Guardian/Observer : The life and death of a cockle picker
Philip Chee
Subject: Guardian/Observer : The life and death of a cockle picker
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 10:47:15 +0800
From The Guardian, UK
Friday February 20, 2004
The life and death of a cockle picker
From a Chinese farm to the sand flats of Lancashire and death, James
Meek and Jonathan Watts trace the life of Yu Hui.
Two days before the disaster, Yu phoned his wife. 'He said his life
was terrible. I told him to leave. He said without this job I can't
eat'
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 (26ft) 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 £700) 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 £15,000).
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 (£7,000). 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 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.
---===============================================================---
Philip Chee <phi...@aleytys.pc.my>
Guard us from the she-wolf and the wolf, and guard us from the thief,
oh Night, and so be good for us to pass.
--
þ 20549.28 þ I'm a 2D cardboard character in a 3D world!