a book. and i said, well it doesn't really have an ending. i don't see it, and then they fired me. and my parents were very loyal andhey shut down my schl. and it helped us spark the civil rights movement in boston.

>> don't be ripped apart by anger or unbelievable sorrow, and exhilaration at some wonderful, beautiful little child in the midst of is all. you have to go through that. and then i tell you, writing -- i'm addicted to writing every single day. when i'm writing a painful book, it's painful, and i get upset. i mean, i actually cry sometimes at something that's -- seems like unbearable.

so it's like i'm saking the unspeakable, and once oprah winfrey told me that she couldn't read my books at bedtime because ty upset her souch. and i think she was referring to "amazing grace," the first book i wrote, and i said to her, is it so pappful for you to -- painful for you to read, let m hay sure you it's equally painful to write. if you don't put it in, the reader won't take it out. there's a lot in the expression that i love, that means nothing

comes out of nothing. and you just don't get it cheap. >> in depth airs live at noon eastern on t first sunday of each month on book tv on c-span 2. log on to book tv.org for information about upcoming guests. >> patrick radden keefealks about cheng chui ping, also own as sister ping, who ran an illegal chinese immigration ring. before being caught she amassed a multimillion dur fortune and created a net that took the fbi ten years to piece together. this event is 50 minutes. >> i'm glad to see there's a good chinatown contingent here.

my name is patrick, and i started work on this book with -- e project that became th book four years ago this summer. i was -- had just finished law school and i was studying for the bar exam in new york. i went to nyu law school, and i was in the library trying to ncentrate, which is not an easy thing to do in july. and sister ping was on trial downtown, at that time, and the press was covering it and there were these interesting stories about this woman who had been what is known in chinese as a snakehead, human smuggler. she would bring people from one country to another illegal, and fro her home in southeast china just across the strait from taiwan to new york cy. and she had done this initially with her close familyembers and then people from her

village, and then peopl from surrounding villagers, and over the course of the years she had brought a lot of people to america. what was intriguing to me about this case was that the govement was making her out to be kind of a godfather figure, a sort of a pretty reprehensible human being who had been really motivated by greed d had been pretty ruthless and engaged in organized crime here in new york. but in chinatown she was a popular figure. people were watching the case closely, and she had a lot of support in chinatown and also in china. that sort of disconnect was part of what appealed to me initially. this idea that here was this person who was providing a service. she was bringing people out of china without the proper documentation and around t rld through a whole series o

different way stations from thailand to keny to guatemala, and then to the united states, and these journeys were often incredibly perilous, hazards you journey. one of the ships, the golden vee, hat been at sea for 120 days by the time the passenger goes here. they had been in the hold of the ship for 120 days. that didn't mean anything to me but if you think about it, 300 people in a space, probably if we started at the shelf and over to the wall would be smaller than this pace, f 120 days. i was trying to find other ways to describe it, andhat about the mayflower that came to plymouth will the pilgrims. they were at sea for 60 days, and the people on the golden

venture were on there for 120. the problem is that some of these ships weren't seaworthy and sometimes they would overturn, d people would go into debt to pay really enormous fees to come here to the united states in the 1980s, andhe fee to come to america was $18,000. by the 1990s, when they started moving people on the boats, the price hadn't gone down, it had gone up, is what $35,000. chinaton has been a cantonees area, and there was a slang, they would say they were $18,000 men, because they paid that much in order to come here. when i thought i would do is just read a little bit of the book and then open it up. just talk about this community that started emerging in the

1980s, on the eastern fringe of chinatown, and we are talking about the bowery. and they start putting up roots. sister ping came in 1981, and she was the folk kale point -- focal point in tha community. and people would come and work around the clock in order to pay off this debt that they accrued. there's a misconception that snakehead smuggles you over. you don't hav$35,000 up front. so you give them a little down payment. and people were slaves for years to their snakehead. that the snakehead would force them into indentured servitude. that wasn't how it worked. if you're a smuggler and bringing people over, wednesday they -- once they get here you don't want to keep track of the people that owed youoney.

