Soviet Union in a high-stakes, no-rules poker game that threatened to bankrupt both countries, but a game in which the poorer of the two would have to cry uncle first. This last-stage arms race left the United States two legacies. The first was an enormous national debt, by far the largest ever. But the huge expenditures were not solely for weaponry, but also to develop and support new technologies, especially in computers and information processing. Once unleashed, these technologies placed enormous pressure on the American industrial economy, triggering a business revolution that would have broad social consequences.

In the new economy, power flowed to those who could create or master new technology faster than their competitors. It should be no surprise that the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, would make his fortune in computers, as the co-founder and leader of Microsoft. By the end of the decade, his net worth was estimated at $85 billion, greater than that of entire countries, as well as the one hundred million poorest Americans combined. The wealthiest one percent of America emerged from the 1990s with 40 percent of the country’s assets, twice as much as they had held only two decades earlier.

Meanwhile, the poor—indeed, all those without the skills demanded by this new economy—grew poorer. According to economist Edward N. Wolff, between 1983 and 1995, poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class families—the bottom 40 percent of American society—lost 80 percent of their net worth; when adjusted for inflation for 1995 dollars, their holdings shrank from $4,000 to $900. One reason for the disappearance of their wealth was that highly paid manufacturing jobs, which had once afforded working- and middle-class Americans a certain measure of prosperity, gradually disappeared as corporations farmed labor-intensive work to Third World countries.

The growing divide between American haves and have-nots was felt keenly not only among whites and blacks, but within the ethnic Chinese population as well. The decade of the 1990s would witness the development of a two-tiered society among new Chinese arrivals: the rise of an elite group of highly visible, educated people, and the disappearance of thousands of illegal aliens into servile positions in an underground economy, where they were forced to endure dismal working conditions. But whether they were “high-tech” or “low-tech” immigrants, both groups would face a series of crises during the 1990s related to their Chinese ethnicity.

For “high-tech” Chinese, the 1990s resembled the gold rush days, except that the 1990 fortune seekers were mining for nuggets in a new form of sand—silicon. The modern gold rush, like the 1849 gold rush, occurred in northern California, but this time south of San Francisco, in a region dubbed Silicon Valley. The area had already witnessed the birth of the personal computer revolution in the 1970s, when two young men, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, started the Apple corporation, selling desktop computers they had built in their garage. Proximity to Stanford University in Palo Alto, the University of California at Berkeley, and San Francisco as a major port for trade with Asia, helped transform the area into a world center of the high-tech industry.⁵⁴ But an even bigger revolution erupted in the 1990s—the Internet revolution.

The roots of the Internet stretch back to the 1960s, when academic and government experts envisioned building a global computer network that could function even in the event of nuclear war. Preliminary research at MIT led to a government contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which linked together a few computers at major universities through telephone lines. For the next two decades, a small community of academics—mostly computer scientists, engineers, and librarians—would exchange information with colleagues by posting messages on this cyberspace bulletin board, a government-funded system of electronic mail (or “e-mail”).

In the early 1990s, this network crashed into public awareness when companies such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigybegan offering the general public unlimited access to this new form of communication for a monthly fee. The unprecedented growth of what came to be called the Internet spawned a rash of new Silicon Valley startups. Known as “dotcoms,” these companies were typically run by young men and women fresh out of school. To attract employees with the special computer talents needed, most of these cash-poor start-ups offered employees stock options in lieu of high pay. When the companies were able to offer their stock to the general public, a rush to get in on the ground floor of a brand-new industry that seemed to have an unbounded future led to oversubscribed initial public offerings (IPOs). The outstanding stock was then bid up to astronomical levels, despite the fact that most of these companies had not yet shown a profit (and many never would). Before the dotcom bubble burst, many young Americans of Chinese heritage, both founders and those who had received stock options, joined the ranks of twenty-somethings with million-dollar portfolios, with many expecting to accumulate their first billion before age thirty. This kind of wealth, noted Stanford historian Gordon Chang, transformed the image of the young Asian American male from “son of a laborer or laundryman” to “future Internet millionaire.”

One icon of the dotcom world was Jerry Yang, the billionaire founder of Yahoo!, an Internet search engine and Web service. Born in Taiwan in 1967, Yang moved with his family to San Jose, California, while he was still a teenager. His company grew out of a simple idea: to create a directory of his favorite sites on the international network of information now referred to as the World Wide Web. By the early 1990s, any location on the Web could be accessed by typing the location’s Web address into an address box. Yang helped develop the first popular search tool for the Web, so that users could type names or relevant phrases into a search box, and have the search engine find all documents with a string of characters matching those in the search box. In a tiny office trailer at Stanford University, Yang, then a twenty-six-year-old doctoral student in electrical engineering, and his classmate, David Filo, sorted hyperlinks by subject and posted them on the Web. Their directory grew so popular that its level of traffic crashed the computer servers at Stanford, forcing the company to move off campus. Yang and Filo took Yahoo! public and watched its worth increase exponentially as the Internet market exploded. By March 2000, the market capitalization of Yahoo! had exceeded $100 billion.⁵⁵

Of course, not all Chinese moguls of the information age made their wealth through dotcom firms. Some, like Morris Chang, earned their fortunes by enabling high-tech companies to outsource their manufacturing to Taiwan. Revered as the “godfather of high technology” in Taiwan, Chang, an electrical engineer educated at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, pioneered the integrated circuit foundry industry as the founder and chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Recognizing that fabricating chips required enormous startup capital (a semiconductor factory could cost literally billions of dollars), Chang’s company, largely funded by the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan, permitted small American chip companies to contract their fabrication work in Taiwan. Taiwan Semiconductor provided independent chip designers, who could not compete on their own against giants like Intel, Motorola, and NEC, access to affordable manufacturing services, freeing them to focus on creative design work. Thus Chang’s insight accelerated the pace of computer innovation worldwide. Thousands of entrepreneurs were now able to compete by offering their own innovations, instead of leaving the industry’s development to just a

Any gold rush has a few celebrity winners and many exhausted losers. Some Chinese immigrants found themselves in a quandary when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990, introducing the H1-B visa program for highly educated and skilled immigrant workers, but restricting the time such visa holders could work in the United States to a maximum of six years. The act abruptly reversed previous immigration policy, which had eagerly welcomed foreign immigrants with advanced education or professional occupations. After 1965, the government had imposed virtually no limits on the admission of Chinese foreign nationals with specialized training. In 1989, the foreign Chinese students who happened to be in the United States during the Tiananmen Square massacre were allowed to obtain green cards immediately. But for those who came after the 1990 act, it was a different story.

High-tech employers viewed the H1-B program as an attractive solution to their labor needs because it gave them a fresh crop of minds to exploit every six years. The policy was perceived as giving domestic industry the opportunity to harness the brainpower of foreign immigrants, but without granting these contributors the full rights and privileges of American citizenship. At first, Congress capped the program at 65,000 visas per year, but the 1990s high-tech boom created a massive shortage of computer programmers, engineers, and systems analysts, which companies hoped to rectify by recruiting from abroad. After intense lobbying from corporations like Microsoft, the U.S. government raised the cap on H1-B visas to 115,000 in 1998, then to 195,000 two years later. India provided the greatest number of skilled foreign workers in the program, followed by the People’s Republic of China.⁵⁶

Critics soon denounced the H1-B visa program as “white-collar indentured servitude.” Middlemen recruiters took as much as half the salary of the workers they procured for companies, and visa holders were beholden to their employers, whom they needed as sponsors for permanent immigration status. If an H1-B visa holder wanted to switch companies, the potential new employer had to petition the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a process that could take several months. Those with H1- B visas had to wait years for a coveted green card, knowing that their visas might expire before they obtained one. Severe backlogs for green card applications developed because applicants from any one country could not make up more than 7 percent of the total number of green cards issued each year.

