When he got back to the apartment he found his neighbor knocking on his door, an old woman with white hair and leathery wrinkled skin. A few times she had offered him food—yellow rice with beans and some salty shredded meat—that he gladly accepted.
Now she spoke very fast, kept poking up the corners of her own eyes, then flashing two fingers, then pointing at the floor. She did this over and over again. Finally he took her wrists in his hands and smiled at her and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Sank you.” She took a breath and shrugged, then went back to her own apartment.
He could still smell the perfume of the whore on his skin, so he took another shower. Then he turned on the television and sat on the mattress. He knew what the old woman had been trying to tell him: Two men with slanted eyes had come looking for him. This was not a shock or surprise. Since his first steps here, in this new place, this new world, he had known that they would find him, that someone would.
Here the dreams were always the same: the taste of the water, the bubble of salt and surf, smoke and gas and oil in his nose and mouth, leaking down his throat. Knowing that his eyes were open in the water and yet all he could see was black; the floating, the flash and flail of his limbs. Was he watching his own death? He did not know then, but it was what he felt now. He woke in the middle of the night and drank a glass of water. Then he sat in the chair he never sat in, sat by the window smoking and watching the sunrise over the highway.
He thought about home, the person he used to be. How he had grown up in a fishing village in Fujian province, learning to farm as well, to make a living with his hands and back. How his family had no money to send him to school; and how he had come to realize around the age of thirteen that he had no talent for the life that his family and ancestors had paved for him. When his parents died (he was twenty by then), he left.
It took him days to get to Fuzhou, walking and stealing rides with strangers. Finally a truck filled with workers took him into the heat of the big buildings, the lights, the colors, the taste and smell of so many people, so many machines. He was afraid he would be swallowed by it all, that everyone around him would know he was a country boy. He found work in a hotel restaurant cleaning dishes and taking out garbage. He worked as many hours as they would let him, slept little, saved all of his money, but still he did not feel like a rich man.
Then one day in the hotel he was relaxing after his shift. The bar and lounge were half-crowded. A man sat down next to him wearing a dark suit and collared shirt with no tie. The man’s watch shined in the lights around the bar. They began talking, and then the man said, “Have you ever thought about going to America?” His face appeared to be young but his eyes made him look old. They stared at each other.
“No,” he said, “never thought about it.”
The man gave him a card. “Call me if you want to stop wasting your life.”
The man paid his bill and walked out. He looked at the man’s card and called him two days later. He said he did not want to go to America, but wanted to stop wasting his life.
His job was to recruit, to work the city for potential clients. He was trained to spot who and what they were looking for.
“Dressed shabby, looking a little lost. You know, country folk.”
“Is that why you came up to me in the bar?”
The man stared at him and told him to pay attention.
“The police are paid off. So are the officials we need. But don’t be cocky. If you show off they will make an example of you.”
He learned to spot them in crowds, in markets, on the street. He had his pitch, all the facts that anyone in the beginning would need to know: thirty-thousand U.S. total, at least five to ten up front, the rest when you get there. “How?” they would sometimes ask, and he would tell them by boat or by plane. It cost more if you wanted passports and special work papers.
“We know your relatives, we know where you live. We are watching you on both sides. We are taking big risks to give you the chance of a lifetime. Don’t disrespect us. Don’t make us or your family lose face.”
He knew when clients were satisfied. People would find him to thank him, tell him how well their sons and husbands and fathers were doing over there, the riches they were making, the opulent lives they would all someday lead. “He’ll be a citizen in a few years, then he can bring us all over,” one wife told him. “He sends me beautiful clothes and jewelry,” said another. “We’re going to live in a big house with big cars.” He would smile and nod and later more people from the same family, the same clan, would come to him to make the journey. They borrowed money from relatives, from friends, from anyone who could afford to give just a little to send them away to find their dreams. No one talked about the ones who did not make it, who were caught and shipped back, held by police and beaten; then sent back to their villages to pay a huge fine, only to begin planning when they would try again.
He worked Fuzhou for two years, then his boss asked him to help with operations in Hong Kong. He practiced his Cantonese, learned the new landscape of police and officials, who knew what, what areas were safe to work. Now he helped to coordinate and find secure holding areas while the boats and ships and passports and payoffs were taken care of. He learned the routes that spanned the world—from Hong Kong or Fuzhou or ports out of Malaysia or Thailand, across the ocean and into South America or Europe. Groups as small as two or three, sometimes as big as twenty, thirty, fifty, more. They might wait in a holding area in a strange country for months, kept by enforcers in a house or warehouse or apartment, until it was safe to move again.
Because they did not want to wind up in the Netherlands or Peru or even Canada. America was where they wanted to go, and even though he was no longer pitching and recruiting the dream, it was still the backdrop of his thoughts—places like New York, San Francisco, cities within cities filled with Chinese; piles of money waiting to be made, the fine clothes and food that would adorn their lives, teachers and schools that would educate their children and make them citizens, so they would never have to suffer.
He had talked so much about it that even he began to believe. But he did not have thirty thousand dollars, and he wondered if he was still wasting his life.
Then he was told about the next big plan: a new shipping route, from Thailand to Kenya, then around the tip of Africa, then on to the U.S. Almost three hundred passengers, they would need extras to work the crew.
“Are you interested?” his boss asked him. “Think of it this way: You get to see the world, spend a few days in New York when it’s over.”
He did not see any way to disagree.
That afternoon he went to the school to deliver the professor’s meal. The professor handed him two brochures, one in Chinese.
