(2 of 6)
The ship that would take Chen across the Pacific was waiting off the coast in the darkness. It was a rusty old Korean freighter with three holds. Chen was among 100 people packed into the rear hold; 60 more were loaded into one of the front holds, and the third held food and water for the voyage. When the hatches were slammed shut, Chen felt as if he were on a prison ship.
Life inside the hold was nightmarish. There were no windows; only one fan worked to suck out the stale air. "We were cold all the time," recalls Chen. The toilets were two buckets, one for men and one for women. Hygiene was impossible in such cramped conditions. "Everyone got eye infections. For a week my eyes were all red, and I couldn't see anything." The snakeheads periodically handed out water, rice, peanuts and some vegetables to their human cargo, but no meat, fish or tea.
Half a dozen snakeheads and three armed Cambodians stood guard. "They were Khmer Rouge--you know, assassins," says Chen. They allowed the inmates onto the deck once a week to wash in salt water. Otherwise Chen and the others were confined to the hold 24 hours a day. Once when he tried to sneak out, he was caught and beaten before being thrown back into the hold. The snakeheads would sit on deck and drink beer at night. Then they would go into the holds and select young women to come up on deck. "Nothing was said, but when they came back, everyone knew what had happened," says Chen.
The snakeheads did not waste much sympathy on their cargo. Several weeks into the trip, a man who was traveling with his wife and three-year-old daughter fell ill. For three days, the man was dizzy and experienced a sense of nausea and didn't know where he was. On the fourth day, the man died. The captain of the boat had his body tossed overboard.
Chen thought the journey would never end. In fact, it would take the aging freighter five weeks to cross 9,000 miles of ocean. Modern container ships are faster and cheaper, but the windowless boxes are locked from the outside, and nobody can get out until the container is unloaded. Immigrants can starve or be asphyxiated, especially if the crew of the ship doesn't know it has stowaways. Even on Chen's cramped ship, though specially fitted for human smuggling, there were no bunks, and people slept cheek by jowl on the floor.
At the beginning of October, Chen's ship encountered a big storm. As the rickety bucket rolled from side to side, waves poured into the holds. Suddenly the daily fear and uncertainty escalated into full-scale terror, and the holds echoed with screams. "Everyone on the ship thought we were going to die," remembers Chen. But the ship plowed on, and on Oct. 8 reached its destination--not America, as Chen had assumed, but Guatemala, well away from the U.S. Coast Guard.