By the end of the decade, a few Chinese H1-B visa holders had begun to organize. In 1998, for example, Swallow Yan, a green card applicant from the PRC, helped create the Immigration Council of the Chinese Professionals and Entrepreneurs Association, a grassroots effort that lobbies politicians on behalf of H1-B visa holders. But in general, most H1-B visa holders were too terrified to voice their complaints to the press or lawmakers. While researching this book, I interviewed several Chinese on H1-B visas who spoke to me only on condition of anonymity.

One woman, whom I will call Sally Chung, asserted that the H1-B visa program had turned her into “a high-tech slave.” An immigrant from mainland China, she came to the United States in 1992 to obtain a bachelor’s degree in engineering. After graduation, she accepted a position as a software designer at a local company, where she was expected to work at least ten hours a day, including weekends, without raises or compensation for overtime. Though Chung was unhappy with her situation, she could not afford to leave—her appli-cation for a green card depended on being employed by this particular company. Quitting her job meant starting the paperwork all over again as well as forfeiting the $10,000 she had invested in legal fees for the green card. A backlog at INS caused the wait to stretch from months to several agonizing years. When she complained that she earned even less than entry-level workers in her field, her boss demoted her title from software engineer to librarian in order to justify her low wages. At the same time, however, he expected her to serve as a software engineer by programming a computer database for the company. “My boss enjoys calling me into his office, shutting the door, and then screaming at me,” she said. “He tells me I have to speak perfect English without an accent before I can get a raise. He says that if he lived in China for only one month, he would be able to speak perfect Chinese. My boss warned me that if I ask him for a raise one more time he will fire me.” Now, she says, “I’m scared to death I’ll lose my job.”

In addition to the H1-B visa system, another development worked against the interests of the “high-tech” Chinese. The sudden demise of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in the arena of international politics, helping China emerge from the cold war as the second greatest military power in the world after the United States. While the economies of Russia and the former Soviet republics were still paying the price for the arms race the Soviet Union could not afford, the economy of the People’s Republic of China was growing almost exponentially. After Mao’s death, the Chinese gross national product had almost tripled by the 1990s, giving rise to American fears of future competition. During the 1990s, economic experts and historians predicted that the next century would belong to mainland China.

One irony of the 1990s was that the United States would come to view China both as its great business partner and its most powerful rival. While the decade saw an explosion of Sino-American corporate partnerships, it also witnessed the dawn of a new era of suspicion regarding the People’s Republic. The Washington Post reported the emergence of an anti-PRC “Blue Team” in Washington, D.C., “a loose alliance of members of Congress, congressional staff, think tank fellows, Republican political operatives, conservative journalists, lobbyists for Taiwan, former intelligence officers and a handful of academics, all united in the view that a rising China poses great risks to America’s vital interests.” A spate of books published in the late 1990s or shortly afterward by members of this Blue Team—The Coming Conflict with China, by Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro; Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate Asia and the World, by Steven W. Mosher; The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America, by Bill Gertz; Year of the Rat and Red Dragon Rising: Communist China’s Military Threat to America, by Edward Timperlak and William Triplett—suggested that a future showdown between the United States and the PRC was inevitable, echoing earlier cold war themes with only the name of the enemy changed.⁵⁷

In 1999, Representative Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) released a seven-hundred-page report accusing mainland China of stealing classified data on American nuclear weapons. Although the report was later denounced by American scientists and missile experts as grossly distorted and erroneous, it received enormous media attention upon its release. In an initial response, Time magazine published a cover story about the possibility of the United States entering a new cold war, this time with China.

With this atmosphere of suspicion came greater scrutiny of ethnic Chinese scientists and engineers, greater fears that they might be potential spies. Historically, the fate of the Chinese American community has always been linked to the health of Sino-American relations, and the 1990s were no exception. Like Tsien Hsue-shen and other Chinese victims of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, Chinese intellectuals who worked in national defense in the 1990s found themselvessuspected of espionage because of their racial heritage and their great number within the high-tech industry.

In 1992, the NASA Ames Research Center fired Raymond Luh, an aerospace engineer and immigrant from Taiwan, for possessing “a paper with Chinese writing on it.” The following year, a court order confined Andrew Wang, a computer scientist, to his Denver home for almost a year after he e-mailed computer code to a friend in town. Wang’s employer had accused him of stealing the code to start a business with alleged Chinese financing. The FBI wanted to pursue the matter as an interstate crime—because Wang’s e-mail had been routed through the Internet by a switching system outside of Colorado—but the authorities later dropped the charges when they learned that Wang’s boss had given him permission to copy the information and that none of it was particularly important. David Lane, Wang’s attorney, attributed the entire matter to a “yellow high-tech peril” kind of fear, adding that his client’s life had been “virtually ruined” for more than a year.

Émigrés, even those reared and educated in Nationalist-controlled Taiwan, were soon being accused of passing information to Communist China. The new climate of suspicion prompted people to come out of the closet and speak frankly about their past treatment by the U.S. government. In 1982, Dr. Chih-Ming Hu had received an unexpected visit from an FBI agent. At the time, Hu, a graduate of National Taiwan University with a doctorate from the University of Maryland, was working on a nonclassified flight simulation project at Computer Sciences Corporation, a contractor for NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. The FBI agent asked Hu if he had ever given classified secrets and his doctoral dissertation to a friend in mainland China. No, Hu said, adding that he had no access to classified data and that his dissertation was already in the public domain, having been published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. A few days later, the agent reappeared, this time accusing Hu of lying and threatening to have him fired by NASA. Vehemently, Hu insisted he was telling the truth and even offered to take a polygraph test. The agent, who did not take up his offer, warned Hu that he suspected him of hiding something. A week later, NASA fired Hu for security reasons, even though he was never officially charged with anything.

Sadly enough, his initial impulse was to do nothing. “It happened so fast, and I was so shocked and scared that I did not know what to do,” Chih-Ming Hu later wrote. He feared that the United States government would retaliate if he fought back: “Most people from Taiwan still remember that during the 1950s to 1970s Taiwan was under Nationalist Party’s dictatorship. During that ‘White Horror’ period, [officials] there could arrest any citizen without court order and put that person in jail or make him/her disappear. So after NASA fired me, I worried so much about what the FBI would do to me next.”

Stigmatized by NASA’s treatment of him, Hu acted like a rape victim, withdrawing from society to hide the shame that had been inflicted upon him. Because he failed to take the natural next step, which many Americans would have done without hesitation—hiring a top lawyer on a contingency basis to sue NASA, Computer Sciences Corporation, and the FBI—his inaction was perceived as a concession of guilt. His peers began to believe that perhaps Hu had committed some sinister, though unspecified, crime. And so they kept their distance from him. During this period, which Hu describes as “a nightmare,” he remained unemployed for eight months. (“When I went to high-tech company job interviews no one dared to make me an offer after they heard my story,” he later told a reporter. “Who dare hire a spy?”) His friends shunned him, and his wife demanded a divorce. Desperate for money, Hu tried to sell real estate, then insurance, but few people wanted to be associated with him in any way. Finally, he secured a job in his field, but only after deciding not to disclose his previous contract with NASA.

