A Young Stowaway’s Quest for the American Dream

The stowaway is little more than a child, and weary. His hands keep wanting to cover his mouth. There is the merest peach fuzz on his upper lip, and at its edge, a tiny blemish. He claims to be 16, then 17, but has no proof and looks years younger. Someone has given him an American haircut and he keeps running his fingers through it. His hair is as smooth as a crow’s back. His nails are chewed to the nubs.

On Christmas Day, a Danish ship out of Hong Kong arrived at the Port of Los Angeles. The manifest for the cargo container where the boy had hidden for 12 days and 12 nights said Heavy Machinery. The container was the size of a tractor-trailer. Of the 13 Chinese nationals huddled in it, the boy was the youngest. For the whole journey, they’d subsisted on crackers and water. The smugglers gave them blankets and mattresses and plastic bags for toilets. One man had a deck of cards, and to pass time they’d played poker by flashlight. For 12 days and 12 nights, they’d battled cold and nausea and the smell of their own waste, talking of one subject: “What it would be like,” the boy says, “in America.”

He speaks as if there were no other subject. In some places, perhaps, there is not. The boy’s home, the coastal backwoods of Fujian, is a worldwide cradle of illegal immigration. No border debate is complete without the Fujian angle--the province’s poverty and corruption, its “snakeheads” who for decades have exported the desperate.

Nor is the debate complete without mention of what happens to the desperate when they get here--though focus-group politics leave little air time for that angle in this state. The word “exploitation” in local immigration parlance tends to mean only what “they” supposedly do to “us.”

“My father”--the boy touches his mouth--”didn’t have regular work.” He is speaking schoolboy Mandarin. Ashley Dunn, a veteran colleague of mine, is translating, but the boy keeps lapsing into dialect. He was the first in his family to attend high school, he says, but he didn’t finish. Between his tuition and the high tax on his parents for exceeding China’s strict childbearing limits--the boy is the third of four children--he felt burdensome.

“The neighbors looked down on my father,” the boy goes on. “My mother is sick. She coughs up blood. When I would ask what was wrong, she would say ‘Nothing.’ I knew America from the movies. I knew I had to go.”

His relatives knew people who could arrange transport. Sixty-thousand dollars, U.S. You could work it off upon arrival, including the down payment. Be at this hotel at this time, he was told. There will be a bus ticket. The bus ride was the first time he’d ever left his village. Two days later, he was in a Hong Kong hotel room with 11 men and an older teenager. “The smugglers told us then that we would be riding in cargo containers, and asked if we could take it,” the boy said. “I said I could.”

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So started the journey: hustling by night to the docks and into the container. Just the clothes on his back and the $100 U.S. the smugglers had given him in cash. The swish of the tarp being pulled shut. The sliver of light from the air hole they’d slashed in it. The wait. The jolt in the morning as a crane hoisted the container aloft. And then just time passing. Days, nights. The stench from the corner. The cold. Someone had said he had an uncle in New York. He’d find him. Maybe work in a restaurant. Days, nights. The dark.

And then the ship docked. Christmas. For three days they waited. Five of the men got antsy. “I told them, just wait for the smugglers to come and get us, but they wouldn’t listen.” To be so close to America--it was unbearable. They tore open the tarp and fled into the still-dark morning. One was caught and escorted back to the container. “They shined a light and yelled to us in English,” the boy says. “And then a translator called, ‘These are the police. Don’t move.’ ”

The boy’s head droops. This is last week. Since his arrest, he has been in L.A. County’s Los Padrinos juvenile hall in Downey. In a few hours, he’ll go to a shelter in Chicago for minors who have no criminal record. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network has applied for his asylum on the grounds that he faces arrest in China and fines three times the size of his father’s annual income. There is also the debt to the snakeheads. “I have not cried,” he says. “I have no feelings here.”

In one breath, he vows not to go back, and in the next, regrets ever leaving. When his lawyer helped him call his village, his parents sobbed uncontrollably. On the TV, in another language, there has been talk all month of another boy, a Cuban, and his tears, and his feelings. Heated talk, but such is the immigration debate, now vivid, now abstract. Less so the American Dream.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.