The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld… (2025)

“There is a famous story about Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Washington in January 1979 when Jimmy Carter scolded him about China’s restrictions on the freedom of departure and suggested more people should be allowed to leave China. Deng fixed Carter with his beady gaze and said: “Certainly, President Carter. How many millions would you like?” - Patrick Radden Keefe

“Early on he went to see her at her at the Knickerbocker Village apartment. He made it clear to her, through the interpreter, that they were on to her and would get her eventually. To his surprise Sister Ping wasn’t fazed in the slightest. ‘You don’t have the time or the resources to get me.’ But what always struck him about the exchange wasn’t just the arrogance of it, or the insult, so much as the fact that she was right.” - Sister Ping to an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, 1984

“For the Fujianese who could now afford refrigerators and televisions, purchase cars, throw wedding banquets and build new homes, no amount of propaganda or persuasion could diminish the widely held conviction the snakehead trade was a fundamental social good. It enabled hundreds of thousands of people to pull themselves out of poverty to material comforts that would have been unimaginable a generation before them.” - Patrick Radden Keefe

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Patrick Radden Keefe, a long time journalist with the NY Times and New Yorker, begins this account of New York’s Chinatown with the 1993 beached ‘Golden Venture’ ship in Queens carrying three hundred undocumented immigrants, ten who died in the landing. Beginning in the 1980’s waves of Fujianese came to NYC, supplanting an earlier Cantonese population here since the late 19th century. The book is only partially a study of the ship incident, and more of the human smuggling gangs operating between China and Chinatown, in particular one leader Sister Ping, and a general history of Chinese immigration to the US.

The 1848 discovery of gold in California and abundance of land attracted Cantonese laborers and fortune seekers. Free passage was provided in exchange for indentured work. The construction of the trans-continental railroad brought many thousands of Chinese workers, until the west was flooded with US migrants after the Civil War. In direct competition for employment the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 ended immigration and the Chinese retreated to restaurant and laundry businesses. FDR repealed the Act in 1943 as a concession to Chinese allies in WWII but Mao’s victory in 1949 curtailed further immigration.

Peasants were tied to their provinces after the war. Ping was born in rural Fujian months after the PRC was created. 1958’s Great Leap Forward turned farms into communes, starving 38 million farmers. 1966’s Cultural Revolution closed schools and encouraged students to turn on elders, further eroding Ping’s trust in China’s future. The Fujianese had a long history of seafaring, trading and smuggling, and were spread over SE Asia and Pacific islands. In 1973 she was married, moving to Hong Kong, and in 1981 followed in the footsteps of her father and husband, who had lived in New York but been deported.

By working long hours at menial off-the-book jobs, living in cramped grimy apartments and sleeping in shifts, the Fujianese were able to pay off their snakehead debts of $18,000 in a few years, the price of illegal passage to the US. They came in the tens of thousands. Ping arrived by airplane with a work visa; she had a successful business in Hong Kong, and rented an apartment in a nearby NYC housing project. She opened a store and began to smuggle Fujianese through Hong Kong, Central America, Mexico to LA inside hidden compartments in vans by the hundreds, with help of her sisters and brothers.

In NY Ping would collect money from relatives of her clients before their release, whom they would need to repay. She undercut Western Union and Bank of China remittance fees, bought a building and opened a restaurant. A 1986 act gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants, encouraging a flood of new ones. Her price for entry doubled to $36,000. Ping was backed by the Chinatown tongs, a combination of credit union, employment agency and an arbitrator of disputes, regulating brothels, gambling and drug trade. By the late 80’s they had begun to subcontract out enforcement duties to street gangs.

The INS and FBI were aware of Ping’s operation soon after it started but short of resources nothing was done. With a large influx of immigrants gangs proliferated, extorting money from businesses, territorial wars waged block-by-block. The new gangs didn’t observe traditional tong power structures and burglarized local homes for hoards of cash, including Ping’s. A leader of the Fuk Ching gang, known as Ah Kay, kidnapped new arrivals and forced families to pay ransom. But the real money was in smuggling people. By the early 90’s Ping began to use the Niagara River as the point of entry into New York.