The scars remained, however. When he finally broke his silence in the late 1990s, Hu had bitter regrets about not speaking out at the time. “I was scared,” he later told a reporter. “I should have fought back.” The memories still haunted and infuriated him: “I was 100 percent innocent! This was purely due to the FBI agent’s rudeness and power abuse! This kind of thing happened a lot in China during the Cultural Revolution. Who would expect this would happen in the U.S.?”

The most notorious case of unjustified treatment involved Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese American scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In March 1999, a New York Times article claimed that Los Alamos was the source of the W-88 nuclear warhead technology that the People’s Republic of China was believed to have obtained through espionage. Lee was abruptly fired without a hearing, and that December, authorities indicted him for allegedly transferring nuclear secrets from a classified computer network onto an insecure computer, and then onto ten portable tapes, seven of which were missing. FBI agents immediately arrested Lee and charged him with fifty-nine counts of mishandling sensitive information and secrecy violations of the Atomic Energy Act.

After a comprehensive three-year investigation involving more than 260 agents and a thousand interviews, during which time Lee was held in custody, under especially dreadful conditions, the United States Justice Department conceded it had no evidence that Lee had committed espionage. The U.S. government also admitted the embarrassing fact that they either knew, or should have learned early in the investigation, that the secret information in the design of the W-88 warhead in Beijing’s possession could not have come from Los Alamos. What China had was based not on the early-stage design used in Los Alamos, but a later-stage version distributed to at least 548 addresses within the U.S. government, available to hundreds if not thousands of people across America.

While many details of the Wen Ho Lee case remain classified, what has emerged is a pattern of government incompetence and outright misconduct. During an interrogation conducted on March 7, 1999, federal agents tried to coerce Dr. Lee to confess to espionage, resorting even to death threats. The FBI told him that he had failed his polygraph, when in fact he had passed it with flying colors. They hinted at the power of the government to manipulate the media by leaking information, and the power of the subsequent coverage to destroy his career and ruin his life, even if he were completely innocent. ⁵⁸ Agents even warned Lee that he could be executed if he did not cop to a lesser plea and confess. “Do you know who the Rosenbergs are?” FBI agent Carol Covert asked Lee. “The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case. You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho.”

When the Justice Department could find no evidence that Lee had spied for Beijing, they changed focus, seizing upon the fact that he had improperly handled data within Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee later admitted that he had moved nuclear codes from a secure computer system to an insecure computer within the laboratory, but claimed he did it only as backup, to protect his files in the event of a system failure.

Most people who have lost important data due to a power-failure crash will understand how such a breach of regulations could occur. In his autobiography, My Country Versus Me, Lee described losing several important files in 1993 after the computers at Los Alamos were converted from one operating system to another. Determined not to experience such a loss again, he decided to make several backup files. Since he lacked his own tape drive, he borrowed one from a friend who worked in the insecure, unclassified region within the laboratory. After making the backups, Lee claimed he left the information on the open system as an extra precaution against future loss, protecting it with three levels of passwords. Later, he acknowledged that this was a mistake and a breach of security, but stressed he did it only “for my convenience, not for any espionage purposes.”

According to Lee’s colleagues, such security lapses were common, and the data Lee had downloaded fell in a gray area of classification: “protect as restricted data,” or PARD. This meant the data had to be handled with care, as it might contain sensitive information, but did not merit the same kind of security precautions as “secret” or even “confidential” data. Scientists could leave PARD on their desks overnight, and a former weapons designer at Los Alamos admitted to the Times that he had committed his own blunder with PARD when the wind blew a sheaf of documents out a window. But after Lee’s arrest, the U.S. government reclassified the downloaded PARD files to a much higher level—as “secret restricted data”—a decision critics described as politically motivated, an attempt to justify what had already been done to Lee.

To put Lee’s actions into context, his supporters pointed to the contrasting treatment of John Deutch, a former director of the CIA, who had committed gross security violations. Wen Ho Lee had transferred PARD information from one computer to another within the laboratory, but Deutch had actually removed top-secret files from the CIA and carried them home in a briefcase. In December 1996, the CIA discovered that Deutch’s unprotected home computer contained seventeen thousand pages of documents that included ultrasecret “black programs,” presidentially approved covert operations, and even a twenty-six-volume personal diary of his tenure at the CIA and the Pentagon. An “alien resident” housekeeper had full access to the room with this computer whenever Deutch and his family were away from home. The computer was routinely used to access the Internet (including porn sites) through America Online, and neither encryption nor a secure phone line had shielded the computer from access by hackers. The CIA also learned that Deutch would leave important memory cards lying around in his car and kept extremely sensitive files on his laptop computer, which could have been easily copied or stolen.

When Deutch learned about the investigation, he immediately began deleting more than a thousand files from his personal computer, and he refused to give interviews to CIA agents on the subject. Given Deutch’s lack of cooperation, the CIA shelved the investigation, even though officials believed the former director had broken three major laws. Security investigators at the CIA wanted to alert the Justice Department about “three crimes we knew were sure-fire violations with clear evidence, but the [current] chief said ‘no,’ ” according to one CIA official, who spoke to the media only under condition of anonymity. These crimes included the unauthorized removal of classified information (punishable by up to one year in prison), the concealment or attempt to remove or destroy government documents (punishable by up to three years in prison), and working on personal projects with a financial interest involved.

The disparity between the Justice Department’s handling of the two cases was stunning. While Wen Ho Lee—a man never formally charged with espionage—was imprisoned and denied bail, Deutch, who had committed far graver offenses against national security, never spent a single night in jail. The only penalty he suffered was the removal of his security clearance, two and a half years after his security breach was discovered. Meanwhile, his life and career went on as usual. When Deutch failed in his efforts to become secretary of defense, he went back to teaching chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More significantly, Deutch may have abused his power as former director of the CIA to obstruct justice. He recommended Nora Slatkin, a CIA official overseeing the internal investigation of Deutch’s security lapses, for a top executive position at Citibank. After Deutch resigned as director in 1996, he joined the board of Citibank, and in 1997, Slatkin became a vice president there.

The double standard in the Lee and Deutch cases infuriated people both inside and outside the Chinese American community. “Deutch can get away with anything because his racial and class background enables him to behave like he owns the country and even if he has done anything illegal, he retains his privilege,” Ling-chi Wang, head of the Berkeley ethnic studies department, wrote in a public e-mail. Indeed, Deutch’s violations caused no great public outcry, no public debate about whether he, like Lee, might have been guilty of espionage. Robert Scheer, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wondered if this was because “Deutch is a leading member of the old-boy intelligence establishment, and Lee is not.” Others wondered how much of the case was driven by racism. Robert Vrooman, former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the Washington Post he believed that the federal government had targeted Lee because he was ethnic Chinese, and that the entire investigation was “built on thin air.”

