Yu Hui had a bear tattooed on his right arm. In China, the bear is the symbol of forbearance. Some people’s tattoos reflect their character. With Yu Hui, it was a reflection, perhaps, of the character he wanted, but didn’t have: a symbol of his struggle between tolerating poverty and a pride that said he wasn’t destined to stay poor. Last June, pride won. He decided he could not humbly accept his lot any more and he left the warmth and strife of south-east China for the other side of the world.
Eight months later, in a howling night in an alien English seascape on Yuan Xiao, the Chinese Valentine’s Day, Yu Hui disappeared.
Lancaster police have refused to show relatives the pictures of the 20 Chinese cockle pickers whose bodies have been recovered from Morecambe Bay, which would allow them to identify their dead. But there seems no doubt that Yu Hui is among the drowned.
The Guardian has traced Yu Hui’s journey from a mean Chinese farm to the sand flats of Lancashire and death. His fate was not, as was often represented in the aftermath of the Morecambe tragedy on February 5, that of a captured victim, a slave at the mercy of evil gangmasters. Like so many immigrants, Yu willingly put his family in debt to the people smugglers, broke the law, and did cold, hard, filthy labour because he wanted to prove himself to his family and his peers, and desperately wanted a better life for his children.
Whoever decided to risk going cockling on the sands on a night when the tide would rise eight metres was exceptionally foolish and reckless, and the North West and North Wales Sea Fisheries Committee, which licenses cocklers on Morecambe Bay, has yet to explain why Yu — smuggled into Britain in a truck — and his fellow Chinese were permitted to work there.
But to portray Yu as a slave, and his employers as nothing more than the merciless outriders of global capitalism, is to obscure the real sadness of the life and death of this proud, naive family man. He was all too ready to do dirty jobs in the rich world, and the rich world was ready to let him do them. But in the rich world he was invisible. He only became visible by dying.
Yu was born on September 5 1969 to a peasant family in Yangbian, a small village in the north of Fujian province, opposite Taiwan. It was the time of the cultural revolution, when Mao Zedong ordered millions of young urban students to experience life in the countryside. But Yu was already there. As the eldest son, he was expected to stay in the world of red earth and paddy fields, looking after his parents, continuing the family line and tending the small plot of land on which they grew rice and vegetables.
But by the time Yu reached adulthood, China was transforming. It had opened up its markets to international trade, cleared farmland for factories and levied fees on education and healthcare. Southern China was the first to experience the change. Those who were quickest to adapt made fortunes. Yu’s father and younger brother prospered by setting up their own bus company. By his mid-20s, Yu seemed to be going backwards. Government requisitions left him with just 1 mu (one 17th of an acre) of land, enough to generate 10 000rmb (about R 8700) of income a year, far less than the family outgoings.
There was also the important consideration of pride — or ”face”. As the elder son, Yu was expected to lead his family, but he was falling behind businessmen and migrants. If you have money, you do not hide it in this part of the world, where the distance between success and failure can be measured in the height of a building. While Yu was stuck in the cramped, run-down two-storey home he shared with his parents and grandparents, his neighbours were building five and six-floor mansions with dollars, yen, pounds and euros sent back by sons and daughters working illegally overseas. The Guardian was shown one new six-storey building in a village near Yangbian built on the remissions home of a single son working in a British bakery. The monthly wads of 10 000rmb are more than 10 times what a local worker would earn.
Ironically, family success may have been the last straw for Yu. Last year, his brother began construction of a flashy new home in the centre of Jiangjing, the biggest town in the area. He took Yu’s two children under his wing and paid 10 000rmb per year for their schooling. To have to accept such generosity was galling to such a proud man. He had tried unsucessfully to supplement his income by labouring on construction sites in Fujian and Guangdong during the slow seasons, but now he decided the only way to lift his own family out of poverty was to head overseas.
The communities in Fujian are geared for migration. They have the family contacts overseas, a money-lending system to fund expensive illegal trips, and the snakeheads — so-called because, wherever they lead, a snake of migrants winds behind them through the long grass of forgery, smuggling and deception.