so they had 72 hours to pay the debt. so duringhat 72-hour period they were oft held by gangsters and sometimes they were held at gunpoint, and if they cldn't satisfy the rest of the debt, sometimes harm was done to them or family members. but most people were actually able through a lot of hard work to pay off the fee in a year or two so i'm going to read y about this community and the role that sister ping developed in it. >> by working long hours, and living frugally, the they managed to save. because their labor was off the books was tax free and arrivals were able to pay off their snakehead debt in a few years. because of that they forged a strong enclave on t perimeters of chinatown after as many as six or 13 consecutive days or works most arrivals took a day of rest, known as a cigaette

day, to shop, wreck rea it and gamble. monday is traditionally a slow day in the restaurant trait trade, and after worki there a week, young men would wind their way past the fishmonger and the storefront grossers, with the fruits and vegetables. as often as not they would end up at the variety store, sister ping's first shop on hester reet, where she presided. advising youngsters to learn english, and generally accumulating relationships. the chinese expression that mend connections that bind a counity together. the locals began to visit sister ping when they needed help or advise. a resurant worker who lost his job because of an injury and

could expect no compensation from this employer, visited sister ping and explained his predicament. she said, payeack when you can, when she gave him 2,000 does. she was accompanied by the american-born babies of illegals from the neighborhood. these were parents who didn't have legal ins status in the usa and needed someone to bring their children to china. i would do it for them free of charge. th is one of the ironies, people would go to great lengths to get out of champion and come re, and then they wld have babies born in the united states so they're u.s. citizens, and then the first thing everye wanted to do is to send them back to china,nd they had to work around the clock and didn't have the funds to take care of children so they september them become to china to be raise bid th grandparents until they were old enough for elementary school in the u.s.

you had this traffic going one dtion, and then the other direction, and sister ping was active in both of these lanes. sister ping ran the store and oversaw the books. she was the dominant partner with her husband always hovererring -- hovering in the background. notable for working hours in her stores that were long even by chinatown standards, and an interest and acumen for business, and for maintaining a modest demeanor, and a simple indulgence-free life. i was credible, she would later say, when asked about her status in the neighborhoods. i had a conscious. i did things for free as favors, i treated relatives and friends welch it's difficult for people to be in a foreign land with new acquaintances. shdeveloped a reputation as someone who could move people.

at this point the book goes into describing the way in which sister ping started out in business initially it was a very hands are on separation. he would bring people in ones and twos,nd they were taking planes withhony documents and she would often accompa them on different legs of the journey. she was so good at it that she gained a reputation in theark place for being a really good snakehead and became more and more popular, and there w more and more demand, and particularly after 1989 there was a huge boom and people wanted to come to the united states, wanted to lve china, and so business just got ver good for sister ping and for other snakehes. nobody knows the actual numbers of people who came in this way during this period but to give you a sense, the cia estimated in 1995 that roughly 100,000 people were coming illegally into the united states in this nner. with ping, paying roughly

$35,000 a head. so you do the math. the fbi said of sister ping they think she made around $40 million. there was -- as a friend of mine said, that's all tax-free so that's $80 million to you and me. as the business got better, what happened with not just sister ping but a lot of snakeheads, the couldn't keep up demand, and so they would put them in ships. you think about it in a way the snakeheatrade was no different than any other kind of global shipping, right? it's-if you think of the people as commodities, they're economies of stale. you want to keep up and you would get these rickety and not very seaworthy ships coming very close to t united states but not actually to u.s. shores because that would be too dangerous and might bet

intercepted by the coast guard. so theyould come maybe 100 miles out, still in international waters, a then people would head out in fishing boats to meet them and they would offload these ships. this was a dangerous process. it would not be up to safety code. you basically have 300 people on a ship that they have been in for months. they're on the high seas. a smaller fishingoat comes out and the tide would be bringing the two up and they would wait until they were close, and then say, jump! on occasion what would happen they would get very close and bash together and there was a danger you would g crushed. at this point sister ping made what i think a lot of people would rega as a fatal mistake in terms of the arc of her criminal story. she turned to a guy known in the ighbor as ah kay who was a young gangster, the head of a

gang called the fuk ching began, and ah kay came from the province win he was a teenager, a very smart, ruthless individual. he had againn a flight and as a 14 or 15-year-old kid, without the necessary paperwork to enter the united states, with n english, and nobody with him, he got off the plane at lax during the stopover and just walk out of the airport and somehow found hi way to new york city and joined this gang. no ah kay was a dgerous guy who to this day people in chinatown that i have spoken with fine it kind of an alarming, scary figure. the first counsel he encountered sister ping, he and his gang robbed her family at gunpoint andctually pointed a gun at her kids and took money from her. the second time he encountered

her was when they did it again because they didn't get enough now. the third time sister ping asked ah kay to go into business with her. he had become goo at bringing his boats o to meet the ships and offload the ships. i could go on and on about the psychology of sister ping, but there was a kind of pragmatism so that when the t first met, ah kay said, look, i got to apogize up front for those times a fewears ago when i robbed your family and pointed a gun at your daughter. and she said, that was in the past we're doing business now. and it -- that was that. they started working together. what i want to do is read -- if i can find it -- a little passage about their relationship and the mysteries of it.

