The Stone Monkey

illegal immigrants to the United States from China come from the southeastern coastal region of that country, generally from two provinces: in the far south, Guangdong Province, where Hong Kong is located, and just north of that, Fujian Province, whose major city is Fuzhou, a large seafaring center and probably the most popular point of embarkation for illegal immigrants beginning their journeys to other lands.
    L ANGUAGE The written Chinese language is the same throughout the country but as spoken there are great differences from one region to the other. The major dialects are Cantonese in the south, Minnanhua in Fujian and Taiwan, and Mandarin, or Putonghua, in Beijing and the north. The few Chinese words I use in the book are in the Putonghua dialect, which is the official language of the country.
    N AMES Chinese names are traditionally given in the reverse order from that used in the United States and Europe. For example, with Li Kangmei, Li is the family name and Kangmei is the given name. Some Chinese in the more urbanized regions of China or with close ties to the United States or other Western cultures may adopt a Western given name, which they use in addition to or instead of a Chinese given name. In such a case the Anglicized name precedes the family name, such as Jerry Tang.
    —J.D.

I
    The Snakehead

    Tuesday, the Hour of the Tiger, 4:30 A.M .,
    to the Hour of the Dragon, 8 A.M .
    The word Wei-Chi consists of two Chinese words—Wei, which means to “encircle,” and Chi, which means “piece.” As the game represents a struggle for life, it may be called the “war game.”
    —Danielle Pecorini and Tong Shu,
The Game of Wei-Chi                   

Chapter One
    They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.
    To the human smugglers—the snakeheads—who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged goods, they were ju-jia, piglets.
    To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were undocumenteds.
    They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.
    Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.
    They were his fragile cargo.
    And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, Captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.
    It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon as camouflage and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space. Trash and children’s plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.
    Despite the pitching waves, Captain Sen—a thirty-year veteran of the seas—walked down the steep metal steps without using the handrails and strode into the middle of the hold. He checked the carbon dioxide meter and found the levels acceptable though the air was vile with the smell of diesel fuel and humans who’d lived for two weeks in close proximity.
    Unlike many of the captains and crew who operated “buckets”—human smuggling ships—and who at best ignored or sometimes even beat or raped the passengers, Sen didn’t mistreat them. Indeed he believed that he was doing a good thing: transporting these families from difficulty to, if not certain wealth, at least the hope of a happy life in America, Meiguo in Chinese, which means the “Beautiful Country.”
    On this particular voyage, however, most of the immigrants distrusted him. And why not? They assumed he was in league with the snakehead who’d chartered the Dragon: Kwan Ang, known universally by his nickname, Gui, the Ghost. Tainted by the snakehead’s reputation for violence, Captain Sen’s efforts to engage the immigrants in conversation had been rebuffed and had yielded only one friend. Chang Jingerzi—who preferred his Western name of Sam Chang—was a forty-five-year-old former college professor from a suburb of the huge port city of Fuzhou in southeastern China. He was bringing his entire family to