In the 1990s, a middle-aged Chinese woman known as Sister Ping ran a multimillion-dollar human trafficking business out of a small store in New York City’s Chinatown. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe investigated her case and captured it in the 2009 book snake headunpublished until now in Spain and which arrives in our bookstores from Reservoir Books. “The debate on immigration is a story that repeats itself again and again, that of people desperate to leave their country and risk their lives to build a better one elsewhere. It is still very present today,” recognizes the author of don’t say anything (2018) and The Empire of Pain (2021) during a virtual meeting with various media held this Tuesday.
More than ten years have passed since he finished his volume, but what is captured in its pages has not aged or expired: “We are in 2024, where in Europe we know very well the desperation of the people who take boats from North Africa to leave there. There are also people who are leaving China again. The political debate continues,” he comments from New York, where he returned after spending several months in Barcelona, where he was the first resident of the international program launched by the Center for Contemporary Culture CCBC in collaboration with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).
“I don’t know if immigration is the big international challenge, it depends on how you frame the problem. For me, climate change is at the top of the list, even if it doesn’t seem so imminent,” he says, “legislators are a bit myopic. “If they can’t take a picture of the problem, it’s not so urgent.” He thus emphasizes that, in his case, he is concerned about “the world that his children, future generations, will inherit.” Regarding the conflict that addresses in snake headbelieves that there is “a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric, based on the idea that there is good and bad immigration, that which comes from the south; and that is absurd.”
“Most of the time, if you scratch the surface when someone who is intolerant talks about immigration, they probably believe in racial purity. When you see Trump and his entourage say, ‘We’re losing our country,’ there’s always a racial connotation to it,” he says. “If you think about it in purely economic terms, in the United States, we need immigrants. There are a lot of jobs that people don’t want to do here, like picking strawberries in California or working in slaughterhouses, for example,” he adds. And then he compares it to drugs: “In any illicit economy, the goods will flow if there’s supply and demand, regardless of what governments do. In the United States, we talk about drugs as if the people of Mexico and Colombia are sending them to us, not as if we’re asking for them, as if there’s no choice but to buy them from them.”
The American wrote in 2019 don’t say anythinga chronicle of the Northern Irish conflict. In it, he addresses the professionalization of the republican militias, the sometimes dirty war of the British state, the escalation of the IRA’s violence and the ideological evolution of some of its protagonists. “I am interested in situations in which the past has not been digested,” he admits, explaining that, in the same way that Belfast interested him at the time, the same thing happened to him after his stay in Barcelona. “You have a place that lives in the present but the shadow of the past is everywhere. During my stay in Catalonia, I noticed that it was one of those places. I saw it materialize in all types of contacts, in politics, language, literature, sport, music, in all these areas you sometimes see that there is a connoted history, there is an identity that is expressed,” he says.
What is journalism worth, if anything?
Patrick Radden Keefe, who has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 2006, describes today as “a much more polarized time” than when he was writing snake head in 2009. “I see him as nostalgic, I would almost say. I would accept with my eyes closed a return to the George Bush government. “We have become more polarized,” he says. The American considers that this is something that can also be applied to the practice of journalism.
“There’s a caricature of progressives and liberals, but if you look at the Murdoch empire and the right-wing press, it’s also very polarized. Historically, those polarized lines get mixed up and blurred. People on the left should be more receptive to refugees, immigration and asylum seekers, while on the right there should be more xenophobia, closing the borders and wanting to deport these people because the economy can’t support them,” he says.
Whatever the context, Radden Keefe remains confident in the power of journalism. “Even if you have no legal or moral responsibility, there are people with power who do terrible things. The truth is important, it has to be put on paper and made readable. It will be there forever and maybe in a few years someone will read it and know that it was you who did it,” he defends himself.
As for how to do it, the journalist points out that human beings are “predestined” to “absorb information more easily if it’s told in the form of a story.” That’s the format in which he captures his research. “There’s a reason why in all cultural traditions, it’s like myths, fables, religious traditions, moral instructions that are transmitted to us through stories,” he says. “I believe in the power of stories. There are journalists who are very good at collecting data and then spewing it out. That’s not what I do.” “You have to find a way to seduce the reader so that they’re interested in the story you’re telling,” he says.
History, empathy, opportunity
Both in don’t say anything as in snake head he needed to enter environments that are not “his own.” “There are people, especially now, who consider it almost like a violation, that you are crossing the line by talking about a culture that is not yours,” he laments. Their position is this, as writers: “We have to be empathetic. We should be able to write about anyone. Of course, there is a price of admission. “If you want to enter someone’s culture, you have to be respectful, you have to do it well so that when someone from that culture reads this book, they feel that you have understood it and not that you are a tourist who has taken a superficial view,” he maintains.
In the case of the story of the illegal human trafficking that took place in the 1990s in Chinatown, he says in the book itself that he wrote it based on more than three hundred interviews conducted between 2005 and 2008 with FBI agents, police officers, immigration investigators, lawyers, White House officials, neighbors and individuals who worked in the snakehead business. He had the invaluable help of William, a man who served as his interpreter for the various dialects that were unknown to him, and with whom he now maintains a close friendship.
“Herman Ping agreed to talk to me but they wouldn’t let me out of prison,” she says with sadness and anger, “that bothered me a lot because the hardest thing was for her to agree.” What she was able to do was exchange letters through the interpreter she was counting on for her legal proceedings. “It ended up giving an almost better result than if I had gone to prison, because there would be a distance between us that there wouldn’t be with her, because she was someone I trusted,” he thanks. Since then, Radden Keefe explains that he has not continued to investigate the situation and has not been able to establish more direct contact with his “protagonist”, given that he died of pancreatic cancer inside the prison, where he died while serving his sentence. to life in prison.