A tragic accident alerted the Canadian authorities who were soon in touch with American investigators. When Ping was caught in a sting many of her family members were arrested with her. They received only a few months in jail for this single incident although courts were aware of the larger operation. The 1989 massacre at Tiananmen had spurred GHW Bush to offer more visas to students and political refugees, a boon for the snakehead trade. It also included provisions to respond to China’s one child policy, coerced abortions or sterilization, so that any fertile Chinese person was a candidate for asylum.

Following the Bush laws remote border crossings were no longer needed. Migrants showed up at JFK after flushing passports down the airplane toilet, claimed political asylum and picked up in the arrivals lobby. They flooded the INS in hundreds of thousands. Impossible to deport, since their country of origin refused to repatriate the undocumented, they disappeared into the underground economy. In contrast to the INS the snakeheads were well funded sophisticated organizations, by some estimates bringing in $3-7 billion in fees. Ah Kay, who was deported after prison time, returned as a political refugee.

An increasing influx of clients led snakeheads to use cargo ships to smuggle people directly, avoiding expensive airfare and travel documents. Ah Kay helped offload passengers on smaller fishing boats to avoid detection by the Coast Guard. Ping formed a partnership with him but gave information to the FBI to get revenge for his previous kidnapping of her children. As business continued to boom Ah Kay financed a large boat along with Ping and others. Clients were stuck in Bangkok and Mombasa with no way to leave. Together the partners purchased a derelict fishing boat and renamed it as the ‘Golden Venture’.

Keefe spends a fair amount of time describing the transport conditions of the immigrants who risked their lives trying to reach the US. Some hiked through the malaria infested jungle of Burma to Thailand, others spent months in the filthy holds of ships with little water or food. Through remote countries like Kenya and Guatemala many died on the way, testaments to their will to survive. Ultimately Ping and Ah Kay went to prison, he with a reduced sentence and witness protection for cooperating on gang cases. Ping was sentenced to 35 years, and served 10 before her death. She is revered in Chinatown along with Bush.

The passengers on the ‘Golden Venture’ were detained in prisons across the country, part of the immigration policy of the new Clinton administration. One in ten were granted asylum, half deported and the rest imprisoned for four years awaiting appeals. Clinton paroled them in 1997. Instead of moving to Chinatown they spread out over the country many opening restaurants. Economic gains in China lessened the volume of migrants. During the time period covered here an estimated 500,000 had gained entry through the snakehead business, although it is hard to determine because of the clandestine nature of the trade.

This book could have been mostly contained in an extended magazine article; one appeared in the New Yorker by Keefe. In over 300 pages Keefe reports on all of his research in the Chinatown underworld. As a sociological study it has limited insight into the majority of the law abiding Chinese who may or may not have landed here illegally. Chinatown has long been and remains a peaceful and culturally stimulating place in lower Manhattan. In the 90’s gang wars were inscrutable to outsiders; things were worse in the Bronx or Brooklyn. Short of this perspective it’s a well written look inside the seamier side of the neighborhood.

In 1960 there were 236,000 Chinese in America. By1990 that number had swelled to 1.6 million. A large portion of that growth was Fujianese, and for the vast majority of Fujianese emigrants, the first stop was New York City. Chinatown residents began referring to East Broadway as Fuzhou Street. They knew that most of the Fujianese rivals were illegal and still paying off their passage. They called them ‘eighteen-thousand-dollar men’ after the going snakehead rate in the eighties.

Keefe describes the extensive human smuggling operations from Fujian province, Fujianese gangs that sprang up and exploited businesses and emigrants in Chinatown, the innocuous looking Sister Ping “the mother of all snakeheads”, and the decade long efforts of U.S. law enforcement to get to the bottom of it all. Snakehead is what Fujianese called the head of a human smuggling enterprise. Smuggling is different from trafficking which deceives people and forces them into servitude. Upon arrival the smuggled Fujianese were free to go and do what they wanted as long as they paid the balance of their fee. The few that didn’t were held for ransom until their relatives who had already committed, paid up. The way the system worked was dependent on a tight family Chinese culture. Getting to America was seen as not only a life altering opportunity for the individual, but for the entire family and progeny. NYC’s Chinatown was the destination because a Fujianese could immediately get a job in a restaurant, laundry or shop. He or she didn’t need to speak English or Mandarin or Cantonese which most didn’t. Speaking the Fujianese dialect was enough. Working in even these menial jobs, they made more in a month than they could in a year back in Fujian. They were soon sending remittances back home to pay off their debts and helping to bring another family member over.

