– J.D.
I . The Snakehead
Tuesday, the Hour of the Tiger, 4:30 A.M.,
to the Hour of the Dragon, 8 a.m.
The word Wei-Chi consists of two Chinese words – Wei, which means to "encircle," and Chi, which means "piece." As the game represents a struggle for life, it may be called the "war game."
– Danielle Pecorini and Tong Shu, The Game of Wei-Chi
Chapter One
They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.
To the human smugglers – the snakeheads – who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged goods; they were ju-jia, piglets.
To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were undocumenteds.
They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.
Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.
They were his fragile cargo.
And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, Captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.
It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon as camouflage and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space. Trash and children's plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.