It is not a choice to be taken lightly. When Yu first began making arrangements to leave in May, his wife, Wu Yanhong, found it hard to believe him. ”I told him we were too poor. I couldn’t take him seriously, but a month later he left home one day saying he was going to work, and never came back.”
The precise details of Yu’s journey from June to his arrival at a west London Chinese takeaway in November are unclear. The Guardian has two sources — his family, and a friend who worked with him in the takeaway for two months. The accounts they give are slightly different; the family may have reasons to obscure what actually happened, and Yu may have bragged or distorted his account, but what seems to have happened was this.
Through snakeheads in China, Yu arranged a fake Korean passport and visa to fly to Paris via Hong Kong. He dyed his hair to make it lighter, hoping to look more like the man in the passport photo. It worked. Carrying $1,000, he was admitted to France. He called his wife to say he had arrived safely and she should pay the snakeheads 190 000 rmb (about R188 400).
Despite the popular belief in Britain that people-smuggling snakeheads get their fees back by docking the wages of Chinese illegals working here, this does not seem to be the case. Rather, it is the families back home are effectively held hostage by the snakeheads to make sure the families pay up on their safe arrival. Often the family will take out a loan to pay the snakeheads, then spend the next few years paying the loan off. This is what Yu’s wife did: she borrowed from private moneylenders, who charge 2,5% per month, with family and friends as guarantors. It is brutal. But it also means that the Chinese illegals in countries such as Britain have, in theory, relative freedom to come and go from jobs. The constraint is that jobs for illegal Chinese immigrants are few and far between, particularly for inexperienced, unskilled workers such as Yu; and that if you don’t work, you don’t eat — and your family is in trouble.
According to Yu’s family, he wanted to find work in Paris, but failed, and returned to the snakeheads to arrange passage to Britain. They obliged, for another 90,000rmb (R87 920). The version told by Yu’s takeaway friend is slightly different: according to this, it was always his intention to go to Britain, and in Paris he was just marking time — he even went sightseeing, the friend said.
The crossing was made in exactly the same way the government has been trying so hard to stop, particularly since the Dover tragedy in which 58 Chinese suffocated. Yu came in a truck. It only took a few hours, said his friend; he ate a bar of chocolate en route.
Yu’s family say he was detained by the immigration authorities on arrival, but Yu’s friend said nothing about this. More mysteriously, the family say Yu did not work in London, and never sent back money. His father, Yu Daiyan, said: ”One day he called to say he was so short of money that he could only afford to eat one piece of bread a day.”
In fact, Yu did work, and told his friend, at least, that he was sending money back. The circumstances in which Yu found work were a brutal shock to the new arrival, who expected help from his compatriots. The chef in the takeaway where he got the job was from the same village — yet, to Yu’s outrage, demanded £200 to give him the post. There was nothing Yu could do.
The boss of the takeaway, who only came round in the early evening to check on his business, was a Cantonese speaker who had been in Britain legally for many years. He looked down on the immigrants. ”He tests them at the beginning before he gives them the job to see if they can do it,” said Yu’s friend. ”He says: ‘If you want to do this, this is how much you’re going to work. There are not going to be any holidays. There are many Chinese workers here and it’s not easy to find a job.”’
Yu worked a six-day week for £170 (about R2 100) a week. Each day, he would have to deliver up to 500 leaflets around the neighbourhood, which took two to three hours. After that, he would work an eight-hour shift in the kitchen, skivvying. Sometimes he would get to cut the vegetables, but he didn’t have the knack, and it was mostly cleaning. The kitchen staff got two free meals a day — not the same food the English customers were given — and Thursday off. But Yu used that day to visit other takeaways to try to learn how to cook.
Yu’s friend never saw the place where Yu lived, but it was a grim little pad above another takeaway, shared with four others, for £20 a week. Yu slept on a mattress he had found in the street. Because of the manner of his arrival, he had few clothes to protect him from the winter cold. He visited a betting shop at least once, and told his friend he had won a few pounds. He said that at Chinese New Year, he sent £300 he had earned to his family, and another £200 he had borrowed.