she was eventually arrested and di four months in prison for a smuggling operation. she got caught in a sting. and there was a young -- wt the fbi did, they sent a young cantonees american because they didn't have any special agents who, so the sent a cantonees guy to meetith sister ping in bring, -- in prison. when the fbi ban investigating the organized crime in the united states they found it differed in several fundamental ways from the paradigms. they did not have any fixes high, aties. the tried as were steeped in codes of conduct but there were

no blood oaths among the asian gangs in america. the considered themselves entrepreneurs and opportunists and by circumstances, family loyalty may have been a bond, but extra fall millional loyalties didn't make sense. alliances and coalitions were fluid, ever evolving, an asoresment of underworld types might come together in a terror joint venture to move chine in white. heroin. but then they would split up and go their separate ways. and the flipside, while loyalty was bad for business, and so was violence. that's how to she got in business with ah kay, a violent youth who threatened th life of

her bhildren. it must have seed that her devotion to her business is what helped him. expectens si can pardon a multitude of sins. what ah kay did not know is that she had already enacted a quiet revenge. whatten in of sister ping's and clients and associates realize it was that aer her release from prison she continued to meet with the young fbi agent in out of the way coffee shops and restaurants in new york and giv him information. lee eventually terminated the relationship after realizang she was anything but reformed, and the fbi has since downplayed the information sister ping provided, suggesting she did not furnish his agents with anything of value. but it has also been suggested

that she used the young and naive l, feeding information on her rivals in the snakehead trade. during the period wn ah kay was getting getting io the smugg business, sister ping was meeting with agent lee. they showed her surveillance photograph, askinher to entify people in the black and whites. there -- she had little betrayal of her own about which he would never now, until now i suppose. sister ping was giving information about ah kay to the fbi. what's interesting in the story is that in fact sister ping gave informatn to the fbi about ah kay, and eventually kay would give the fbi information about sister ping and would testify agait her. her husband was giving information to the fbi. everybody was cooperating in all kinds of different ways and many people were betraying one another. so it turned out fairly kind of

twisted and interesting story. i want to shift -- focus a little to talk about the golden venture and the other part of the book. thus far we're talking bat book that is strictly about crime. but this is also a boo about migration and the immrant experiencen america, and my thinking in terms of sister beginning and the golden venture, the story i wanted to tell is where you actually interview everyon the police, the fbi, undocumented chinese, sister ping, snakeheads, peopl they have smuggled, immigration lawyers, officials who determine immigration policy in washington. everybody sort of through the whole -- along the whole continuum, and the centerpiece ishieving of the golden venture. and some of you may have vague

memories of. after sister inning and ah kay cooperated, there was a ship that came to new york called the golden venture. as it happened there had been another ship prior to this one that was called the najd ii and it made it as far as kenya and couldn't get any further, just bottomed out. these passengers, hundreds of them, were stranded in kenya. they had been planning on going to the united states. the voyage has taken them longer. they didn't have money, they were stuck. one of the main characters in the book is a guy named chow, who has the american name. and he was a passenger on the ship, najd ii. wherever you come down on the immigration debate -- and we can discuss it, and i'm sure we will -- you have to appreciate what people like this guy went through. he was 17 or 18 and he left home

with very lite money, with in i.d. no passport, nothing. a backpack and a change of clothes. he made his way to border of burma. snuck into bur half. spent a couple months trucking through the jungle-covered mountains of burma. whichas pretty perilous, other chinese had died and you would see the bodies of the people who had come before you who had gotten sick or ran out of water. the bodies were by the side of e trail. he eventually made it to goaden triangle. patrolledy war lords. maded throughout there into thigh -- thailand. spent time in a safe house. he was so young, theyere trying to get him a passport.

