A well-told, panoramic international true-crime adventure.
Expanding on his intriguing New Yorker article, Keefe (Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, 2005) tells the story of a multimillion-dollar smuggling ring that ferried illegal immigrants from China to New York City in the 1980s and early ’90s.
The ringleader, or “snakehead,” was a legal immigrant named Cheng Chui Ping, known to everyone in her Chinatown neighborhood as “Sister Ping.” Ping ran her operation, one of the largest and most sophisticated of its kind in the world, from a storefront on Chinatown’s Hester Street beginning in 1982. During the next decade, she raked in millions of dollars from poor Chinese desperate to get to America; each paid thousands of dollars to be smuggled in. Ping collaborated with the violent Chinatown gang Fuk Ching, an arrangement that would eventually lead to her downfall. On a June night in 1993, two Fuk Ching members were the victims of a revenge killing by a rival gang—the same day they were supposed to offload a ship of Chinese “customers.” With no one to meet it, the Golden Venture ran aground in Queens; ten people were killed, and many more were injured and arrested by police. In the wake of the tragedy, authorities tracked Ping, but it took years before she was finally captured in Hong Kong in 2000. Keefe ably navigates this extremely complex story, interviewing people at all levels, including law enforcement officials and—via written questions and answers—the imprisoned Sister Ping. Most effective are the author’s interviews with the illegal Chinese immigrants, who explain their willingness to pay a fortune—and risk their lives on a dangerous journey—just for the chance to reach America.
A well-told, panoramic international true-crime adventure.Pub Date: July 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52130-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
This graphic account of the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution will put to rest any remaining romantic notions about Chairman Mao. First published in France in 1989, the book recounts the author's life in a ``bourgeois'' family (her grandfather was a banker, her parents actors). Born just days before Mao declared the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Niu-Niu was four when armed Red Guards invaded her home and took her parents to a reeducation camp as punishment for their unspecified ``counter-revolutionary'' crimes; she did not see them again for eight years. The girl found refuge with her grandparents, who were the subject of local Communist Party criticism meetings that took the form of beatings. Her grandfather was finally beaten to death, and young Niu-Niu was derided in her neighborhood and at school as the ``child of criminals.'' She and her grandmother had so little food that the child took to stealing to supplement their diet. The outcast Niu- Niu became a member of a children's gang involved in a wide array of petty theft; she was continually in trouble with the authorities. Once her parents were allowed to return home after the official end of the Cultural Revolution, she shaped up long enough to pass her exams and enter a Beijing university specializing in film production. Niu-Niu's constant rebellion against the school's efforts to make students conform to the Communist Party line ultimately led to her expulsion. Her perseverance and courage in the face of tyranny will overwhelm readers. The book ends with her departure from China for a new life in France with a French citizen she later married. (They are now divorced.) The excellent translation does justice to this remarkable story. An important depiction of recent Chinese history too quickly being forgotten in the rush to seek trade with China.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89733-410-8
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
The candid, fast-moving memoir of a significant member of the Warsaw Ghetto's fighting underground. This is a marked contrast to Yitzhak Zuckerman's recent A Surplus of Memory (1993), also translated by Harshav. Although they worked together in the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), the personalities of ``Antek'' and ``Kazik,'' to use their noms de guerre, could not have been more different. The older Antek (Zuckerman), head of the ZOB, was a consummate organizer, diplomat, and archivist, while the younger Kazik (Rotem) was a lover and fighter. Never hesitating to lead dangerous street-level missions dressed as a Gestapo collaborator or to venture through the vast Warsaw sewer system, Kazik ``argued bitterly'' with Antek against saving piles of records from the burning ghetto: ``And why endanger ourselves? For papers? For `history'?'' Because he looked enough like a member of the Polish gentile working class among whom he had grown up, Kazik operated as a tough member of the Polish resistance who could intimidate uncooperative Jews and gentiles. After the ghetto was systematically destroyed, Kazik, in fact, didn't hesitate to join the anti-Semitic Armia Krajowa Polish underground in its short-lived uprising against the Germans. His chutzpah is at its best when he cajoles these partisans into keeping up the fight so as not to be shamed by the superior resistance of the city's underfed and undersupplied Jews. He had the sensitivity to feel guilty when gorging on a farmer's banquet while his family and friends starved in their bunkers, but this guileless man of action wasn't one to pass up a good meal, an opportunity for revenge, or a love affair. Such qualities color this memoir with the personal, so that it transcends a historical document. The record of these desperate, brave days is enriched by the injection of Kazik's salty, active personality. (4 pages photos, not seen).
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-05797-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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