Strangely, Yu told his friend a story which, his family told The Guardian, was not true. Yu never mentioned his brother to his friend; he said it was he, Yu Hui, who was building a big new house, he who was paying to put his children through school, and that he had spent five years working in Japan in the 1990s, earning a small fortune. It is speculation, but it may be that Yu was actually telling the story of his brother’s life as if it were his own; the life he had wanted, and felt he should have had.
”I could tell by looking at him that he was under a lot of pressure,” said Yu’s friend, who asked that neither he nor the restaurant where he worked be identified. ”Whenever he had money he just sent it back. I thought very highly of him. Before he left, in mid-January, I joked with him. I said: ‘One day, when you make money, give me a call.’ We took the bus together after work. I wished him good luck.”
Yu had expected to be earning more. He told his friend he was going to work in another takeaway in Birmingham where the pay was slightly better, but if he really went to Birmingham, it could not have been for long before he hooked up with a cockling crew and began working the Morecambe sands. He told his family he had found cockling work on January 18, at the same time he told his friend he was going to Birmingham. Perhaps he was embarrassed to be going back to something like field work.
While in London, Yu would call home every couple of days. From Morecambe, his calls became more infrequent and more miserable, his family said. He told them: ”The work is very hard. It is cold and hurts my back. I don’t even know when and how much I’ll get paid. I’m depressed. I want to quit, but I have no freedom, no choice because I’m illegal.”
He said he was living in a room with about 40 other workers and living off rice. The sister of another lost cockler, who had befriended Yu in Paris, Wang Minglin, said: ”Every time he called home, he was crying, saying, ‘I can’t make it, I can’t make it.”’
Yu’s last call to his wife — made on a borrowed mobile — came two days before the disaster. ”He told me his life was terrible, that the work was exhausting him. I told him to leave. He said, ‘I can’t quit. There is no other work. Without this job, I can’t eat.”’
He also spoke by phone to a distant relative who arrived in Britain and claimed asylum shortly before the tragedy. ”He told me he was cockling,” she said. ”He told me it was a very, very hard job, and it was very cold. He didn’t seem very happy. I know he’d asked friends in London to see if they could find him a job so he could come back.”
The relative, who asked not to be identified, said Yu didn’t seem to be making more than enough money to keep himself alive.
Shortly after the disaster, a former Chinese cockle picker at Morecambe gave The Guardian an idea of the organisation and economics of the work. Five different Chinese teams, all under the control of a ”gangmaster”, worked different sections of the bay, she said. They worked according to the tides, sometimes at night, in groups of 20 to 30. It was appallingly hard work, but the pickers were paid cash in hand: about £8 per bag after deductions by the gangmaster. The dealer paid £15 a bag. The woman was able to make about £32 a day. Men were able to earn more, she said. She shared four rooms with 11 workers. But she also said that there was an ”English boss” who took her team out to the sands in a tractor.
David Eden, who with his father, also David, runs the Liverpool Bay Fishing Company in Liverpool, admits that he began buying cockles from a Chinese cockling team on Morecambe Bay shortly before the tragedy, but says he had no direct involvement with the cocklers. He and his father were arrested by police in connection with the incident but have not been charged, and have been trying to clear their names ever since. He never met Yu Hui; he never knew any of the cocklers by name, and never met them, just the representative who sold the cockles.
Eden bought from the Chinese, he says, because they did the job better; their cockles were better washed, with the tiddlers sieved out. This may be why, as he says, the last days of Yu and the other cocklers were troubled by threats from rival, non-Chinese cockling teams. According to Eden, it was because of these threats and a series of attacks, including diesel being poured on their cockles, which forced them to work at night, when the non-Chinese wouldn’t risk it.