Sister Ping moved to Chinatown in 1981. She opened a small store and slept in a room above it. Leading a seemingly simple life, she looked like an average resident. But she was a mastermind. She used a wide variety of schemes to smuggle people in. She began simply, giving people fake passports and booking them on flights to the U.S. where they would ask for asylum, be released and then disappear into Chinatown. But as her reputation and business grew, she needed to cost effectively scale up her methods. She flew large groups into Honduras or Guatemala and then snuck them across the border to the U. S. She began using more and more agents and helpers, many from the gangs. This would lead to her eventual downfall. She along with other snakeheads would buy or lease entire ships that would be crammed full of emigrants. The Golden Venture incident became national news precipitating the political pressure that focused law enforcement to finally uncover how Sister Ping and her cohorts worked.

In 1993 the Golden Venture was purposely run aground near the beach at Rockaway, NY. Law enforcement was caught totally by surprise. The gang that was to meet the ship and bring the 272 men, women and children ashore had been arrested for unrelated matters. The on-board smuggler in charge was desperate to unload the passengers. They had spent four months on the ship coming from Bangkok via Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. They survived on rice and peanuts in the ship’s hold where they lived and slept each on a 2X6 foot piece of plywood, one crammed next to the others. Many had spent months prior to that on another miserable ship that became inoperable and was abandoned by two captains. At Rockaway the passengers had to swim ashore and ten drowned. The survivors were taken to jail while they filed for asylum. Many spent years in jail. Others agreed to be deported. Those returning to China would be punished. Only two on board the Golden Venture were Sister Ping’s clients. Most of her clients had refused to get on the ship. But the subsequent investigation into the Golden Venture would piece by piece uncover enough information to enable law enforcement years later to apprehend Sister Ping. She had amassed tens of millions of dollars smuggling many thousands of Fujianese into the U.S. She had also profited from an extensive underground banking operation.

Keefe gives us a well-researched true crime drama that is relevant to the current dilemma around illegal immigration in the U.S. He exposes a significant chapter in human smuggling to the United States that I had not known about. Keefe details the myriad ways the snakeheads used to get people into the U.S. and the international corruption that made it possible. He reports extensively on the years of investigation, how detectives worked informants, made arrests, got cooperation from those facing prison time, and finally cornered Sister Ping. He also reports on the gang wars that rocked Chinatown in the eighties and nineties. The book is a straight forward, informative and worthwhile read. It illustrates what a difficult problem human smuggling is in a world where an ever-increasing number of people are being marginalized and desperate to find a way to a better life.

All of the elements of a thriller are here (murder, corruption, double-crosses, huge sums of cash, intimidation, among others) but it really doesn’t read that way. Instead it’s more of a sweeping view of the snakehead trade between Fujian Province, China and Chinatown in Manhattan. In particular we learn about a small handful of major players in the late 80s and early 90s.

The author writes extremely well and, quite similar to Sebastian Junger, has an informatively digressive style. He never gets too far into the details, always giving enough information on the side before returning to the main story. The people we meet along the way don’t come with excessive baggage or angel’s wings, we’re left to make our own judgments.

I’m very surprised I hadn’t heard anything about this book before reading it. If I hadn’t stumbled on it in my library’s online inventory I would have never known it existed. It deserves a wide audience and would make a great miniseries.

Edit Feb 2023: Picador has just republished this with a tastefully minimalist cover. It's an allegedly updated version of the original published in 2009. Saw it at the airport bookshop before taking a domestic flight this morning. When I was looking for it a year ago, I found it surprising, given PRF's recent success, that one of his major works was out of print and unavailable as an ebook (unless you looked really hard;)). Another surprise: it's under 400 pages.

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Modus Operandi PRK: pick an interesting subject, research the f out of it, and write a looong book. He saves his opinions and judgements until the end. A wise choice, you don't have to agree with his politics to enjoy his work.

