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Bad weather hampered a landing, and on the first night only half the Fujianese, including Chen, were unloaded. The Fujianese were forced to stand on a shallow reef, with water up to their thighs, waiting for small boats to come out from the shore to pick them up. Finally five boats manned by Taiwanese gangsters ferried them to land. The Fujianese trudged through fields for several hours before they reached a road where vans awaited them. The next night the Taiwanese boats went out again, but this time the Guatemalan police were waiting at the landing site. Chen thinks peasants who saw the first group tipped off the law. Most of the second batch of Fujianese were arrested as soon as they reached shore, but one boat capsized in the choppy water. Chen says a dozen people drowned.
Chen and about 100 others were taken to the house of a Taiwanese who lived with his Guatemalan wife on the outskirts of Guatemala City. "He was a big boss. His house was like a mansion, and there were 100 servants." Chen quickly discovered that local peasants had "much worse lives" than farmers in China. He and his fellow illegals were not fleeing desperate poverty. Their coastal province is relatively well off for China: Fujian gets investment from Taiwan, just across the strait, and the land is fertile enough to feed everyone. But Fujianese have a centuries-old tradition of emigration, peopling many Chinatowns around the world; the young grow up with the idea of emigrating to join their rich overseas relatives. What China denies many is opportunity. At home Chen was making $120 a month wholesaling fish and running the noodle stall. But he knew that in the U.S. he could earn much more.
At the house of the Taiwanese, Chen and the others were told to keep out of sight. The Guatemalan police were searching for them, so they spent a month holed up inside, waiting to resume their journey. They were not allowed to call home. For the snakeheads, who get paid only on arrival, the trip had now gone badly wrong. A dozen of their human cargo were dead, 38 others arrested, and the U.S. immigration authorities had been alerted.
What Chen did not know was that news of the deaths and the arrests had made its way back to Fujian. In their small red brick house at the end of a dirt road, Chen's parents were deeply worried. "We would make food and then just sit at the table looking at it, with no appetite to eat it," says his mother, a thin woman with a weather-beaten face from years of working in the fields. She wished bitterly that she had been able to stop him from going.
At the beginning of November, a white truck pulled up to the Taiwanese gangster's house. Chen and 24 others were pushed into a tight crawl space under a false floor in the back of the truck. The truck was loaded with grapefruit and driven north into Mexico. "It took 40 hours; we had no water, very little air, lying down all the time. For sure if it had lasted even another hour or two, I would have suffocated," says Chen. "By then I was more scared of dying than of being caught and sent back." Lying there, all he could think of was his home and his family, and he wished he had never left.