you boy a legitimate pasort off a touris, and they couldn't nd any where the person loed young enough for him to actually say, this is me. so he was in the safe houseor six months. ten he gets on t ship the naid2. it breaks down in kenya, and he is stuck in kenya stick months, and eventually thas golden venture came to pick them up. i talk about the voyage of the golden venture. a real nightmare for the 300 people on board. what happen was that ah kay's gang was supposed to go out and offload the ship. sister inning and the other snakeheads had gotten him to do this. but the profits that the snakehead trade was gener rate at the time -- there was a fight within the began, a rift, and ah kay and his brothers were supposed to meet the ship, and they were at a safe house in

teaneck, new jersey, and it's a bizarre story. and there was this one safe house, and the guys were all there hanging out, and a rival faction of the gang rolled up, came inside, and massaed them all, andilled tm all. a terrible, terrible sce. and the thinking had been, if we go and kill those gs, there's this ship coming in -- 300 customers, $35,000 a head. there will be a lot of money there but the boats in teaneck all got back into the van, it's this -- it's 6:00 p.m. in may, in the suburbs, all tse people mowing their lawns and they see these young chinese guys with machine guns getting into a dodge caravan and taking off. somebody said we should check the gw bridge, and the cops pulled them over and they get out and they're covered in blood, and i shouldn't make light of this but it was kind of

an absurd, a ludicrous situation. so the first guys were in jail and nobody was there to meet the ship, and it came up off the ast of new york, and nobody knewhat to do there was a fury. they thought, let's turn around and go back. they thought it would be a mutiny. and then there was a mutiny. and -- which is to say some snakeheads took over andeposed the captain and the passengers were able to actually te control. a crazy plan, i found out, was briefly entertained where the guys in the ship had a mapf new york harbor and somody said, i want you to look at man t tan and look down on the bottom right there, there's two bridges, they're really close toth. just bring the ship up between the two bridges and drop everybody off there, which would have been between the manhattan bridge right there in chinatown.

they didn't do that. so they ranhe ship aground in rockaway, and they told all the penguins to jump out -- passengers to jump out, because they would get asylum. and evebody jumped often the ship, and ten died trying to swim ashore. one of the strengthnesses of the story is about these people, who they were, why they left china, the trips they took to get here, the experience on the golden venture, and then, crucially, what happened to them when they got here. so this is the last bit i will read you part of the reason you have so many people coming, is particularly post-tianimen, it had been easy to get asylum in the u.s. we said if you're here and you're a democracy protester or opposed to the one-child policy, we will make it easier for you to get asylum. so numbers went way up and this

actually drove people to pay the snakeheads to bring them here to undertake the risks because you have to be here in order to ask for asylum to people would do this to get here. the golden venture changed all at is that. people managed to get in and make their way through the system. the golden venture arrived in new york city on national tv. people woke up to the fact it was here. so i will just read about this reversal. in the last moments at sea, he cod feel the golden venture pick up speed. theyad been warned to brace themselves and he had grown accustomed during the months in in the hold to clutching his belongings and positioning himself so he did not role. they put replywood in -- ply wood in the hold of the shop.

it was electric with excitement and anticipation. it had been worth it. the sacrifice, the danger, the hunger, sea sickness and storms. the treks throu bedroom in the lonely months in bangkok, and the hope for interlude in africa. it was over, they were aut to step foot on american soil. ...

>> he wasn't a strong swimmer, but he had learned how to swim growing up, and knew if he kept moving all four limbs he would stay afloat. he made it to the way, took off his t shorts and his pants, and put a leg over the edge and jumped. his firstsensation was the coldness of the water. it seemed literally toreeze your limbs, turning them useless. shawn found the strength move the arms and legs. he swam. he would have been in the water for stop ten minutes or by hr one arm over the other. he half walked half crawled the last remain yards until he reached t beach where others were comes ashe.

then he straightene took a few more steps, and mrs.ed. when he came to he was lying a garment, a hospital gown. he was in a hostal. there was a black man standing above him in a uniform. a police officer. the officer was speaking to him in english. shawn tried to remember the english he had learned from his dictionary at bangkok and practiced the months at sea. he asked, where am i? yore in new york city. shawn felt a sense of relief. but the release was tempered by one depail. as shawn lay there in the hospital with the police offic and slowly tk it all in, he made an alarming discovery. he was handcuffed to the bed. and what ended up happening is