Before dusk on Thursday February 5, Yu and his comrades headed out to the cockle beds for the last time, with the intention, it seems, of picking until the tide came in. But the wind was strong; the tide was due to be unusually high; and in the darkness it would be hard to see what the sea was doing.
The route would have taken Yu north-west from Red Bank Farm in Bolton-Le-Sands, past a high-lying sandbank called Priest Skear, across a channel called Keer Channel, and onto the cockle beds. There, they would have laid wooden planks down on the sand and agitated them to bring the cockles to the surface. Using rakes, they would have dragged the cockles out, cleaned and sacked them.
We know Yu was there, because at 5pm that day a friend of his relative’s called another cockler who was standing next to him on the sand, to ask about coming up to join them. ”He could hear over the telephone the sound of the wind,” said the relative. ”It was very high.”
The peril Yu was in was this: that in the darkness, they would only be able to tell the tide was rising when it approached their feet. But by that time, the channel they had to cross in order to escape would already be full.
The emergency calls began coming in around 9pm. ”It was nasty,” said Michael Wood, who was on the RNLI hovercraft that tried to make it out to where the cocklers were thought to be, only to be beaten back by the wind. ”The wind was about 20 knots, the tide was coming in, it was dark. The hovercraft has limits in what it can go out in. We were experiencing two-metre wave height.
”A lot of people just don’t understand the bay and what it can do. You can get very disorientated at night. The tide hadn’t come in fully, but the channel had got too deep. Then it gets really disorienting when you’ve got the wind howling round you.”
One hypothermic survivor was found by an inshore lifeboat clinging to Priest Skear, which at that time was still above water. If only Yu and the others had stayed with him, they would have survived. But they had gone in a different direction. In the end, all the hovercraft could do was pick them up. It is not yet known if Yu was in that group. ”Most of them were in a group together, within a few metres of each other. Ten or 15 of them. It was terrible,” said Wood, still deeply affected by what he saw. So far 20 bodies have been recovered.
Bobby Chan, a British Chinese lawyer in London who works with Chinese immigrants and asylum seekers, argues that by criminalising immigration, the government drives it into the unregulated shadows where people die. ”If people are able to immigrate legally, they are more likely to wait and see how it goes, rather than rushing to spend £20 000 to be smuggled here,” he said.
Was the problem that the rich countries wanted freedom of movement for goods and money, but not people?
”They want a free market for people, but only the people they want,” said Chan.
A few miles drive from Yangbian, the contrast between winners and losers is striking. The sounds of laughter, music and merrymaking fill a smart new village hall, while less than 100 yards away in a dark, dilapidated hovel another of the widows of Morecambe weeps uncontrollably.
As the happy audience chortles at jokes cracked by brightly dressed Chinese opera performers, the exhausted woman waits by the phone for a call that will never come, tears streaming down her cheeks as she clutches a photo of her missing husband to her chest.
Catching the mood of celebration in the hall, musicians in the 40-strong opera troupe delight the crowd with their lutes, gongs, suonatrumpets and two-stringed fiddles. By the mourning wife’s bedside, neighbours file in quietly to offer sympathy and support.
The all-day, all-night opera has been laid on at great expense by the Xia family as a form of thanksgiving. Their son, Lin, recently called them from Japan to say he has arrived safely after a risky, illegal and expensive passage. Anticipating the wealth he will send home, they want to share — and show off — their good fortune with the entire village.
The woman, He Xiuyu, has been devastated by the silence of her husband in Britain. He last called her from Morecambe to say he had found a job as a cockle picker. His almost certain death has ruined the family. They borrowed the equivalent of 50 years’ worth of local wages to pay the snakeheads and now they have lost the only breadwinner who could make the repayments.
Asked which of the two would influence their decision on whether to travel illegally, young members of the village express no hesitation. ”It’s a shame about what happened at Morecambe,” says one man outside the opera. ”But it’s just one small accident, compared to all the good things we get from having people work overseas and send money home. I don’t think it will change anything.”
Additional reporting by Hsiao-Hung Pai. – Guardian Unlimited Â