Dreams of Leaving

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Many Chinese would consider Little Lin's life plenty fortunate already. His construction job near the city of Fuzhou earns him $375 a month in peak season. With that salary, he can afford Levis and Internet sessions to learn about his future home. He prefers David Beckham to Wayne Rooney, and knows the pound-yuan exchange rate. Often, Little Lin talks with his friends in England through icq or text messages. "There is not so much distance between Fujian and England," he says.

If only that were true. The number and nature of countries between China and England are a bit fuzzy to Little Lin. But it's through these places that he will have to travel. The snakehead has promised Little Lin a real tourist visa to Russia, then a clandestine overland trip through Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany and onward to England. Little Lin knows he will have to hide in vans and safe houses and subsist on rice gruel. But he is optimistic. Someone from his village recently arrived safely in England after using the same snakehead he has contacted. "It's very safe," he insists. "Bad things can happen here, too."

Little Lin has heard from friends in England that it will take about three years to repay the snakehead's fee, but hopes he'll be able to work off the debt more quickly. Then perhaps he and his brother will start a chain of restaurants together. It doesn't matter that Little Lin doesn't know how to cook. English people, his brother has told him, aren't too particular about what they eat. "Maybe when I return, I'll own three restaurants," he says. "Then my family will be proud of me, just like we are of my big brother."

The first thing the snakehead wants to say is that he isn't some slave driver or gangster. He is, he says, a respectable businessman from Fujian's interior who settled in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s and started a textile import company. That was just after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and it was easy for an enterprising Fujianese to sell cheap cloth to Czechs. Today, he has upgraded his trading from cloth to people. Willing people, he insists. "There are too many people in China, so we have to go abroad to make money," he says. "And in Europe, the people are old or lazy, so they need to import cheap labor." For the past seven years the snakehead has been searching for the equilibrium between supply and demand. This time, he's back in Sanming to shore up old contacts and size up new customers, sitting in a private room in one of the city's many tea houses. The call from Little Lin was like any other. Little Lin had heard from friends that the snakehead didn't cheat his customers. Could he please help him, too? The snakehead agreed. "It's a dangerous business," says the 36-year-old. "But in the end you can make people happy, so that's a good end to the story."

Governments and law enforcement agencies don't view the snakehead's activities so favorably. Illegal immigrants have little recourse should the snakehead make off with their deposit, and are vulnerable to Dickensian conditions in the places where they must work long hours to pay off their debt. Knowing the snakehead or his family personally diminishes such risks, and most Fujianese migrants are only one degree removed from the person they will pay to get them abroad. "This isn't like cocaine, where there's one boss in Colombia who directs the whole business," says Frank Pieke, the director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Oxford University, who has written a book on Fujianese migration to Europe. "Instead, you have a very loose network of independent people with close local connections. This creates a sense of trust that results in stable commercial transactions."

The odyssey begins in Fujian, where the snakehead's contacts in the local Public Security Bureau help the customer get a Chinese passport. Then it's on to Beijing to apply for a visa to Russia, which easily grants visas to Chinese. The trip to Moscow is the simple part of the journey. The snakehead then takes the person's passport. He says it's for safety — it's harder to deport someone without ID — but, clearly, holding the document gives him power over his clients. From Russia, the Fujianese cross the forested and poorly patrolled Ukrainian and Slovakian borders by foot at night. Then they are stuffed into a minivan — with up to 12 Chinese crouched in the back — for the trip into the Czech Republic.