they were thrown in prison. because having up until that point essentially said you're coming here and asking an asylum, we're let you out. we'll have you -- it was decided that that would bome a magnet that it was drawing. even the golden venture washe ship that changedll of that. so all of these passengers wepe thrown in prison. and shawn was in a prison in york, pennsylvania. the initialtive, they were being held at an detention facility. but there were so many immiation lawyers that they all started going pro bono and sudden all of the them end u on buses. and there's something interested that happened. which is the community in york, actually rallied around these immigrants. and all of these people with

different politicaltripes and backgrounds kind of came together around the cause. butaving said that, a large contingent vere in prison for almost four years. they never charged with a crime a part from having entered without authorizationo do so. when they were released they weren't given green cards, they were paroled out. a lot of them are living in a legal limbo today. and with that i think i wan to just stop and see if you ve any questions. iean this gives you he sense of the different types of issues that the book raises and we can anywhere you'd like. but thank y. [applause] >> tryig to come here legally -- >> sorry. let me give you this. >> the chinese have come here

and not just for the famil but to try and affect the political chain a liberalize the czars and run for like in the american way. >> and it's really interesting question. look, i think that there's a huge amount of back and forth. and i went to the providence myself last year. and the most astonishing thing for me is that i was going and i wanted to see this environment that people had done souch to leave in the 's and '0e9ds. theyad risked everything to get out. i got there and the economy was booming, there's construction projects everywhere. it was very st of kind of glit, everyone seemed hap. it didn't seemike the kind of repressed or impoverished

society. obviously so much as changed. i think the china and the u.s. when these communities are so close, and think areeally close, there was not a village i walked through i said new york and my cousin has a restaurant on henry street. there's a lot of that. and i think inevitable on a call choral level that's going to be have an impact. -- on a cultural level that's going to have an impact. i should s on economic level it's staggered. the investment foreople who have left the providence is really amazing. there's a side that i didn't get into. sister ping, part of what she was known was remitting money back. some ways she was well known for running an underground bank. she basically didn't hew the money. she had a big pile of cash here and a big pile in chi. and if you needed to send money

back i was to send x or y and they would pay it all of that amount there. and if they were sending money here, it would go the other way and balance the book at the end of the month and it worked. she sent a huge amount of money that way. in chunglo where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people have left to come to the u.s., there's this amazing monument in the center of town which is really unlike anything ie ever seen. it has a big intersection and there's this huge thing that looked like a sale. but it has the two airplane wings on it. and i asked somebody i was driving around with there, what is this monument? she said it was blt to honor the many people who have left chunglo on planes and boats because they have brought great

prosperity to our city. that struck me as interesting. culturally the idea that you have memory rated the people who have left. but certainly in the '80s and 0s this was the real kind of engine of growth. i promise i won't be that long winded in answering the next question if someone will ask. q. >> how concentr@ted the immigration was. you can sort of trace an enormous amount of chinese who have ended up to two parts of china. i'm curious, why? why is i sop concentrated in a few places? >> i think there are -- i'm going to be long winded. there e two reasons for that.

e is that -- one, actually it's not distinctly chinese at all. which is the chain migration. there's a great expression, one brings ten and ten brings 100. in the idea many people comes from parts of the world a pioneer comes, they find a new place they say this isn't so bad, you can made a lives and you sent word back and it spreads. i didn't do a hug amount of looking at different ethnic groups. but i know that 100 years ago if you would have been on the street, there was streets on mott street that had only people from chuck ya -- columbi but the same village. it has to do with policy in both the u.s. and in china.

the so, you basically have two periods of time when large numbers of people have ce. the first is the mid 19th century. when we were referring people because we wanted them to build railroads and work in the mines. lots and lots of people came. they came from a small handful of townships. so that was theort of the first source of people. and i think that you know the fact that they all came from the same story, that was typical the word spread. people knew they were on the coast. sy way out. then you get chinese excsion. and at the end of the 19th century we say that's it enough. and people still do comerom china to the u.s., but by and large, theyave come illegally andou don't get loot o people comes from chi in the next few decades. and we get to world war iind chinese exclusion is still going strong. there's the awkward is now china

is ourally. and roosevelt repeels chinese exclusion. but then he said in one can leave. you have the u.s. and china on the other side of the century. and ty combine so that for almost 100 years, you couldn't legallyome from china to the u.s. they central to say in the '70s and '80s for people t move. not a large amount of people could get vis -- visas to come. i think that's part of he reason. you have these two moments. i think there's something that people don't know about the chinese and the united states, it's obviously there are a lot of chinese or people from whenever else.