'The Snakehead' is about illegal migration to the USA in the 1980s and 90s from the Chinese province of Fujian. New kids on the block in New York's Cantonese-dominated Chinatown, the Fujianese started to form their own gangs. The most famous was the Fuk Ching, whose leader Ah Kay robbed and then worked with a big-time people smuggler, or snakehead, known as Sister Ping. I'd learnt about these characters from researching my own book but PRK filled in a lot of gaps.

'The Snakehead' is centred around the disastrous running aground of the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with illegal Chinese immigrants, in Queens, New York. Ten people drowned. Sister Ping and other snakeheads had contracted Ah Kay to unload the passengers onto fishing boats. However, because of a turf war among members of the Fuk Ching, he didn't come through for them.

The second half of the book deals with the legal cases of Golden Venture passengers fighting to stay in the USA, and eventually the trial of Sister Ping. PRK is an exhaustive writer and can go into too much detail, but I didn't get as bogged down here as I did in his new book about the opioid epidemic, 'Empire of Pain.'

Patrick Radden Keefe wrote two of my favourite non-fiction books of recent years (Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021)) so I was keen to read more by him. The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, originally published in 2009, is getting republished, presumably on the back of the acclaim for his more recent work.

People smuggling is a grim business. Migrants and asylum seekers are invariably desperate and willing to risk everything for the possibility of a better life, something that often gets lost in debates about immigration, certainly here in the UK.

This book explores the history of Chinese immigration to America and how in the 1980s and early 1990s lucrative smuggling rings, known as the snakehead trade, brought thousands of illegal immigrants into the USA. Many of these came from China's Fujian province. The smuggler makes c$18000 per person which the new arrival has to clear as soon as possible usually through years of hard menial work. The remarkable Sister Ping (aka Cheng Chui Ping) is one such smuggler who ran her business out of a nondescript shop. She was revered within her own community for her role in getting people into the US and for transferring funds back home, amongst other illegal activities.

The Snakehead is further proof that Patrick Radden Keefe is an excellent investigative journalist and a consummate storyteller. He keeps this engrossing tale moving along at a good pace and ably illuminates the world of Chinese gangs, US immigration policy, people smuggling, law enforcement and the judicial process.

Another fascinating read from Patrick Radden Keefe.

4/5

A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss

In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.

The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.

As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.

Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.

THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.

I have really enjoyed previous books by Patrick Radden Keefe, including, ‘Say Nothing,’ and ‘Empire of Pain.’ I was pleased to receive a copy of this republished work through NetGalley and, I am delighted to say, that I was fascinated by this. Keefe writes non-fiction but he is an excellent storyteller, and, in this book, he has a fascinating story to tell.

This is a tale of immigration, people smuggling, corruption, organised crime, personal suffering and personal gain. At its heart is the snakehead trade in humans between Fujian Province in China and Chinatown in New York. Central is Sister Ping, the nickname of Cheng Chui Ping, who immigrated to America legally, but then proceeded to smuggle those from her homeland to the States. She hid behind cultural beliefs in supporting those from China, saying that family was central to the Chinese and that it was expected that immigrants would bring family over. In reality, of course, this was about money and power. Respected in her community, she set up her office opposite the Bank of China, undercutting them to workers wishing to send money home and becoming so confident that she informed government officials who became aware of her, that they would be unable to stop her.

As with other books, Keefe branches out to explore the difficult questions around immigration, people smuggling and how people find the risk worthwhile to embark on often deadly dangerous journeys to try to find a new life. This is despite having to pay back huge amounts to people smugglers, as well as the high possibility of losing their life. It also looks at those, like Sister Ping, who become central to these illegal routes into the country and how, even if they are stopped, the problem continues. Organised crime is precisely that and it is debatable how much control governments have over the constant desire of people to better their lives. A fascinating tale and well told.

This book is mainly about the stories of the snakehead Sister Ping & the human smuggling ship, Golden Venture. I remember reading about illegal immigration from China & seeing news clips about it years ago. However, this book went into great details about NYC Chinatown, Chinese gangs, & Sister Ping back in the 90s. Although, the book read like a fictional action/mystery novel, the characters, events, & locations in the book are all true. I thought all the stories were all written in a very interesting way & I couldn’t put the book down. Anyone who wants to read a great book on modern Chinese-American history, this one is it.

