Patrick Radden Keefe has written about international security, immigration, espionage, and the globalization of crime for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Slate. He is a fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank in New York, and a project leader at the World Policy Institute. Keefe’s most recent book, The Snakehead, tells the story of Sister Ping, a legendary crime boss who specialized in smuggling illegal immigrants into New York City’s Chinatown. Sister Ping was earning an estimated $40 million a year from her smuggling business before the Golden Venture, a ship carrying 300 people in its hold, ran aground in Queens, beginning her downfall. Keefe talked with Byron Perry for Zócalo about the changing demographics of Manhattan’s Chinatown and circuitous immigration routes.

Q. How did you first begin writing The Snakehead?

A. The book started in the summer of 2005. I had just finished law school and I was studying for the bar exam in New York and Sister Ping, who was a snakehead, a smuggler – who’s one of the central figures in the book – was on trial in New York. And there was a lot of press coverage in New York papers and she just seemed like a really compelling character. So that was what started it all, I started following the trial and then I pitched the New Yorker to let me write an article about the trial and about her. That was sort of the beginning of the book, this New Yorker article which ended up coming out in the spring of 2006.

Q. Why do they call human smugglers “snakeheads”? I looked it up and it’s actually a fish.

A. Well, there’s no relation to the fish. Nobody really knows exactly, I’ve heard a bunch of different stories when I was doing the research in Chinatown, and in China and Hong Kong, and Bangkok. Different people will tell you different things. One explanation was that the routes that the smugglers use to bring people to the U.S. are incredibly circuitous, they kind of snake around the planet. Sometimes you’ll hear the route referred to as the snake, so the snakehead is the person leading that.

Q. How well did you know New York’s Chinatown before you wrote The Snakehead? Did it meet your expectations or were there any surprising things you discovered?

A. I actually didn’t know it all that well. I knew New York pretty well, I’d gone to college in New York and I’d already lived there for a few years, but Chinatown for me was restaurants and occasionally festivals. Everything was surprising. The first thing that really surprised me as I got to know it was, I had naively thought of Chinatown as this kind of undifferentiated neighborhood. I didn’t realize that in New York City there’s the old Chinatown, which is everything west of the Bowery, and that was a very Cantonese neighborhood that was established 100 years ago. And then there’s the new Chinatown, which is really mostly Fujianese and east of the Bowery. It began with people like Sister Ping, who came in the early ‘80s, and then started sending for their families, and relatives, and neighbors and eventually tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people settled that area.

Q. The website for The Snakehead mentions that apparently the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. over the last three decades have been from the Fujian Province. Why is that?

A. There are a couple different explanations. One is that… people always leave the Fujian Province. If you actually go there, and I did, it’s this little sliver of a province right on the southeast coast and it’s kind of walled off from China by mountains on three sides. There’s basically mountains on three sides and then the coast. And going back hundreds of years, people have left Fujian Province, whether it was sailors and fisherman or pirates. People who made their living from the sea. Actually if you go around the Pacific Rim, a lot of the Chinese communities in Indonesia and the Phillippines and so forth are actually really heavily Fujianese people who moved a long time ago. So that’s part of it. And then, there was just this weird thing that happened where a few people came in the ‘80s and word got back to Fujian Province that you could make in a year in New York City what you would make in 10 years in China. So more and more people started coming and it was this sort of freak thing. The Fujianese actually have a great expression, they say, “One brings ten, ten bring a hundred.” And that was what happened.

Q. Yea, as happens with all immigration networks. They start with a few people and then word breaks out and before you know it a whole neighborhood is created.

A. Yea, I mean, part of what was so fun about this story is that in some respect, there are aspects of it that were distinctly Fujianese, but in another respect it’s just another American immigration story. And the neighborhood where the Fujianese settled, before the Fujianese were there it was the Jews from Easter Europe, the Italians. Various people cycled through the Lower East Side.

Q. How did Sister Ping and her criminal network compare to other snakeheads around America in other Chinatowns? How does the smuggling of people in New York’s Chinatown compare to smuggling in, say, San Francisco or L.A.? Is New York the epicenter?

A. Yes. At least for the Fujianese, New York was always the big jumping off point where you wanted to be. But that didn’t mean that people stayed. If you were Fujianese, often you would have family and friends in New York’s Chinatown, you could find people that spoke your dialect. But once people got a toehold in Chinatown, often they would move out either to Chinatowns in San Francisco or Philly or wherever, or to the suburbs. A lot of these people end up in the restaurant business. The view is, you know, “Why would I want to run a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown somewhere with all the competition. What I want to do is move out to the ‘burbs, a long way from any Chinese people, where I’m the only Chinese restaurant from miles around.”

Q. So New York is the epicenter then, for smuggling people from China into the U.S.?

A. Yea, absolutely.

Q. Is it big on the West Coast anywhere?

A. Yea, definitely San Diego, L.A., San Francisco were destinations as well. Sister Ping brought people into those cities. Some people would come to New York and then relocate to those cities. But New York’s Chinatown was always the heart of the snakehead trade.