the bulk of the chinese and u.s. come from the two tiny places in the southeast. do you have a mic? oh, you need it. >> you may not hafe th answer. but i'm just curious to hear more about the nonhigher ark call criminals? does that mean that sister ping is not popular becau there are people to repla her? >> it's weird that you use the word node. i was say that chinese organized ime as i've come to explain and bit fbi is very much a network kind of thing. sister ping was a node.

the chinese, you have one person you can take down the fily. you start with the boss, you start rolling people and youan take out the family. hopefully they won't be replaced. in the snakehead, it's all network. sister ping is now in prison probably for the rest of her life. but others will step up. and so i think that it's such a big subject. but it's much more network and much more fluid. it's not a sense of high hierarchy. is triads. does that mean it's not crimil an ruthless? , it is. but in some ways this i a much

more robust kind of system. one person gets arrested and someone else will step up a take their place. yes? >> this is related a little bit to the previous question. could you talk a bit about to what degree violence or least the threat of violence pyed in the snakehead process? >> yeah, absolutely. it played in both direct and indirect ways. in the direct sense it came up insofar as as you bring people over, hold them in the safe house, and i was under the threat oiolence that they would be obliged to pay the balance of their fees. there was so much money that like any other form, people started fighting. this was amazingow to think about it. some of you must remember

chinatown in the late '80s and early '90s, but it was a violent place. most of the crime was chinese on chinese and the law enforcement was slow to pick on it. there's a big episde in the book which is a shoot out in a beeper store. a lot of beepers in this book. in a beeper store on alan street where this was the fight and it was broad daylight and somebody walked in boom killed one guy, killed ather, pointed at the third, and ran out of bullets and ran away. this started as an article years ag i was -- i did the first thing you do. yo go back and look for the old press club. this is double homicide business on the weekday. and there was not a single line in the daily news, new york

post and we have the shooting up where nobody was killed and front page of the "times." it has changed. so i think it did come in. there was this threat of violence. but it also played out in weird ways that i think made it difficult for law enforcement. so to give you an example, say you pay a snakehead $2,000. you are transported in the safe house. you are in the suburbs. you don't speak english. there's no place too. there's a guy with the gun who's there in the house with you. but often he comes fro a village closeo the village you came front. he's not pointing the gun at your head. the cops and prosecutors would try and bring these as hostage taking cases. they were tryingo crge the

snakeheads for these kind of situatn. the interesting thing that a lot of time the victims was saying i wasn't a hostge. i knew going in that i needed to pay the balance of my fee. if people don't payhe balance snakeheads aren't going to do what they do. that's a bad outcome. because we want people to be able to get to the u.s. that was violent. i don't mean to sugaroat sister ping. i see her as morally ambiguous character or daily newspaper is evil. the snakehead sort of the long accent on s. i think she'sore complicated than this. at the se time there was instants which people didn't pay. the family in china says we're going to amputate your kids'

feet if you don't send the money. >> how does the rate of immigration currentlyompare to what it was in the '80s and '90s? >> no, it's dropped off. it's really weird because during the period of time i was writing this book, china was booming. and the funny antedote i tell is the one i got to. this was my first trip to the thailand. bangkok was a big hub. i was talking to law enforcement. i was writing a book about chinese human snuggling. people being smuggled into china, it's auge pblem. i realized times had changed. things had certainly slowed down. people were telling me they still come. the one thing they said which was kind of surprising to me is

theyaid back in the '80s and '90s it was the risk taker. the cream that rises to the top. he said i'm too big in this town. and they were the ones that left. i would say for an immigration point of view you could argue that these were the people they want. if we had to choose -- they said now that the economy is so good in china those people n are saying iant to go and people said this to me. why would i want to go a be undocumented a work as a dishwasher when i bould be here and save money and start a factory? so that's changed. having said that, since the economic crisise' seen something really interesting happening in china along the coast. that's the labor force is incredibly sensitive to every

econom change and development as manufacturing and factory closures and people comin back. there's been enormous internal migration of people leaveing the coast and leaveing chattown. i'm completely pucklated, but it is my hunch that if that trend continues you won't just see large numbers of people going inland, you will see large numbers of people leaveing ain. >> well, the business has changed. so the -- there's a sticker shock moment. it's now $70,000 is the price that i heard again and again. but it's changed. $70,000 by and large that's for you flying with funny documents of some sort. so, you know, there'sess risk for you. and also more expense for t snakehead. from a busins pnt of view,