The Snake Head by Patrick Radden Keefe

This history of the Chinese smuggling trade into the United States was penned in 2009. While not as popular as his 2019 blockbuster, Say Nothing, about the violence in Northern Ireland, Snake Head is a fascinating read.

This history follows Cheng Chui Ping, a Chinese immigrant to NYC, as she bankrolled and worked with the Fuk Ching gang to smuggle thousands of Fujianese into NYC during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Her nickname is Sister Ping and she is revered in Chinatown and has become quite wealthy.

The story begins in 1993 with a shipwreck off the coast of Long Island where several Chinese immigrants die and one of the survivors who swims the currents to the safety of the beach mentions to Police that Sister Ping was the head of the smuggling operation known as the Snake Head. The name comes from the resemblance between an illegal immigrant wiggling through fence wires to a snake. This shipwreck incident draws the attention of the Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) and they begin an investigation. Over several years the government and prosecutors put together a picture of the extent of the smuggling operation that had been in place since the early 1980’s. They get a ruthless but key gang-leader to name names to avoid prison. Authorities were amazed with the lack of accountability for the crimes on the part of the ringleaders. The ringleaders underestimated the outrage of prosecutors and the judicial system.

There is a good deal of history going back to Chinese immigration of the 19th century. In the 1960’s there were fewer than 20,000 Chinese immigrants in NYC but by 1990 there were more than a quarter million. Many had crossed the border with Mexico, Canada but 50% of immigrants had come through JFK and Sister Ping told them what to say to immigration agents, knowing if the clients said they lost their passport then there was no space to detain them. There were several examples in the book of smuggling operations that became tragic including one incident along a common Chinese smuggling route near Niagara Falls in upstate New York. It ended with bodies at the bottom of Niagara Falls.

4 stars. Very solid story in a narrative format. And an interesting bit of American history.

According to the author, a "snakehead" is someone who charges a huge amount of money to "take people out of China and into other countries." This book focuses on one of these people, Sister Ping, who came to the US legally and then proceeded to cash in on every opportunity she could, including smuggling human beings into the country for millions in profit. It was the wreck of the ship Golden Venture near Rockaway NY in 1993 in which several people died that captured the attention of the Federal Government and set several officials on the trail of Sister Ping. But that's not the whole story here...it's also a look at the shifting policies of the Feds on legal and illegal immigration throughout our country's history as well as an examination of why law enforcement often has trouble getting a handle on this very big problem. Misinformation, lack of funding, a staggering amount of asylum requests (and the question of who will receive asylum and who will be deported), and often corruption on the part of some INS (now ICE) agents are all factors that the author examines in trying to understand why this woman was able to elude capture for nearly a decade; not to mention the closing of ranks within the Chinese communities in the US around someone they considered almost a saint.

The story of the Golden Venture is the focal point for examining wider and pertinent issues, and while the author examines the impact of human smuggling and illegal immigrants in this country, he also makes very clear that many people trying to get their chance at the American dream are willing to take the risks involved with illegal smuggling operations. Also, he makes the point when the Feds actually manage to capture someone like Sister Ping, there are other people waiting in the wings.

Overall, this was a good read. It seemed to go on a bit, and probably could have been somewhat condensed, but other than that, I liked it. People on both sides of the issue of illegal immigration will want to read this book.

Un altre llibre brutal de Don Patrick Radden Keefe

This is the fascinating true story of the "snakeheads", those NYC Chinatown based purveyors of human traffic from China. I had not realized the number of people who were fleeing from China in the 1990s and the extent of the network of human smugglers who were making millions of dollars from this business. The major player in this nefarious business was the infamous Sister Ping, an unassuming Chinese woman who owned a restaurant in Chinatown. She reached legendary status with those that she brought to the United States, although she charged them exorbitant prices for her services
The story begins with the scuttling of the Golden Venture, a rusted hulk that transported human cargo across the Atlantic and ended up off the beach at Rockaway, NY. Many of the passengers drowned and the rest were incarcerated for several years.....this tragedy instigated the search for Sister Ping and her compatriots.
This is a well researched book and will raise the question as to whether the "snakeheads" were actually providing a service to their clients, or just gangsters out for a quick buck. It's an interesting tale and recommended.

