Word: fujian
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...Chinese woman is a saint to thousands. For 13 years Cheng Chui-ping sold clothes and cheap eats along East Broadway in New York City's Chinatown. During lunch hours she would chop vegetables, wash dishes and wait on tables at a restaurant that served dishes from her native Fujian province. Occasionally she could be seen tottering down the street struggling with bales of clothes, dragging them into her general-merchandise store. But to many she was a veritable goddess, dispensing both mercy and fortune. Her devotees called her Dajie Ping--Big Sister Ping...
...snakeheads were not finished with Chen anyway. After a day in Houston, he was driven to Los Angeles, locked in a room and told to phone his family in Fujian for the passage money. The price had suddenly increased because of the Chinese who died or were arrested en route. The snakeheads now demanded $50,000 for delivering Chen to the U.S. That represented a fortune, more than 30 years' earnings for Chen back in Fujian. The amount was not negotiable...
...come of age in the course of his long odyssey. He cannot hide his pride when he says he will keep sending money to support his family in China, even after he has paid off his debt. For the time being he works with 17 other Chinese, all from Fujian, as well as five Bangladeshis and one Indian--not a green card among them. Finding proper papers will come. "I haven't had time to work that out yet," he says, implying it will not be that hard. Meanwhile, he is trying to learn English so he can climb...
What Chen did not know was that news of the deaths and the arrests had made its way back to Fujian. In their small red brick house at the end of a dirt road, Chen's parents were deeply worried. "We would make food and then just sit at the table looking at it, with no appetite to eat it," says his mother, a thin woman with a weather-beaten face from years of working in the fields. She wished bitterly that she had been able to stop him from going...
...night, when the temperature dropped below freezing, they could do nothing but hold each other for warmth. Their Mexican guides would not allow them to light fires, and Chen still had only the two thin shirts and one pair of trousers he had been wearing since he left Fujian. On the sixth night they reached a chainlink fence. The Mexicans sliced it open, and Chen pushed his way through. After 10,500 miles and 135 days, he had finally made...