Word: snakehead
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...back out by a distant force. That faraway energy is tugging at him, too, drawing him away from this muddy beach in China's eastern Fujian province toward Europe, to a better life he is sure will one day be his. Last year, the 29-year-old told a snakehead, as traffickers who help smuggle Chinese abroad are known, that he was ready. Many of his friends and family members have already gone. Now it is his turn. He wants to follow his older brother to England, where he's heard that the need for cheap labor is so great...
...overseas gold remains great. When his restaurant in England is busy, Little Lin's brother, Big Lin, can make $600 a week, tax free, and despite his underground status, his life is hardly a misery. Big Lin does not know anyone who has been held hostage by a snakehead or enslaved in a factory. Nor has he ever been stopped by the police or threatened with deportation, despite an official 2005 U.K. study that estimated there are up to 570,000 illegal immigrants there...
...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...
...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...
...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...