There was a lot of great information in this book. It is a great work of journalism, but it just read like a few dozen long magazine articles stapled together with no real cohesion. There isn’t much in it that propels you forward. I found the same true in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Troubles in Ireland.

I have been trying hard to research the Chinese community where I live in Spain, but it’s almost impossible to find the thinnest shred of information. There is NEVER anything in the press about the 10,000 or 20,000 or who knows how many Chinese people living in Valencia. In all of my years here, I could count on the fingers of one hand the journalism pieces I have read about Chinese “immigrants” here. I put that word in quotations because I don’t believe that they are immigrants in the true sense, but more like economic colonists doing the bidding for the Chinese mainland government halfway across the globe.

4.5/5

sure i’ll say it, always so so grateful for my parents and my grandparents for immigrating to the us and it’s a sacrifice you can’t even imagine but this book serves as yet another reminder

i’ve grown to love nonfiction as a genre so much because of patrick radden keefe’s books ill read anything he writes forever

We can always trust Patrick Radden Keefe for a compelling deep dive. This backlist treat is no exception. I knew very little about Chinese migration to the US in the ‘80s and ‘90s, legal or otherwise. This investigation into the Snakehead trade, through the case of Sister Ping is narrative non-fiction at its best. You can’t make this kind of story up.

I would have been much more into this had it been a longform article and not an entire book. Well-researched and competently written, but I was pretty bored throughout and skimmed a lot.

My first experience with PRK, but Ta and Nicola were raving so much about him that this felt overdue. Love his writing! And what a compelling story. It occurs to me now that he's kinda doing the Isabelle Wilkerson warmth-of-other-suns thing: telling a broader story about human smuggling, undocumented immigration, and the Chinatown criminal underworld through the experiences of individuals who lived it. Which I continue to feel is the best way to communicate history.

I also really liked the position that PRK staked out in this book: he didn't shy away from questions about the morality of various actors (Sister Ping, hired gunmen, the US govt, the migrants themselves) but he allowed for their to be ambiguity. In particular, (spoiler) he doesn't come down one way or another on Sister Ping, instead describing how some regard her as a feckless, predatory criminal while others see her as a trailblazing hero. (I just looked up "feckless" and that's definitely not the word I wanted - maybe "remorseless" or "unprincipled" or something like that.)

I’m impressed with how Keefe explores the nuances of illegal immigration without directly commenting on any of those issues, instead letting the people and situations he describes speak for themselves. The result is sensitive and humanizing. Keefe doesn’t flatten the characters’ motivations for the sake of a narrative, which is rare for nonfiction and why I keep returning to his work. This is one of his earlier books and doesn’t quite have the polish of Say Nothing or Empire of Pain but is still a great read.

Snakehead is a term for people who bring foreigners into a country illegally, outside of immigration laws. Mostly through the book the storyline follows a particularly successful snakehead, Sister Ping. The book details Sister Ping and other snakeheads smuggling Chinese citizens to the US, as well as their plentiful helpers from many different countries. For human smuggling, you could say it takes a village. Law enforcement in the US is also examined here, with profiles of a few of the people that took charge of investigations and prosecutions. Also included are many different examples of people entering the country with the help of snakeheads. The personal stories of so many involved was well done. I most appreciated the descriptions of how the snakeheads figured out how the immigration control system was changing, and changed their tactics to keep a step ahead of the law. For instance, for a few years a sure way to enter the US was to fly on a fake passport, aided by bribed airport personnel in a foreign country, then flush the passport in the arrival airport, which was usually JFK. When that procedure was shut down, the snakeheads just looked for new ways, and always found them. Sister Ping and the others were quite enterprising. And when caught by law enforcement, they were generally lightly punished. Overall, an interesting take on “true crime”, and a sorry perspective on the holes in the US immigration law enforcement. This compares well to many “pop business” business strategy books I’ve read, focusing on pivoting your operations when your market or environment changes, and the book may appeal to fans of those kinds of books.

Patrick Radden Keefe has quickly become one of my favorite non-fiction writers. I came to this book after reading his latest, “Say Anything” and I am gobsmacked that not only is/are the story/stories in “Snakehead” true but happened where I live— albeit before my time here.