Critics began to compare the handling of the Lee case with the conduct of foreign dictatorships during the cold war. In a New Mexico jail, Lee had endured conditions that few convicted felons face: for more than two hundred days, he lived in solitary confinement and was shackled in chains whenever he stepped out of his cell, which was one hour a day for exercise, and one hour a week to see his family. “While Deutch has been coddled,” Robert Scheer wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “Lee sits in a solitary jail cell after having been lied to by the FBI, which, acting like goons from some totalitarian country, told him he had failed the lie detector test that they knew he had easily passed.” Many people believed Lee was imprisoned without bail so he would plead guilty under pressure. “This case stinks and the resolution doesn’t make it smell any better,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. “If he pleaded innocent, he had to remain in jail, but if he pleads guilty, he gets out of jail—it is so Soviet. It is un-American.” Fang Lizhi, the renowned scientist and human rights activist who had escaped from the PRC after the Tiananmen Square massacre, compared Lee’s experience in jail with human rights abuses in mainland China. The extraordinarily brutal conditions of Lee’s incarceration led even Plato Cacheris—the attorney for Aldrich Ames, the convicted spy for Moscow—to comment that Wen Ho Lee was treated far worse than his own client.

In the fall of 2000, to salvage a rapidly eroding case against Lee, the Justice Department worked out a plea bargain with his attorneys, dropping all but one of the fifty-nine counts in exchange for his agreement to cooperate with federal authorities. The judge later apologized to Lee, asserting that he had been “terribly wronged” and admitting that federal prosecutors had “embarrassed our entire nation.” It was later discovered that several government leaks to the media were not only lies but also violations of U.S. law. The following year, declassified portions of an eight-hundred-page report commissioned by Attorney General Janet Reno concluded that “the FBI has been investigating a crime which was never established to have occurred.”

The incident left a lasting wound on the psyche of the Chinese American community. They would remember not only the unbounded arrogance of the Justice Department but also the role of an irresponsible press that fanned flames of racist paranoia across America. During the Lee investigation, the media exploited cruel caricatures of the Chinese, reminding historians of the racist cartoons that led to the exclusion era of the nineteenth century.

A big part of Lee’s problems must be laid at the feet of the well-respected New York Times, whose reporters and editors too gullibly did the government’s bidding by running unsubstantiated government leaks on its front page. Within days, the Lee story degenerated into an orgy of yellow journalism across the nation. Talk-radio and television hosts lumped together all ethnic Chinese—Chinese Americans and foreign Chinese nationals alike—as potential spies.⁵⁹ Major newspapers drew fantasies of millions of Chinese united by a nefarious master scheme to commit espionage. “China’s spying, they say, more typically involves cajoling morsels of information out of visiting foreign experts and tasking thousands of Chinese abroad to bring secrets home one at a time like ants carrying grains of sand,” the Washington Post wrote. “The Chinese have been assembling such grains of sand since at least the fourth century B.C., when the military philosopher Sun Tzu noted the value of espionage in his classic work, ‘The Art of War.’ ”

Eventually the New York Times faced criticism, both within the organization and by outsiders, for its careless reporting of the Wen Ho Lee case. In the series of articles that started it all, the Times reported a mysterious $700 withdrawal that Lee had made from an American Express office in Hong Kong, and speculated that he used it to buy an airplane ticket to Shanghai. It was later discovered, however, that the money had in fact been used by his daughter on a sightseeing tour outside Hong Kong. No detail was too small to be interpreted as possible evidence of Lee’s guilt. When Lee was warmly greeted by a PRC nuclear expert at a public function in Los Alamos, as scientists greet foreign colleagues whenever and wherever they meet, the Times wrote that the Chinese scientist hugged Lee “in a manner that seemed suspiciously congratulatory.”

The Chinese American community would also remember offhand comments made by certain politicians during the Wen Ho Lee affair that revealed the depth of their anti-Chinese feelings. In March 1999, Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, told the NBC program Meet the Press, “We’ve got to remember the Chinese are everywhere as far as our weapons systems, not only in our labs that make our nuclear weapons and development, but also in the technology to deliver them. We’ve seen some of that. They’re real. They’re here. And probably in some ways, very crafty people.” Though a spokesperson from his office later explained that Shelby meant Chinese spies, not Chinese Americans in general, his remarks infuriated the Asian American community. “He doesn’t distinguish between Chinese foreign nationals, Chinese graduate students, and Chinese Americans, some of whom are fifth-generation Californians,” Frank Wu, a Howard University law professor, told the San Francisco Examiner. “He sees them everywhere. That should be troubling.”

Equally disturbing was the fact that Robert Smith, a Republican congressman from New Hampshire, mixed up Wen Ho Lee with Bill Lann Lee, the assistant attorney general for civil rights. “The problem is guilt by racial association,” said Wu. “This gives Asian Americans insight into African-American complaints about racial profiling.”

After the press coverage of the Wen Ho Lee affair, a cloud of suspicion descended over all ethnic Chinese scientists at the national laboratories. The U.S. government began to investigate Chinese Americans for the most innocuous activities. According to Brian Sun, the attorney for Wen Ho Lee, one Chinese American in Los Angeles was interrogated merely because he sent his laptop computer out to be repaired. As one of several authors of a memo distributed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one Chinese American employee felt she was considered guilty just because of her race: “The Lab treated me as a suspect when it denied my access to the computers in my office until my computers proved that I was innocent ... I love my job. Please don’t squeeze me out.”

During the Wen Ho Lee affair, the U.S. government shocked the Chinese American community by openly acknowledging that it would use racial profiling as a tactic to investigate possible PRC espionage. Paul Moore, former head of FBI Chinese counterintelligence, said the FBI would focus their efforts on Chinese American scientists as long as PRC agents were “interested obsessively in people of Chinese American ancestry to the exclusion of people from other groups.”

The Wen Ho Lee case served as a wake-up call for the Chinese at the national laboratories. The case and its aftermath forced many Chinese American scientists—particularly those in the second wave—to rethink their priorities. Why devote their energies to supporting institutions that regarded them as untrustworthy? Would their talents not be better served in a more respectful environment? If the U.S. government did not reward their effort, or withheld promotions on the basis of skin color and ethnicity, then why did it deserve the best years of their lives? They began to complain of an environment rife with nepotism, incompetence, and racial prejudice, all of which deprived Chinese Americans of recognition. Joel Wong, an immigrant engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, spoke for thousands of other Chinese Americans in Science magazine: “The term going around now among us is that we’re high-tech coolies—if we work hard, we’re given more work.” He and other Asian Americans, several of them Taiwanese American, charged that a glass ceiling kept them from the ranks of upper management. They called the performance evaluations “subjective, arbitrary and capricious” because they were conducted in secret, were hard to contest, and were influenced by the “old-boys network.”

According to their analysis of lab salaries, the average Asian American physics Ph.D. earned as much as $12,000 less than other employees with similar credentials. In fact, Asian American compensation was often lower than white compensation by as much as 15 to 20 percent. Pointing out that racial discrimination violated federal law, the group voiced their desire for management to use “the same appropriate yardsticks for everyone, instead of the current rubber yardsticks.”

Some believed the problem arose from different values: the military culture of the administration at the national laboratories, and the academic culture of the ethnic Chinese who worked not as policy-makers or analysts, but as rank-and-file scientists. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the highest echelons of management tend to be retired naval officers. Several Chinese Americans who worked under these officers believed their bosses were deeply suspicious of all Asians because of the legacy of three wars fought in Asia: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Many ethnic Chinese scientists asserted that this racism existed at such a deep, visceral level that the perpetrators themselves were often unaware of it. “Subconsciously, you become the enemy,” said one Taiwanese American employee at the lab. “The moment they hear your accent, they distrust you.”

