Alice Su

“But in the last few years, more and more Chinese people have been taking this route to reach the US too. Last year, there were more than 37,000. That's nearly 10 times more than the year before, and 50 times more than the year before that. And that surprised me. Because China is a superpower.”

“Sister Huang had come a long way. She grew up in a rural village in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China. Sister Huang had already broken many of the norms and conventions in her hometown. She'd left the village to go work in towns, then cities, and then even abroad as a migrant worker in Singapore. She became financially independent, which gave her the capacity to divorce her gambling husband and raise two children to university age.”

“I then realized that the husband was visually impaired. He wasn't totally blind, but he could only see blurry shapes. They invited me into their room on the hotel's top floor, and they introduced me to their two kids, Angela, who's 12, and Tom, who's 10. But sitting there with the family, beneath a buzzing light, I couldn't imagine how they were going to get across the Darién Gap. They had a smuggler arranged, but Agan couldn't even see clearly, and the kids were so small.”

“And when I asked him how he planned to stay and work in America, he told me outright that he was going to lie and exploit the asylum system. He said, political asylum in America is just a deceptive game. Americans get to feel good about their morals while actually using the system to import cheap labor for the dirty, tiring jobs that Americans don't want to do.”

“Wang Jun is 34 years old. He is originally from Hunan, but he migrated to Shenzhen in the early 2010s. He joined a pro-democracy group there and was arrested and convicted of subverting state power as a result. He spent more than three years in prison. As soon as I left and walked across China's border, I felt this rush of relief. I could breathe again. I had tears in my eyes.”

“One of them was named Sam Lu. He was from Wuhan. He told me he'd been one of the first people to get COVID all the way back in 2019, and he'd gotten so sick, he thought he might die. Sam recovered, but his grandmother caught COVID from him, and she died. Sam was devastated. He wrote about what had happened to his grandmother online. Then the police called him in and rebuked him for what he'd said. Sam had been set on leaving China ever since.”

“I noticed that the whole family was wearing big cross necklaces, but Agan said actually they just bought those so that they could blend in on the trail. They thought wearing crosses might deter bandits from targeting them. I heard there are a lot of Catholics on this route. I don't know the specifics, but maybe if you run into a thug and they think you're someone of faith, you might have a better chance of being spared.”

“And this was a dilemma for many of the Chinese migrants. They could afford to pay double or sometimes even quadruple the smuggling costs that the other migrants paid. Locals joked that they were VIP migrants, but that also made them vulnerable to robbery. And they seemed to just know so little about the countries they were about to go through. At one point, Huang forgot the name of which country she was in, and I had to remind her, this is Columbia.”