I highly recommend this book and his other work— including his New Yorker writings. Radden Keefe painstakingly investigates and researches his books for years and it makes the wait to read his work worth it. He is an incredible writer and investigates material that is utterly fascinating.

I can’t wait to read his next book.

A++

The Snakehead is not as concise or as enthrallingly brilliant as Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent Say Nothing, but it is still a completely fascinating examination of criminal ingenuity, greed, the conflict between immigration and isolationism, and the quest for the American Dream.

In particular, the first half of the book that details how a little old Asian lady in NYC’s Chinatown set up an expansive, complex international criminal enterprise was brilliant. This book is the kind of property that should be optioned as a miniseries, just like HBO’s Chernobyl.

The government hates to see a girlboss win.

I really enjoyed this book and am so happy Shirley recommended it! The book felt so relevant as someone who can regularly interact with New York’s Chinatowns and as someone with so many family members from Fuzhou.

I had long known that many Chinese immigrants who owned restaurants were from Fuzhou and that Chinatowns across the world are composed of Fujianese immigrants. Hearing more about the community’s journey to the US helped fill in the gaps in my knowledge and paint a fuller picture of the various shades of Chinese immigration. Reading about the history of these immigrants coming in from China in waves in the 80’s and 90’s was especially relevant since Bush’s Executive Order in 1990, which spurred a lot of immigration after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, also helped my mom get an expedited path to citizenship.

I loved learning more about specific streets in Manhattan’s Chinatown and learning the history behind buildings I’ve often walked past like the Fuzhounese Association of America. Will lived for a summer on East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and we instantly noticed all the Fuzhounese restaurants and community organizations on the block. It felt crazy to learn that Manhattan’s Chinatown used to be run by Chinese gangs and “tongs”, and that authorities didn’t really care about policing the neighborhood until outsiders started dying in random crossfire.

I’m also particularly glad I read this book to learn more about the thousands of Chinese immigrants who come to the US illegally since I pretty much only knew one story of immigration growing up, which was coming to the US for higher education, which my mom did in 1990. As illegal immigration, increasingly with Chinese people, is one of the biggest political issues of our current times, it was enlightening to learn more about the inefficiencies of our immigration system and why the root of our problems have been around for decades. Corruption in neighboring Latin American countries continues to provide passageways to the US, and the vast amount of money involved in human smuggling will continue to provide perverse incentives for the trade to exist in perpetuity, and the author noted that even US immigration agents dabbled in the trade.

I was also fascinated by the main characters of the book, the snakeheads themselves. The Chinatown community often revered and protected leaders like Sister Ping since she was their ticket to America and a better life, even if she exploited many customers for tens of thousands of dollars after they arrived. Compared to their lives in China, many people still opted to work grueling under-the-table jobs in the shadows for a chance at a better life in America. The price of the American Dream could oftentimes be your life, but still many were willing to take this chance.

The book also did a great job of painting the resilience of the Fujianese community. With a reputation for being very entrepreneurial and familial, the author expertly conveyed the hope of the community in the face of so much violence and despair, “And if this particular story is in some ways an unhappy one, it is also a story about the awesome power of optimism and bravery and hope, about the many twisting paths that bring strangers to this country, and about what it means to be - and to become - American.”

It is often thought that if you came to the US illegally, no matter how long you’ve been here and how much you’ve contributed to and bettered the country, you still don’t have a right to call yourself American. This book has taught me that the issue is much more complex than that because what - if anything - is more American than immigrants pursuing and living out their own American Dreams despite every obstacle?

This is the third book I've read by Patrick Raddon Keefe, so I was expecting a solid, well-researched and absorbing tale, and that's precisely what I got. At the core of the books I've read is crime -- motivated by politics (Say Nothing), greed (Empire of Pain), and opportunism/greed (The Snakehead). All three books were fascinating, and it's especially impressive how Keefes follow the legal angles, and, in this case, the politics of immigration.

Having said that, it's best to read these books at a reasonable clip so that you don't lose track of who's who. This isn't light reading, but it's rewarding for those who prefer nonfiction and don't expect anything remotely resembling a happy ending. As with his other books, I came away having learned a lot, and with my cynicism fortified.

Gives a lot of historical context of the migration of Chinese immigrants to NYC that I was unaware of.