Many Chinese immigrant scientists had originally entered the labs because they appeared to offer not only an intellectual environment, but also the secure haven that had eluded their early years. As immigrants who had fled war and revolution since childhood, many longed for a certain measure of peace and stability. Now they began to wonder about their decision. “In hindsight, there are some things I might have done differently,” Wen Ho Lee later wrote. “I might have made different career decisions, maybe going to work in private industry, or teaching at a university, rather than devoting more than twenty years to the national laboratories.”

In response to Lee’s experience, many have urged scientists of Chinese heritage not to work in the field of government defense. “Boycott Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and other national labs run by the Energy Department,” read one Web page that supported Wen Ho Lee. “Don’t apply for jobs there. You’ll just be a high-tech coolie, a glass ceiling will prevent you from advancing, and they’ll do to you what they did to Wen Ho Lee.” The unofficial boycott was a success. In February 2000, not one single Chinese graduate student from universities in the PRC, Taiwan, or the United States applied for the top postdoctoral fellowships at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Before the Lee affair, about half of the ten finalists would have been ethnic Chinese.

The boycott led to protracted negotiations between officials at the national laboratories and Chinese American activists, which, as this book went to press, had not yet been resolved. And the boycott was soon followed by litigation. In March 2002, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of hundreds of Asian American employees at Lawrence Livermore who alleged they were victims of discrimination.

Only time will tell if the racial profiling tactics and obsessive security measures of the late 1990s have jeopardized U.S. national security more than protecting it. According to Michael May, a Stanford University physicist, the United States evolved as the world’s leader in technology because for more than a century it had embraced the talent of foreign immigrants in academia, industry, and government. The nation’s entire scientific system—its universities, companies, and defense institutes—had been fueled by a brain tap from other countries, European as well as Asian. In the first half of the twentieth century, men like Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller enriched the American scientific community and assisted, either directly or indirectly, the nation’s national defense. In the second half through to the twenty-first century, Asian immigrants have also been making important contributions.

The degree to which the United States academic community has benefited from the Chinese is borne out by statistics. By the end of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants constituted the largest group of foreign students in the United States, mostly concentrated in science and engineering. In 1997, about half of all foreign scientists with doctorates in the U.S. came from either the PRC or Taiwan. If the scientists of Chinese heritage from other regions were included, the numbers would be even higher.

Officials at Los Alamos had to confront their need for foreign brainpower when in 1999 they advertised a postdoctoral position in nuclear materials—and not one of the twenty-four applicants was American. They also learned that the fallout from the Wen Ho Lee case had cost them several world-class Chinese scientists. One was Feng Gai, an expert on the proteins that might unlock the secrets of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. When the Department of Energy fired Wen Ho Lee, it ordered Feng Gai to stay home from work while Los Alamos erected a new screening system for foreigners. At this point, the lab lost him to the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him a professorship in chemistry as well as a new $400,000 laboratory. In a Newsweek “My Turn” column, David Pines, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, wrote that he had discouraged a brilliant young scientist from the PRC from accepting a postdoc at the lab, because he “felt his every move would be monitored.” Pines wondered “whether we’ve lost a chance to attract to America a major contributor to science—and a potential Nobel laureate.”

For Chinese American intellectuals not interested in working for the government, the 1990s were a time of extremes. Some “high-tech” Chinese made fortunes, while others were badly fleeced. The media depicted them as moguls and geniuses, crooks and spies. But no matter how great the economic and political pressures against them, these could not compare to the experiences of another population, mostly hidden from view. This group of Chinese immigrants—the “low-tech” Chinese—came from the poorest echelons of society, and their fates differed widely, depending on a random throw of life’s dice.

One group of new émigrés was Chinese baby girls, abandoned by their biological parents in China and adopted by American families. Perhaps it was inevitable that China, an overpopulated nation filled with parents who could not afford to feed their children, would provide the answer to thousands of desperate couples in the United States, a country with soaring infertility rates and a diminished supply of infants available for adoption.

This emigration pattern grew out of a Chinese experiment in social engineering. The Chinese population had exploded under the leadership of Mao, who had long considered birth control a form of genocide. In 1979, to reverse the trend, the Deng administration created the “one-child family” policy: couples who gave birth to only one child received better government benefits, while those who had more than one could be penalized with heavy fines. The goal was to shrink the population to 700 million people by the year 2030.

But centuries-old traditions die hard. In China, a woman’s value historically hinged on her ability to give birth to sons to preserve the family name. Restricted to one child, families in some regions came to consider female life so worthless that they did not even bother to name daughters; in those same areas, many couples were willing to risk everything, even government persecution, to try to have a male heir.

After the 1982 Chinese census revealed the population had surpassed one billion people, the one-child policy was enforced rigorously, even ruthlessly. To circumvent the law, Chinese couples who longed for sons hid their daughters with relatives, or, in extreme cases, even resorted to infanticide or abandonment. Female Chinese babies began to turn up in public areas such as parks, bus stations, on the doorsteps of orphanages, and even at the side of the road. Occasionally, handwritten notes were tucked into her clothes. “Owing to the current political situation and heavy pressures that are too difficult to explain, we, who were her parents for these first days, cannot continue taking care of her,” one note read. “We can only hope that in this world there is a kind-hearted person who will care for her. Thank you. In regret and shame, your father and mother.”

The sheer number of homeless girls overwhelmed Chinese orphanages, and underfunding and understaffing soon led to monstrous conditions. Eyewitnesses described babies who had starved or choked to death because they were tied to beds during feedings. Without shoes or socks, barely covered with thin cotton clothes, even in freezing weather, these children were often kept strapped to chairs, cribs, or toilets for days. In 1995, a journalist from the German magazine Der Spiegel described the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute as a “children’s gulag”:

In a dim room, as big as a dance hall, babies and small children are lying—no, they are not lying, they are laid out, in cribs: handicapped small bodies, some just skin and bones. Kicking and thrashing, they doze in their own urine, some naked, some dressed in a dirty little jacket. The older children have wrapped the [corpse of a baby] in a couple of dirty cloths, which serve as a shroud. Then they shoved the dead baby under the bed, where it stays until the staff gets around to removing the corpse. On weekends that can take two or three days.

Possibly to relieve the orphanages of their workload, in 1992 mainland China began encouraging large-scale international adoption. That year, about two hundred children from China joined American families. Payment for services often occurred under mysterious circumstances (some American parents were asked to donate $3,000 in $100 bills to an orphanage), causing the U.S. media to hint at a profit motive. In 1993, the New York Times Sunday magazine ran a cover story about adoptions from China under the headline “China’s Market in Orphan Girls,” calling the babies “the Newest Chinese Export.” In response, the PRC temporarily shut down its adoption program, but resumed it shortly afterward—no doubt because the American demand for Chinese children was simply too great for the program to end permanently.

