The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

Earlier this month a read a master work of narrative nonfiction  Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 

Through the Chicago Public Library I was able to borrow another work by Patrick Radden Keefe, The  Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,focusing on the trafficking of Undocumented immigrants from China to the New York City..  The leaders in this enterprise are called "snakeheads"

"In this thrilling panorama of real-life events, the bestselling author of Empire of Pain investigates a secret world run by a surprising criminal: a charismatic middle-aged grandmother, who from a tiny noodle shop in New York’s Chinatown managed a multi-million dollar business smuggling people.

“Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that it’s all true.” —Time" From the publisher Penquin Random House

 

Keefe reveals the inner workings of Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way, he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of illegal immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them. Grand in scope yet propulsive in narrative force, The Snakehead is both a kaleidoscopic crime story and a brilliant exploration of the ironies of immigration in America.

In 1993, a cargo ship called the Golden Venture ran aground on a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York. The ship, which had set off four months earlier from Bangkok, had stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach America. It carried a desperate cargo: 286 undocumented people from Fuzhou in China, who had made the voyage in the clothes they stood up in, without any kind of adequate sanitation on board, and little food or water. With the ship stranded offshore, most of the migrants, stick-thin and delirious, jumped into the freezing sea – it was 2am – to try to reach the promised land, the lights of Coney Island visible across the bay. Ten people drowned, the rest were picked up by the quickly scrambled authorities on the beach to be held in various prisons, some for four years, while they sought asylum. About half were eventually deported.

The Book goes back to Fuzhou China showing us why people would go into huge debt to try to get to America.  Keefe explains the complex international criminal conspiracies involved.  He follows the lives of the people who remained in America and those deported as well as Americans dedicated to helping them.

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter. 

Patrick started contributing to The New Yorker in 2006. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014. Say Nothing received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was selected by the New York Times as one of the “20 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Empire of Pain was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. 

He is also the writer and host of WIND OF CHANGE, an 8-part podcast, which investigates the strange convergence of espionage and heavy metal music during the Cold War, and was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by The Guardian and Entertainment Weekly.  

Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a law degree from Yale. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.