Q. How did you find people to talk to you in Chinatown, and was it difficult? Do you speak Chinese?

A. I don’t speak Chinese and it was a challenge. Although, I think to some extent the insularity of Chinatown and the sort of inscrutability of the Chinese in America can be overblown a little bit. It was definitely a struggle initially, mainly because I didn’t speak Chinese and at first I didn’t have connections in the community. I was sort of the white guy with a notebook knocking on your door, which is never a good thing. It really helped actually having the New Yorker article. The book started with the article and when I finished the article I was able to give that to people and basically say, “Look, this is the kind of thing I’m doing, this is what the book is gonna look like.” People would read it and through that I managed to find a few people in the Fujianese community who kind of embraced the project and gave it their blessing. They started introducing me to people and that was really the key. A couple of these people sort of blessed the undertaking and then all kinds of people came around and wanted to talk to me. It’s actually sort of typical of how things work in Chinatown. You never go to a person directly, you never go and knock on the front door. You get someone else to refer you. And that was how it worked when I went to China. The good reporting I was able to do there happened because people in Chinatown had said that I was coming over.

Q. Do you have any idea why they blessed your project? Was there anything they wanted to get the word out about or gain from your story?

A. Well, I think there were two things that were going on. One was simply that, within the Chinese community in America, the arrival of huge numbers of Fujianese in the last three decades is a big story and it’s one that, in the minds of the people I interviewed, hadn’t really been covered in a major, comprehensive way in the English-language press. So part of it was, you know, for people living in Chinatown, this demographic fact of how their neighborhood has changed. The other part of it was about Sister Ping in particular. Part of what appealed to me about her as a subject from the beginning was that even as the FBI chased after her and Justice Department prosecuted her and she was sentenced to 35 years – in Chinatown, she was and is regarded as kind of a hero. Sort of a noble people who helped a lot of people escape pretty difficult lives and build new lives in America. For a lot of people, there was a sense, I think, in talking to me that she had been covered in a one-dimensional way. Negatively. As kind of a devil woman. And I certainly never suggested that I would whitewash anything. If you read the book, she does an awful lot of pretty bad things, and in my view she’s not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. But I think people were generally eager to have someone acknowledge that in Chinatown she is regarded morally as a more complicated person than she has been in the press.

Q. You mentioned that you traveled to China to research and report for the book. Where did you go in China and did you go anywhere else outside of New York to report for the book?

A. I went to Fujian Province in China and I was there for almost two weeks doing a lot of reporting in the various towns and villages. I went to Hong Kong twice and did a lot of research there because that was a big hub for snakeheads. I went to Thailand – Bangkok and also down the coast to Pattaya, which was where the ships would pick people up. It was where the Golden Venture went and actually picked up passengers. It’s sort of a straight shot to the coast from Bangkok. The passengers wouldn’t leave China directly, they would go to western China and cross through Burma, trek through the mountains, through the Golden Triangle to Thailand and Bangkok. And then from Bangkok to Pattaya, where ships would pick them up. I went to Canada. I went all over the U.S.

Q. Why wouldn’t they leave directly from China?

A. Well, because there was this weird thing happening where snakeheads had a hub in Bangkok and there was so much corruption at the Bangkok International Airport that it was easier to fly people directly to the U.S. from Bangkok than from Hong Kong. The idea was, if you can get to Bangkok, you can get to America. And then, eventually in the early ‘90s U.S. immigration agents at the Bangkok airport started cracking down on them. And that was when they started using ships. There were so many people waiting in Bangkok to leave that they couldn’t fit them all on planes. So at that point they started thinking that they could put them all in the hold of a ship.

Q. Is there any message you’d like readers to take away from the book on immigration in the U.S.? Do you make any argument or judgment on immigration?

A. I make a lot of arguments. One would be that there are 12 million illegal immigrants in this country and we have to acknowledge that they’re here. We’re not going to be able to deport them all and trying to close our eyes and hope they all go away is not realistic. And that a lot of them are forced into a sort of underworld where they become very vulnerable. So I think that’s something we need to deal with. The other really big thing for me – and this can cut both ways, depending on where you come down on immigration issues – is that the number one thing that astonished me when I did the research was the incredible lengths that people will go to get to America. It’s not easy. People go into debt, they will risk their lives, they’ll make these incredible journeys. The amazing thing for me about the Golden Venture is that the ship was at sea for 120 days. To give you a yardstick on that, the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 was a 60-day voyage. So these people were in the hold of a ship for twice that. And then a lot of them were in prison for four years in the U.S. and they came out and they love America. They want to stay here. To me that was startling. I was lucky enough to be born in America, but I’m not sure that if I wasn’t I could necessarily do the things that these people did to get here and to stay here.

*Photo of Patrick Radden Keefe by Sai Srikandarajah.