Because of a trend among American women to delay marriage and childbearing in favor of their careers, there were, by the end of the twentieth century, greater numbers of affluent, childless couples eager to adopt. But they also had to compete for fewer available children, because growing social acceptance of single mothers in the United States meant more of these mothers were keeping babies born out of wedlock. Moreover, the United States adoption system had become a bureaucratic nightmare, and other countries enforced strict rules regarding international adoptions, which favored younger, traditional, and heterosexual couples. For many Americans, adopting a baby girl from China was their only opportunity to start a family, and between 1985 and 2002, Americans adopted more than thirty-three thousand infants from the PRC—the largest source of American adoptions from abroad.⁶⁰

The typical couple adopting a Chinese immigrant baby was educated, older, and upper-middle-class. According to one study, their median age was 42.7 years, and about 65 percent of them had completed postgraduate studies. Because most Americans could not afford the cost of adopting a baby from China (from $15,000 to $20,000), the median household income of those adopting in the 1990s was high, in the $70,000-to-$90,000 range. The process was not only expensive but tedious and laborious, requiring background checks by the FBI, a visit from a social worker, fingerprinting by the police, and filing papers with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Typically, the adopting parents had to wait a year and a half just to have the paperwork completed.

The wait period was excruciating for many couples, especially as some formed psychological bonds with their future children even before meeting them in China. For instance, one Massachusetts woman had already received a photograph of the Chinese baby she would be adopting when the PRC abruptly closed its adoption program after the negative New York Times Sunday magazine article. “She spent eight months in purgatory, looking at that picture and thinking about how her baby was faring in a very distant country and orphanage,” wrote Christine Kukka in the anthology A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China. Shanti Fry remembered writing a new will: “I thought that if I got a child, Jeff and I could be traveling back with her from China and the plane would crash and somehow I would die and Jeff and the baby would survive—in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!”

For the lucky, the long-anticipated date would eventually arrive. The adoptive parents would fly to China, meet with orphanage officials, and receive their babies in hotel rooms and lobbies. After the realities of parenthood sank in—the diapers, the squalls, the constant feedings—some agonized over the best way to handle the ethnicity of their new children. Should they be reared as Americans or as Chinese? Would the child be culturally deprived after leaving her homeland? Jean H. Seeley remembered fighting back tears when she boarded the airplane with her new daughter. “Say good-bye to China, I don’t know when you will be back again,” she told her infant. Then she wondered, “Was it the right thing to take her to grow up in a country where she would be a minority?”

That their children would one day grow up and suffer racism was evident from remarks uttered from strangers. “Why are you kissing that child?” demanded a Los Angeles police officer when he saw a Caucasian mother nuzzling her toddler from China. After the expense and time required to adopt a baby, it did not occur to many parents that they might be viewed as kidnappers or pedophiles. They were shocked by the crudeness and insensitivity of other Americans. Some heard their children called “a chink baby” and suffered offhand jokes, like “Couldn’t get a white one, huh?” Others received hostile stares from men who had served in the Vietnam War. One outraged parent even met a Vietnam War veteran who told her baby that he had “killed a lot of your cousins.”

They knew their children would one day question their own identity, and the mystery surrounding their birth and first months. Some infants were found with gifts from the birth parents—sometimes a bracelet, a pendant, a sack of rice—while others bore tiny scars or birth-marks on their skin. Were these clues that might be used one day to trace their children to their original families? The children themselves, especially the precocious ones, were tormented by the enigma. Several Chinese daughters demanded to know why they were orphaned at birth, venting their confusion during temper tantrums: “You’re mean,” one daughter screamed. “I want my other Mommy in China!”

To handle these challenges, many parents did their best to teach their children about their heritage. They delved into ancient Chinese mythology, Confucian philosophy, and the novels of Pearl Buck. Although this education was not really Chinese, but rather an American interpretation of Chinese culture, the effort, nonetheless, was genuine. One proud parent announced that “we shop at Asian markets, we go to festivals.” Her daughters loved pandas, could identify China on a map, and could recite all the Chinese spoken in Big Bird Goes to China. The parents also networked with each other, exchanging information and child-rearing tips through Internet organizations such as Families with Children from China.

The adoption process sensitized thousands of parents to subtle racism in America. Suddenly they noticed the often cruel stereotypes of the Chinese in the media, even in children’s television programs like Sesame Street, which featured a female worm-puppet named “Lo Mein.” They became more attentive to the treatment of foreign aliens by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and aggressively lobbied for citizenship rights for their children. Annoyed by the red tape required to naturalize their Chinese babies, adoptive parents have demanded legislation to allow citizenship immediately and retroactively for all adopted foreign-born children. As a consequence, these children are serving as bridges between the Caucasian and ethnic Chinese communities in the United States. “I began to see children and their ‘differences’ in a new light,” one mother explained. “Suddenly the nonwhite kids weren’t ’nonwhite,‘ they were ’like my daughter.’”

It is ironic that some infants who had been discarded like garbage in the PRC ended up in some of the most affluent households in the United States, while thousands of adult Chinese worked for years to earn their passage to America. These nonstudent, nonprofessional adult immigrants were the group least visible to the white community, a group largely made up of illegal menial laborers hidden in the nation’s Chinatowns.

Some started as part of a “floating” migrant population of peasant workers in China, a population estimated to be as high as 200 million to 250 million people for the year 2000. Drifting from the countryside into the cities, they serviced the needs of the urban Chinese nouveau riche, and, treated like second-class citizens, many yearned to migrate abroad, in order to secure better wages and a better future for their children. Others came from the small business or entrepreneur class in China, frustrated by a system that favored those with political clout and by the incessant need to bribe the powerful in order to survive. A factory owner from Fuzhou claimed that when he refused to pay extortion money to local officials, they accused him of a crime he had not committed. “That’s why I left in a hurry,” he later said. “I made up my mind in a few days.” Others echoed similar dissatisfaction. According to Xiao Chen, formerly an illegal alien from Fuzhou, “In China today, unless you are the child of an official, or know how to open back doors, it’s hopeless.”

For many ambitious Chinese, only three choices seemed open: to resign oneself to one’s station in life; to master the game of politics; or to leave. The globalized Western media made the third alternative the most enticing. During the Deng era, the glamorous lives of Hollywood celebrities reached the Chinese masses through satellite dishes and VCRs.⁶¹ By the early 1990s, the prospect of unlimited wealth in America had infected the Fuzhou region with immigration fever. One cause for the perceived differences in national wealth was the exaggerations of movie and television dramas, but the greatest reason could be found in hard numbers. In 1991, the per capita income in the United States was $22,204, compared to a figure that ranged between $370 and $1,450 in China, leading many Chinese to become obsessed with the prospect of making a quick fortune in America. “Everyone went crazy,” the Sing Tao Daily reported. “The area was in a frenzy. Farmers put down their tools, students discarded their books, workers quit their jobs, and everyone was talking about nothing but going to America ... If people found out someone had just successfully arrived in the United States, his or her home will be crowded with people, both acquaintances and strangers, to come to collect information about going to America.”

Even though the United States granted an annual quota of twenty thousand immigration slots to the PRC, these usually went to the Chinese with education, official connections, or relatives in the United States. Consequently, many of the poorer or less-educated Chinese had to emigrate illegally, turning to the underworld for help, to achieve their Western dream. No one knows how many resorted to such methods, for it is not the nature of illegal operations to maintain records. Estimates range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand people a year, but an exact figure is impossible: “It’s like trying to pin jello to a wall,” said one FBI agent in New York.

These arrivals bore a striking resemblance to the first wave of Chinese who arrived during the nineteenth century. Both émigré waves consisted largely of young, able-bodied adult men with wives and families remaining in their native land. According to a survey conducted by Ko-lin Chin, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, most illegal Chinese immigrants in New York City were married men between the ages of twenty and forty, former laborers with an elementary or junior high education. But instead of originating from Canton like the early waves, they came mostly from Fuzhou, a commercial and fishing city of five million in Fujian province in the south of China.