Like every good tale, there is more than one side to the story, with many unexpected heros and traitors. The contrast between the American perspective of Sister Ping vs the Chinese is fascinating. I liked how the author included both perspectives in this book.

Makes me think a lot about my own societal privileges…

Really well written!

I’m so mad I didn’t read this earlier. Patrick Radden Keefe is simply the best narrative non-fiction writer alive, exploring topics of global importance in such a compelling way that you never want his books to end. With a sharp eye for character and a guillotine-like way of cutting to the heart of the matter, PRK allows for the complexity of these stories to surface while always keeping the story he’s telling moving. I was first exposed to his work with SAY NOTHING, his brilliant work on Northern Ireland, framed around the murder of a single woman. There’s something similar at work with the structure here, with a much larger issue (illegal immigration) framed around the story of one woman, Sister Ping, who facilitated illegal immigrants for decades. PRK’s arguable masterpiece is EMPIRE OF PAIN, which explored (along with many other themes) how greed and graft corrupt families and institutions, and there’s a similar focus here on immigration policy and the inordinate sums of money people are willing to spend and extort in trying to find a better life. But THE SNAKEHEAD is very much its own book, and fascinating in how relevant it feels despite being written nearly 20 years ago. His books are essential reading. All of them have my highest possible recommendation.

A huge book that spans a massive network: it helped me comprehend what we talk about when we talk about migration not as much in the human sense, but in the gears that grind it along and churn billions of dollars out of it along the way. He is so intimate with the subject matter (and without knowing any Chinese...?) that it makes sense of it all and is still a page turner. A reminder also of how different the dialogue around immigration was even 10 years ago when this book was published—in a lot of ways, the post-9/11 immigration world in the US shares more in common with the pre 9/11 immigration world than with now. The alliance of The Golden Vision advocacy group just wouldn’t happen now.

And so ends my summer of non-fiction.

As someone technically of Fujianese descent, I found this story about my peoples completing arduous journeys to come to the states and then committing ruthless organized crime to be quite compelling. Not only have I lived, Laf'd, and loved (the food) in NYC's Chinatown, I have also personally observed the various consequences of the neighborhood's history in my experiences there and in my parents' retelling of their old memories.

A particularly salient example of the characteristic efficiency of Fujianese and Cantonese immigrants was noticed by one Dr. Redman. He once pointed out that, surrounding a single plaza in Chinatown close to where we lived, there is an unholy trifecta of the following: Multiple bars and taverns, a courthouse (with a correctional center another block away), and a handful of bail bond services. How convenient and efficient! A relentless cycle of vice and bureaucracy which likely only ends in one of the three funeral homes in the same plaza or finds a temporary reprieve in Tasty Dumpling (which has the same dish as their "Daily Special" every day of the year). Now put that level of ingenuity and enterprising spirit behind organized crime and you'll get a gist of the contents of this book.

This opens up on the dark shores of New York, one turbulent evening back in June 1993, where the vessel the Golden Venture ran aground, along with hundreds of Chinese immigrants. Keefe describes the chaotic scenes with an almost cinematic quality, doing a fine job of giving clarity and insight into quite a large cast of criminals in various turbulent circumstances and violent events.

He pulls in much historical and cultural background, of the people from the Fujian Province, which allows us to understand more and put the wider details and motives into perspective. Covering the politics, lawyers, religion, criminal gangs and all sorts of other fun and games we soon get a rather broad, deep and richer understanding of the bigger picture.

I certainly learned a lot about a lot of people and events. This is another enjoyable piece of long-form journalism from Keefe, It’s tightly written, well edited and has a good mix of solid research with a pleasing writing style.

Patrick Radden Keefe is fast becoming one of my favorite writers stumbing upon Say Something and now this. It is indeed an epic tale of American Dream and the desire to achieve it with whatever way possible. And when the desire for something is so intense crime is bound to rear its ugly head. Its a story of how common people who once came to the US in search of livelihood for their families became heads of global and sophisticated human smuggling syndicate. The book reads like a crime thriller and is hard to put down.

Okay not as perfect as Say Nothing or Empire but PRK is still my boyfriend and got me out of my June 3-star slump! Fascinating story and super compelling storytelling, though I wonder how it would have been different had it been written today.