the snakehead is having to come up with more. there are still ships i'm told that are going almost never directly to the coast of u.s. to places lik guatemala where the navy is on the payroll. and so they will kindf bring people in and then people wil come overland through mexico. and there's all kinds of interesting intactions between snakeheads and chi oat tees. coyotes. >> we have time for one more question. >> nothing? >> they are that in awe. q. yeah. >> thank youery much. >> thank you. >> patrick radden keefe, to find

out more visit his web site. >> adam bradley what is rap? >> what is rap? rap is rhythmic speech to a beat in the simplestorm. it comes out of the of the african-american oral tradition, taking it all the way back to muhammad ali and it brings in the western poetic tdition. it's the fusion of those forms, rimes -- rhymes to a beat. >> what's hip hop? >> hip hop is mcing or rap, djing, or turntablism, dancing, pole or break, and gray fitty audit. those four elements are under,

and rap is only one of those. >> you quote in your book, "book of rhymes, the poetic of hip hop ." you are quoted says raps the cnn for black folk. >> why? >> because somimes the news from the streets and the strongline report on what's going on. and course over the years rap is reported on a ht of things from the struggling in inner cities neighborhoods and starts in the south bronx all the way through the rodney king beatings all the way up to today talking about obama and the kind of impact that barack obama's campaign has had upon young people. cnn repts on whas going on in not only black culture but youth culture more generally in the united states. >> what is lil wayne bring to

the american experience? >> lil wayne is an artist who brings in a strange way i'd compare to someone like samuel taylor a romantic poet who was fond of his substances for inpicte ration, but also a real wordshut. lil wayne brings almost a intergalactic perspective. in the '90s, it was east coast, west coast. lil wayne comes on the scene and says i'm a marsian. it expands the temples of i art form. >> does rap need to be defended? >> you know, that was a qstion i dealt witho much many thinng about how to phrase my book. i think wrap -- rap is a

reflection of our cull myrrh. in some ways what we might criticize pro fanty is the very thing we wld criticize in other lives. in our films and literature even. so i guess i try not to be an apoll gist. i try to say this is what it is. the good, the bad, and everything in between. here's how we can talk aut and understand it and here's how you as a listener or reader can make yourudgment upon its merits. >> who's your favorite rapper? >> so many. i guess jay z. he embodies the best and showing w it c emerge into a modern age.

it's an art form that's entering its middle age and many of its artist are doing the same thing. what jay z was rapping about in 20s and now today in 30s is marketably different. that's the breath of his art is the thing that draws me to jay z. >> you spent quite a bit of time breaking down the stax of rap and hip hop music, why? >> because i think it's overlooked. rap is the clear cellophane rapping, no pun intended, upon its content. they start talking about the subject or thematic. those things are important. but what i wanted to do of book of rhymes is to say let's also look at the form. yo can he a artist, take jay z, who is talking about something like caring a gun.

not theost sopsticated thing. but instead of saying i have gun, like short sleeves bear arms. just the word play and pun. it creates and expands that which is close at hand and takes it familiar and makes it unfamiliar. so looking at rap on the level of language and rhythm, it's ri, and it's word play expands it in such a way that we can begin to appreciate just what rapas done for the language, just what it's done for amerin culture and poetry. >> adam bradley, you said that rap is throughout the american experience. can you expand on that? >> if you look at the verbal linguistichat rap embodies. you ca hear within it elements of the black church, the word

play of the preacher like martin luther king jr., the language of someone like malco x, the work songs of slavery, and those who trace it back to west african. my intervention is to say in additi to the rich tradition of word play that we find in ali's pattern before the boxing match, we also have the western poetic tradition. we also have the ballad stance. these elements of poetics have been the center of the english language since it's origin. it me the connection across centuries. hip hop at its best employs all of those. rappers at their best are masters of dual traditions, masters of the african-american tradition, but also masters of the border tradition of which that oral tradition i a part.

they are hhly literal individuals at their best. the kinds of things that they are doing are marvels of poetic innovation and suggest to me the renaissance of the word and a reintroduction of rhythm and rhyme to our verbal cture. and it is done in quite stunning ways. >> so for someone who reads bayowolf? >> well, maybe the story telling. theeason why the strong stress meter that is used by the poet is so effective that it helps with memory, memorization. so we can think of the four beat line during raps early days or more recently someone like andre