Like Canton, Fuzhou enjoyed a tradition of citizens migrating abroad and establishing overseas communities in other countries. Close-knit family relationships provided émigrés with international capital and extensive business networks. Fujian province, like Guangdong, was also renowned for its independence and entrepreneurial spirit. Historically, it had been a frontier country overrun by outlaws and adventurers, something like the Wild West in the United States. The Chinese stereotyped the Fujianese as ruthless and ambitious, obsessed with making their fortunes. It is notable that among the forty billionaires of Chinese heritage in Asia, over half either came from Fujian or were descended from Fujianese people.

The story of illegal Fujianese immigration to the United States was not new. Some of the first Fujianese arrivals were sailors who served as staff on ships of the American armed forces during World War II. Many jumped ship, then settled secretly in New York City or other areas along the East Coast. Almost six thousand Chinese crewmen, many of them Fujianese, deserted and entered the United States between 1944 and 1960. As a result, the first links—kinship ties—so helpful in establishing immigration patterns, were forged between the United States and the Fujian region, especially the city of Fuzhou. By the end of the twentieth century, some PRC officials estimated that the vast majority of illegal Chinese aliens in the United States were natives of Fuzhou.

Clearly, some had left to escape political repression. Rutgers professor Ko-lin Chin, who surveyed dozens of illegal Fujian aliens, published some of their reasons for leaving. “During the Cultural Revolution, I was wrongfully labeled as a ‘counterrevolutionary’ and tortured,” one said. “I was victimized under the one-child policy, and I am disgusted with the Communist regime,” reported another. “When my wife was pregnant with our second child, she was forced to have an abortion five days before she was to give birth.”

But the most popular reason for emigration was not political but economic. According to Ko-lin Chin, 61 percent of the people in his study cited one dominant reason: money. Dreams of riches abound in the responses collected in his survey. “I heard that everything was so nice in America, you can even find gold in the streets.” “Before I came, I thought America was a very prosperous country, that it was a heaven filled with gold.” “When overseas Chinese came back, they spent money like water ... That’s why I envied the American lifestyle before I came here.” “When I was in China, I considered going to America as going to heaven.” “For us, it doesn’t mean freedom,” a Chinese villager told a reporter when describing the Statue of Liberty. “It means opportunity.”

To fill an insatiable demand for illegal immigration, organized crime figures—known as “snakeheads” for their stealth and speed—ran elaborate smuggling enterprises. By the end of the 1990s, the industry had become highly lucrative, earning up to $8 billion a year. Indeed, some international gangs came to favor human smuggling over narcotics, because the former was low-risk but highly profitable.

Smuggling was largely a game of cat-and-mouse played between the smugglers and the authorities. The first stage was routine. The snakehead would negotiate a fee for bringing the client to the United States (in the year 2000, the going rate was about $60,000 to $70,000). After receiving part of the fee as a deposit, the smuggler would secure a list of telephone numbers and addresses of relatives in both Fujian province and the United States who could provide down payments for the journey.

The second stage—preparing the paperwork—was also relatively easy. The snakeheads secured exit visas by bribing PRC officials, and once out of China, the émigrés waited in safe houses in cities like Hong Kong or Bangkok while the snakeheads procured the travel documents necessary for their entry into the United States. Fake passports would be created by professional forgers, bought as stolen goods on the black market, or obtained from corrupt officials in North America.

For some émigrés, the wait was long and agonizing. One man from Fujian province said he was locked in a motel basement for six months in Bangkok before the smugglers placed him and others on a tiny boat headed for Africa, en route to the United States. Another immigrant, a farmer, was forced to hide in a pigsty for months in rural Thailand before the snakeheads flew him to Frankfurt and then Miami.

The actual journey was the most difficult part of all. With no one single route to the United States, Chinese illegal aliens could arrive from all directions, by air, sea, or land. A review of internal INS documents revealed Chinese smuggling rings in countries like Australia, Japan, Guam, Brazil, Spain, and Russia. Sometimes the Chinese were flown directly into the United States, and in the early 1990s about one in five illegal Chinese aliens entered the United States by plane. But a much safer strategy was to fly the Chinese immigrant into Canada or Mexico instead. Once in Canada, the immigrant could hide in the airport bathroom, flush his documents down the toilet, and then claim political asylum. After his release by immigration authorities, he could sneak over the border with counterfeit papers, hide in the trunk of a car, or travel by boat, inflatable raft, or snowmobile to New York State. Immigrants could also slip across the border from Mexico, in refrigerated trucks or tourist buses.

Most of the time, the Chinese illegal aliens were required to make the journey across water and land. Many hid aboard Taiwanese fishing boats or cargo ships that sailed for Central America, or traveled by rail to cities with lax or corrupt security, such as Moscow or Budapest. Some immigrants endured long train rides to Eastern Europe, during which they subsisted on scanty meals of rice and nuts, then attempted to cross the border into Western European countries. This might involve climbing mountains and swimming across rivers. “It is arduous and taxing—many don’t make it,” Beng Chew, a London solicitor, told a reporter in June 2000. “Last year, I heard one woman in her early 30s died from exhaustion in the mountains. Some of the others didn’t want to leave her but the agent insisted that they carry on.”

The dangers of the journey equaled or surpassed what nineteenth-century Chinese émigrés endured. Smuggling often entailed lethal conditions, such as boats made of rotting, crumbling wood; illegal Chinese aliens have described trips in which they were forced to bail water out of sinking ships. In one case, crew members abandoned a disabled vessel and considered dynamiting it with hundreds of passengers on board. In July 1995, the U.S. Coast Guard discovered 147 illegal aliens from China on a fishing boat that one American authority called “the most incredibly screwed-up, rusted-out vessel I’ve ever seen.” The immigrants had squeezed into a room no larger than the width of two cars. Contaminated water filled the hold, and the air was fetid because the portholes were covered with plywood.

Not surprisingly, the journey for some Chinese ended in the morgue. In June 1993, the Golden Venture, a ship with more than 260 illegal Chinese passengers, ran aground two hundred yards from Rockaway Peninsula near New York City. The crew urged the immigrants to jump overboard and swim for shore. So close to reaching their America, the Chinese took a last risk. Ten drowned, while hundreds of others were rescued by the New York City police, the Immigration Service, and the Coast Guard. Some Chinese émigrés died in Europe, which presumably many saw as a way station to the United States. In 1995, eighteen Chinese died of asphyxiation in a sealed trailer en route to Hungary. The following year, five Chinese corpses were discovered in a truck crossing the Austrian border. In the summer of 2000, authorities found one of the most grisly human smuggling tragedies yet: fifty-eight Chinese suffocated in a giant refrigerator of rotting tomatoes in Dover, England. When officials swung open the doors, they were met by the putrid stench of decay, and two survivors reaching out with torn bloody fingers, gasping, “Bang wo! Bang wo!”(Help me! Help me!)

The most frightening voyages occurred within sealed cargo containers on freight ships. Some illegal immigrants were literally boxed in for weeks, enduring the entire trip in near-darkness. Some were given a certain measure of comfort, such as fans, mattresses, and cell phones, while others arrived “awash in human waste,” in conditions so filthy that immigration authorities had to don hazardous materials gear before entering. Many survived on starvation-level food and water rations: one Chinese boy who spent twelve days and nights in a cargo container said he had eaten nothing but water and crackers during the entire journey. He and his fellow passengers huddled under blankets on a mattress, used plastic bags as toilets, and played poker by flashlight to while away the time.

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 the amount, some sweatshop owners paid no wages to workers at all: when a manufacturing contract was completed, the owner would shut down the operation and move elsewhere. As a result, some Chinese bitterly regretted moving to America. “To tell you the truth, I feel like garbage in the United States,” a construction worker said. “Here, we sleep on the floor, and we work like slaves ... Those living with me in the same apartment cry all the time.”

Overinflated rents worsened their misery. During the 1980s and 1990s, illegal Chinese aliens poured into Chinatowns just as businessmen from Taiwan and Hong Kong, jittery about political developments in Asia, invested their capital in American real estate. The result was a frenzy of speculation and soaring rents,⁶³ which pressured Chinatown sweatshop owners to slash payments to workers even further. In New York, Chinese laborers routinely worked twelve hours a day in unventilated garment shops with broken sprinkler systems and padlocked metal gates barring the fire escapes, conditions rivaling those in the ill-fated Triangle Shirtwaist factory, where a fire destroyed 146 lives in 1911.

After work, many Chinese aliens came home to dingy, crowded apartments, often rat-infested, dungeon-like basements with exposed rusty pipes, live wires, and asbestos. Instead of taking a private room, many rented bunk space—often little more than two-by-fours-for ninety dollars a month, and shared the cost with other illegal immigrants by sleeping in shifts. “Most of our villagers considered America heaven,” K. T. Yang, president of the United Fujian American Association told a reporter in New York. “And they’re now forced to live in hell.”

Despite these hardships, the frugal living habits of these illegal Chinese aliens—such as sharing crowded apartments and eating at the restaurants that employed them—enabled many to clear their financial obligations within a few years. According to Ko-lin Chin, by the early twenty-first century Chinese smugglees typically worked off their debt to the snakeheads in four years, with the majority obtaining their green cards or U.S. citizenship within five or six years of their arrival. “They are hard-working and ambitious, which is why they are here,” Chin said. “Sooner or later, most will find a way to legalize their status.”

Over time, he noted, some of these naturalized Chinese Americans have become highly successful, opening their own take-out restaurants, garment factories, renovation companies, groceries, and other small businesses. “They now drive Mercedes-Benzes and own million-dollar homes,” Chin said of several Chinese he had surveyed as illegal aliens years before. “Most don’t have a lot of formal education or skills—you wouldn’t see them in computers—but they are good entrepreneurs. Americans don’t realize how creative they can be.”

But unforeseen events could thwart even the best-laid plans, and during the first critical years in the United States—the years when illegal aliens struggled feverishly to pay off their debt—the opportunities for their extortion were endless. Snakeheads were known to threaten relatives of immigrants, hoping to squeeze more money out of them, even if they were not behind on their payments. “If smugglers want the money, they say they will kill the males and sell the girls into a brothel,” one illegal Chinese alien said. In 1995, Chinese debt collectors kidnapped Gao Liqin, a thirty-eight-year-old immigrant seamstress, from her home in Queens, New York. The abductors woke her family in Fujian with a phone call in the middle of the night, demanding $38,000 in ransom. Weeping into the phone, Gao Liqin made desperate pleas to her parents to cooperate. But by sending their daughter to the United States, the Gao family still owed a $30,000 debt, and they could not raise the money. The kidnappers cut off her finger, stuffed her head into a plastic bag, gang-raped her, strangled her with a telephone cord, and crushed her skull by hitting her over the head with a TV set. Amazingly, this killing did not deter other members of the Gao family from planning to travel to America. “If you work hard and stay out of trouble, usually you are fine,” her brother said. “We had bad luck.”

Many illegal aliens believed that eluding the snakeheads was impossible. “You can hide for a few years, maybe a year or two, but you can’t for a lifetime,” said Wang Libin, a passenger on the ill-fated Golden Venture who was granted political asylum because of his activism during the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. However, he still owed money to the smugglers. “You have friends, these friends have friends, you have family. They will find you. There’s no way to hide.”

As a result, many victims dared not report snakehead crimes to the authorities. For even if they did, neither the police nor the INS would have the manpower, time, or money to crack down on the underground world of Chinese smugglers. Nor did officials have any incentive to do so.⁶⁴During the 1990s, critics charged that neither the U.S. government nor the People’s Republic of China enforced their immigration laws because the American garment industry relied on or exploited illegal Chinese aliens, and the mainland Chinese economy benefited from overseas remittances.

Given these unfavorable conditions, then, why did the Chinese continue to come? For those considering emigration, the prospect of their being exploited was only half of the equation. The other half was how their families would benefit from remittances sent home. During the 1990s, the fruits of émigré labor transformed entire regions in China, studding the Fuzhou landscape with mansions. Many were elegant stone houses with traditional moon gates and round windows; others were cheap, gaudy replicas of European castles, sparkling with pink or gold tiles, resembling the architecture of Las Vegas and Disneyland. Some were six stories tall, complete with elevators, swimming pools, luxury cars, and satellite dishes. Within these ostentatious homes, occupants wore gold jewelry and carried cell phones—flashy displays of wealth that provoked envy among neighbors and inspired others to emigrate.

Like suburban bedroom communities, these Chinese neighborhoods were filled with wives and children, except the men were working not in a nearby city but on another continent. By the end of the 1990s, so many wives were left behind in Fujian province that their home villages were known as “widow villages.” Some “widows” built mansions piecemeal. Looming over rice paddies were half-constructed palatial homes, some with bare concrete inside, awaiting fresh infusions of cash from the United States. They evoked memories of the fortresses in Toishan, built by relatives of the earliest Chinese immigrants. Indeed, the people of Fujian were repeating a pattern from the nineteenth century—impoverished, overworked Chinese émigrés laboring under conditions of near-slavery in the United States, supporting families who lived like gentry in China. By the end of the twentieth century, a culture of leisure had already settled among the young in Fujian province. Everyone knew that laborers who earned $40 a month in China could make $2,000 in the United States. “So no one in the village works before they go to America,” one immigrant’s wife told a reporter. “There’s no point.”

In many areas, even the wives and mothers were missing. Some villages have been reduced to “ghost towns,” as one scholar put it, “populated only by old people caring for very young children whose parents are working in garment factories on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Chinese takeout restaurants scattered across the 50 states.” Because these communities lost their most productive adults—almost all men and women between the ages of eighteen and forty-five—child care responsibilities fell primarily on the shoulders of doting but aged grandparents. In 1999, the New York Times reported that female garment workers were paying a $1,000 fee, plus airfare, to have their infants safely delivered from New York Chinatown to their families in Fujian. So while some of the most affluent Americans were importing Chinese babies for adoption, many of the poorest Chinese women were shipping their babies—U.S. citizens by American birth—back to their home villages, to join the ranks of a new Chinese aristocracy.

Many illegal aliens felt the money was worth the risk, the heartbreak, and the fractured families. Some believed their children would ultimately benefit from the arrangement: “I am sacrificing myself to bring happiness to my family,” one Chinese worker said. Others groped toward an elusive but enticing vision of future paradise. “Look at your salary,” Fuzhou native Cho Li Muwang told an American reporter after two failed attempts to leave China. “If you can go to some other place, even very far away, across the ocean, and work the same, but make ten times more money, would you go? What about twenty times more? What about one hundred times more? Would you go?”